ABSTRACT
Intensional meaning is the 'sense' of a word as opposed to extensional meaning, which is the set of objects, properties, events and so forth to which the word descriptively applies. The children's early words had roughly two kinds of intensional meaning: one set of words had an action meaning while another set referred to perceptual form characteristics. Theories on the development of meaning are empirically competitive only if they occur at the same descriptive level. The equation of meaning with use seems to imply a simple, outdated behaviouristic view of language, as if meaning could be identified with a directly observable component of verbal behaviour. Plasticity is an argument against a depth theory which claims that the meaning of presentations in a surface system, as vision or audition, depends on their relationships with concepts - or any other meaningful essence - of a universal, underlying system.
