The Citadel Itself: Defending Semantic Internalism

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