Compositionality & Frege's context principle
Imagine a game of tangrams played like this: when it's your turn, you're given a handful of pieces and something you have to make out of them before your time runs out. If you're asked to make a horse, you have to make it out of the pieces you have--there is no "horse" piece, just as in language there is no word that means, "I'll stop at the store on the way home tonight and get milk."
No piece alone amounts to anything. Pieces put together the wrong way don't count either. But the key to getting the points is still to understand what each piece is and how it can be put together with others to make what you want to. The shapes of the pieces don't change depending on what you make out of them, but their having the shapes they have is what allows you to make a horse one turn, a truck the next, and a ballerina the next.
No piece alone amounts to anything. Pieces put together the wrong way don't count either. But the key to getting the points is still to understand what each piece is and how it can be put together with others to make what you want to. The shapes of the pieces don't change depending on what you make out of them, but their having the shapes they have is what allows you to make a horse one turn, a truck the next, and a ballerina the next.
Comments (79)
What do you expect when no question is asked in your OP :/
Compositionality and the context principle are two of the absolutely central concepts of philosophy of language, but I for one have been having difficulty seeing how they fit together. Dummett has trouble explaining how they fit together. If it already made sense to you, that's cool.
Oddly enough, though, between two people, there often are such words. I go walking with a mate every Tuesday and he gets a text at some point during the day. 'Milk' means, 'Please stop at the store on the way home and get milk.' 'No milk,' means...well, guess :)
I don't get it either, Srap. But we have to rewrite the philosophy of language from pragmatics upwards to get it all straight. I fear I may not have the time or energy.
No, that's just ellipsis, and the rest of the sentence is understood from the wider context of the relationship between these people, their housekeeping habits, the rigors of communicating on mobile devices, etc. "Milk" still just means milk. (That whole sentence will never appear in a dictionary as one of the meanings of the word "milk," and for good reason.)
The word "milk" is also ambiguous, but it's pretty clear that the parties to this exchange have a usual agreed-upon meaning, so the ambiguity is not an issue here for them. You could also think of this as part of the context of their exchange.
None of this is really the sort of context at stake in Frege's context principle.
You cannot perform a complete linguistic act with just a word or any bunch of words. (Except, as noted, elliptically.) Sentences are special. So you want to say something like, "the meaning of a word is its use in sentences." (We can get much fancier about formulating the context principle if needed.)
The trick (besides dealing with the potential circularity) is to avoid denying compositionality. You can end up thinking the sentence, or the wider context of its utterance, "gives" the words in it meaning, which they lacked until they appeared in that sentence (or until its utterance in a particular context, etc.). This is patently false. If it were true, language would be impossible.
The primary goal of the principle of compositionality (the idea that the meaning of sentences depends systematically on the meaning of their parts, viz. words) is to explain how can we understand a potentially infinite number of new sentences which we never encountered without much trouble. And the natural idea seems to be that we can understand them because they are composed of words that we are already familiar with, combined according to rules which we have learned in the past. And so the idea is that we deduce the meaning of the sentence (which is unknown) based on the meaning of its parts (which are already known).
However, according to the context principle, words don't have any meaning on their own, but only sentences do, and this seems to be at odds with compositionality. Notice however that the principle of compositionality has two components: 1. the basic thought that to understand something new, it must contain old elements which we already familiar with 2. what the old elements contribute to the new sentence is self-standing meanings that we can grasp independently of their function in sentences. And my proposal is that we can accept (1) (which is not at odds with the context principle) and reject (2) (which is), thus preserving the general explanatory framework of compositionality without accepting its specific explanation of how the meaning of sentences is determined by its parts. And once we make this distinction, it becomes clear that there could be other explanations of how words contribute to the meaning of a sentence, which do not assume that words have meanings on their own.
