Lexical semantics and its philosophical applications

Lexical semantics is the field of cognitive science which attempts to explain how speakers learn to use and accept sentences like She filled the glass with water but avoid and reject sentences like She poured the glass with water, often with poor or impoverished evidence. In order to explain why some verbs alternate in these expressions and others do not, lexical semantics finds it necessary to hypothesize information in the verb that contributes to its alternation patterns. In providing an empirical motivation for the existence of decompositional linguistic meanings, lexical semantics has important consequences for the philosophy of mind, language and epistemology. Specifically, I argue that it is possible to provide necessary conditions for the possession of some concepts and demonstrate a kind of analyticity, while also providing support for recent developments in contextualism.