Devitt’s Naturalistic Program For Semantic Localism

According to Devitt, semantic holism is something that very close to orthodoxy in philosophy of language, psychology and artificial intelligence, but it is obviously wrong, because it regards each language or psychological symbol’s meaning as constituted by a complete set of its reasoning feature. Thus, he defends a semantic localism, it is a more moderate "molecule localism" idea, and thinks some reasoning feature of the symbol can constitute its meaning. The reason for this is:first of all, Devitt thinks that semantic holism involved in what he calls a "Cartesian" meaning of accessibility.In this view, we have a special approach to meaning and the facts about meaning, even we have privileged knowledge for the nature of meaning. Second, the traditional conception is considered to have a lot of unpleasant results. For example, in the traditional analytic-synthetic distinction, something is prior to know, and these things can’t be seen as a mistake.In the criticism of the armchair philosophy, Devitt deliberates "what is semantics task? Why do they worth studying? How do we implement them?" and puts forward a "naturalistic" point of view, it means that there is no any prior knowledge, experience is the only way to knowing, is also the basis of science. Devitt’s ideas about the nature of the semantics forms his program for this discipline and further forms his illustration for the task of semantics, he worries that most semantic theorizing implicitly depends on the ad hoc views of semantic task. So do not doubt that in semantics need a naturalistic theory of science, think semantics should be an experience science about the meaning, we can use a scientific way to study meaning. He seek to give semantics research a specific programm, scientificly appealing, resolves semantic disputes and can guide the future semantic researching process, and this is Devitt’s naturalistic methodology of semantics.