Jerrold J. Katz Semantics and Conceptual Change 1979

Philosophical Review
Semantics and Conceptual Change

Author(s): Jerrold J. Katz
Source: The Philosophical Review, Vol. 88, No. 3 (Jul., 1979), pp. 327-365
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SEMANTICS AND CONCEPTUAL CHANGE*
Jerrold J. Katz
The discussion of conceptual change that has taken place

over the last two decades is peculiar in an important re-
spect: meaning and change of meaning loom large in these dis-
cussions, yet no consideration seems to have been given to what
linguistics says on these topics. It is almost perverse that in dis-
cussions of science carried out by philosophers of science, in
which highly controversial claims concerning science turn on
assumptions about meaning, there is no attempt to use ideas
from the science that studies meaning.1 In ignoring linguistics,
these discussions restrict themselves to an overly narrow range
of positions on conceptual change in science. In the present
paper, I will show that linguistics has a significant contribution
to make in extending this range of positions. I will show that
there are ideas in linguistics that lead to a new position on con-
*This paper has been presented at the Conference on Conceptual Change at

Ripon College, and to the philosophy departments at the University of Toronto,
Columbia University, University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and the State
University of New York at Albany. I wish to thank Joe Bevando, Tamara
Horowitz, Paul Horwich, Arnold Koslow, Keith Lehrer, Sid Morgenbesser,
Tom Nagel, Charles Parsons, and Peter Unger for their comments on earlier
drafts. I wish to specially thank Virginia Valian for her helpful comments
on the final draft.
1 Ironically, the closest thing to such an attempt in the literature is a
neglected, early piece by Putnam (Putnam, H., "How Not to Talk about
Meaning," in Boston Studies in The Philosophy of Science, Vol. II, R. S. Cohen
& M. W. Wartofsky, eds., Humanities Press, New York, 1965, pp. 205-222)
in which he defends the ordinary distinction between meaning and belief
against Feyerabend's conception of theory-relative meaning. What is ironic,
as we shall see below, is that it is now necessary to defend the same dis-
tinction against Putnam. It is also worth mentioning for the record that
Feyerabend's reaction was to make the pronouncement that "As far as I am
concerned, even the most detailed conversations about meanings belong in the
gossip columns and have no place in the theory of knowledge." (p. 230)
2 Shapere, D. "Meaning and Scientific Change," in Mind and Cosmos:
Essays in Contemporary Science and Philosophy, Vol. III, University of Pitts-
burgh Series in the Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh Press,
1966, pp. 41-85.
327
JERROLD J. KATZ
ceptual change in science. I will exhibit its advantages over the

positions taken thus far, and I will show how it might clarify
disputes in the philosophy and history of science.
The discussion of conceptual change has been carried out
largely as a debate between the "new philosophers of science,"
as Shapere refers to Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Toulmin, and the
older, logical empiricist philosophers of science.2 Philosophy of
science, on the logical empiricist conception, is "metascience,"
on analogy to metalogic. It concerns, as Shapere characterizes it,
the "logical form" . . . of scientific statements rather than their "content," with,
for example, the logical structure of all possible statements claiming to be scien-
tific laws, . . . with the logical skeleton of any possible scientific theory, rather
than with particular actual scientific theories.'
This aim is to be achieved using
the techniques of modern mathematical logic in approaching ... problems ...

difficulties were to be overcome ... by giving a more satisfactory reformulation
in terms of that logic.'
The particular choice of applied predicate calculi for such

reformulation is guided by an empiricist metaphysics which
claimed that
all scientific theory must, in some precise and formally specifiable sense, be
grounded in experience, both as to the meanings of terms and the acceptability
of assertions.'
Scientific theories were conceived of as axiomatic systems con-

nected to experience through rules that interpret their theo-
retical vocabulary exclusively in terms of an observation
vocabulary. Scientific development is a process of stockpiling
truths and weeding out falsehoods.
3Ibid., p. 42.
4Ibid., p. 42.
5 Ibid., p. 44.
6 Ibid., pp. 44-47.
'See, for example, Hempel, C. G., "Problems and Changes in the Empiri-
cist Criterion of Meaning," Revue Internationale de Philosophie, Vol. IV, No.
11, 1950, pp. 41-63, and Hempel, C. G., "Implications of Carnap's Work for
the Philosophy of Science," in The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, A. Schilpp, ed.,
Open Court Press, 1963, pp. 685-710.
328
SEMANTICS AND CONCEPTUAL CHANGE
A number of things prepared the way for the rebellion against

this "old philosophy of science." The four most significant seem
to be these.6 First, the old philosophy of science lost credibility
because it failed to make good its promise to eliminate meta-
physics through the logical analysis of language, Especi
explain how the meaning of theoretical terms can be given in
terms of an observation vocabulary.7 Second, the emphasis on
"the logical skeleton of any possible theory" made the work of
these philosophers increasingly less relevant to "actual scientific
theory." Third, Wittgenstein's criticism of the ideal of rational
reconstruction undermined the belief that it actually removed
problems. Lastly, history of science emerged as a "new pro-
fessionalized discipline," with results challenging the logical
empiricist's "upward and onward" picture of scientific develop-
ment.8
The new philosophers of science earned this title by first
formulating an alternative conception of scientific theory and
scientific development. Its principal feature was a picture of
scientific development in which periodically sciences experience
revolutions that so radically redefine them that
the normal scientific tradition that emerges ... is not only incompatible but
often actually incommensurable with that which has gone before.9
The emerging theory does not refute the old theory, it replaces it.
Since the replacement can so fundamentally transform the
science that no common methodological basis exists on which
to compare the claims in the old and new theories, scientific
development is not cumulative.
The significance of meaning and change of meaning for scien-
tific development can be appreciated from the fact that both the
cumulative and the noncumulative pictures of scientific de-
velopment are grounded in accounts of meaning. Logical
empiricists ground their picture in an empiricist account of
8 "Meaning and Scientific Change," pp. 46-48.
9 Kuhn, T. S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago
Press, Chicago, 1962, p. 102. There is a difficulty with Kuhn's formulation
here. Since he intends "incommensurability" to apply when the theoretical
terms in the old and the emerging traditions are interpreted so that the
basic principles of these traditions are logically independent, the two tradi-
tions cannot be "incompatible" when they are "incommensurable". I will
assume that Kuhn's reference to incompatibility is just a slip.
329
JERROLD J. KATZ
meaning. The account makes it reasonable to think that there

is a theory-neutral vocabulary of observation terms that pro-
vides theory-independent, experiential meanings for the theo-
retical terms of all scientific theories. Thus, there is a basis for
claiming that the same meaning can be assigned to a term in
different theories and that translatability between theories is
always possible.
The new philosophers of science, too, ground their picture in
an account of meaning. The failure of the logical empiricists to
vindicate the empiricist account of meaning enabled the new
philosophers of science to replace the empiricist account with
their account of meaning on which there is no theory-neutral
basis for interpreting scientific terms. Such terms are idiosyn-
cratically interpreted in the theories employing them and their
semantics is relative to that theory. Feyerabend claims:
the meaning of every term we use depends upon the theoretical context in which
it occurs. Words do not 'mean' something in isolation; they obtain their
meaning by being part of a theoretical system. 10
Hence, if the new theory emerging from a revolution is suffi-

ciently different from the old in respect of the interpretation
of terms, the theories, not surprisingly, turn out incommensur-
able. The controversial claims of the new philosophers of science
about scientific theory and scientific development thus depend
on replacing the logical empiricist's absolutist account of mean-
ing with an account on which meaning is theory-relative.
Given that there is no a priori reason to suppose that these two
accounts of meaning are the only possible accounts, the ques-
tion arises of why philosophers haven't tried to formulate an
absolute semantics that does not rest on the logical empiricists'
empiricism and its dubious theoretical term/observation term
distinction.11 An answer is not hard to find. The new philoso-
10 Feyerabend, P. "Problems of Empiricism," in Beyond the Edge of Certainty,

R. Colodny, ed., Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, 1965, p. 180.
" Even as resourceful a critic of the new philosophy of science as Shapere
tries instead to deemphasize the importance of meaning. (See "Meaning
and Scientific Change," pp. 68-69). Shapere claims that there is a "danger"
in making use of the notion of meaning. He says: "-we expose ourselves to the
danger of relegating some features of the use of a term to the 'less important'
status of not being 'part of the meaning.' Yet those very features, for some
purposes, may prove to be the very ones that are of central importance in
330
phers of science's position on meaning has broad support in the

history and philosophy of science. The position that meaning
is theory relative has the authority of one of the most widely
respected figures in the history and philosophy of science, Pierre
Duhem. Duhem wrote:
According to whether we adopt one theory or another, the very words which
figure in a physical law change their meaning, so that the law may be accepted
by one physicist who admits a certain theory and rejected by another physicist
who admits some other theory.12
The position is encouraged by other influential figures like N. R.

