Preproceedings 2006 - Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society

Natural Language and its Speakers: Davidson’s Compositionality Requirement - Isaac Nevo
set of semantic primitives that is constructed along these
lines, i.e., by aggregating the primitive vocabularies of all
actual speakers, need not be attributable to any single
speaker. It may be too large, or too counterfactual, for that
purpose. Just uniting the various sets of primitives that
different speakers use need not work up to a workable
theory, even if we settle for a finite set of such sets
according to the finite number of speakers there actually
are.
Secondly, the set of finite vocabularies of finitely
many speakers may not exhaust the language either, for
given any such enlarged vocabulary, the language may
still grow and change. The latter set is, of course, finite,
and no language will ever have more than a finite number
of speakers. But this de-facto finitude of language is not a
consequence of its truth-theoretic form, and it is
compatible with the language being potentially infinite, i.e.,
with it’s not being exhausted by any finite theory. As to the
set of primitives that would exhaust the language in terms
of its potentiality of expression, there is no guaranteed that
it is a finite set. The set of all finite sets of primitives that
would be needed to derive any sentence that might be
formulated in the language need not be a finite set. This is
not to say, of course, that any natural language is in fact
infinite, only that it is potentially so (and the infinite
potentiality of a natural language is what gives it its
prospects of development and growth).
But why is potentiality of expression relevant for the
empirical study of language? Admittedly, no empirical
theory should be held accountable to such a notion of
potentiality. An empirical theory need not be made to
account for all the different ways in which a language may
develop and change. The point is only that it should not
preclude such changes and developments, by imposing –
non-empirically – a theoretical individuation of languages.
Finite and empirical theories are all very well as long as
they are not taken as exhaustive of the phenomenon
under discussion, i.e., as long as they do not replace their
own principles of individuation for the more customary
ones.
3. The Context Principle
In a famous passage, Davidson extends Frege’s context
principle from sentences to whole languages. His
argument is as follows:
We decided a while back not to assume that parts of
sentences have meaning except in the ontologically
neutral sense of making a systematic contribution to the
meanings of the sentences in which they occur . . . One
direction in which it points is a certain holistic view of
meaning. If sentences depend for their meaning on their
structure [WCP, I add], and we understand the meaning
of each item in the structure only as an abstraction from
the totality of sentences in which it features [WCP,
again], then we can give the meaning of any sentence
(or word) only by giving the meaning of every sentence
(and word) in the language [SCP. Notice how “language”
slips in to replace the lesser totality of sentences in
which a word appears]. Frege said that only in the
context of a sentence does a word have meaning; in the
same vein he might have added that only in the context
of the language does a sentence (and therefore a word)
have meaning (1984: p. 22. Bracketed comments
added).
However, the passage from sentence to language
as the minimal unit of meaning is more slippery then
Davidson would have it. The totality of sentences in which
a word occurs, or even the totality of sentences in which a
particular finite vocabulary occurs, need not be the same
as the whole of language, at least not if “language” is
meant to apply inclusively to natural, as well as formally
constructed languages. And while it is plausible to assume
that the meanings of the words are abstractions from the
roles that they play in the sentences they occur, it is much
less plausible to assume that these various totalities must
all merge into a single formal unity. Vocabularies and the
sentences that can be expressed by them hang together,
but different vocabularies (and different totalities of
sentences) need not be unified under a single theoretical
structure. In this respect natural languages are very
different from formal systems. They evolve continuously
without loosing their identity, and they constitute “wholes”
that are greater than those captured by any particular set
of rules and words. Hence, to the extent that Davidson’s
holism consists in imposing a single theoretical structure
on the whole of language, it freezes a dynamic human
activity into an abstract and a formal entity.
In ‘Reality without Reference’ (1984[1977])
Davidson poses a dilemma for the theory of meaning. It is
the following. No theory of meaning could be adequate
unless it supplied an account of truth (since ‘truth
conditions’ are such a central feature of what a theory of
meaning is a theory of). Hence, also, no theory of meaning
could be adequate unless it supplied an account of
reference (since the determination of reference must enter
into the determination of truth). However, any reductive
theory of reference, i.e., a theory of reference in nonsemantic
terms, is bound to lead to results that are
unsatisfactory in various respects. First, such ‘building
block’ theories tend to be metaphysical in nature, reducing
semantics to non-semantic facts. Secondly, no such
reduction can do as well as reference in point of underlying
the compositionality of language. Only the semantic
feature of satisfaction has in fact been given a
compositionality-supporting account (Tarski’s). Thus, an
account of meaning requires an account of truth, and the
latter account requires an account of reference, but no
account of reference that could be independently given
satisfies other requirements of the theory of meaning,
particularly the requirement of compositionality.
Davidson goes on to formulate what he calls the
‘paradox of reference.’ It is the following. Although the
‘building block’ method of semantics, which starts by
accounting for the meanings (references) of constituent
terms and builds upwards to the meanings (truth
conditions) of the sentences in which they occur fails as a
theoretical account, the alternative, namely, the holistic
approach, which views the semantic features of subsentential
components (predicates) as mere abstractions
from the meanings of sentences in which they occur, is
incapable of giving ‘a complete account’ of the meanings
of these sub-sentential components, and, consequently,
no account of truth either. Davidson’s resolution is ‘to
defend a version of the holistic approach, and urge that we
must give up the concept of reference . . .’ (1984: p. 221).
The point is that relative to a finitely-based theory which
makes possible a derivation of truth conditions to all
sentences of the language, reference and satisfaction
could be seen as mere theoretical constructs, for which
there should be no non-theoretical role (and no reductive
account). Given that semantic theory could find its
empirical basis in the connection between sentences and
extra-linguistic facts, no further evidence is needed
regarding the semantic features of sub-sentential
components. Words and their various connections with
223