ABSTRACT
Roy Harris' integrational linguistics, cognitive linguistics (CL), which emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s, may be seen as largely supportive of the nonessentialist, non-Aristotelian view of meaning, definition, and categorization. Cognitive linguistics is to a considerable extent nonessentialist. One of the nonessentialists claims that most, if not all, cognitive linguists agree on is that meaning is not resident in words, but assigned to words by human beings. The philosophical foundations on which cognitive linguists build are similar in some respects to those on which Karl Popper and the general semanticists built. This especially concerns the treatment of meaning and definitions. The prototype theory of the concept says that concepts, these little bits and pieces in terms of which they understand the phenomena around them, are best understood when viewed as mental images or mental descriptions, which are nondiscrete. In linguistics as an academic field, essentialism may lead to confusion, frustration, and a lack of progress.
