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Three Versions of Semantic Minimalism

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Book cover Modeling and Using Context (CONTEXT 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 10257))

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Abstract

All of the semantic minimalists come together in seeking to reduce contextual inputs in semantics to a minimum, but they disagree over what this quantity may be, and more specifically, the extent to which something can still be classed as “minimal”. With this issue increasingly addressed, three versions of semantic minimalism can be identified: weak, strong, and radical. They are still gathered under the tag “Semantic Minimalism”, yet what they share is in fact less than their divergences as regards the minimal role of context. By revealing their divergent answers to the Range Problem and the Intention Problem, we will clearly see within semantic minimalism the schism, which is preliminary to assessing it.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The distinction between weak minimalism and strong minimalism is borrowed from Robbins [17].

  2. 2.

    Not precise enough as we see, “plus and minor a bit” blurs the scope of context-sensitive expressions, and in fact neither weak nor strong versions of semantic minimalism give a neat and definite scope.

  3. 3.

    In this passage, Borg explains what the so-called formal route to semantics is: “According to minimalism, the only reasoning processes involved en route to recovery of semantic content are deductive, computationally tractable processes.” ([11], p. 114).

  4. 4.

    This point benefits from an anonymous reviewer.

  5. 5.

    These examples of hidden indexicals are tagged as “weather and other environmental reports (‘it is raining’)”, “terms with missing complements(‘John is ready’)”, “relational terms (‘Louis is a fan’)” and “perspectival terms (‘the hospital is on the left’)”.

  6. 6.

    Prima facie, “liberal truth-conditions” seems to indicate that “John is ready” (relative to a context) alone cannot express a complete proposition since the complete proposition (truth-condition) is “John is ready for something in c” and it therefore seems that Borg stands in the same line with Bach in this regard. However, Borg construes a liberal truth-condition for the utterance of “John is ready” whereas Bach refutes that “John is ready” expresses any truth-evaluable proposition. As Bach ([7], p. 91) notes: “A great many sentences, such as ‘Jerry is ready’, ‘Tom is tall’, and ‘Leaves are edible’, do not express a proposition independently of context. It does not follow that such a sentence expresses a proposition relative to a context, for it may not express a proposition at all. Many supposed cases of context sensitivity are really instances of something else: semantic incompleteness.”

  7. 7.

    This distinction is from the unpublished work “Reference, Intention, Context: Do Demonstratives Really Refer” of Bach.

  8. 8.

    As Bach ([3], p. 435) claims, propositionalism is “the conservative dogma that every indexical-free declarative sentence expressed a proposition”.

  9. 9.

    Borg’s analysis of Grice as a conventionalist is however debatable.

References

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Acknowledgement

This paper is funded by Chinese Scholarship Council, grant number: 201306140060. Special thanks go to my supervisor Anne Reboul and the autonomous reviewer for helpful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CNRS, UMR5304, Laboratoire sur le langage, le cerveau et la cognition & Department of Philosophy, East China Normal University & UMR 5317, ENS de Lyon, Lyon, France

    Yang Hu

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Correspondence to Yang Hu .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Pierre and Marie Curie University , Paris, France

    Patrick Brézillon

  2. University of Maine , Orono, Maine, USA

    Roy Turner

  3. University of Genoa , Genoa, Italy

    Carlo Penco

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Hu, Y. (2017). Three Versions of Semantic Minimalism. In: Brézillon, P., Turner, R., Penco, C. (eds) Modeling and Using Context. CONTEXT 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10257. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57837-8_23

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57837-8_23

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