COLORING AND COMPOSITION

Stephen Neale, University of California, Berkeley (II-B)

The idea that an utterance (or inscription) of a basic declarative sentence expresses a single proposition has dominated philosophical discussions of meaning in this century. Refinements aside, the idea is not so much a substantive thesis as part of a background against which particular theories of meaning are evaluated. There are good reasons ditching this assumption, not least of which is the existence of phenomena (noted by Frege, Strawson, and Grice) that threaten at least the completeness of classical theories of meaning, which associate with an utterance (or inscription) of a simple sentence a truth-condition, a Russellian proposition, or a Fregean thought. A framework according within which utterances (and inscriptions) express sequences of propositions may provide much of what is needed to account for the relevant phenomena, a better overall picture of the way language works, and an enticingly uniform perspective on semantic problems raised by sentence connectives, sentence modifiers, proper names, demonstratives, descriptions, apposition, and verbs used to report psychological states and events.

The package I have to offer is based on three ideas: (i) the meaning of an individual word is a sequence of instructions for generating a sequence of propositions (in conjunction with compositional instructions (syntax) and elements of context); (ii) judgments of truth, falsity, commitment, and conflict are shaped, in part, by the weights attached to individual propositions that occur in sequences expressed, weights that may be set (and reset) by contextual considerations; (iii) Fregean senses are superfluous; propositions might as well be Russellian. The resulting framework respects the distinction between Semantics and Pragmatics as well as Principles of Composition and Semantic Innocence.

An examination of what Frege calls "coloring" and Grice calls "conventional implicature" is used to get the ball rolling. My primary interest is not in the history of such examples but in how we can might piece together elements of the work of Frege, Grice, and others to extricate ourselves from a semantic strait-jacket within which we are still shuffling in vain attempts to solve major problems about language and the mind.