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Meaning and individual minds : the case of if

sense they have taken out the same book, but in the concrete sense a different one. Chomsky writes: Quote 9: [...] the internal conditions on meaning are rich, complex, and unsuspected; in fact, barely known. The most elaborate dictionaries do not dream of such subtleties; they provide no more than hints that enable the intended concept to be identified by those who already have it (at least, in essential respects). (Chomsky 2000a: 36) There are two points to be made about quote 9. On the one hand, the semantics, or the perspectives for viewing the world that lexical items afford, are genetically given. Chomsky claims that a child would not be able to understand the richness and complexity of meaning if it were not – in some ‘essential respects’ – innately predetermined (see also 2000a: 61). It seems then that such innate semantics should, in principle, be subject to a naturalistic inquiry, like that of Chomsky’s. But it is not; the 31 question about the meaning/semantics of linguistic expressions falls outside Chomsky’s naturalistic enquiry into the nature of FL (e.g. Chomsky 2000a: 20, 36). The reason for this is that, even though perspectives – or let us call them conceptual primitives – are innate and hence species-invariant, the associations between morpho-phonological labels and conceptual structures are dependent on context and individualistic psychology. If we combine the innateness thesis with the individualistic nature of language, Chomsky’s point seems to be that even though semantic content (i.e. conceptual content) is innate, the role it plays in language use – or the way it is involved in meaning/semantics of linguistic expressions – is context-variable and speakervariable. Another thorny issue that Chomsky hints at in discussing natural language semantics concerns the intricacy and often paradoxicality of the perspectives that a linguistic expression can provide; the abstract and concrete aspects of a book discussed above are a case in point. But let us take a closer look at a word like cow. If we wanted to argue that natural language semantics was subject to a naturalistic inquiry, we would have to find a level of semantic representation that corresponds to the word cow and that is species-invariant. Presumably, such semantic representation would have to be abstract enough as to underdetermine all uses of the word cow. The intuitive, pretheoretical problem is that a word cow can provide such conflicting perspectives as [animate] as well as [inanimate] (‘Would you like a cow or a dog?’, asked by a mother to a child at a toy shop), [human] (‘She’s a cow’, spoken derogatorily of a woman) alongside [non-human], [male], [female], [white], [brown], [purple], [dotty], [dead], [alive], [fleshy], [fluffy], [made of clay] among millions of other possible perspectives. It is not surprising then that Chomsky (2000a: 132) regards a naturalistic inquiry into natural language semantics as ill-fated. The consequences are profound: from Chomsky’s internalism-individualism it follows that the meaning/semantics of linguistic expressions is neither stable nor shared in any interesting way, i.e. it is not shared in a way that supports naturalistic (or social externalist) accounts of linguistic semantics. This is the essence of I-language. Fundamentally, Chomsky (e.g. 2000a: 137) argues that a radically individualistic approach to the study of natural language meaning/semantics – i.e. a holistic approach, which involves the study of beliefs mediating between us and things in the world – seems to be a ‘fruitful’ direction to pursue. 15 15 In this context, Chomsky (2000a: 137) makes reference to Bilgrami’s (1992) radically contextualist thesis about unity and locality of semantic content. Bilgrami’s approach is discussed in chapter 3. 32 However, this sympathy of Chomsky’s for holism and individualism is in tension with his view of language, and thus of linguistic expressions, as doubly constituted by phonological and semantic properties. The next section is concerned with this tension. 1.2.4 Chomsky’s legacy in research into semantics and pragmatics As discussed earlier, Chomsky (e.g. 2005a: 10) reconstructs Aristotle’s idea – that language links sound and meaning – by attributing both phonology and semantics to linguistic expressions. On this view, linguistic expressions are taken to be doubleinterface syntactic objects constituted by phonological and semantic properties (). The following figure illustrates this. Figure 1.4: The double-interface object Following from this double-interface assumption is the view that (i) words, and linguistic expressions generally, have meaning in virtue of encoding linguistic semantics as their constitutive property and that (ii) it is in virtue of having meaning as their constitutive property that words guide interpretation to specific regions of the conceptual space. For example, in Relevance Theory (e.g. Sperber & Wilson 1995, Carston 2002), which considers itself an adjunct to (/an extension of) Chomskyan tradition (Wedgewood 2007: 679), the encoded linguistic semantics is necessarily and always decoded by the language module and delivered as logical form to the pragmatic processor. The point that I am making here is this. The view that there exists a specifically linguistic, i.e. non-pragmatic, semantic level follows from the view that linguistic expressions are double-interface objects. Indeed, in the light of the double-interface view of language, Chomsky’s (2005a: 4) claim that natural language semantics may be ‘related’ to the semantics of thought and Chomsky’s (e.g. 2000a: 62) endorsement of the analytic-synthetic distinction may be interpreted in favour of some notion of linguistic semantics. On the other hand, Chomsky’s (2005a: 4) claim that natural