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Context, Content, and Compositionality

Final Report Summary - CCC (Context, Content, and Compositionality)

It is customary, in the study of natural language, to contrast the meaning of an utterance (determined by the meanings of its parts and the way they are syntactically combined) and what the speaker who makes the utterance means and manages to convey. The latter massively depends upon the context, in contrast to the former, which is fixed by linguistic rules. This corresponds to the so-called semantics/pragmatics divide. In this project, the PI and his co-workers argued against the traditional understanding of that divide: they showed (on both conceptual and empirical grounds) that what an utterance says — its intuitive truth-conditions — cannot be neatly separated from what the speaker means. In particular, the speaker’s meaning endows words with senses that are tailored to the situation of utterance and depart from the conventional meanings carried by the words in isolation. This phenomenon of ‘contextual modulation’ cannot be relegated to pragmatics and ignored by semanticists, for it interacts with the grammar-driven process of semantic composition (through which the meaning of an utterance is built up from the meanings of its parts). Because of that interaction, the content of an utterance always depends upon the context in which it is made. This claim defines Contextualism, a view which has attracted considerable attention in recent years.
Many theorists are suspicious of Contextualism because they take it to threaten the very enterprise of semantics. In the literature, one often finds arguments to the effect that, if Contextualism is right, then systematic semantics becomes impossible. The specific aim of the CCC project was to defend Contextualism by demonstrating that it is not incompatible with the project of constructing a systematic, compositional semantics for natural language.
The first half of the project was devoted to showing that the compositionality requirement can be satisfied while remaining faithful to the spirit of Contextualism. We elaborated a model on which the content of a complex expression is a function of the modulated contents of its parts and the syntax. It is customary, since Kaplan, to accept that content is compositional even though, in contrast to linguistic meaning, it is context-dependent and rests upon the pragmatic process of ‘saturation’. Adding modulation as another type of pragmatic process on which content depends does not fundamentally change the picture: if kaplanian content is compositional, then the pragmatically richer sort of content posited by Contextualism can be made to be compositional too.
The goal of the second half of the project was to answer the question: What is the relation between the notion of content used in belief-desire psychology (including the theory of communication) and the notion of content or meaning (‘semantic values’) applied to expressions of the language ? Current metasemantic theorizing rests on the Determination Thesis, according to which linguistic meaning determines assertoric content (with respect to context, but in autonomy from ‘speaker’s meaning’). We have shown the Determination Thesis to be incorrect, and this encouraged us to neatly separate content from semantic value, to appreciate that distinct constraints apply to them, and to acknowledge the role of pragmatics in the generation of the former from the latter.
Of course, separating content from semantic value makes sense only if we can relate them appropriately. To relate content and semantic value, we used situation theory. Both the sentence’s semantic value (its linguistic meaning) and the content based on it were construed as situation types. The meaning of a sentence is a determinable situation-type with free parameters, while the content is a determinate situation-type. An utterance of the sentence is true just in case the ‘topic situation’ is of the determinate type in question. The pragmatic step from sentence meaning to content thus involves matching the abstract situation described by the sentence to the specific situation talked about in context. In the matching process, the abstract situation is anchored and adjusted to the topic situation through saturation and modulation.