Anti-psychologism has exerted a powerful influence on 20th century views about language, thought, and mind. It motivated the search for a system of rules which generates our abilities to speak and think. So-called indexicals pose a particular problem for anti-psychologism: Words like 'I,' 'here,' and 'now' have no dictionary-definitions but relate speakers to their environments in very particular ways. One can only understand these words if one knows a good bit about the world and about mental states. It therefore appears unlikely that there could be semantic rules which determine the reference of these terms for every situation. And even if there were such rules, wouldn't intentionality (a psychological category!) play a role in their application?
Anne's work on indexicals thus ties in with her work on more general issues in the theory of knowledge, namely, the critique not only of anti-psychologism but also of the recent resurgence of psychologism. The anti-psychologist doctrines of Frege and Husserl were formulated against the views of Boole or Mill who had suggested that logic and epistemology are natural sciences of the mind which establish laws of thought. Instead Frege and Husserl did not consider "thought" a psychological property or mental state at all. However, subsequent attempts to reduce all psychological talk of beliefs, intentions, attitudes, etc. to a formal system of rules have proven futile, generating a resurgence of psychologism in the name of a naturalized epistemology. This new kind of psychologism or naturalism is committed to the development of empirical theories of brain and mind, neurophysiology, and the like. Anne rejects this scientistic form of psychologism if it neglects to ask questions about the philosophical presuppositions that inform the work of neurophysiologists, for example. A naturalistic or scientistic psychologism needs to be preceded by philosophical psychology, by a clarification of what beliefs, attitudes, desires are and what role they play in language and thought.
This is where Anne's critique of experimental work (and her own experimentation) comes in. On Anne's conception of philosophical psychology, our employment of language presupposes psychological entities like attitudes, intentions, beliefs, and desires. Moreover, our use of language presupposes knowledge of such entities in ourselves and others. Indexical expressions, for example, have meaning only within a particular context, and the self, my own desires and those of others are part of that context. One should think, therefore, that when a child wants something here and now, that child has some conception of its own desires and of the fact that her parents may have desires of their own.
However, some experimental work appears to have shown quite conclusively that children do not develop a theory of mind until age 4 1/2. In other words, even though younger children can already speak, they cannot conceive of other people having beliefs different from their own. Anti-psychologist theories of mind and language blindly defer to such findings, not realizing that these experiments may themselves reflect inadequate theories of mind and language. Indeed, slight changes in the design of such experiments have been shown to indicate that, on the contrary, small children do attribute minds of their own to other people. Anne's own experiments zero in on such slight differences in design. Their primary purpose is not to produce yet another set of experimental facts to which philosophers ought to defer. Instead, they show how sensitive experiments are to theoretical presuppositions and thus allow for a philosophical critique of empirical research.
For more detail, see Anne's publications: You will find abstracts on her home-page. Here are just four references to recent work: "Pragmatics and Singular Reference" (Mind and Language, 11:2, 1996, pp. 133-159); "Resisting the Step Toward Naturalism" (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 56:4, 1996, pp. 743-770); "The Communication de re Thoughts" (Nous, 31:2, 1997, pp. 197-225; and "How Context-Dependent are Attitude Ascriptions?" (forthcoming in Acta Analytica).
Alfred Nordmann
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