Close Range

My Other Life

As those of you who know me very well already know, I am an avid outdoors person. I am particularly intense about bowhunting and flyfishing. At the same time, I am well aware of (and deeply troubled by) various arguments concerning animal rights and environmental impacts of hunting/fishing. In order to help me work out various ideas on these topics, I have started another blog on this topic. Although most of the posts on that blog would hardly count as analytic philosophy, they nevertheless represent a fairly serious philosophical attempt to locate certain very personal, detailed issues in a larger context. In this sense they are something of a philosophical case study.

I doubt that very many people who come across this blog will find the material on that one even remotely interesting. Nonetheless, for those few who share my interests, please take a look here.

Applied Metaphysics

So weight problems are now officially a disease and, hence, covered by medicaire. It's about time! Our nutritional environment is easily as polluted as the our air and it seems a bit naive to think people can routinely navigate the available offerings (not to mention withstand the marketing) sufficiently well to eat healthy. I offer myself as an example. I am a reasonably intelligent person who knows quite a bit about nutrition (for a layman), but I find it challenging to eat a healthy diet.

It is becoming increasingly clear that weight problems are driven in large measure by physiological factors. Here are a couple: (1) Eating high carb foods innundates our cells with insulin, making them increasingly insulin resistant, causing us to crave more high carb foods; (2) One of the hormones (I forget which) which makes us feel hungry spikes in overweight people during the day (when they can eat), but spikes in "skinny" folks at night (when they sleep through it).

On the flip side, those who oppose using tax dollars to cover weight problems say that being overweight is a matter of free choice. Since being overweight is a matter of free choice, they say, it shouldn't fall to the taxpayers to cover the costs of weight loss programs.

Now, according to compatibilists (as I understand things), these two claims about weight problems are compatible: one can consistently maintain that weight problems are physically (physiologically) determined AND that they are the result of free choice. Suppose that all of this is true. How then are we to adjudicate the health care issue? The only way I can see to resolve the issue is to be utilitarian: if the benefits of covering weight problems out weight the costs (according to some measure of costs/benefits), then cover the problems; otherwise don't. Is this right? Does compatiblism entail utilitarianism wrt public decision making?

Response to Stanley (2)

I was a little more concessive in my response to Jason's comments than I intended, and I just want to clarify my position some more. I agree with Jason that covert syntax and construction grammar are compatible. This much, I take it, was implied by my initial concession (in my original post) that I wasn't trying to argue against certain narrowly syntactic arguments in favor of a nonovert level of logical form. What I had in mind here (paradigmatically) was basically the theory of traces in GB. [I just flat out don't know enough about Minimalism to comment on it. So I won't.] Construction Grammarians tend to favor a monostratal theory of syntax and so typically do reject covert syntax even here, but I don't have the requisite knowledge of this debate to adjudicate the issue.

But somewhere between the theory of traces and, for instance, neoDavidsonian event semantics, I begin to get very suspicious. Or, to take a clearer example, hidden-indexical theories of attitude reports. In the latter case, it is pretty clear that the reasons for positing an existentially quantified argument for modes-of-presentation are purely semantic. In fact, a natural way of understanding such theories (I'll make use of now dated versions because they are less complex and it doesn't affect the point I want to make) is as an analysis of the concept of believing (etc.). Thus:

Nec(x believes that p iff (Em)(m is of type M & x BELs that p under m)).

The claim is that the English sentence on the left hand side of the biconditional is synonymous with the sentence of philosopher's-English on the right hand side. The difference is that the sentence on the right hand side makes the "logical form" (i.e., analysis) of the expressed proposition explicit, whereas the sentence on the left hand side does not.

Now the question arises: given constraints on learnability and compositionality, how can the English sentence "x believes that p" express a proposition whose analysis is given by the sentence of philosopher's English on the right hand side? That is, if the two sentences are really synonymous, then the semantics of belief reports is much richer than one would have prima facie imagined. How do we account for this unexpected semantic richness? There are, it would seem, three non-complex approaches: (1) give an account of the overt constituents of the sentence that is richer than one might expect; (2) posit nonovert constituents of the English sentence that make up the difference; (3) take the structure of the sentence as a whole to provide additional semantic information not fixed by the semantics of its constituent expressions.

I don't think many people are going to find complete reliance on (1) all that appealing. If not, then some or all of the work is going to have to be done by approaches (2) and/or (3). If we try to do all the work with (2) we DO get a neat picture; namely, a view according to which the nonovert logical form of every sentence is structurally isomorphic to the decompositional analysis of the proposition it expresses (predication relations and their ilk to one side). The worry, and I think this was Chomsky's original concern about this view of the syntax/semantics interface, is that positing syntactic structure solely on the basis of semantic considerations is both ad hoc and as likely as not to cause significant problems for articulating an adequate syntactic theory.

