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date: 03 June 2020

Abstract and Keywords

This article examines how communicative intentions affect the way people use and understand both spoken and written language. It first provides an overview of the link between intention and meaning and looks at evidence on the use and understanding of intentional language. It then considers intentions in written language, some problems with the argument that intentions are entirely private mental states in the minds of individual people, and the self-organization of intentional meaning. It rejects the intentional perspective on linguistic communication and instead views intentional behaviors as emergent products of complex self-organization processes that characterize many physical and biological systems. It also analyzes how the empirical evidence on intentions in meaningful experiences of language can be reconciled with the alternative perspective of self-organizational theory.

Keywords: Intention, language, meaning, self-organization, mental states, linguistic communication, self-organizational theory

Raymond W. Gibbs Jr.

Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. (PhD 1980) is professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He received his PhD from the University of California, San Diego, and did postdoctoral research in cognitive science at Yale and Stanford Universities before joining the faculty at UC Santa Cruz. Gibbs's research focuses on language, thought, and embodied experience, especially in relation to pragmatics and figurative language. He is author of The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding (1994), Intentions in the Experience of Meaning (1999), and Embodiment and Cognitive Science (2006), all published by Cambridge University Press. He is also coeditor of Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics (with Gerard Steen, 1999) and is currently editor of the journal Metaphor and Symbol. Gibbs became interested in Cognitive Linguistics because of his studies on idiom and metaphor processing, and more general concern with the relations between thought, language, and the body. Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., can be reached at gibbs@ucsc.edu.

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