54 The Demise of Definitions, Part I

54 The Demise of Definitions, Part I
anybody’s story, the money and the crowd’s being happy are quite different
sorts of things, why do we also need a difference between the meanings of
‘keep’ to explain what’s going on in the examples?
People sometimes used to say that ‘exist’ must be ambiguous because
look at the difference between ‘chairs exist’ and ‘numbers exist’. A familiar
reply goes: the difference between the existence of chairs and the existence
of numbers seems, on reflection, strikingly like the difference between
numbers and chairs. Since you have the latter to explain the former, you
don’t also need ‘exist’ to be polysemic.
This reply strikes me as convincing, but the fallacy that it exposes dies
awfully hard. For example, Steven Pinker (personal communication, 1996)
has argued that ‘keep’ can’t be univocal because it implies possession in
sentences like J2 but not in sentences like J3. I think Pinker is right that
‘Susan kept the money’ entails that something was possessed and that
‘Sam kept the crowd happy’ doesn’t. But (here we go again) it just begs the
question to assume that this difference arises from a polysemy in ‘keep’.
For example: maybe ‘keep’ has an underlying complement in sentences
like (2) and (3); so that, roughly, ‘Susan kept the money’ is a variant of
Susan kept having the money and ‘John kept the crowd happy’ is a variant
of John kept the crowd being happy. Then the implication of possession in
the former doesn’t derive from ‘keep’ after all; rather, it’s contributed by
material in the underlying complement clause. On reflection, the difference
between keeping the money and keeping the crowd happy does seem
strikingly like the difference between having the money and the crowd
being happy, a fact that the semantics of (2) and (3) might reasonably be
expected to capture. This modest analysis posits no structure inside lexical
items, and it stays pretty close to surface form. I wouldn’t want to claim
that it’s apodictic, but it does avoid the proliferation of lexical polysemes
and/or semantic fields and it’s quite compatible with the claim that ‘keep’
means neither more nor less than keep in all of the examples under
consideration.10
Auntie: Fiddlesticks. Consider the case where language A has a single
unambiguous word, of which the translation in language B is either of
two words, depending on context. Everybody who knows anything knows
that happens all the time. Whenever it does, the language-A word is ipso
10 Fodor and Lepore (forthcoming a) provides some independent evidence for the
analysis proposed here. Suppose, however, that this horse won’t run, and the asymmetry
Pinker points to really does show that ‘keep’ is polysemous. That would be no comfort to
Jackendoff, since Jackendoff’s account of the polysemy doesn’t predict the asymmetry of
entailments either: that J2 but not J3 belongs to the semantic field “possession” in
Jackendoff’s analysis is pure stipulation.
But I won’t stress this. Auntie says I should swear off ad hominems.
facto polysemous. If you weren’t so embarrassingly monolingual, you’d
have noticed this for yourself. (As it is, I’m indebted to Luca Bonatti for
raising the point.)
—: No. Suppose English has two words, ‘spoiled’ and ‘addled,’ both of
which mean spoiled, but one of which is used only of eggs. Suppose also
that there is some other language which has a word ‘spoilissimoed’ which
means spoiled and is used both of spoiled eggs and of other spoiled things.
The right way to describe this situation is surely not that ‘spoiled’ is ipso
facto polysemous. Rather the thing to say is: ‘spoiled’ and ‘addled’ are
synonyms and are (thus) both correctly translated ‘spoilissimoed’. The difference
between the languages is that one, but not the other, has a word
that means spoiled and is context restricted to eggs; hence one language,
but not the other, has a word for being spoiled whose possession condition
includes having the concept EGG. This is another reason for distinguishing
questions about meaning from questions about possession conditions
(in case another reason is required. Remember WATER and H2O).
Auntie (who has been catching a brief nap during the preceding expository
passage) wakes with a start: Now I’ve got you. You say ‘keep’ is univocal.
Well, then, what is the relation that it univocally expresses? What is the
relation such that, according to you, Susan bears it to the money in J2
and Sam bears it to the crowd’s being happy in J3?
