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Long-time research led Fiorin, Assistant Professor at ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� College Utrecht, to write a book about the underpinnings of meaning-making. “This line of research is relevant to some of the challenges we face today as a global society.”

In the recently published , Fiorin and his co-author Denis Delfitto look at the very notion of meaning: what it is, how language conveys it, and how we humans comprehend it and make it part of our social and cognitive lives.

“In the end, the book defends a parallel between language and perception, by demonstrating that they are both systems designed to interface cognitive agents with their ecology,” he explains.

How did the book come about?

“Me and Denis have worked on the topics discussed in the book for more than fifteen years. In fact, this book was conceived as a way to organize the different results achieved during this time in a coherent and comprehensive framework.”

“A significant part of our research - and, correspondingly, a significant portion of the book - focuses on those linguistic expressions that language users rely on to refer to themselves, such as the first-person pronoun ‘I’ in English. These elements are found in all languages and, although they may seem simple on the surface, they hide an extraordinary linguistic complexity. When investigated with the necessary attention, this complexity is key to disclosing some of the fundamental features of the notion of meaning.”

Does the book also link with your teaching at the ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� College?

“The book was very profoundly influenced by my experience as teacher of both logic and linguistics at ľ�ϸ���Ӱ�� College Utrecht, as well as by the many interactions I have had in the years with my colleagues and students.”

“Among other things, I wanted this book to be as complete and accessible as possible. In doing so, I could rely on the experience I gained by teaching. In many ways, the College has been my ideal audience throughout the whole writing process. The book is also prominently interdisciplinary in that its main proposal lies at the intersection between formal semantic theorizing as it is done in contemporary linguistics, the philosophy of language in the analytic and Wittgensteinian traditions, and the cognitive neuroscience of perception.” 

Are you planning to continue this line of research, and how?

“Yes! This research is close to my heart. I will not be done with it any time soon. Whereas the book advances some well-defined theses, it also opens novel research questions and corresponding lines of inquiry, which I intend to continue exploring in the future and, in part, I am already exploring. More recently, Denis and I have published that extends the analysis presented in the book to the so-called Moore's paradox, a logical puzzle concerning the first-person.”

“What is more, I find that this line of research is especially relevant to some of the challenges we face today as a global society. In particular, a view that grounds meaningful language at the intersection between human cognition and its ecological niche has the potential to provide a naturalistic account of fundamental logical notions such as that of truth, which, today more than ever, appears to be under serious threat.”