English Composition -- and Grice

Of course when you enrol for a course on "Composition" you are not expected to be taught Frege. But this is not a course on composition.

Dale has this beautiful footnote. Jones was referring to ch. iv in Dale's thesis. Dale notes -- in this footnote below -- that his approach to compositionality in ch. iv is 'systematic' rather than 'historic'.

The historicist in me wants to expand then on his footnote in ch. ii -- the historical chapter. Dale has mentioned Frege as the founder of the 'compositional' tradition (cfr. Coffa) and quoted Carnap as following suit. Dale focuses on Davidson's seminal 1967 Synthese paper as having attempted a truth-theory for, unlike Tarski, a 'natural language' such as English.

Dale refers then to

"Davidson (1963), Davidson (1967), and Davidson (1973). See also Evans and McDowell (1976)"

and adds:

"I believe that credit has to be given to Katz and Fodor for their important early work attempting to deal with the compositional features of natural languages."

Dale studied under Fodor in New York.

"See Katz and Fodor (1963)."

"But," Dale notes, "I don't know whether before Davidson the idea had ever been explicitly suggested that meaning might be explained - or explained away - by stating a relation of some sort between speakers and compositional-semantic theories."

Good point. I wonder about that, too. But to have that 1963 early reference is very good. Talking of early references, I'm always fascinated by this pretty very early reference by Chomsky to, of all people, one

"A. P. Grice"

in "Aspects of a theory of syntax" -- recall that Katz/Fodor were thinking of contributing to the same type of project. Chomsky seems to be quoting "A. P. Grice" to the effect that

"She married and had a child"

bears the logical form:

p & q

-- and so that the 'and then'

"She married and THEN had a child."

comes out as an implicature. This was before the William James lectures, but Grice had indeed referred to implicatures by then -- as his Oxford notes on logic and conversation, 1966, cited elsewhere in this blog -- testify.

Dale goes on:

"The fact is, I am not sure if Davidson really explicitly suggested this before his paper "Radical Interpretation" (Davidson (1973)). But these fine points of the history of the theory of meaning will have to be discussed on another occasion."

----

Dale adds:

"It should also be pointed out that a compositional-semantic meaning theory need not be incompatible with either or both of an intention-based theory or a causal theory."

which is an excellent point to make.

Dale adds:

"See Jerry Fodor for an example of someone who finds a way of combining all three approaches. See Fodor (1987), p. 98 and Fodor (1989), p. 178."

Both Katz and Fodor would quote from Grice, occasionally. While Katz remained a philosophical interest on things like technical aspects of presuppositions and speech acts ('philosophy of language'), I think Fodor started to concentrate on his Mentalese, to the point that much of what he writes now falls within what people (but not Grice) would call, 'philosophy of mind' (Grice preferred 'philosophical psychology').

Dale continues:

"It is because Welby explicitly called for a theory of meaning in terms of speakers' intentions that we can say that the intention-based tradition begins way back at the beginning of this century. Likewise, Peirce clearly had in mind the hopes of explicating what meaning generally was. Langer, for example, clearly took him in this way as is evidenced in the quote given in note 66 above. But nobody explicitly claimed, so far as I know, that meaning was to be explained in terms of relations to compositional-semantic theories until Davidson."

---- Very good. Dale is of course right that Frege is the founder here. Interestingly, one of Grice's students at Berkeley, Michael Wrigley, researched on just that: from Frege to Dummett, as it were, via Witters! So I'm pleased to be able to say that Grice had to _listen_ to a lot of this, with charm and the occasional witticism.

Grice himself liked to say he contributed to the development of formal semantics, and would often quote from his 1971 Irvine seminar, on "How pirots karulise elatically: some simpler ways" -- punning on both Carnap and Austin, if you must.

Dale notes in the next footnote:

"To speak of the psychological grounds of meaning here is not to speak of the psychological grounds of meanings."

Exactly. This relates to 'meaning' qua mass-noun, as it were, as per Mats Furberg note posted in this blog.

Dale:

"Looking for the psychological grounds of meaning, in the sense in which this is intended here, is not inconsistent with Frege's platonism, that is, his anti-psychologism, with respect to meanings."

That above should please Jones, and Langer, in that the point is often made that only an abstract, 'formalised' system can give credit to much of what is taken to be 'anti-psychological' in formal semantics. But as Dale notes, his point is philosophical.

As Grice would have it, semantics ultimately does ground on what he was bold enough to call 'rational psychology'!