Griceian arguments against compositionality

Adapted from Szabo, Stanford Encyclopedia, online, essay on 'compositionality'. Later fragments.

Szabo entitles the section, "Arguments against compositionality."

Szabo offers an example from Chess, which Grice played well, and notes:

"We CAN have productive and systematic understanding of representations even if we do NOT understand complex representations merely by understanding their simple components and the way those components are combined."

Szabo presents a similar sub-argument to the same effect.

The next section is entitled,

"How compositionality allegedly fails"

(a) Conditionals

Consider the following minimal pair:

(1) Everyone will succeed if he works hard.
(2) No one will succeed if he goofs off.

"A good translation of (1) into a first-order language is (1′)."

"But the analogous translation of (2) would yield (2′), which is inadequate."

A good translation for (2) would be (2″) but it is unclear why. We might convert

¬∃

to the equivalent ∀¬

but then we must also inexplicably push the negation into the consequent of the embedded conditional."

(1′)

∀x(x works hard → x will succeed)

(2′)

¬∃x (x goofs off → x will succeed)

(2″)

∀x (x goofs off → ¬(x will succeed))

"This gives rise to a problem for the compositionality of English, since is seems rather plausible that the syntactic structure of (1) and (2) is the same and that ‘if’ contributes some sort of conditional connective—not necessarily a material conditional!—to the meaning of (1)."

"But it seems that it cannot contribute just that to the meaning of (2)."

"More precisely, the interpretation of an embedded conditional clause appears to be sensitive to the nature of the quantifier in the embedding sentence—a violation of compositionality.[16]"

"One response might be to claim that ‘if’ does not contribute a conditional connective to the meaning of either (1) or (2)—rather, it marks a restriction on the domain of the quantifier, as the paraphrases under (1″) and (2″) suggest:[17]."

(1″) Everyone who works hard will succeed.

(2″) No one who goofs off will succeed.

"But this simple proposal (however it may be implemented) runs into trouble when it comes to quantifiers like ‘most’. Unlike (3′), (3) says that those students (in the contextually given domain) who succeed if they work hard are most of the students (in the contextually relevant domain)."

(3) Most students will succeed if they work hard.

(3′) Most students who work hard will succeed.

"The debate whether a good semantic analysis of if-clauses under quantifiers can obey compositionality is lively and open.[18]"

SECOND suspect-case:

Cross-sentential anaphora

Consider the following minimal pair from Barbara Partee:

(4)

I dropped 10 marbles and found all but 1 of them. It is probably under the sofa.

(5)

I dropped 10 marbles and found 9 of them. It is probably under the sofa.

"There is a clear difference between (4) and (5)—the first one is unproblematic, the second markedly odd."

"This difference is plausibly a matter of meaning, and so (4) and (5) cannot be synonyms."

"Nonetheless, the first sentences are at least truth-conditionally equivalent."

"If we adopt a conception of meaning where truth-conditional equivalence is sufficient for synonymy, we have an apparent counterexample to compositionality."

"Few would insist that the first sentences of (4) and (5) are really synonymous."

"What is interesting about this example is that even if we conclude that we should opt for a more fine grained conception of meaning, it is not immediately clear how that will account for the contrast between these sentences."

"The difference is obviously due to the fact that ‘1’ occurs in the first sentence of (4), which is available as a proper antecedent for ‘it’ and that there is nothing in the first sentence of (5) that could play a similar role."

"Some authors have suggested that the right way to approach this problem is to opt for a dynamic conception of meaning, one that can encode anaphoric possibilities for subsequent sentences.[19]"

"Interesting though these cases might be, it is not at all clear that we are faced with a genuine challenge to compositionality, even if we want to stick with the idea that meanings are just truth-conditions."

"For it is not clear that (5) lacks the normal reading of (4)—on reflection it seems better to say that the reading is available even though it is considerably harder to get."

"Contrast this with an example due to—I think—Irene Heim:

They got married. She is beautiful.

"This is like (5) because the first sentence lacks an explicit antecedent for the pronoun in the second."

"Nonetheless, it is clear that the bride is said to be beautiful."

"If the difference between (4) and (5) is only this, it is no longer clear that we must accept the idea that they must differ in meaning."

THIRD SUSPECT-CASE: Adjectives -- Grice on 'shaggy' and 'French poem' (in Aristotle and the multiplicity of being" PPQ)

"Suppose a Japanese maple leaf, turned brown, has been painted green. Consider someone pointing at this leaf uttering (6)."

(6) This leaf is green.

"The utterance could be true on one occasion (say, when the speaker is sorting leaves for decoration) and false on another (say, when the speaker is trying to identify the species of tree the leaf belongs to)."

"The meanings of the words are the same on both occasions and so is their syntactic composition."

"But the meaning of (6) on these two occasions—what (6) says when uttered in these occasions—is different."

"As Travis, the inventor of this example puts it:

“…words may have all the stipulated features while saying something true, but also while saying something false.”[[20]

"At least three responses offer themselves. One is to deny the relevant intuition. Perhaps the leaf really is green if it is painted green and (6) is uttered truly in both situations."

"Nonetheless, we might be sometimes reluctant to make such a true utterance for fear of being misleading. We might be taken to falsely suggest that the leaf is green under the paint or that it is not painted at all.[21] The second option is to point out that the fact that a sentence can say one thing on one occasion and something else on another is not in conflict with its meaning remaining the same. Do we have then a challenge to compositionality of reference, or perhaps to compositionality of content? Not clear, for the reference or content of ‘green’ may also change between the two situations. This could happen, for example, if the lexical representation of this word contains an indexical element.[22] If this seems ad hoc, we can say instead that although (6) can be used to make both true and false assertions, the truth-value of the sentence itself is determined compositionally.[23]"

FOURTH CASE: Propositional attitudes

"Perhaps the most widely known objection to compositionality comes from the observation that even if e and e′ are synonyms, the truth-values of sentences where they occur embedded within the clausal complement of a mental attitude verb may well differ."

"So, despite the fact that ‘eye-doctor’ and ‘ophthalmologist’ are synonyms (7) may be true and (8) false if Carla is ignorant of this fact:

(7)

Carla believes that eye doctors are rich.

(8)

Carla believes that ophthalmologists are rich.

"So, we have a case of apparent violation of compositionality; cf. Pelletier (1994)."

"There is a sizable literature on the semantics of propositional attitude reports."

"Some think that considerations like this show that there are no genuine synonyms in natural languages. If so, compositionality (at least the language-bound version) is of course vacuously true. Some deny the intuition that (7) and (8) may differ in truth-conditions and seek explanations for the contrary appearance in terms of implicature.[24] Some give up the letter of compositionality but still provide recursive semantic clauses.[25] And some preserve compositionality by postulating a hidden indexical associated with ‘believe’.[26]"

And the debate ensues...

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