The Basis of Epistemology: How the Mind Understands and Develops Meaning

Abstract

The neurophysiological mechanism of meaning is explained as being essentially the same as that of consciousness. While consciousness and meaning are not the same semantically, at the physiological level, the difference between the two functions is mainly that, in the case of meanings, the underlying qualities are not available to consciousness and unlike consciousness, meanings are understood by the individual as being in the mind instead of in the environment. With the presupposition of the Identity Theory, both consciousness and meaning reduce to Understandings within the mind. They are similar “mental” (physical) constructions.