Natural languages - idioms such as English and Cantonese, Zulu and Amharic, Basque and Nicaraguan Sign Language - allow their speakers to convey meaning and transmit meaning to one another. But what is meaning exactly? What is this thing that words convey and speakers communicate? Few questions are as elusive as this. Yet, few features are as essential to who we are and what we do as human beings as the capacity to convey meaning through language. In this book, Gaetano Fiorin and Denis Delfitto disclose a notion of linguistic meaning that is structured around three distinct, yet interconnected dimensions: a linguistic dimension, relating meaning to the linguistic forms that convey it; a material dimension, relating meaning to the material and social conditions of its environment; and a psychological dimension, relating meaning to the cognitive lives of its users. By paying special attention to the puzzle surrounding first-person reference - the way speakers exploit language to refer to themselves - and by capitalizing on a number of recent findings in the cognitive sciences, Fiorin and Delfitto develop the original hypothesis that meaningful language shares the same underlying logical and metaphysical structure of sense perception, effectively acting as a system of classification and discrimination at the interface between cognitive agents and their ecologies.

This book offers original insights around a fascinating idea: Perception and the rest of cognition, crucially including language, are closer to each other than the Cartesian tradition dared to dream. By combining recent results in cognitive neuroscience, the philosophy of perception, and the syntax of natural language, the book demonstrates that there is continuity between higher and lower cognition. Percepts from perceptual experience are propositional, conceptual, and they are not divorced from objective reality. Human cognition is merged with the natural world, able to reflect it in complex ways and interact with it in modalities that are since the very beginning computationally complex and rich in content.

Natural languages - idioms such as English and Cantonese, Zulu and Amharic, Basque and Nicaraguan Sign Language - allow their speakers to convey meaning and transmit meaning to one another. But what is meaning exactly? What is this thing that words convey and speakers communicate? Few questions are as elusive as this. Yet, few features are as essential to who we are and what we do as human beings as the capacity to convey meaning through language. In this book, Gaetano Fiorin and Denis Delfitto disclose a notion of linguistic meaning that is structured around three distinct, yet interconnected dimensions: a linguistic dimension, relating meaning to the linguistic forms that convey it; a material dimension, relating meaning to the material and social conditions of its environment; and a psychological dimension, relating meaning to the cognitive lives of its users. By paying special attention to the puzzle surrounding first-person reference - the way speakers exploit language to refer to themselves - and by capitalizing on a number of recent findings in the cognitive sciences, Fiorin and Delfitto develop the original hypothesis that meaningful language shares the same underlying logical and metaphysical structure of sense perception, effectively acting as a system of classification and discrimination at the interface between cognitive agents and their ecologies.