Abstract

Loar's project is to reduce the semantic and the psychological to the physical by reducing the semantic to the psychological and the psychological to the physical. More specifically, he attempts to show that: all semantic concepts can be adequately explicated in terms of propositional attitudes; propositional attitude ascriptions can be adequately explicated without appeal to semantic concepts or intensional concepts of any sort; and propositional attitude-ascriptions can be adequately explicated so that a system could satisfy them solely in virtue of its physical properties. is to be accomplished for public natural language semantic concepts via a Gricean-Schifferian communicative-intention-based semantics; while additional provisos of intention-based semantics are in order should natural languages prove to be what we think in. and are to be accomplished via a functional theory of the content of propositional attitudes. Subtleties aside, the idea is that propositional attitudes are second-order functional states whose first-order realizations are physical states; while public natural language sentences are conventional devices for making known communicative-intentions.