Abstract

Each sentence derives its meaning from what its component words mean and from its syntactic structure. And the thesis of this chapter is that this is so because the meaning‐property of a sentence is nothing over and above the property of being constructed in a certain way from primitives with certain meanings. In this explanation of how sentence meanings are ’composed’, absolutely nothing is presupposed about the source of word meaning. Thus the possibility of compositionality imposes no constraint on how the meanings of words are engendered. In particular, we see that compositionality gives us no reason to accept Davidson's explication of meaning in terms of truth conditions.