Small Verbs, Complex Events: Analyticity without Synonymy

Pietroski, Paul M.

doi:10.1002/9780470690024.ch8

Cited by 54 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…In highly influential early work in the 1960s with Jerrold Katz (who had been a fellow graduate student at Princeton), Fodor also defended a “Semantic Markerese” conception of an internalist semantics that they thought brought to Chomsky's linguistics program Fregean demands for compositionality and underwrote traditional philosophical claims about the “analytic.” Unlike Katz, however, Fodor soon became persuaded that there was no way to save such a semantics from the attacks on the analytic raised by Quine, particularly from the challenge to distinguish intuitions about meaning from simply tenacious beliefs (he also raised serious doubts that even so syntactic seeming an analyticity as “to kill is to cause to die” could be defended syntactically (Fodor, ), an issue that inflamed the “linguistic wars” of the time about “generative semantics” and is still discussed today—see Pietroski, , §1.2). In view of ConfirmHolism, what today may be taken to be “analytic” may tomorrow, with enough pressure from other beliefs, be found to be false.…”

Section: Contributions To Cognitive Sciencementioning

confidence: 99%

Remembering Jerry Fodor and his work

Rey

2018

Mind & Language

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This is a reminiscence and short biographical sketch of the late philosopher and cognitive scientist Jerry Fodor. It includes a summary of his main proposals about the mind: his “Language of Thought” hypothesis; his rejection of analyticity and conceptual role semantics; his “mad dog nativism”; his proposal of mental modules and—by contrast—his skepticism about a computational theory of central cognition; his anti‐reductionist, but still physicalist, views about psychology; and, lastly, his attacks on selectionism. I conclude with some discussion of his idiosyncratic style and of his aesthetic and other interests. An appendix provides some memorable quotes.

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Section: Contributions To Cognitive Sciencementioning

confidence: 99%

Remembering Jerry Fodor and his work

Rey

2018

Mind & Language

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“…Lyons () suggests: ‘If we just take concepts to be psychological entities, in particular, those mental representations the tokening of which is partially constitutive of the tokening of an occurrent belief, the notion of containment becomes tractably clear’. Such a neoclassical approach to analyticity has been recently developed and discussed by Chomsky (), Horwich (), Lyons (), Pietroski (), and Rey (), which each author calls ‘I‐analyticity’, inspired by Chomsky's distinction between E‐Language and I‐Language. I‐analyticity holds speakers to have, often implicitly, certain basic inferential commitments by virtue of understanding their native language.…”

Section: Conceptual Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There is actually some independent support for this from etymology: Pietroski () reports that the Old English words for ‘kill’ and ‘die’ were ‘cwell’ and ‘cwel’, respectively.…”

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confidence: 99%

Neoclassical Concepts

Leben

2015

Mind & Language

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Linguistic theories of lexical semantics support a Neoclassical Theory of concepts, where entities like CAUSE, STATE, and MANNER serve as necessary conditions for the possession of individual event concepts. Not all concepts have a neoclassical structure, and whether or not words participate in regular linguistic patterns such as verbal alternations will be proposed as a probe for identifying whether their corresponding concepts do indeed have such structure. I show how the Neoclassical Theory supplements existing theories of concepts and supports a version of analyticity and conceptual analysis.After engaging in debate for a sufficient amount of time, one realizes that arguments can only proceed when participants share the relevant concepts. Establishing shared concepts is so important to philosophy that during the 20th century many philosophers explicitly stated that the entire aim of the field was to analyze and clarify concepts, helping to facilitate some debates and put an end to others. This article will argue that linguistic theories of lexical semantics have interesting and important consequences for the study of concepts. The first section sets out the phenomena a theory of concepts is supposed to explain, and the second provides a survey of some current theories and the challenges they face. Section 3 presents an overview of decompositional approaches to lexical semantics, and Section 4 shows how these approaches support a Neoclassical Theory of concepts that helps explain the phenomena at issue. Finally, Sections 5 and 6 develop a kind of conceptual analysis from this theory and show how it can be applied to philosophical problems.

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“…I posit Felicity‐on‐Proposition (FoP) to capture the relating property of the feature cause . As the cause stands “in binary thematic relations to each of the verb's arguments (Pietroski :188)”, the ‘beyond‐control” semantics in the object theme position should be understood in reference to the directly causing event. The forced control of the external argument is computed as sufficient enough to trigger the formation of improvised causatives only in relation to the degree of control‐over‐the‐action of the affected entity.…”

Section: Main Proposals: Improvised Causativizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improvised Causativization

Kwon

2013

Studia Linguistica

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In this paper, I argue a special kind of causative alternation that arises from a speaker's immediate need to express the ‘forced control’ semantics of an imposed causer. This type of causativization, termed improvised causativization, is not limited by the argument structure of an intransitive base verb, whether it is unergative or unaccusative. Based on this observation, I propose that causativization be syntactically represented through a cause phrase that is added after a vP is completed; specifically, at the step of derivation when an intransitive profile is completed (cf. Levin & Rappaport Hovav 1995). Along with a claim in lexical semantics (Pylkkänen 2002, cf. Neeleman & van de Koot 2010) that cause relates a caused to a causing event, I argue that the mediating role of the cause is based on a set of felicity conditions. Under this analysis, variations at different levels, i.e., individual, dialectal, diachronic, or language acquisitional, can be accounted for without further stipulation.

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Small Verbs, Complex Events: Analyticity without Synonymy

Cited by 54 publications

References 23 publications

Remembering Jerry Fodor and his work

Remembering Jerry Fodor and his work

Neoclassical Concepts

Improvised Causativization

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