Campbell. Also, putting the issue of the theoretical/observa-
tional vocabulary distinction to one side, there is not all that
much different about the old and new philosophies of science.
In Carnap's case, this is clear just from the unrestricted onto-
logical freedom we are given in answering so-called "external
questions." The similarity between the old and new philosophy
comparing two uses, for relative importance of features of usage must not be
enshrined in an absolute and a priori distinction between essential and in-
essential features. It thus seems wiser to allow all features of the use of a term
to be equally potentially relevant in comparing the usage of the terms in
different contexts. But this step relieves the notion of meaning of any impor-
tance whatever as a tool for analyzing the relations between different scien-
tific 'theories.' " First, the distinction between "part of the meaning" and
''not part of the meaning" is not the distinction between "essential" and
"inessential." But even if it were, it is surely just an equivocation on these
terms to take them, as Shapere does, to carry the force of, respectively,
"important" and "unimportant." There is no reason to suppose that, be-
cause some feature is not part of the meaning of a term or not essential, it is less
important than some feature that is part of the meaning of the term.
There seems to be widespread confusion among first-rate philosophers
of science over the difference between definitional and essential properties.
For instance, N. R. Campbell's criticism of the distinction between defining
and nondefining properties of scientific terms rests on such a confusion.
Campbell poses the question as follows: "Are there properties of silver which
simply define what we mean by silver and such that, if they were altered, the
substance would not be silver; and are there on the other hand nondefining
properties, such that they might be changed without affecting the fact that
the substance in question is silver?" Campbell, N. R., Foundations of Science,
Dover Publications, Inc., New York, 1957, p. 47. But properties such that
if something did not have them, it would not be the same thing (p. 47) are
essential properties but not necessarily definitional properties. Being the
single even prime is a property such that nothing without it can be the number
two, but it is not a definitional property of two.
12 Duhem, P. The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, Princeton University
Press, Princeton, 1954, p. 167.
331
JERROLD J KA TZ
also follows from other, more widely held, doctrines of Car-

nap's. 13 Moreover, the position of the new philosophers of
science is significantly strengthened by the hostility of present
philosophical opinion toward the traditional notion of meaning.
The effect of this hostility is to prevent us from restricting prin-
ciples for interpreting terms from entire systems of beliefs to
analytic beliefs. As Quine put it:
Once I reject the distinction between analytic sentences and other community-
wide beliefs, however, my nearest approximation to a null theory is the class of
all community-wide beliefs. 14
Although Quine's attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction

initiated this hostility, it has been kept up, on the one hand, by
followers of Quine's like Davidson and Harman,15 and on the
other, by philosophers coming to the issue of the separability
of language and theory from the study of reference like Putnam
and Kripke. 16
With widespread opposition to distinguishing the linguistic
component of a theory from the rest of the theory as that part
which interprets the terms of the theory, it is easy to see why the
account of meaning of the new philosophers of science ran into
so little trouble. Since their relativization of meaning to theory
was the real force behind the radical doctrines about the non-
cumulativeness of scientific development, their conformity to
orthodox opinion on the language/theory distinction shielded
"See Carnap, R., "Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology," in Semantics

and the Philosophy of Language, L. Linsky, ed., University of Illinois Press,
Urbana, 1952, pp. 208-230. See English, J., "Partial Interpretation and Mean-
ing Change," The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. LXXV, No. 2, 1978, pp. 57-76
for an argument that widely accepted logical empiricist doctrines are close
to the doctrines of the new philosophers of science.
14 Quine, W. V. "Reply to Chomsky," Synthese, Vol. 19, No. 1/2, 1968, p. 282.
'5 Davidson, D. "Truth and Meaning," Synthese, Vol. 17, No. 3, 1967, pp.
304-323; Harman, G. Thought, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1973,
pp. 84-111.
16 Putnam, H. "It Ain't Necessarily So," The Journal of Philosophy, Vol.

No. 22, 1962, pp. 658-671; "Is Semantics Possible?", Metaphilosophy, Vol. 1,
1970, pp. 189-201; "The Meaning of 'Meaning,'" Language, Mind, and
Knowledge, Vol. VII, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, K.
Gunderson, ed., University of Minnesota Press, 1975, pp. 131-193. Kripke,
S. "Naming and Necessity," Semantics of Natural Language, D. Davidson & G.
Harman, eds., D. Reidel Publishing Co., Dordrecht, Holland, 1972, pp. 253-
355.
332
these doctrines from the most basic form of criticism to which

they are open."
II
With so widespread a skeptical attitude toward the language/

theory distinction, there are surprisingly few serious arguments
to show that the distinction cannot be drawn. To my knowledge,
there are only three. In this and the next two sections, I shall
show that all three are inadequate. Then I will develop an
account of meaning and of the language/theory distinction that
is absolutist like the logical empiricist account but makes none of
the dubious assumptions that got the latter account into trouble.
Finally, I sketch the implications of my account for conceptual
change in science.
Perhaps the best known attempt to argue that the language/
theory distinction cannot be drawn is Quine's argument that
meaning and related notions cannot be explained well enough
for them to qualify for use in scientific theories about language.
Feyerabend's less well known argument that in a conflict be-
tween two different high level background theories there is in
principle no possibility of translation comes to much the same
thing as Quine's indeterminacy of translation.18 Furthermore,
Feyerabend's account of how different high level background
theories are comparable in terms of his "pragmatic theory of
observation" is quite similar to Quine's account, in his theory of
stimulus meaning, of how different languages confront the same
experience. 19 Thus, I will take Quine's argument as representa-
tive of Feyerabend's and others' attempts to establish that there
is no truth of the matter about questions of meaning and
synonymy.
As will be recalled, the argument in "Two Dogmas of Empiri-
cism" begins by considering three definitional ways of explain-
17 For my response to the Putnam and Kripke papers, see Katz, J. J. "A
Proper Theory of Names," Philosophical Studies, Vol. 31, No. 1, 1977, pp. 1-80.
The present paper is the discussion promised in footnote 60 (p. 78).
18 See Shapere's discussion of Feyerabend'9 claim in "Meaning and Scien-
tific Change," pp. 57-58; Quine, W. V. Word and Object, M. I. T. Press, Cam-
bridge, 1960, pp. 26-79.
'9 "Problems of Empiricism," pp. 217f; Word and Object, pp. 80f.
333
JERROLD J KA TZ
ing semantic notions: lexicographical definition, rational

reconstruction, and notational abbreviation.20 Quine rejects
all three as incapable, in principle, of clarifying such notions.
Quine then takes up two theoretical ways of explaining these no-
tions: interchangeability and semantical rules. He tries to show
that these methods of clarification also can be dismissed because
they lead to circularity. Quine concludes that there is no
analytic-synthetic distinction to be drawn.
The argument to this conclusion has a logic that has eluded
both Quine's critics and his sympathizers. Grice and Strawson
commit the original sin in suggesting that Quine's argument
proceeds invalidly from cases where the analytic-synthetic dis-
tinction has not been adequately explained to the conclusion
that there is nothing to explain.21 Putnam follows them and
suggests that there must be something deeper to Quine's argu-
ment, otherwise "it is puzzling why this [argument] is supposed
to be a good argument." The logic of Quine's argument is this.
Quine's essay has three polemical sections: "Definition," "Inter-
changeability," and "Semantical Rules." In the first, Quine
considers explicit definition in all its forms, and in the second
and third, he considers implicit definition in the two relevant
areas of science, linguistics and logic. The point that Grice,
Strawson and Putnam miss is that Quine's argument exhausts
the relevant areas where a method for clarification of semantic
notions might exist. Thus, if he can show that there is no method
that can do this in one of these areas, it is reasonable to think
the notion of meaning is not clear enough to ground a theory
of a priori truth.
Quine's dismissal of explicit definition is unobjectionable:
notational abbreviation rests on arbitrary stipulation and both
rational reconstruction and lexicographical definition assume
prior synonymy relations instead of explaining them. Further-
more, Quine's dismissal of implicit definition in logic, namely
postulate or rule specification, modeled on definitions of logical
0 Quine, W. V. From a Logical Point of View, Harper & Row, Inc., New
York, 1953, pp. 20-46.
21 Grice, H. P. and Strawson, P. F. "In Defense of a Dogma," The Phi
sophical Review, Vol. LXV, No. 2, 1956, pp. 141-158.
22 Putnam, H. "'Two Dogmas' Revisited," in Contemporary Aspects of P
ophy, G. Ryle, ed., Oriel Press, London, 1976, p. 203.
334
truth in first order' logic, is also unobjectionable: specific

of meaning postulates or semantical rules enables us to "under-
stand what expressions the rules attribute analyticity to, but we
do not understand what the rules attribute to those expres-
sions."' Given the point that has been missed, Quine's argu-
ment would go through if his treatment of implicit definition
in linguistics were sound.
Putnam compounds the original sin by misrepresenting
Quine's argument that synonymy is hopelessly unclear. Putnam
says, "The only evidence that Quine produced to support this
remarkable claim was that he, Quine, could not clarify the
notion in a few pages."24 In those "few pages," -however, Q
mounts a very sophisticated argument against synonymy. Put-
nam's reconstruction of Quine's argument as an induction from
a sample of one does the argument an injustice.
Quine's argument is rather this: Quine poses the problem of
clarifying a notion of synonymy in linguistics as that of showing
that it is possible to separate synonymous pairs of expressions
from nonsynonymous pairs on the basis of an interchangeability
or substitution test. He then observes that either the corpus con-
taining the "substitution frames" is intensional, because it con-
tains expressions like "Necessarily, bachelors are bachelors," or
extensional. If the corpus contains such intensional contexts, the
question has already been begged. If the corpus does not contain
them, every attempt to state an interchangeability test must beg
the question. Such a test must cite the property to be preserved
when and only when synonyms replace synonyms. But since the
choice is between truth and analyticity, no acceptable test can
be formulated. Requiring the substitution to preserve truth fails
to separate synonymous pairs of expressions from nonsynony-
mous but coextensive pairs while requiring analyticity assumes
meaning is unproblematic and begs the question.
This argument would show that the central notions of the
theory of meaning cannot be made clear enough for linguistics
if Quine can legitimately assume that interchangeability tests
are the proper criteria for determining what is clear enough for
this science. Though Quine's assumption is mistaken, he had
2 From a Logical Point of View, p. 33.
24 cc 'Two Dogmas' Revisited," p. 204.
335
JERROLD J. KA TZ
good grounds for making it at the time. The assumption came

