What is the nature of meaning?
What is it for a word to have a meaning?
How does language relate to the external world?
It is fair to say that there is hardly any topic in biolinguistics that has drawn more interdisciplinary attention than the problem of meaning. Originating in philosophy and linguistics, the topic now plays a major role in biology, computer science, neuroscience, and anthropology. In Ray Jackendoff's terms, "meaning is the 'holy grail' not only of linguistics, but also of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience -- not to mention more distant domains such as cultural and literary theory. Understanding how we mean and how we think is a vital issue for our intuitive sense of ourselves as human beings."
In short, meaning is a pervasive topic in all fields related to cognitive science. Despite substantial progress on the problem, however, there remains ample disagreement on profound and fundamental questions: the different camps do not only disagree about theoretical technology, but in fact about what a theory of meaning is a theory of. Are meanings in the head or in the world? What is the relation between syntax/form and meaning? Does knowledge of meaning reduce to or require knowledge of truth conditions? What is the biological basis of meaning? Do formal or scientific languages and natural languages differ fundamentally in their semantics? How did our knowledge of meaning evolve? How does knowledge of meaning arise in the individual?
All these questions are profoundly interdisciplinary, and it is reasonable to assume that a final theory of meaning will have to take all of them (and more) into account. Since reasoning about meaning dates back to classical Greek philosophy, the topic has a historical dimension, too; and it is remarkable that one finds almost all of the major figures in cognitive, behavioral, and brain sciences represented in the debate.
Broadly speaking, two camps can be identified that have developed different approaches to the problem of linguistic meaning. According to externalist doctrine, meaning is determined by mind-external facts about things, to which minds stand in a certain relation; as Hilary Putnam famously put it, on this view "meanings just ain't in the head". On the other side are the internalists, who hold that knowledge of meaning does not depend on word-object relations, hence is "in the head" in a strong sense. Most approaches in formal semantics have an externalist flavor, employing notions such as "denotation", "possible worlds", and "reference". It is interesting that virtually all of philosophy of language adopts these notions without extensive discussion; the internalist position of Chomsky, Jackendoff, Hinzen and others remains the exotic underdog, commonly either dismissed or ignored.
The purpose of this reading group is to explore the underdog: internalist approaches to meaning, and a philosophy of language that is based on the scientific study of language known as Generative Grammar. If the internalists are right, our understanding of meaning and the organism-world relations that enter into conceptual and linguistic development have to be rethought. Needless to say, such a shift would have enormous consequences not only for the study of mind, but also for our conception of ourselves as linguistic organisms.
Knowledge of meaning is an essential ingredient of human nature; hence, what is at stake, quite literally, is no less than the meaning of everything.