The literature on the semantics of fiction is long-standing and voluminous. The null hypothesis, however, is rarely seriously entertained. Such a hypothesis simply denies that the fiction/non-fiction distinction is a semantic one, and so just like other statements, fictive ones of all kinds might be true or false depending on how the world is, and their truth conditions involve no ontological exotica or bespoke semantic machinery for their specification. As far as language goes, we might say, there just is no fiction. The present paper attempts nothing as ambitious as a full articulation and defence of this position; still less a refutation of the extant alternatives that are the focus of contemporary discussion. Much of the work in this regard, however, has been done in various ways by Ludlow (2006), Azzouni (2010), Friend (2012), Crane (2013), and Collins (2021a). Instead, my aim is to raise and dispel what might seem conclusive evidence against the null hypothesis. If nothing else, then, I'd like the null hypothesis to be rendered as a genuine null hypothesis from which we need a reason to depart. The problem to be addressed is one of logical indiscipline, that is, if fiction is treated as on all fours with non-fiction, then inconsistency quickly follows in the shape of patently false conclusions appearing to follow from accepted premises, and contradictions being formulated by the conjunction of truths. A kind of sceptical solution will be presented: the relevant inferences break down outside of fiction, so the null hypothesis is not to blame; a naïve view of the extent of natural language's discipline is the problem. That said, we still need to differentiate fiction from non-fiction, if we are not to be confused, but this is not a semantic achievement. Before all of that, the following section will set out some preliminary semantic assumptions and the section after will present a general clarification and partial defence of the null hypothesis. Firstly, I shall assume throughout that an adequate semantic theory for a language will assign truth conditions to each sentence of the language in a compositional manner; perforce, the semantics for each lexical item and phrase will specify how the expression contributes to the truth conditions of its potential host sentences. I shall leave in abeyance how such an assignment might best be realised, what general ontology the assignment assumes, and what might guide the compositional assignment (whether, say, the semantics interprets an independently specified syntactic structure or some intermediate translation such as a formal logical language). In short, my considerations do not depend either upon an endorsement of any contentious semantic view that might be deemed independently implausible or a rejection of any semantic bells and whistles that might accompany truth-conditional semantics; my claim is simply that, per the null hypothesis, an account of fiction does not require anything not on general semantic duty beyond fictional discourse. An immediate problem, it might be thought, is that a truth-conditional theory specifies the semantics of a nominal in terms of its referent, for that is what contributes to the truth conditions of the nominal's potential host sentences. Yet what referents do fictional expressions have? Per the null hypothesis, they cannot be bespoke ontological exotica or abstract artefacts, but then what? This quandary is not really a problem for semantic theory, qua a chapter of linguistics, for the theory is happy to specify the semantic contribution of a nominal via a meta-linguistic term such that, roughly, Donald Trump refers to Donald Trump and Donald Duck refers to Donald Duck. Just what it is to be Donald Trump or Donald Duck that contributes to the truth conditions of 'F(DD)' is left entirely open (cf., Azzouni, 2017; Collins, 2017a; Glanzberg, 2014; Pietroski, 2018).11 The shibboleth that semantics concerns language-world relations is not undermined, it is just not endorsed by a truth-conditional semantic theory. The doctrine is simply a strong metaphysical reading of the semantic framework; no aspect of the theory strictly presupposes or entails external-world referents for nominals. Second, I shall remain neutral on what ontology there might be. Let one's ontological jungle be as dense as one likes. Again, the null hypothesis is only claiming that whatever makes a fictive statement true or false is just the stuff that makes a non-fictional statement true or false. Fiction is not special, at least as far as language is concerned, although it might be special as a genre, as Friend (2012) suggests. Third, I acknowledge, of course, a fiction/non-fiction distinction; the null hypothesis only says that it is not registered in the semantics of natural language. Fiction is illocutionary in the sense that it involves the telling of a story or some other make-believe, and includes the linguistic expressions from such story telling put to other uses (see immediately below). Non-fiction is liable to reality independent of the story telling. This distinction