Here's my alternative explanation of how this can work. When we encounter a new sentence, what we do is not to first analyze the meanings of its individual words (and then deduce the meaning of the complete sentence) but we compare the new sentence with the vocabulary and syntactical structure of other sentences which we are already familiar with. So to take a somewhat simplistic example: suppose that we encounter a sentence like "the dog is on the mat", and suppose also that as children we learned the two sentences "the cat is on the mat" and "the dog is on the sofa", but have never encountered "the dog is on the mat". We can see that there are analogous components and structures in common between the sentences: we know what it is for a dog to sit on a sofa, and we know what it means for a cat so seat on a mat, and from that we can understand that a dog is something that can also sit on the mat analogously to a cat. So what I'm saying here is that what we know is not the "meanings" of individual words like 'dog' and 'cat', but rather we are familiar with sentences that make claims about cats and dogs, and by analogy we employ this knowledge to grasp new sentences about dogs and cats (so there's nothing in this process which we grasp that is less than the meaning of a complete sentence). There's no such thing as abstract knowledge of the meaning of words like 'cat' or 'dog', rather we have a stock of propositions about cats and dos which we understand, on the basis of which we can understand new propositions about cats and dogs. We do however need the new sentences to be composed from old familiar words (this is the part which is correct in compositionality), however they don't have a meaning on their own which they carry into new sentences, but they serve as syntactical cues which help us to connect the new sentences with the old familiar ones.
Why would anyone claim that?
The short answer is that the philosophical notion of "meaning" is pretty obscure (as it was argued for example by Quine in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism"), and the notion of the meaning of a single word is even more obscure. As I see it, the real question here is not whether words have "meaning" on their own, but what is "meaning" in the first place? What kind of philosophical work is the notion supposed to do?
So if we go back to Frege, who first formulated the context principle, what interested him was truth and not meaning, and therefore he proposed that we should ask about meaning in language only so far as it helps to illuminate the concept of truth. However the concept of truth clearly applies to whole sentences (propositions) and not single words, therefore Frege proposed (as methodological maxim for investigating truth) that we shouldn't ask about the meaning of words outside the context of a sentence, but ask what kind of logical contribution does a given word makes to the truth conditions of the sentence in which it appears. So there is no such thing for Frege as taking a single word like 'cat' and asking about it's "meaning", rather we should ask what is in common between all sentences that employ the word 'cat'.
It is also connected to Frege's rejection of psychologism, that is treating logical questions as psychological, since he thought that thinking about words an isolation from sentences encourages a picture where we take "meaning" as something psychological or subjective, which would undermine the objectivity of logic and language that Frege wanted to defend.
Well, meaning is simply a mental association one makes with a term (for example). One can easily do that with a single term.
I don't buy that we're talking about some "special sense of the term 'meaning'" in philosophy. If Frege only cared about truth, then that apparently led him astray in his analysis of meaning.
That's fine, but in itself it doesn't have any philosophical significance. As I said, it really depends on your philosophical goals. Usually in philosophy of language "meaning" is supposed to do some specific explanatory work of this or that phenomena, as in the argument for compositinality which I presented (i.e., if words had no meaning on their own we couldn't understand unfamiliar sentences). "Meaning" as a psychological association between words and mental images has no philosophical interest in itself (maybe it's true, maybe it isn't, but philosophy obviously can't decide that).
But it's a fact, philosophers did propose all sorts of definitions and theories for the notion of "meaning", so it does become pretty technical in many discussions.
The philosophical significance is that it gets right what meaning is.
The point of philosophy isn't to make shit up that has no resemblance to what the world is really like.
On my view, but it's not. Philosophers propose all sort of definitions and theories for the notion of meaning, sure, but they're not doing so by way of making shit up. They're trying to analyze what meaning is. Lots of philosophers are getting that wrong.
Well, and biology gets things right about beetles and flowers - would you also say that it is philosophically significant?
Quoting Terrapin Station
So far you are the one here who makes shit up. Do you have any empirical evidence that people always have mental associations with every word they know? That sounds to me like a totally far fetched claim. For example I have no idea what kind of things I associate with most of the words I know, except perhaps some faint images with familiar nouns. What mental associations do you have with a words like 'and' or 'because'?
There's no "correct" analysis of 'meaning', because there are many different senses in which this word is employed, inside and outside philosophy.
