The Primacy of Grammar Part 15

rule.

(113) If X and Y are numbers, X plus Y def X Y, the arithmetical sum.

However, someone, say, Ali's use of plus must be based on a finite number of past uses of this word. Hence, there must be some given numbers, say, 55 and 65, beyond which Ali has not checked his use so far. Thus, the entirety of Ali's past usage is also compatible with the following (nonstandard) rule: (114) If X and Y are numbers, X quus Y def X Y for X,Y a 65; def 10, otherwise.

How can Ali tell, when he is currently using plus, that he is not using it in the sense of quus since all of Ali's past uses of plus are compatible with (114) as well? It seems we need some matter of fact that uniquely decides in favor of one of the definitions/usages-preferably (113)-as a representation of Ali's ability to compute the arithmetical sum of two numbers. As Kripke's ingenuous handling of the available options shows, there are no non-question-begging criteria, including a survey of Ali's introspective states, that a rule follower may invoke to justify his particular choice (Kripke 1982, chapter 2).

According to Kripke, the problem just raised leads to Wittgenstein's (1953, paragraph 201) remark that ''no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made to accord with the rule.'' Hence, to ''think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule. Otherwise, thinking one was obeying a rule would be the same thing as obeying it'' (paragraph 202). Therefore, ''when I obey a rule, I do not choose; I obey the rule blindly'' (paragraph 219).

There is a ma.s.sive philosophical literature that tries to understand what Kripke's problem and the a.s.sociated remarks from Wittgenstein mean (Goldfarb 1985; Ebbs 1997; Horwich 1998; Hattiangadi 2007, etc.). Of direct interest here is Kripke's suggestion that ''if statements attributing rule following are neither to be regarded as stating facts, nor to be thought of as explaining our behavior, it would seem that the use of the ideas of rules and competence in linguistics needs serious 142

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reconsideration.'' Kripke (1982, 3132) also thinks that the ''problems are compounded if, as in linguistics, the rules are thought of as tacit, to be reconstructed by the scientist and inferred as an explanation of behavior.'' Since the idea of rule following is used to describe visual systems and insect navigation, the problem compounds even further.

Chomsky (1986, 225) responds to all this as follows: ''If I follow R, I do so without reason. I am just so constructed. I follow R because So maps data presented into Ss, which incorporates R. There is no answer to the Wittgensteinian skeptic and there need be none.'' According to Chomsky, then, the question of justification, or the lack of it, as posed by Kripke simply does not arise in the context of cognitive explanations.

Again, the scope of Kripke's very general problem-and Chomsky's sweeping denial of it-is unclear. Immediately following these remarks, Chomsky gives three examples where he thinks the skeptic need not be answered: ''I know that 27 5 32, that this thing is a desk, that in a certain sentence a p.r.o.noun cannot be referentially dependent on a certain noun phrase etc.''

The first example concerns (113) and it falls squarely within the scope of Wittgenstein's skeptic. It is hard to see that Ali's knowledge that 27 5 32, rather than 27 5 10, can be traced to a fact about Ali's const.i.tution. If Ali was so const.i.tuted, how could he come up with a widely dierent rule in his skeptical moment? The question is all the more pertinent because nonstandard formulation of standard arithmetical practices is part of the practice of mathematics itself. Nonstandard mathematics would have been impossible if our const.i.tution allowed only standard formulations. So, it is more likely that if there are facts of const.i.tution underlying our arithmetical practices-there must be such facts-then a ''rule-following'' description of the const.i.tution will be more abstract than either (113) or (114) such that both are admissible as equivalent descriptions. The desired description will essentially give an account of the meaning of plus, or of the concept PLUS. The issue is whether such an account is available in a non-question-begging manner.

Suppose the second example concerns a meaning rule: desk means desk. Then, in the light of the above and in a Quinean vein, Kripke would suggest that such rules are not qualitatively dierent from arithmetical rules. For example, Kripke (1982, 19) asks, ''Can I answer a skeptic who supposes that by table in the past I meant tabair, where a tabair is anything that is a table not found at the base of the Eiel Tower, or a chair found there?'' Recalling the discussion on Quine's gavagai-problem, it is unlikely that the problem of equivalent descriptions, as it arises for mean- Words and Concepts 143.

ing postulations or translation manuals, has a clear solution in advance of detailed empirical research. In fact, it could well turn out that problems of ''indeterminacy'' resist any coherent empirical approach toward understanding our const.i.tution in these respects. In view of this uncertainty, we do not know what it means to trace Ali's preference for the ''standard''

meaning of desk to some aspect of his const.i.tution.