will become clearer in the next section. It bears emphasis now, however, that the null hypothesis is not beholden to great precision on this matter. If the distinction between fiction and non-fiction is ultimately vague or indeterminate, then so much the better for a hypothesis that assumes that language does not register the distinction. If the distinction is ultimately precise, it is much less plausible that natural language will register it. The point here has been noted before. The immersive character of fiction relies upon its fictionality not being linguistically registered, at least not in any straightforward way.22 Thus, if there were a fictive mood, say, along with declarative and interrogative moods, then fiction would be impossible. See Davidson (1984). Fourthly, while fiction is myriad, I shall assume that it comes in three basic types. In-fiction: this category covers what might be in a text (broadly construed) or directly implied by a text. For example: Out-fiction: This category covers the use of in-fictional expressions outside of a text in relation to the broader world. For example: The distinction between these two cases can be thought of as a distinction between the person (or thing) in the fictional world and the character or role that the fiction or story grounds in the sense of being created by an author. The two notions are obviously related, but distinct in the respect that what is true of a character, such as being popular or influential or making lots of money for an author, is often times not true of the person (/thing) in the fiction. James Bond is not popular in the fiction—the guy is a spy! Further, while the two notions are asymmetrically related—you cannot have a character without some originary story—the relation is somewhat nebulous in various ways. First, a speaker might be competent with Oedipus or James Bond, say, without having any knowledge whatsoever of the originary texts (such might well be the norm). Second, what might be truly said of a character is not necessarily dependent on an originary text. For example, most people are familiar with Bond via the films rather than the books. Only the obtuse would insist that Bond really smokes, say, because he does so in the books. Third, there might not be any identifiable originary text. This holds for Greek drama, say, where the origin of many of the stories lies in a long-lost oral tradition, likewise for Robin Hood and the knights of the round table. In short, for many cases, the actual relation between in-fiction and out-fiction is opaque. All the distinction depends upon, though, is the difference between predications that are part of some story and those that bear upon extra-story matters.33 Of course, just what constitutes the boundaries of a story is unobvious. The narrator of a novel is not part of the story as such, if he or she does not interact with characters, but is part of the 'fictional world', and the identity of the author and narrator is itself complex. Nabokov, for instance, often included himself, Hitchcock-like, in his stories, with characters sometimes having the erry feeling that another character knows their secrets. Still, nothing to be argued here relies upon a flat-footed conception of fiction. What is clear, though, is that it will not do to say that an in-fiction is made true by whatever is in a canonical text, for no such text need be relevant, metaphysically, epistemically or semantically. Copredication: This category covers cases where an expression has a simultaneous in-out reading: The crucial point about these cases is that the single nominal (Agamemnon, Media, Oedipus) supports in- and out-predications, or simultaneously refers, if you like, to both the person in the text (who killed family members, say) and the trans-textual character who relates to extra-textual things, such as Aristotle, a film, or Freud. In this respect, they are like other cases of copredication where a single polysemous nominal supports predicates that appear to select for different kinds of entity.44 Polysemy covers a range of complex lexical phenomnea. Roughly, polysemy is where an open-class expression (but also prepositions) have two or more semantically related 'senses'. For example, names for cities and countries can pick out geographical areas, populations, buildings, lifestyles, etc. These different senses can be selected, individually or simultaneously, given a choice of predicate (London is happy/expensive/in south-east England) or understood contextually. Copredication is simply where two or more predicates appear to select different 'senses' in the one construction. Copredication does not necessarily entail polysemy, for the subject can be pronominal or quantificational, which generally excludes polysemy. Still, in such cases, copredication is understood as if the subject is specifiable by a polysemous nominal. For example, that is not polysemous, but copredication occurs in That is heavy but fascinating insofar as that picks out a book, say, and book is polysemous (assuming that the book's fascination is due to its