MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences - Cryptome

514 Memory
4. What is the relationship between the meaning of an
expression and what, if anything, the expression refers
to?
5. What is the relationship between the meaning of a complex
expression and the meanings of its constituents?
An answer to question 1 would say whether meanings are
psychological, social, or abstract, although many philosophers
would balk at the question, insisting that meanings are
not entities in their own right and that answering question 2
would take care of question 1. An answer to question 3
would help answer question 2, for what expressions mean
cannot be separated from (and is perhaps reducible to) what
people take them to mean. And question 4 bears on question
3. It was formerly assumed that the speaker’s internal state
underlying his knowledge of the meaning of a term determines
the term’s reference, but Putnam’s (1975) influential
TWIN EARTH thought experiments have challenged this
“internalist” or “individualist” assumption. In reaction,
Chomsky (1986, 1995) and Katz (1990) have defended versions
of internalism about knowledge of language and
meaning.
Question 5 points to the goal of linguistic theory: to provide
a systematic account of the relation between form and
meaning. SYNTAX is concerned with linguistic form, including
LOGICAL FORM, needed to represent scope relationships
induced by quantificational phrases and modal and other
operators; SEMANTICS, with how form maps onto linguistic
meaning. The aim is to characterize the semantic contributions
made by different types of expression to sentences in
which they occur. The usual strategy is to seek a systematic,
recursive way of specifying the meanings of a complex
expression (a phrase or sentence) in terms of the meanings
of its constituents and its syntactic structure (see Larson and
Segal 1995 for a detailed implementation). Underlying this
strategy is the principle of semantic COMPOSITIONALITY,
which seems needed to explain how a natural language is
learnable (but see Schiffer 1987). Compositionality poses
certain difficulties, however, regarding conditional sentences,
PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDE ascriptions, and various
constructions of concern to linguists, such as genitives and
adjectival modification. For example, although Rick’s team
is a so-called possessive phrase, Rick’s team need not be the
team Rick owns—it might be the team he plays for,
coaches, or just roots for. Or consider how the force of the
adjective fast varies in the phrases fast car, fast driver, fast
track, and fast race (see Pustejovsky 1995 for a computational
approach to such problems).
The study of speaker’s meaning belongs to PRAGMATICS.
What a speaker means in uttering a sentence is not just a
matter of what his words mean, for he might mean something
other than or more than what he says. For example,
one might use “You’re another Shakespeare” to mean that
someone has little literary ability and “The door is over
there” to mean also that someone should leave. The listener
has to figure out such things, and also resolve any AMBIGU-
ITY or VAGUENESS in the utterance and identify the references
of any INDEXICALS AND DEMONSTRATIVES. GRICE
(1989) ingeniously proposed that communicating involves a
distinctive sort of audience-directed intention: that one’s
audience is to recognize one’s intention partly on the suppo-
sition that they are intended to recognize it. This idea, which
has important applications to GAME THEORY (communication
is a kind of cooperative game), is essential to explaining
how a speaker can make himself understood even if he does
not make fully explicit what he means, as in IMPLICATURE.
Understanding a speaker is not just a matter of understanding
his words but of identifying his communicative intention.
One must rely not just on knowledge of linguistic
meaning but also on collateral information that one can reasonably
take the speaker to be intending one to rely on (see
Bach and Harnish 1979 for a detailed account). Communication
is essentially an intentional-inferential affair, and linguistic
meaning is just the input to the inference.
See also INDIVIDUALISM; NARROW CONTENT; RADICAL
INTERPRETATION; SENSE AND REFERENCE; REFERENCE, THE-
ORIES OF
—Kent Bach
References
Bach, K., and R. M. Harnish. (1979). Linguistic Communication
and Speech Acts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, N. (1986). Knowledge of Language. New York: Praeger.
Chomsky, N. (1995). Language and nature. Mind 104: 1–61.
Davidson, D. (1984). Essays on Truth and Interpretation. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Grice, P. (1989). Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Hale, B., and C. Wright, Eds. (1997). The Blackwell Companion to
the Philosophy of Language. Oxford: Blackwell.
Katz, J. J. (1990). The Metaphysics of Meaning. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Kripke, S. (1982). Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Larson, R., and G. Segal. (1995). Knowledge of Meaning. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Lyons, J. (1995). Linguistic Semantics: An Introduction. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Pustejovsky, J. (1995). The Generative Lexicon. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Putnam, H. (1975). The meaning of “meaning.” In K. Gunderson,
Ed., Language, Mind, and Knowledge. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, pp. 131–193.
Quine, W. V. (1960) Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Schiffer, S. (1972). Meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schiffer, S. (1987). The Remnants of Meaning. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations. New York:
Macmillan.
Memory
The term memory implies the capacity to encode, store, and
retrieve information. The possibility that memory might not
be a unitary system was proposed by William JAMES (1898)
who suggested two systems which he named primary and
secondary memory. Donald HEBB (1949) also proposed a
dichotomy, suggesting that the brain might use two separate
neural mechanisms with primary or short-term storage
being based on electrical activation, while long-term mem-