Top-down compositionality

From same site,

http://www.uea.ac.uk/~j108/Horwich.htm

"Horwich assumes that a Davidsonian
explanation of compositionality is
bottom-up."

"That is, the ability of [people] to understand
complex expressions is explained by
"their attaching meanings to the (relatively few) basic
terms of the language" (Ibid, p. 32). And
such explanation "severely constrains what sort of thing a meaning property might reduce to" (op cit)."