from the then dominant theory of language in linguistics, the
taxonomic theory of grammar. This theory not only had the
authority of scientific orthodoxy, but, being behaviorist, empiri-
cist, and physicalist, it also had the proper philosophical creden-
tials for Quine.25 Quine himself is quite explicit about appealing
to the taxonomic theory of grammar for a conception of the way
that linguistics explains linguistic notions:
So-called substitution criteria, or conditions of interchangeability, have in one

form or another played central roles in modern grammar [viz., taxonomic
theory]. For the synonymy problem of semantics such an approach seems
more obvious still. 26
Quine also is quite explicit about the fact that it is this model of
explanation that he used in his examination of the notion of
synonymy. 2
The true reason why Quine's argument fails is that it had the
ground cut from under it by the dissolution of the taxonomic
theory of grammar. Logically speaking, the "vicious circle"
shows no more than that either notions like synonymy cannot be
made sufficiently clear or the standard of clarity used in judging
them is not adequate. It is plausible to think that these notions
are inherently unclear in linguistics if it is, in fact, plausible to
think that the standard is adequate. But there is no valid infer-
ence to the conclusion that the central notions in the theory of
meaning are hopelessly unclear if the assumed standard of clarity
is discredited. Since Chomsky's refutation of the taxonomic
theory as an acceptable scientific theory of language establishes
the inadequacy of substitution tests in linguistics, Quine's argu-
ment is a casualty of Chomsky's revolution in linguistics.28
Not only does Chomsky's revolution bring about the collapse
of Quine's argument against meaning, it introduces a new con-
ception of the proper way to clarify linguistic notions. Taxo-
25 Compare remarks of Bloomfield, the founder of the taxonomic theo

in linguistics, such as those in Bloomfield, L. "Language or Idea?" Language,
Vol. 12, 1936, p. 93 with those of Quine'ssuch as From a Logical Point of View,
p. 48.
26 From a Logical Point of View, p. 56.
27Ibid., pp. 56-57.
28 See Katz, J. J. "Logic and Language: An Examination of Recent
Criticisms of Intensionalism," in Language, Mind, and Knowledge, pp. 36-63.
336
nomic theory conceives of grammars as data-cataloguing devices,

compact tabulations of the distributional regularities in a sample
of speech. It thus conceives of clarification in terms of the oper-
ationalism of substitution tests. Chomsky conceives of grammars
as idealizations of the knowledge of a language that speakers
exercise in verbal behavior. This makes linguistic theorizing
like theorizing in the advanced sciences. It thus legitimizes in
linguistics the same standard of clarity employed in the ad-
vanced sciences. Notions of any sort can appear in the rules of a
grammar so long as, first, they can be precisely stated, and
second, their appearance can be justified as a theoretical posit,
that is, as essential to the predictions and explanations of the
simplest theory of the phenomena. In linguistics, this means
accounting for grammatical properties and relations.
Furthermore, Chomsky's theory contained a new way of de-
fining syntactic properties and relations that could serve as a
model for definitions of semantic properties and relations. The
crux of the idea was to set up the syntactic component of a
grammar as an explication of the syntactic competence of the
ideal speaker-hearer, to explicate this competence in terms of
syntactic rules that generate syntactic representations of sen-
tences, and then to define syntactic properties and relations on
the output of these rules. For example, a string of words is
marked as well-formed just in case it has a syntactic representa-
tion; two strings are marked as constituents of the same syntactic type
just in case they are categorized in the same way in syntactic
representation.
On this model, semantic theory was set up as a theory of the
semantic competence of the speaker. Semantic theory specifies
semantic rules and definitions of semantic properties and rela-
tions stated in terms of their output. The semantic rules con-
sist of a set of dictionary rules and a projection rule. The dictionar
rules assign formal semantic representations to lexical items as
descriptions of their senses. The projection rule combines se-
mantic representations of lexical items to form semantic repre-
sentations of the compositional meaning of syntactically
complex constituents. Semantic properties and relations are
defined, in analogy to syntactic properties like well-formed,
on the output of these semantic rules. For example, a sentence
337
JERROLD J KA TZ
or expression in a sentence is marked as meaningful just in case it

is assigned at least one semantic representation, meaningless just
if it is assigned none, and ambiguous just in case it is assigned two
or more. Two expressions or sentences are marked as synonymous
(on a sense) just in case they are assigned the same semantic
representation. 2
Given the possibility of a semantic theory, Quine's thesis
of indeterminacy of translation has nothing to support it. Hy-
potheses about the semantic component of a grammar of a lan-
guage can be justified by checking their predictions about the
meaningfulness, meaninglessness, ambiguity, and other seman-
tic properties and relations of sentences against the judgments
of speakers of the language. Evidence about the semantic prop-
erties and relations of expressions in languages can be used to
confirm the existence of synonymy or translation relations, even
in the case of radical translation. Bilingual speakers can, in
principle, provide evidence, both direct and indirect, about
whether or not, for example, "gavagai" has the same sense as
"rabbit" or "rabbit stage" or "undetached rabbit part." We can
ask such speakers for their judgment about whether "gavagai"
is synonymous with any of these three English expressions. We
may get a clear, unequivocal response. We may not. If we do,
we have evidence. If not, we can ask a somewhat more sophisti-
cated question or a somewhat more sophisticated informant.
For example, we might come back with the question whether
"gavagai" bears the relation to some expression (in either lan-
guage) that "undetached finger" bears to "hand." There are in-
definitely many such further questions, and indefinitely many
potential informants. 30 Since there are no a priori reasons to think
that, with sufficient effort, the evidence cannot be made clear
enough to compensate for inductive underdetermination, there
29 For a comprehensive presentation of the theory referred to, see Katz, J. J

Semantic Theory, Harper & Row, Inc. New York, 1972.
30 Semantic intuitions of speakers may not always be clear and in some
cases may not remain clear, but, as Chomsky points out in Syntactic Structu
Mouton & Co., 'S -Gravenhage, 1957, pp. 13-17,, grammar construction is
explication and in explication unclear cases can be decided on the basis of
what the relevant rules of the grammar imply about these cases when these
rules are set up in the simplest way to handle the clear cases.
338
is as much a fact of the matter about identity of sense as about

anything else in science.
III
Putnam claims that Quine's real argument is the "historical

argument" that "no statement is immune from revision" be-
cause "Revision even of the law of excluded middle has been
proposed as a means of simplifying quantum mechanics; and
what difference is there in principle between such a shift and a
shift whereby Kepler superceded Ptolemy, or Einstein Newton,
or Darwin Aristotle?""3 Without quibbling about whether this
is the real argument for Quine, let us see whether the argument
amounts to anything.
On Putnam's account, Quine is saying three things: (a)
"Open-mindedness even to the extent of being prepared to
revise logical laws is necessary in the scientific enterprise";
(b) "previous revolutions have required us to give up principles
that were once regarded as a priori"; (c) "the proposal to use a
nonstandard logic in quantum mechanics is not fundamentally
different from the proposal to use non-Euclidean geometry in
theory of space-time."32 If this is what Quine's argument comes
down to, it is easy to answer:
(a') Consistency takes precedence over open-mindedness.

Open-mindedness to the extent of revising logical
laws clutters the mind with every thought.
(b') While it is true that previous revolutions have re-

quired us to give up principles that were once re-
garded as a priori, none could have required us to give
up ones that were actually a priori.
(c') Putnam gives no argument that the two proposals

are "not fundamentally different." Thus, one can reply
that a case of standard logic is different from the case
3' From a Logical Point of View, p. 43. Putnam makes the claim on pages 205
and following.
32 "'Two Dogmas' Revisited," pp. 205-206.
339
JERROLD J. KA TZ
of Euclidean geometry. Euclidean geometry was once

a part of the physical theory of space-time, but stan-
dard logic was never a part of quantum mechanics.
Standard logic was always a putative theory of logical
implication, nothing more. Euclidean geometry re-
mains the correct theory of a mathematical space even
after being replaced by a non-Euclidean geometry in
the physical theory of space-time. If standard logic
were found to license invalid inferences in quantum
mechanics, standard logic would be replaced by a non-
standard logic as our theory of logical implication
(rather than as part of quantum mechanics) and
standard logic then would not be the correct theory of
anything. The rationalist view that logical laws are a
priori truths allows that statements in a putative
theory of logical implication can be discredited by
examples from an actual science (just as it allows them
to be discredited by examples from science fiction).
It cannot allow that such statements are part of an
empirical theory, no matter how broad,33 but there
is no argument to show this.
Putnam finds Quine's holistic picture of knowledge is a forceful

argument for the claim that there is no difference between logical
and empirical laws. This is Quine's holistic picture of knowledge.
The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters
of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of
pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experi-
ence only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field
of force whose boundary conditions are experience. A conflict with experience
at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field. Truth
values have to be redistributed over some of our statements. Reevaluation of
some statements entails reevaluation of others, because of their logical intercon-
nections-the logical laws being in turn simply certain further elements of the
field. Having reevaluated one statement we must reevaluate some others, which
33 We, of course, reject the empiricist's holistic picture of knowledge in which

logic is simply the most general of the disciplines, since this picture is designed
to assimilate the cases a rationalist wants to distinguish as fundamentally
different.
340
may be statements logically connected with the first or may be the statements
of logical connection themselves.34
Appeal to this picture would be disastrous because its account

of knowledge is incoherent. To see this, let us ask what the force
of the term "must" is in these claims about the ramifications of
a conflict with experience. Surely, the force of "must" can only
be the force of logical necessity: the reevaluation of statements in
the interior of the field is forced on pain of logical contradiction.
If not, we could either allow conflicts with experience to stand or
reevaluate some statements without reevaluating any particular
others. Quine could hardly mount an argument establishing the
revisability of logical laws if we were allowed to reevaluate as we
please. But if "must" has the force of logical necessity, the law
of noncontradiction is immune to revision. Since logical laws are
"simply certain further statements of the system, certain further
elements of the field," "no statement is immune from revision,"
and the law of noncontradiction is a logical law, it follows that
the law of noncontradiction is both immune from revision and
not immune from revision.
IV
The only other serious attempt I know of to show that there is

no language/theory distinction is the line of argument against
analyticity that begins with Donnellan's criticism of C. I. Lewis35
and is made into a comprehensive critique by Putnam and
others.36 Lewis's account of analyticity is Kant's with Kantian
talk of concepts and judgments replaced by talk of criteria of
application and linguistic expressions. According to Lewis:
attribution of meaning in this sense requires only two things; (1) that determi-
nation of applicability or nonapplicability of a term . .. be possible by way of
sense-presentable characters, and (2) that what such characters will, if presented,
evidence applicability of... should be fixed in advance of the particular experi-
ence, in the determination of the meaning in question."
"' From a Logical Point of View, p. 42. Emphasis mine.

