What do we mean

What is meaning? These sound like spiritual or philosophical questions, but surprisingly science may be able to provide some answers. It might not seem like the kind of thing that can be tackled using the detached and impersonal methods of science. But by framing the right questions, researchers in language, cognitive science, primatology and artificial intelligence can make some progress. Read more: Careful how you treat today's AI: it might take revenge in the future.

Take human language. What distinguishes it from communication used by other animals such as the sign language we can teach to chimpanzees , bird calls and the pollen dances performed by bees? One factor is the systems used by other animals are basically linear: the meaning of each symbol is modified only by the one immediately before it or after it.

The third word is distinct from the first, only joined by the second. But in a standard sentence from any human language, the words at the end of a sentence can modify the meaning of those back at the start. Did you ever have to diagram a sentence while learning grammar in school? A sentence of human language has to be diagrammed in a tree-like structure.

This structure reflects the hierarchies embedded in the language. Cognitive scientist W. Tecumseh Fitch, an expert in the evolution of human language, says what separates humans from other species is our ability to interpret things in a tree-like structure.

Our brains are built to group things and to arrange them into hierarchies, and not just in grammar. This opens up a whole universe of meanings that we are able to extract from language and other sources of information. Feedback See Today's Synonym. Word of the Day. Meanings Meanings. Examples Origin Usage. Acronyms dictionary WE or W. What's hot. Related words WTV , yw , cool story, bro , zero fucks , I mean , oh my god. Where does WE come from? Chris Riotta, Mic , February 4, Code is speech: Legal tinkering, expertise, and protest among free and open source software developers.

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