Does it follow that all ascriptions of rule following have the same (uncertain) eect? Consider the contemporary research on face recognition.

It has been found that recognition of faces, say, from photographs, depends on interesting geometrical properties which remain invariant under varying light and shade, tilt, rotation, degree of camouflage, and so on (Carey 1979). There are threshold points upto which this ability works with remarkable regularity and success. No one is ever taught these regularities; in fact no one knew about them until recently. Suppose we write these regularities down in some notation to develop a rule system-a ''grammar''-of face recognition.

It will be absurd to suggest that recognition of faces is an unjustified activity just because the relevant capacity has been described in terms of rules and representations, and the subjects are viewed as having internalized this rule system.7 There may be equivalent descriptions here as well as a matter of routine scientific practice. But these are not alternative descriptions we could adopt, but alternative descriptions of a single objective reality, a matter of fact, concerning some aspect of human behavior.

There is no answer to the skeptic and there need be none. We are just constructed that way. It may even be counterintuitive to call such behavior ''rule-governed,'' displaying the usual vagueness with which we enter big philosophical debates.

For the case of face recognition, some neurological evidence has been found to support and extend the early ''top-down'' theories (Rodman 1999). The neurological story is in its infancy; but it is enough to suggest that we are looking at natural principles, perhaps specific to the domain (Jackendo 1992, 73). But suppose there is no neurological evidence as indeed was the case at the beginning of this research. That should not alter the basic methodological issue: the presence or absence of neurological evidence cannot suddenly change a matter of faith to a matter of fact.

If there is a matter of fact to be studied at all, even the use of the vocabulary of rules and representations in the early stages of research ought to be viewed as describing the same aspect of nature. The basic issue seems to be the character of what we are studying, not just the vocabulary in which studies are phrased.

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Consider now Chomsky's third example. The example concerns the phenomenon of p.r.o.noun binding. Speakers of English know that them as in the men expected to like them can not be referentially dependent on the men. We saw that the phenomenon is explained by Principle B of binding theory: a p.r.o.nominal is free in a local domain. The phenomenon is grammatical in character and the relevant principle is buried deep in human const.i.tution such that a nonlinguist is not likely to have any access to it. Even Shakespeare would not have been able to justify the rule that the men can not bind them in the cited construction; he would have followed it blindly. Needless to say, a linguist can now justify this practice, including his own, on usual scientific grounds by furnis.h.i.+ng a variety of evidence, some of which we saw.

The point is further substantiated by another example discussed by Chomsky (1986, 227). It is well known that, at a certain stage of language development, children characteristically overgeneralize the rule for forming past tense-for example, they say sleeped instead of slept (Pinker 1995b, 2001; Pinker and Ullman 2002). Chomsky holds that we have ''no diculty in attributing to them rules for past tense, rules that we recognize to be dierent from our own.'' Whatever principle a theorist may come up with to account for this, the desired explanation will probably invoke several abstract principles working in tandem which do not prevent the child at that stage from saying sleeped, so she says it. No one taught her, just the opposite actually. She probably will become adjusted to normative ways of adult speech and learn to say slept. Let us say sleep, slept, slept will then be just the sort of rule which enables a speaker to conform to a social practice; it is of some interest that we view slept as ''irregular.''8 By parity, the earlier rule sleep, sleeped, sleeped can only be viewed as a fact about the child's const.i.tution. The application of both the rules is ''blind,'' but in dierent ways.

The skeptic need not be answered, then, if we can restrict attention to only those aspects of human language learning ability which may properly be called ''grammatical.'' Two things happen in this area: (i) it allows a level of explanation for a universal object and, hence, the explanation const.i.tutes something like natural principles on par with the face-recognition paradigm; (ii) we can avoid meaning rules as part of the explanatory vocabulary enabling us, thereby, to avoid the principle thrust of the skeptic. It will be puzzling to claim that the Webster's Dictionary reflects how we are const.i.tuted; it is eminently plausible that the principles of universal grammar have a biological basis.

