The Compositionality Papers

by Fodor, Jerry A.; Lepore, Ernie

• ISBN13: 9780199252169
• ISBN10: 0199252165
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-10-24
• Publisher: Clarendon Press

Summary

Jerry Fodor and Ernie Lepore have produced a series of original and controversial essays on issues relating to compositionality in language and mind; they have now revised them all for publication together in this volume. Compositionality is the following aspect of a system of representation:the complex symbols in the system inherit their syntactic and semantic properties from the primitive symbols of the system. Fodor and Lepore argue that compositionality determines what view we must take of the nature of concepts. Anyone trying to figure out how language and mind work must takeaccount of this challenging work by two leading figures in the field.

Author Biography

Jerry A. Fodor is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, New Jersey. Ernie Lepore is Director of Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science.

Table of Contents

Geographical Introduction	1	(9)
Part I. Composition
Why Meaning (Probably) Isn't Conceptual Role	9	(18)
The Pet Fish and the Red Herring: Why Concepts Still Can't Be Prototypes	27	(16)
Why Compositionality Won't Go Away: Reflections on Horwich's `Deflationary' Theory	43	(20)
What Can't Be Valued Can't Be Valued, and it Can't Be Supervalued Either	63	(26)
Part II. Decomposition
The Emptiness of the Lexicon: Reflections on Pustejovsky	89	(31)
Impossible Words?	120	(15)
Part III. New Pragmatists
Brandom's Burdens: Compositionality and Inferentialism	135	(20)
Paul Churchland and State Space Semantics	155	(19)
All at Sea in Semantic Space: Churchland on Meaning Similarity	174	(27)
Reference	201	(6)
Name Index	207	(2)
Subject Index	209