This paper examines some conceptions of semantic interpretation that have come out of cognitive theories of mental representation. Fundamental to the cognitivist perspective of classical computational theories is a conception of mental representation based on self-contained systems of formal symbols which require separate principles of interpretation to fix their semantics. A number of specific proposals about interpretation developed in connection with computational theories of representation are critically examined, and it is argued that they all in various ways presuppose rather than genuinely explain the semantics of the mental. The basis for this sort of presupposition is then examined in the context of a hermeneutic conception of interpretation. It is argued that cognitive theory requires a radical revision of the notion of interpretation, that interpretation is not fundamentally a matter of attaching a meaning to a meaningless form, but of relating meaning as preinterpretively understood to meaning as more explicitly articulated.
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