🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov9.202812.11520@midway.uchicago.edu> you write:

> 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.

I suspected this was what you were after.  I often hear it referred to as
the "symbol-grounding problem".  Before looking at any of the books you
mentioned were suggested to you (including my own suggestion of Allen),
find Eco, Santanbrogio, and Violi's _Meaning and Mental Representation_.
It's an anthology of summaries of Barwise's situation semantics work,
Johnson-Laird's mental models work, and others.  But I suggest starting
with Yorick Wilks' article, which explains why he prefers "procedural"
semantics to "denotative" semantics, and why he believes Barwise and
Johnson-Laird have both come up short.

You might also want to look for work under the subject heading of
mutual knowledge, e.g. N. Smith and Herbert Clark.

	-dp-