The Detection of the Hidden design of Meaning

Meaning is a marvellous and dreadful matter, as it is neither totally intelligible nor totally unintelligible. It cannot be considered as an univocal, closed and fixed entity, atomic in nature, universally shared and invariable in time. Rather, meaning has a complex design, composed by different facets: a referential, an inferential, and a differential one. This standpoint, which overcomes the truth-conditional semantics as well as the structural one, entails that meaning is patterned in nature, based on the encyclopaedic knowledge and connected with mental concepts. The meaning dilemma between variability and stability is crucial for every semantic theory, as meaning flexibility, grounded on the daily experience, displays a large range of linguistic phenomena like the defeasibility of semantic traits, fuzzy boundaries, radial categorization, semantic gradualness and polysemy, the interconnection between the literal and non-literal semantic domain as well as the context dependence. The semantic variability calls for an inferential process, as modal meaning is not an immediate and fully evident datum; rather, it is generated by communicators during their interactio