Semantics of Emanuel and Joseph Sprute

Semantics if studied or practised in the real perspective and logically can be proved and is true to life,it is real else fictitious and so, overall it teaches us to be real based on cause and effect relationship nearing meaning

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Does semantics need reality?

Peter Gärdenfors

Chapter · January 2000

DOI: 10.1007/978-0-585-29605-0_23

[Within philosophy of language, one can find two fundamentally different answers to the ontological question, one realistic and one cognitive (or conceptualistic). According to the realistic approach to semantics the meaning of a word or expression is something out there in the world. According to the cognitivistic answer, meanings are mental entities. Thus the two approaches give contrary answers to the question of whether semantics needs reality.

CONCLUSION: THE NEED FOR REALITY

In this article my point of departure has been the four fundamental questions for semantics. On the basis of these questions, the cognitive and the constructivist approaches to semantics have been contrasted with the more traditional realist types of semantics. To sum up the previous discussion, the cognitive and the constructivist approaches can handle the epistemological question by relying on an associationistic theory of learning. On the other hand, realist branches of semantics have serious problems with this question, unless they answer it via a cognitivistic model. Realists have no direct problem answering the communicative question. Putnam, among others, has argued that a cognitivistic semantics can’t give a satisfactory answer. I have tried to rebut their criticism by supplementing a cognitivistic semantics with information about who has power over linguistic meaning. Well, then, does semantics need reality? The realist credo is a loud “yes.” (Some of them, for example David Lewis, even say that we need several realities in the form of possible worlds). The answer according to constructivism is “no.” Von Glasersfeld (1995, p. 137) formulates the position in the following elegant way:

“Language, then, opens a not quite transparent window on the abstractions and representations individuals glean from their experiental reality, but it does not, as analytical philosophers were hoping, open any window on the ontological reality of an independent world.”

The answer according to cognitive semantics is “not directly.” Once we accept the conceptual structure of an individual as given, the semantic mapping between sound patterns and the detached representations that constitute meanings can be described without any recourse to the external world. But a second part of the cognitivistic answer is “indirectly,” since the conceptual structure is built up in an individual in interaction with reality. However, for the communicative problem reality is not needed – only information about the social roles of the members of the linguistic community.]