3'5 Lewis, C. I. An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, The Open Court Pub-
lishing Co., La Salle, 1946, pp. 3-95.
36 See references in note 16.
"Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, p. 35.
341
JERROLD J KATZ
Sentences like "All squares are rectangles" are necessary because

the criterion for applying the predicate is included in the cri-
terion for applying the subject. But Lewis says no more about
how to determine when a criterion is fixed in advance than Kant
says about how to determine when a predicate concept adds
nothing . . . to the concept of the subject, but merely break[s] it up into those
constituent concepts that have all along been thought in it.'8
Noting this failure to supply the critical explanation, Donnellan

makes the point that what has been said about sentences like
"All squares are rectangles" can also be said about sentences
like "All creatures with hearts are creatures with kidneys." The
required distinction between a priori and a posteriori criteria
has not been supplied and we are in no position to reply that the
criterion of having a kidney could fail as a test for creatures with
hearts, but the criterion of being a rectangle couldn't fail as a
test for squares. Donnellan sums up as follows:
There is no reason, a priori, why our present usage should legislate for all hy-
pothetical cases. Given present circumstances, the correct thing to say is that all
whales are mammals. But whether this is, as we intend it, a necessary truth or
contingent is indeterminate. It is indeterminate because the decision as to which
it is would depend upon our being able to say now what we should say about
certain hypothetical cases.39
Even though Donnellan put his finger on the fatal flaw of the
Kantian position, he allows that a sentence like "Cats are ani-
mals" expresses an analytic truth.40 It was Putnam who first
noticed that there is no reason to make such exceptions. 41 He saw
that the nature of the flaw allowed Donnellan's argument
against the analyticity of "Whales are mammals" to be made
against all putatively analytic sentences. Putnam's famous
robot-cat case both filled the gap Donnellan had left and pro-
vided the model for the numerous similar examples that have
since been brought up by Putnam, Kripke, and others.
Although this line of argument works against the traditional
intensionalist position of Kant, Lewis, and others, it does not
38 Kant, I. The Critique of Pure Reason, N. K. Smith, trans., Humanities P
New York, 1957, p. 48.
39 Donnellan, K. "Necessity and Criteria," The Journal of Philosophy, Vol.
LIX, No. 22, 1962, pp. 657-658.
40 Ibid., Section 5, pp. 652-653.
41 "It Ain't Necessarily So," pp. 659-660.
342
show there are no analytic sentences. A semantic theory of th

kind described above differs from the traditional position in
the relevant respect: such a semantic theory contains an expla
tion of what it is to fix the conditions of reference for an exp
sion in advance of its use. I shall set out this explanation and
show how it handles the hypothetical cases cited as counter-
examples.
To fix the conditions of reference in advance for expressions
like "cat," we can use the principles underlying our response to
Quine's indeterminacy claim, that is, the principles used in
arguing that the acceptability of hypotheses about the meaning
of "gavagai" depends on how well they predict judgments of
speakers concerning logical properties and relations like
synonymy. To make these principles explicit, we have to do
two things. First, we have to define the notions optimal semantic
representation of an expression and meaning of an expression. This
is done in (Cl) and (C2):
(Cl) r is an optimal semantic representation of the ex-

pression e just in case, relative to the definitions of
the semantic properties and relations in semantic
theory, r predicts each semantic property and rela-
tion of e and of every expression e occurs in, and there
is no simpler semantic representation of e that is
different from r and makes the same predictions as
r. 42
42There are two important points that have to be noted in connection

with (C ,). First, I have simplified somewhat; the full definition has to refer
to the entire grammar (as is implicit in the reference to semantic relations
and to expressions in which the expression occurs). Second, the definition
allows the possibility that there may be more than one optimal semantic
representation, that is, more than one simplest hypothesis that predicts all
the semantic properties and relations of e. I take this possibility as no more
serious than the fact that the logical form of sentences in the propositional
calculus may with equal simplicity be represented with formulas in disjunc-
tion and negation or formulas in conjunction and negation. Such semantic
representations are strongly equivalent, in the same sense as grammatical
descriptions expressed as trees with labeled nodes or as labeled bracketings.
The critical point is that the possibility of more than one optimal representa-
tion cannot be used by Quinians to argue that there is a form of the inde-
terminacy problem within the framework I have erected. The reason is that
343
JERROLD J KA TZ
(C 2) The concepts cI, .. ., en are the meaning of an expres-

sion e just in case the optimal semantic representa-
tion of e contains the semantic markers m , ... n
which represent them.
The second thing we have to do is to explain in what sense

meaning determines reference. The problem here is that there
are two notions of reference. On the one hand, there is the notion
of the reference of sentences and other linguistic types. This
notion, which we call type reference, is one on which conditions
for picking out a referent are determined just by the meaning
of the expression in the language. The notion appears in various
philosophical contexts. One is the standard criticism of the theory
that meaning is reference, namely, that this theory falsely predicts
that the coreferential but nonsynonymous expressions "creature
with a heart" and "creature with a kidney" are synonymous. The
relation of coreference here is type coreference. On the other
hand, there is the notion of the reference of utterances or uses of
linguistic types. This notion, which we call token reference, is one on
which conditions for picking out a referent are determined not
only by the meaning of the expression in the language but also by
contextual factors like the beliefs of the speaker and audience.
The notion appears in descriptions of particular referential acts
such as Mark Anthony's use of "honorable men" to refer to the
Roman senators who murdered Caesar.
Traditional intensionalists like Frege make the unqualified
statement that meaning determines reference. Their critics have
reasonably taken these statements to express the false thesis
that meaning determines token reference. In this way, inten-
sionalism deserves some of the grief it has received. But, having
separated type and token reference, we can disambiguate tradi-
tional statements of the relation between meaning and reference
and subscribe only to the thesis that meaning determines type
reference.
each such representation will predict the same synonymy relations, etc.-
contrary to the indeterminacy thesis-and hence such representations can be
regarded as notational variants. If synonymy is thus definable, and hence
we have a criterion of propositional identity, there is a fact of the matter
about questions of meaning and translation.
344
In subscribing to this thesis, we are bringing type reference

under grammar: type reference is a matter of semantic compe-
tence while token reference is a matter of performance. One
remark about the mechanics of bringing type reference under
the grammar's account of meaning: this requires, as part of the
grammar's account of semantic competence, principles that
map from semantic representations of senses onto conditions
for type referents. These principles will include traditional
principles like the principle that something is a referent of an
expression e just in case it falls under the concepts which consti-
tute the meaning of e.
This leaves us with the explanation of how token reference
works and the role type reference plays. This explanation is the
last step in explaining how the conditions of reference can be
fixed in advance. Token reference is not fully determined by
meaning; it is a matter of performance because it is a function of
extragrammatical information from the speech context as well
as grammatical information from the language. Thus, an
account of how token reference works will be a psychological
model of how speakers exercise their semantic competence, rela-
tive to extragrammatical information, to connect utterances
with the things to which they refer. The only plausible model I
know claims that token reference works like heuristic programming:
speakers token refer on the basis of heuristic strategies exploiting
their extragrammatical or encyclopedia information but under
the control of fail-proof procedures exploiting their semantic com-
petence.
Why did God equip us with such strategies? Why weren't con-
ditions for type reference enough? The conditions for type refer-
ence, typically, are too abstract to meet the practical demands
of language use. For example, the meaning of "physician" in
English is something like "one who has earned the degree of
doctor of medicine." But such a referential condition would be
difficult to apply in most situations. Accordingly, language users
require a way of expediting reference and this they get by using
a heuristic strategy that identifies physicians on the basis of the
stereotype that physicians wear white jackets with prominently
displayed stethoscopes. Such strategies not only enable the
speaker to refer quickly and easily but they run a minimal risk
345
JERROLD J KA TZ
of error because the extragrammatical information employed in

such a heuristic strategy can be evaluated for validity as a
criterion for picking out the desired objects. That is, information
is selected only if there is a high probability that, relative to the
class of situations where the strategy is needed, the information
will pick out objects in the type reference. Though misidentifi-
cations like identifying an actor on location wearing a white
hospital jacket as a physician can occur, if the use of strategies
is restricted to situations in which the aforementioned probability
is high their occurrence is rare enough to make the risk worth-
while.
We have now explained the notion of fixing the conditions of
reference in advance: the entire theories of semantic competence
and performance are required to plug the gap in the traditional
intensionalist position. Let us now return to Putnam. His claim,
we recall, was that what one would naturally say about certain
hypothetical cases is inconsistent with intensionalist views about
analyticity. The claim is based on alleged counterexamples, all
of which are variants of Putnam's original robot-cat case. Put-
nam's argument for the claim is this: Cats could turn out to be
robot spy devices that look and behave like animals; conse-
quently, the sentence "Cats are animals" cannot be analytic,
since if it were, cats could not turn out to be robots.
This argument, whether formulated in terms of robot cats,
organic pencils, or machine trees, can easily be turned back on
Putnam. If the sentence "Cats are animals" is analytic, then
no robot can be a cat because it is impossible for a genuine cat
to be anything but an animal. But the force of so turning Put-
nam's argument back on him depends on the position of the
person doing the turning. If this position is the one that Kant,
Frege, C. I. Lewis and their contemporary followers take, the
counterargument has little force. For, as Donnellan pointed out,
this position has no account of the difference between a priori
and a posteriori criteria for applying expressions. Thus, some-
one with this position has no way to anchor the claim that "cat"
has its reference fixed a priori by a criterion that requires its
referent to be an animal. There is no distinction between the
sentence "Cats are animals" turning out not to be analytic and
people's referential uses of "cat" turning out to be references to
nonanimals.
346
However, the counterargument has great force if made from