Analysis of what meaning is isn't a field other than philosophy. What biology gets right about beetles and flowers is certainly important for philosophy of biology. Philosophers of biology aren't just going to start making shit up that has no connection to facts per biology.
Quoting Fafner
You're attempting to lecture me about what constitutes philosophy, and then all of sudden you start acting as if it's an empirical science? Seriously?
Quoting Fafner
Wow, the bullcrap is deep in this one. You'll fit in well here.
Thanks for your thoughts. I'm tied up at work right now but will get to this soon as I can.
Absolutely we'll deny (2) as formulated, but I don't think the "only sentences have meaning" view can be made to work.
More later. Have fun with Terrapin.
What does it mean then to make a philosophical analysis of meaning? How should we decide who is right?
Quoting Terrapin Station
I'm just saying that someone who's complaining about people making things up, shouldn't do the same thing himself...
Quoting Terrapin Station
That's not an argument.
What's the alternative?
And by the way, don't change my words when you quote me. I didn't say "There's no analysis of "meaning""
As I'm doing here, I highlighted your post and hit the "quote" button. It's not as if I retyped anything. You apparently edited your post after I quoted you.
Tell me something about your background with philosophy. I'm curious how this question can fit with the content and tenor of your other comments in the thread so far.
Quoting Fafner
And indeed I wasn't. I was talking about what meaning is, in general. I wasn't making up something that bears no resemblance to that and saying that it's meaning--"Oh, just in a [i]special philosophical sense."
Quoting Fafner
If only that could imply that it's not the case.
I don't see how this is relevant.
Quoting Terrapin Station
So on your account, do you want to say that all meaningful words must have mental associations? (because that's an empirical claim whether they do), and if they don't does it follow that they are not meaningful?
I also don't understand what you mean by something that bears "resemblance" to meaning (I suppose you meant something like a definition). How do you identify something as "meaning" in the first place, and know whether your definition "resembles" it or not? (and it's connected to my first question about what it is to analyze something in philosophy).
You are probably right, my fault.
I don't see why it matters if you see how it's relevant.
The alternative is to say that words do have sense, and that the sense of a word is the contribution it makes to the sense of a sentence in which it is used.
You avoid circularity by beginning with sentences simple enough for you to have a way of grasping their sense independently. These atomic sentences are just what Frege forms concepts/predicates from.
More later.
Not that anyone is necessarily doing this, but I think it's important to remember that it doesn't work in a "robotic," black & white way. Words in isolation often have meaning (and they can express fairly complex thoughts or actions), but it's also the case that phrases and complete sentences can be "units" of meaning on their own. In other words, it's not that people always assign meaning to individual words, and then concatenations of them are always concatenations of the meanings of the individual words in the phrase or sentence. It varies by person, by situation, by context, etc.
But the more substantial question is what the context principle supposed to deny in the first place (or what kind of view Frege sought to oppose when he formulated the principle), and what interests me in particular are contemporary views about the semantics of natural language which almost all presuppose some strong form of compositionality and also deny the context principle. Contemporary philosophers of language typically think of "meaning" as something like the definition of a term (or some other more abstract sort of rule), and argue that sentences acquire meaning only as a function of the meaning of the words from which the sentence is composed, plus fixed syntactical rules that tell you which words can go where. Now THAT I think Frege would've denied, and no doubt Wittgenstein as well (both early and late). And so the main question (in the contemporary debate about compositionality) is what is the basic semantic unit of a language, sentences or words? And it's not clear to me how exactly Frege's notion of sense is related to this more contemporary understanding of "semantics".
The analogy between putting together pieces whose 'shapes' have no reference to anything beyond themselves to form a representation of a horse, and putting together words, whose 'shapes' do have reference to things beyond themselves to form a 'representation' of a very specific action "I'll stop at the store on the way home tonight and get milk" doesn't seem very compelling to me.
Many, if not all, of the 'pieces' of that sentence, could be substituted by a potentially unlimited number of alternatives. And the ability of the listener to understand any alternative representation of 'stopping at the store on the way home from work to buy milk' would be limited only by their familiarity with the references of the pieces used to construct the representation. The shapes that fit together (presumably only one way like a jigsaw puzzle) to form a representation of a horse have their 'logic' built right into them, whereas the 'shapes' of words do not, but rather rely on external reference for their logic.
