Contents:
Preface
1. The Principle
1.1. Statement of the Principle
1.2 Alternative Formulations
1.3 Parallelism
1.4 Substitutivity
1.5 Functionality
1.6 Summary
2. Linguistic Semantics
2.1 Is Semantics Empirical
2.2 The First Dogma
2.3 The Second Dogma
2.4 Semantics without Epistemology
2.5 Semantics without Ontology
2.6 The Third Dogma
2.7 Summary
3. The Argument
3.1 The Argument from Understanding
3.2 Meaning and Understanding
3.3 The Strong Principle of Understanding
3.4 The Modest Principle of Understanding
3.5 Understanding and the Missing Shade of Blue
3.6 Summary
4. Adjectives in Context
4.1 The Context Thesis
4.2 The Color of a Painted Leaf
4.3 Problems of 'Good'
4.4 Ways of Being Good
4.5 Varieties of Incompleteness
4.6 Ways of Being Green?
4.7 Summary
5. Descriptions in Context
5.1 A Parallel
5.2 Referring and Quantifying Phrases
5.3 Two Objections to the Quantificational View
5.4 Replies to Donnellan's Objection
5.5 Replies to Heim's Objection
5.6 Methodological Considerations
5.7 Co-referring Phrases and File-Cards
5.8 Summary
6. In Place of a Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

This book is a critical discussion of the principle of compositionality, the thesis that the meaning of a complex expression is fully determined by the meanings of its constituents and its structure. The aim of this book is to clarify what is meant by this principle, to show that its traditional justification is insufficient, and to discuss some of the problems that have to be addressed before a new attempt can be made to justify it.

This volume contains 21 new and original contributions to the study of formal semantics, written by distinguished experts in response to landmark papers in the field. The chapters make the target articles more accessible by providing background, modernizing the notation, providing critical commentary, explaining the afterlife of the proposals, and offering a useful bibliography for further study. The chapters were commissioned by the series editors to mark the 100th volume in the book series Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy. The target articles are amongst the most widely read and cited papers up to the end of the 20th century, and cover most of the important subfields of formal semantics. The authors are all prominent researchers in the field, making this volume a valuable addition to the literature for researchers, students, and teachers of formal semantics. Chapter 19 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This unique textbook introduces linguists to key issues in the philosophy of language. Accessible to students who have taken only a single course in linguistics, yet sophisticated enough to be used at the graduate level, the book provides an overview of the central issues in philosophy of language, a key topic in educating the next generation of researchers in semantics and pragmatics. Thoroughly grounded in contemporary linguistic theory, the book focus on the core foundational and philosophical issues in semantics and pragmatics, richly illustrated with historical case studies to show how linguistic questions are related to philosophical problems in areas such as metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Students are introduced in Part I to the issues at the core of semantics, including compositionality, reference and intentionality. Part II looks at pragmatics: context, conversational update, implicature and speech acts; whilst Part III discusses foundational questions about meaning. The book will encourage future collaboration and development between philosophy of language and linguistics.

Leading scholars in the philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics present brand-new papers on a major topic at the intersection of the two fields, the distinction between semantics and pragmatics. Anyone engaged with this issue in either discipline will find much to reward their attention here.
Contributors Kent Bach, Herman Cappelen, Michael Glanzberg, Jeffrey C. King, Ernie Lepore, Stephen Neale, F. Recanati, Nathan Salmon, Mandy Simons, Scott Soames, Robert J. Stainton, Jason Stanley, Zoltan Gendler Szabo

Leading scholars in the philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics present brand-new papers on a major topic at the intersection of the two fields, the distinction between semantics and pragmatics. Anyone engaged with this issue in either discipline will find much to reward their attention here.
Contributors Kent Bach, Herman Cappelen, Michael Glanzberg, Jeffrey C. King, Ernie Lepore, Stephen Neale, F. Recanati, Nathan Salmon, Mandy Simons, Scott Soames, Robert J. Stainton, Jason Stanley, Zoltan Gendler Szabo