Hinzen's "...On names and truth"

The contemporary debate on the nature of semantic content looks, at least from afar, like a battle between two armies. On the one hand, one finds the externalists, who claim that the content of what you have in your head depends on what’s out there in the world. For example, the content of my concept of WATER is determined by the substance in the world that instantiates it, while the content of my thoughts about ARTHRITIS is dependent on the social conventions of my community. Internalists, on the other hand, have ‘pushed the world into the mind’ (to borrow Ray Jackendoff ’s phrase) and hold that it is the compositional and/or inferential nature of conceptual representations that determine their content.

Curiously, the defenders of externalism seem to come largely from a philosophical background, while linguists often opt for the internalist mode of explanation. Wolfram Hinzen, who is a professor of philosophy at the University of Durham, but works within the biolinguistics program, seems to be the ideal person to reanimate this sometimes gridlocked debate.

Hinzen’s latest book, An essay on names and truth, is part of an ambitious venture in which the author aims to invalidate the central intuitions behind externalism, while at the same time arguing for a type of internalism that has next to nothing in common with comparable theories on the market. Hinzen takes as a starting point two traditional strongholds for externalist theories of meaning : names, ‘ the very paradigm of a referential expression ’ (2), and truth, which few theorists would dare suggest have nothing to do with the external world. His central idea is that the judgements of truth we make are dependent on the syntax that underpins thought, and that names, like all other expressions, get their content from their syntactic form...

Fascinating review by Georg Kjøll of Wolfam Hinzen's latest book "An essay on names and truth." Find the article under Reviews here, at the Journal of Linguistics, and read on.