A Guide to Naturalizing Semantics

Abstract

Semantic Naturalism is a metaphysical doctrine about the status of semantic properties. It is the view that, the metaphysical connections between naturalistic and semantic properties are sufficiently systematic and transparent to allow us to see that certain naturalistic conditions are sufficient for certain semantic properties. Most semantic naturalizers also think that the property of being a belief involves an internal mental representation, and that this representation bears the state's semantic properties. This chapter provides survey of specific naturalization proposals with the crude causal theory (CCT) for the reference of Mentalese predicates. Teleological theories propose to explain the truth-conditional content of mental states, especially certain desires and beliefs, in terms of their biological functions. The chapter explains causal-role semantics (CRS), an approach to naturalizing semantics that deserves mention. In attempting to avoid counter-examples, semantic naturalists place restrictions on the reference constituting causes or information.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 50 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.