—: I’m afraid you aren’t going to like this.
Auntie: Try me.
—: It’s (sigh!) keeping. (Cf: “What is it that “exist” expresses in both
‘numbers exist’ and ‘chairs exist’?” Reply: “It’s (sigh!) existing.”)
In effect, what I’m selling is a disquotational lexicon. Not, however,
because I think semantic facts are, somehow, merely pleonastic; but rather
because I take semantic facts with full ontological seriousness, and I can’t
think of a better way to say what ‘keep’ means than to say that it means
keep. If, as I suppose, the concept KEEP is an atom, it’s hardly surprising
that there’s no better way to say what ‘keep’ means than to say that it
means keep.
I know of no reason, empirical or a priori, to suppose that the
expressive power of English can be captured in a language whose stock of
morphologically primitive expressions is interestingly smaller than the
lexicon of English. To be sure, if you are committed to ‘keep’ being
definable, and to its having the same definition in each semantic field, then
you will have to face the task of saying, in words other than ‘keep’, what
relation it is that keeping the money and keeping the crowd happy both
instance. But, I would have thought, saying what relation they both
instance is precisely what the word ‘keep’ is for; why on earth do you
suppose that you can say it ‘in other words’? I repeat: assuming that ‘keep’
The Linguist’s Tale 55
has a definition is what makes the problem about polysemy; take away
that assumption and ‘what do keeping the money and keeping the crowd
happy share?’ is easy. They’re both keeping.
Auntie: I think that’s silly, frivolous, and shallow! There is no such thing
as keeping; there isn’t anything that keeping the money and keeping the
crowd happy share. It’s all just made up.11
—: Strictly speaking, that view isn’t available to Aunties who wish also
to claim that ‘keep’ has a definition that is satisfied in all of its semantic
fields; by definition, such a definition would express something that
keeping money and keeping crowds happy have in common. Still, I do sort
of agree that ontology is at the bottom of the pile. I reserve comment till
the last two chapters.
Pinker
There is, as I remarked at the outset, a very substantial linguistic literature
on lexical semantics; far more than I have the space or inclination to
review. But something needs to be said, before we call it quits, about a
sustained attempt that Steven Pinker has been making (Pinker 1984; 1989)
to co-opt the apparatus of lexical semantics for employment in a theory
of how children learn aspects of syntax. If this project can be carried
through, it might produce the kind of reasonably unequivocal support for
definitional analysis that I claim that the considerations about polysemy
fail to provide.
Pinker offers, in fact, two kinds of ontogenetic arguments for
definitions; the one in Pinker 1984 depends on a “semantic bootstrapping”
theory of syntax acquisition; the one in Pinker 1989, turns on an analysis
56 The Demise of Definitions, Part I
11 Auntie’s not the only one with this grumble; Hilary Putnam has recently voiced a
generalized version of the same complaint. “[O]n Fodor’s theory . . . the meaning of . . .
words is not determined, even in part, by the conceptual relations among the various notions
I have mastered—e.g., between ‘minute’ and my other time concepts—but depends only on
‘nomic relations’ between the words (e.g. minute) and the corresponding universals (e.g.
minutehood). These ‘universals’ are just word-shaped objects which Fodor’s metaphysics
projects out into the world for the words to latch on to via mysterious ‘nomic relations’; the
whole story is nothing but a ‘naturalistic’ version of the Museum Myth of Meaning” (1995:
79; italics and scare-quotes are Putnam’s). This does seem to me to be a little underspecified.
Since Putnam provides no further exposition (and, endearingly, no arguments at all), I’m
not sure whether I’m supposed to worry that there aren’t any universals, or only that there
aren’t the universals that my semantics requires. But if Putnam thinks saying “‘takes a
minute’ expresses the property of taking a minute” all by itself puts me in debt for a general
refutation of nominalism, then he needs to have his methodology examined.
Still, it’s right that informational semantics needs an ontology, and that the one it opts
for had better not beg the questions that a semantic theory is supposed to answer. I’ll have
a lot to say about all that in Chapters 6 and 7.