Introduction: The Problem

A perennial problem in the philosophy of language, and in the theory of mind, concerns the proper criterion for mapping the lexicon of one language onto the lexicon of another, or the concepts of one person's conceptual framework onto the concepts of another's, in such a fashion as to preserve sense, meaning, or semantic identity across the pairings effected by such a mapping (see Figure 8.1). This “translational” problem is part and parcel, of course, of the larger ontological problem of what meaning is and of what concepts are, and thus it is unlikely to be solved independently of some correlative account of both of these background matters. Disagreements on the former topic are sure to be entangled with disagreements on the latter topics, and so it is with those of us who defend a state-space semantics (SSS) approach to these problems against those who champion a language-of-thought (LOT) approach. For SSS theorists, concepts are functionally salient points, regions, or trajectories in various neuronal activation spaces; for LOT theorists, concepts are functionally salient wordlike elements in a languagelike system of internal representations. For both groups, however, the plausibility of their favored approach depends, in part, on the integrity and plausibility of the inevitably quite different accounts of “translation” that they provide.

The present paper takes up these issues as they are variously developed in three recent papers.