The Relationship of Language to the Formation of Concepts

Abstract

Consider W. v. Orman Quine’s distinction between meaning and reference. Determination of meaning in terms of physical description is not feasible. The question remains whether the occurrence of those words that have reference can be fully accounted for by some objective description of physical phenomena. A reductionist semantic theory would answer this affirmatively. It would hold that the lexicon of a natural language has a set of primitive terms whose reference is exhaustively describable in terms of physical specifications (i.e. sensory terms such as red, hard, square), and that the rest of the lexicon is in turn describable in terms of these “primitive words”.

The oral presentation differed from this summary in that some of the evidence referred to here was given in greater detail. Reference and discussion of my own earlier work is left in rather skeletal form here since the results have been published elsewhere.