So here is my proposal: covert syntactic structure based on semantic considerations should be rejected unless it can be shown to be independently motivated on syntactic grounds. Put differently, there is nothing wrong with syntacticians looking to the semantics literature for clues to syntactic structure which might lead to nice theoretical generalizations.

One final point. Even if semantic considerations do motivate us to posit syntactic structure, it doesn't just follow that we must posit covert syntactic structure in the Chomskyan tradition. There is still a debate to be had (initiated by Gazdar et al. with their work in GPSG) about whether or not structurally complex syntactic categories can do what we want within a monostratal framework. As with Construction Grammar, I think this approach has the benefit of relying on resources that we are going to have to posit anyway. But at this point I am really out of my element.

[Correction: many of the theoretical insights which motivated GPSG and its sucessors were laid down by Gilbert Harman in his "Generative grammar without transformational rules. Language, 39 (1963): 597-616.]

Response to Stanley

I've been away for a while and didn't get the opportunity to read Jason's posts until last night. Since I have a great deal of respect for his work in philosophy of language and linguistics, I feel that I should at least make an attempt to clarify my position in light of his comments.

First, I want to reiterate that I am here taking it as a background presuppostion that construction-level effects are unavoidable in a general theory of language. Although the way I have cast this claim (in the jargon of constructions) makes it appear controversial, I don't think it is. All I want to claim is that lexical semantics is insufficient for determining the semantics of complex strings and that whatever else is needed is itself part of semantics. So, for instance, knowing the semantic interpretation of 'a', 'R', and 'b' in the string 'aRb' is insufficient for determing the proposition expressed by 'aRb'. In addition, we need to know (minimally) whether sentences of the for of 'aRb' are to be interpreted as 'a stands in R to b' or as 'b stands in R to a'.

Now what I want to claim is that if you want to be a construction grammarian of a more robust sort, this little bit of (largely) uncontroversial semantics gives you a pretty solid platform on which to stand. The reason is that the need to take into account the form of the string 'aRb' in interpreting it implies right at the start (as it were) that languages have resources which satisfy the Construction Grammarians definition of a construction. To my mind, this shows that languages have [must have? --not quite!] the sorts of construction-level resources that Construction Grammarians claim they have.

Of course, Construction Grammarians want more than this from a construction-based grammar. And, in my opinion, it is in their attempt to push such resources past the uncontroversial point that they have (potentially) made a significant contribution to philosophical semantics. As I see it, that contribution is the insight that there is no principled distinction between minimal and robust constructions. A construction is minimal only if its semantic contribution is minimal; it is robust only if its semantic contribution is robust. I have no general take on what a minimal (robust) semantic contribution is; in fact, I doubt a principled disintction can be drawn here either. But we might start (as perhaps Montague did) with an extreme minimalism according to which constructions never contribute anything beyond function-application (or, predication) relations. A still minimal, but less minimal, view might (following Geach) allow constructions to introduce function-composition as well as function-application. At the opposite extreme, robust constructions might contribute such semantically nontrivial relations as causation or intentionality.

Now if Construction Grammarians are right that there is no principled distinction between minimal and robust constructions (so that we can retain the former while throwing out the latter), then constructions themselves become a possible source of semantic richness. And it is here that an interest in linguistic constructions begins to lock horns with linguistic theories that posit rich underlying logical forms, especially when those logical forms are being posited primarily in order to account for semantic richness rather than, say, grammaticality judgments. At this point, then, I have simply tried to sketch a view according to which constructions themselves might provide an alternative explanation of semantic richness.

In my last post, I was wondering why philosophers of language (and, to a large extent, linguistic semanticists) had opted for the LF account rather than the construction-based account. [Last time I said "suckered". It was a poor choice of words, but I didn't intend anything derogatory. I was trying to convey the idea that the LF approach was tempting to the point of making philosophers blind to alternatives.] I suppose that there are lots of reasons. One, as Jason notes, is that most philosophers have been exposed to and convinced by the arguments for a fairly robust level of LF. But I wonder if the temptation of the LF approach isn't at least greatly enhanced by its resonance with the Fregean view that our grasp of propositions is necessarily mediated by sentences.

In retrospect, I think that part of my interest in the question was this. If Frege's thesis locates an appealing picture about the structural relations between forms and meanings in language, might not that picture actually provide a presumption in favor of the LF approach (i.e., in favor of only minimal constructions)? I don't mean to insinuate that there are currently a lot philosophers out there today who accept Frege's thesis, most I would guess reject it. But I, at any rate, do find that Frege's thesis has some intuitive pull. And so, even if we reject the thesis, might it not still have a tacit indirect influence on which alternative we favor?