On 27/03/2008, Mike Tintner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > 3. While philosophically, intellectually, most people dealing with this > area may expect words to have precise meanings, they know practically and > intuitively that this is impossible and work on the basis that words can > have different meanings according to who uses them - and that they > themselves keep shifting their usage of words. Philosophers, for example may > argue philosophically that words can and should have precise meanings and be > treated as true or false, but know in practice that pretty well all the > major words/concepts in philosophy, like > "mind"/"consciousness"/"determinism" - have multiple, indeed > endless definitions. Or just think about AGI'ers and "intelligence." >
It seems to me that the linguistics are just a secondary phenomena intended to express and riding on top of a deeper underlying dynamic consisting of prelinguistic concepts, motor acts, imagery and so on. There may be a many to one mapping between the linguistic expression and the underlying models, hence the belief that individuals may talk with precise meanings. In a sense the meanings may be precise when translated into the underlying models, but the process of interpretation may have multiple paths and be quite ambiguous. Trying to understand language completely in isolation as a kind of statistical word game is probably going to fail in my view. Language itself is just a tool or mode of expression for things which may be intimately bound up with our embodiment and the way we perceive and act in the world. ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
