Mental spaces

Gilles Fauconnier proposes that words and phrases do not carry meaning straight through truth conditions. Instead, at a certain level of cognition, they help assemble mental spaces, each with its own internal structure and connections to the others. This account bridges linguistic semantics, the philosophy of language, and cognitive approaches to meaning, and it treats them as one integrated subject.

The expressions alone rarely fix how these spaces are built, so a few simple principles can generate several readings and make ordinary sentences look highly ambiguous. Rather than studying the words themselves, Fauconnier looks at the mental constructions associated with them, and he argues that a single general, uniform pattern underlies many surface phenomena that seem varied and intricate.

The argument pushes against several long-standing assumptions about meaning and natural language. Any adequate theory of truth and reference, Fauconnier contends, has to account for the cognitive process of constructing spaces, and the standard linguistic case for hidden structural levels loses its force. Gilles Fauconnier directs studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and is a professor of linguistics at the University of Paris VIII.