Paul M. Pietroski: Conjoining Meanings. Semantics Without Truth Values

Abstract

There is an enormous range of theories of meaning in linguistics and philosophy, and most notably, there is still a wide gap between logical and (especially cognitive) linguistic approaches. With his monograph Conjoining Meanings (henceforth CM), Paul M. Pietroski sets out to join the communities and to bridge this gap with an "internalist semantics" approach to meaning that is cognitive in the Chomskyan sense, but rooted in modern logic. In Chapter 0 "Overture", Pietroski introduces the core assumptions of CM treated in more depth in later chapters. He starts by saying that human natural languages (which he calls "Slangs") are generative procedures that connect meanings with pronunciations. Continuing with what meanings are not, he rejects both the notion 'meanings are concepts' (i. e., to identify meanings and concepts) and 'meanings are extensions' (or corresponding/equivalent truth-conditional conceptions, i. e., the propositional and Davidsonian stances according to Speaks 2018). Instead, Pietroski proposes to view meanings as instructions for how to access simple concepts or build complex concepts. As to semantic composition, he notes that Frege's functor-argument apparatus and derivatives like type-theoretic Lambda calculus are much too powerful to model human meaning composition. The alternative he then previews is based on a restricted kind of predication (only classificatory monadic concepts of type ⟨M⟩ and relational dyadic concepts of type ⟨D⟩) with corresponding compositional operations (M-junction, D-junction). Chapter 1 elaborates on the linguistic reasons for assuming a mentalist, generative, non-extensional approach, where meaning is neither based on extensions or representations of extensions, nor on relations to truth values (contrary to Lewisian, Davidsonian, and also Montagovian approaches). To exemplify his points, Pietroski uses linguistic ambiguities, Putnam's "water" case, and Liar sentences. Chapter 2 introduces concepts as "composable mental symbols that can be used to think about things" (p. 77) based on predicates which Pietroski shows can be motivated by classical logic (cf. 3.1) but differ from those in other current accounts. He argues that monadic predicates should not be regarded as truth-Open Access.