I-SEMANTICS:

DENOTATIONAL APPROACH

Abstract

Larson & Segal (L&S) defend the thesis that semantics should be seen as a branch of cognitive psychology. They seek to insert their proposal within the generative program, borrowing not only the formal resources developed by the generative grammarians, but also the conceptual assumptions that guide this program. In this article, I expose the object of study of I-semantics (Internal, intentional and individual semantics) as proposed by L&S. In this article, I argue that there is a tension between the type of internalism proposed by L&S and the core of the generative program. If the L & S proposal is incorporated into the generative program, it will be necessary to modify the latter, to add new premises that are inconsistent with its core of its theoretical assumptions. This problem can be diagnosed from a distinction between the Interpretive Problem (PI) and the Combinatorial Problem (PC). We will see that the generative program provides an empirical contribution to the solution of the first problem, but not the second. However, for L&S, these are and one and the same problem.