contents not cover, say). For example: Such cases can be multiplied indefinitely, for both nominal and verb. There is no settled approach to the phenomenon, or even what exactly counts as copredicative.55 For background on polysemy and copredication, see Cruse (1986), Asher (2011), and Falkum and Vicente (2015). For recent philosophical debate of its significance, see Chomsky (2000), Liebesman and Magidor (2017), Gotham (2017), Collins (2017b), King (2018), Pietroski (2018), Vicente (2021). What is clear is that copredication is not ambiguity, for homophonous terms do not admit conjunction reduction or anaphoric binding.66 Conjunction reduction refers to a class of phenomena involving the acceptability of a non-ambiguous nominal to take a conjunctive predicate formed from the conjunction of sentences featuring instances of the same nominal. Thus, argument A is clearly invalid, while argument B is fine:A: P 1: The bank is an ideal fishing spot P 2: The bank increased the interest rate. C: The bank is an ideal fishing spot and increased the interest rate.B: P1: The book weighs 2 lb P2: The book is character-driven. C: The book weighs 2 lb and is character-drivenAnaphora is where a pronoun is referentially dependent on an antecedent nominal. Anaphora is fine where antecedet and pronoun have different 'senses' of the polysemous nominal, but not when the nominal is ambiguous:(i) a The book was heavy but Sally found it exciting b # The bank marked a steep drop into the river and its bailout kept it solvent Equally, copredication appears not to be a species of context sensitivity, that is, the multiplicity of senses activated by the two or more predicates in the construction is not licensed by variation in context.77 Liebesman and Magidor (2017) and King (2018) forward such views; for objections, see Collins (2021b) and Collins and Rey (2022). For my purposes, I make no stand on the general phenomenon or how it applies to the fiction case specifically. I only assume that the kind of constructions are well-formed, that is, they can have perfectly coherent truth conditions (their syntactic soundness is beyond question). I should add, however, that copredication cases are not easily assimilable to standard treatments of fiction precisely because they meld different ways in which fiction is used, and so prima facie preclude approaches designed exclusively to deal with in or out cases, respectively, and also dual treatments that assume fictional terms to be somehow ambiguous between, say, character as abstract artefact and pretence (Kripke, 2013). If a traditional account is to work on copredication, something additional is required (Collins, 2021a). My argument will not rely upon any doubts in the direction of filling the lacuna, though. This is all I assume. Recall, my purpose is not to refute extant accounts of fiction or fully defend the null hypothesis; the aim is only to show that the hypothesis can be cleanly stated and that it evades what might appear to be a damning consequence. Let the semantic null hypothesis about fiction be the following: The theoretical import of SNH is that if one has an adequate semantic theory for non-fictional or literal language, then, eo ipso, the theory will apply to fiction, too, in exactly the same manner with exactly the same results, that is, sentences will be are made variously true or false depending on how the world is and what the meaning of the sentences specify about the world. This is not a deflationary or eliminative claim, however, as if fiction were a fiction, as it were; rather, the implication is that the basis and interest of fiction lies beyond what a semantic theory should specify. In a phrase: fiction has no linguistic signature. Three points of clarification are in order.1010 A reviewer made the interesting suggestion that components of the SNH could be employed to differentiate views as to their degree of departure from treating fiction and non-fiction alike. A pretence view, for instance, counts as null by (i)–(ii), but not (iii). I am interested in the strongest possible view, and see problems for other views precisely because they fail to fully endorse SNH (see below and Collins, 2021a). Firstly, SNH is the null hypothesis simply because it recognises no semantically significant linguistic distinction between fiction and non-fiction. The claim can be understood both linguistically, as in clause (ii), and metaphysically, as in clause (iii). At the level of language, the hypothesis says that fiction does not call for any special meaning or speaker attitude or uniform truth value, as if all fiction is false or indeterminate or a mode of pretence, say. Perforce, fiction does not call for any special semantico-syntactic structure, such as covert operators or some other kind of fictive index. Semantically speaking, fiction is just like any other discourse. At the level of the world, the hypothesis says that fiction does not call for any special or additional ontology of ficta, abstract objects, or artefacts of a kind one would otherwise have no mind to endorse.1111 Of course, it