The Citadel Itself: Defending Semantic Internalism

Abstract

Semantic internalism is the view that linguistic meaning amounts to forms of conceptual instructions, and that the process of forming linguistic representations does not involve reference to extra-mental entities. Contemporary philosophy of language remains predominantly externalist in focus, having developed systems of extensional reference which depart from classical rationalist assumptions. I will defend semantic internalism using a broad range of case studies, accruing what I see at the most convincing arguments in its favour. Particular focus will be placed on exemplar cases such as natural kind and artifactual terms. Copredication via inherent polysemy will be used as a strong source of evidence for internalism, countering the received view of the externalist character of meaning. Overall, my aim is to comprehensively defend internalism against its critics and to push the exploration of linguistic content and meaning “back into the brain”.

Natural language syntax complies with the free-energy principle

“…Looking at different types of relative clauses (subject relative and object relative) that involve different syntactic movement paths, their entropy reduction pattern directly matches independent psycholinguistic measures of reading difficulty. Conceptually speaking, entropy reduction measures and Kolmogorov complexity measures speak to the costs of endogenous syntactic computations, being more directly informative about internal states than more externalist measures like surprisal(Murphy 2021).A challenge for future research is to appropriately frame the interfacing of syntax with other systems in terms that accord with the minimisation of surprise and variational free energy. Since the FEP has attendant process theories (e.g., active inference), one of the latent payoffs of our suggestions here is the development of generative models of active inference that fully ground specific factors in syntactic theory and, through simulation work, may align with recent advances in the electrophysiology, neural dynamics and neural harmonics of syntax(Keitel et al 2017, Tavano et al 2021.…”