🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov9.005957.7189@midway.uchicago.edu> I write: 
>Can anyone direct me toward any viable theories of meaning that do
>not postulate that some kind of truth functional logic is at the
>foundation of meaning?

And I have already gotten several good responses about modern /
cognitive research in this area:

James Allen, _Natural Language Understanding_.

J. Barwise & J. Perry (1983), _Situations and Attitudes_, MIT Press.

Collins & Quillian (1969?).

Collins & Loftus (1972?).

Ray Jackendoff (1984), _Semantics and Cognition_, MIT.
	(1991), _Semantic Structures_, MIT.

P.N. Johnson-Laird (1983), _Mental Models_, Harvard.
	(in press?), _Deduction_.

Steven Levinson, _Pragmatics_.

Thanks, these look worthwhile. (I would give credit to those who
supplied this info if it was anything more that just bibliographic.)
I'll be off to the library to check out situation semantics and mental
models more closely.

Now I think my original question was not specific enough. What bothers
me about the theories of meaning that I have seen is that they do not
adequately account for how meaningful symbols are linked to WHAT THEY
MEAN. Ie, while we have made a good amount of progress in syntax and
taxonomic classifications, which describe how meaningful signs
interact with and relate to each other, I have not encountered any
theories of how the signifier is linked to the signified.

It seems to me that employing symbolic representations (and nothing
else) in theories of meaning bypasses this whole issue. This gets into
the well-worn argument of meaningless infinite regress. So I will
refine my question:

Can anyone direct me toward any viable theories of meaning that manage
to link symbolic / categorical representation to any form of
nonsymbolic / noncategorical representation? What kinds of nonsymbolic
representation are there?

John Haugeland, in "Representational Genera" in _Philosophy and
Connectionist Theory_ (forgot the year & publisher), does a good job
differentiating symbolic (he says "logical") representation from
iconic representation (eg, the kind used in pictures and analog
recordings). He goes on to suggest that the kind of representation
done in "neural-nets" (etc) is different from either of the first two.

Has anyone else done anything similar?

Thanks for reading (and answering)!

Jake.

-- 
"What's so interdisciplinary about studying lower levels of thought process?"
				  <-- Jacob Galley / gal2@midway.uchicago.edu