開催日：2018年11月24日

会場：東京大学駒場Iキャンパス18号館4階コラボレーションルーム

Tokyo Workshop on Philosophy of Language

Date: 24 November, 2019, 13:00-18:00
Venue: Collaboration room 4, 4th floor of 18th Building, Komaba I Campus, the University of Tokyo

Speakers:
Paul Pietroski (Rutgers University)
Kazuki Iijima (Tamagawa University)
Ryohei Takaya (Keio University)

Timetable:
13:00-14:10 Kazuki Iijima, TBA
14:20-15:30 Ryohei Takaya, `Compositionality for What?: Reconsidering Arguments for (and against) Compositionality’
16:00-17:30 Paul Pietroski, `Meanings, Homophony, and Polysemy’
17:30-18:00 General Discussion (discussant: Yu Izumi)

Abstracts:

Kazuki Iijima: TBA

Ryohei Takaya: `Compositionality for What?: Reconsidering Arguments for (and against) Compositionality’
This talk is about the status of compositionality in our linguistic communication and its theorizing. The principle of compositionality, according to which a meaning of complex expression is determined by meanings of its constituents and the way they are combined, has been regarded as an essential precondition under which semantic theories are built since the principle seems to explain some important facts about natural language, such as learnability and novelty. According to some authors, however, the project of formal semantics can be done properly without compositionality and so we need not care about it anymore.

In this talk, I will present a new methodological argument for compositionality which is based on our linguistic intuition about the notion of un-synonymy and substitution. My claim is that compositionality can be a useful criterion for theorizing semantics even if semantic theories themselves are non-compositional in a significant sense. I hope that this argument also provides us an answer to another important question; what kind of compositionality should we consider?

Paul Pietroski: `Meanings, Homophony, and Polysemy’
It’s often said that words have meanings that determine extensions of some kind, at least relative to contexts. But the phenomenon of polysemy, illustrated with words like ‘window’ and ‘book’, suggests that a single meaning can correspond to a family of concepts that are not extensionally equivalent. I’ll argue that polysemy, which differs importantly from lexical homophony, is an instance of the broader phenomenon that words are—by their nature—conceptually equivocal: even if a word is introduced as a device for expressing a single concept that has an extension, once it is introduced, the word can be used to express other concepts that are not extensionally equivalent. This is true even for words like ‘water’; following Chomsky, I think Putnam was wrong about the meaning of ‘water’ (and the meaning of ‘meaning’). Indeed, I’ll end by arguing that Putnam’s famous examples support a kind of internalism about linguistic meaning, even given an externalist accounts of conceptual contents.  

Organizer and contact person: Naoya Fujikawa fjnaoya [at] gmail.com
(This workshop is supported by JSPS through grant 19K00035)