Events And Semantic Architecture

Events and Semantic Architecture This page intentionally left blank Events and Semantic Architecture PAUL M. PIETROSKI AC AC Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp 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 in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Sa˜o Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York # Paul M. Pietroski 2005 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2005 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, 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 book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data (Data available) ISBN 0--19--924430--8 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn Preface In my first week as a graduate student, I was introduced to Frege’s logic via George Boolos, and to the subject of linguistics via Noam Chomsky. In retrospect, that seems to have been a formative experience, from which I have since been trying to recover—with lots of help, beginning with teachers like George and Noam and Richard Larson, who were willing to encourage ill-prepared students. For better or worse, I never doubted that Frege’s toolkit could be fruitfully applied to the study of natural language, or that logic, linguistics, and the philosophy of language are continuous enterprises. Such thoughts, once formed, seemed obviously true. But a little inquiry brings ignorance into focus. And the need for a dissertation, followed by life as an assistant professor advertised as a philosopher of mind, pushed me towards other topics. A counterveiling force, Jim McGilvray, kept nudging me back to issues concerning linguistic meaning and innate constraints on human thought. Jim also forced me to confront various respects in which Frege’s technical apparatus is ill-suited to natural language, as stressed by Frege and Chomsky themselves. One of my goals in writing this book—and another in the works—has been to get free of some assumptions that I had absorbed in spite of my first teachers: in particular, that a semantic theory for a natural language will associate predicates with sets and sentences with truth-values. Jim also started a reading group at McGill University, focused mainly on issues at the cusp of linguistics and philosophy. This proved enormously