UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 13 (2001)
Psychosemantic analyticity
RICHARD HORSEY
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.
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