Language and Meaning in Cognitive Science

Cognitive Issues and Semantic theory

Andy Clark, Josefa Toribio

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136525391
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Summarizes and illuminates two decades of research
Gathering important papers by both philosophers and scientists, this collection illuminates the central themes that have arisen during the last two decades of work on the conceptual foundations of artificial intelligence and cognitive science. Each volume begins with a comprehensive introduction that places the coverage in a broader perspective and links it with material in the companion volumes. The collection is of interest in many disciplines including computer science, linguistics, biology, information science, psychology, neuroscience, iconography, and philosophy. Examines initial efforts and the latest controversies
The topics covered range from the bedrock assumptions of the computational approach to understanding the mind, to the more recent debates concerning cognitive architectures, all the way to the latest developments in robotics, artificial life, and dynamical systems theory. The collection first examines the lineage of major research programs, beginning with the basic idea of machine intelligence itself, then focuses on specific aspects of thought and intelligence, highlighting the much-discussed issue of consciousness, the equally important, but less densely researched issue of emotional response, and the more traditionally philosophical topic of language and meaning. Provides a gamut of perspectives
The editors have included several articles that challenge crucial elements of the familiar research program of cognitive science, as well as important writings whose previous circulation has been limited. Within each volume the papers are organized to reflect a variety of research programs and issues. The substantive introductions that accompany each volume further organize the material and provide readers with a working sense of the issues and the connection between articles.

MIDWEST STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY, X (1986)

Advertisement for a Semantics for Psychology

NED BLOCK

Meaning is notoriously vague. So, it should not be surprising that semanticists (those who study meaning) have had somewhat different purposes in mind, and thus have sharpened the ordinary concept of meaning in somewhat different ways. It is a curious and unfortunate fact that semanticists typically tell us little about what aspects of meaning they are and are not attempting to deal with. One is given little guidance as to what extent “rival” research programs actually disagree.

My purpose here is to advocate an approach to semantics relevant to the foundations of psychology, or, rather, one approach to one branch of psychology, namely cognitive science. I shall be talking in terms of some of the leading ideas of cognitive science, most importantly the representational theory of mind, aspects of which will be sketched as they become relevant.¹ The representalist doctrine that my argument depends on is that thoughts are structured entities. I know this will be a sticking point for some readers, so I will say a bit more about what this comes to, and I will compare my position with related positions that reject it.

My strategy will be to begin with some desiderata. These desiderata vary along many dimensions: how central they are to meaning, how psychologically oriented they are, how controversial they are. I will argue that one approach to semantics (not to keep you in suspense—conceptual role semantics) promises to handle such desiderata better than the others that I know about. Though I think my desiderata yield a coherent picture of a psychologically relevant semantics, they are not intended to be pretheoretically obvious; rather, they were chosen to flatter the theory I have in mind. I will not be arguing that semantic theories that fail to satisfy these desiderata are thereby defective; there are distinct—and equally legitimate—questions about meaning that a semantic theory can seek to answer.

The view that I am advertising is a variant on the functionalism familiar in the philosophy of mind. However, I will not be attempting to counter the objections that have been raised to that view (except briefly, and in passing). My bet is that looking at functionalism from the point of view of meaning (rather than mentality) and with an eye to its fertility and power rather than its weaknesses will provide a rationale for working on its problems.

DESIDERATA

Desideratum 1: Explain the relation between meaning and reference/truth. This is the least psychological of all my desiderata. The details of what I have in mind will be discussed when I say how conceptual role semantics promises to explain the relation between meaning and truth.

Desideratum 2: Explain what makes meaningful expressions meaningful. What is it about ‘cat’ in virtue of which it has the meaning it has? What is the difference between ‘cat’ and ‘glurg’ in virtue of which the former has meaning and the latter does not? (And so on, for types of expressions other than words.)

Desideratum 3: Explain the relativity of meaning to representational system. This desideratum is arguably just a special case of the preceding one, but I think it is worth mentioning and discussing separately. As we all know, one linguistic item—for example, a sound or linguistic expression—can have different meanings in different languages. For example, many vocabulary items have different meanings in the dialects of English spoken in North America and England, as in ‘trailer’ and ‘bathroom’.

