On the mental mapping of public meanings
Stavros Assimakopoulos
stavros.assimakopoulos@um.edu.mt
Linguistic Circle University of Malta
01/12/2011
Cognitivism and linguistics
A thorough investigation of cognition is possible through
positing mental structures and accounting for the
computational relevance of mental states and processes.
Linguistics research:
e.g. Chomsky’s I-language: “some element of the mind of the
person who knows a language, acquired by the learner, and
used by the speaker-hearer” (Chomsky 1986:22)
In this sense, the study of language is meant to provide a
‘window’ to the mind.
Cognitivism and linguistics
What about the study of linguistic meaning?
Traditional reliance on metaphysics which idealises away from
the conditions in which language actually exists.
e.g. “I distinguish two topics: (1), the description of possible
languages or grammars as abstract semantic systems
whereby symbols are associated with aspects of the world;
and (2), the description of the psychological and sociological
facts whereby a particular one of these abstract semantic
systems is the one used by a person or population. Only
confusion comes of mixing the two topics. This paper deals
almost entirely with the first.” (Lewis 1970:19)
Linguistic meaning and communication
A parallel (Fregean) argument has traditionally been held for
understanding communication:
Linguistic communication involves the exact reduplication of
the speaker’s thoughts in the mind of the hearer
- Mutual knowledge of linguistic meaning
- Mutual knowledge of context used
Code model of communication:
Speaker encodes message
Hearer decodes it
e.g. “Snow is white”
SNOW IS WHITE
Linguistic meaning and communication
But this is not the only game in town.
Recent(ish) move towards truth-conditional pragmatics:
“Linguistically encoded semantic representations are abstract
mental structures which must be inferentially enriched
before they can be taken to represent anything of
interest” (Sperber & Wilson 1986:174)
Inferential model of communication:
Speaker encodes message
Hearer decodes it and
inferentially enriches it into a truth-evaluable proposition
e.g. “John is ready”
JOHN IS READY FOR X AT TIME Y
etc.
Plan of this talk
Why Relevance Theory?
Cognitivism: “What is needed is an attempt to rethink, in
psychologically realistic terms, such basic questions as: What
form of shared information is available to humans? How is
shared information exploited in communication? What is
relevance and how is it achieved?” (Sperber & Wilson
1986:38)
Linguistic meaning is information that humans share and
exploit in communication.
RT addresses how we exploit semantic content but relies on
Fodor with respect to how we share it.
Fodorian semantics
Fodorian semantics:
Linguistic semantics is translational:
A public language form ‘abc’ directly encodes a Mentalese
form ‘ijk’.
Mental representation is the only locus of real semantics
(= truth-conditional explication of the relation between our
thoughts. and reality)
“English has no semantics. Learning English isn't learning a
theory about what its sentences mean, it's learning how to
associate its sentences with the corresponding thoughts.”
(Fodor 1998:9)
RT and Fodorian semantics
“Apart from Fodor's simplifying assumption that natural
language sentences are isomorphic with the thoughts they
express, this view is consonant with the relevance-theoretic
outlook.” (Carston 1999:90)
Linguistic underdeterminacy thesis:
Linguistic meaning underdetermines the proposition that is
explicitly expressed by an utterance. (Carston 2002)
Some sort of inferential enrichment is necessary for the
interpreter of an utterance to construct the basic
proposition it expresses. => explicature
(Remember “John is ready”?)
RT and Fodorian semantics
So, how do we comprehend an utterance ?
- The grammar decodes the uttered sentence into its subpropositional assumption schema.
- In parallel, the utterance’s explicature and implicatures are
constructed in a dedicated processor via deductive inference
against the context of utterance .
Interpretive hypotheses are assessed in order of accessibility
until a satisfactory interpretation is yielded.
RT and Fodorian semantics
Therefore, for RT linguistic semantics belongs to the
description of assumptions schemas (encoded contextindependent meaning).
But if assumption schemas are patently incomplete
propositions, as linguistic underdeterminacy suggests,
Mentalese, they cannot possibly be ascribed any ‘real’
semantics.
[By definition, only full propositions can be evaluated for their
truth in the world.]
RT and Fodorian semantics
Reaction: Semantic Minimalism Context-independent basic
propositions are psychologically real and truly shared among
speakers of the same language.
Conceding with the minimalists:
Even if context-independent semantic content was real, “the
propositions concerned would usually be very weak/general
or absurdly strong, often either truisms or obvious
falsehoods”. (Carston 2010:23)
But if we don’t use semantic contents, why do we need to
assume they are mental representations in the first place?
