Peter Gärdenfors
What are meanings?
- Realism: meanings are out there in the world (e.g., the meaning of the word 'horse' is the set of all horses)(i.e., extensional). Plato, Frege
- Conceptual: meanings are in the head (i.e., cognitive constructs). Gärdenfors, Lakoff
- Nominal: words don't have meaning, they are just triggers of behavior
What is the relation between communicative acts and their meanings?
Meanings are truth conditions about the world
- Builds on realism
- Extensional
- Language -(truth)-> World
- Intensional
- Language -(truth)-> Possible Worlds
- Builds on conceptualism
- Mapping between cognitive structures of language and cognitive structures of the world
- (Language -(meaning)-> Conceptual Structure) -> World
How can meanings be learned?
What is the relation between individual speakers and their communal language?
What is the relation between perceptual processes and meaning? What is the relation between action processes and meaning?
- A conceptual space consists of a number of dimensions (color, size, shape, weight, position)
- Dimensions have topological or geometric structures
- e.g., time is isomorphic to the real line
- e.g., weight is isomorphic to the positive real line (i.e., no negative)
- Dimensions are sorted into (independent) domains
- i.e., bundles of dimensions forming a group
- e.g., color space, shape space
- Less distance means greater similarity of meaning
- betweeness is the key operation of a dimension
- Concepts are represented as convex regions of conceptual spaces