Semantic Transparency

What is that?

That's the question I've been pondering for over a week, when it was floated as a possible paper topic for my cognitive science class. Well, I almost know how a computer scientist would define it, and a bit of googling reinforces that apprehension. But how would a philosopher define it? How would a neuroscientist?

Classical AI folks think knowledge is symbolic representation, and once you take care of the syntax, semantics will follow. Connectionist (neural network) folks aren't much more enlighted on the subject of syntax begetting semantics, except they believe there are no stored syntactic tokens, per se. I don't think you can ignore semantics for long if you're really interested in modeling the human mind.

But this isn't just semantics, it's semantic transparency. Meaning, I assume, that the meaning itself it carried (how?) between systems (of what kind?) in a lossless way. Seems like a tall order, for any system - maybe especially a biological one.

Anybody care to put in their two bits?

Update: I think I've partly figured it out...

Comments

[Michael J.]

Way outta my league!

If there were true semantic transparency, I could understand the term....

[Andrea BK]

This may be a little off topic but the thesis I just completed discusses social reproduction theory, the theory that class structure is reproduced from one generation to the next. Some theorists focus on how language perpetuates the classes. Below is a quote from one of the theorists and a few sentences from my paper. I can lend you the books I used if you would like to read more.

==

The influence of linguistic capital, particularly manifest in the first years of schooling when the understanding and use of language are the major points of leverage for teachers’ assessments, never ceases to be felt: style is always taken into account, implicitly or explicitly, at every level of the educational system and, to a varying extent, in all university careers, even scientific ones. Moreover, language is not simply an instrument of communication: it also provides, together with a richer or poorer vocabulary, a more or less complex system of categories, so that the capacity to decipher and manipulate complex structures, whether logical or aesthetic, depends partly on the complexity of the language transmitted by the family. It follows logically that the educational mortality rate can only increase as one moves towards the classes most distant from scholarly language, but also that, in a school population constituted by selection, unequal selectedness tends to reduce progressively and even to cancel out the effects of unequal selection. (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990)

===

The theorists Bernstein and Health focused their work on one aspect of social reproduction, language. Bernstein’s research focuses on linking micro and macro sociological issues through analyzing the language codes used and how they defined ones place, while Heath researched the different language patterns and how they reflected cultural values