Edouard Machery

Gerhard Schurz

Markus Werning

Representational systems such as language, mind or brain, exhibit a structure that is widely assumed to be compositional, i.e., the semantic value of complex representations is determined by the semantic values of its parts. Dating back to the late nineteenth century, the principle of compositionality has recently regained wide attention. Since the way the principle has been dealt with differs across disciplines, the aim of these two volumes is to conjoin the diverging approaches. The editors have assembled a collection of original essays that cover the topic of compositionality from virtually all perspectives of interest in the contemporary debate. The well chosen international list of authors includes psychologists, neuroscientists, computer scientists, linguists and philosophers, among them: D. Bonnais; Johannes Brandl; Marc Breuer; David Byrd; Daniel Cohnitz; Malte Dahlgr�n; Reinaldo Elugardo; Tim Fernando; Kenneth Gemes; Verena Gottschling; Pierre Jacob; Hannes Leitgeb; Menno Lievers; Alda Mari ; Jaume Mateu; Albert Newen; Jaroslav Peregrin; Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen; Kenneth Presting; Oleg Prosorov; Gerhard Schurz ; Finn Spicer; and Markus Werning. Markus Werning, Edouard Machery, and Gerhard Schurz are professors of philosophy at the Heinrich-Heine-University at Duesseldorf, Germany.

The Compositionality of Meaning and Content: Foundational issues

Wolfram Hinzen

In this book leading scholars from every relevant field report on all aspects of compositionality, the notion that the meaning of an expression can be derived from its parts. Understanding how compositionality works is a central element of syntactic and semantic analysis and a challenge for models of cognition. It is a key concept in linguistics and philosophy and in the cognitive sciences more generally, and is without question one of the most exciting fields in the study of language and mind. The authors of this book report critically on lines of research in different disciplines, revealing the connections between them and highlighting current problems and opportunities. The force and justification of compositionality have long been contentious. First proposed by Frege as the notion that the meaning of an expression is generally determined by the meaning and syntax of its components, it has since been deployed as a constraint on the relation between theories of syntax and semantics, as a means of analysis, and more recently as underlying the structures of representational systems, such as computer programs and neural architectures. The Oxford Handbook of Compositionality explores these and many other dimensions of this challenging field. It will appeal to researchers and advanced students in linguistics and philosophy and to everyone concerned with the study of language and cognition including those working in neuroscience, computational science, and bio-informatics.

The Oxford Handbook of Compositionality

Representational systems such as language, mind and perhaps even the brain exhibit a structure that is often assumed to be compositional. That is, the semantic value of a complex representation is determined by the semantic value of their parts and the way they are put together. Dating back to the late 19th century, the principle of compositionality has regained wide attention recently. Since the principle has been dealt with very differently across disciplines, the aim of the two volumes is to bring together the diverging approaches. They assemble a collection of original papers that cover the topic of compositionality from virtually all perspectives of interest in the contemporary debate. The well-chosen international list of authors includes psychologists, neuroscientists, computer scientists, linguists, and philosophers.

Foundational Issues

The second volume is devoted to issues of compositionality that arouse in the sciences of language, the investigation of the mind, and the modeling of representational brain functions. How could compositional languages evolve? How many sentences are needed to learn a compositional language? How does compositionality relate to the interpretation of texts, the generation of idioms and metaphors, and the understanding of aberrant expressions? What psychological mechanism underlies the combination of complex concepts? And finally, what neuronal structure can possibly realize a compositional system of mental representations?

Markus Werning

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