LINGUISTIC SEMANTICS FROM A COGNITIVE SCIENCE PERSPECTIVE

Cognitive science can be divided into two streams: representational and non-representational cognitive science. Within the representational paradigm two approaches emerge: amodal and modal views. The goal of this summary is to review the main theories and interpret the status of linguistic semantics in these. Special attention is devoted in this summary to the theory of Perceptual Symbol Systems proposed by Barsalou (1999), which claims that conceptual processing is modality-specific. An opposing view is propagated by Fodor (1998), according to whom part of our elementary concepts are represented in unstructurable conceptual atoms; the latter are stored in modality-neutral (amodal) symbols. Last, an influential paradigm in cognitive science (Maturana and Varela’s radical constructivism) is presented, which totally dismisses the existence of representations.