On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 5:18 AM, <wann...@ababian.com> wrote: Well, first, it's "pseudo", not "psuedo".At least as far as I understand it, word use is more of a prediction than a reference. In the social language game, we are just trying to find the right word in some situation. The arguments include some stuff about how hard it would be to induce a category from a label, so learning has to move from stimulus to label, not the other way around.
So I've been ruminating over this idea for a little while. One thing that does occur to me is that in computer science, reference is good decription of what is going on in computer languages. Symbols do have specific referents. I bring that up because it puts out a bias toward thinking this is the correct view of meaning, when it may really not be psychologically valid, and could be misleading and ineffective for an AGI program. andi Thanks for pointing the misspelling of pseudo out to me. Oh, by the way, it's description not decription. (I am only having some fun! But talk about a psychological slip. What was on your mind when you wrote decription I wonder?) I believe that there must be many different ways to interpret something, whether it is symbolic language or a system of events, and this fact means that we have to keep these different methods in mind when thinking about developing an AGI program. I don't think there is any question that we could write a computer program that would be able to learn an artificial language - even using trial and error of some kind - if the elements of the language had specific and unique meanings. And I do not think there is any question that human languages are much more complicated than that. Symbols do not always have specific and unique referents (especially across different conversations). However, it must be a mistake to become over reliant on using insights like this by treating the referents of such statements as if they were specific. You cannot interpret that statement as if it were an absolute statement that referred to a hard edged truth. And because abstractions can be generalized, there are different levels of generalization and there are different contexts of specification, even when a word is used to designate a specific object it may need a great deal of clarification to comprehend what is being said in a conversation. To make matters worse, human beings rely on different interpretations of their own use of a symbol during their musings. So while I agree with you that words and phrases do not have specific referents, at the same time I think it is obvious that the advantage of using language is that words and phrases can refer to something (or some level of generalization). During communication we do use language as a method to understand what the other person is saying and using that communication to come to better insights about the subject matter ourselves. The effort to understand what other people are saying does involve making guesses and receiving clarification. This is where implicit prediction about the meaning of a term comes to play. Jim Bromer On Wed, September 15, 2010 11:00 am, Jim Bromer wrote: > I thought that Charles Sanders Peirce developed the idea of "pointing" as > one of his signs in the 19th century, but I might be wrong. From > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sanders_Peirce > > 1. A *sign* (or *representamen*) represents, in the broadest possible > sense of "represents". It is something interpretable as saying > something > about something. It is not necessarily symbolic, linguistic, or > artificial. > > His sign does also include other kinds of symbols. The recognition of the > concept of 'pointing' as a symbolic referent might be older than that but > I > am not aware of it. And David Jones went on and on about some kind of hope about a child-like learning AGI. Well, first, it's "pseudo", not "psuedo". A lot hinges on what I have learned is called one's theory of reference. It's a problem I have been concerned with lately, and I've found that it's in there as a major philosophical problem, philosophical in the sense of us not having enough of a grasp on it to be scientific about it. How words can have meanings at all. The idea that is almost universally held is that words refer, in that sort of sense of pointing, in some way to things or categories. And it brings up the issues of how much categories or things are really out there or are mental constructs--basic sorts of philosophy issues. But then I saw a blog with someone railing against Chomsky's nativist grammar idea. It was from Melody Dye, a cognitive science researcher at Stanford, but it looks like that article is gone. But it led me to the papers from that group and I found one that seemed to bear on the theories of reference: http://psych.stanford.edu/~michael/papers/Ramscar_flo.pdf . It suggested a different approach to the problem. The context is developmental psychology. At least as far as I understand it, word use is more of a prediction than a reference. In the social language game, we are just trying to find the right word in some situation. The arguments include some stuff about how hard it would be to induce a category from a label, so learning has to move from stimulus to label, not the other way around. Also, categories are not formed by detecting similarities, but by learning which features are needed to discriminate in choosing labels. I don't know. It's not a complete theory, but it's interesting in at least opposing the common idea of reference as pointing. So I've been ruminating over this idea for a little while. One thing that does occur to me is that in computer science, reference is good decription of what is going on in computer languages. Symbols do have specific referents. I bring that up because it puts out a bias toward thinking this is the correct view of meaning, when it may really not be psychologically valid, and could be misleading and ineffective for an AGI program. andi ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/8660244-d750797a Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=8660244-6e7fb59c Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
