without also investigating contextualized meaning cannot in any event tell us whether our hypothesized distinction is
correct.^140
A moreworthymotivefor tryingtoseparatesemanticsfrom conceptualizationmightbeFrege's(1892)quitelegitimate
desire to eliminate“personal association”fro mse mantics. Frege makes the all-i mportant distinction between the
referenceofan expression—what itdenotes—fro mitssense—themanner or routebywhichitdenotesthereference.But
he is also careful to distinguish sense fro mthe idea in the language user's mind, which hefinds too subjective and
variable for his purposes. He therefore takes sense to be an abstract, objectiveproperty conventionally associated with
a linguistic expression. This approach thus can idealize away fro mpersonal associations—such as the endearing way
one's dog comes bounding up to visitors, which probably should not be part of the meaning ofdogas it functions in
interpersonal communication.
However, it is difficult if not impossible to draw a principled line between the“public”meaning of a word and its
personalassociations. Thereforethedesiretodrawsucha lineisnota justifiedmotivefor separatinglinguisticmeaning
fro mcontextualized meaning. Here is why.
Suppose two people have the same personal associations for certain words, perhaps because they have grown up
together. This permits them to use these words with each other, and the personal associations have a “public”
meaning, albeit for a very restricted public. But as far as the rest of the world is concerned, these are just“personal
associations”that cannot be recovered fro mhearing the words in question.
The same holds at a larger scale when we consider special uses of words by a technical subcommunity. WhenI use the
termlanguagein speaking to a linguist, I can invoke associations that come from shared experience in the linguistics
community. WhenI use thewordinspeakingtomy dentist, though, I cannotpresume these associations and must put
them aside in attemptingto get my message across. But it's not as though I have two wordslanguagein my vocabulary,
one for linguists and one for dentists. Moreover, there is a spectru mof inter mediate co m munities, fro m
psycholinguists to philosophers to neuroscientists to biologists, for which some of my“personal associations”are
appropriateand others are not; successfulcommunicationdepends oncareful gauging ofwhichtopresume. Do I then
have a multiplicityof wordslanguagein my vocabulary? I would rather say that I have intuitions about what aspects of
the word's meaning for me are appropriate for my hearers. And when I don't know what
284 SEMANTIC AND CONCEPTUAL FOUNDATIONS
(^140) And if linguists abdicate fro mstudying general-purpose knowledge and belief, who is supposed to study it? None of the other cognitive scienceshas better tools to do the
work in its full glorious combinatorial detail.