Meaning and Content in Cognitive Science
In Richard Schantz (ed.), Prospects for Meaning. de Gruyter (forthcoming)
| Abstract | What are the prospects for a cognitive science of meaning? As stated, we think this question is ill posed, for it invites the conflation of several importantly different semantic concepts. In this paper, we want to distinguish the sort of meaning that is an explanandum for cognitive science—something we are going to call meaning—from the sort of meaning that is an explanans in cognitive science—something we are not going to call meaning at all, but rather content. What we are going to call meaning is paradigmatically a property of linguistic expressions or acts: what one’s utterance or sentence means, and what one means by it. What we are going to call content is a property of, among other things, mental representations and indicator signals. We will argue that it is a mistake to identify meaning with content, and that, once this is appreciated, some serious problems emerge for grounding meaning in the sorts of content that cognitive science is likely to provide. | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,679 |
| External links | This entry has no external links. Add one. |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesLouise M. Antony (1990). Semantic Anorexia: On the Notion of Content in Cognitive Science. In George S. Boolos (ed.), Meaning and Method. Cambridge University Press.
William Edward Morris (2009). Meaning(Fullness) Without Metaphysics: Another Look at Hume's “Meaning Empiricism”. Philosophia 37 (3):441-454.
J. Christopher Maloney (1990). Mental Misrepresentation. Philosophy of Science 57 (September):445-58.
Holger Lyre (2008). Handedness, Self-Models and Embodied Cognitive Content. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7 (4):529–538.
James Blackmon, David Byrd, Robert C. Cummins, Alexa Lee & Martin Roth (2006). Representation and Unexploited Content. In Graham F. Macdonald & David Papineau (eds.), Teleosemantics. Oxford University Press.
Jay L. Garfield (2000). The Meanings of "Meaning" and "Meaning": Dimensions of the Sciences of Mind. Philosophical Psychology 13 (4):421-440.
Sergeiy Sandler (2012). What Is Meaning? By Scott Soames. Soochow University Lectures in Philosophy. [REVIEW] The European Legacy 17 (5):708-709.
Hilary Putnam (1975). The Meaning of 'Meaning'. Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 7:131-193.
Tadeusz Szubka (2000). Meaning Rationalism, a Priori, and Transparency of Content. Philosophical Psychology 13 (4):491-503.
Stephen Schiffer (2013). Meaning In Speech and In Thought. Philosophical Quarterly 63 (250):141-159.
Rebecca Kukla (1992). Cognitive Models and Representation. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 43 (2):219-32.
Winfried D'Avis (1998). Theoretische Lücken der Cognitive Science. Journal for General Philosophy of Science 29 (1):37-57.
Ray S. Jackendoff (2006). Locating Meaning in the Mind (Where It Belongs). In Robert J. Stainton (ed.), Contemporary Debates in Cognitive Science. Malden MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2010-09-12Total downloads96 ( #6,738 of 549,088 )Recent downloads (6 months)1 ( #63,317 of 549,088 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
