Meaning and context: the implications of LSA (latent semantic analysis) for semantics.

Until recently, cognitive science understood semantics in terms of its using the information contained in first-order (or direct) associations. In Psychological Review (1997), Landauer and Dumais in an approach they called latent semantic analysis (LSA), showed that the acquisition and comprehension of word meaning depended upon the processing and extraction of a previously unexamined kind of information (hidden in word context and past word usage): higher-order (or indirect) associations. Higherorder association arise from the totally of associations in past usage that every word has with every other one. A diverse and heterogeneous collection of meanings are also context dependent (and so based upon higher-order associations). (For example, those that underlie the social meaning of human interactions and intentionality .) Before LSA, the ability to theoretically and empirically explore the links between meaning and context through such associations was severely limited. LSA has now corrected this situation by providing an objective, and in the case of language, a tested model of the relationship between meaning, usage constraints, and context. I explore the implications of this for how we understand our capacity to experience meaningfulness not only of words but social and intentional existence.