might be thought that artefacts of various kinds should be admitted into our ontology independent of the fiction case. Thus, treating fictional expressions as referring to abstract artefacts aligns them with other expressions and involves no bespoke ontology (Thomasson, 1999). This kind of position would still treat the artefacts as bespoke vis-à-vis fictive expressions, for fictive abstract artefacts are not otherwise required than to provide semantic values for the relevant expressions. More generally, a defender of SNH has two options against the artefactual view. One is to deny in general the ontology of abstract artefacts as referents for expressions. Another option is to deny that fictional expressions in particular have artefactual referents. One reason for scepticism here is that the artefact would have to serve both in and out predications, but artefacts are ill suited for in-fictional referents. See Collins (2021a). To be sure, the truth and falsity of statements about Sherlock Holmes, say, depend upon certain human creations (texts, films, etc.) in ways that the truth and falsity of (some) statements about Donald Trump do not. The crucial point here is that, according to SNH, the relevant texts are not what a speaker refers to in using Holmes; nor even do the texts enter into a specification of the semantic properties of the name in any way whatsoever. Still less are speakers referring to an additional entity somehow conjured from the texts. The texts make true or false what a speaker of (the relevant) fiction says, but the literal content of what is said does not advert to any such texts. So, SNH does not claim that there is no difference between fiction and non-fiction, as if James Bond is on all fours with Ian Fleming. The claim is only that the distinction is not a linguistic one to which the semantics of a language is sensitive. I want to assume that this semantic claim is defensible in the absence of a full-dress theory of fiction as a distinctive mode of human cognition and activity. Still, as just intimated, I take all fiction to involve some cognitive creation. So, at a first pass, the difference between statements involving Holmes and ones involving Trump is going to feature somewhere down the line an appeal to authorship in the first case, but not the second (more on this anon). Put ontologically, this thought might appear to endorse ficta as cognitive artefacts. The point, however, is that such putative artefacts are not the semantic values of fictional terms. Secondly, by 'semantic', as it occurs in SNH, I mean a property of a linguistic expression (word, phrase, sentence) that contributes to what can be literally said by way of the expression, where a saying has essential truth conditions. There are broader extra-linguistic conceptions of the semantic that would render my hypothesis trivially false. For example, I take it that it is a feature of many concepts that they express fictional notions, and so, at the level of concepts, SNH is surely false. If, however, we restrict the semantic to the linguistic, SNH is a substantive hypothesis. We may note this by recognising that the truth of SNH is not decidable without serious consideration of the relevant linguistic phenomena. SNH would be false, for instance, if there were a fictive or pretence mood, along with the declarative, imperative, optative, and interrogative moods, or if fictional terms carried a certain feature that marked them as such, or had a special index of some sort. There is not the least evidence for any of that, and I do not know anyone who has even entertained such notions. Still, there are other ways in which SNH might be false that are less committal than the syntactico-semantic ideas just mooted. It could be that all fictions are false, precisely because some constituent expression of the fictional statement lacks a semantic value. That would count as a linguistic property, albeit not a syntactically registered one. It could also be, instead, that fictional expressions have bespoke referents, such as abstract artefacts of a certain kind, or abstract objects of a more thoroughgoing kind. It might be that fictions always involve a covert operator, which would virtually be a fictive mood. Equally, SNH will be true, if no such proposal holds that distinguishes fiction from non-fiction in terms of a uniform semantic property. It bears emphasis that SNH is perfectly consistent with fiction being a wholly conceptual notion, or a notion that is registered in discourse and how we take statements to be made true or not. All that SNH insists upon is that the distinction is not marked in the language itself. Thirdly, I intend SNH to apply to all types of fictional discourse: in-fiction, out-fiction, and copredication. Suppose we take Media married Jason. Per SNH, we can say that it is true, but here we have not necessarily invoked any covert intensionality, ontological exotica, or merely made as if to assert the claim. What makes the claim true are some ancient texts by Euripides and Apollodorous and myths that predate them. Yet what makes the