Sunday, June 12, 2005
‘If Josef kills Leon, is Leon dead?’
‘If Josef kills Leon, is Leon dead?’
"Little introspection is required to determine that he must be:
‘Josef kills Leon’ entails the death of the unfortunate Leon. A traditional account of this fact would be given by decomposing the meaning of ‘kill’ as in (1).
(1) ‘kill’ = CAUSE TO DIE
As pointed out by Fodor (1975), the lexical decomposition theory of word meaning faces serious problems. One of the most obvious is the clear absence of definitions for most monomorphemic words. This has been demonstrated by Wittgenstein, in his famous discussion of the word ‘game’, and by the general failure of analytic philosophy. In the case of ‘kill’, for example, while every case of killing is a case of causing to die, not every case of causing to die is a case of killing.2 Fodor proposed that, rather than being definitions, word meanings were atomic, as in (2).
(2) ‘kill’ = KILL
In order to account for the meaning relations between certain words, Fodor proposed ‘meaning postulates’ linking atomic concepts, as in (3)–(4):
(3) RED → COLOUR
(4) x KILL y → y DIE
"Little introspection is required to determine that he must be:
‘Josef kills Leon’ entails the death of the unfortunate Leon. A traditional account of this fact would be given by decomposing the meaning of ‘kill’ as in (1).
(1) ‘kill’ = CAUSE TO DIE
As pointed out by Fodor (1975), the lexical decomposition theory of word meaning faces serious problems. One of the most obvious is the clear absence of definitions for most monomorphemic words. This has been demonstrated by Wittgenstein, in his famous discussion of the word ‘game’, and by the general failure of analytic philosophy. In the case of ‘kill’, for example, while every case of killing is a case of causing to die, not every case of causing to die is a case of killing.2 Fodor proposed that, rather than being definitions, word meanings were atomic, as in (2).
(2) ‘kill’ = KILL
In order to account for the meaning relations between certain words, Fodor proposed ‘meaning postulates’ linking atomic concepts, as in (3)–(4):
(3) RED → COLOUR
(4) x KILL y → y DIE
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