the position developed immediately above. On this position,
there is an account of what it is to fix the conditions for reference
in advance, and hence an account of the difference between a
priori and a posteriori criteria. Appealing to this account, in
particular, to (C2) and the semantic theory underlying it, we
have grounds for determining the analyticity of a sentence that
are independent of what previous uses of "cat" referred to. The
analyticity of "Cats are animals" is a matter of whether or not
the judgments of speakers about the structure of sentences in
which "cat" and "animal" occur are best explained by semantic
representations of "cat" and "animal" on which the concepts in
the meaning of "cat" include the sense of "animal." The grounds
on which (C2) determines analyticity concern the internal struc-
ture of sentences.
This means that the conditions of reference for words like
"cat" and "animal" and the truth conditions for analytic sen-
tences like "Cats are animals" are fixed in the same way as are
the conditions of reference for quantifiers like "all" and "some"
and the truth conditions for logical truths like "If someone
is not happy, then not everyone is happy." The conditions for
logical truths are fixed a priori because they are determined on
the basis of judgments about the structure of sentences rather
than on the basis of experience (that is, the absence in experience
of cases in which someone is not happy but everyone is). The
conception of meaning and reference outlined above puts the
fixing of the conditions for reference and truth in connection
with analytic sentences on the same footing: the conditions for
a sentence like "Bachelors are unmarried" are fixed a priori
because they, too, are determined on the basis of judgments
about the structure of sentences rather than experience (that is,
the absence in experience of married bachelors).
Thus, the force of our reply to Putnam is like that of a reply
to the claim that a logical truth might be false: Putnam's claim
must be false because it is inconsistent with a necessary truth.
Either "Cats are animals" is analytic or not-on purely gram-
matical grounds. If it is synthetic, there is no issue. But if it is
analytic, then, even though the objects to which speakers have
been referring turn out to be robot spy devices, the sentence is
347
JERROLD J. KA TZ
true. Such objects are not cats: it is impossible for something to

be a genuine cat and not an animal because the condition for being
an animal is included in the condition for being a cat. A claim
that something is a counterexample to "Cats are animals" must
be false just as a claim that some statement is a counterexample to
"No statement is both true and false" must be false.
How could people all along have referred to robot spy devices
with "cat" when ex hypothesi "cat" means "feline animal"?
The explanation is simple: such uses are references under a
false (semantic) description.'3 Such token references are in no
essential way different from those that Donnellan counts as
reference under a false description: in both sets of cases, the
conditions for reference determined by the meaning of an ex-
pression are not satisfied by the object to which a use of the
expression refers. "
The failure of the serious arguments against a language/

theory distinction not only frees us to employ this distinction
but suggests the proper way in which to draw the distinction.
In a nutshell, it is this: something is a matter of language in con-
nection with an expression e (leaving phonological and syntactic
matters aside) just in case it is represented in an optimal seman-
tic representation of e. Something is a matter of theory in con-
nection with e just in case it is not represented in an optimal
"See Donnellan, K. "Reference and Definite Descriptions," The Philo-

sophical Review, Vol. LXXV, No. 3, 1966, pp. 281-304.
" Reference under a false description is simply the case where the token
referent(s) of an expression is not identical to the type referent(s) of that expres-
sion. We might similarly reconstruct the ordinary language philosopher's
notion of a standard use as a reference under a true description, that is, as the
case in which the token referent(s) is in the type reference of the expression.
This, in fact, reconstructs only the portion of the notion of standard use that
concerns acts of reference. The other portions which concern acts of stating,
requesting, etc. can be easily encompassed by changing the explication to
the condition that reference be under a true description and further that
utterance meaning and sentence meaning match in propositional type
and content. See Katz, J. J. Propositional Structure and Illocutionarj Force, T. Y.
Crowell, Harper & Row, Inc., New York, 1977.
348
semantic representation of e but is essential to stating the laws

that explain the behavior of the referent(s) of e. Given definitions
of analyticity and syntheticity in semantic theory,45 this implies
that matters of language in connection with e are expressed in the
maximal set of analytic sentences in which e is the subject, while
matters of theory in connection with e are expressed in the syn-
thetic sentences containing e that state the laws for the domain
in which e's referent(s) falls.
We are now in a position to set out the implications of the
language/theory distinction for conceptual change in science.
Logical empiricists defended the existence of meaning invari-
ance or translatability through any theory change on the
grounds that the meaning of all theoretical terms derives from
a common observation vocabulary. The logical empiricists thus
linked the fate of meaning invariance to the fate of their theo-
retical/observational distinction and their program of ground-
ing meaning in experience. Accordingly, when both the
distinction and the program collapsed, it seemed, in the context
of skepticism about the language/theory distinction, as if the
thesis of meaning invariance too had collapsed. It was a short
step from the apparent collapse of meaning invariance to the
doctrines of the new philosophers of science on conceptual
change.
The language/theory distinction keeps these controversial
doctrines from getting off the ground. If we make this distinc-
tion, the collapse of the logical empiricist's basis for meaning
invariance no longer leads directly to the doctrines of the new
philosophers of science. Meaning invariance can be based on
the common semantic structure of languages instead of the
common observational vocabulary of theories. Thus, the new
philosophers of science fallaciously infer that, since the logical
empiricist doctrine that terms gain their meaning from experi-
45 Quine voiced a traditional and well justified complaint against Kant's

formulation of analyticity: "This formulation has two shortcomings: it limits
itself to statements of subject-predicate form, and it appeals to a notion of
containment which is left at a metaphorical level." From a Logical Point of View,
p. 21. Both deficiencies are overcome when the formulation of analyticity is
made the explicandum for one of the definitions in semantic theory. See
Semantic Theory, pp. 171-182.
349
JERROLD J. KA TZ
ence is inadequate, the Duhemian doctrine that terms gain their

meaning from theories is the only alternative.
The existence of a semantic theory of the kind described above
not only enables us to make this logical criticism of the new
philosophy of science, but, in suggesting this alternative basis
for meaning invariance, it enables us to replace the empiricist
metaphysics of logical empiricism with the rationalist meta-
physics of the Cartesian tradition underlying semantic theory
and the Chomskian framework. When we make this replace-
ment, we obtain the following conception of the metaphysics
of meaning invariance: meaning invariance results from the
fact that terms gain their meaning from an innate system of
meanings underlying all natural languages; each natural lan-
guage correlates these meanings with the members of a dis-
tinct set of sentences. The same theory is expressible in different
languages because the sentences of a language provide different
sets of sensible signs for these universal meanings. Different
theories are expressible in the same language because the gram-
matical principles of correlation and sentence formation of a
language are, in principle, capable of producing the synthetic
sentences to state the laws and explanations that characterize
different theories.
We now come to the new position on conceptual change in
science that I promised at the beginning of this essay. I will call
the new position "linguistic rationalism." "Rationalism," be-
cause the position has its roots in the Cartesian tradition and
maintains that the conceptual structure underlying our knowl-
edge comes not from experience, as logical empiricism claimed,
but from the innate conditions for such knowledge. "Linguistic,"
because the position stresses the application of linguistic theory
to philosophical questions similar to the way logical empiricism
stressed the application of logical theory to them. I will develop
the exposition by enumerating and explaining further differ-
ences between linguistic rationalism and logical empiricism.46
Linguistic rationalism's conception of the philosophy of science differs

from logical empiricism's in two further respects. First, it rejects the latter's
metascience conception of the philosophy of science. Underlying this concep-
tion is, I think, another facet of their confusion of language and theory.
350
SEMANTICS AND CONCEPTUA L CHANGE
The general difference in outlook between these positions is

that linguistic rationalism emphasizes the continuity of linguis-
tic and rational processes from everyday thought to scientific
thought, whereas logical empiricism had emphasized the discon-
tinuity of such processes. It viewed scientific progress as a struggle
to liberate us from prescientific modes of thought. Linguistic ra-
tionalism sees scientific progress as a refinement of everyday
thought processes. The difference in outlook leads to concrete
differences on a number of philosophical issues.
The attempt on the part of Frege and his logical empiricist
followers to construct a logically perfect artificial language is
a case in point. Frege and the logical empiricists believed that
natural languages are riddled with imperfections, such things as
ambiguities and failures of grammatically well-formed expres-
sions to have a referent. Because such "imperfections" mislead
reasoners, Frege and the logical empiricists held that natural
languages were ill-suited for doing science and proposed to
replace them with an artificial language designed to be a per-
fect instrument for science.
Linguistic rationalism agrees with Wittgenstein47 on the

