Minimal Propositions, Cognitive Safety Mechanisms, and Psychological Reality

Abstract

Abstract Cappelen and Lepore’s Semantic Minimalism is based on the familiar idea that natural language is semantically compositional: the meaning of every sentence of a natural language L is compositionally fixed solely by the meanings of its syntactic constituents, and its syntactic structure (2005: 144– 5). The meaning assigned to a sentence of L is the output of a finite, recursively definable, computational procedure defined over a finite stock of semantic primitives. The procedure is a bottom– up, semantically interpretative, process extending from a sentence’s lexical parts, through its phrasal parts, and onto its clausal parts, which includes the sentence itself. Cappelen and Lepore add something else to this familiar picture: the semantic content of a non-indexical sentence is a complete, truth-evaluable, proposition that has no semantically unarticulated constituent: every constituent of the proposition expressed corresponds to some formal bit in the sentence’s syntax (IS 3–4). Call these propositions, ‘‘minimal propositions’’.