http://psychology.emory.edu/cognition/barsalou/papers/Barsalou_chap_2005_situated_conceptualization.pdf

(This paper obviously contains simplifications and not all details are worked out yet. Compression galore)

To me, your question is part of the larger program of explaining meaning, morality, consciousness, and other seemingly nonmechanistic things within a mechanistic framework without losing them in the process. For one such attempt, see Gary Drescher’s book “Good and Real” (which does not get everything right, but is an interesting read nonetheless).

The caricature version of my view on how language and reference can be explained within a mechanistic framework goes like this:

As you mentioned, the meaning of a word is not a property of that word, but of an interpreter. The same word may have different meanings for different interpreters. To be an interpreter, you need to have a model of the world that is constructed from concepts and these concepts need to have names.

A concept is not unlike an entity in a formal scientific theory — its computational structure mirrors certain structural features of the real thing such that you can derive useful statements about the real thing by performing syntactic operations on the concept in your head. By combining your concepts in a way that mirrors relevant structure of the world, you build a model of the world in your head that you can use to reason about the world by purely syntactic means.

When you want to say what the word “cat” means to an interpreter without using intentional vocabulary, you remember that, when you learned the word “cat”, what you learned was to associate this string of letters with your prelinguistic concept of a cat (added: or possibly it was the co-occurrence of the string of letters and real cats that enabled you to learn the prelinguistic concept and the word at the same time). Now, whenever you see the string “cat”, this concept gets invoked, allows you to pose queries about its properties and to use it in reasoning. Using your continuously updated model of the world, you can even determine whether there is a cat in any given situation by checking whether your concept of a cat is part of your model of that situation or not.

The same holds for references to states of affairs, although here you may additionally have the compositional structure of your input string that gets mirrored into a compositionally constructed model of the situation in your head.

If I want to express what the word “cat” refers to for a certain interpreter without using intentional vocabulary, what I need to do is to completely describe the conceptual structure and world model of the interpreter and denote that the meaning of “cat” is every physical structure that, via perceptual input and subsequent situation model, invokes the prelinguistic concept cat (which itself is a computational structure). This is just one option; other interpretations of what is meant by “meaning” exist, but they can be explained similarly. From the fact that I can give such a nonintentional description and that this description does not contain any information that is not part of a complete description of the physical state of the interpreter, it follows that all the information that is required to determine what “cat” means to this interpreter is already there in the interpreter’s description in elementary physics.

(This sketch obviously contains simplifications and not all details are worked out yet.)

How do you think language relates to all that? I know, linguistics is probably not what you mean when talking about science. But if statements in the language of elementary physics should compress all information about a human being without loss, then also language with all its complexities should be included in this “image”.

But how do you express in a physical statement the fact that this and that word refers to this and that entity, or even worse – that this and that sentence refers to this and that state of affairs. And how do you express all the relations that hold between the different words themselves. The multitude of languages in the world, and the seemingly infitine amount of meaningful forms that can be constructed in them are certainly difficult to pin down in a single (no matter how long!) physical statement.

In my opinion, this is not a problem that tedious work in the hard sciences could solve but rather a fundamental shortcoming with the approach you suggested. Meaning is something virtual, it does no exist in the physical world as such, but is actively created by living beings – it is a relation that holds between a living being and something in its environment. But how do you describe an arbitrary relation, be it as simple as the relation between the word “cat” and the animal cat, in physical statement? Actually, includeing the latter two would not be enough – you also should include the interpreter to whom this particular word has this particular meaning… But if the theory of elementary physics cannot describe this tripartite relation, it cannot compress the “images” of living beings (especially humans) without loss.

I am very curous about your feedback;)

Regarding emergence: Reality only has one level and if this level does not contain certain information, no redescription will take care of that. Different people use the term “emergence” to denote different things, but I have yet to see a situation that is both real and such that viewing it as compression is not an improvement over opaquely calling it “emergence”.

Johannes: That’s a great illustration! I inlined it to get more people to look at it.

I am not at all sure about the fourth item. Maybe I should have inverted the colors for good measure. ;)