Abstract

This book argues that a descriptive, systematic, non-intuitive semantics cannot be provided for a natural language: that while a non-intuitive, formal explication can be provided for the competent speaker’s intuitions about grammaticality, this has not been, and likely cannot be, provided for such a speaker’s intuitions of synonymy, analyticity, and significance. Tartaglia concludes that Quine has actually established, not that we do not have an intuitive, informal notion of the analytic-synthetic distinction, but rather that we have failed, and likely will fail, at providing "a practical, nonintuitive procedure for deciding, irrespective of extra linguistic content, whether a given statement is analytic or synthetic." "[Since] the language of knowledge consists of a system or systems in which no single statement can be said to be true or false in isolation from other statements in its system, then the lexicographer’s problem is insoluble". Tartaglia criticizes the 1964 Katz-Fodor paper, "The Structure of a Semantic Theory" by the undiminishing flea method: the bachelor finally dies is ambiguous both by theory and intuition; but the old bachelor finally dies requires the addition of a semantic marker,, to bring theory in line with intuition ; and the congenitally blind bachelor finally dies will make another semantic marker necessary and so on. But the trick can be worked with grammaticality too. Tartaglia suggests that grammaticality is well on its way to a reasonably adequate explication, while synonymy, etc., is not.