Helen Keller Was Never in a Chinese Room

Advances in multimedia and interactive technologies book series, 2018

Computationalism should not be the view that (human) cognition is computation; it should be the view that cognition (simpliciter) is computable. It follows that computationalism can be true even if (human) cognition is not the result of computations in the brain. If semiotic systems are systems that interpret signs, then both humans and computers are semiotic systems. Finally, minds can be considered as virtual machines implemented in certain semiotic systems, primarily the brain, but also AI computers.

Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 1999

Mind and Language, 1990

This essay continues my investigation of 'syntactic semantics': the theory that, pace Searle's Chinese-Room Argument, syntax does suffice for semantics (in particular, for the semantics needed for a computational cognitive theory of natural-language understanding). Here, I argue that syntactic semantics (which is internal and first-person) is what has been called a conceptual-role semantics: The meaning of any expression is the role that it plays in the complete system of expressions. Such a 'narrow', conceptual-role semantics is the appropriate sort of semantics to account (from an 'internal', or first-person perspective) for how a cognitive agent understands language. Some have argued for the primacy of external, or 'wide', semantics, while others have argued for a two-factor analysis. But, although two factors can be specified-one internal and first-person, the other only specifiable in an external, third-person way-only the internal, first-person one is needed for understanding how someone understands. A truth-conditional semantics can still be provided, but only from a third-person perspective.

Journal of Pragmatics, 2006

Leonard Talmy is a leading light of cognitive linguistics, known especially for his work in cognitive semantics, an approach to linguistics that aims to describe the linguistic representation of conceptual structure. The two-volume set ''Toward a Cognitive Semantics'' is a collection of 16 of Talmy's papers spanning roughly 30 years of his thinking and writing. The papers have been updated, expanded, revised, and arranged by concept into chapters. This review of the volumes is tailored to a non-specialist linguist or cognitive scientist interested in a general orientation to the contents and presentation. In the introduction common to the two books, Talmy situates cognitive linguistics within the discipline of linguistics and identifies his primary methodology as introspection. The ''overlapping systems model'' of cognitive organization is outlined, in which cognitive systems, such as language, vision, kinesthetics, and reasoning can and do interact. Talmy proposes ''the general finding that each system has certain structural properties that are uniquely its own, certain structural properties that it shares with only one or a few other systems, and certain structural properties that it shares with most or all the other systems. These last properties would constitute the most fundamental properties of conceptual structuring in human cognition.'' The reader is guided to specific chapters in which the linguistic system is compared to other cognitive systems of visual perception, kinesthetic perception, attention, understanding/reasoning, pattern integration, cognitive culture, and affect. Each volume of the set is about 500 pages long, with eight chapters organized into three or four major sections. The first volume, ''Concept structuring systems'' expounds Talmy's vision of the fundamental systems of conceptual structuring in language. Part 1 presents a theoretical orientation, Part 2 addresses configurational structure, Part 3 discusses the distribution of attention, and Part 4 describes force dynamics. The second volume, ''Typology and process in concept structuring,'' turns from conceptual systems themselves to the processes that structure concepts and the typologies that emerge from these. Part 1 looks at the processes on a long-term scale, longer than an individual's lifetime, that deal with the representation of event structure. Part 2 considers the short-term scale of cognitive processing with a look at online processing, and Part 3 addresses medium-term processes in the acquisition of culture and the processing of narrative. In volume 1, Chapter 1, ''The relation of grammar to cognition,'' is a greatly revised and expanded version of a 1988 paper, itself an expansion of papers from 1977 and 1978. This paper details the ''semantics of grammar'' in language, toward the larger goal of determining the character of conceptual structure in general. Talmy proposes that the fundamental design feature www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2011

2004

Journal Language and Linguistics, 2003

Langackerians and Chomskyites alike would probably agree that the purpose of linguistic analysis is to explicate the mental representations and processes resulting in linguistic behavior, and so a fundamental issue of current linguistic theory is the cognitive processing of meaning. The intersection of semantics and cognition has developed along at least four lines: (1) Meaning is equivalent to conceptualization, schematically and structurally represented in the human mind; (2) the meanings of clauses or sentences are essentially based on the semantic properties of predicates with reference to their argument roles; (3) phrasal constructions carry independent meanings which interact with the meanings of verbs in non-trivial ways; (4) interpretation of meaning does not rely solely on semantic structure, but is crucially ascribed to pragmatic factors (such as discourse manipulation or talk-in-interaction). The discussion that follows will sketch out these four approaches.

Proceedings of the 20th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics -, 1982

We argue that because the very concept of computation rests on notions of interpretation, the semantics of natural languages and the semantics of computational formalisms are in the deepest sense the same subject. The attempt to use computational formalisms in aid of an explanation of natural language semantics, therefore, is an enterprise that must be undertaken with particular care. We describe a framework for semantical analysis that we have used in the computational realm, and suggest that it may serve to underwrite computadonally-oriented linguistic ser.antics as well. The major feature of this framework is the explicit recognition of both the declarative and the procedural import of meaningful expressions; we argue that whereas these two viewpoints have traditionally been taken as alternative, any comprehensive semantical theory must account for how both aspects of an expression contribute to its overall significance.