sentence true is not part of its semantics in any sense. One could be perfectly competent with the sentence but not know of Euripides, say, or even know that the sentence expresses a fiction (it could turn out not to be). All that is demanded is that whatever makes the sentence true can be accurately specified as Media marrying Jason, but a competent speaker need know no more than that. Likewise for out-fiction. Take, Freud made Oedipus into a complex. Again, what makes this true are various facts about texts of Sophocles and Freud and the dissemination of ideas throughout the 20th century. Oedipus as another entity in reality is not among such facts, but a competent speaker need not know that. I dare say that many probably think there was such a king of Thebes (why not?). They would be ignorant of history, but not semantically incompetent. All they need to know is what whatever makes the sentence true is specifiable in terms of Oedipus, which of course it is, for how else would one make sense of the relevant texts. Finally, copredication comes out as expected. Take: Oeadipus married his mother and remains a by-word today for a tragic figure. This is made true by a complex set of facts pertaining to Sophocles' texts and their cultural transmission over the proceeding couple of millennia. All the competent speaker need know is that such facts can be specified as involving Oedipus marrying his mother and so on, regardless of whether it is fact or fiction. In essence, then, SNH claims that the world makes true or false fictional statements, and since semantic competence is insensitive to how statements are made true, the relation may or may not involve a text or story telling more generally with semantic competence and semantic value remaining invariant. Much more could be said on each of these points. All I hope to have shown is that SNH can be stated in a way that dispels its first blush absurdity. In the next section, I shall entertain what appears to be a decisive problem for the view. If SNH is at least to be seriously entertained, it cannot be rejected on the grounds that it denies a fiction/non-fiction distinction, for it is perfectly happy with the distinction; its only claim is that it is not one to which natural language semantics is sensitive. Nor can the position be rejected because it ushers in a really true and truth-in-fiction distinction. All kinds of fictions, according to SNH, are really true, if true. It is just that some of them are made true by what is in a text or story and others are made true in a text-free way, but being cognisant of which condition holds for which sentence is not constitutive of semantic competence. What does present a problem for SNH is where fictional truth clashes, if you will, with non-fictional truth. Such a clash would appear to be semantic in character rather than merely a difference in what makes the respective claims true (text or non-text), for we do not want to credit the world itself as somehow inconsistent, at least not merely on the basis of such clashes. I think the literalist [SNH, for our purposes] position needs qualification… [P]eople do not think that "Holmes lived on Baker Street" is really true, and contraryappearances are easily explained away; and people would be right not tothink that these sentences are genuinely true…If the story says that Holmes had tea with Gladstone, literalists claim that wetreat the sentence "Holmes had tea with Gladstone" as true. But we certainlywould not without qualification (in, say, writing a life of Gladstone) treatthe equivalent sentence "Gladstone had tea with Holmes" as true. The problem is that, even if we are minded to treat fiction as true simpliciter, we better be able to corral it from other truths lest we utter falsehoods, such as would occur if we included Holmes in a biographer of Gladstone. The underlying problem here does not so much concern the very idea of true fictions, but more that if a semantic distinction is not drawn between the fiction and non-fiction, then a logical indiscipline follows, which suggests, in contradiction of SNH, that the distinction must be semantic after all. Let a language have logical discipline if properties of consistency and entailment hold of it as a matter of the semantic properties of (at least some) lexical items and principles of composition. Since such properties are aspects of the semantics of the language, a competent speaker will appreciate how certain elementary logical principles are realised in their language. Of course, performance limits the exercise of competence, in both logic and language. No speaker may properly acknowledge all of the infinite consequences of some one of their statements, even though such consequences are genuine ones given what the statement in fact means. The point is not that speakers must be logically consistent and complete in their endorsements (logically omniscient), but only that their competence gives a certain logical shape to their performance, such that bare contradictions and simple entailments are acknowledged, and much more complex