The world is too complex to manage without radical functional simplification. Meaning appears to exist as the basis for such simplification. The meaning that guides functional simplification may be usefully considered as consisting of three classes. The first class consists of meanings of the determinate world. These are meanings based in motivation, emotion, and personal and social identity. F...

Unlike homophonous meanings, which are semantically unrelated (e.g., the use of bat to refer to a baseball bat and a flying rodent), polysemous meanings are systematically related to one another (e.g., the use of book, CD, and video to refer to physical objects, as in 'the leather book', or to the intellectual content they contain, as in 'the profound book'). But do perceived relations among po...

We compare three approaches to compositional semantics for words that are modeled (in part) using perceptual classifiers: ”meanings as sets”, ”meanings as transparent functions”, and ”meanings as opaque functions”. The approaches are evaluated according to whether they fulfill a set of desiderata, including dealing with non-intersective compositionality, working with state of the art classifier...