Semantic Perception: How the Illusion of a Common Language Arises and Persists

You have a great deal of semantic knowledge. You know, for example, that the sentence 'Hasselhoff is handsome' is meaningful. But do you see that 'Hasselhoff is handsome' is meaningful? If I were to utter it in your presence, would you experience that 'Hasselhoff is handsome' is meaningful? More generally, do the contents of human perception sometimes involve semantic properties, such as meaningfulness? According to Jody Azzouni, the answer is 'yes'. "My thesis is that we (human beings) involuntarily see uttered words, among other things, as possessing certain monadic meaning-properties, and that we involuntarily see uttered sentences as possessing other (but related) monadic meaning-properties" (p. 1).