Abstract

In this small book logician and mathematician Jens Erik Fenstad addresses some of the most important foundational questions of linguistics: What should a theory of meaning look like and how might we provide the missing link between meaning theory and our knowledge of how the brain works? The author’s answer is twofold. On the one hand, he suggests that logical semantics in the Montague tradition and other broadly conceived symbolic approaches do not suffice. On the other hand, he does not argue that the logical approach should be discarded; instead, he opts for a methodological pluralism in which symbolic approaches to meaning are combined with geo- metric ones such as Conceptual Spaces [9] and discusses ways in which these geometric accounts could be hooked up with connectionist frameworks and dynamic systems approaches in neurophysiology