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Humans naturally acquire languages that connect meanings with pronunciations. Paul M. Pietroski presents an account of these distinctive languages as generative procedures that respect substantive constraints. Children acquire meaningful lexical items that can be combined, in certain ways, to form meaningful complex expressions. This raises questions about what meanings are, how they can be combined, and what kinds of meanings lexical items can have. According to Pietroski, meanings are neither concepts nor extensions, and sentences do not have truth conditions. He argues that meanings are composable instructions for how to access and assemble concepts of a special sort. More specifically, phrasal meanings are instructions for how to build monadic concepts (a.k.a. mental predicates) that are massively conjunctive, while lexical meanings are instructions for how to fetch concepts that are monadic or dyadic. This allows for polysemy, since a lexical item can be linked to an address that is shared by a family of fetchable concepts. But the posited combinatorial operations are limited and limiting. They impose severe restrictions on which concepts can be fetched for purposes of semantic composition. Correspondingly, Pietroski argues that in lexicalization, available representations are often used to introduce concepts that can be combined via the relevant operations.
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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/3/2018, SPi Conjoining Meanings OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/3/2018, SPi CONTEXT AND CONTENT SERIES EDITOR : François Recanati, Institut Nicod Other titles in the series: The Inessential Indexical On the Philosophical Insignificance of Perspective and the First Person Herman Cappelen and Josh Dever Fixing Reference Imogen Dickie Propositional Content Peter Hanks The Mirror of the World Subjects, Consciousness, and Self-Consciousness Christopher Peacocke Assessment Sensitivity Relative Truth and its Applications John MacFarlane Context Robert C. Stalnaker OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/3/2018, SPi Conjoining Meanings Semantics Without Truth Values PAUL M. PIETROSKI 1 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/3/2018, SPi 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Paul M. Pietroski The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in Impression: All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press Madison Avenue, New York, NY , United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: ISBN – – – – Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15