The metascience conception identifies the enterprise of explicating the
logical form of scientific propositions with the enterprise of explicating the
methodological notions and principles used in science. Linguistic rationalism
sees these as distinct. Explication of the logical form of scientific sentences
as is implied by the discussion in the text, is simply a part of the task of expli-
cating the logical form of sentences in the natural language. Explication of
scientific methodology, on the other hand, is not a matter of better under-
standing language but a matter of better understanding the theory con-
struction faculties we bring to the organization and interpretation of
ordinary and scientific experience.
As a corollary, linguistic rationalism denies that there is any special tech-
nique for overcoming philosophical difficulties of the sort that logical
empiricists recommended under the title "reformulation" or "reconstruc-
tion." (See Maxwell, G. & Feigl, H. "Why Ordinary Language Needs
Reforming," The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. LVIII, 1961, pp. 488-498.) As we
made clear in the text, natural language has' no faults and so reform is uncalled
for. As suggested just above, the methodological problems arising in connec-
tion with notions like 'law,' 'theory,' 'confirmation,' 'simplicity,' etc. cannot
be solved with a better understanding of language because we do not want
to know what "law," "theory," "confirmation," "simplicity," etc. mean in
English but what law, theory, confirmation, simplicity, etc. are. What is
required is a more sophisticated epistemological theory, not a more sophisti-
cated grammar of English.
4 Wittgenstein, L. Philosophical Investigations, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1953.
351
JERROLD J. KATZ
adequacy of natural languages and the status of artificial lan-

guages (though not, of course, on the value of philosophical
theories). It sees no grounds for taking such things as ambiguities
or non-referring expressions to be imperfections. A fallacy
stemming from the wrong step at an ambiguity or a plunge into
a truth value gap is no more the fault of the language than an un-
wary hiker's wrong turn at a fork in the road or fall into a depres-
sion is the fault of the terrain.48 Linguistic rationalism does not
blame the hammer when its user hits a finger instead of the nail.
To linguistic rationalism, the entire quest for a logically perfect
language is simply a confusion between language and language
use.
This is not to deny the usefulness of artificial languages, but
only to conceive of their role in science differently. First, lin-
guistic rationalism denies that the role of artificial languages is to
create a demarcation between everyday thought and scientific
thought. Rather, artificial languages are viewed as extensions
of the expressive side of natural languages, bound by the same
constraints as natural diachronic processes. The power of arti-
ficial languages to express propositions is acquired from natural
language, as can be seen from attempts like Carnap's to construct
relatively comprehensive artificial languages.49 It comes from the
parasitic relation between an artificial language and the natural
language used to explain it. Artificial languages are extensions
of natural languages which exploit abbreviatory definition. They
provide a high level of precision in some area of the vocabulary of
the natural language without the prolixity that would otherwise
be the price paid for such precision. There is, in principle, no
reason why mathematics could not be done with English expres-
sions like "the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diame-
ter" instead of formal symbols like " Beings with perceptual
and intellectual faculties "far superior to ours," who would not
48 For further discussion, see Katz, J. J. "The Theory of Semantic Repre-

sentation," Erkenntnis, Vol. 13, 1978, pp. 69-72.
4 Carnap, R. "Foundations of Logic and Mathematics," International
Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Vol. I, Nos. 1-5, The University of Chicago
Press, Chicago, 1955, pp. 143-213, particularly, the treatment of interpreta-
tion.
352
find such prolixity a hindrance, would have no notational

preference. 50
Second, linguistic rationalism denies that the role of artificial
languages is to create a demarcation between science and meta-
physics. It rejects the claim of Hempel and others that the cri-
terion for meaningfulness is translatability into a logically
perfect language-otherwise known as an "empiricist lan-
guage."51 Linguistic rationalism instead proposes the criterion
that meaningfulness is expressibility in a meaningful sentence
of a natural language. We know that a sentence is meaningful
by knowing that it is one to which an optimal grammar of the
language assigns a semantic representation. Thus, to determine
what is meaningful, we construct grammars-theories of a
language' not artificial languages.
Third, linguistic rationalism questions the adequacy of the
apparatus for representing the logical form of sentences in
natural languages that philosophers of science have taken over
from the tradition of logical theorizing in connection with arti-
ficial languages. This apparatus is adequate only if the postu-
lational approach in this tradition can, as Carnap thought in
suggesting the use of meaning postulates, be extended, with no
essential change in the apparatus, to deal with the aspects of
logical form contributed by the meanings of words generally.
I have argued elsewhere52 that the apparatus is inadequate
because it treats nondeductive meaning relations in the logical
50 I am suggesting that a concept like I is at the apex of a definitional py

mid where at each level the concepts appearing at the preceding level are ex-
panded. The pyramid rests on a foundation of conceptual primitives, about
which I will have more to say in the text below. Thus, in the example, the notion
of circumference will be expanded as something like the external boundary
of a figure.
51 "Problems and Changes in the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning." The
following question never comes up in discussions (like Hempel's) of translat-
ability into an empiricist language as a criterion of meaningfulness: how do
we know that failure to be able to translate a sentence into such a language
is not a sign of the inadequacy of such languages rather than a sign of the
inadequacy of the sentence? Why shouldn't failure of translation not be taken
as failure of the empiricist assumptions underlying the constraints on such
languages?
52 Katz, J. J. "The Advantages of Semantic Theory over Predicate Calculus
in the Representation of Logical Form in Natural Languages," New Directions
in Semantics, The Monist, Vol. 60, No. 3, 1977, pp. 380-405.
353
JERROLD J KATZ
form of sentences as if they were deductive in nature. Two

ful effects on the philosophy of science of this mistaken tre
will illustrate the broad relevance of linguistic rationalis
this subject.
Many philosophers of science have said that the traditional
conception of logical structure implies, as Cohen and Nagel put
it, that "all science is circular."53 Some philosophers of science,
like Cohen and Nagel themselves, claim that there is nothing
wrong with arguing in a circle providing the circle is too big to
escape. But this is like saying that there is nothing wrong with
cancer providing carcinogens are too prevalent to escape. Others,
like Campbell, take an even more drastic way out, claiming that
"no question of deducing one law from another" arises in science,
that "all the so-called laws of science [are to be regarded as]
one single law which is always being extended and refined."54
Linguistic rationalism offers a much more plausible solution.
It introduces new apparatus to handle nondeductive logical
relations. This apparatus characterizes a notion of analytic
implication in which the conclusion expresses nothing more
than what is in the logical form of the premiss. As a byproduct,
linguistic rationalism enables us to define "circular argument"
as an argument whose conclusion is analytically implied by its
premiss. The definition is broad enough to cover genuine petitio
principii but narrow enough to exclude logical deductions:
linguistic rationalism says that science can be deductive without
being circular. 55
The second illustration is of the way in which artificial lan-
guage doctrines encourage fallacies in philosophy of science.
The case I have in mind is Campbell's claim that meaning in
science is only a contingent matter dependent on particular laws.
Campbell writes
the use of certain words implies the assumption that certain laws are true, and
"Cohen, M. R. and Nagel, E. Introduction to Logic and the Scientific Method

Harcourt, Brace, & Co., New York, 1934, p. 379.
"'Campbell, N. R. What is Science? Dover Publications, Inc., New York,
1952, p. 47.
5; Paradigmatic cases of the petitio principii are examples like that in Copi, I.
Introduction to Logic, The Macmillan Company, New York, 1961, p. 65.
354
that any statement in which those words are involved is without any meaning
whatever if the laws are not true.56
Campbell's grounds for this are that
Every statement which we make about forces involves the tacit assumption
that the laws of dynamics are true; without that assumption a statement such
as that made in Hooke's Law would be neither true nor false; it would be simply
meaningless. 5
But these grounds are sound only if the account in the tradi-
tional conception of logical structure of the relation between
statementhood and meaningfulness-the account Russell gives
in his theory of descriptions58-is correct for natural languages.
Thus, the argument of Strawson and others59 that in natural
languages, unlike Princitaese, the conditions for a sentence to
be meaningful are distinct from the conditions under which it
is true or false exhibits the fallacy in Campbell's argument.
I will mention one further philosophical difference between
linguistic rationalism and logical empiricism. It concerns the-
logical empiricist's answer to the Kantian question of how syn-
thetic a priori knowledge is possible in mathematics. Logical
empiricists claim to have shown that empiricism can escape the
traditional rationalist criticism that empiricism cannot account
for a priori knowledge in mathematics and logic. They argued
on the basis of Frege's work that mathematics is logic and logic
nothing more than analyticities grounded in semantic stipulation
(which can be known through experience).
The first point to note is that Frege did not actually demon-
strate that mathematical truths translate into logical truths and
logical truths are analytic truths. The latter part of his "demon-
stration" turns out to be a piece of epistemological sleight of
hand: Frege begins with the Kantian notion of analyticity but
56 Foundations of Science, p. 42.

57Ibid., p. 42.
58 Russell, B. Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, George Allen & Unw
Ltd., London, 1919, pp. 167-180.
5 Strawson, P. F. "On Referring," Mind, LIX, No. 235, pp. 320-344. Katz,
J. J. Semantic Theory, Harper & Row, Inc., New York, 1972, pp. 136-150 and
Katz, J. J. "A Solution to the Projection Problem for Presupposition," in
Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 11: Presupposition, Choon-Kyu Oh & David A.
Dinnen, eds., Academic Press, Inc., in press.
355
JERROLD J KA TZ
immediately switches to his own notion of deduction from logical

axioms and definitions.60 Frege diverts our eye by remarking
that he does not "mean to assign a new sense to these terms" [i.e.,
"analytic", "synthetic", "a priori", "a posteriori"] "but only to
state accurately what earlier writers, Kant in particular, have
meant by them"; then, on the next page, Frege does assign a new
sense to "analytic truth," namely, as "a truth deducible from
general logical laws and definitions but without assumptions
taken from the sphere of a special science."6
The second point to note is that linguistic rationalism shows
how to separate meaning relations and deductive relations, thus
blocking the empiricist's attempt to escape the criticism. Lin-
guistic rationalism is based on a grammatical explication of
Kant's notion of analyticity. 62 This explication overcomes Frege's
criticism of Kant's notion, viz., that Kant's notion applies only to
subject-predicate sentences, as well as others such as the criticism
that Kant's notion appeals to an inherently metaphorical concept
of containment. The explication generalizes Kant's notion so
that it applies to subject-predicate sentences and relational sen-
tences equally (stating the generalization in terms of a formally
defined notion of inclusion). The generalization reveals that
Frege's notion of analyticity is not simply an extension of Kant's
notion that avoids its "narrowness," but an entirely different con-
cept, as different from Kant's as the containment of "plants ...
in their seeds" is different from the containment of "beams ... in
a house."' Since Frege's argument for the analyticity of logical
truths fails, the logical empiricist no longer has a response to the
criticism that empiricism cannot account for a priori knowledge
of mathematical truths. The grammatical explication of Kant's
notion shows that the Kantian notion of analyticity applies only
to language while the Fregean notion applies only to (logical)
theory. Thus, the explication shows that the logical empiricist's
response to the criticism of traditional rationalism is another
example of the confusion of language and theory.64
6 Semantic Theory, p. 1 19.

