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The Routledge Handbook of Semantics
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About This Book
The Routledge Handbook of Semantics provides a broad and state-of-the-art survey of this field, covering semantic research at both word and sentence level. It presents a synoptic view of the most important areas of semantic investigation, including contemporary methodologies and debates, and indicating possible future directions in the field.
Written by experts from around the world, the 29 chapters cover key issues and approaches within the following areas:
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- meaning and conceptualisation;
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- meaning and context;
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- lexical semantics;
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- semantics of specific phenomena;
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- development, change and variation.
The Routledge Handbook of Semantics is essential reading for researchers and postgraduate students working in this area.
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Part I
Foundational issues
1
(Descriptive) Externalism in semantics
1 Introduction
Semantics is the study of meaningâin some sense. In what sense? According to a common view, semantics concerns inter alia the relation between words and the worldâin particular, their intentional (or representational, aboutness) relations. When a competent user utters âSchnee ist weissâ to make an assertion, she makes a claim about how the world is. What in part enables her to represent the world as being this way is that âSchneeâ refers to snow, something satisfies âist weissâ just in case itâs white, and so âSchnee ist weissâ is true just in case snow is white. As David Lewis (1970: 18) famously put it: âsemantics with no treatment of truth-conditions is not semantics.â Similar sentiments are found in leading semantics textbooks:
To know the meaning of a sentence is to know its truth-conditions. If I say to you [âThere is a bag of potatoes in my pantryâ] you may not know whether what I said is true. What you do know, however, is what the world would have to be like for it to be true . . . . A theory of meaning, then, pairs sentences with their truth-conditions.
(Heim and Kratzer 1998: 1)
The study of the relation of symbols to what they stand for [ârefer to,â âdenote,â âtheir informational contentâ] must indeed be a part of an account of meaning. For otherwise how could we understand the fundamental fact that configurations of symbols carry information about all the diverse aspects of our experience?
(Chierchia and McGonnell-Ginet 1990: 53)
Characterizing these semantic properties is no easy matter. Language users understand many more expressions than they could store individually in memory. So much of the hard work involves compositionally characterizing the semantic properties of a potentially infinite number of complex expressions as a function of those of their constituents and their mode of combination. Moreover, the subtleties of these semantic properties are often masked by our own competence with the terms. âSnowâ is a mass term, apparently denoting some sort of undifferentiated stuff, unlike a count noun such as âsnowballsâ; and âsnow is whiteâ expresses a generic claim that is not falsified by a bit of yellow snow. How best to (compositionally) characterize the semantics of mass nouns and of generics is much disputed.
Our focus, however, is not these complexities, but the underlying word-world, or externalist, conception of semantics. A central debate in the foundations of semantics concerns whether itâs correct. Internalist opponents maintain that semantics rather concerns, or ought to concern, only non-intentional relations among linguistic items and (other) mental structures (see Chapter 2). On their view, semantics lays out what concepts or thoughts expressions directly activate or express, without recourse to intentional relations to things external to the mind/brain. (The qualification âdirectlyâ is meant to put to one side priming, association, and inference via world knowledge.) For example, the word âSchneeâ might activate oneâs concept snow; one might utter âSchnee ist weissâ to express oneâs belief that snow is white. Whether these concepts and thoughts represent aspects of the worldâand whether such representational properties have a place in empirical inquiry into the mind-brainâis another matter, not a question for linguistic semantics, which concerns itself only with the semantic properties of linguistic items (words, phrases, sentences, etc.).
In this chapter, we examine some of the prominent arguments for and against externalism, as well as the disputeâs upshot for existing work in the field. Note that the question is not what the word âsemanticsâ means, but rather what are, or would be, fruitful paths for work in semantics to take. Also, the question is not whether characterizing wordsâ intentional relations to the world exhausts semantics, but rather whether it is, or should be, a part of semantics. This allows that semantics might concern both wordsâ non-intentional relations to other mental structures and their intentional relations to the world, so that work championed by typical externalists and work championed by typical internalists could turn out to be compatible. As we frame things, however, the theses of externalism and internalism are opposed to one another, even if work championed by their proponents is notâsince we include in internalism the rejection of intentional relations so far as the scientific study of linguistic semantics is concerned. Finally, regarding the upshot for extant work, we will need to consider whether, if internalist considerations win the day, this requires us to jettison work in truth-conditional semantics or rather just to reconstrue it in internalist terms.
