Establishment holds that thc psychological mechanism of inference is the ment psychological thcorizing. Moreover, given this conciliatory reading, transformation of mental representations, it follows that perception is in.

Some philosophers hold that philosophy is what you do to a problem until it’s clear enough to solve it by doing science. Others hold that if a philosophical problem succumbs to empirical methods, that shows it wasn’t really philosophical to begin with. Either way, the facts seem clear enough: questions first mooted by philosophers are sometimes coopted by people who do experiments. This seems to be happening now to the question: “what are propositional attitudes?” and cognitive psychology is the science (...) of note. (shrink)

It's an achievement of the last couple of decades that people who work in linguistic semantics and people who work in the philosophy of language have arrived at a friendly, de facto agreement as to their respective job descriptions. The terms of this agreement are that the semanticists do the work and the philosophers do the worrying. The semanticists try to construct actual theories of meaning (or truth theories, or model theories, or whatever) for one or another kind of expression (...) in one or another natural language; for example, they try to figure out how the temperature could be rising compatibly with the substitutivity of identicals. The philosophers, by contrast, keep an eye on the large, foundational issues, such as: what's the relation between sense and denotation; what's the relation between thought and language; whether translation is determinate; and whether life is like a fountain. Every now and then the philosophers and the semanticists are supposed to get together and compare notes on their respective progress. Or lack thereof. (shrink)

This paper is devoted to an investigation of one variant of the ?use theory of meaning?. It explores the possibility of characterizing the use of a linguistic unit in terms of non?linguistic facts regularly associated with utterances of the unit in question. It is argued that such regularities are associated with only a small sub?set of English sentences, and then only when these sentences occur in ?standard? contexts. An attempt is then made to characterize the relevant sense of ?standard?ness? in (...) terms of the role of this concept in a theory of language. In the final section of the paper, some consideration is given to the problem of generalizing the theory to cover sentences which are not regularly associated with recurrent non?linguistic features. (shrink)