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tags:philosophysemantics
Thought
The Routledge Handbook of Semantics provides a broad and state-of-the-art survey of this field, covering semantic research at both word and sentence level. It presents a synoptic view of the most important areas of semantic investigation, including contemporary methodologies and debates, and indicating possible future directions in the field.
These books are extremely dense.
rel:Routledge Handbook of Essence in Philosophy
Semantics - A theory in search of an object
French Marxist Georges Politzer claims: Even if no one considers protesting against the general claim that theories are mortal and that science can only advance over its own ruins, it is barely possible to make the proponents of an existing theory recognize its death. The majority of academics is composed of researchers who, having neither the sense of life, nor that of truth, can only work in the shelter of officially recognized theories: it is impossible to ask them to acknowledge a fact which isn’t a given, but which has to be created … And so they acknowledge the mortality of all theories, even their own, but only in the abstract: it always strikes them as unlikely that, for them, the instant of death could already have arrived.
In general, though, the various schools of semantic research pursue largely independent programmes. No doubt as a result, the lack of consensus within the discipline is all too rarely even acknowledged. This is particularly the case for the most basic characterization of descriptive meaning in lexical semantics, on which so many subsequent theoretical explorations rest.
But we should recognize that any future, predictive understanding of linguistic behaviour seems unlikely to emerge from theories of the language system developed in linguistics or some other human science, but will instead arise within the neurosciences, with their entirely different explanatory regime
Phenomenologically, it is a commonplace observation that we do not usually even experience utterances as having meanings, if by “meaning” we mean some extra factor that is separable from the chain of sounds being spoken, and of which we are independently aware.
It follows from this way of thinking about semantics that we should not expect to uncover any unique and monolithic “meaning” that expressions convey. Meaning is a shorthand con- cept that ties together a variety of diverse explanatory factors. There are, no doubt, many shorthand concepts of this nature. Colour, for example, seems to be one. To describe a book as “red” is a shorthand way of expressing the fact that when observed by normal eyes in normal lighting conditions, the book has a particular hue. But it is readily apparent that red- ness isn’t a property the book has inherently; it’s a relational property that holds between our nervous system, the surface of the book, and the quality of the light. Given different condi- tions, the same book would be a different colour: if we were wearing coloured glasses, for instance, or observing under certain artificial lighting situations. rel:Where she sat
Descriptive Externalism in Semantics
rel: Internalism and externalism
To know the meaning of a sentence is to know its truth-conditions. If I say to you (“There is a bag of potatoes in my pantry”) you may not know whether what I said is true. What you do know, however, is what the world would have to be like for it to be true … . A theory of meaning, then, pairs sentences with their truth-conditions.
“Snow is white.”
“Snow” is a mass term, apparently denoting some sort of undifferentiated stuff, unlike a count noun such as “snowballs”; and “snow is white” expresses a generic claim that is not falsified by a bit of yellow snow. How best to (compositionally) characterize the semantics of mass nouns and of generics is much disputed.
Descriptive semantics - asks what semantic properties expression have. Foundational semantics - asks in virtue of what they have them.
Externalist foundational semantic claim:
The descriptive semantic fact that “Hund” means dog obtains in virtue of a convention among Germans, involving attitudes and expectations they have towards one another.
Chomsky defines two categories, and favors inquiry in the former: I-language, or internalized language - is the computational system realized in the individuals mind/brain, that generates the structures specifically implicated in linguistic behavior. E-Language is an “externalized” language understood independently of the properties of the mind/brain.
(There’s no superman to point to) Particularly problematic are negative existential sentences such as “Superman does not exist”
“Hand me the green book”
The idea that, in natural languages, pragmatics intrudes into semantics has an august lineage.
For externalism
We use language inter alia to inform others about how things are in the world. When I say, “I’ll leave the keys under the mat,” you know where to look and can thereby succeed in finding them. How could there have been this success unless you knew that, in uttering those words, I had said something quite specific about an aspect of the world—viz., that a particular place would have a certain set of keys there at a particular time? And how could you have known that, in uttering those words then, I had said that, unless you knew what those words mean? Finally, how could your words’ meaning what they do issue in a speech act with representational content unless they too had content— that is, bore intentional relations to the world? The implied answer is that an explanation of communicative success requires an externalist conception of semantics.
Internalist Semantics
Meaning, conceptualization and expression
For externalists, meaning consists of the connection between language and the external environment: word’s meaning, roughly speaking, is their reference to the world.
Internalist linguistic semantics generally speaking assumes that mental representations called concepts are key parts of the mechanisms linking mind to world. There is a sense in which, construed internalistically, meaning might not have anything to do with concepts at all, despite current assumptions.
