🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov9.202812.11520@midway.uchicago.edu>, gal2@ellis.uchicago.edu (Jacob Galley) writes:

[earlier bibliographic references]
 

> 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. 

[...]

> 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?

[...]

It sounds as if you are interested in what we often call lexical
meaning.  And you are interested in non-truth-conditional approaches.

There are two things you probably should look into; one
is prototype theory; anything by Eleanor Rosch, and for a recent
summary, John R. Taylor, _Linguistic Categorization: Prototypes in
Linguistic Theory_.

The other is natural kinds; Hilary Putnam, several of the papers in
_Mind, Language, and Reality_; and Saul Kripke, "Naming and Necessity"
in D. Davidson & G. Harman, eds., _Semantics of Natural Language_, and
for a recent summary, Georgia Green, _Pragmatics and Natural Language
Understanding_ (L. Erlbaum, 1989), Ch. 3, section 3 (she proposes that
*all* terms are natural kind terms).
-- 
-Ken <miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> {Sometimes you have to look reality straight
 OPINIONS ARE MY OWN            {in the eye, and deny it. - G. Keillor