Table of Treaties

Abstract

Troughout its history the principle of compositionality, a widely acknowledged cornerstone for any theory of meaning, has been closely associated with what one might call the principle of semantic constituency. The latter characterizes the subclass of the symbolic theories of meaning. In this chapter a neurobiologically motivated theory of meaning as internal representation will be developed that holds on to the principle of compositionality, but negates the principle of semantic constituency. It is in this sense non-symbolic. The approach builds on neurobiological findings regarding topologically structured cortical feature maps and the mechanism of object-related binding by neuronal synchronization. It incorporates the Gestalt principles of psychology and is implemented by recurrent neural networks. The semantics to be developed is structural analogous - yes, in fact isomorphic - to some variant of model-theoretical semantics, which likewise is compositional and non-symbolic. However, unlike standard model-theoretical semantics, it regards meanings as set-theoretical constructions not of denotations, but of their neural counterparts or, as we will say, their emulations. The semantics to be developed is a neuro-emulative model-theoretical semantics of a first- order language.