logical properties can be robustly appreciated as following from their competence.1212 Perhaps the most thoroughly investigated logical aspect of natural language is quantification. Inquiry here, it should be stressed, does not assume that natural language has a uniform logic as such, but only that certain semantic relations it expresses have an underlying algebraic structure (cp., Szabolcsi, 2010). Also, the bare idea of logical discipline does not entail or even suggest a particular logical framework in which the various disciplinary notions are to be proprietorially encoded. There might be no such framework independent of the contingent facts of the syntax-semantics interface of natural language. Suppose, then, that we seek to impose logical discipline upon fictional discourse, as we must, it seems, if SNH holds, for that hypothesis exactly says that fiction has no special semantic status and so whatever discipline holds generally should hold for fiction in particular. Logical discipline poses a challenge to every account of fiction, although some positions appear better suited to meet the challenge than others.1313 Brock (2015) discusses in-fiction inferences but to different ends than the present paper. A position that claims all fiction to be false has an easy time of it, albeit at the expense of denying what appear to be simple truths (both in-fiction and out-fiction). The real problem arises for those positions that consider fiction to be variously true and false, such as SNH. Since I wish to defend SNH, hereafter I shall just consider how that position might handle logical discipline. Felix Lighter is Bond's CIA friend. We also know that Ian Fleming created Lighter and that George Bush was director of the CIA (1976–77). Thus, the sentences in (5) appear to be true: Given that, we can readily concoct some valid arguments with false conclusions: One may obviously proceed in a like manner for all cases of fiction we reckon to be true. The general recipe here is to take some fictional truths (in-fiction and/or out-fiction) and put them together in a premise set with non-fictional statements, and then simply draw the relevant conclusions based upon the shared predications, such as being a member of the CIA or, say, living in London, which renders Holmes and the Queen residents of London. The basic moral is that if we treat in-fiction and out-fiction as true, then nothing appears untoward, so long as we keep to describing the fictional world or the created character; if we infer to a statement concerning the fiction in the non-fictional world or in relation to non-fictional elements, then we appear to land with absurdity. The first thing to note is that, in fact, copredication appears to give rise to the same problem. (8a) appears to be true, and (8b) appears to be entailed by it, but (8b) strikes us as obviously false, if not a pun: An initial diagnosis for the problem here is that while we readily consider in-fiction true, it also appears to be isolated, or a world unto itself. The CIA of the Bond stories is just not the CIA Bush headed, just as the London of Holmes is just not the London in which the Queen resides. If so, we cannot generalise over both worlds, as it were, or infer from one to another. The problem is how to square such restrictions with logical discipline, which, precisely because it is logical, does not essentially recognise such divisions. Given the diagnosis, there are, it seems, two basic approaches to this problem one may take. A Meinongian (for want of a better term) or anyone who thinks of ficta as abstract might respond to the problem by saying, 'Exactly! Ficta exist independently of actual or concrete things, so there is a fictitious London, a fictitious CIA, and so on, besides the concrete ones. Don't mix the two up, for they are different things!'. Someone who thinks of ficta as abstract artefacts might make much the same reply, save for thinking of there being an artefactual CIA and a non-artefactual one, and so and so forth. Regardless of how ultimately coherent such approaches might be, an advocate of SNH must eschew them, for fiction does not, ex hypothesi, introduce any novel ontology or semantic apparatus. In this light, I shall suggest on behalf of SNH a response to the logical indiscipline problem. We assumed above that logical discipline is a fair condition on non-fictiona

Truth appears to be a predicate of sentence-like structures. This raises the question of what a sentence is (or what it is to be sentence-like) such that it is truth-apt. A natural move is to treat sentences and truth-aptness as somehow conceptually or metaphysical coeval—made for each other. This resolution conflicts, however, with now standard approaches in syntactic theory that treat sentences as mere epiphenomena. Siding with the developments in syntax, the paper argues that truth-aptness properly belongs, not to sentences, but to clauses as structures that can be selected by verbs that specify truth-apt states. It is further argued that this arrangement is perfectly consistent with truth-conditional semantics.