If you don't like the analogy, that's fine. I'm not in love with it. The motivation was to combine two ideas: that performing a linguistic act is like making a move or taking a turn in a game; a sentence is composed of words put together in a certain way.
(Tangrams aren't like jigsaw puzzles. There's likely more than one way to do it.)
OK, there might be more than one way to do it, so the shapes have a very determinate logic as to how the ways they can fit together, but not necessarily to form only one specific picture. That's closer to being analogous to words, but now it seems to be only analogous to grammar; there is still no analogy to reference. It is the references of the words that allow us to put the words together in various combinations (which may well be ungrammatical (but that is a matter of convention, not of logic) to represent the same very specific action (stopping at the shop). Or we can even use different shapes (words) which are related by their references.
It seems to me that reference is the key to meaning, although context and intention obviously contribute, too. What does this sentence mean, for example: "I am looking forward to more intelligent posts from you"? Is it praising or insulting? It seems that it has a determinate meaning only to me, it's specific meaning depends on what I have in mind.
Quickly, yes I'm going to be following Frege's usage. There's some exegesis you have to get through, because at the time of the Grundlagen he hadn't split meaning into sense and reference yet, and he never enunciated the context principle again later.
However, there are statements in the Grundlagen (ref. when I get home) that show Frege also believed in compositionality. So he didn't think they were incompatible.
The motto he gives goes something like this: from the word to the sense, from the sense to the reference. So the sense of a singular term is what fixes its reference, and its reference is an object. The sense of a sentence is the thought it expresses, and the reference is its truth-value.
More later.
"Reference" is often thought of as "the act or procedure of fixing the sense to the referent." A la "How does reference work?"
Or in other words, "referent" is used as a noun in an (usually external) object sense. "Reference" is used with more of a verb connotation.
Just bringing that up because it might help some folks understand it.
Yes, words are related to one another in terms of their references to various objects, actions and so on. For example, the worlds 'gold', 'steel' and 'copper' are related because they all refer to metals.
So, what's your point; I'm not seeing it.
Did you read the whole post? The last sentence was this: "Just bringing that up because it might help some folks understand it."
Which "folks" that you felt were in need of edification did you have in mind then?
Anyone who might be reading the thread and who might benefit from further clarification. You know that anyone can read a public message board, right? This isn't a private conversation that we're having.
What made you think there would be people reading this thread who did not possess such rudimentary knowledge? Or was it just an opportunity to show off your knowledge? It seems like a bit of unnecessary effort to go to just in case there might be someone who wasn't aware of the most basic ideas in the philosophy of language. Why would anyone who didn't have such a basic grounding even bother to read a thread called " Compositionality and Frege's context priniciple"?
We're already explaining sense and reference in Frege. That's not rudimentary?
Then it's certainly not outside of the scope and tenor of the thread in general just in case it's rudimentary. (And just like having to answer your questions certainly isn't outside of the scope of rudimentariness.)
'Reference' is not the same as the act of fixing reference (in the sense of an ostensive definition). 'Reference' is believed by philosophers to be a relation between linguistic expressions (or perhaps some mental states) and things in the world, and not a name for any act or procedure.
Secondly, referents don't have 'sense', but only the bearers of meaning do (such as linguistic expressions or beliefs) that stand in the relation of reference to their referents. The words 'Barack Obama' have sense in English (they denote a particular person, which is their referent), but Barack Obama himself doesn't posses any kind of 'sense'.
That's only believed by deficient philosophers to not involve acts or procedures.
What does the "secondly" part have to do with anything I'd typed? (Ah, I just realized that you must have done some sort of weird Aspie reading of "fixing the sense to the referent" haha)
But it's a question of definition, not you opinion. This is what the term means in the philosophical literature, it has nothing to do with what you or anyone else thinks about how reference is established, they are not treated as the same thing.
