Eliminativismo semantico e competenza lessicale

According to Meaning Eliminativism [ME] (Recanati 2004), an explanation of our lexical competence does not need to associate the entries of the lexicon with a set of stable “meanings” or “semantic potentials”. According to such a view, the speaker calculates a word's meaning on a speciic occasion of use based on the similarity between that use and all the past uses of the same word, without the mediation of an abstract representation of its conventional meaning. My purpose in this paper is to show that ME is not viable as an empirical thesis about the acquisition and the exercise of lexical competence. If ME were correct, we would have to deny the existence of the so-called «semantic memory», i.e. the memory that is functionally dedicated to the storage of declarative semantic knowledge relative to a word. Conversely, we would have to accept that all the performances that are traditionally associated to semantic memory are underpinned by the so-called «episodic memory», i.e. the memory of past personal experience that occurred at a particular time and place. Nevertheless, a critical analysis of a series of available neuropsychological data (i.e. data coming from brain damaged patients) will show that such an empirical hypothesis is unsustainable.