《Is semantics still possible》.pdf

Journal of Pragmatics 34 (2002) 349–359 /locate/pragma Is semantics still possible? Jonathan Berg Department of Philosophy, University of Haifa, Haifa 31-905 Israel Abstract The standard view of semantics—that every disambiguated sentence has a determinate semantic content, relative to an assignment of contents to its indexical expressions, and not necessarily identical to what may be conveyed (pragmatically) by its utterance—is defended against standard objections and is also argued for on independent grounds, which suggest that resistance to the view comes from a failure to distinguish between ‘‘strict semantics’’ and ‘‘loose semantics’’. # 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Semantics; Pragmatics; Context; Meaning; ‘What is said’; Literal; Nonliteral 1. The question ‘‘In the last decade enormous progress seems to have been made in the syntactic theory of natural languages . . . Comparable progress seems not to have been made in the semantic theory of natural languages, and perhaps it is time to ask why this should be the case. Why is the theory of meaning so hard ?’’ (Putnam, 1970: 139). When Hilary Putnam posed this question, over 30 years ago, he was concerned in particular with the semantics of natural kind terms—which he showed to be not nearly as simple as previously supposed. Nevertheless, he eventually answered the question with guarded optimism: ‘‘Why, then, is semantics so hard? In terms of the foregoing, I want to suggest that semantics is a typical social science. The sloppiness, the lack of precise theories and laws, the lack of mathematical rigor, are all characteristic of the social sciences today. A general and precise theory. . .is still a