Words and Concepts 145.

It is reasonable then to conclude that the challenges posed by Quine and Kripke do not aect grammatical theory. As to word meanings, I am not rejecting any of the objections stated in this section, but I am not accepting them either at this stage of inquiry. Each of the objections, we saw, can be admitted, set aside or deferred provided a more abstract account of the structure of concepts is reached. At the first guess, it seems that the question of whether such an account is reachable is an empirical one. Thus, more material is needed before we can evaluate the eect of these objections. I return to this topic in section 4.4.

4.3.2.

Nouns The cla.s.sic work of Jerrold Katz (Katz and Fodor 1963; Katz 1972) contains the most explicit articulation of the goal of semantic decomposition.

Katz proposed his theory several decades ago, and everyone in the field knows that it has fatal problems. Yet, it is unclear if these problems pertain to the specific formulations in Katz's theory, or whether the stated goal of lexical semantics is fundamentally flawed. To focus on this issue, I will ignore several aspects of Katz's work that he thought to be central to his theory, and which have been strongly criticized in the subsequent literature.9 Thus, I will simply pick a noun and ask what concepts can be listed, in some order, to specify its meaning-that is, I will treat all concepts that enter into the decomposition of a complex concept as semantic markers.

Katz's basic idea is that once we have a sucient body of decompositions in terms of semantic markers for a variety of nouns, some patterns and uniformities are likely to emerge to lead us toward a finite set of general concepts which superordinate on the rest. Following this intuition, the only constraint I will impose in the theory is superordination: a more general concept must dominate a less general concept in a semantic tree.

This will ensure that, in the final a.n.a.lysis, the most general concepts ( primitives) dominate the rest. Testing for taxonomic organization of common nouns as coordinate (arm-leg) and superordinate ( fruit-apple) is a standard method of measuring semantic competence (Morais and Kolinsky 2001, 471).

Furthermore, it is advisable that we begin with nouns whose decompositional character is something of common knowledge-that is, nouns that have generally agreed definitions for some of their central uses. It is well known that explicit decomposition of meaning is a rare phenomenon in any case. It seems to work, if at all, for fairly restricted cla.s.ses 146

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of lexical items: these include jargon vocabularies (ketch, highball ), terms in axiomatized systems (triangle), and kins.h.i.+p vocabularies (grand-mother, bachelor) (Fodor et al. 1980). As Jerry Fodor (1998, 7072), following Putnam (1983), observes, it is dicult to deny the ''conserva-tive'' intuition that bachelor and unmarried have an ''intrinsic conceptual connection'' such that bachelors are unmarried is ''boringly a.n.a.lytic.''

I will focus on bachelor to judge the theory on its strongest cla.s.sical ground.

Since semantic markers are nothing but concepts, we represent a semantic marker also in the uppercase. Markers such as HUMAN and COLOR are not supposed to be English words. They are supposed to be ''theoretical constructs'' lexicalized in English as human and color. In a language dierent from English, these constructs will be either lexicalized dierently, or borrowed from some other language, or not lexicalized at all. In other words, the English word human is supposed to invoke, among other things, the conceptual information HUMAN; similarly for other common nouns such as male, adult, animal, and the like. Thinking of common nouns as ''predicates'' that take (a set of ) semantic markers as ''arguments,'' these markers may now be used to decompose the meaning of a complex predicate such as bachelor. Following the constraint of superordination, the dictionary entry for bachelor will then be listed as a path with markers [HUMAN MALE ADULT UNMARRIED], in that order of increasing specificity. Despite the high rhetoric borrowed from grammatical research, the theory is beset with serious internal problems from the beginning.