Why would you believe that I was talking about definitions in my post? You seriously believed that I was saying that the words "act or procedure" were to be found in some formal definition of "reference"? Why would you read my post that way?
Well you ought to talk about definitions because you claimed at the beginning of your post that "In contemporary analytic philosophy..." reference means such and such, and that means that we are not talking here about your personal opinion, but about how the term is commonly used/defined/understood by the majority of analytic philosophers. And yes analytic philosophers do often give precise enough definitions for the terminology they are employing (I don't know what you mean by 'formal'), so we ought to talk about definitions, or something close to this.
I explicitly said "often thought of." That doesn't denote that I'm about to give a definition. You can't read. But do go ahead and "lecture" me some more despite that fact.
First, it is a definition even if it doesn't apply to everyone who uses the term. Secondly, I don't think that any serious philosopher actually thinks that this is what reference is, because there is an obvious distinction between an expression having reference and the question about how reference is fixed, or what are the conditions under which a term acquires a referent. Read any classical text about reference such as Kripke's "Naming and Necessity" and you'll see that he makes a very sharp distinction between the two, and everyone to my best knowledge follows him.
And btw, here's the definition of reference from SEP:
"Reference is a relation that obtains between certain sorts of representational tokens (e.g., names, mental states, pictures) and objects." (my emphesis)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reference/
I seriously challenge you to show me even a single peer-reviewed text that doesn't treat reference as a relation but defines it as an "act" or "procedure".
What does the pronoun "it" stand for in that sentence?
Whatever you were talking about. Again, if you are trying to explain a term then it's a definition in my understanding. If you don't like the word, you can choose another one, it doesn't matter. My point is that when you make claims about how other people use a certain word, then you can't just make stuff up, you have to back it up with something.
I wasn't talking about definitions, though. So we're back to you not being able to comprehend how someone could say something like "often thought of as" and not be talking about a definition. So do we need to explain that, or . . . it sounds like you're not very attached now to whether we call my comment a statement of a definition and we can drop your first sentence, "It is a definition even if it doesn't apply to everyone who uses the term." Which option do you want to go with?
I already told you that if you don't like the word 'definition' then you can drop it, I don't care. My point is the same whether you call what you said a 'definition' or something else. You say something false about the usage of the word 'reference' among all professional philosophers, and it doesn't change it even if you qualify it by 'often', because no one talks like this ever.
I'm not asking what I want to do. I'm asking if you're okay in dropping that one sentence, or do you need an explanation of how my post can make sense while not being a definition? One thing at a time. Don't type something if it's not important.. (And you and John doing this major thread crapping is certainly important.)
Listen, I don't want to argue about meaningless verbal questions. If you still don't understand, or want to ignore the substantial objection that I made about what you said then I'm out.
And I don't really want to have a conversation with someone who is so hell-bent on being combative (and thread-crapping in the process) that they can't even say whether they're okay with dropping a particular sentence--that's too much of a concession to make. If you like combat that much, though, continue.
And I don't want conversations with people who can't be bothered to properly explain themselves.
Right. So I guess you won't be talking to me any further.
I want to try to make an approach to the "only sentences have meaning" view. (For now, I'll use the word "meaning" without saying what it is.)
We'll all agree, I think, that only statements (let's leave aside everything else for a bit) can have a truth-value. But we need to distinguish somehow between grasping the meaning of a statement and knowing whether it is true or false.
So what's the meaning of a statement? What do you know when you know what the meaning of a statement is? One widely discussed view is that when you know the meaning of a statement, you know what conditions must obtain for the statement to be true, so that should do for now.
Let's take two statements, "It is raining," and "It was raining." One can be true when the other is false, so they must not have the same meaning. The proposal is that we grasp the meaning of a statement by comparing it to other statements that we already know the meaning of. So let's try that here.
Suppose our stock of statements include, besides the two at issue, "It is sunny," "It is cloudy," "It is snowing," and the past tenses of all those. So maybe we learn to say "It is raining," when the other three present tense statements are false. In that sense, we know the meaning of "It is raining" and the other present tense statements comparatively.
