Industrial meanings

Industrial Society and its Museums 1890–1990: Social Aspirations and Cultural Politics, by Brigitte Schroeder‐Gudehus, ed., Newark, NJ: Harwood Academic Publs, Gordon & Breach Science Publs, 1993, hb, $48.00; UK: Chur & Reading, hb £30.00.     

Local contexts and local meanings

Stalnaker (1978) made two seminal claims about presuppositions. The most influential one was that presupposition projection is computed by a pragmatic mechanism based on a notion of ‘local context’. Due to conceptual and technical difficulties, however, the latter notion was reinterpreted in purely semantic terms within ‘dynamic semantics’ (Heim 1983). The second claim was that some instances of presupposition generation should also be explained in pragmatic terms. But despite various attempts, the definition of a precise ‘triggering algorithm’ has remained somewhat elusive. We discuss possible extensions of both claims. First, we offer a reconstruction of ‘local contexts’ which circumvents some of the difficulties faced by Stalnaker’s original analysis. We preserve the idea that local contexts are computed by a pragmatic mechanism that aggregates the information that follows from an incomplete sentence given the global context; but we crucially rely on a modified notion of entailment (‘R-entailment’), whose plausibility should be assessed on independent grounds. Second, we speculate that local contexts might prove necessary (though by no means sufficient) to understand how some presuppositions are triggered. In a nutshell, we suggest that a presupposition is triggered when the semantic contribution of an expression to its local context is in some sense ‘heterogeneous’. Without giving an analysis of the latter notion, we note that this architecture implies that presuppositions should be triggered on the basis of the meaning that an expression has relative to its local context (what we call its ‘local meaning’); we sketch some possible consequences of this analysis.     

Fixing unsaid meanings

The First International Workshop on Semantics, Pragmatics and Rhetorics (SPR-01) was held in Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain, on 22-24 November 2001. The conference was organized by the Institute for Logic, Cognition, Language and Information (ILCLI), and the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU).     

Interaction between reflexive fighting and cooperative escape

Subjects separated by a Plexiglas partition were trained to follow a cooperative escape procedure which produced behavior like the escape responding of individual subjects. Removal of the partition produced fighting and less efficient escape. Efficient escape behavior was restored and fighting disappeared when the partition was replaced. Neither increased space nor a moving toy affected escape behavior. The results indicate that switching animals from an isolated to a social situation produced a change in the effect of shock upon escape which was related to shock-induced fighting.     

Multiple meanings,number of related meanings,frequency of occurrence,and the lexicon

A series of experiments was conducted examining lexical access of words with multiple meanings. Words with many meanings were accessed faster than words with few meanings. This effect was obtained independently of word frequency. Furthermore, while words may have several etymological derivations, the number of derivations does not affect access. Finally, among words with an equal number of derivations and an equal number of meanings, those whose meanings tend to be associated with only one derivation are also accessed faster. The relation between number of meanings and word frequency is discussed, especially with respect to the role number of meanings may have played in other research.     

Concepts,structures, and meanings

Concepts are basic elements of thought. Piaget has a conception of the nature of concepts as informational or computational operations performed in an inner milieu and enabling the child to understand the world in which it lives and acts. Concepts are, however, not merely logico‐mathematical but are also conceptually linked to the mastery of language which itself involves the appropriate use of words in social and interpersonal settings. In the light of Vygotsky's work on the social and interactive nature of children's thinking and the nature of language as an essentially public currency of rule‐governed signs, we are led to reconstrue conceptual mastery as the acquisition of an interactive and interpersonal repertoire of tools which introduces the child to the world of those who educate it. In this way we come to see the elements of mind as constitutively involving that activity in which the determinants of meaning constrain and direct the child's linguistic development.     

The ontology of meanings

In part 4 of Meaning, Expression, and Thought, Davis rejects what he calls Fregean ideational theories, according to which the meaning of an expression is an idea; and then presents his own account, which states that, e.g., the meaning of ‘Primzahl’ in German is the property of meaning prime number. Before casting doubt on the latter ontology of meanings, I come to Frege’s defence by pointing out that he was not an advocate of the position Davis named after him because Fregean senses are not lexical meanings and Fregean thoughts are not types of mental events.

