Cham: Springer Verlag. Edited by De La Cruz & M. Vivian (
2016)
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Abstract
Neurosemantics is not yet a common term and in current neuroscience
and philosophy it is used with two different sorts of objectives. One deals with the
meaning of the electrical and the chemical activities going on in neural circuits.
This way of using the term regards the project of explaining linguistic meaning
in terms of the computations done by the brain. This book explores this second
sense of neurosemantics, but in doing so, it will address much of the first as well,
for we believe that the capacity of neural circuits to support linguistic meaning,
hinges on their peculiar role in coding entities and facts of the world. It is an
enterprise at the edge of the available state-of-the-art knowledge in neuroscience
and specifically, in the growing understanding of brain computational mechanisms.
We conceive neurosemantics, however, as the natural evolution of a long standing
project that began in the early days of Boole’s logic, the idea that semantics can
be construed and explained in mathematical terms. Classical formal semantics, for
a very long time, excluded from the analysis of language any account of mental
processes, which on the contrary, became the central focus during the cognitive turn.
Cognitive semantics, however, failed to provide a rigorous mathematical framework
for semantic processes. Today, it is possible to begin explaining language by way
of a new mathematical foundation, one that is empirically grounded in how the
brain computes: neurosemantics. The way this book intends to contribute is twofold.
One is to present a series of existing examples of neurosemantics in practice: early
models addressing aspects of linguistic semantics purely in neurocomputational
terms. The other is to try to identify the principles upon which models of this kind
can be constructed, and their corresponding neural bases.