But the significance of this relativity of meaning to system of representation goes deeper than such examples suggest. One way to see this is to note that whole semantic (and syntactic) categories are relative to system of representation. Ink marks that function as a picture in your tribe may function as a word in mine. Further, within the category of pictures, representations are understood differently in different cultures.² Finally, syntactic category is relative in the same way. Handwriting, for example, differs in different school systems. Perhaps the ink marks that are regarded as an ‘A’ in Edinburgh are regarded as an ‘H’ in Chicago. Is there some common explanation of the relativity to representational system of both semantic and syntactic categories?

Desideratum 4: Explain compositionality. The meaning of a sentence is in some sense a function of the meanings of the words in it (plus the syntax of the sentence). What, exactly, is the relation between the semantic values of sentences and words? Is one more basic than the other? Another question arises once we have fixed on an answer to these questions—namely, why is it that the semantic value of a sentence has whatever relation it has to the semantic values of its parts?

Desideratum 5: Fit in with an account of the relation between meaning and mind/brain. Why should one expect (or at least hope for) a semantic theory to fit into an account of the relation between meaning and mind or brain? Because it would be surprising if the nature of meaning (what meaning is) were utterly irrelevant to explaining what it is to grasp or understand meanings, and how grasping meanings can have physical effects. At least, one can imagine differences between x and y that make for a difference between what it is to grasp x and y. For example, understanding x may require skills or recognitional abilities, whereas understanding y may require only propositional knowledge.

I said “mind or brain,” but in fact I will focus on the brain. And in discussing this matter, I will simply adopt a form of materialism (the “token” identity thesis—that each particular mental occurrence is a physical occurrence).

What is supposed to be in need of explanation about the relation of meaning to the brain? Well, one obvious question is: what is it for the brain to grasp meanings, and how is it that the brain's grasp of meanings has effects on the world? Meanings are (at least apparently) nonphysical abstract objects. And the relation between a brain and the meanings it grasps does not seem to be like the relation between a metal bar and the number of degrees Celsius that is its temperature—a case in which there are proposals about how a change in the value of the temperature can cause, say, expansion of the bar (see Field 1980). Yet the difference between a brain that grasps a certain meaning and a brain that does not makes for a difference in the causal properties of that brain. A brain that grasps the meaning of ‘transmogrify’ can win a quiz show for its owner, transporting the two of them to a hotel in the Catskills. We need an account of how such a relation between a brain and a meaning can make a causal difference.

Desideratum 6: Illuminate the relation between autonomous and inherited meaning. If there are representations in the brain, as the representational theory of the mind contends, then there is an obvious distinction to be made between them and other representations—for instance, representations on this page (Searle, 1980a; Haugeland, 1980). The representations on the page must be read or heard to be understood, but not so for the representations in the brain. The representations on the page require for their understanding translation, or at least transliteration into the language of thought; the representations in the brain (some of them, at any rate) require no such translation or transliteration. Let us say that the representations that require no translation or transliteration have antonomous meaning, where as the ones that do require translation or transliteration have inherited meaning.

Different views of meaning have quite different consequences for the issue of what a semantic theory could hope to say about either type of meaning. On Searle's view, for example, the most a semantic theory could say about this matter is to give an account of how inherited meaning (observer-relative meaning, in his terminology) is inherited from autonomous meaning (intrinsic meaning, in his terminology). Explaining autonomous meaning itself, in his view, is simply outside the scope of semantics. The most we can say by way of giving an account of autonomous meaning, according to Searle, is that it arises from the causal powers of the human brain and would arise from any other object (e.g., a machine) that has “equivalent causal powers.”

Despite the panoply of views on this matter, there are a few questions whose interest should be agreed on by all who accept the distinction between autonomous and inherited meaning to begin with. The main questions are: What are autonomous and inherited meaning? What is the relation between autonomous and inherited meaning? For example, are they just two different types of meaning, neither of which is derivative from or reducible to the other?³

A related question is how a representation with autonomous meaning can mean the same as a representation with inherited meaning. Many philosophers would disparage such a question because of skepticism about synonomy. But it is not clear that those who accept it are caught in the Quinean quicksand. That depends on whether the notion of meaning used in cognitive science must carry with it commitment to truths of meaning, and hence commitment to a priori truth.⁴

Desideratum 7: Explain the connections between knowing, learning, and using an expression, and the expression's meaning. Obviously, there is a close connection between the meaning of a word, on the one hand, and what we know when we know or understand a word and what we learn when we learn a word, on the other hand. Indeed, it is intuitively plausible that these italicized descriptions have the same referent (though it would be a mistake to adhere dogmatically to this pretheoretic intuition).

