Chapter 3: Programming Dumbella

Introduction: aim of the book is to help us build a model of our mental lexicon

 

Chapter 4: Slipper Customers – Attempting to pin down the meaning of words

Fixed meaning assumption:  there indeed exists, somewhere, a basic meaning for each word, which individuals will strive to attain. semantic entries in one’s mental lexicon is “cut and dried”

Fixed meaning adherents: lexicographers + schoolmasters (their jobs would be easier fi words had precise meanings)

Fuzzy meaning assumption:  words cannot be assignment a firm meaning, natural language concepts have vague boundaries and fuzzy edges.  extremely difficult to characterize entries in a person’s mental lexicon

Fuzzy meaning adherents: poets + mystics

Not typically, but philosophers  fixed meaning, psychologists  fuzzy meaning.

LOOKING AT what info might be in a person’s mind rather than trying to come to grips with how can one define a meaning of a word (which is more of a philosophical question)

NOT concerned with “inscrutability of reference” complex relationship between a word and a real-world thing it labels. Words concepts  things (unclear link)

Are there abstract concepts which are separate from word meaning? Or are word meanings and concepts identical?

Assumption (for book)

1.       People translate the real world into objects. They reflect the external world fairly well and there is a certain consensus on what the word means across people who speak different languages.

2.       ‘Meaning’ of a word overlaps with concept. To a large extent, but not entirely. “Concept” may extend beyond the notion of a “word”.

FIXED MEANING CAMP

Edward Bradford Titchener: we have words filed as a series of snapshots, Adlestrop thus conjures up a particular file from the file (that of a view through a train window)

(Psychologists: episodic memory, where a particular episode is remembered with great clarity, sometimes with a word label attached)

Problems with the SNAPSHOT VIEWPOINT AS a general theory of word meaning:

- e.g. snapshot of a cat, do we need a whole dossier of photos of a cat in every single position and every single colour/size, before we can learn to identify something new we see as a cat?

- for something as general as an animal, how could there be a specific associated image

“Meaning involves a mental image.” – unsatisfactory.

‘Check-list’ theory: meaning of a word involves certain essential and