2 Varieties of externalism and internalism
The âexternalist vs. internalistâ label is also applied to other disagreements concerning the nature of semantics. This is no accident, as the various externalisms sometimes come packaged together, likewise for the various internalisms. But the disagreements are, or seem to be, dissociable. So our first order of business is to clarify our main topic further by distinguishing it from these other externalist/internalist debates.
Letâs first distinguish descriptive and foundational semantics (Stalnaker 1997; cf. Kaplan 1989 on semantics vs. metasemantics). Descriptive semantics asks what semantic properties expressions have. Foundational semantics asks in virtue of what they have them. A candidate descriptive semantic claim, in this case externalist, might be: âHundâ means dog. Foundational semantics assumes that this descriptive fact (granting it is one) obtains in virtue of something more basic. It assumes that a dependence relation obtains between semantic properties and more fundamental non-semantic properties (the supervenience base), and it inquires into that relation. A candidate foundational semantic claim, again from an externalist, might be: The descriptive semantic fact that âHundâ means dog obtains in virtue of a convention among Germans, involving attitudes and expectations they have towards one another (cf. Lewis 1975). Note that the foundational question is not about causes (though answers may invoke them), but about constitution. Phylogeny, glossogeny, and ontogeny might bear on how it came to pass that âHundâ means dog, but itâs a further question whether elements of the causal story are also among the supervenience base for âHundâ now having that semantic property. (Compare: this is a water molecule in virtue of the relations among the hydrogen and oxygen atoms that constitute it, however they came to be so arranged.)
Distinct externalist/internalist debates correspond to the descriptive/foundational distinction. Our focus is the descriptive externalist/internalist debate: whether intentional relations to aspects of the world are among the semantic properties of linguistic items. The foundational externalist/internalist debate concerns what makes it the case that those properties obtainâin particular, whether the supervenience base for semantic properties includes only properties internal to language users or rather also includes relations to things external to them. It is this second debate that philosophers of language usually have in mind when they talk of semantic externalism and internalism. A typical foundational externalist allows that neurophysiological twins can have otherwise identical lexical items with different semantic properties; what makes the difference must thus reside in some relation to something external. Hilary Putnam (1975), for example, argues that what a speakerâs natural kind terms refer to depends in part on the speakerâs natural and social environments. A typical foundational internalist denies this.
Putnam argues for foundational externalism by arguing that a descriptively externalist semantic propertyâthe reference of natural kind termsâdoes not supervene on an internalist supervenience base. His view is thus both foundationally and descriptively externalist. But it would seem that (pending substantive argument to the contrary) a descriptive externalist may be either a foundational internalist or a foundational externalistâsimilarly for descriptive internalists. The debates thus cross-cut. Various descriptive externalists (e.g. Segal 2000) have challenged Putnamâs arguments for foundational externalism, maintaining instead that speakersâ intrinsic properties fix the reference of their terms. Likewise, itâs a possible position (though proponents are not readily found) to deny, with descriptive internalists, that linguistic items stand in representational relations to worldly items, but also hold, with foundational externalists, that the non-intentional semantic properties expressions do have are determined in part by (non-intentional) relations to things in the world. For example, one might hold that linguistic items are computational mental structures without representational properties, but also that computational structures are themselves individuated in part in virtue of the mind/brainâs relation to its environment (cf. Bontly 1998, Ludlow 2003a).
