Abstract

Essays and Asides: What's All This Semantics?

The article focuses on semantics. Semantics seeks to analyze processes of human intelligence in the sense of better adjustment to conditions of the earth. It makes use of findings of psychology, physiology, and neurology, in studying the direct experiences, which words symbolize. It uses the scientific method to discover how human beings know what they know. When philosophers attempt this, normally without the scientific method, it is called epistemology. The semantic analysis begins with light waves, sound waves, tactile pressures, coming from the environment to the eye, ear, finger tips; and notes that it is the business of the central nervous system to take these stimuli, sort and digest them and issue commands to the organism.