Bloomfield and semantics

Bloomfield’s position with regard to meaning and its importance in human use of language has been persistently misinterpreted. From a Wundtian, mentalistic psychology in his 1914 Introduction, he passed to a Weissian, non-mentalistic approach, as a result of which he considered it impossible to capture the totality of meaning because of its inaccessibility to scientific investigation by currently available techniques. Far from excluding considerations of meaning from our study of language, he regarded them as nevertheless essential. The author finds both Bloomfield’s and his critics’ views of the nature of meaning unsatisfactory, because they regard meaning as existent somewhere outside of the individual speaker. In this respect, Bloomfield’s point of view in his 1914 book was closer to reality than that which he expressed in his 1933 Language.