Language and the Measure of Mind

In his recent book The Measure of Mind Robert Matthews presents the most elaborate and convincing attempt to date to account for the propositional attitudes in measurement theoretic terms. In the first section of this paper I review earlier applications of measurement-theoretic conceptualization to the discussion of the mind, I outline Matthews' own account, and I raise two questions concerning it. Then, in the second section of the paper, I present a unified measurement-theoretic account of both linguistic meaning and the propositional attitudes, in which a variant of Matthews' position is embedded. Such a unified account, I argue, yields satisfactory answers to the questions raised with respect to Matthews' original view, and demonstrates other advantages.