All at sea in semantic space : Churchland on meaning similarity

@article{Fodor1999AllAS,
  title={All at sea in semantic space : Churchland on meaning similarity},
  author={Jerry A. Fodor and Ernie Lepore},
  journal={The Journal of Philosophy},
  year={1999},
  volume={96},
  pages={381-403}
}
Critique de la notion de similarite du contenu qui caracterise les theories semantiques contemporaines. Mettant en evidence la non-pertinence de l'idee de similarite du point de vue des theories de la signification, l'A. refute l'entreprise de reconstruction conceptuelle developpee par P. Churchland et montre que celle-ci se reduit a une sorte d'ignoratio elenchi (argument par ignorance). Examinant les conditions de satisfaction, ainsi que les criteres de la compositionnalite, de la traduction… 
View via Publisher
ruccs.rutgers.edu
52 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
2
Background Citations
20

52 Citations

Connectionist Semantics and the Collateral Information Challenge

It is argued that a connectionist sympathiser of Churchland could not make use of Laakso and Cottrell's 's neurosimulations to address Fodor and Lepore's collateral information challenge.

State space semantics and conceptual similarity: Reply to Churchland

Jerry Fodor and Ernest Lepore [(1992) Holism: a shopper's guide, Oxford: Blackwell; (1996) in R. McCauley (Ed.) The Churchlands and their critics , Cambridge: Blackwell] have launched a powerful…

A connectionist defence of the inscrutability thesis and the elimination of the mental

This work consists of two parts. In Part I (chapters 1-5), I shall produce a Connectionist Defence of Quine's Thesis of the Inscrutability of Reference, according to which there is no objective fact…

Detecting the Evolution of Semantics and Individual Beliefs through Statistical Analysis of Language Use

An automatic mechanism which can replicate semantics by observing regularities in language use through statistical text analysis is demonstrated, postulate that human children, who are fantastic pattern recognizers, may also exploit this same information, thus this mechanism may be an essential module in a human-like cognitive system.

Logical structure and relevance

This thesis sets out to investigate relevance-theoretic pragmatics and its contribution to the study of linguistic meaning from a mentalist outlook and suggests that it is an innate predisposition which enables us to efficiently align the authors' contexts in instances of communication.

An Impossibility Result on Semantic Resemblance

We show that a set of prima facie plausible assumptions on the relation of meaning resemblance - one of which is a compositionality postulate - is inconsistent. On this basis we argue that either…

The Internet and Semantic Structure: A Re-Examination

It is concluded that page counts can be used with some confidence in the social/behavioral sciences, and promising avenues for further research are discussed.

Do We Share a Language? Communitarism and Its Challenges

The idea that natural languages are shared by speakers within linguistic communities is often taken for granted. Several philosophers even take the notion of shared language as fundamental and that…

An Ecological Theory of Rational Interpretation

According to traditional views of philosophy, human beings are the only creatures capable of rationality. Rationality is a special property of human beings, thanks to which they can be distinguished…

Empirical Lessons for Philosophical Theories of Mental Content

This thesis concerns the content of mental representations and draws lessons for philosophical theories of content from some empirical findings about brains and behaviour drawn from experimental psychology, cognitive neuroscience and cognitive science, and some of the representational systems found in real brains.
...

References

SHOWING 1-2 OF 2 REFERENCES

State-Space Semantics and Meaning Holism

The aim here is to show that the statespace approach is both more resilient and more resourceful than their critique would suggest.

17 We are not, please note, asserting – or even suggesting—that content individuation is non-monotonic because it's a species of functional individuation

  • 17 We are not, please note, asserting – or even suggesting—that content individuation is non-monotonic because it's a species of functional individuation