Voluntary and reflexive eye movements to illusory lengths

Considerable debate surrounds the extent and manner that motor control is, like perception, susceptible to visual illusions. Using the Brentano version of the Müller-Lyer illusion, we measured the accuracy of voluntary and reflexive eye movements to the endpoints of equal length line segments that appeared different (Experiment 1) and different length line segments that appeared equal (Experiment 3). Voluntary and reflexive saccades were both influenced by the illusion, but the former were more strongly biased and closer to the subjective percept. Experiment 2 demonstrated that these data were the results of the illusion and not centre-of-gravity effects. The representations underlying perception and action interact and this interaction produces biases for actions, particularly voluntary actions.     

Taking control of reflexive social attention

Attention is shifted reflexively to where other people are looking. It has been argued by a number of investigators that this social attention effect reflects the obligatory bottom-up activation of domain-specific modules within the inferior temporal (IT) cortex that are specialized for processing face and gaze information. However, it is also the case that top-down factors may modulate the activation of IT cells. Here we examined behaviorally whether reflexive social orienting is purely automatic or sensitive to top-down modulation. Participants were shown an ambiguous stimulus that could be perceived either as representing EYES or a CAR. In we demonstrated between groups that an automatic shift of attention, equivalent to that triggered by a schematic FACE, occurred only when the stimulus was referred to as possessing EYES. In all participants received the EYES and CAR conditions. When the stimulus was first referred to as a CAR and then as EYES, an attentional shift was only present for the EYES condition. However, when the stimulus was first referred to as possessing EYES, and then later as a CAR, attentional shifts were observed for both conditions. These data indicate that the emergence of a reflexive social attention effect is influenced by top-down mechanisms but in an asymmetrical manner. Top-down processes appear to be effective for triggering IT involvement, that is, for perceiving a stimulus as a face, which produces the social attention effect. But top-down mechanisms are ineffective once IT involvement has been triggered. That is, once a stimulus has been seen as having eyes, it continues to be seen that way, and accordingly, the social attention effect persists.     

Communication and Structured Correlation

Philosophers and social scientists have recently turned to Lewis sender–receiver games to provide an account of how lexical terms can acquire meaning through an evolutionary process. However, the evolution of meaning is contingent on both the particular sender–receiver game played and the choice of evolutionary dynamic. In this paper I explore some differences between models that presume an infinitely large and randomly mixed population and models in which a finite number of agents communicate with their neighbors in a social network. My results show that communication with neighbors is more conducive to the evolution of meaning than communication with strangers. Additionally, I show that the behavior of the system is highly dependent on the topological structure of the social network. I argue that a specific class of networks—small world graphs—is especially conducive to the evolution of meaning. This is because small world graphs have a short characteristic path length while still maintaining a high degree of correlation between neighbors. Since many actual social networks, such as friendship networks and nervous systems, are conjectured to be small world structures, these results indicate that these networks are quite hospitable to the efficient evolution of meaning.     

Processing idioms with multiple meanings

Three experiments are presented that examine understanding of idioms with one or more meaning. The results of Experiment 1 showed that subjects took longer to read and make paraphrase judgments for idioms when both their idiomatic and literal meanings are intended than it did to comprehend idioms meant only literally or idiomatically. In Experiments 2 and 3, subjects were faster at making phrase classification judgments for idioms with several different nonliteral interpretations than they were to make the same judgments for idioms with only one idiomatic interpretation. These findings suggest that idioms with more entries in the mental lexicon are accessed faster because it is more likely that one of their meanings will be encountered in a short time. The data overall support the idea that idioms are represented differently depending on their number of associated meanings.This research was supported by a Faculty Research Grant from the University of California, Santa Cruz. We wish to thank Dennis Johnston for his assistance in running subjects.