What’s behind meaning?

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Professor of Theoretical Philosophy, University of Florence, Italy

Abstract

The paper addresses the main questions to be dealt with by any semantic theory which is committed to provide an explanation of how meaning is possible. On one side the paper argues that the resources provided by the development of mathematical logic, theoretical computer science, cognitive psychology, and general linguistics in the 20th Century, however indispensable to investigate the structure of language, rely on the existence of end products in the morphogenesis of meaning. On the other, the paper argues that philosophy of language, which, either in the analytic or the structuralist or the hermeneutical tradition, made little use of such resources (when they are not simply rejected). Left the main question unanswered. Though phenomenology intended to focus on the constitutive process, it ended up mostly with philology. Cognitive semantics paved the way to focus on patterns of bodily interaction within the natural environment out of which basic schemes emerge and are metaphorically “lifted” to any universe of discourse. The explanatory commitment is thus endorsed through two hypotheses: (1) these schemes, of topological and kinaesthetic structure, determine the range of forms of atomic sentences of any natural language, and (2) the category-theoretic notion of universality allows for a proper analysis of how such schemes are “lifted”.

Keywords

References

-         Bell, John (1986) Toposes and Local Set Theories, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
-         Feldman, Jeremy (2006) From Molecule to Metaphor, MIT Press, Cambridge (MA).
-         Fillmore, Charles (1968) The case for case, in E. Bach, R. Harms (eds.) Universals in Linguistic Theory, Holt, Rineheart & Wilson, New York 1968 (pp. 1-88).
-         Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark (1980) Metaphors we live by, Chicago University Press, Chicago.
-         Lakoff, George (1987) Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
-         Lawvere, William (2000) Comments on the Development of Topos theory in J.-P. Pier ed., The Development of Mathematics 1950-2000, Birkhauser, Basel (pp 715-734).
-         Lawvere, William and Rosebrugh, Robert (2003) Sets for Mathematics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
-         Mac Lane, Saunders (1986) Mathematics: Form and Function, Springer, New York.
-         Macnamara, John and Reyes, Gonzalo eds. (1994), Logical Foundations of Cognition, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
-         Peruzzi, Alberto (1988) The Theory of Descriptions Revisited, Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, 30 pp. 91-104.
-         Peruzzi, Alberto (1989) Towards a Real Phenomenology of Logic, Husserl Studies, 6, pp 1-24.
-         Peruzi, Alberto (1993) Holism: the polarized spectrum, Grazer Philosophische Studien, 46, pp. 231-282.
-         Peruzzi, Alberto (1994) From Kant to entwined naturalism, Atti del Dipartimento di Filosofia, University of Florence, vol. IX, pp. 225-334.
-         Peruzzi, Alberto (2004) Noema fondato, in R. Lanfredini (ed.), Fenomenologia applicata, pp. 13-38, Guerini, Milan.
-         Peruzzi, Alberto ed. (2004) Mind and Causality, Benjamins, Amsterdam.
-         Peruzzi, Alberto (2011) Logic in category theory in M. Hallett, D. Devidi, P. Clark (eds.), Vintage Enthusiasms: Logic, Mathematics, Philosophy, essays in honour of John Lane Bell, Springer, New York (pp. 287-326).
-         Petitot, Jean (2011), Cognitive Morphodynamics (in collaboration with R. Doursat), Peter Lang, Berlin.
-         Port, Robert and van Gelder, Tim, eds. (1995) Mind as Motion, MIT Press, Cambridge (MA).
-         Thom, René (1980) Modèles mathématiques de la morphogenèse. C. Bourgois, Paris.
-         Tragesser, Robert (1977) Phenomenology and Logic, Cornell University Press, Ithaca.
-         Weyl, Hermann (1926) Philosophie der Mathematik und Naturwissenschaft, R. Oldenbourg, München
Send comment about this article
CAPTCHA Image
Journal of Philosophical Investigations
Volume 11, Issue 21
2017
Pages 119-145

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics