The field of conceptual semantics concerns how meaning of language is subjective in both the speaker and listener’s brains. How these mental representations are structured, the context, and the idea of subjective truth is the focus.
This sub-field is still primarily focused on language, and benefits from the massive corpus of readily available data and language being a very observable phenomenon.
We are interested in the more general form of cognition, where language may never occur.
Description
Field created by by Jackendoff, Pinker, and Pustejovsky.
Notes taken from:
- Claudia Maienborn, Klaus von Heusinger, Paul Portner (eds.), Semantics: Theories, “Conceptual Semantics”, Chapter 3, pg. 86., 2019
- Ray Jackendoff, A User’s Guide to Thought and Meaning, Oxford University Press, 2012
Sources of Commitment to Mental State
Speaker has arrived at commitments of the world view by these following sources; 1. hearsay 2. memory 3. inference 4. perception
References
Separate two different types of reference between the physical and the mental
- r-reference
- realist reference
- point to something in the world or a possible world
- m-reference
- mentalist reference
- relation between mental structures in the speaker’s mind
Truth
Determining the conditions of the world that will satisfy a sentence to be true (r-truth) versus determining the conceptualizations of the world under which they judge a sentence to be true.
- r-truth
- realist truth
- m-truth
- mentalist truth