Compositionality and Contextuality: The Symbolic and Statistical Theories of Meaning

Author(s):  
Yoshihiro Maruyama
Keyword(s):  
2010 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-121
Author(s):  
Anik Waldow

This essay argues that Humean impressions are triggers of associative processes, which enable us to form stable patterns of thought that co-vary with our experiences of the world. It will thus challenge the importance of the Copy Principle by claiming that it is the regularity with which certain kinds of sensory inputs motivate certain sets of complex ideas that matters for the discrimination of ideas. This reading is conducive to Hume’s account of perception, because it avoids the impoverishment of conceptual resources so typical for empiricist theories of meaning and explains why ideas should be based on impressions, although impressions cannot be known to mirror matters of fact. Dieser Aufsatz argumentiert dafür, dass humesche Eindrücke („impressions“) Auslöser von assoziativen Prozessen sind, welche es uns ermöglichen, stabile Denkmuster zu bilden, die mit unseren Erfahrungen der Welt kovariant sind. Der Aufsatz stellt somit die Wichtigkeit des Kopien-Prinzips in Frage, nämlich dadurch, dass behauptet wird, für die Unterscheidung der Ideen sei die Regelmäßigkeit maßgeblich, mit der gewisse Arten von sensorischen Eingaben gewisse Mengen von komplexen Ideen motivieren. Diese Lesart trägt zu einem Verständnis von Humes Auffassung der Wahrnehmung bei, da sie die Verarmung der begrifflichen Mittel, die für empiristische Theorien der Bedeutung so typisch ist, vermeidet und erklärt, warum Ideen auf Eindrücken basieren sollten, obwohl Eindrücke nicht als Abbildungen von Tatsachen erkannt werden können.


Author(s):  
Paul M. Pietroski

This chapter summarizes the main themes. Humans naturally acquire generative procedures that connect meanings with pronunciations. These meanings are neither concepts nor extensions. Meanings are composable instructions for how to access and assemble concepts of a special sort. In particular, phrasal meanings are instructions for how to build monadic (i.e., predicative) concepts that are massively conjunctive. Theories of meaning should not be confused with theories of truth. Lexicalization is a process of introducing concepts that can be combined via simple operations whose inputs must be monadic or dyadic. In theorizing about meanings, we can and should eschew much of the powerful typology and combinatorial operations that the founders of modern logic introduced for very different purposes.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory Bochner

How do words stand for things? Taking ideas from philosophical semantics and pragmatics, this book offers a unique, detailed, and critical survey of central debates concerning linguistic reference in the twentieth century. It then uses the survey to identify and argue for a novel version of current 'two-dimensional' theories of meaning, which generalise the context-dependency of indexical expressions. The survey highlights the history of tensions between semantic and epistemic constraints on plausible theories of word meaning, from analytic philosophy and modern truth-conditional semantics, to the Referentialist and Externalist revolutions in theories of meaning, to the more recent reconciliatory ambition of two-dimensionalists. It clearly introduces technical semantical notions, theses, and arguments, with easy-to-follow, step-by-step guides. Wide-ranging in its scope, yet offering an accessible route into literature that can seem complex and technical, this will be essential reading for advanced students, and academic researchers in semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language.


2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (5) ◽  
pp. 593-625 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chi-Hé Elder ◽  
Michael Haugh

Abstract Dominant accounts of “speaker meaning” in post-Gricean contextualist pragmatics tend to focus on single utterances, making the theoretical assumption that the object of pragmatic analysis is restricted to cases where speakers and hearers agree on utterance meanings, leaving instances of misunderstandings out of their scope. However, we know that divergences in understandings between interlocutors do often arise, and that when they do, speakers can engage in a local process of meaning negotiation. In this paper, we take insights from interactional pragmatics to offer an empirically informed view on speaker meaning that incorporates both speakers’ and hearers’ perspectives, alongside a formalization of how to model speaker meanings in such a way that we can account for both understandings – the canonical cases – and misunderstandings, but critically, also the process of interactionally negotiating meanings between interlocutors. We highlight that utterance-level theories of meaning provide only a partial representation of speaker meaning as it is understood in interaction, and show that inferences about a given utterance at any given time are formally connected to prior and future inferences of participants. Our proposed model thus provides a more fine-grained account of how speakers converge on speaker meanings in real time, showing how such meanings are often subject to a joint endeavor of complex inferential work.


1970 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-41
Author(s):  
Louis Caruana

Discussions dealing with natural science, philosophy and common sense are bound to draw on long-standing debates dealing with realism, methodology of science, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, epistemology, theories of meaning, and other topics. Instead of presenting a broad overview of these main trends, which will necessarily be superficial, I will do a kind of case study. The aim is to present just one particular debate which is of relevance to current research. The presentation is meant to give a taste of how these various long-standing debates are brought to bear on a specific issue. In this way, the very practice of engaging in a particular area of philosophy of science will serve as a platform from where the major areas can be seen in actual operation. The paper has four sections: the nature of ordinary talk; the ontological implications of this; the recently proposed account of the mental; an evaluation.


2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-73
Author(s):  
Mohammad Yahya ◽  
Tanti Juliyanti ◽  
Hazma Hazma

This paper was written based on the practice of translating four O. Henry stories  into Bahasa Indonesia. The translated stories are “A Harlem Tragedy”, “A Lickpenny Lover”, “The Last Leaf”, and “The Pendulum”. The strategy of translation and the techniques proposed by Molina and Albir were applied, combined with the the application of theories of meaning, grammatical equivalence, and stylistic devices. In this study these aspects are termed as ‘soft tools of translation’. By applying the soft tools,  the witticism, clever wordplay, unexpected ‘twist’ ending and epic life moment  of ordinary people, as the characteristics of O Henry’s short stories, and foreign culture elements were pursued to preserve in the translation.Key terms: translation, soft tools, short stories, charateristics, culture elements, preserve


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