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date: 05 March 2021

Abstract and Keywords

There are two different things that are thought of when the issue of compositionality is considered. One concerns a generalized notion of “what is a complex item made of?” A second view of compositionality comes mostly from linguistic semantics. In this conception, the question is whether there is a certain relationship that holds amongst the properties of members of a structure. In the language case, the property that is usually of interest is the meaning of arbitrary members of the syntactically given structure. The fundamental idea behind holism is to give some sort of priority to a “whole” in preference to the “parts” of that whole, and this plays out differently in different areas where the term is used.

Keywords: compositionality, linguistic semantics, holism, wholism, internal relations doctrine

Francis Jeffry Pelletier

Francis Jeffry Pelletier was Mellon Chair in Cognitive Science at the University of Rochester, 1990–2; Professor of Philosophy and Computing Science at the University of Alberta, 1992–2003; and Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Science and Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics at Simon Fraser University from 2003 until 2009. He now teaches at the University of Alberta and writes on issues of the philosophy of language and logic, formal semantics, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence, as well as some specific topics that overlap with these areas (e.g., mass terms and generics).

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