NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/sci/cognitiv/667

Text File | 1992-11-18 | 1.8 KB | 39 lines

Newsgroups: sci.cognitive
Path: sparky!uunet!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!darwin.sura.net!Sirius.dfn.de!chx400!news.unige.ch!divsun.unige.ch!swann
From: [e-mail] (SWANN Philip)
Subject: Re: Theory of Meaning
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Sender: [e-mail]
Organization: University of Geneva, Switzerland
References: <[e-mail]> <peeters.722041321@tasman>
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1992 09:23:28 GMT
Lines: 27

In article <peeters.722041321@tasman>, [e-mail] (bert peeters) writes:

  The
> case was made worse by Swann's slip (Stich for Schiffer). I only
> found out who he had in mind by checking the library holdings under
> "title" rather than "author"....{deleted} And why he
> made the slip? Honestly, I do NOT know. I do not know either whether
> I really "calculated that he couldn't actually have meant what he
> did mean", so all that follows from there (including "this is why
> we don't need semantics" and including the smiley) is shaky. We do
> need theories of meaning, to avoid misunderstandings like this one.

Sorry, I thought the point would have been clear in the context of this
discussion. I assumed Peeters was familiar with both Stich and Schiffer
and their books. I also assumed he would have made the natural
psycholinguistic inference that the short hamming distance between the two
names made their retrieval unreliable (i.e. at some low level the wires
tend to get crossed) - or in folk terms, I didn't say what I meant because
of a slip of the tongue. I believe that all communication takes place in
this kind of noisy context-dependent way, so for Peeters to construct
a referential interpretation seemed to me to be a good example of
semantics imposing a simplistic and irrelevant theory on a *very*
complex phenomenon.


Philip Swann