Where does the idea of concepts come from?
However, as documented by Lillard (1998), among others, even a non-exhaustive survey reveals a number of cultures in which “thought” and “feeling” are either not distinguished, or in which “thought” does not exist as a named psychological state at all.
- concept as simply to refer to whatever psychological structures support meaning.
- this weak use entails no commitments about the nature of the structures in question.
Features of Concepts
Word meanings are the clearest examples of concepts. However, language is just one among the many cognitive capacities that concepts are intended to explain.
NOTE
I’m not really satisfied by this below, but what do I know.
Holding a rainbow shaped bottle? seems easier than a bottle shaped rainbow? the bow-ness is inherent to word/concept, like a form but my experience of rainbows generally isn’t arc-like in all cases. Nor is full ROYGBIV present.
Case of fire and fire, or two words that are the same but different. Must be found through context, cannot look at word in isolation and know what it means.
Concepts can be thought of as mental instructors or rules for binding representations of different properties together. The concept of RAINBOW binds together properties such as colored, in the sky, striped, curved and occurs after rain into a single representation. Only if someone possesses the concept RAINBOW can they identify actual rainbows and reason and communicate about them. (although, as with any arbitrary concatenation of properties, we could always create such a concept and stipulate a name for it)
How do perceptual signals (in case of the rainbow patterns of stimulation) make their way to the conceptual system?
Diverse forms of bottles get connected to the concept of bottle enough that people can reason and communicate about bottles the way they do.
Concepts must be invariant: An important consequence of the representational character of concepts is that they are taken to be invariant – in all essential respects – from one individual to another, and within the one individual over time. Since concepts reflect the actual way the world objectively is, they must, like the world itself, be the same for everyone. What goes for non-linguistic cognition also goes for language. Speakers can only coordinate their linguistic action on the world successfully if they share a similar enough way of using words to refer to aspects of the environment, and if the factual knowledge they have of referents is, in essential respects, shared.
Many investigators have thought that there is something wrong about declaring that the meaning of a given word – say, rainbow – includes all the conceptual information that we have stocked in long-term memory about the word’s referents.
Everyone has had different experiences of different rainbows, and will therefore access slightly different sets of concepts. But it seems wrong to say that we do not still share a single meaning for the word “rainbow”.
NOTE
Why? I’m going to struggle to even give any unassailable meaning for the concept rainbow. I can just define another concept for all of these near adjacent cases that miss the concept of rainbow. What if the definition space becomes incredibly dense like an alien world completely rainbow? Does the rainbow definition exist in a space not yet know or spoken and all of us searching for that true word? If I could devote my life to the evocation of a single word, in the search of a true definition, which would it be?
If your and my concepts of “rainbow” are slightly different, then we can no longer claim to be sharing them perfectly when we use the word rainbow to communicate. This relaxation may appear innocent, but it is rich in consequences: once we admit that the conceptualizations underlying a single word may not fully coincide between members of the same speech community, we are no longer entitled to assume that apparent identities of language use reflect the same underlying conceptualizations.
You and I may use rainbow to refer to the same kind of thing, but perhaps we do so in virtue of slightly different underlying conceptualizations – a possibility that there are other, more general reasons to take seriously.
Explanatory Autonomy - a potential feature of concepts. The postulation of concepts is justified by the hypothesis that our rational capacities are open to analysis on a distinctive, autonomous cognitive level of explanation – that is, a level fundamentally different from that of electrochemical brain processes on the one hand, and that of the common-sense, folk-psychological categories we use to talk about meaning and the mind informally on the other.
Some believe linguistics will be entirely superseded, and thus decidedly not explanatorily autonomous.
Critiques
emotion episodes are often viewed in post-Enlightenment thinking as temporary disruptions of a permanent rational background – a “cold and neutral state of intellectual perception”, - which goes against the widespread assumption that people are always experiencing some kind of emotion or other.
A small class of language is thought to be expressive (rel:Magic Action Words) such as exclamations (damn! yuck! shit!)
A history of semantics
Human beings name things in their environment. It is generally accepted today that language expressions have meaning by convention, but this invites the question: How does the convention get established? rel: Naming and Necessity by Saul Kripke’s baptism, where history of conventional use characterizes a language and lets successive generations communicate easily.
Peter Abelard, Leibniz and Chomsky: Sentences refer to the world and not to someone’s understanding of the world. Language is not a medium for the transmission of ideas from one human to another, but conveys information about the world.
Early Etymologies: They assumed that knowledge is embodied in word meanings and can be elucidated via reference to the original meaning;
Listeme
(linguistics) An item that is memorized as part of a list, as opposed to being generated by a rule. Idioms such as “red herring” are listemes, as are irregular forms such as “geese”.
