Pragmatics/History/1980s

Before 1600s 1700s 1800s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s

1980s

1980 Bohm

• David Bohm (1980). Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London: Routledge. ^{[^]}

1980 Fish

• Fish, Stanley (1980). Is There A Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Harvard University Press. ^{[^]}

1980 Lakoff and Johnson

• Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson (1980). Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press. ^{[^]}

1982 Berman

• Berman, Sanford (1982). Words, Meanings and People, International Society for General Semantics,Concord, CA, 2001. ^{[^]}

Many scholars have long recognized this semantic problem. One of the earliest and greatest semanticists was A. B. Johnson. He said, "Much of what is esteemed as profound philosophy is nothing but a disputatious criticism on the meaning of words." Professor A. Schuster said, "Scientific controversies constantly resolve themselves into differences about the meaning of words." And John Locke observed, "Men content themselves with the same words as other people use, as if the sound necessarily carried the same meaning."

Compare the three quotes respectively with:

• 1923/Ogden/Opening quotations#Hume
• 1923/Ogden/Opening quotations#Schuster
• 1923/Ogden/Opening quotations#Locke

Language is an important variable in thinking, perceiving, communicating and behaving. This is one of the important principles in general semantics. The title of Korzybski's above article implies the relationship between language and human perception. Anthropologists and linguists such as Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, along with Korzybski, have emphasized the important role that language plays in thinking, perceiving and behaving. (p. 44-45)

— From Our human limitations

Cf. The subtitle of Ogden, C. K. & I. A. Richards (1923). The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. ^{[^]}

1982 Eco

• Literature/1982/Eco ^{[^]}

• 1:1 map

1984 Blackburn

• Literature/1984/Blackburn ^{[^]}

1986 Rhodes

• Literature/1986/Rhodes ^{[^]}

In London, where Southampton Row passes Russell Square, across from the British Museum in Bloomsbury, Leo Szilard waited irritably one gray depression morning for the stoplight to change. A trace of rain had fallen during the night; Tuesday, September 12, 1933, dawned cool, humid and dull. Drizzling rain would begin again in early afternoon. When Szilard told the story later he never mentioned his destination that morning. He may have had none; he often walked to think. In any case another destination intervened. The stoplight changed to green. Szilard stepped off the curb. As he crossed the street time cracked open before him and he saw a way to the future, death into the world and all our woes, the shape of things to come. (wiki links)

1986 Sperber

• Literature/1986/Sperber ^{[^]}

1987 Kochen

• Kochen, Manfred (1987). "How Well Do We Acknowledge Intellectual Debts?" Journal of Documentation, 43 (1): 54-64. ^{[^]}

1988 Carston

• Literature/1988/Carston ^{[^]}

1988 Deerwester

• Literature/1988/Deerwester ^{[^]}

See also

• w: Latent semantic analysis

Synonymy and polysemy are fundamental problems in natural language processing:

• Synonymy is the phenomenon where different words describe the same idea. Thus, a query in a search engine may fail to retrieve a relevant document that does not contain the words which appeared in the query. For example, a search for "doctors" may not return a document containing the word "physicians", even though the words have the same meaning.
• Polysemy is the phenomenon where the same word has multiple meanings. So a search may retrieve irrelevant documents containing the desired words in the wrong meaning. For example, a botanist and a computer scientist looking for the word "tree" probably desire different sets of documents.

1989 Kochen

• Kochen, Manfred, ed. (1989). The Small World: A Volume of Recent Research Advances Commemorating Ithiel de Sola Pool, Stanley Milgram, Theodore Newcomb. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corp. (January 1, 1989). ^{[^]}

1989 Rorty

• Literature/1989/Rorty ^{[^]}

The contingency of language

Here, Rorty argues that all language is contingent. This is because only descriptions of the world can be true or false, and descriptions are made by humans who must make truth or falsity, as opposed to truth or falsity being determined by any innate property of the world being described. Green grass is not true or false, but "the grass is green" is. For example, I can say that 'the grass is green' and you could agree with that statement (which for Rorty makes the statement true), but our use of the words to describe grass is independent of the grass itself. Without the human proposition, truth or falsity is simply irrelevant. Rorty consequently argues that all discussion of language in relation to reality should be abandoned, and that one should instead discuss vocabularies in relation to other vocabularies.

— From w: Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

See also

• #1979 Rorty