Goal-derived concepts and the semantic latency thesis

Abstract

In this article, we investigate the extent to which certain approaches to the concept of concept established in the last decades in the scope of cognitive sciences could pave the way for a reworking of the semantic latency thesis (originally defended by philosophers such as Ernst Cassirer and Owen Barfield). Since the 1980s, Eleanor Rosch, Lakoff & Johnson, Wilson & Sperber, Lawrence Barsalou, among others, have been investigating (each in their own way), the conversational occurrences of linguistic signs articulations that are, at the same time, meaningful and not fixed by a code. We claim that Relevance Theory, on the one hand, with its tripartite concept of concept, and certain branches of Embodied Cognition, on the other, with its multimodal approach to ad hoc concepts, offer us the necessary means for a rehabilitation of the thesis that certain forms of semantic innovation are just “pieces of evidence” of mnemonic access to concepts formed for certain specific purposes (goal-derived), which can be operative in the life of a community in a veiled way, i.e., on condition of anonymity. However, our working hypothesis that the semantic latency thesis can be strengthened in these terms faces the challenge of showing the feasibility of matching the good insights of Wilson and Sperber, in their Relevance Theory, with the simulation model of grounded cognition proposed by Lawrence Barsalou, despite the intellectualist positions taken by the former.