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The Method to “Meaning”: A Reply to Leplin

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Nancy J. Nersessian
Nancy J. Nersessian*
Affiliation:
Program in History of Science Princeton University
*
‡Send reprint requests to the author, Program in History of Science, 129 Dickinson Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544–1017.
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Abstract

In his article, “Is Essentialism Unscientific?” (1988), Jarrett Leplin claims that I do not have sufficient grounds for rejecting the customary “philosophical method of discovery” that allows for the direct transfer of theories developed in the philosophy of language to science. While admitting that all attempts at transfer thus far have failed, he still maintains that method is sound. I argue that the wholesale failure of these attempts is reason enough to suspect the method and to try to devise one more suitable to fathoming how “meaning”, “reference”, and “meaning change” are to be understood for scientific theories. The method I have proposed in Nersessian (1984b), and subsequent work, demands that we learn how to incorporate the actual practices of meaning construction in science into our analyses. Leplin distorts my analysis and, thus, fails to understand the insights that study provides.

Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 58 , Issue 4 , December 1991 , pp. 678 - 686
Copyright
Copyright © 1991 The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

Preparation of this paper was supported by National Science Foundation Scholars Award DIR-8821422. I wish to thank Floris Cohen for his invaluable assistance in revising this article.

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