A Neurocognitive Perspective On The Aspects Of Word Meaning

In this thesis I cope with the issue of word meaning. I hold the position that word meaning is a neural bio-electrochemical activation and connection process in human brain rather than an attribute of the outside world or the spoken or written forms of words. Consequently, there is no such reality of word meaning outside human brain, and there is no such reality of unified word meaning across the population. To demonstrate this, I have explored the models and aspects of word meaning by reviewing and discussing ideas from conceptual or cognitive approaches to the neural and neurocognitive approaches, in the process of which I have also used the objectivist views as the major reference targets. I point out that conceptual (cognitive) approaches have contributed to our understanding of some aspects of word meaning, but their models and ideas of word meaning have been mostly inferential. To qualify word-meaning study as a definite real science, we must cope with both the mind and the brain. So I have gathered facts and findings from brain studies, demonstrating that word meaning is instantiated in human brain and it has a solid material basis. Here, I infer the meanings traditionally treated in pragmatics are also instantiated in brain, particularly in the right hemisphere. Then, I have situated word meaning in the more exact neuroscience and have further consolidated my position. Moreover, to make neural approaches meaningful, I have subsumed them under a unified'neurocognitive'perspective, and then have described the word-meaning instantiation process and redefined the nature of word meaning. As word meaning is the central theme of this paper, I have also presented a philosophy-oriented account of it and its relations with truth in neurocognitive terms.