UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 12 (2000)
Meaning postulates and deference
RICHARD HORSEY
Fodor (1998) argues that most lexical concepts have no internal structure. He
rejects what he calls Inferential Role Semantics (IRS), the view that primitive
concepts are constituted by their inferential relations, on the grounds that
this violates the compositionality constraint and leads to an unacceptable form
of holism. In rejecting IRS, Fodor must also reject meaning postulates. I
argue, contra Fodor, that meaning postulates must be retained, but that when
suitably constrained they are not susceptible to his arguments against IRS.
This has important implications for the view that certain of our concepts are
deferential. A consequence of the arguments I present is that deference is
relegated to a relatively minor role in what Sperber (1997) refers to as
reflective concepts; deference has no important role to play in the vast
majority of our intuitive concepts.
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