The lexical item bachelor typically means an unmarried male, as noted; but it could also mean a male animal without a mate during breeding sea-son (mawam), among other things. It is important that these two readings apply to the same word bachelor since it is a part of the native user's grasp of bachelor that, unlike kite and bat, it is not ambiguous. How do we capture this in a single lexical entry? The problem is that the dierences between these two readings of bachelor begin straight away. Since bachelor could cover either people or mawams, the markerese paths branch right at the top, HUMAN or ANIMAL. So, the semantic decompositions for the two readings will consist of [HUMAN MALE ADULT UNMARRIED] and [ANIMAL MALE YOUNG WITHOUT-A-MATE] respectively. Notice that we must use MALE after HUMAN (or, ANIMAL) since HUMAN/ANIMAL is a higher category. This means that the marker MALE will have to be listed twice: once after HUMAN to terminate in UNMARRIED, and again after ANIMAL to Words and Concepts 147.

terminate in WITHOUT-A-MATE. The generalization that MALE is common to the two readings of bachelor is missed. The result is that we are forced to view bachelor as lexicalizing two entirely dierent conceptual paths with nothing in common. But in fact, apart from MALE, the two readings have a central feature in common-something like WITHOUT-A-MATE; how do we insert this item?

Notice that we cannot begin with WITHOUT-A-MATE at the top to solve the problem because this category is subordinate to both HUMAN and ANIMAL: everything that is without a mate is either a human or an animal (or a robot), but not all humans or animals (or robots) are without a mate. If we insert WITHOUT-A-MATE after HUMAN or ANIMAL in separate paths, the commonality will not be represented.

Suppose, as Fodor suggested, we give up everything else and settle for UNMARRIED as the meaning of bachelor, since we failed to accommodate this crucial item in tandem with other markers except HUMAN and MALE. As noted, there is also an intuition that the sense in which bachelor applies to people has something in common with its application to mawams. That intuition has to be given up now since UNMARRIED will not apply to anything outside humans. In this picture, HUMAN immediately dominates the sequence [MALE ADULT UNMARRIED]

where the path terminates.

The composite concept BACHELOR now applies to each unmarried adult human male. A popular counterexample, due to George Lako 1987, is the Pope; the Pope is unmarried, is he a bachelor? Suppose we introduce the item CAN-MARRY to exclude the Pope. All human males of (marriageable age) are thus subjected to a binary cla.s.sification, UNMARRIED and MARRIED. Under UNMARRIED, let us have a second binary branching into CAN-MARRY and CANNOT-MARRY.

So, a bachelor is [UNMARRIED CAN-MARRY], the Pope is the other one. But then a Muslim (another popular counterexample), who is allowed up to four wives but in fact has two, cannot be placed in the scheme: he is both married and can marry. If we now allow the second binary branching under MARRIED as well, it generates the contradic-tory path [MARRIED CANNOT-MARRY]. To solve the problem, we go back and revise the item CAN-MARRY to CAN-MARRY-AGAIN so that we have a consistent path [MARRIED CAN-MARRY-AGAIN]

that accommodates the Muslim. But now, a bachelor is a human male who is unmarried, but who can marry again. But CAN-MARRY-AGAIN applies only to someone who is already married which conflicts with the item UNMARRIED. We cannot have it both ways.

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We can go on like this. All we are left with is that bachelors are some sort of solitary individuals, but solitary individual and bachelor are not only not synonymous, they do not even have the same extension. The philosopher of science Norwood Hanson once opened a very high profile conference on meaning of theoretical terms in science with the observation that electron means little things that wiggle.

Most of these problems are well known in the literature, as noted.

Thus, regarding the attempt to give an ''exhaustive decomposition'' of the ''necessary and sucient conditions'' governing the meaning of bachelor, Ray Jackendo (2002, 375) dismisses the entire project because ''the meaning of bachelor is inseparable from the understanding of a complicated social framework in which it is embedded.'' But then he suggests immediately that ''someone has to study these more complex aspects of meaning eventually'' (p. 376). This raises the prospect that someone, may be Jackendo himself, is prepared to enter into an understanding of the ''complicated social framework.''

