ABSTRACT
The first part of this chapter is an overview of what I call ‘psychologistic semantics’, a general approach to issues in the philosophy of language which I think philosophers and others should be pursuing, and which I have begun pursuing myself (Horgan 1986a, b, 1987, 1990). 1 The discussion compares psychologistic semantics to the more standard approaches in contemporary philosophy of language, and summarizes its major advantages over these approaches. The second part of the chapter examines, in somewhat greater detail, the topic of vagueness. Within the framework of psychologistic semantics, a research programme is sketched for dealing with vagueness – a programme that lies at the interface of philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science, and in which the notion of prototype figures prominently.
