S 4 mantique et Recherches Cognitives Francois

In this superbly written essay, Francois Rastier, a distinguished French linguist with several books on interpretative semantics, questions the foundations of linguistics and cognitive science in order to investigate the role of semantics with respect to the other disciplines of this 'new' interdisciplinary science of cognition. The book is organized into three sections: the first, of 100 pages, considers the history and epistemology of cognitive science; the second, of particular relevance to computational linguists, studies in 60 pages the relationship between semantics and AI; and the last, of 70 pages, investigates the interactions between semantics on the one hand, and psychology and neurosciences on the other hand. Before developing these different studies, Rastier clearly states his positions in a 10-page introduction. In his opinion, "linguistics is a descriptive, partially predictive science [and] empirical rationalism 1 is the philosophical approach best suited to the theoretical activity of the linguist "2 (p. 12) for it can account for the multiplicity of determinations proper to linguistic objects such as texts. Only the dogmatic rationalist, guilty of unwarranted theoretical reductionism, searches for methodological universals "that he invents and reifies, admiring himself for their discovery" (p. 12). For Rastier, diversity, not unity, is taken to be the fundamental problem of linguistics. In particular, context, both linguistic and nonlinguistic, is taken to be an integral unpredictable component of comprehension, accounting for the multiplicity of interpretations. One may reduce context to a Montague-like index, but recognizing the existence of contextual variables says little about their instantiation. Consequently, for Rastier, "linguistic performance consists in adapting oneself to a situation whose parameters escape the computational paradigm" (p. 13). Linguistics is viewed as a subdiscipline of semiotics, a social science, concerned with actual tongues, 3 concrete linguistic communication, and cultures--three factors systematically downplayed, if not ignored, by cognitive science. This introduction sets the tone for the rest of the book and presents its two recurring themes: a systematic attack on universalism (its leaders and its philosophical underpinnings) and a strong argument in favor of the existence and autonomy of a semiotic level, which includes semantics, the world of the Saussurian signifid, distinct from the conceptual level. Section 1 starts with an investigation into the nature, history, and assumptions of cognitive science. According to Rastier, only the functionalist postulate, which assumes