Internalist Deflationism: On the Limits of Ontological Investigation

For the Quinean Realist, a language with such a semantics is fruitful for ontological investigation, insofar as analyzing the denotational meanings of (the constituents of) sentences in that language reveals which objects populate the (external) worldly domain.

However, consigning meaning over to truth in this manner comes at a cost. The externalist thesis is only had by sacrificing the explanatory adequacy of our theory of meaning. Three arguments suggest this: first, facts about the rapid human acquisition of natural language suggests that languages are internal to the human mind, as an innate module in cognitive architecture; second, naturalist commitments suggest that there is no sui generis, mind-independent kind `word' to stand in the word-to-world relations posited by the externalist; third, natural languages exhibit lexical flexibility, as manifest in the distribution of natural language speaker judgments, and this property cannot be easily explained by an externalist semantics.