61 The Foundations of Arithmetic, pp. 3e-40.
62Semantic Theory, pp. 171-181.
63 "The Advantages of Semantic Theory over Predicate Calculus in the
Representation of Logical Form in Natural Languages"; also, Smith, G. &
Katz, J. J. "Intensionally Admissible Models: The Extensional Interpretation
356
VI
Change of meaning in science occurs in both of the ways

change of meaning occurs in diachronic processes outside science.
Some changes emerge in the historical process of scientific de-
velopment, and others result from stipulations, explicit or impli-
cit, on the part of a particular scientist or scientists. The term
"geologist" provides an example of the former change of mean-
ing. Geologists today study the moon. The term now means some-
thing like "scientist who studies the solid matter of a celestial
body". Examples of the changes or differences that result from
stipulation are found in disputes like the one over whether New-
ton and Einstein meant the same thing by "mass".
Linguistic rationalism provides a definition of change or dif-
ference in meaning that covers both cases:
(C,) An expression e changes its meaning from stage t

to stage t of a language just in case the optimal
semantic representation of e at t makes a different
prediction about a semantic property or relation of e
than does the optimal semantic representation of e at
t J.
This criterion of semantic difference together with the account

of type and token reference developed above can help to clarify
important controversies in the history and philosophy of science
about when two scientists mean or refer to the same thing with a
common term. Let me take an example from the controversy
between the old and new philosophies of science. In a famous
passage from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn rai
the following objection to the claim that Newtonian dynamics
follows from Einsteinian dynamics:
The physical referents of these Einsteinian concepts are by no means identical

with those of the Newtonian concepts that bear the same name. (Newtonian
mass is conserved; Einsteinian is convertible with energy.... ) 65
of Intensional Semantics," in preparation

' This point goes back to Katz, J. J. "Some Remarks on Quine on Analyti-
city," The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. LXIV, No. 2, 1967, pp. 51-52.
65 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, pp. 100-101.
357
JERROLD D. KATZ
Shapere, in his review of Kuhn's book, replies,
one might equally well be tempted to say that the "concept" of mass (the
"meaning" of "mass") has remained the same (thus accounting for the deduci-
bility) even though the application has changed.66
Shapere goes on to comment,
The real trouble with such arguments arises with regard to the cash difference
between saying, in such cases, that the "meaning" has changed, as opposed to
saying that the "meaning" has remained the same though the "application" has
changed. 67
Linguistic rationalism provides a general framework within

which to answer such questions. The scientist makes a choice,
explicitly or implicitly, as to what senses theoretical terms will
have and what propositions will be expressed by the synthetic
sentences chosen as postulates. If the scientist makes an explicit
choice but is unclear about it, or makes an implicit choice, there
can be a question about the meaning of the term. In this case,
semantic theory characterizes the evidence that bears on the
question of its meaning: semantic theory specifies the "cash
difference" in terms of the definitions (C'), (C 2), and (C 3). These
apply equally to the scientist's idiolect and to the language.
Given then, that we can, in principle, decide what "mass"
meant to Newton and Einstein, were they talking about the
same thing? The conception of reference in terms of a dual
system with a semantic fail-proof procedure and encyclopedic
strategies brings to light an equivocation between whether
"talking about" is glossed as "type referring" or as "token re-
ferring." I will first consider the case where "talking about" is
glossed as "type referring." In that case Newton and Einstein
were talking about the same thing if "mass" had the same mean-
ing in both their idiolects. If "mass" had different meanings
in their idiolects, they could still be talking about the same
thing if the two senses have the same extension. Suppose, for
example, Newton's "mass" means "the aspect of a body that
determines its inertial behavior" and Einstein's. means "the
66 Shapere, D. "Review of The Structure of Scientifc Revolutions," The Philo-

sophical Review, Vol. LXXIII, 1964, p. 390.
67 Ibid., p. 390.
358
aspect of a bQdy that determines the gravitational force acting

on it from the stars and galaxies in the universe." If we then find
out that one and the same aspect of a body determines its inertial
behavior and the gravitational force acting on it from the stars
and galaxies, Newton and Einstein were talking about the same
thing but making different empirical claims about it. If we
find out that these terms have different extensions then Newton
and Einstein were not talking about the same thing.
I now consider the case where "talking about" is glossed as
"token referring." Here we are asking wither certain specific
uses of "mass" on the part of Newton and Einstein picked out the
same thing. Now knowing both the meaning of "mass" in their
idiolects and knowing about the relevant facts about the physical
world no longer suffices to answer the question. The obstacle is
possible divergence of their referential strategies. Coreference of
Newton's and Einstein's use of "mass" depends on such things as
whether their respective beliefs that mass is conserved and that
mass is convertible appear as necessary conditions on the token
referent in the strategies on which the uses in question were based.
It might be that Newton's "quantity of matter" conception of
mass was an encyclopedia account while his inertial conception
was definitional.8
Even though it may be extremely difficult or practically impos-
sible to actually determine the historical facts of the matter in
one of these cases, particularly in the case of token reference, th
analysis provided by linguistic rationalism sustains Shapere's
reply to Kuhn and clarifies what it might mean for scientists to be
talking about the same thing.
VII
What is conceptual change according to linguistic rational-

ism? It is not change of meaning in the sense of (C,). Change of
meaning is merely an alteration in the correlation of senses in
the semantic repertoire of the language with expressions and
' See Koslow, A. Changes in the Concept of Mass, from Newton to Einstein, Ph.D.
Dissertation, Columbia University, 1965, pp. 52-92.
359
JERROLD D. KATZ
possible expressions of the language. Conceptual change has to

do with the development of new and better scientific concepts.
To see what notion of conceptual change linguistic rationalism
has, recall that linguistic rationalism does not just claim that the
linguistic system underlying science is continuous with that in
everyday life. It also claims that the rational processes under-
lying theories in science are continuous with those that produce
the ordinary explanations of everyday life. It claims that the
sophisticated scientific practices of statistical confirmation,
concept formation, and theory construction are prefigured in
the methodology underlying such things as the entrenchment
of encyclopedia information used in strategies of token reference.
The ability to make correlations and judge significance which
is required to determine that a property like "wears a white
jacket with prominently displayed stethoscope" can function
heuristically to identify physicians is the precursor of sophisti-
cated abilities in statistical confirmation. The ability to con-
struct a concept, stereotype, or prototype that links and unifies
diverse encyclopedia information is the precursor of sophisticated
abilities in concept formation. The ability to form common
sense explanations of why there should exist the empirical
co-occurrences on which the linking of diverse encyclopedia in-
formation rests is the precursor of sophisticated theory construc-
tion and model building.
We can thus treat conceptual change generally, and, in line
with what we said above about the difference between matters of
language and matters of theory, we can characterize conceptual
change as, typically, the replacement of one set of explanatory
principles with the concepts cmi, . . . , c, by another set with th
concepts c', ... , c', in the belief that the new concepts in c'm , ...
cnenable the replacing principles to better explain the phenom-
ena.
We can now distinguish change of meaning from conceptual
change and both from scientific change in general. Meaning
change occurs when an expression of a language which is cor-
related with a particular concept or sense at one time is no longer
correlated with it at some later time. The expression may lose
meaning altogether, or may become associated with a new sense.
360
If meaning change occurs, then scientific change must occur, w

or without conceptual change.
Now consider a scientific theory whose postulates are the syn-
thetic propositions P,, . . . , Pn, each composed of a particular set
of concepts. Scientific change occurs when PI, . . ., Pn are replaced
by a different set of synthetic propositions Q, . . . , Q,,. The con-
cepts from which Q, . . . , Qn are constructed may or may not
contain only concepts originally appearing in P, . . . , Pn. If the
same concepts are used, but in different propositions, conceptual
change will not occur. The theory makes different statements but
neither enlarges nor reduces the stock of concepts on which it
originally drew. Conceptual change is the special case of scien-
tific change that occurs when construction of the new postulates
Q,... , Qn requires new concepts that did not figure in the origi-
nal theory. Thus, scientific change may or may not involve
conceptual change.
Finally, scientific change with or without conceptual change
may or may not be accompanied by change of meaning, since
one of the terms of one of the synthetic sentences expressing a
postulate of the theory may or may not become correlated with
a new concept. If meaning change takes place and the new con-
cept is drawn from the set of concepts comprising the original
theory, only scientific change takes place. If it is drawn from out-
side the theory, conceptual change takes place. Scientific change
takes place without meaning change if the theory's postulates
are changed without any of the terms in the theory becoming
associated with a different (or no) sense. Conceptual change takes
place without meaning change just in case none of the terms in
the original theory loses its original sense and a new term from
outside the theory is introduced as part of the new theory.
Such replacement involves two steps, a step of conceptual
innovation and a step of principle evaluation. Linguistic ration-
alism has something original to say only about the step of con-
ceptual innovation, but it casts some familiar points about the
step of principle evaluation in the old and new philosophies of
science in a new light. Accordingly I will discuss linguistic
rationalism's position on conceptual innovation in some detail
and return briefly to principle evaluation at the end.
361
JERROLD D. KATZ
If we combine linguistic rationalism's conception of the con-

