Phenomenological References : Arguments for Mentalistic Natural Language Semantics

In a prevailing view of meaning and reference (cf. Frege 1892), words pick out entities in the physical world by virtue of meaning. Linguists and philosophers have argued whether the meaning of a word is inside or out-side language users' mind; but, in general, they have taken it for granted that words refer to entities in the physical world. Hilary Putnam (1975), based on his famous twin-earth thought experiment, argued that the meaning of a word could not be inside language users' head. In this paper, I point out that Putnam's argument makes sense only if words refer to entities in the physical world. That is, Putnam did not provide any argument against mentalistic semantics, since he erroneously assumed that meaning, but not reference, was inside our mind in mentalistic semantics. Mentalistic semanticist, however, assume that words pick out their references inside our head (instead of a possible outside world). A number of arguments for the mentalistic position come from psychology: studies on emotion and visual perception provide numerous cases where words cannot pick out entities from the physical world, but inside our head. The mentalistic theory has desirable consequences for the philosophy of language in that some classical puzzles of language (e.g. Russell's (1919) well-known puzzle of excluded middle) are explained well in the proposed theory.