process, I have found it necessary also to part company with much of the mainstream in semantics and philosophyof
mind, in part onfirst principles, and in part because the sorts of linguistic generalization I have wished to express are
incomprehensiblein more standard frameworks. Thisfinal part of the book is devotedto a survey of the landscape of
meaning from the perspective thus achieved.
Thepresentchapterand thenextareconcernedwithfoundationalissues; theyare followedbytwochapters thatsketch
a broad range ofempiricallybased results in lexical and phrasal semantics. However, thereader should understand that
in practice one cannotfirst establish the foundations and then go on to do the work. Rather, the empirical results are
part of what motivates the search for new foundations. I am interested in constructing a stance on meaning from
whichit is possible to make sense of the sort of detailed empiricalinvestigation that linguists do. The relationbetween
the philosophy and the dirty work has to be a two-way street.
I propose to begin fro mthe following surely uncontroversial postulate:
Peoplefind sentences (and other entities) meaningful because of something going on in their brains.
Thatis, we are ultimatelyinterested notinthequestion: Whatis meaning?butrather: Whatmakes things meaningfulto
people?This anchors the enterprise both in the theory of psychology and in ordinary human experience.
A second postulate is:
There is no magic.
That is, we seek a thoroughly naturalistic explanation that ultimately can be embedded in our understanding of the
physical world.
Such an explanation comes at a heavy price. The overall point to bear in mind is that:
Meaning is central to everything human.
If you are not prepared to deal with at least language, intelligence, consciousness, the self, and social and cultural
interaction, you are not going to understand meaning.
9.2 Semantics vis-à-vis mainstream generative grammar
As already intimated, generative grammar has on the whole had little to say about meaning. Early contributions by
Katz and Fodor (1963; Katz 1972), Bierwisch (1967; 1969), and Weinreich (1966), among others, were developed