  The paper argues that Fodor and Lepore are misguided in their attack on
Pustejovsky's Generative Lexicon, largely because their argument rests on a
traditional, but implausible and discredited, view of the lexicon on which it
is effectively empty of content, a view that stands in the long line of
explaining word meaning (a) by ostension and then (b) explaining it by means of
a vacuous symbol in a lexicon, often the word itself after typographic
transmogrification. (a) and (b) both share the wrong belief that to a word must
correspond a simple entity that is its meaning. I then turn to the semantic
rules that Pustejovsky uses and argue first that, although they have novel
features, they are in a well-established Artificial Intelligence tradition of
explaining meaning by reference to structures that mention other structures
assigned to words that may occur in close proximity to the first. It is argued
that Fodor and Lepore's view that there cannot be such rules is without
foundation, and indeed systems using such rules have proved their practical
worth in computational systems. Their justification descends from line of
argument, whose high points were probably Wittgenstein and Quine that meaning
is not to be understood by simple links to the world, ostensive or otherwise,
but by the relationship of whole cultural representational structures to each
other and to the world as a whole.
