Composicionalismo semântico, predicação e o automorfismo de Quine

Abstract

This paper offers a new reconstruction of the arguments in Quine’s famous second chapter of Word and Object and of his idea of Ra-dical Translation. According to this approach, Quine’s main target is the notion of compositionality as a key element in any theory of meaning. In short, according to Quine there could not be any “theories of meaning” simply because the notion of compositionality should be rejected as the cen-tral notion of semantics. We also sharply differentiate empirically oriented arguments from a priori, modal arguments. These later ones constitute the core of what we propose to call Quine’s Automorphism Theorem, the idea that there are alternative ways of reconstructing the grammatical structure of any language including predication which could maintain invariant all our dispositions for verbal behavior under any actual or even only possible estates of affairs. It is this theorem, we argue, which provides the main support for Quine’s rejection of compositionality and thus of all theories of meaning.