IL SIGNIFICATO INESISTENTE: LEZIONI SULLA SEMANTICA

The volume provides a critical examination of the different answers given in XXth century’s philosophy to the questions: What is meaning? Which cognitive resources make our acquaintance with meaning possible? At which extent is semantics dependent on or independent of embodiment? The main philosophical steps (and problems) of contemporary research in semantic theory are considered in relation to the different perspectives offered by logic, linguistics, psychology and computer science. Such steps serve to to identify the core of fundamental issues in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. Progressively, the path changes from a historical reconstruction to a theoretical one, by listing the ingredients of an overall picture, pivoting on a few central claims: thought cannot be reduced to language, semantic competence is rooted in kinaesthetic ‘schemata’, holism can be subscribed in only a local version, modularity of mind is gauged according to a process here indicated as ‘lifting’, stability of meaning is the outcome of emergent attractors, the notion of ‘I’ is made possible by ‘sheafification’, as generalised within category theory. By joining together such claims, a standpoint defined as ‘entwined naturalism’ is advocated in the final chapters to ride out the difficulties met by other answers to the starting questions.