Further, one who has learned an expression (and therefore knows it) automatically has a capacity to use it correctly; also, evidence of correct usage is evidence for knowing the meaning. A psychologically relevant theory of meaning ought to illuminate the connections between knowing/understanding/learning and usage, on the one hand, and meaning on the other.

Desideratum 8: Explain why different aspects of meaning are relevant in different ways to the determination of reference and to psychological explanation. One can distinguish between two aspects of meaning that are relevant to psychological explanation in quite different ways. One type of case involves indexicals, for example:

(1) I am in danger of being run over.

(2) Ned Block is in danger of being run over.

Consider the difference between the beliefs I would express by uttering (1), as compared with (2). Believing (2) cannot be guaranteed to have the same life-saving effect on my behavior as believing (1), since I may not know I am Ned Block (I may think I am Napoleon).⁵ So there is an important difference between (1) and (2) with respect to causation (and therefore causal explanation) of behavior.

This observation is one motivation for a familiar way of thinking about meaning and belief content in which, when you and I have beliefs expressed by our (respective) utterances of (1), we have beliefs with the same content. This is the way of individuating in which two lunatics who say “I am Napoleon” have the same delusion. Corresponding to this way of individuating belief content, we have a way of individuating meanings in which the meanings of the two lunatics’ sentence tokens are the same. This is the way of individuating meanings of tokens that is geared toward sentence types, and thus seems most natural for linguistics—since it makes the meaning of a sentence a function of the meanings of the words in the sentence (plus syntax). Notice that on this way of individuating, utterances of (1) and (2) by me have different meanings and standardly express beliefs with different contents. Again, this way of individuating is natural for linguistics, since no reasonable dictionary would give ‘I’ and ‘Ned Block’ the same entry.

Nonetheless, (1), said by me, and (2) express the same proposition, according to a familiar way of individuating propositions. In a familiar sense of ‘meaning’ in which two sentence tokens have the same meaning just in case they express the same proposition, (1), said by me, and (2) have the same meaning. If we individuate contents of beliefs as we individuate the propositions believed, the belief I express by (1) would have the same content as the belief I express by (2). Further, the belief I express by (1) would have different content from the belief you express by (1); similarly, the meaning of my utterance of (1) would be different from your utterance of (1).

Call the former scheme of individuation narrow individuation and the latter wide individuation (cf. Kaplan's different distinction between character and content). Wide individuation groups token sentences together if they attribute the same properties to the same individuals, whereas narrow individuation groups sentence tokens together if they attribute the same properties using the same descriptions of individuals—irrespective of whether the individuals referred to are the same. In other words, narrow individuation abstracts from the question of (i.e., ignores) whether the same individuals are involved and depends instead on how the individuals are referred to.⁶ (Note that the question of how individuals are referred to is quite different from the question of how the referrer thinks of the referent. For example, two uses of (1) have the same narrow meaning (in my sense of the phrase) even if one user thinks he's Napoleon while the other thinks he's Wittgenstein.)

One can think of narrow and wide individuation as specifying different aspects of meaning, narrow and wide meaning. (I am not saying that narrow and wide meaning are kinds of meaning, but only aspects or perhaps only determinants of meaning.) Narrow meaning is “in the head,” in the sense of this phrase in which it indicates supervenience on physical constitution,⁷ and narrow meaning captures the semantic aspect of what is in common to utterances of (e.g.) (1) by different people. Wide meaning, by contrast, depends on what individuals outside the head are referred to, so wide meaning is not “in the head.” The type of individuation that gives rise to the concept of narrow meaning also gives rise to a corresponding concept of narrow belief content. Two utterances have the same narrow meaning just in case the beliefs they express have the same narrow content.

Note that despite the misleading terminology, wide meaning does not include narrow meaning. Utterances of (1) (by me) and (2) have the same wide meaning but not the same narrow meaning.⁸

Narrow meaning/content and wide meaning/content are relevant to psychological explanation in quite different ways. For one thing, the narrow meaning of a sentence believed is more informative about the mental state of the bel...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• On the Nature, Use and Acquisition of Language
• Magic Words: How Language Augments Human Computation
• Rules of Language
• Can Machines Think?
• Understanding Understanding: Syntactic Semantics and Computational Cognition
• Understanding Natural Language
• Individualism, Computation, and Perceptual Content
• Externalist Explanation
• Ecological Content
• Advertisement for a Semantics for Psychology
• Putting Information to Work
• Biosemantics
• Acknowledgments