SEMANTICS OF IMAGINABILITY – VORSTELLUNGSSEMANTIK: 13 THESES
SEMANTICS OF IMAGINABILITY – VORSTELLUNGSSEMANTIK: 13 THESES

Summary/Abstract: Taking its starting point from a comment by Ludwig Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations, the paper presents a skeleton view of a semantics of imaginability in point form, sketching the minimal foundations of natural language in opposition to standard accounts in linguistics and the philosophy of language. At the core of this version of semantics the reader will find a redefinition of meaning, the linguistic sign, reference, and concept, as well as arguments for referential background and implicit deixis. The theory offers a non-formal, mentalist explanation of language in which Vorstellung, redefined as mental, iconic transformation of perception, plays a central role. The concluding section Implications identifies a number of shortcomings in the dominant natural language paradigms from the perspective of the advocated semantics of imaginability.

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