But what about the past tense statements? How could you learn their meaning comparatively? Since the truth conditions of the present tense statements are exclusive, there's a clear path for comparison. But truth conditions for the past tense statements overlap with each other and with the present tense statements. It's just not clear to me how comparison takes hold here.
I'm not sure how the issue of overlapping is relevant here. Surly not all truth conditions of past tense sentences overlap with each other - the truth conditions of "Frege was born in 1848" don't overlap with "Frege was born in 1850". Similarly, weather reports about the past presuppose either explicit or implicit reference to time and place. If I tell you out of the blue that is was raining without telling you when and where (and it's not clear from the context) then I haven't expressed with the sentence anything with definite truth conditions. So it seems to me that past and present tense sentences are analogous in this respect (and you said that present tense sentences don't pose a problem for me).
Another thing, you ask me how to explain the learning of the meaning of past tense sentences (the beginning of the quote). But this is not the question that I meant to answer, because it is not the challenge which (let's call him) the compositionalist poses to the contextualist (which is how I formulated the argument from the creativity of language). I think both parties agree that someone who can use only present tense sentences cannot learn to use past tense sentences on the basis of this knowledge alone - he must learn some new syntactic or semantic rules. The challenge is rather to explain simpler cases, which do seem troubling for the contextualist but not the compositionalist (because both of them have to explain how we learn sentences with new meaning, it doesn't come for free just because you accept compositionality). So for example, the contextualist should explain how can we understand new sentences in the past tense, even when we already understand some other sentences about the past. The compositionalist will say that it is simply a matter of reconfiguring the meanings of old words according to familiar rules, whereas the contextualist cannot say this since for him the smallest semantic or meaningful unit in a language is the sentence and not individual words. So the challenge here is to explain what it is, if not the meanings of the old known parts, that explains our ability to understand the sentence? (maybe this is not what you meant by your question, but just in case)
The past tense thing was just meant as a proxy for all the stuff we learn to talk about where we cannot directly check that the relevant truth conditions obtain. I think you hit a wall pretty quickly if all you have to go on is the truth and falsehood of statements.
Even the natural next step is blocked, which is recursively generating complex statements from simple ones using the logical constants. (And similarly for understanding such statements by analysing then into simple statements so coupled.) I don't see how you get the logical constants going at all.
If forced to choose, I'm saying the word is the basic semantic unit, not the sentence, so long as it's understood that the meaning of a word is the semantic contribution it makes to a sentence in which it is used. The statement is the unit of judgment, though, so "semantic" up there is really the wrong word. The word is the smallest unit of meaning.
If it matters, I think this is Frege's view as well, despite the way it is expressed in the Grundlagen, but that's considerably less important.
Sorry I don't get your point. On my account you don't have to know the truth or falsehood of this or that particular sentence, only understand the truth conditions of some sentences (which is of course not the same as knowing whether they actually obtain).
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Again, I don't see your point here... If as you say logical constants recursively generate sentences by combining other sentences, then how is the question about the meaning of single words supposed to arise here? I think that on the contrary, truth functional logic seems to be very congenial to the contextualist.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Perhaps there is a sense in which this whole debate is terminological. You could say that words have individual "meanings" on my account, but only if by "meaning" we understand something other than saying, e.g., that the meaning of the word 'cat' is cats (that is, that meaning can be explained by sub-sentential relation between words and things in the world (such as reference)). Rather knowing the "meaning" of a word is to know its logical function in different sentences, or seeing what is in common between different sentences that contain the same word (and I have in mind here Wittgenstein's "propositional variables" in the Tractatus, and it can be argued that Frege's object/concept/function distinction is a similar idea). So perhaps the real issue here is explanatory priority between words and sentences, rather than the question about the meaning of individual words (which can be understood in all sorts of different ways).
A meaning of a statement is simply the mental associations you make with the statement, which includes representations, referents you take it to pick out (if you do), relations you take it to specify or claim, and so on.
One assigns meaning.
