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A Defense of Formal Approaches to Semantics The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts PRAGMATIC MINIMALISM: A DEFENSE OF FORMAL APPROACHES TO SEMANTICS A Dissertation in Philosophy by David W. Agler © 2012 David W. Agler Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2012 The dissertation of David W. Agler was reviewed and approved* by the following: Vincent M. Colapietro Liberal Arts Research Professor of Philosophy Dissertation Adviser Chair of Committee Emily Grosholz Liberal Arts Professor of Philosophy, African American Studies and English Christopher Long Associate Professor of Philosophy and Classics Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies, College of the Liberal Arts Linda F. Selzer Associate Professor of English Shannon Sullivan Professor of Philosophy, Women’s Studies, and African and African American Studies Head of the Department of Philosophy *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School. ii ABSTRACT Context plays a fundamental role in interpreting language. It aids in determining what was said, what was meant, and how we choose to respond. Knowing what a particular utterance means is thus not simply a matter of knowing what the words in the sentence mean along with a grammar. Knowing a language also requires the non-linguistic (pragmatic) capacity to know how context influences the interpretation of sentences. Minimalism is the theory that the role context plays in determining the literal meaning of an utterance is guided entirely by the syntactic and lexical features in the sentence. That is, if the meaning of a sentence depends upon the context in which the sentence is used, then there will be some feature in the sentence itself that conventionally directs the language user to the context. In short, language drives a turn to context. Contextualism, by contrast, is the theory that the interpretation of utterances involves a process of free enrichment, i.e. conversational or pragmatic rules will draw upon features from context to shape the content in certain ways. My argument for minimalism occurs in two parts. First, I articulate and respond to two major objections to minimalism. Incompleteness objections state that the minimalist theory does not deliver propositional content and so falls short as a semantic theory. The inappropriateness objections state that the minimalist theory may deliver propositional content but this content plays no functional role in a larger story involving human communication and cognition. I argue that by appealing to a more expansive notion of language (involving its syntactic and semiotic underpinnings) both of these objections are unwarranted. Second, I offer a number of reasons for choosing minimalism over contextualism. I argue that minimalism offers a psychologically realistic (modular) picture of how we process language, that it provides the best explanation for the existence of cross-contextual communication, and that it best explains the distinction between what we are committed to in virtue of the words we use and what we are committed to in virtue of conversational principles governing communication. iii CONTENTS List of Abbreviations ......................................................................................................... vi Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ vi Chapter 1: Semantics and Pragmatics ................................................................................. 1 1. Introduction ................................................................................................................. 1 2. Semantics & Pragmatics .............................................................................................. 1 3. Outline of Thesis and Argument ................................................................................. 6 4. Originality of the Dissertation ..................................................................................... 9 5. Two Reasons Why This Matters ............................................................................... 11 Chapter 2: Sandcastle Semantics in the Sea of Pragmatics .............................................. 20 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................... 20 2. Formal Semantics ...................................................................................................... 21 3. An Objection to Strong Formal Theories of Semantics ............................................ 37 4. A Weak Formal Theory ............................................................................................. 42 5. Minimalism and Contextualism (2a and 2b) ............................................................. 43 6. Narrow and Wide Contexts (3a and 3b) .................................................................... 50 7. Four Roles for Context .............................................................................................. 55 8. Two Theories of Extralinguistic Context .................................................................. 60 9. Conclusion ................................................................................................................. 84 Chapter 3: Dry Land, Shoring up Minimalist Semantics .................................................. 86 1. Introduction: Two Objections to Minimalism ........................................................... 86 2. Two General Problems and Three General Responses ............................................. 87 3. Incompleteness Objections ........................................................................................ 96 4. The Minimalist’s Composite Reply ......................................................................... 104 5. The Inappropriateness Objection ............................................................................. 130 6. Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 147 Chapter 4: Building the Minimal Castle ......................................................................... 148 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................. 148 2. Argument #1: Modularity and Minimalism............................................................. 151 iv 3. Argument #2: The Miracle of Communication ....................................................... 172 4. Argument #3: Fallback Content .............................................................................. 196 5. Three Arguments for Semantic Minimalism ........................................................... 207 Chapter 5: Peirce’s Supposed Contextualism ................................................................. 209 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................. 209 2. Why Peirce? ............................................................................................................. 210 3. Three Arguments for a Peircean Contextualism...................................................... 215 4. Non-Sentential Assertion and Unarticulated Constituents ...................................... 226 5. Peirce’s Contextualism: The Argument from Fiction ............................................. 233 6. Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 236 Chapter 6: Minimalism, A Conclusion ........................................................................... 238 References ....................................................................................................................... 242 v LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS C Contexts MOC Miracle of Communication NP Noun phrase S Sentence u, v variables for utterances UC Unarticulated Constituent VP Verb phrase WS Williams Syndrome vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My interest in the philosophy of language grew out of an effort to explain what it means to be a person. Early on, I became convinced that the concept of personhood was a vague one and so if one wanted to give a clear account of the notion of personhood, one had to give a clear account of vagueness (specifically vague predicates). Very quickly I found that vagueness itself was no easy concept to crack, that vagueness itself was both a vague and general notion, and that the existing philosophical theories of vagueness were not convincing in the least. My dissatisfaction with the existing philosophical treatments on vagueness led to writing my M.A. thesis ‘Vagueness and Its Boundaries: A Peircean Theory of Vagueness.’ In it, I argued for what I took to be a ‘pragmatic’ solution to the problem of vagueness that made the meaning of vague predicates sensitive to context. From another end, I tried to make sense of reference to persons by analyzing the semantic functions of proper names. This led to writing ‘Peirce’s Direct, Non-Reductive Contextual Theory of Names.’ There I argued that while our knowledge of the meaning of a proper name is entirely exhausted by our knowledge of its referent, an account of how we came to label an object with a given name (and how we communicate the referent of a name to others) is a complicated, context-sensitive affair. So, with respect to vague predication, I was troubled by the fact that it seemed necessary to posit hidden context-sensitivity to make sense
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