ABSTRACT
For generations, philosophers have engaged in a long, unresolved debate on the ‘furniture of the world’; namely, should reality be understood as consisting merely of spatio-temporal particulars such as material objects, or are there also ‘universals’ in ‘reality’ such as concepts or abstract mathematical objects like numbers or groups? I avoid the debate between Nominalism, which argues that mathematics, for example, is about spatio-temporal particulars, and Platonism, which maintains that mathematics is about abstract entities outside of space and time. Rather, the position adopted here is closer to conceptualism, which considers mathematics as well as language and logic to be about constructs of thinking. This is one of the main innovations of the cognitive revolutions in recent times. Cognitive linguistics, which emerged in the last third of the twentieth century, owes much to the heyday of philosophy of language, and primarily to Russell, Frege, and Wittgenstein, the mathematicians and logicians who searched for order and structure in language. However, cognitive linguistics was and still is faced with several entrenched philosophical and scientific beliefs. Cognitive linguistics—including the present study—does not share logical positivism’s rejection of metaphysical notions such as ‘God’, ‘soul’, ‘eternity’, ‘good’, ‘just’, ‘cause’, ‘self’, and others because of their lack of direct referent in the world. Such notions were rejected by the Vienna Circle as devoid of meaning and hence were considered misleading and seen as an obstacle to the progress of science toward a true understanding of the world.
