Semantics etc.

Zoltán Gendler Szabó has three new online papers:

• Entry on “Chomsky”. The Dictionary of American Philosophers
• “On Direct Compositionality”. Comments at Michigan in November 2004 on Pauline Jacobson’s paper on direct compositionality.
• “The Loss of Uniqueness”.

  Abstract: I begin by briefly reviewing the case against the uniqueness entailment Russell’s theory associates with singular definite descriptions. My main concern here, however, is not so much whether the case stands, but why it matters whether it does. Do we lose anything of substance from Russell’s own insights or the subsequent use to which they were put if we drop the uniqueness clause from his analysis of definite descriptions? Russell himself would not be bothered by this argument: he did not believe that an empirically adequate semantics is possible for natural languages and he was not interested in devising theories that are merely close to being adequate. If despite Russell’s contrary intentions, we are determined to view his theory of descriptions as part of the semantics of English, we need to settle what components of the original view we should hold on to. I argue that the current focus on the particular truth-conditions he gave is misguided – the semantic explanations in On Denoting put almost no constraint on what the truth-conditional content of the definite article might be. We can drop uniqueness and remain true Russellians about descriptions, if we wish. But we should not. In the final section I argue that the Russell-inspired view that descriptions could in principle be eliminated from a language that is equipped with standard quantifiers and the identity predicate is mistaken. Whatever descriptions are, they are not mere devices of quantification.

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