Question

The limits on formal semantics: compositionality, context and truth values

When reading stuff like Categorial or Montangue Grammar or Davidson´s account of meaning based on truth values, this principle is a pillar of how meaning is constructed. The problem is that I do not understand why this is not trivially false. I am not thinking of the usual exceptions (sarcasm, literary language,...), but about very ordinary not-sarcastic expressions like:

I already had dinner

I've already read that book

Any competent speaker understand that the first already means some hours ago, while the second one can mean earlier in my life. To know this, seems to me, one needs a detailed knowledge of human habits. An alien who just learned english as a formal system would not be able to adscribe truth-values of any sort to these sentences. Similarly, in

I have some of Marie's book at home

I have some of Jane Austen´s books at home,

the meaning of the genitive is that of ownership in one case and one of authorship in another. It seems obvious then that the notion of compositionality collapses and it is impossible to assign truth-values to utterances unless we take into account a notion of context that goes widely beyond the usual [speaker, time, place], including common beliefs, cultural items, etc. True, if you consider sentences like John is running or Marie saw that John bought the car that Lucy painted (which is what you find analysed with painstaking formal detail in books like Gamut's Logic, Language and Meaning), then compositionality seems to work, but these are artificial examples which do not represent ordinary language. Actually, by studying the metaphoric maps common in everyday language (I´m thinking of the contemporary theory of metaphor started by Lakoff in the 80´s), it is easy to derive dozens of common expressions that defy compositionaly in similar ways.

Is it not the case then that semantics does not make sense isolated, without pragmatics? I do not understand that there can really be something in between syntax and pragmatics that makes sense on its own.

Answer 1

Semantics alone cannot fully capture the nuances of everyday language, necessitating the inclusion of pragmatics to account for context and cultural dynamics. Philosophers like Wittgenstein and movements such as post-structuralism highlight that language meaning is context-dependent and shaped by social functions.

Step-by-step explanation:

Understanding the intersection between semantics and pragmatics in language requires exploring theories from philosophers like Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gottlob Frege, and through movements such as post-structuralism and pragmatism. Wittgenstein's later work, including Philosophical Investigations, challenges the idea that language can be understood in isolation from its use in context, emphasizing that meaning is verifiable only within particular contexts. Frege's work in logic and the subsequent development of formal approaches to semantics posit that sentences of natural language can be expressed in a formal symbolic language, aiming to reduce ambiguity and vagueness inherent in natural language.

However, this view is met with limitations when we consider how language is actually used in everyday scenarios. Post-structuralism and pragmatism suggest that reality and meaning are constructs shaped by social functions and group consensus. This implies that reality and language are not fixed entities but are inherently flexible and nuanced, shaped by the values and functions ascribed to them by social groups. Furthermore, the concept of categorization in language and the distinction between descriptive claims and evaluative claims also highlight the interconnectedness of facts and values, suggesting that language cannot be fully comprehended in isolation from its function or context.

In essence, while formal semantics and compositional theories provide frameworks to systematize language, they fall short in capturing the full range of linguistic context and human behavior. This points to the necessity of integrating pragmatics to fully understand meaning, thereby recognizing that semantics alone cannot account for the subtleties of everyday language. We conclude that linguistic meaning is inherently contextual and cannot be divorced from cultural and social dynamics.