more from this thinker
|
more from this text
Single Idea 23488
[filed under theme 19. Language / C. Assigning Meanings / 4. Compositionality
]
Full Idea
A proposition is understood by anyone who understands its constituents.
Gist of Idea
Propositions are understood via their constituents
Source
Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1921], 4.024)
Book Ref
Wittgenstein,Ludwig: 'Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Pears)', ed/tr. Pears,D. /McGuinness,B. [RKP 1961], p.21
A Reaction
The 'constituents' had better include the grammatical relationships. Otherwise it's 'rearrange these words to make a well known saying'. That said, this strikes me as an important truth about language. We assemble sentence meanings.
The
16 ideas
with the same theme
[sentence meaning as built up from its components]:
22280
|
Frege's account was top-down and decompositional, not bottom-up and compositional
[Frege, by Potter]
|
23488
|
Propositions are understood via their constituents
[Wittgenstein]
|
23511
|
Propositions use old expressions for a new sense
[Wittgenstein]
|
7772
|
Compositionality explains how long sentences work, and truth conditions are the main compositional feature
[Davidson, by Lycan]
|
19133
|
If you assign semantics to sentence parts, the sentence fails to compose a whole
[Davidson]
|
12610
|
Encountering novel sentences shows conclusively that meaning must be compositional
[Peacocke]
|
18994
|
The content of an assertion can be quite different from compositional content
[Yablo]
|
11005
|
Negative existentials with compositionality make the whole sentence meaningless
[Read]
|
21655
|
Compositonality is a way to build up the truth-conditions of a sentence
[Hofweber]
|
22283
|
Compositionality should rely on the parsing tree, which may contain more than sentence components
[Potter]
|
22282
|
'Direct compositonality' says the components wholly explain a sentence meaning
[Potter]
|
22296
|
Compositionality is more welcome in logic than in linguistics (which is more contextual)
[Potter]
|
18000
|
Weaker compositionality says meaningful well-formed sentences get the meaning from the parts
[Magidor]
|
17999
|
Strong compositionality says meaningful expressions syntactically well-formed are meaningful
[Magidor]
|
18014
|
Understanding unlimited numbers of sentences suggests that meaning is compositional
[Magidor]
|
14695
|
Semantic theories show how truth of sentences depends on rules for interpreting and joining their parts
[Schroeter]
|