Abstract
I propose, develop and defend the view that theories of meaning — for instance, a theory specifying the logical form or truth conditions of natural language sentences — should be naturalized to scientific psychological inquiry. This involves both psychologism — the claim that semantics characterizes psychological states — and scientific naturalism — the claim that semantics will depend on the data and theories of scientific psychology. I argue that scientific psychologism is more plausible than the traditional alternative, the view that a theory of meaning is a priori. After defending scientific psychologism against several objections, I offer a speculative proposal that shows how a theory of meaning can be integrated into scientific psychology.
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This essay is a descendant of part of my MIT doctoral dissertation. Thanks to Ned Block, Noam Chomsky, Jim Higginbotham and Bob Stalnaker for their comments and criticisms on earlier versions, and for helpful discussion of the issues.
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Kaye, L.J. A scientific psychologistic foundation for theories of meaning. Mind Mach 5, 187–206 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00974743
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00974743