An Assessment of (Mentalist) Cognitive Semantics
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Common claims within cognitive semantics (e.g. Johnson 1987; Lakoff 1987; Langacker 1987) are that “the most fundamental issue in linguistic theory is the nature of meaning” and “meaning is a matter of conceptualization”. But the latter claim creates a problem. On the one hand, for many cognitive semanticists conceptualization takes place under the level of consciousness. On the other hand, semantic analysis is carried out on the level of consciousness, namely by means of (conscious) intuition-cum-introspection. What is, then, meaning? As Wittgenstein argues, meaning is use, understood as a web of intersubjective norms, comparable to rules of a game and accessible to conscious intuition. In this article I elaborate on this claim, and thus offer critique to those who equate linguistic meaning with conceptualizations understood as private mental representations. Furthermore, I argue that the non-causal study of norms (langue) must be kept separate from the causal study of (norm-following or norm-breaking) behaviour (parole). Because of its variationist nature, linguistic behaviour demands statistical explanation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it