RT and Fodorian semantics
Turning to lexical meaning, the problem becomes more
obvious…
Again, for Fodor (as for most traditional semanticists) there is
a one-to-one mapping between words and concepts.
e.g. The meaning of “bachelor” is given by the atomic concept
BACHELOR.
How?
We get nomologically locked to the essential property of the
real-world entity to which a concept refers.
RT and Fodorian semantics
Problem #1: Positing ad hoc concepts in the mind
For RT words encode atomic concepts but the lexical
meanings that are constructed during utterance
comprehension might not be the encoded ones.
e.g. “Mary wants to meet some bachelors.”
Encoded concept: BACHELOR
But the communicated concept is inferentially constructed
on an ad hoc basis: BACHELORS* (unmarried guys eligible
to get married, obviously not the Pope)
RT and Fodorian semantics
Various criticisms have been expressed regarding the
compatibility of this notion of ad hoc concept with Fodor’s
views. (Burton-Roberts 2007, Groefsema 2007, Vicente &
Manrique-Martinez 2010)
What I want to ask in turn is: Are ad hoc concepts merely
the result of the comprehension procedure or do they
generalise in thought as well?
In short: When Mary is thinking about bachelors is she
thinking about BACHELORS or BACHELORS*?
RT and Fodorian semantics
This problem does not arise for Fodor since Mary always
thinks of BACHELORS and communicates BACHELORS.
Why?
Because for philosophical semantics to work thought and
language need to be isomorphic [Publicity constraint:
meanings are stable across times and individuals]:
“the kind of explanations that semantic theories are supposed to
give would not survive substituting a similarity-based notion of
content for an identity-based notion” (Fodor & Lepore, 1999:382)
(e.g. compositionality, satisfaction conditions assignment,
intentional explanation etc.)
RT and Fodorian semantics
But ad hoc concepts are not stable entities and cannot but
be similar enough between two interlocutors, since they are
based on subjective contexts to construct. (cf. Barsalou
1993)
The problem generalises even further since ad hoc concepts
are pervasive in thought (at least in the propositions
generated by the comprehension process):
“in any case, the concept communicated will only
occasionally be the same as the one encoded”. (Sperber &
Wilson 1998:200)
RT and Fodorian semantics
Consider also:
1) Words like ‘happy’ (Carston 2002:360), ‘cut’ (Searle
1980:221).
Can they encode a general abstract concept, and if they do,
does this ever appear in thought?
2) Expressivist terms: there are plenty of (moral, ethical etc.)
lexical items that are (often assumed to be) non-descriptive.
3) Pro-concepts: my, your, and, but, however, near...
RT and Fodorian semantics
Against this background, we seem to have two types of
concepts:
- Ones that encode ‘a sort of common core of meaning
shared’ by every occasion of them.
- Ones that are communicated and maybe utilised in thought
in the place of their encoded counterparts.
Surely, Fodor wouldn’t want to go there…
RT and Fodorian semantics
“In fact (barring indexicals and the like) I doubt that one can
distinguish, in any motivated way, the contribution that
context makes to disambiguation and the contribution it
makes to lexical sense/meaning per se. For this (and many
other) reasons, I'm increasingly inclined to conclude that
there is no such thing as sense/meaning, and that the
semantics, both for language and for thought, is purely
referential”. (p.c., cf. Fodor 2008)
[In order to reconcile RT with Fodor’s externalism, we would
need to say that apart from locking to the concept BACHELOR,
we also lock to the set of concepts (BACHELOR*…
BACHELOR*n) - This is ontologically a nightmare]
RT and Fodorian semantics
Problem #2: Analyticity
“The ‘meaning’ of a word is provided by [its...] associated
concept. (Sperber & Wilson 1995:90)
Concepts comprise (are coupled with) “triples of entries,
logical, lexical and encyclopaedic.” (Sperber & Wilson
1995:92)
Lexical Entry:
“syntactic and phonological information that would be
contained in the lexical entry for that item in a generative
grammar: information about its syntactic category
membership and co-occurrence possibilities, phonological
structure, and so on.” (Sperber & Wilson 1995:90)
RT and Fodorian semantics
Logical Entry:
“a set of deductive rules which apply to logical forms of
which that concept is a constituent.” (Sperber & Wilson
1995:86) => meaning postulates capturing analytic
implications of the concept
e.g. φ-CAT-ψ → φ-ANIMAL-ψ
Encyclopaedic Entry:
“information about the concept’s extension and/or
denotation: the objects, events and/or properties which
instantiate it.” (Sperber & Wilson 1995:87) => assumptions,
images etc.
