Abstract

The main aim of this thesis is to bring into the open what I see as a serious confusion in contemporary naturalistic approaches to meaning, where the programme is to explicate our semantic and intentional concepts in non-semantic and non-intentional terms. The problem is this: energies are currently being spent on naturalizing intentionality by appealing to a non-intentional relation with the world, namely a causal one, when that relation is really an intentional one. It is generally recognized that there are two issues that need dealing with; that of explaining why a particular state is an intentional one and that of explaining what makes certain systems capable of having intentional states. I argue, however, that because answering the first sort of question necessarily entails an appeal to the intentionality of the system having the mental state, these two questions must be answered together, rather than treated as separate projects as they are today. Since no non-intentional answer to the first question can be given unless one is provided in an answer to the second question, a causal account of intentionality that is not underwritten by a non-intentional account of what it is to be an intentional system will not have succeeded in providing a naturalistic answer to our problem. ;In the final chapter, I suggest what a causal account that embraces these conclusions might look like. On this approach, linguistic meaning reduces to speaker meaning, and speaker meaning is explained by appeal to what I call a causal/conceptual relation. The first step in explicating this relation is to distinguish between thoughts and concepts. In the first three sections of this chapter, I discuss what concepts are and what role they play in our mental lives. Then I discuss what thoughts are and how they are related to concepts by providing an answer to three central questions of intentionality: How do we get the stuff in our heads? What makes the stuff in our heads about stuff? What out there is the stuff in our heads about? In the final section, I explore how this new view can be used to answer two traditional problems in the philosophy of language, namely, explicating attributive uses of definite descriptions and meeting Frege's challenge to views that identify meaning with reference