Pursuing Meaning

Eight years after her first monograph on minimal semantics, in Pursuing Meaning Borg returns to the topic and presents a systematic defence of semantic minimalism against competing semantic theories. The two main defining features of Borg's minimalism characterize it as a formal semantics. They are the theses that the semantic content of a well-formed declarative sentence is both (i) propositional, i.e., truth evaluable, and (ii) dependent solely on its syntactical structure and lexical content. Borg's motivations for the second claim are frankly epistemological. The systematicity of our linguistic competence is explained by the fact ‘that semantic content is delivered via recursively specified rules operating over syntactically described objects’ (p. 6). Borg subscribes to Fodor's modularity theory of mind, which she takes to be independently supported, and claims that the compatibility of minimalism with a modular view of linguistic competence lends support to minimalism. In defence of the first claim, Borg appeals to our intuition that at least some (well-formed) sentences have a truth-evaluable content and points out that if this held of only some sentences, then one would need a criterion to characterize them. Lacking such a criterion, we can maintain that sentences are generally truth evaluable. Some additional arguments in favour of Borg's propositional minimalism over Kent Bach's radical minimalism, which shuns truth evaluability, are given in ch. 6, § 6.1. Yet, given the centrality of propositionalism to Borg's minimalism, a more fundamental, general argument still seems missing.

Epistemology · Linguistics · Meaning (existential) · Minimalism (technical communication) · Sentence · Truth condition · Computer Science · Philosophy · Philosophy and Theoretical Science · Psychology