creators_name: Horsey, Richard
type: journale
datestamp: 2003-10-29
lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:55:23
metadata_visibility: show
title: Psychosemantic analyticity
ispublished: pub
subjects: phil-mind
subjects: phil-logic
subjects: ling-prag
full_text_status: public
keywords: logical vocabulary
analyticity
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.


date: 2001-09
date_type: published
publication: UCL Working Papers in Linguistics
volume: 13
refereed: FALSE
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citation:   Horsey, Richard  (2001) Psychosemantic analyticity.  [Journal (On-line/Unpaginated)]     
document_url: http://cogprints.org/3254/1/analytic.pdf