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Psychosemantic analyticity

Horsey, Richard (2001) Psychosemantic analyticity. [Journal (On-line/Unpaginated)]

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Abstract

It is widely agreed that the content of a logical concept such as and is constituted by the inferences it enters into. I argue that it is impossible to draw a principled distinction between logical and non-logical concepts, and hence that the content of non-logical concepts can also be constituted by certain of their inferential relations. The traditional problem with such a view has been that, given Quine’s arguments against the analytic-synthetic distinction, there does not seem to be any way to distinguish between those inferences that are content constitutive and those that are not. I propose that such a distinction can be drawn by appealing to a notion of ‘psychosemantic analyticity’. This approach is immune to Quine’s arguments, since ‘psychosemantic analyticity’ is a psychological property, and it is thus an empirical question which inferences have this property.

Item Type:Journal (On-line/Unpaginated)
Keywords:logical vocabulary analyticity
Subjects:Philosophy > Philosophy of Mind
Philosophy > Logic
Linguistics > Pragmatics
ID Code:3254
Deposited By: Horsey, Richard
Deposited On:29 Oct 2003
Last Modified:11 Mar 2011 08:55

References in Article

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