The fact that the project is never launched by Jackendo, or by anyone else to my knowledge, deserves examination. In our a.n.a.lysis of bachelor, we just asked for some nontrivial addition to grammatical story that tells us how to represent the meaning of bachelor in terms of concepts. The basic problem seems to be quite overwhelming, namely, that in order to a.n.a.lyze the meaning of a common noun such as bachelor just to find a distinguis.h.i.+ng concept, we have to jump into a vast sea of knowledge fairly blindly; this sea does not seem to part in accordance with our semantic intuitions. To review, it is a central part of the data for bachelor that bachelors are unmarried males is ''boringly a.n.a.lytic''; to that extent, there is no problem in representing this intuition in terms of concepts [ADULT, MALE, HUMAN, UNMARRIED] in some order.10 But the data for bachelor also includes intuitions such as mawams are bachelors, bachelor is closer in meaning to spinster than to professor, the Pope though unmarried is not a bachelor, bachelors are without a mate, two unmarried adult male s.h.i.+pmates are both bachelors, and so on.

The complexity of the organization of these intuitions has little to do with the ''complicated social framework'' involved in the concept of marriage without denying that marriage is complicated. In other words, the problem is not just that whatever decomposes BACHELOR is itself complicated, the problem is that our intuitions seem to wander across these complicated decomposers. These intuitions concern any of marriage, mates, adulthood, heteros.e.xual activity, loneliness, and so on, on a piece- Words and Concepts 149.

meal basis apparently without any concern for global coherence with respect to the decomposers just listed.

The preceding diagnosis of the problem might be seen as a step towards a more comprehensive lexical semantics that takes into account many more dimensions of world knowledge. Thus James Pustejovsky (1995) proposes that we enlarge the scope of semantics to include aspects of world knowledge such as the origin, material const.i.tution, layout, function and future course of things. It is hard to see how these notions throw significant light on the semantics of abstract terms such as bachelor. But may be a systematic application of these dimensions allows a more comprehensive semantics for concrete nouns (Moravcsik 1981). It is unclear if the complex character of semantic intuitions described above can be interestingly accommodated even with such rich resources.

Chomsky's a.n.a.lysis of river is a dramatic ill.u.s.tration of the suspicion just raised (Chomsky 2001b). Elaborating on Hobbes's definition that we call something the ''same river'' if it comes from the same source ( origin), Chomsky points out that if the river changes its course by several miles, we will continue to call it the ''same river'' as long as it has the same source. But then suppose the course of the river is reversed, that is, it does not have the same source any more and we know about it, even then it would be the same river. Next, we can have a river that is artificially broken into tributaries so that it ends up somewhere else; it will be the same river. Suppose it is filled with waste containing 99 percent a.r.s.e-nic from some chemical plant upstream thus changing material const.i.tution drastically; it is still the same river. Similarly, if the river dries up completely the material const.i.tution changes, but it is the same river.

In contrast, suppose we make a minuscule quantum-theoretic change so tiny that n.o.body can even detect it, and the river hardens into a gla.s.sy substance. Suppose we sprinkle something on it to add friction, draw a line in the middle, and cars start going up and down. It is the same object at the same place with virtually the same material const.i.tution. But it will not be called a ''river,'' it will be called a ''highway.'' To add to Chomsky, suppose further that the river remains dry for many years, the bed fills up with erosion from the banks, and people start cultivation. Suppose this state of aairs continues for several generations, and the name of the river disappears from the local dialect. Then, one day, torrential rains start, the sand and the mud are washed away, and water starts flowing.

It will now be called a ''flooded field.'' Chomsky concludes: ''It's physically identical to what it was before, but it's not a river. On the other 150

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hand, you can change its course, move it, you can reverse its direction, and you can change its content, it still will be the same river.''

The net result is that even if we enlarge the scope of semantics in many dimensions to include the origin, material const.i.tution, layout, function, and future course of things as well as social expectations, conventions, and psychological needs, it is unclear how these additional dimensions fit the organization of semantic intuitions. It seems that semantic decomposition basically boils down to making lists of current uses of a term, as above, to be supplemented in the future as and when new uses are detected. One could add some theoretical flavor to such lists by introducing technical expressions such as ''polysemy,'' ''family resemblance,''

''cl.u.s.ter concept,'' ''fuzziness,'' and the like. But all they do is to highlight the fact that we have a list, nothing more.

Ray Jackendo raises a similar complaint with much influential work in lexical semantics: building ''an industry on the endless details of a single word'' is not ''properly systematic,'' he says. Thus, he is unhappy with the work of Steven Pinker and Anna Wierzbicka because ''the result is all too often a tiring list, impossible for any but the most dedicated reader to a.s.similate'' (Jackendo 2002, 377). Jackendo 's complaint is that the activity of making unsystematic lists is not even a first step for the solution of Plato's problem.

