1 Introduction

1 Introduction Language is a complex system that consists of atomic units called morph- emes. These units can be combined in the form of structured entities called sentences. There are two main sorts of words: singular terms and predic- ates. While the former refer to individual objects, the latter refer to sets thereof. Words mean something by virtue of referring. Sentences mean something by virtue of expressing truths and falsehoods. Something along these lines is the orthodox view in formal semantics and the mainstream opinion conveyed in contemporary philosophy of language textbooks. The main thesis of this book is that this view is essentially wrong-headed. The opposite view to the above approach is usage-based semantics. This book explains why current strands in empirical research undermine formal semantic theories. Classications always imply simplications. I take it that one quite plaus- ible divide in the area of philosophical approaches to meaning is along the lines of ‘truth-conditional vs usage-based’. In the following chapters, I shall therefore present the current debate in philosophy guided by this distinc- tion. Truth-conditional semantics is the orthodox view in philosophy in two distinct respects. There are many explicit adherents of this research tradition, most notably Emma Borg, Ernest Lepore, and Kirk Ludwig.1 But then there are even more people who are implicitly committed to this view or related views. Although it is hard to prove this point, usage-based semantics is probably the minority view in current philosophy of language. The currently by far most inuential usage-based philosopher is Paul Hor- wich. Much of this book is inspired by his 1998 book Meaning. The main thesis of the present book is that current empirical research in linguistics clearly suggests that philosophical semantics should be pur- 1 Among the historically most inuential scholars in that area are people like Gottlob Frege, Richard Montague, and Bertrand Russell. 13 1 Introduction sued on a usage-based basis.2 In the empirical disciplines, the research paradigm of construction grammar has gained more and more popularity recently—especially in the area of language acquisition, language evolu- tion, and grammar theory.3 The idea of construction grammar is that all dierent kinds of linguistic information can be represented in a common format: constructions. That is, from words to complex phrases to syntactic structures, everything might be a construction, where a construction is, roughly speaking, a pairing of form and meaning. Up to now, there has been no satisfying account that could serve as a philosophical underpinning of construction grammar. This is the main reason for the existence of this book. Construction grammar has quite a few features that are highly relevant from a philosophical perspective. The most important ones are: (i) construction grammar suggests that there is no clear-cut divide between semantics and pragmatics; (ii) furthermore, it suggests that semantics can’t be pursued formally; (iii) it suggests that a theory of meaning should be part of a theory of communication, and not the other way around; (iv) it suggests that pragmatics is by far more relevant for the study of semantics than the reverse. Construction grammar is a movement in which a variety of disciplines are involved, among them semantics, developmental psychology, conver- sational analysis, anthropology, and psycholinguistics. The general tend- encies that I just cited apply universally to all strands of ‘construction grammar’, although, to be sure, many dierent theories sail under this ag. There is not just one construction grammar but many dierent theories that go by this name. Still, for most philosophical concerns these dierences are irrelevant. More importantly, the unifying characteristic as regards philosophy is that they are all incompatible with the mainstream view, i.e. with truth-conditional semantics. 2 I shall lay out in detail in 2.2.1 why certain developments in linguistics can impose restrictions on what a corresponding philosophical theory should look like. 3 Which, to be sure, is far from saying that construction grammar is universally accepted in these areas, or even accepted by the majority of linguists. The only thing I am saying here is that there is a signicant increase in popularity of the constructionist paradigm in linguistics; and that this is a fact philosophy of language should respond to. 14 1.1 Structure of the Book Accordingly, this book explains why—in view of the evidence provided by theorists working within a constructionist research framework—truth- conditional semantics is awed in that most varieties of construction grammar clearly work on the assumption that their relevant semantics are usage- based. It also explains why established usage-based approaches to meaning à la Horwich are incapable of providing the philosophical underpinning of construction grammar. Last but not least, this book provides an alternative theory framework that is capable of providing such an underpinning in the required sense. 