ABSTRACT
George Miller was the keynote speaker for the first meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology held at MIT in the mid-1970s. His paper summarized Quine’s speculations concerning how children learn color words and went on to argue that linguistic analysis of the color lexicon, together with data from empirical studies of language acquisition, proved Quine’s speculation wrong. This address launched a successful society, which is dedicated to two interrelated principles that Miller’s career exemplifies: (a) many of the issues debated in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science are empirical issues on which the disciplines in cognitive science are making scientific progress; and (b) many of the issues debated in cognitive science have a long history in philosophy, and cognitive science ignores that history at its peril.
