Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

The harbingers were especially two scholars of rather different interests: the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1931), seeking a foundation for linguistics and arriving at his structuralist theory of language; and the logician Gottlob Frege (1892a), struggling to fortify the foundations of mathematics and consequently divorcing semantics from psychology and wedding it to mathematics instead1.

Note that this does not mean that it cannot be relevant from other viewpoints, such as that of the psychology of communication – i.e. the study of what goes on in one's mind when one communicates.

Not quite - for the best way to see this paper is as fighting on two fronts: against the construal of semantics as parasitic upon psychology, and against its construal as based on a realistic metaphysics.

At the same time it is futile to see semantics as parasitic upon a psychology of language use. Semantics is primarily neither a matter of relating words with things, or of words with thoughts, it is a matter of displaying a certain kind of structure of language.

The approaches of the other group do not approve of formalization and consider a theory of language closer to psychology than to mathematics.

I call attention to the fact that in studying the laws of harmony in a harmony text there is no mention of "agreeableness"; psychology drops out.

Why are they so different, and what is their relation to psychology?

In what sense is aesthetic investigation a matter of psychology?

One might think that it is entirely a matter of psychology whether something is good or beautiful, that in comparing musical arrangements, for example, one is making a psychological experiment to determine which produces the more pleasing effect.

In aesthetic investigation the thing we are not interested in is causal connections, whereas in psychology we are.