Rayo's Common Sense in Polysemy

In the field of linguistics, there is a large body of work investigating linguistic semantics and metasemantics. Popular theories include conceptions of abstract objects qua Fregean senses (see Frege 1892), social rules qua Wittgenstein (1953), truth-conditionality qua Montague (1970), and even mental representations like concepts qua Fodor (1975). The philosophy of Rayo (2013), therefore, produces a strange contraposition to this research in its conception of a ‘nonlinguistic’ semantics where lexical items and utterances do not fundamentally depend upon ‘linguistic’ meanings. To this end, Rayo advocates for a view he names ‘Grab Bag Localism’ (GBL), composed of two distinct theses: ‘the Grab Bag Model’ and ‘Localism’. The former proposes that language users construct mental domains called ‘grab bags’ ad hoc and fill them with ‘mental items’ like memories and general knowledge to licence words’ meanings. The latter, put simply, suggests that all that is required for an assertion to be in good order is for it to succeed in dividing the possibilities that are relevant for the purposes of the assertion into verifiers and falsifiers. 

 

One key concept for GBL is a loosely defined cognitive faculty that Rayo calls ‘sensitivity to context and common sense’ (SCCS). For Rayo (2013), SCCS is what allows two individuals with entirely separate grab bags for lexical items to be mutually intelligible in the same language; SCCS fills in the non-linguistic gaps for us to arrive at linguistic meanings, so to speak. The powers of this faculty are the objects of Rayo’s appeals also in the case of polysemy, wherein it is claimed that SCCS has the ability to disambiguate polysemous senses contextually. Taking an approach that might be called the ‘experimental philosophy of linguistics’, assessing the strength of this particular appeal is the focus of the present paper. 

 

By manually annotating 2,761 instances of nine different polysemes from the ARCHER 3.2 diachronic corpus of British and American English, this study shall consider whether SCCS can be said to exist in contexts where an ambiguous polyseme is present, and then whether any change to the function of SCCS might be observable over time. The polysemes to be analysed are: ‘hand’, ‘head’, ‘door’, ‘once’, ‘book’, ‘run’, ‘cut’, ‘stop’, and ‘court’, and were selected on the basis of their frequency in the corpus and whether they had been studied by other researchers before. Tentative evidence for the existence of SCCS shall be offered, although no evidence for any change to the function of SCCS can be presented from data collected here.