Making the private public: external grounding in inner States

Recent discussions about the nature of meaning and concepts focus on abstract semantic knowledge including key information about inner states of the individual. Classic cognitive approaches anchor the meaning of words in universal concepts, semantic networks or semantic features encapsulated in the individual's own mind. However, this does not explain how symbols become interpretable during language development. Embodiment theorists acknowledge the relevance of semantic grounding of concrete referential symbols in perceptions and actions during learning, but, similar to classic cognitivism, assume internal anchoring of mental terms in introspection, thus once again implicating a main role of privileged access to 'private' inner states in language learning. This raises the basic question as to how a public language can be founded in private inner access. Here, we argue that, in semantic learning, a purely introspection-based classification of inner states is neither possible nor required, and even less so a first-person privilege in accessing these states. Rather, classification and semantic learning of symbols for mentalistic concepts is an interactive process between the learner and an external observer who can employ contextual knowledge and behavioral information for recognizing and categorizing the learner's mental states. In support of this 'extrospective' mental grounding account, we review observations that, in case of doubt about internal states, third-person evidence can play a decisive role. We also highlight supporting empirical studies showing that individuals in whom the link between first-person experience and externally observable behavior is broken may suffer from deficits in processing and understanding the related mentalistic vocabulary.