ABSTRACT
Tyler Burge and I have long been allies in the struggle against individualistic accounts of meaning and of mental contents generally. We have influenced each other through the years. And we certainly agree that the “determiners” of mental states do not lie inside our heads. But Burge has qualms about my counting the things in the extension of a natural kind term as components of the meaning of the term. (He describes himself as “non-committal, shading toward the doubtful.”) The clearest statement of these qualms occurs early in his talk, when he writes:
I think that the notion of meaning has a root conceptual connection to the notion of potential understanding. I think that a direct connection between understanding and physical objects has never been made clear or plausible. Understanding is certainly always perspectival. The idea of understanding, or indeed perceiving, a physical object (even as a component of meaning) neat is, I think, incoherent. So if physical objects in the environment are to be considered components of meaning, some account of meaning that loosens its relation to understanding must be developed.
(Burge in this volume, p. 264)