OUT OF CONTEXT JERRY FODOR AND ERNIE LEPORE RUTGERS UNIVERSITY 1. INTRODUCTION It’s been, for some time now, a pet thesis of ours that compositionality is the key constraint on theories of linguistic content. On the one hand, we’re convinced by the usual arguments that the compositionality of natural languages 1 explains how L-speakers can understand any of the indefinitely many expressions that belong to L. 2 And, on the other hand, we claim that compositionality excludes all “pragmatist” 3 accounts of content; hence, practically all of the theories of meaning that have been floated by philosophers and cognitive scientists for the last fifty years or so. A number of objections to our claim have been suggested to us, but none that we find persuasive (see, for example, the discussions of the “uniformity principle” and of “reverse compositionality” in Fodor and Lepore 2002). These objections have a common thread: they all grant that mental and linguistic content are compositional but challenge the thesis that compositionality is incompatible with semantic pragmatism. In this paper, we want to consider an objection of a fundamentally different kind, namely, that it doesn’t matter whether compositionality excludes semantic pragmatism because compositionality isn’t true; the content of an expression supervenes not on its linguistic structure 4 alone but on its linguistic structure together with the context of its tokening. 5 Here’s the general idea: by stipulation, a sentence of L is compositional if and only if a (canonical) representation of its linguistic structure encodes all the information that a speaker/hearer of L requires in order to understand it. 6 This means that, if L is compositional, then having once assigned a linguistic representation to a sentence token, there is no more work for a hearer to do in order to understand it. And since having knowledge of the syntax of the sentences in L and of the meanings of its lexical items is presumably constitutive of being an L- speaker/hearer, 7 it follows that anyone who is a speaker/hearer of L is thereby guaranteed to be able to interpret an utterance of any of its sentences. 8 The notions “speaker/hearer,” “semantic interpretation,” “compositionality,” and “understanding” are thus inter-defined: an L- speaker is somebody who is able to understand (tokens of) L- expressions; to understand an L-expression is to grasp its semantic interpretation; an expression is compositional if and only if its semantic interpretation is determined by its linguistic structure; and a representation of the linguistic structure of an expression is “adequate” only if compositionality determines its semantic interpretation. The