Here is a recapitulation of the brief exchange between Russell Dale and myself (for the purpose of locating any definite disagreement between us).

This began when I noticed Russell's PhD thesis online (at utexas actually, but it is also on RussellDale.com).

Because of its relevance to Grice I mentioned it at the Grice Club. I had skipped straight to Chapter 4 which seems to be much less sympathetic to formal techniques than Grice had been, and seemed to me to be offering some very general arguments in principle against the possibility of formal semantics making a worthwhile contribution to a theory of meaning. Whether that is really Russell's intention is not yet clear to me.

There followed discussion at the Grice club, of compositionality and of some aspects of natural languages which seem to represent problems for compositional semantics (presumably since the word compositional appears prominently in the matters discussed in Russell's chapter 4).

It seemed to me that whatever problems there might be in formal semantics for natural languages, these could not be problems arising from compositionality, and so a wrote a message entitled "Compositionality and Semantics" addressing that specific topic (not actually specifically addressing anything in Russell's thesis).

The central conjecture in that message was offered as a purely mathematical conjecture to the effect that any language for which there exists a truth conditional

semantics there will also be a compositional semantics.

Note here that my terminology differs from Russell's, and in particular that "a semantics" is to be understood as an abstract entity, like a function or a set, as distinct from,

say a formal system (though that also is an abstract entity).

This conjecture I followed up with some remarks about the kind of thing which might in a compositional semantics be the meaning of a sentence (a proposition), to which I said little more than that it would be some kind of set.

This is all pretty vague stuff, and the main point was simply the conjecture to the effect that compositionality in itself is in principle not a problem.

Russell then responded.

However, so far as I could see, his response did not actually respond to anything that I wrote.

 

He did not comment on the conjecture which was the main point of my message, nor on the supporting definitions, even though the concepts in terms of which I understand the problem are quite different to the ones he has used.

So far as I could see, Russell was primarily defending his position against criticisms which I did not raise, and not addressing the points I did raise.

He incorrectly inferred from my message that I regard a proposition as a set of possible worlds, so I will say a couple of words on that point.

I do describe a "truth conditional semantics", which is pretty close to being a set of possible worlds.

However, it is clear, even to me, that truth conditions cannot be the whole of meaning. Apart from the examples which Russell has offered there is the simple observation that if propositions are identified with their truth conditions then all analytic sentences have the same meaning, and hence "Fermat's last theorem" would have the same meaning as "2+2=4".

So far, it seems to me, Russell and I have not engaged, we are talking past each other.

My point of entry was a negative reaction to Chapter 4, which seems to me to be offering principled reasons why formal semantics has nothing to offer to a theory of meaning.

Whether that is Russell's intention is not clear to me, for reasons which will emerge if we progress this question.

This is really the material just in 4.1 I am talking about here.

So I would like to know of Russell whether that was what he was intending to do in 4.1. in which case I am interested in looking closer at the arguments which he presents in that section.

If it is Russell's intention to offer such a general principled argument against the applicability of formal semantics to a theory of meaning, then my first problem would be with some of his terminology (even it if isn't his own), which seems to me to be unsatisfactory on two grounds.

The first objection, to his account of CTT, is that is does not appear to say anything about "compositionality" at all.

The second objection, which is relevant only if a general critique of formal semantics is intended, is that it is not appropriate for the kind of formal semantics that I would be likely to undertake, and hence not sufficiently general for an argument against formal semantics in general.

In conclusion, I am interested in obtaining clarification of what Russell intended to achieve in 4.1 and in debating whether he does indeed achieve that objective.

Roger Jones