ABSTRACT

This chapter presents an overview of 'psychologistic semantics', a general approach to issues in the philosophy of language. It examines 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. The chapter summarizes the 'rules and representations paradigm' (RR paradigm), the problems that have led to Kuhnian crisis, the relevance of these problems to theoretical accounts of conceptual cognition, and the potential new paradigm for cognition for that is suggested by connectionism. The RR paradigm posits structurally complex mental representations, many of which encode propositional information syntactically via language-like sentential structure. The chapter suggests that a multi-dimensional research programme along these lines has the potential to shed some badly needed light on the phenomenon of robust vagueness, and hence is well worth pursuing.