Birkbeck Philosophy Society - Summer Term Talk Series: Hsuan-Chih Lin
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 30 Russell Square
No booking required
Tuesday 2nd June 2015 - Hsuan-Chih Lin
Compositionality Revisited
In this talk, I aim to answer the following question: What is the metaphysical basis for the principle of compositionality? Apparently, almost all philosophers who have some thought about meaning commit to the principle. And yet it is not clear whether the ground of the principle is well established in spite of the empirical evidence obtained from common sense and linguistics. However, the way I want to pursue the question is distinct from the recent tendency of trying to account for the exact relation between the meaning of a sentence and the meaning of its constituents, (e.g. Szabo (2000), Hodges1998, Pagin and Westerstaahl (2010).) The principle of compositionality, as I see it, is a derived principle from the answer to the problem of the unity of the proposition, a problem whose origin can be traced back to the problem of predication in Plato. I will show that, contrary to our intuition, in order to justify our use of the principle, we need to solve the problem of propositional unity and even the problem of predication.