The Neuroscience Role in Ontological Semantics: ERPs in Schizophrenia

This contribution outlines the role of one neuroscientific method (i.e. event-rela-ted potentials, ERPs) of analyzing the semantic components of language, within a particular philosophical view of semantics, the existential semantics. This concept is based on the coincidence between linguistic meaning and real life meaning. Such a coincidence reveals itself in the use of meaning within precise existential dynamics. Within this interpretative framework, schizophrenic language – disjointed, odd and apparently senseless – might be explained as a way of building meaning which is different from the shared one, from the common sense of the meanings we are normally accustomed to. The event-related potentials might provide the neuroscientific interpretation key to explain the way of building meaning in psychopathology and normality.