1.1 Structure of the Book This book has three parts. The rst part, ‘Meaning’, is an extended review of the state of the art. Chapter 2 gives a general overview of some of the most important theories of meaning on the market. This chapter serves as a backdrop for the whole discussion. I shall show in this chapter that the notion ‘meaning’ can serve all sorts of dierent purposes. Moreover, my main aim here is to demonstrate that (philosophical) semantics is best o if it begins by observing actual practice in the empirical disciplines, and by ‘incorporating’ their actual results. The following two chapters provide overviews of usage-based approaches to meaning and of truth-conditional semantics. Both chapters include critical remarks. In the chapter on usage- based theories, these remarks concern Horwich’s identication of ‘use properties’ with ‘acceptance properties’, which I will explain in due course. This strategy of identifying ‘use properties’ with something else, namely acceptance, has some undesirable consequences. The most important one is that the restriction to acceptance properties implies accompanying restrictions in the classes of words that are covered by the semantic theory; i.e. that such a theory is, in eect, limited to descriptions of words that contribute truth-evaluable content. In the chapter on truth-conditional semantics, the focus lies on Davidson’s ‘psychological’ argument that the learnability of natural languages suggests that semantic knowledge is based on the knowledge of recursively dened rules. These rules, which operate on word meaning, are supposed to explain why languages are learnable in the rst place. I show that the crucial decit of this argument is that research in lan- 15 1 Introduction guage acquisition indicates that just the opposite is true: during language learning, hearers understand syntactically ‘complex’ expressions without parsing their underlying structure. I present my own view in part two and three. The second part, ‘Dis- position’, consists of chapters 5 and 6, the rst of which directly links to the critical discussion of Davidson. My main point here is that two distinct issues often get mixed up in the literature.4 One is the phenomenon that people seem to understand sentences that they have not encountered before. The other issue is compositionality. I argue that keeping both issues apart helps seeing what is going on in language acquisition. Chapter 6 is highly relevant for the rest of the book. There, I defend the view that one should clearly distinguish between the metaphysical basis of meaning5 and adequate semantic descriptions that try to ‘capture’ this basis. Many serious counterarguments against usage-based semantics can be disarmed by showing that the notion of ‘meaning’ that they apply oscillates between these two readings. I argue that the most appropriate semantic descriptions are dispositional analyses. The third part of the book is entitled ‘Method’ and contains my meth- odological convictions that shine through at several points throughout the book. Chapter 7 contains important background assumptions, most notably my arguments for why philosophical theories of meaning should strive at compatibility with relevant theories of language acquisition. Construc- tionist theories of language acquisition are usage-based, which lends fur- ther support to the idea that philosophical semantics should be pursued usage-based as well. Chapter 8, then, is an argument to the eect that tokens (as opposed to types) play a central role in any usage-based theory 4 The least I would defend here is that many people, even if they do not literally conate the two notions, they still tend to think that it goes without saying that compositionality is the only reasonable option you could possibly think of for explaining learnability of natural languages. And that suggestion, I think, comes too soon. 5 When it comes to semantic theories in philosophy, we are typically dealing with theories devoted to the ‘reductionist programme’, i.e. theories that try to answer the question: by virtue of which underlying—more basic—properties do natural language expressions have the semantic properties that they de facto have? In this sense, theories of this sort try to ‘reduce’ higher-order properties (the semantic ones) to some lower-order properties in a systematic way. So when I talk about ‘metaphysical basis’, I typically mean these lower-order properties that serve as one’s reduction base. 16 1.2 Terminological Preliminaries of meaning. Thus, in this chapter my focus lies in explaining why this is, in eect, a virtue of usage-based theories, and how token-based theory frame- works can cope with the most relevant counter-objections. In particular, I explain why token-based theories of meaning are well-designed to handle meaning shifts, i.e. long-term developments of word semantics.

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