That's one thing that's the case when one assigns meaning to a statement (we could argue that it shoudn't count as a statement if that's not the case), but I wouldn't say that that's what meaning amounts to. That's rather analogous to saying that when one owns a car, one will have keys to start the car. But what it is to own a car is not exhausted by having keys to start the car.
That would only be the case in some instances. Not all.
I'm not clear on what you'd find confusing here. But one way that you could comparatively grasp "It was raining" is by being familiar with "It was snowing", and then knowing the difference between rain and snow.
You either analyse sentences into components or you don't. If only sentences have meaning, then their components are meaningless. You can't have your cake and eat it too. Your contextualist who notices "structural similarities" among sentences would be like the guy who reasons that "ball" and "balk" and "balm" must have similar meanings. If you don't get to use components, all you have is truth conditions.
Quoting Fafner
It's the logical constants themselves that you don't get to have, because by definition they're meaningless.
I think I'm okay with your last paragraph, mostly at least, but I'm at work, so...
It can't be right that if something is composed of meaningless parts, then it itself must be meaningless (if this is what you meant). Surely, the letters of the alphabet from which words are composed are semantically meaningless, and yet the compositionalist claims that words are meaningful (and the same applies to sentences, they are also composed of meaningless letters). So if you are right, then even on the compositionalist view all words (and therefore sentences) are meaningless - and that can't be right.
The same applies to what you said about logical connectives.
If words are the smallest units of meaning, then letters are meaningless. If sentences are the smallest unit of meaning, then words are meaningless. But it is clearly possible to hold that words are meaningful and can be combined into larger meaningful expressions, including sentences. I so hold.
The way I construe the meaning of a word, the logical constants are meaningful.
[Edit: wrote "connectives" instead of "constants."]
Letters are not meaningless; their meaningfulness consists in their relationships to sounds that can be made by the human voice and the diverse but phonetically constrained ways in which they can combine to form words. Words are not meaningless; their meaning consists in both their individual references and the relationships of similarity and difference between their various references as well as the diverse but constrained ways in which they can combine to form phrases and sentences.
I would say it's semantics all the way down.
There's something to this, so long as, as you follow the chain up from phoneme to morpheme to word to sentence, you manage to mark the boundaries. (There's also a side trip some words take through "singular term.") The boundaries are important. It is arguably one of Frege's greatest legacies that he recognized the importance of the crossover from word to sentence.
It might be reasonable, helpful, or desirable, to use a different word for what we get at each step that we didn't have at the one before. The use of "meaning" at the word stage and the sentence stage does lead to confusion, but the usage is pretty well entrenched. There may be a darn good reason.
We don't have to stop at sentence, either. One next step that works for a lot of cases is language-game. You could also look to pragmatics, maybe speech-acts; whatever you call it, this would be the point at which you're looking not just for what a sentence means, but what is meant by its utterance. There is one more next step up from sentence that I think deserves special treatment, and that's inference.
About the meaning of words, as I said in another post, it's a bit of a terminological dispute. The really interesting question is in what sense words have "meaning" and what is the relation between the meaning of words and the meaning of sentences, and which one is more basic. We can talk about the meaning of words in some sense, but on my view (as someone who takes the context principle seriously) the meaning of words is parasitic on the meaning of sentences, and that means that atomistic semantic theories (that try to explain the meaning of sentences on the basis of the meanings of their words) are false.
Yes I agree that letters do not have meaning which relates directly to the meaning of sentences as words do; I was just pointing out that they constitute their own layer of meaning as the 'basic pieces of the game' which also express our physicality and emotionality (as the sounds we can make). This is certainly not any kind of determinate propositional meaning, to be sure; it is more a kind of indeterminate phenomenological meaning. I think the more determinate meaning grows out of the basic meaningfulness that signs, including letters, words and sentences, but also everything else in the environment, have for us.
Here you are thinking of the intentionality of utterances and the inferences we make about the intentions of speakers as another layer 'above' the 'literal' meanings of sentences?
It's not really worded well there. What I meant was there are several choices for where to go after sentences, and I gave some examples. I don't know if there is one next step, but there are candidates that I think are important.
