Objects of Metaphor by Samuel Guttenplan

Author:Samuel Guttenplan [Guttenplan, Samuel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 0199280894

end p.148

objects employed in qualification (where this includes their cultural roles) rules out any such thing. Moreover, if one insists on using 'semantic' so that the only things which exhibit this feature compose in the way that words in natural language are reputed to do, then I had better refrain from using this term of our ability to use objects as qualifiers of other objects. However, while these answers suggest something like surrender, this is not so. The lack of compositionality of objects in their qualifying roles is only problematic if it threatens whatever compositionality we think we find in natural language. But, on my account, no such threat exists. Indeed, it is precisely one of the virtues of that account that it leaves the words of natural language—meanings and all—unreformed. Black and theorists like him tell a story about how words, in the context of a metaphor, come to acquire new meanings. It is this kind of project which is threatened by the worry about compositionality, not mine. If 'woman', 'infant', or 'sun' figure in a compositional theory for English, this is well and good. The semantic descent account takes these words with their compositional meanings just as they are, using them only as conduits to the things these words, in their unreformed employment, extend.

As to the term 'semantic': while I could just allow that this term is appropriate only of natural language words (and constructions), and then only when they form a system recognizable as compositional, this seems unreasonable and contrary to common philosophical usage. Surely, if someone tells a story using a salt cellar to refer to their car, we would regard that as an exercise of a semantic ability, though we would certainly not wonder whether salt cellars compose. Similarly, if one sees some event as giving us information about another, then, however context-sensitive and unsystematic, we should I think regard what happens, just as we did in the referential case, as an exercise of a semantic ability.

Even if, in respect of acquisition and general functioning, there is no radical difference between words and objects functioning like words, and even if the issue of compositionality is not relevant, there is still a difference that needs further discussion.

One might be willing to accept that there are parallels between words and their meanings, and certain kinds of objects and their significances, but still insist that objects like the sun need pragmatic (contextual) input to avoid a kind of indeterminacy that simply doesn't attach to predicate expressions like 'woman'. After all, it is one thing to fend off as mistaken interpretations of (R) which, for example, take Romeo to have said that Juliet gets up early, or that she is hot stuff. But the object itself still seems to leave what many would regard as an unacceptably wide range of less off-beam interpretations that can only be reined in by appeal to context. In contrast, though we can entertain the possibility of someone using 'woman' in a way which

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