Prospects for an Explanatory Theory of Semantics
Wolfram Hinzen · Biolinguistics · 2008
IThis essay reports and reflects on a workshop on Biosemantics -Semantics within the Biolinguistic Program, organized by Boban Arsenijevi! and myself, which took place at Leiden University from 10 to 12 September 2008 and was funded in the frame of the 'Origins of Truth' project by the Dutch NWO.The reader can hardly expect that I will now review the state of the art on semantics within the biolinguistic program: Truth be told, there is no field here with a state of the art to report.Do we know even the rough outlines of what an explanatory research program on the origins of human semantics looks like?Everyone present at an informal pre-workshop meeting agreed, in particular, that one aspect of the problem was beyond the scope of current research: the fact that there is semanticity at all -the problem of 'intentionality', as philosophers have dubbed it.Syntax allows us to generate complex descriptions of the world (or possible worlds) -but the very term 'description' is an intentional one.Syntactic structures actually mean something -we can use them to refer to real or possible worlds in highly systematic ways.This is something that syntax as we know it does not explain.This, indeed, is the business of semantics (jointly with pragmatics, whatever the difference between these two may amount to).We can formalize semantics, to be sure.Yet, this won't tell us why it exists or why it does what it does.That said, I think it is fair to say that the workshop did isolate some questions that we can put on our research agendas.I will summarize these in the final section.Before that, I will report on some of the talks and the discussions that took place.I will embed this within some stage-setting on what I am calling an explanatory theory of semantics.I should warn upfront that my account is necessarily selective and coloured by my perceptions, if not simply by what I understood.II Under the broad umbrella of the biolinguistic program, syntax has clearly held centre-stage.This is, presumably, because syntax as a domain of inquiry fits into I am very grateful to Boban Arsenijevi! and Dora Achourioti for perceptive comments on an earlier version of this review.