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Meanings, Sounds, Signs, & Gestures

EasyChair Preprint no. 868

15 pagesDate: March 31, 2019

Abstract

Motivated by Noam Chomsky’s “rocks and kittens argument,” I argue that whatever some meanings are, they appear to have a massive prelinguistic dimension. I begin by addressing Michael Dummett’s questions regarding the possibility of theories of meaning by suggesting that we do all have, minimally speaking, a sense of what meanings are, which justifies the search for a theory. I also propose that a theory of meaning that relates lexical concepts with internal representations of the sort internalists like Chomsky, James McGilvray, and Paul Pietroski posit, is in line with recent studies on infants and nonhuman animals.

Keyphrases: biolinguistics, concepts, Externalism, Generativism, Innate, innate concept, innate idea, internal representation, Internalism, language, lexical concept, Lexical item, logical form, massive prelinguistic dimension, meanings, nonhuman animal, paul pietroski posit, polysemy, semantics, theories, understanding

BibTeX entry
BibTeX does not have the right entry for preprints. This is a hack for producing the correct reference:
@Booklet{EasyChair:868,
  author = {Tristan Tondino},
  title = {Meanings, Sounds, Signs, & Gestures},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint no. 868},

  year = {EasyChair, 2019}}
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