Abstract
Locke’s view of ideas radically differs from Aristotle’s: they are more similar to what Frege calls “images”, or what contemporary psychology calls “memory traces” (in various modalities). For Locke, the primary function of linguistic signs is that they evoke such ideas. Thus, a semantic theory adopting the Lockean stance is radically different from the mainstream approach. In particular, it does not take reference to be the main explicandum of semantics, and it considers the relationship of utterances to logical assertions a rather indirect one. This type of approach, I argue, is a promising alternative of Frege and Carnap’s theory of model theoretic semantics and Montague’s compositional machinery. In particular, it is capable of explaining the role of association (a non-logical concept) in human communication, people’s diverging judgments concerning logical relations between utterances, and the non-bottom-up character of human interpretation.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Carnap (1952) proposes to capture such regularities using meaning postulates, i.e., constraints on possible language/model pairs that force certain set theoretic relations to hold between predicate extensions in each possible world. It is only natural that the need for such a device arose. On the other hand, meaning postulates were not designed as a systematic and comprehensive account of senses, and they were never thought of as taking over the task of intensions altogether.
- 2.
This principle has been attributed to many thinkers, including Plato, Boole and Frege, but the most widespread definition originates from Montague (1973), in terms of which there must exist a homomorphism between the algebra of linguistic representations and that of semantic representations.
References
Anderson, J.R. 1983. A spreading activation theory of memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 22 (3): 261–295.
Barsalou, L.W. 2005. Situated conceptualization. In Handbook of categorization in cognitive science, ed. H. Cohen and C. Lefebvre, 619–650. Oxford: Elsevier, Chapt. 28.
Blevins, J.P., and J. Blevins (eds.). 2009. Analogy in grammar: Form and acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Carnap, R. 1947. Meaning and necessity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Carnap, R. 1952. Meaning postulates. Philosophical Studies 3: 65–73.
Chomsky, N. 1957. Syntactic structures. The Hague: Mouton.
Davidson, K. 2013. ‘And’ or ‘or’: General use coordination in ASL. Semantics and Pragmatics 6: 1–44.
de Saussure, F. 1931. Cours de linguistique générale. Paris: Payot.
Diessel, H., and M. Hilpert. 2016. Frequency effects in grammar. In Oxford research encyclopedia in linguistics, ed. M. Aronoff. New York: Oxford University Press.
Eddington, D. 2006. Paradigm uniformity and analogy: The capitalistic versus militaristic debate. International Journal of English Studies 6: 1–18.
Evans, J.S.B.T. 1982. The psychology of deductive reasoning. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Foppolo, F. 2009. ‘The puzzle of donkey anaphora resolution’. In NELS 38. GLSA.
Frege, G. 1892. Über Sinn und Bedeutung. Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 100: 25–50.
Frege, G. 1996. On sense and nominatum. In The philosophy of language, ed. A.P. Martinich, 186–198. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Geurts, B. 2002. Donkey business. Linguistics and Philosophy 25: 129–156.
Gruber, J.S. 1985. Lexical, conceptual, and ancyclopedic meaning. Quaderni de Semantica 2: 254–267.
Hayes, P.J. 1979. The naive physics manifesto. In Expert systems in the electronic age, ed. D. Michie, 242–270. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Hume, D. 1738. A treatise of human nature. Oxford: Clarendon Press. revised by P.H. Nidditch, 1975 edition.
Kamp, H. 1973. Free choice permission. In Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 74: 57–74.
Kripke, S. 1980a. Naming and necessity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Kripke, S. 1980b. Naming and necessity. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Locke, J. 1690. An essay concerning humane understanding. London: Thomas Bassett.
Montague, R. 1973. The proper treatment of quantification in ordinary English. In Approaches to Natural Language, ed. J. Hintikka, J. Moravcsik, and P. Suppes, 221–242. Dordrecht: Foris.
Montague, R. 1974. Formal philosophy: Selected papers of Richard Montague. New Haven CT: Yale University Press. Edited and with an introduction by Richmond Thomason.
Partee, B. 1979, ‘Semantics—Mathematics or psychology?’. In Semantics from different points of view, ed. R. Bäuerle, U. Egli, and A. von Stechow, 1–14. Springer
Schank, R., and R.P. Abelson. 1977. Scripts, plans, goals and understanding. New Jersey: Erlbaum.
Skousen, R. 1989. Analogical modeling of language. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Press.
Smolensky, P. 1988. On the proper treatment of connectionism. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11: 1–23.
Szabolcsi, A., and B. Haddican. 2004. Conjunction meets negation: A study in cross-linguistic variation. Journal of Semantics 21 (3): 219–249.
Turney, P.D., and P. Pantel. 2010. From frequency to meaning: Vector space models of semantics. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 37: 141–188.
Zimmermann, T.E. 2000. Free choice disjunction and epistemic possibility. Natural Language Semantics 8: 255–290.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kálmán, L. (2018). Neo-Lockean Semantics. In: Bartos, H., den Dikken, M., Bánréti, Z., Váradi, T. (eds) Boundaries Crossed, at the Interfaces of Morphosyntax, Phonology, Pragmatics and Semantics. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, vol 94. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90710-9_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90710-9_14
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-90709-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-90710-9
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)