Psychologism, Semantics, and Ontology

Abstract

I shall propose an approach to the semantics of natural language which is considerably more psychologistic than traditional approaches in the philosophy of language. I advocate a more empirically based, naturalizing orientation, which links the notion of truth quite directly to the operation of human cognitive mechanisms. This conception of semantics also loosens the traditional connections between truth and reference; questions of ontology and ontological commitment are thereby cast in a new light, and new prospects emerge for defending a narrowly physicalist ontology. My proposal is inspired largely by the psychologist Eleanor Rosch's work in prototype theory, and by related recent developments in cognitive science and linguistics. I have been influenced too by Carnap's famous (1950), which I think contains important elements of truth despite Quine's well known criticisms in (1966). Many contemporary philosophers, myself included, would like to cleave to a sparse ontology: perhaps an ontology like Quine's, consisting only of classes and physical objects; or perhaps an even sparser one, consisting of physical objects alone. (A physical object, according to Quine (1970, p. 30) is simply the whole fourdimensional material content, however sporadic and heterogeneous, of some portion of space-time.) But this aspiration toward ontological minimalism runs afoul of the fact that there are numerous garden-variety sentences with the following features: (i) we take them to be unproblematically true; (ii) they contain singular terms which appear to denote-and/or unnegated existential-quantifier expressions which appear to range over-entities other than those countenanced by a minimal ontology; (iii) there is no obvious or natural way to paraphrase the sentences into forms which avoid this apparent ontological commitment to unwelcome entities; and (iv) there is no plausible way to identify the entities purportedly referred to in these sentences with ontologically respectable entities (such