Internalist Deflationism: On the Limits of Ontological Investigation
Internalist Deflationism: On the Limits of Ontological Investigation
Files
Publication or External Link
Date
2015
Authors
Vogel, Christopher A.
Advisor
Pietroski, Paul M
Citation
DRUM DOI
Abstract
Since Frege(1879), the history of semantics identifies the meanings of natural
language expressions with the mind external things they denote, be they pedestrian
objects (e.g., cows and chairs), less pedestrian objects (e.g. mereological sums), or
abstracta (e.g., sets of possible worlds). For the Quinean Realist, a language with
such a semantics is fruitful for ontological investigation, insofar as analyzing the denotational meanings of (the constituents of) sentences in that language reveals which
objects populate the (external) worldly domain. However, consigning meaning over
to truth in this manner comes at a cost. The externalist thesis is only had by sacrificing the explanatory adequacy of our theory of meaning. Three arguments suggest
this: first, facts about the rapid human acquisition of natural language suggests
that languages are internal to the human mind, as an innate module in cognitive
architecture; second, naturalist commitments suggest that there is no sui generis,
mind-independent kind `word' to stand in the word-to-world relations posited by
the externalist; third, natural languages exhibit lexical flexibility, as manifest in the
distribution of natural language speaker judgments, and this property cannot be
easily explained by an externalist semantics. The Realist might respond to these
arguments by appealing to the languages utilized to express our best scientific theories, using those invented languages as ontological guides. Since these scientific
languages are constructed with the expressed purpose of perspicuously describing
reality, the Realist could contend that expressions in those languages have an externalist semantics. I argue, using examples from evolutionary biology, that scientific
languages exhibit lexical flexibility as well, casting doubt on the claim that these
languages have meanings that admit to externalist treatment. The Realist then
should reject the metaphysical methodology which assumes the externalist thesis
that the meaning of a linguistic expression determines its truth-conditions.