"Human Syntax, and
Why Philosophers Should Care"
|
Abstract:
The first part of the talk will be devoted to illustrating
various
constraints on semantic composition in natural human languages. For
example,
'Was the hiker who lost kept walking in circles' cannot be used to ask
whether
or not the hiker who was lost kept walking in circles. Such
constraints,
often surprising, provide explananda for linguists. And as discussed in
the
second part of the talk, these "negative facts" suggest that many
conceptions
of meaning--currently popular among philosophers--are fundamentally
mistaken.
If time permits, I'll sketch an alternative (Chomskyan) conception of
linguistic
meanings as instructions for constructing (typically monadic) concepts
in
accordance with constraints imposed by the human language faculty.
Two relevant forthcoming articles are: "Meaning Before Truth" and
"Character Before Content". They can be found
here.