How theories of meaning resemble
attributed situations:
methodological suggestions for
representing how people conceive the
contents of theories of meaning,
extracting signifiers’ identity conditions,
and measuring domains for allowed
influences
This thesis develops methods for representing how the contents of theories of meaning
become conceived by their users. These contents are treated as the range of systematically
elicited conceptions afforded by a designated corpus of key texts. The approach being taken
involves first detailing a formal scheme for the components of situations attributed to various
entities (e.g. ‘your situation’). This scheme is then applied as a framing device to form a template which accounts for the shared structure between the mental spaces which embody how
people conceive different theories of meaning. For the purposes of this task, cognition is
treated as embodied in the sense that both the form and content of personal conceptualisations are largely dependent on what both bodily and ecological factors afford.
The purpose of this approach is to help understand how theories operate when viewed as
worldly entities within a materialist framework. The significance of such understanding lies in
enabling analyses and comparisons which account for the effects of material restrictions such
as how a theory’s presentation must necessarily be selective and how human cognition operates on models set by precedent. The framework being provided here allows the conceptions
each individual theory of meaning elicits to be reduced to formal, commensurate models
which account for differences between typical influences on the conceptions characteristic of
different demographics such as experts of related fields. Approaching theories of meaning
from this angle also reveals new avenues of comparison concerning otherwise implicit details.
One involves theory-internal conditions on the full material identity of meaning-instantiating
entities. The other concerns the extent of the domains for aggregating applicable influences
for which a theory accounts and the range of those it may accommodate
