SEMANTIC REPRESENTATION OF MEANING - A DEFENSE

Recently, Shanon (1988) argued that evidence from the comprehension of linguistic expressions indicates that semantic representations cannot be the basis for knowledge of word meaning. However, many of the supposed inadequacies of representational theories of mind, identified by Shanon, reflect a number of common misconceptions. First, the properties of the representational medium are mistakenly identified with the message being represented. Second, a key feature of semantic representations - compositionality - is ignored. Finally, the particular representational theory outlined by Fodor (1975) is assumed to be the only formulation available to cognitive psychologists.