Cooperation, Conceptual Spaces and the Evolution of Semantics

摘要

We start by providing an evolutionary scenario for the emergence of semantics. It is argued that the evolution of anticipatory cognition and theory of mind in the hominids opened up for cooperation about future goals. This cooperation requires symbolic communication. The meanings of the symbols are established via a "meeting of minds." The concepts in the minds of communicating individuals are modelled as convex regions in conceptual spaces. We then outline a mathematical framework based on fixpoints in continuous mappings between conceptual spaces that can be used to model such a semantics.