Philosophical reflections on the generative dimension of meaning in natural language

Abstract

This contribution aims at offering a philosophical interpretative framework concerning the generative dimension of meaning, through the analysis of the most recent data offered by neuroscience, neurolinguistics and complexity epistemology. The reference to experiments in neurosemantics for a shared semantic processing, to the predictive simulations of meaning recorded by the Linear Learning Model and to the very recent perspective provided by differential heterogenesis offer for us the starting point for the elaboration of a philosophical interpretation of a dynamicist approach to meaning as a holistic unit emerging from the combination of semantic dimensions and capable of rewriting the concrete organisational structure of embodiment processes. Therefore, in line with the models of embodied language and the theory of biological self-organisation, meaning becomes, in our perspective, the evolutionary engine (by selective means) of the symbolic species, establishing circular links in the intentional space between the autonomous agent and the environment.