ABSTRACT
Generic naturalism thus denies the existence of the supematural, the possibility of any supematuralistic ways of knowing, and the possibility of any supernatural values or norms. Hence, it would be opposed to certain kinds of ontologies, epistemologies and methodologies, and certain theories of value. Extensional ism can easily accommodate naturalism because an extensionalist needs only a set of particular spatio-temporal concrete objects for his theory of meaning. By contrast, an intensionalist will have a more difficult time because she will have to countenance not only sets of objects and instantiated properties, but either Platonic-like entities—Frege’s senses, abstract ideas, or Platonic Forms—or concepts in the mind. The task for contemporary psychology, therefore, appears to involve the construction of a naturalist psychological semantics: a theory of meaning that countenances only naturalistic entities knowable by naturalistic methods. This would seem to involve adopting an “external” point of view and abandoning a purely “internal” point of view.