These externalist/internalist debatesâdescriptive and foundationalâboth concern the semantic properties of linguistic items. Itâs worth noting that parallel debates arise concerning the properties of non-linguistic items, particularly non-linguistic mental structures: what, if any, representational properties do they have, and in virtue of what do they have them? In the introduction, we said in effect that linguistic descriptive internalism neednât address whether the concepts and thoughts that they take linguistic items to activate or express are themselves representational. Having drawn the descriptive/foundational distinction, we can now add that linguistic descriptive internalism also neednât address foundational questions concerning what makes concepts and thoughts have whatever properties they do. (For a seminal extension of Putnamâs linguistic foundational externalism to mental content, see Burge 1979; cf. also Burge 2003 on Chomskyâs internalism more generally.)
Though one can contrast linguistic items with concepts and thoughts, it doesnât follow that linguistic items are not mental structures (of some other kind). This brings us to yet another debate to which the label âexternalist vs. internalistâ gets appliedânow concerning what words are, as opposed to what semantic properties they have.
Chomsky (1986) famously distinguishes two conceptions of language. An I-languageâor âinternalizedâ languageâis the computational system, realized in an individualâs mind/brain, that generates the structures specifically implicated in linguistic behavior. An E-language is an âexternalizedâ language that is understood independently of the properties of the mind/brain. Chomsky introduces the notion of E-language in discussing proposed technical constructs in the scientific study of language. But it also naturally comprises pre-theoretic conceptions of languagesâEnglish, German, etc.âas existing external to and independently of any particular person.
Chomsky argues that I-languages are the proper target of scientific inquiry: E-languages, among other things, have insufficiently clear identity conditions, while a focus on I-languages opens fruitful lines of inquiry concerning acquisition, the causal basis of linguistic behavior, the interface of linguistic competence with other cognitive capacities, cross-linguistic commonalities and variation, etc. (See Wiggins (1997) for a defense of E-language, and Heck (2006) in reply; see also Stainton (2006) for an overview of Chomskyâs views on these and related matters.) But debates about the proper object of linguistic inquiryâI-languages or E-languages (or both)âagain seem to cross-cut our primary concern, at least pending substantive argument. Various authors (Larson and Segal 1995; Ludlow 2003b, 2011) explicitly present themselves as providing a descriptive externalist semantics (a characterization of intentional word-world relations) for the structures generated by an I-language. Others (Brandom 1994) embrace a social, E-language conception of language while eschewing representational properties in their theorizing.
Finally, the externalist/internalist debate is sometimes formulated as one concerning what kind of thing a meaning is: whether it is something that can be external to the mind/brain (the referent of a term) or something internal to it (a concept). But descriptive externalism need not commit one to external meaning entities. Some descriptive externalistsânotably Donald Davidson (1984, cf. also Lepore and Ludwig 2005)âeschew meaning entities altogether as obscure and explanatorily otiose. The claim is not that the putative referents of wordsâtables, rocks, Donald Davidsonâdonât exist, but rather that there are no entities that are meanings; so, in particular, those entities arenât meanings. Moreover, a meaning-entity internalist can embrace descriptive externalism. Elbourne (2011), who casts the externalist/internalist debate in meaning-entity terms, favors meaning-entity internalism (meanings are concepts), but maintains that meaning-entity externalists and internalists agree that the meanings of wordsâwhatever they areâare what enable words to âhook onâ to the world. (Incidentally, instead of identifying meanings either with referents or with concepts, one might suggest that they are the combination of the two, with concepts determining reference. Cf. Frege (1918), albeit this use of âconceptâ aligns more with his âSinnâ (sense). His use of the term âBegriffâ (concept) corresponds more closely, albeit imperfectly, to our âproperty.â We should note also that some take concepts to be non-spatial abstracta, and so in that sense neither internal nor external.)
These other ...
Table of contents
- Cover Page
- Half Title Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Table of Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Semantics â a theory in search of an object
- Part I Foundational issues
- Part II Approaches
- Part III Meaning and conceptualization
- Part IV Meaning and context
- Part V Lexical semantics
- Part VI Semantics of specific phenomena
- Part VII Extensions
- Index