Tom Swift and his procedural grandmother

Rumor has it that, in semantics, AI is where the action is. We hear not only that computational (hereafter ‘procedural’) semantics offers an alternative to the classical semantics of truth, reference and modality’, but that it provides what its predecessor so notably lacked: clear implications for psychological models of the speaker/hearer. Procedural semantics is said to be ‘the psychologist’s’ theory of meaning, just as classical semantics was ‘the logician’s’. What’s bruited in the by-ways is thus nothing less than a synthesis of the theory of meaning with the theory of mind. Glad tidings these, and widely credited. But, alas, unreliable. I shall argue that, soberly considered: (a) The computer models provide no semantic theory at all, if what you mean by a semantic theory is an account of the relation between language and the world. In particular, procedural semantics doesn’t supplant classical semantics, it merely begs the questions that classical semanticists set out to answer. The begging of these questions is, of course, quite inadvertent; we shall consider at length how it comes about. (b) Procedural semantics does provide a theory about what it is to know the meaning of a word. But it’s not a brave new theory. On the contrary, it’s just an archaic and wildly implausible form of verificationism. Since practically nobody except procedural semanticists takes verificationism seriously any more, it will be of some interest to trace the sources of their adherence to the doctrine. (c) It’s the verificationism which connects the procedural theory of language to the procedural theory of perception. The consequence is a view of the relation between language and mind which is not significantly different from that of Locke or Hume. The recidivism of PS theorizing is among the most striking of the ironies now to be explored.