48 The Demise of Definitions, Part I

should be) then the evidence that there are definitions is of much the same
kind as the evidence that there are nouns.
Just how radical is this disagreement between the linguist’s claim that
definition is a central notion in lexical semantics and the otherwise widely
prevalent view that there are, in fact, hardly any definitions at all? That’s
actually less clear than one might at first suppose. It is entirely
characteristic of lexical semanticists to hold that “although it is an
empirical issue [linguistic evidence] supports the claim that the number of
primitives is small, significantly smaller than the number of lexical items
whose lexical meanings may be encoded using the primitives” (Konrfilt
and Correra 1993). Now, one would have thought that if there are
significantly fewer semantic primitives than there are lexical items, then
there must be quite a lot of definable words (in, say, English). That would
surprise philosophers, whose experience has been that there are practically
none. However, having made this strong claim with one hand, lexical
semanticists often hedge it with the other. For, unlike bona fide (viz.
eliminative) definitions, the lexical semanticist’s verb “decompositions . . .
intend to capture the core aspects of the verb meanings, without implying
that all aspects of the meanings are represented” (ibid.: 83).
Whether the definition story about words and concepts is interesting
or surprising in this attenuated form depends, of course, on what one takes
the “core aspects” of meaning to be. It is, after all, not in dispute that some
aspects of lexical meanings can be represented in quite an exiguous
vocabulary; some aspects of anything can be represented in quite an
exiguous vocabulary. ‘Core meaning’ and the like are not, however, notions
for which much precise explication gets provided in the lexical semantics
literature. The upshot, often enough, is that the definitions that are put on
offer are isolated, simply by stipulation, from prima facie counterexamples.
5
This strikes me as a mug’s game, and not one that I’m tempted to play.
I take the proper ground rule to be that one expression defines another
only if the two expressions are synonymous; and I take it to be a necessary
condition for their synonymy that whatever the one expression applies to,
the other does too. To insist on taking it this way isn’t, I think, merely
persnickety on my part. Unless definitions express semantic equivalences,
they can’t do the jobs that they are supposed to do in, for example, theories
48 The Demise of Definitions, Part I
5 It’s important to distinguish the idea that definitions typically capture only the core
meaning of a univocal expression from the idea that definitions typically capture only one
sense of an ambiguous expression. The latter is unobjectionable because it is responsive to
pretheoretic intuitions that are often pretty emphatic: surely ‘bank’ has more than one
meaning. But who knows how many “aspects” the meaning of an unambiguous word has?
A fortiori, who knows when a theory succeeds in capturing some but not all of them?
of lexical meaning and theories of concept acquisition. The idea is that its
definition is what you acquire when you acquire a concept, and that its
definition is what the word corresponding to the concept expresses. But
how could “bachelor” and “unmarried male” express the same concept—
viz. UNMARRIED MALE—if it’s not even true that “bachelor” and
“unmarried male” apply to the same things? And how could acquiring the
concept BACHELOR be the same process as acquiring the concept
UNMARRIED MALE if there are semantic properties that the two
concepts don’t share? It’s supposed to be the main virtue of definitions
that, in all sorts of cases, they reduce problems about the defined concept
to corresponding problems about its primitive parts. But that won’t
happen unless each definition has the very same content as the concept
that it defines.
I propose now to consider some of the linguistic arguments that are
supposed to show that many English words have definitions, where,
however, “definitions” means definitions. I think that, when so constrained,
none of these arguments is any good at all. The lexical semantics literature
is, however, enormous and I can’t prove this by enumeration.What I’ll do
instead is to have a close look at some typical (and influential) examples.
(For discussions of some other kinds of ‘linguistic’ arguments for
definitions, see Fodor 1970; Fodor and Lepore, forthcoming a; Fodor and
Lepore, forthcoming b.)
Jackendoff
Here’s a passage from Jackendoff 1992. (For simplification, I have omitted
from the quotation what Jackendoff takes to be some parallel examples;
and I’ve correspondingly renumbered the cited formulas.)
The basic insight . . . is that the formalism for encoding concepts of spatial
location and motion, suitably abstracted, can be generalized to many verbs and
prepositions in two or more semantic fields, forming intuitively related paradigms.
[J1–J4] illustrates [a] basic case.
[J1 Semantic field:] Spatial location and motion: ‘Harry kept the bird in the
cage.’
[J2 Semantic field:] Possession: ‘Susan kept the money.’
[J3 Semantic field:] Ascription of properties [sic]:6 ‘Sam kept the crowd
happy.’
The Linguist’s Tale 49
6 Wherein does this semantic field differ from any other? If I say that Harry kept the bird
in the cage, don’t I thereby ascribe a property—viz. the property of keeping the bird in the
cage—to Harry? Jackendoff has a lot of trouble deciding what to call his semantic fields.
This might well be because they’re gerrymandered.
[J4 Semantic field:] Scheduling of activities: ‘Let’s keep the trip on Saturday.’
. . .
The claim is that the different concepts expressed by ‘keep’. . . are not unrelated:
they share the same functional structure and differ only in the semantic field
feature. (1992: 37–9).
I think the argument Jackendoff has in mind must be something like this:
‘Keep’ is “polysemous”. On the one hand, there’s the intuition that the
very same word occurs in J1–J4; ‘keep’ isn’t ambiguous like ‘bank’. On
the other hand, there’s the intuition that the sense of ‘keep’ does somehow
differ in the four cases. The relation between Susan and the money in J2
doesn’t seem to be quite the same as the relation between John and the
crowd in J3. How to reconcile these intuitions?
Well, suppose that ‘keep’ sentences “all denote the causation of a state
that endures over a period of time” (37).7 That would account for our
feeling that ‘keep’ is univocal. The intuition that there’s something
different, all the same, between keeping the money and keeping the crowd
happy can now also be accommodated by reference to the differences
among the semantic fields, each of which “has its own particular
inferential patterns”(39). So Jackendoff “accounts for [the univocality of
‘keep’ in J1–J4] by claiming that they are each realizations of the basic
conceptual functions” (specified by the putative definition) (37). What
accounts for the differences among them is “a semantic field feature that
designates the field in which the Event [to which the analysis of ‘keep’
refers] . . . is defined” (38). So if we assume that ‘keep’ has a definition, and
that its definition is displayed at some level of linguistic/cognitive
representation, then we can see how it can be true both that ‘keep’ means
what it does and that what it means depends on the semantic field in which
it is applied.8
So much for exposition. I claim that Jackendoff’s account of polysemy
offers no good reason to think that there are definitions. As often happens
in lexical semantics, the problem that postulating definitions is supposed
to solve is really only begged; it’s, as it were, kicked upstairs into the
metalanguage. The proposed account of polysemy works only because it
50 The Demise of Definitions, Part I
7 This analysis couldn’t be exhaustive; cf. ‘keep an appointment/ promise’ and the like.
But perhaps ‘keep’ is ambiguous as well as polysemous. There’s certainly something
zeugmatic about ‘He kept his promises and his snowshoes in the cellar’.
8 On the West Coast of the United States, much the same sort of thesis is often held in
the form that lexical analysis captures the regularities in a word’s behaviour by exhibiting a
core meaning together with a system of ‘metaphorical’ extensions. See, for example, the
putative explanation of polysemy in Lakoff (1988) and in many other treatises on “cognitive
semantics”. As far as I can tell, the arguments against Jackendoff that I’m about to offer
apply without alteration to Lakoff as well.