Online research in philosophy

This paper provides a précis of Ernst Cassirer’s concept of art as a symbolic form. It does so, though, in a specific respect. It points to the fact that Cassirer’s concept of “symbolic form” is two-sided. On the one hand, the concept captures general cultural phenomena that are not only meaningful but also manifest the way man makes sense of the world; thus myth, religion, and art are considered general symbolic forms. On the other hand, it captures the formal structures (...) and semiotic tools thanks to which meaning is constructed within each general symbolic form (Cassirer called these structures “modes of objectivation”); thus, in art, perspective or the golden section are well-known examples of symbolic forms, now in a narrow sense, i.e. they are means to configure parts into an organized, meaningful whole. The paper will comment on art along both these two dimensions, but its main goal is to provide with concrete examples of aesthetic symbolic forms in the narrow sense in order to show how conceptual meaning can be inscribed in the space of aesthetic intuition. (shrink)

One of the central issues in linguistics is whether or not language should be considered a self-contained, autonomous formal system, essentially reducible to the syntactic algorithms of meaning construction (as Chomskyan grammar would have it), or a holistic-functional system serving the means of expressing pre-organized intentional contents and thus accessible with respect to features and structures pertaining to other cognitive subsystems or to human experience as such (as Cognitive Linguistics would have it). The latter claim depends critically on the existence (...) of principles governing the composition of semantic contents. Husserl''s fourth Logical Investigation is well known as a genuine precursor for Chomskyan grammar. However, I will establish the heterogeneous character of the Investigation and show that the whole first part of it is devoted to the exposition of a semantic combinatorial system cognate to the one elaborated within Cognitive Linguistics. I will thus show how theoretical results in linguistics may serve to corroborate and shed light on those parts of Husserl''s Fourth Investigation that have traditionally been dismissed as vague or simply ignored. (shrink)

How is linguistic communication possible? How do we come to share the same meanings of words and utterances? One classical position holds that human beings share a transcendental “platonic” ideality independent of individual cognition and language use (Frege 1948). Another stresses immanent linguistic relations (Saussure 1959), and yet another basic embodied structures as the ground for invariant aspects of meaning (Lakoff and Johnson 1999). Here we propose an alternative account in which the possibility for sharing meaning is motivated by four (...) sources of structural stability: 1) the physical constraints and affordances of our surrounding material environment, 2) biological constraints of our human bodies, 3) social normative constraints of culture and society, and 4) the local history of social interactions. These structures and constraints interact in dynamical ways in actual language usage situations: local dialogical and social dynamics motivate and stabilize the profiling of a conceptual space already highly structured by our shared biology, culture, and environment. We will substantiate this perspective with reference to recent studies in experimental pragmatics and semiotics in which participants interact linguistically to solve cooperative tasks. Three main cases will be considered: The dynamic grounding of linguistic categories, the construction of conceptual models to relate entities in a scene, and the construction of shared conceptual scales for assessing and appraising subjective experiences. (shrink)