ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to enquire into issues of meaning that until have remained largely unexplored in a no man's land between mainly humanistically oriented studies of collectively constituted meaning and language as a system and studies of individual human cognition, linguistic competence and performance, and situated linguistic mediation of meaning. To the extent that psychology can be considered as a single discipline at all, it is indeed a thoroughly hybrid academic trade. Most versions of individual cognitive psychology and cognitive science cope with semantic issues. The potential contribution of psychology to a cross-disciplinary venture is twofold: Some important issues of meaning can be conceptualized and further explored in terms of a psychology of the individual organism. Two of the most influential American psychologists of language prior to the cognitive revolution in linguistics and psychology were Charles E. Osgood at the University of Illinois and James Deese at Johns Hopkins University.