RT and Fodorian semantics
For Fodor (since 1998) – and many other philosophers –
analyticities don’t even exist, if one follows Quine’s
compelling argumentation.
But for RT meaning postulates are necessary given their
computational nature. (otherwise there would be no way to
decode an utterance’s assumption schema)
The only way out of this is by positing a psychological notion
of analyticity, i.e. that meaning postulates included in the
logical entry of a concept are merely viewed by the
individual mind as analytic.
=> Psychosemantic analyticity (Horsey 2006, following
Boghossian 1993)
RT and Fodorian semantics
“It is at least possible, then, to dissociate the notion ‘contentconstitutive inference’ from the notion ‘analytic inference’.
[…] content constitutive inferences are now to be conceived
of psychologically - and while the majority of our
psychologically represented inference rules are no doubt
veridical, this is by no means necessary. There can be plenty
of cases, such as the ‘φ WHALE ψ → φ FISH ψ’ example
[…], where our meaning postulates are not in fact veridical,
and hence fail to be analytic.” (Horsey 2006:73-74)
RT and Fodorian semantics
Content-constitutive psychosemantic analyticities in the form
of meaning postulates are to be included in the logical entry
of our concepts.
But that would again violate Fodor’s publicity constraint, since
psychosemantic analyticities are not strictly speaking
shareable:
And “meeting the requirement that intentional contents be
literally public is non-trivial; like compositionality, publicity
imposes a substantial constraint upon one’s theory of
concepts and hence, derivatively, upon one’s theory of
language.” (Fodor 1998:30)
RT and Fodorian semantics
Consider: “some concepts are properly shared, and can be
unequivocally expressed […]. Other concepts are
idiosyncratic, but as a result of common experience or
communication, are close enough to the idiosyncratic
concepts of others to play a role in the co-ordination of
behaviour”. (Sperber & Wilson 1998:200)
For Fodor ALL concepts are properly shared because they
are locked to the same properties in the world. (how?)
RT and Fodorian semantics
But even this view is not without its problems.
e.g. The problem of translation:
If language has no semantics and words get their meaning
from the corresponding concepts, does it mean that having
two words for something gives us two concepts?
“as von Vintel and Matthewson (2008) show, there are
probably no senses that are lexicalized across all languages in
the same manner. For sure, some semantic universals exist,
but even the best candidates (WATER, COLD, WHITE) don’t
map perfectly across languages, corresponding to one lexical
entry in one language and two or more in others.” (Kjoll ms.)
RT and Fodorian semantics
In conclusion, Fodor’s publicity constraint cannot be
maintained for a theory that examines language in the
natural setting of communication.
- Shared basic propositions for utterances are of
questionable psychological value.
- Ad hoc concepts cannot be shared.
- Psychosemantic analyticities cannot be shared.
- Maybe even some encoded concepts are partially shared.
Inference and intersubjective meanings
So, if our conceptual contents are personal, what is it that
keeps us from having really disparate intuitions about
linguistic meaning?
Proposal: We have a natural tendency to remain conventional
and thus think that we share the same linguistic meaning
through “tuning our conceptualisations to those of
others” (Jackendoff 2002:330)
This can be accounted for empirically (through research on
mindreading and social cognition) and philosophically
(through the notion of the Background)
Inference and intersubjective meanings
Mindreading and social cognition
- Metarepresentation
In contrast to other animals, we are massive users of
metarepresentations.
e.g. If Marie starts showing me her watch now, I can safely
construct the metarepresentation:
‘Marie intends me to believe that it is time I start
wrapping up my talk’.
Inference and intersubjective meanings
There is a pattern according to which we begin computing
higher-order metarepresentations at certain points in our
development. (Sperber 1994)
§ Naive optimism: accept the first interpretation that comes
to mind to be the intended one.
§ Cautious optimism: ability to consider what meaning the
speaker might have intended, at the cost of an extra layer of
metarepresentation.
§ Sophisticated understanding: ability not only to consider
which interpretation the speaker has intended, but also
whether it is deceptive.
