New Directions in Semantics

Abstract

This collection of thirteen papers aims to present a variety of approaches to the semantics of natural language, though the book falls short of giving a comprehensive survey of current trends in this area. The emphasis of the papers is primarily foundational, concentrating on such questions as the proper subject matter of semantics, the role of truth and formalization and the relationship between semantics and the use and understanding of language. The work of Donald Davidson receives a considerable amount of attention, whereas other active (and perhaps less philosophical) areas of semantic investigation, like situation semantics, discourse representation theory or generalized quantification rate little or no mention. This book is likely to be of more interest to people working on the philosophy of language than to those who are more directly involved in computational linguistics. One subject dealt with in several papers is the nature of meaning itself. This can be approached from two directions: meaning and the relationship between language and reality, and meaning and the relationship between language and understanding. Is meaning something primitive and undefinable in terms of things that are more basic? Or can we give a reductive account of meaning that defines it in terms of the relationship between (? sentences of a) language and either reality or understanding or both? Harman ((Nonsolipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics) gives a reductive account of meaning, taking the relation between language and understanding as primary. The meaning of an expression is its conceptual role, which is determined by the functional role in someone's psychology of the concepts out of which the expression is constructed. A standard complaint against conceptual role semantics is that it leads towards solipsism: the same expression may have different functional roles for different people, or even the same person at different times. If meaning is something public and interpersonal that is suitable for communication, solipsism makes conceptual role an inadequate candidate for meaning. Harman tries to avoid solipsism in two ways. First, he counts

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