Concepts, Meanings and Truth: First Nature, Second Nature and Hard Work

I argue that linguistic meanings are instructions to build monadic concepts that lie between lexicalizable concepts and truth-evaluable judgments. In acquiring words, humans use concepts of various adicities to introduce concepts that can be fetched and systematically combined via certain conjunctive operations, which require monadic inputs. These concepts do not have Tarskian satisfaction conditions. But they provide bases for refinements and elaborations that can yield truth-evaluable judgments. Constructing mental sentences that are true or false requires cognitive work, not just an exercise of basic linguistic capacities. How are the concepts that we humans deploy in thought related to the meanings of expressions that we use in speech? How are these concepts and meanings related to judgments that are true or false? Does distinctively human thought require special atomic concepts, special ways of combining concepts, or both? In this paper, I offer some tentative answers that cohere, drawing on Chomsky (1977, 1986, 1995, 2000) and many others. The leading idea is that in the course of language acquisition, humans use available concepts to introduce formally new concepts that can be fetched via lexical items and combined via certain operations that are invoked by the human faculty of language (HFL). On this view, words do not merely label concepts in accord with grammatical principles. Acquiring words is a process in which prior concepts—of diverse and perhaps incommensurate sorts—are used to make concepts that exhibit the format required by the composition operations that correspond to phrasal syntax. More specifically, I claim that these operations are fundamentally conjunctive, and that they require monadic inputs. For example, if ‘give’ lexicalizes a relational concept, a corresponding monadic concept (of events) must be introduced for purposes of fetching and conjoining with others. In which case, human linguistic competence is no mere capacity to generate expressions whose elements label the concepts we lexicalize. To have a language like English is to have a cognitive tool that lets one reanalyze independently available thoughts as thoughts whose main constituents are systematically recombinable monadic conjuncts. This can be useful, even without interpersonal communication, since conjunction of monadic concepts is a simple operation with logical consequences that are easy to track. For helpful comments and discussion, my thanks to: Cedric Boeckx, Susan Dwyer, Valentine Hacquard, Norbert Hornstein, Terje Lohndal, Jim McGilvray, Barry Smith, Alexander Williams, and three referees. Address for correspondence: Department of Linguistics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA. Email: [email protected] Mind & Language, Vol. 25, No. 3 June 2010, pp. 247–278. © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd