The Neurobiological Basis of Meaning

Corey Washington

This paper has three parts. In the first part, which is largely historical, I argue that Frege's claim that words only have meaning in the context of a proposition (the 'Context Thesis') is taken almost directly from remarks made by the 19th century neuroscientist Hughlings Jackson. I show how Jackson's more detailed comments on the topic clear up ambiguities in Frege's statement and offer clear examples the propositional and non-propositional utterances that the thesis implicitly contrasts. In the second part, I defend the thesis by arguing that examples of propositional utterance (ordinary statements, questions, etc.) and non-propostional utterances (recurring utterances) offer a clear line of demarcation for the point at which meaning appears in spoken language. In the third section, I assess some of the evidence on the neuroanatomic seat of the capacity to produce propositional utterances to draw conclusions about the basis of the capacity to speak meaningfully.