Generative linguistics is often claimed by Chomsky to have a 'Galilean style', which is intended to position linguistics as a science continuous with standard practise in the natural sciences. These claims, however, are more suggestive than explanatory. The paper will, first, explain just what a Galilean style is. It will then be argued that its application to two key notions in generative linguistics - the competence/performance distinction (with reference to centre-embedding) and the notion of computation - demands a departure from what we might expect of a Galilean style. In this sense, the epithet is misleading. It will also be shown, however, that the 'Galilean' label is appropriate once we factor in the difference between a science concerned with kinematics (the relations between objects in space and time) and one concerned with language.

AbstractThe concern in this chapter will be with the different roles of laws and luck in linguistics, and specifically in what ways various phenomena of spoken language depend upon accidental or “lucky” facts that are not sufficiently stable to feature in laws, and so should not serve as the foci of linguistic theory. This “nomological” conception is what drives the Chomskyan study of an “I-language” as an internal computational system underlying human linguistic “competence,” as opposed to the more widespread, commonsensical view, advocated by, e.g., David Lewis and Michael Devitt, of language as fundamentally concerned with conventional “performance.” The chapter briefly reviews some of the crucial data that support this Chomskyan conception in the cases of syntax, phonology, and at least an internalist semantics. With regard to this last case, numerous examples are discussed that suggest that an externalist, referentialist semantics is indeed too subject to “lucky” contextual effects to be nomologically explanatory. The chapter concludes by pointing how such a denial of an externalist semantics does not have the dire consequences for metaphysical realism that both friend and foe of Chomskyan linguistics sometimes seem to assume.

Words appear to be denizens of the external world or, at any rate, not wholly mental, unlike our pains. It is the norm for philosophical accounts of words to reflect this appearance by offering various socio-cultural conditions to which an adequate account of wordhood must cleave. The paper argues, to the contrary, that an adequate account of word phenomena need avert to nothing other than individual psychology along with potential external factors that in-themselves do not count as linguistic. My principal leverage will be that, by everyone’s lights, whatever words are, they are syntactically combinable and possess structural properties. But such conditions cannot be externally realised; instead, they are aspects of our internally realised cognitive capacity. It will also be argued, however, that the position is consistent with much of our common lore about words, albeit sans an externalist linguistic ontology.

The paper argues that natural language quantification, as expressed by determiner phrases, is not polysemous. The foil for this claim is Hofweber (Ontology and the ambitions of metaphysics. Oxford University Press, 2016; Mind, 128:699–734, 2019), who contends that natural language quantification is polysemous between a domain reading and an inferential reading. The thesis is intended to support a more general division between externalist and internalist positions in semantics. The paper, to the contrary, argues that there is no linguistic evidence for polysemous quantification, and Hofweber’s proposal proves to be non-compositional. Further, an approach at least consistent with internalism is available independent of an inferential reading, for natural language quantification can be read as ontologically neutral, which removes the rationale for the polysemy hypothesis. The paper remains neutral on so-called heavyweight (thick) vs. lightweight (thin) construals of quantification, which are not claims about natural language semantics.

The chapter presents, after Chomsky, the prevailing conception of our 'knowledge of language' that is the target of explanation of generative linguistics. The chapter details how, since its inception, the knowledge at issue is construed in a thin sense, more of a specification of the kind of phenomena at issue rather than a presupposition about the kind of states that explain linguistic behaviour. In particular, the conception does not fit with either a 'know that' or 'know how' construal, as if linguistics posits tacit propositional knowledge or structures essentially involved in linguistic actions. That this conception was operative will be made clear via discussion of the famous 'competence/performance' distinction. More recent considerations will also be brought to bear on the issue, where an explicit understanding of the kind of the conception advertised is articulated as a way of making clear what was implicit from the beginning.

The paper responds to Duffley's hypothesis that syntactic phenomena are explicable by the ways in which constructions are used. A model of explanation will be offered, and on this basis 'tough' constructions and the general counterfunctionality of syntax will be discussed.