One of those is pragmatics, and yes I think of what is meant by an utterance of a sentence as something other than what the sentence (literally, as they say) means, and that depends on loads of stuff, including but not limited to the intentionality of the speaker. (Sometimes pragmatics has been taken as the theory of indexicals, but there's some reason to think they ought to come in earlier, at the sentence level. It's tricky, right?)
One other place to go from sentences is inference, and here I'm talking about reasoning and logic. For one thing, here the concept of utterance doesn't seem particularly valuable, and you're looking exactly at what a sentence means, not what someone might mean by it. (Sentences connect to each other to form arguments, in a way reminiscent of words connecting to form sentences.)
That sounds a little dogmatic, because of course one of the things we do a lot of, and why I found the Comey testimony interesting, is reason about utterances, and quite often it's the difference between what was said and what was meant by what was said that's at issue. But here we have the utterance as object. The utterance of your reasoning about some utterances -- maybe you're into rhetoric there, or something.
I think it does. 'Meaning', like many other words, is polysemous. As long as we can clarify what we mean to say, and where the areas of determinability and indeterminability lie, why should we be excessively anal about terminology? What would you say to the word 'significance' as a substitute? Perhaps I should have said 'it is semiotics all the way down' instead; would that make you happier?
Here's an example to clarify my view of the context principle.
I mentioned the logical constants several times. Let's suppose someone asks me, "What does 'and' mean?" I seriously have no idea what to say. Can you explain that without using the word? (I'm tempted to check and see how dictionaries handle this, but of course dictionaries have to rely on cycles of words to define each other mutually.)
You have to show someone how to use the logical constants. You train them. (The sequent calculus carries an echo of this in its introduction and elimination rules.) At some point they know how to use them, and understand how the logical constants modify the truth conditions of statements.
Frege's point is that once you know that, there's nothing left to know about their meaning. There's no meaning besides how they're used in sentences and how that use changes truth conditions. That use is their meaning.
Are we talking about natural languages, like English, or some sketch of an "ideal language" in a logician's notebook? I'll assume we're talking about natural language, or perhaps language in general.
This much seems obvious to me:
1. Compositionality has its limits. Phonemes and letters don't have standalone meanings. The same word or phrase can have various meanings. The same sentence can have various meanings. The same proposition can be expressed in various sentences composed of entirely different parts.
2. Context does a lot of the work for us in constraining all that variability. Relevant aspects of context may include the intentions of the speaker; the shared associations, habits, and beliefs of the speech-community; relations among speaker's intention, utterance, and perceptible features of the environment; and so on.
3. Conversations like this one will remain mired in confusion if we proceed by assuming that everyone has roughly the same idea of what "meaning" means in them.
If a Fregean decrees that "words have no meaning", he's not rejecting the assertions in ordinary English that "words have meaning" or "words are meaningful", nor is he affirming the assertions in ordinary English that "words are meaningless" or "words have no meaning". Rather he's constraining the use of the term "meaning" in the special context of his philosophical discourse.
Of course words have some sort of linguistic significance, of course they mean something, of course they have meaning.... Of course it's often the case that we can tell whether or not someone "knows what a word means". The Fregean should acknowledge all this when he's speaking ordinary English among ordinary-English speakers; it's his burden to find some way to paraphrase these commonplace insights into his own peculiar idiom, and to find some way to make his own peculiar insights intelligible in the common tongue.
In that light, I just don't see what the tension between "compositionality" and "context" is supposed to be. It seems clear to me that the meaning of an English utterance depends in part on the meaning of the English sentence uttered; in part on the speaker's intention in uttering that sentence; and often in part on other features of context.
The analyst is free to isolate the English sentence and consider its "meaning" in abstraction from any context of utterance. It seems clear this abstract "meaning" can be analyzed in terms of the arrangement of linguistically significant parts according to rules of sentence "composition". It seems just as clear that this abstract "meaning" of sentences is only one component of linguistic meaning, and that the results of such analysis will often seem incomplete or at odds with respect to the full-blooded meaning of utterances in context.
The abstract significance of the sentence thus isolated is nonetheless an important component of linguistic meaning, essential to natural language as we know it.