But for the moment I am mainly working on the first of these. One of the most remarkable facts about us is that although we're finite beings and have only a finite capacity for learning things, the languages we speak and understand have an infinite number of nonsynonymous sentences in them. There are an infinite number of these sentences. This capacity enables us to understand novel sentences when we hear them, and is what separates our symbol manipulating capacities from those of the other higher primates. The job of a compositional meaning theory is to provide a theoretical representation of this practical ability.
Philosophical research is basic research for the most part.
I'm primarily interested in understanding things. I want to know what the relation is between our thoughts and language and the world they are both about, and the answers to similar foundational questions. Much of the value of the pursuit of these questions lies in the greater understanding it promises to give us of the kind of beings we are and where we fit into the natural order. But most basic research has practical implications also, though sometimes you don't discover them for a long, long time. The more basic the research, the longer the time.