🚀 go-pugleaf

gal2@ellis.uchicago.edu (Jacob Galley) writes:

>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.

See work by Benny Shanon, for example two recent papers in
Philosophical Psychology and a 1988 PSych Bulletin paper.  HE shares
this same concern and has talked about ways to get beyond this
solipsism.
In general my impression is that most psychologists don't think that
there can be a psychological theory of extensional meaning, hence
their interest in what Shanon calls "horizontal" theories of meaning.

>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?

What about Harnad's work on categorical perception?  My impression was
that this is exactly the issue that he is interested in.  You can down
load a number of his papers from princeton.edu (I think), in the
pub/harnad directory. 


Russ Poldrack
rpoldrac@psych.uiuc.edu