tinuity of linguistic and rational processes from everyday
thought to scientific thought with the conception of the acquisi-
tion of knowledge in the Cartesian view that provides the ration-
alist underpinnings of the position, we are led to a conception
of the source of the concepts in conceptual change in science
and of the nature of the process of change that is radically dif-
ferent from the prevailing accounts in the old and new philoso-
phies of science. Linguistic rationalism claims that all the
concepts available to science and everyday explanation are
contained in the innate space of possible senses with which
humans face the task of language acquisition. The notion of
an innate space of possible senses is to be understood in the con-
text of Chomsky's now familiar Cartesian position on language
acquisition. Chomsky argues that only a theory of acquisition
that posits innate grammatical principles rich enough to specify
the set of all possible grammars can account for the fact that
normal children learn the immensely complex structures of a
natural language quickly, uniformly, and on the basis of highly
degraded samples of speech. On our view, the posit of such
innate grammatical principles includes semantic principles that
specify the space of possible senses. Further, the notion of all
concepts being contained in this space is to be understood in the
sense in which an infinity of theorems is contained in a finite
set of axioms. The innate semantic principles include a finite
set of primitive senses which provide the stock of elementary
concepts and also operations for compounding primitive senses
to form any complex concept.
Linguistic rationalism's conception of the nature of the process
of conceptual change is the following. A problem of conceptual
change arises when it is suspected that a set of explanatory con-
cepts is inadequate. The development of explanatorily better
concepts requires, on our view, locating such concepts in the
innate conceptual space. This means that the scientist has to con-
struct a not yet assembled concept from the elementary concepts
(and those that have already been assembled) using the appro-
priate compounding operations. The construction has to produce
the right concept, that's, one that is better for the scientific job at
362
hand. Hence, the construction must be carried out under the

guidance of "assembly instructions" that provide the necessary
subset of elementary concepts and a suitable sequence of com-
binatorial operations. Thus, the nature of the failure of the
original concepts has to be analyzed in a way that provides such
assembly instructions.69
It must be stressed that there is no denial of novelty here. The
stock of primitive senses and the combinatorial operations
specify the infinite possibilities in our conceptual potential re-
cursively, and so linguistic rationalism denies that any concept
comes ex nihilo. This, I take it, is a good thing to deny. But this
denial is not a denial of novelty in concept formation. The claim
that our conceptual potential is limited to the infinite possibili-
ties in our innate conceptual space no more denies the prospect
of novel concepts than the claim that the syntax potential of a
speaker is limited to the infinitely many grammatical sentences
denies the prospect of novel sentences. Both in the case of con-
cepts and in the case of sentences, the claim is only that novelty is
rule-governed: new constructions not resembling already known
69 I should point out also that there is to my knowledge, no alternative ac-

count of concept formation. Empiricist accounts are not even possible. The ar-
gument showing this has been presented by various rationalistically inclined
philosophers (Katz, J. J. The Philosophy of Language, Harper & Row, Inc., New
York, 1966, pp. 216-266; Fodor, J. A. The Language of Thought, T. Y. Crowell,
Harper & Row, Inc., New York, 1975, pp. 55-97). On my own version of
the argument, Goodman's grue paradox is turned on the empiricism he
espouses. Suppose a concept is not definable within the set of innate primitive
senses and hence not constructable by the operations for forming compound
concepts. Such a concept must be acquired from a finite sample of its instances,
but, by the grue-argument, any sample projects indefinitely many incompat-
ible concepts, and by the fact that ex hypothesi there is no way to relate the
concept in question completely to the primitives and make simplicity com-
parisons relative to the operations of construction, there is no way to narrow
down the indefinitely many incompatible concepts consistent with the sample
to one. (See my "Simplicity," in preparation.) Note, finally, that Goodman's
own theory of entrenchment, apart from its many other woes, cannot come
to the aid of his empiricism, since this theory only applies on the illegitimate
assumption that some body of empirical statements is well enough inductively
confirmed to serve as a basis for the initial uses of entrenchment. The question
is how these statements got confirmed without some prior body of statements.
The answer is they couldn't have on pain of infinite regress.
363
JERROLD D. KATZ
constructions are nonetheless logically contained in our tacit

rules for them. Such rule-governed novelty is, moreover, com-
patible with absolute creativity in actual processes of analyzing
problems, constructing concepts, and assessing their adequacy
for the scientific job at hand.
VIII
Linguistic rationalism preserves what is of value in both the

new and the old philosophies of science. What is of value in the
new philosophy of science is not its philosophical doctrines but
its sociological doctrines. Loose as Kuhn's notion of a paradigm is,
it, together with Kuhn's distinction between revolutionary and
normal science, contains genuine insights about the sociological
processes at work in the development of science. These are not
philosophical insights about how scientists ought to conceive of
the scientific method, but socio-historical insights about how
they often do conceive of it in practice. Kuhn's account of the
tendency of research during periods of normal science to confine
itself to an established paradigm that poses specific problems
for future investigation, channels research to them, influences the
selection of data and hypotheses, and so on expresses an impor-
tant truth about what goes on in normal scientific practice. Also,
Kuhn's account of the centrality of paradigm replacement to
scientific revolution expresses an important truth about what goes
on in scientific transitions. There is no obstacle to the acceptance
of these insights so long as they are not thought of as bound up
with philosophical doctrines such as the relativity of meaning
and the indeterminacy underlying the non-cumulative con-
ception of scientific development.
What is of value in logical empiricism are two things: the con-
ception of cumulative progress in science based on a universal
scheme for interpreting terms in theories and the conception of
theory evaluation as a thoroughly determinate rational process
based on methodological canons for judging theories against evi-
dence. Linguistic rationalism incorporates these conceptions
into its own framework by providing a rationalist basis for the
interpretation of scientific terms and the evaluation of scientific
theories. In so doing, linguistic rationalism rescues these concep-
364
tions from the criticisms that undermined the empiricist based

version of them.
City University of New York

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Jerrold J. Katz Semantics and Conceptual Change 1979

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Philosophical Review

Semantics and Conceptual Change

The discussion of conceptual change that has taken place

*This paper has been presented at the Conference on Conceptual Change at

ceptual change in science. I will exhibit its advantages over the

This aim is to be achieved using

the techniques of modern mathematical logic in approaching ... problems ...

The particular choice of applied predicate calculi for such

Scientific theories were conceived of as axiomatic systems con-

A number of things prepared the way for the rebellion against

meaning. The account makes it reasonable to think that there

Hence, if the new theory emerging from a revolution is suffi-

10 Feyerabend, P. "Problems of Empiricism," in Beyond the Edge of Certainty,

phers of science's position on meaning has broad support in the

The position is encouraged by other influential figures like N. R.

also follows from other, more widely held, doctrines of Car-

Although Quine's attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction

"See Carnap, R., "Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology," in Semantics

16 Putnam, H. "It Ain't Necessarily So," The Journal of Philosophy, Vol.

these doctrines from the most basic form of criticism to which

With so widespread a skeptical attitude toward the language/

ing semantic notions: lexicographical definition, rational

truth in first order' logic, is also unobjectionable: specific

good grounds for making it at the time. The assumption came

So-called substitution criteria, or conditions of interchangeability, have in one

25 Compare remarks of Bloomfield, the founder of the taxonomic theo

nomic theory conceives of grammars as data-cataloguing devices,

or expression in a sentence is marked as meaningful just in case it

29 For a comprehensive presentation of the theory referred to, see Katz, J. J

is as much a fact of the matter about identity of sense as about

Putnam claims that Quine's real argument is the "historical

(a') Consistency takes precedence over open-mindedness.

(b') While it is true that previous revolutions have re-

(c') Putnam gives no argument that the two proposals

of Euclidean geometry. Euclidean geometry was once

Putnam finds Quine's holistic picture of knowledge is a forceful

33 We, of course, reject the empiricist's holistic picture of knowledge in which

Appeal to this picture would be disastrous because its account

The only other serious attempt I know of to show that there is

"' From a Logical Point of View, p. 42. Emphasis mine.

Sentences like "All squares are rectangles" are necessary because

Noting this failure to supply the critical explanation, Donnellan

show there are no analytic sentences. A semantic theory of th

(Cl) r is an optimal semantic representation of the ex-

42There are two important points that have to be noted in connection

(C 2) The concepts cI, .. ., en are the meaning of an expres-

The second thing we have to do is to explain in what sense

In subscribing to this thesis, we are bringing type reference

of error because the extragrammatical information employed in

However, the counterargument has great force if made from

true. Such objects are not cats: it is impossible for something to

The failure of the serious arguments against a language/

"See Donnellan, K. "Reference and Definite Descriptions," The Philo-

semantic representation of e but is essential to stating the laws

45 Quine voiced a traditional and well justified complaint against Kant's

ence is inadequate, the Duhemian doctrine that terms gain their

Linguistic rationalism's conception of the philosophy of science differs

The general difference in outlook between these positions is

Linguistic rationalism agrees with Wittgenstein47 on the

adequacy of natural languages and the status of artificial lan-

48 For further discussion, see Katz, J. J. "The Theory of Semantic Repre-

find such prolixity a hindrance, would have no notational

50 I am suggesting that a concept like I is at the apex of a definitional py

form of sentences as if they were deductive in nature. Two