Before
1600s
1700s
1800s
1900s
1910s
1920s
1930s
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s
2010s


1980s

edit

1980 Bohm

edit

1980 Fish

edit
  • Fish, Stanley (1980). Is There A Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Harvard University Press. [^]

1980 Lakoff and Johnson

edit

1982 Berman

edit
  • Berman, Sanford (1982). Words, Meanings and People, International Society for General Semantics,Concord, CA, 2001. [^]

Many scholars have long recognized this semantic problem. One of the earliest and greatest semanticists was A. B. Johnson. He said, "Much of what is esteemed as profound philosophy is nothing but a disputatious criticism on the meaning of words." Professor A. Schuster said, "Scientific controversies constantly resolve themselves into differences about the meaning of words." And John Locke observed, "Men content themselves with the same words as other people use, as if the sound necessarily carried the same meaning."

Compare the three quotes respectively with:

Language is an important variable in thinking, perceiving, communicating and behaving. This is one of the important principles in general semantics. The title of Korzybski's above article[1] implies the relationship between language and human perception. Anthropologists and linguists such as Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, along with Korzybski, have emphasized the important role that language plays in thinking, perceiving and behaving. (p. 44-45)

From Our human limitations

Cf. The subtitle of Ogden, C. K. & I. A. Richards (1923). The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. [^]

1982 Eco

edit
  • 1:1 map

1984 Blackburn

edit

1986 Rhodes

edit

In London, where Southampton Row passes Russell Square, across from the British Museum in Bloomsbury, Leo Szilard waited irritably one gray depression morning for the stoplight to change. A trace of rain had fallen during the night; Tuesday, September 12, 1933, dawned cool, humid and dull. Drizzling rain would begin again in early afternoon. When Szilard told the story later he never mentioned his destination that morning. He may have had none; he often walked to think. In any case another destination intervened. The stoplight changed to green. Szilard stepped off the curb. As he crossed the street time cracked open before him and he saw a way to the future, death into the world and all our woes, the shape of things to come. (wiki links)

1986 Sperber

edit

1987 Kochen

edit
  • Kochen, Manfred (1987). "How Well Do We Acknowledge Intellectual Debts?" Journal of Documentation, 43 (1): 54-64. [^]

1988 Carston

edit

1988 Deerwester

edit
See also

Synonymy and polysemy are fundamental problems in natural language processing:

  • Synonymy is the phenomenon where different words describe the same idea. Thus, a query in a search engine may fail to retrieve a relevant document that does not contain the words which appeared in the query. For example, a search for "doctors" may not return a document containing the word "physicians", even though the words have the same meaning.
  • Polysemy is the phenomenon where the same word has multiple meanings. So a search may retrieve irrelevant documents containing the desired words in the wrong meaning. For example, a botanist and a computer scientist looking for the word "tree" probably desire different sets of documents.

1989 Kochen

edit
  • Kochen, Manfred, ed. (1989). The Small World: A Volume of Recent Research Advances Commemorating Ithiel de Sola Pool, Stanley Milgram, Theodore Newcomb. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corp. (January 1, 1989). [^]

1989 Rorty

edit

The contingency of language

Here, Rorty argues that all language is contingent. This is because only descriptions of the world can be true or false, and descriptions are made by humans who must make truth or falsity, as opposed to truth or falsity being determined by any innate property of the world being described. Green grass is not true or false, but "the grass is green" is. For example, I can say that 'the grass is green' and you could agree with that statement (which for Rorty makes the statement true), but our use of the words to describe grass is independent of the grass itself. Without the human proposition, truth or falsity is simply irrelevant. Rorty consequently argues that all discussion of language in relation to reality should be abandoned, and that one should instead discuss vocabularies in relation to other vocabularies.

From w: Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

See also

edit

Notes

edit
  1. "The Role of Language in the Perceptual Process"