Systematicity via Monadicity (draft 24Jan07)

Paul M. Pietroski (University of Maryland) Thinking requires concepts. Talking requires words. We humans have thoughts that are composed of concepts, which we can express with words that can be combined to form sentences, which we can use to express thoughts. I take this as given. But how are human concepts related to the words that children naturally acquire? Do words compose in the same way, or ways, that concepts compose? Does lexicalization leave our concepts unchanged? Are human concepts especially composable? I offer a proposal according to which lexicalization is a creative process, and the composability of words makes human concepts distinctive. 1. The Idea: Words as Monadicizers When a concept is lexicalized, I’ll argue, it is linked to an analytically related monadic concept. For example, the dyadic concept CHASE(_, _) might be linked to CHASE(_), a concept that applies to certain events. But the monadic concept, which may be formed in the course of lexicalization, is not a constituent of the dyadic concept. Analysis can take the form of abstraction, as opposed to decomposition. Like Fodor (1998), I think words tend to indicate atomic concepts, which vary in adicity. Though as Frege (1884) showed, it can be useful to impose analyses on thoughts; see Horty (forthcoming). My suggestion is that the human language faculty imposes monadic analyses, in a constrained way, letting us build new complex concepts by simple conjunction. Suppose that concepts are elements of one or more mental languages, whose sentences include PAST+CHASE(FIDO, FELIX),; where this mental sentence is the internal translation of the spoken sentence ‘Fido chased Felix’. Then setting tense aside, for a moment, the English sentence indicates a thought of the form ú(:, B) . Given standard principles of inference, any j k