The Long Shadow of Semantic Platonism Part II: Recent Illustrations

• Published in: Philosophia (Ramat Gan) Vol. 49; no. 5; pp. 2211 - 2242
• Main Author: Picazo, Gustavo
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01-11-2021
• Subjects: Education; Epistemology; Ethics; Philosophy; Philosophy of Language; Philosophy of Mind; Philosophy of Science; semantic biologism; semantic Platonism; Analytic methodology; radical semantic views; recent philosophy of language; semantic mentalism
• ISSN: 0048-3893; 1574-9274
• DOI: 10.1007/s11406-021-00321-x

The present article is the second part of a trilogy of papers, devoted to analysing the influence of semantic Platonism on contemporary philosophy of language. In Part I (Picazo
2021
), the discussion was set out by examining a number of typical traces of Platonism in semantic theory since Frege. In a subsequent paper that shall be published elsewere, additional illustrations of such traces will be provided, taken from a collection of classic texts in the philosophy of language, also from Frege onwards (Baghramian
1998
). Then, the present paper is devoted to providing yet additional illustrations of those traces, but this time taken from a collection of recent commissioned essays on the subject: the book
Prospects for Meaning
, edited by Richard Schantz in
2012
. We shall, thus, describe a considerable number of examples in which the influence of semantic Platonism on these essays can be felt. Prominent among these examples are the adhesion to pseudo-Platonism in the form of semantic mentalism; the typical limitations of avoidant and trivializing semantic accounts; the confinement to logico-philosophical analysis as the only methodology for semantic research; the excesses committed by some radical semantic anti-representationalists and some radical semantic biologists; and the adhesion to hardcore semantic Platonism itself.