-eme = indicating a fundamental unit of something, chiefly linguistic structure
Important: When new objects and new ways of doing things come into existence there is a change in the conceptual field that leads to a change in the semantic field resulting from the adding of listemes or the semantic extension of existing ones. Seemingly closed fields such as case inflexions or kin terms should permit exhaustive componential analysis in which every term within the field is characterized by a unique subset of the universal set of semantic components defining the field. However, these systems invariably leak into other fields when meaning extensions and figurative usage are considered. Furthermore, an exhaustive componential analysis of the entire vocabulary of a language is probably unachievable, because it proves impossible to define the boundaries, and hence all the components, of every field.
Foundations of Formal Semantics
A formal language is nothing more than a set of strings over a finite vocabulary. Semantic competence in a language consist of knowing truth conditions for for the sentences of a language. Natural languages are unbounded in the number of interpretable sentences they contain.
Islands
rel:Islands
How did Fred not behave?
Cognitive Semantics
One of the basic tenets of these cognitive theories is that language does not constitute a separate innate faculty of mind. Undeniably, human beings have an innate (i.e. genetically determined) predisposition that allows them to learn language; however, the full articulation of the linguistic system depends on experiential factors (physiological as well as cultural) and cognitive abilities that are not unique to language.
Despite arbitrariness of relationship between sign and signified, meaning of compositional structures is not arbitrary since it is derivable from the meaning of parts. In other words, speakers know how to figure out the meaning of com- positional words such as woodstove or windmill on the basis of (i) the meaning of the parts (wood and stove, wind and mill) and (ii) the meaning(s) of the N-N compounds in English.
Knowledge is seen by many cognitive semanticists as being grounded in patterns of bodily experience. These patterns, called image schemas, emerge throughout sensorimotor activity as we manipulate objects, orient ourselves spatially and temporally, and direct our perceptual focus for various purposes
If one were pushed to summarise cognitive semantics in a number of keywords, some proper candidates would be conceptualisation (which entails encyclopaedic), construal (the cognitive capacity to conceptualise experience in alternate ways), image schemas (schematic patterns of bodily experience) and prototype-structured categorisation. These principles are not restricted to lexical items, but underlie linguistic structures at all levels, ranging from morphemes, lexical items and semi-open idioms, to semantically highly schematic grammatical patterns.
Corpus Semantics
The term “corpus semantics” is a shorthand way of referring to a combination of data, methods and theory: empirical observational evidence from large computer-readable corpora is used to formulate hypotheses about meaning.
The layperson’s notion of the basic unit of meaning is the word. Dictionaries generally present language units in an alphabetic sequence that is irrelevant to both their semantic notion and use in communication. rel:Alphabetic Order
This contributes to the odd but wide-spread notion that each word has a “literal meaning”; that is, a basic inherent meaning when it is not being used to communicate anything
Concordance
A Concordance is a Dictionary, or an Index, wherein all the words used are ranged alphabetically, and the various places where they occur are referred to, to assist us in comparing the several significations of the same word.
Meaning is patterns of use.
Weaver (1955) used the term “statistical semantics” to mean that probabilistic patterns of language usage in large text collections can provide evidence of what words mean.
McIntosh (1961) predicts that nouns that follow the adjective molten will be similar in meaning, though it would be “laborious” to list them. But with modern computation we can do this
metal 31, rock 26, lava 15, iron 14, lead 10, glass 9, material 9, gold 8
Linguistic Relativity
According to the theory of linguistic relativity, language shapes the way people think.
We should find that in tasks that require reference to representations in memory that don’t make use of any linguistic expression, people who speak different languages will respond in similar, or even identical, ways. That is, representations for nonlinguistic purposes may differ very little across cultures or languages.
English tends to describe duration in terms of one-dimensional spatial length, such as a long time, a long rope. This unidirectional mapping is assumed universal, related to the unidirectional flight of time’s arrow. Even when replacing long you are left with lengthy, extended, protracted, drawn out, all which express time in terms of linear extent.
Greek speakers tend to speak in terms of volume and amount (a lot of time, a big night instead of a long night.)
people who use different temporal metaphors in their native languages conceptualize time the way they talk about it, even when they are not using language. Furthermore, linguistic experience can play a causal role in shaping mental representations of time. Producing or understanding spatio-temporal language like a Greek speaker, even for a few minutes, can cause English speakers to think about time differently, using a different kind of spatial scaffolding.
Using different spoken metaphors can strengthen some implicit associations in memory while weakening others, leading to differences in the mental representation of time and musical pitch that can be found even when people are prevented from using language.