To that end, Jackendo (2002, xvi) suggests that we stick to the original agenda of semantic decomposition, but aim for a ''far richer notion of lexical decomposition.'' Thus, he wishes to reformulate the agenda with the explicit recognition that word meanings const.i.tute a ''richly structured system'' along a variety of dimensions. These dimensions include ''conditions that shade away from focal values, conditions that operate in a cl.u.s.ter system, features that cut across semantic fields,'' and so on.

We note that these suggestions were made in the context of the complexity of bachelor and proper names, among other things (p. 377). It is totally unclear how these dimensions are supposed to harness the complexity of bachelor or river. In any case, Jackendo does not give any indication of how to do so for, say, bachelor.

4.3.3.

Verbs However, there is another way of looking at Jackendo 's suggestion that does seem to oer, perhaps subliminally, a theoretical handle on the issue of complexity of nouns. Jackendo could be suggesting that notions such as ''focal value'' and ''semantic field'' already form a part of the theoreti- Words and Concepts 151.

cal vocabulary in the field of lexical semantics. But the domain in which these notions have theoretical value does not currently include nouns.

Chomsky (2001b) makes a similar point: the ''internal structure of nouns is not studied very much'' because when ''you start looking at the structure of the simplest nouns, their complexity is overwhelming.'' As a result, lexical semantics has dealt mostly with verbs because ''you can discover things; you can find the primitive elements that seem to be rearranged in dierent ways.''

From this perspective, the study of common nouns with ''richly structured systems'' of meanings becomes a future research program already implemented in less complex cases. Thus it is not surprising that most of the work, including Jackendo 's, on semantic fields and related aspects of lexical meaning is concentrated on verbs and prepositions rather than on nouns. In our terms, we may not yet know what distinguishes college from church, or rabbit from rabbit part, in a systematic study of nouns, but there is some promise of a theoretical framework that will ultimately make a systematic postgrammatical distinction between decide and try.

The hope is that once the semantics of verbs is adequately understood, it might lead to a better understanding of the semantics of nouns. Setting nouns aside, then, we try to find some theoretical guidelines from the study of verbs.

Over fifteen years ago, Jackendo (1990, 3) suggested that the state of semantics at that point was akin to the generative syntax of the early 1960s with its emphasis on attaining ''descriptive power.'' Jackendo asked for ''some years of experience'' in ''semantic description'' before ''issues of explanation'' could be meaningfully explored. The remark is puzzling since work on syntax-inspired semantics started in the early 1960s itself (Katz and Fodor 1963; Katz and Postal 1964; Gruber 1965), not to mention philosophical explorations that go back at least to Austin 1962, Wittgenstein 1953, and Frege 1892. In any case, according to Jackendo, lexical semantics continued to be ''descriptive'' in the early 1990s while grammatical research was entering the ''Galilean'' phase. In the decade that followed this remark, the c.u.mulative international eort on semantics far exceeded syntax research. Yet, in his later work, Jackendo (2002, 377) concludes an extensive survey of lexical semantics with the following words: ''there are fundamental methodological and expository diculties in doing lexical semantics . . . (p)erhaps there is no way out: there are just so many G.o.dd.a.m.ned words, and so many parts to them.'' I am reminded at once of Chomsky's (2000d, 104) remark that 152

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any ''complex system will appear to be a hopeless array of confusion before it comes to be understood, and its principles of organization and function discovered.''

With these somber thoughts in mind, I will consider perhaps the most encouraging work in the semantics of verbs: the study of semantic fields (Gruber 1965). Jackendo has described and elaborated on Gruber's proposals in a number of books (1972, 1983, 1990, 1992, 2002, etc.). As with the gavagai problem, some authors (Larson and Segal 1995, 4) view the study of semantic fields to be a central concern of semantic theory. Jackendo (1990, 2527; 2002, 356357) appeals to the following data: (115) a. Spatial location and motion (i) The bird went from the ground to the tree.

(ii) The bird is in the tree.

(iii) Harry kept the bird in the cage.