Noam Chomsky's engagement with contemporary philosophy from the 1960s onwards has involved lengthy discussion with critics and others on the significance of linguistics for traditional and contemporary philosophy. This chapter draws the background to generative linguistics and shows how Chomsky's real philosophical achievement in this area was to pose an explanatory question that had previously been neglected. Generative grammar as a research field was initiated by Chomsky in the 1950s. Chomsky's cognitive turn was revolutionary, not least because it went against the philosophical grain vis-a-vis the role of formalism or logical analysis. P. Strawson had suggested that there is a Homeric struggle between those who favor a formal approach to natural language and those who favor a communicationintention approach. For Chomsky, the proper role of formalism in the realm of natural language is the framing of structural constraints on the consumption and production of language, both of which are cognitive capacities.

The division between internalist and externalist perspectives has dominated many areas of philosophy over the last few decades. In broadest terms, the issue is how best to individuate or otherwise categorize properties of agents that bear upon them being rational, perceiving, acting creatures. Are the properties internal to the agent, to the exclusion of external factors, or are they essentially involving of properties and things external to the agents? In the philosophy of language, the relevant properties pertain to general linguistic competence, and so we may ask if language itself (appropriately understood) is an internal property of speaker-hearers, or, say, if a word's meaning is essentially world involving. Only a cursory survey of internalism in the philosophy of language would be possible in the space available; the chapter's ambition, instead, is to offer something of a rapprochement.

Noam Chomsky often appeals to the distinction between problems and mysteries. This chapter explains and evaluates Chomsky's remarks on these topics scattered throughout numerous texts. Next, it explains the p/m distinction via Chomsky's analogy of science with language. The chapter briefly discusses the topic of linguistic creativity. It focuses on the distinction itself, not what might fall under it. The chapter critically evaluates Chomsky's considerations in favor of the conception of the p/m distinction. A further suggestion from Chomsky is that convergence is a key signature of a science-forming faculty. Convergence on scientific theories requires explanation, for that there is convergence at all appears not to follow from the observational data, still less the socio-cultural facts of scientific practice.

The chapter seeks to settle on the general syntactic and semantic properties of weather reports. In particular, it is argued that the locative construal of weather reports is adjunctional, that is, the position for a locative phrase is optional and so does not militate for any syntactic or lexical structure when such a position is not overtly occupied. It is also argued that Recanati’s arguments to a similar conclusion can be faulted in ways the strict linguistic argument on offer cannot be. It is concluded, in light of the phenomena discussed, that relevant meteorological predicates are derived from a general principle that raises nominal roots into verbal positions.

The chapter argues that so-called semantic and syntactic intuitions, as appealed to as evidence in linguistic theory, are two sides of the same coin. Speaker-hearers do not have direct intuitive access to linguistic facts, but instead have intuitions about what can be said with a sentence; it is the theorist’s task to sieve such coarse-grained reports to discover the contribution of semantic and syntactic principles to the content associated with a sentence. The chapter contends that this conception better accommodates the complexity of linguistic phenomena vis-à-vis intuition. It also shows how the position is defensible against two troubling linguistic phenomena: one where we find interpretation without grammaticality, and another where we find grammaticality without interpretation. Both cases are illusory, at least as so described. In both, grammaticality (syntactic soundness) is aligned with semantic interpretability.

Following the “Wrongful Conviction of Forensic Science,” Crime Lab Report released a followup article that was published in a popular criminal justice journal. The article attempted to expose the very serious risks associated with legal activists who “contaminate” the context of a forensic case by mischaracterizing what the scientific evidence meant and how it was used or challenged by trial attorneys. As the authors explain in this chapter, this sequel, of sorts, became one of the most controversial, celebrated, and widely read articles ever published by Crime Lab Report. The chapter introduces the concept of contextual contamination in the application of scientific evidence and draws from the Crime Lab Report archive other articles that addressed this problem in ways that no other publication ever has.