Abstract

In this dissertation I critically examine Jerrold Katz's linguistic Platonism. Through my examination of Katz's theory I challenge the view that an adequate account of meaning requires a more abstract account of language and conclude that any theory of meaning which appeals to abstract objects is ipso facto unable to account for objective meaning. ;Katz's view is that meaning is internal to the compositional structure of sentences and that sentences ought to be viewed as abstract objects on the order of Platonic forms. I evaluate this theory with respect to three issues: the arguments Katz uses to justify his theory; what, on this account, meaning is; and how it is grasped by human beings. ;Katz appeals to two main arguments to justify his theory of meaning. He claims that Frege's and Husserl's arguments against psychologistic accounts of mathematics and logic carry over to psychologistic accounts of language as well, thereby justifying a realist account, and that naturalist accounts of language commit the naturalistic fallacy. Katz defines meaning as the correlation between sense and expression type 'in the language'--that is, in the language as seen as a set of objectively real sentences--and claims that meaning, so construed, is apprehended through intuition. ;I argue in response that the arguments Katz uses to justify linguistic Platonism do not succeed; that his account of meaning, which rests on the assumption that a principled distinction can be drawn between grammatical and extragrammatical meaning, cannot be defended inasmuch as he fails to make the distinction coherent; and that his account of intuition is likewise indefensible in that it presupposes the very sort of direct contact between human beings and abstract objects which the account is meant to avoid. ;Finally, drawing upon my discussion of Katz, I conclude that Platonist theories of meaning in general are unsuccessful because they cannot explain how conferring the status of abstract object upon linguistic meanings vouchsafes objectivity.