Inference and intersubjective meanings
- Joint Attention
In the first year of life, infants make remarkable strides in the
area of social cognition. More specifically, by the ninth month,
infants begin to alternate looks between an adult and
objects, use communicative gestures to direct adult attention
and follow an adult’s line of gaze or pointing towards an
object. These achievements are among the first overt acts
that permit inferences about the sharing of attention, and
collectively, are termed joint attention. (Yazbek &
D’Entremont 2006:589)
Inference and intersubjective meanings
“The very ability to attend with others is founded on an
innate and developing understanding of others’ intentionality,
that is, an understanding as to what, out of a host of
possibilities, another is attending to and, most essentially, for
what purposes”. (Kidwell & Zimmerman 2007:594)
“To realize his aim, the agent focuses selectively on particular
perceptual features. In that sense, attention is intentionally
directed perception. The only way for an agent to read the
intention of another agent is by watching its
behaviour.” (Kaplan & Hafner 2004:68)
Inference and intersubjective meanings
Developmental pattern:
§ At younger ages than that of 9 months infants can detect
intentional actions without cognitively representing
intentional agents (e.g. Cohen & Oakes 1993, Corkum &
Moore 1994, Tomasello 1999)
§ At the age of 9 months, they start attending to stimuli in
their environment jointly with a peer, in an attempt to
understand his/her intentionality with respect to these
stimuli. (e.g. Gopnik & Meltzoff 1993, Tomasello 1995, Rochat
& Striano 1999)
§ Coordinated joint engagement increases with age (e.g.
Bakeman & Adamson 1984, Striano & Bertin 2005)
Inference and intersubjective meanings
So, growing up, an individual manages to eventually develop a
highly sophisticated ‘theory of mind’, attending to potential
stimuli jointly with others and entertaining complex
metarepresentations regarding his/her peers’ intentionality.
In the current setting then, it is plausible that our conceptual
contents that provide word meanings are not identical
between us, but similar enough as our mindreading capacity
keeps us conventional in what we psychologise as semantic
meaning.
After all, mindreading has been suggested to be a main ability
leading to word meaning acquisition. (Bloom 2000)
Inference and intersubjective meanings
Revamping the Background:
“The Background is a set of nonrepresentational mental
capacities that enable all representing to take place”. ( Searle
1983:143).
Two main categories:
- Deep Background: “at least all of those Background
capacities that are common to all normal human beings in
virtue of their biological makeup – capacities such as walking,
eating, grasping, perceiving, recognizing, and the preintentional
stance that takes account of the solidity of things, and
independent existence of objects and other people” (Searle
1983:143-144).
Inference and intersubjective meanings
- Local Background: “such things as opening doors, drinking
beers from bottles, and the preintentional stance that we
take toward such things as cars, refrigerators, money and
cocktail parties” (Searle 1983:144)
Since by definition we share a deep Background with every
individual in the world and a local Background with a large
proportion of the people with whom we interact everyday,
we are bound to attribute to them intentions, beliefs and
desires that they are likely to have themselves.
Inference and intersubjective meanings
It can be hypothesised that the shared Background of two
individuals makes it likely for their mental contents to be
similar enough between them. And the development of
intersubjective conceptual meanings for words could be a
case in point.
In a sense, the Background works like a ‘filter’ in the way we
conceptualise the world. It allows us to think and act
conventionally.
It could be the case then that it is our predisposition to see
the world in a certain way that causally provides us with
our conceptual contents.
Inference and intersubjective meanings
All in all, is it possible to share linguistic meaning in a
psychologically plausible way?
Tentative answer (1):
Yes, if we posit a ‘generative lexicon’ (á la Pustejovsky)
But:
“the lexical entries posited include an arbitrary subset of
general world knowledge” and “the approach can account
for only a very restricted range of cases of meaning
modulation, leaving the vast bulk of context-specific senses to
be explained by a pragmatic account, which, once provided,
will also apply to the few that are allegedly resolved by intralexical means” (Carston 2010)
Inference and intersubjective meanings
Tentative answer (2):
Yes, if we posit a ‘poor’ lexicon and a ‘rich’ inferential system.
Here words encode:
Either underspecified meaning (pointer towards creating a
concept)
Or some psychological variant of “atomic” content (based on
salience over past use more or less, Recanati or Giorastyle???)
The automatic inferential system creates meaning over this
following the RT comprehension procedure.
Inference and intersubjective meanings
In this picture then, inferential pragmatics takes over most of
the ‘business’ that reference-based semantics is traditionally
supposed to take care of.
But this is what Lewis would call “madness”.
Maybe not really: As for semantics, insofar as we understand
language use, the argument for a reference-based semantics
seems to me weak. It is possible that natural language has only
syntax and pragmatics [...]. In this view, natural language consists
of internalist computations and performance systems that
access them along with much other information and belief,
carrying out their instructions in particular ways to enable us to
talk and communicate, among other things. (Chomsky 2000:132)
Thank you for your time