Abstract not found

The congeries of theoretical views collectively referred to as "situated action" (SA) claim that humans and their interactions with the world cannot be understood using symbol-system models and methodology, but only by observing them within real-world contexts or building nonsymbolic models of them. SA claims also that rapid, real-time interaction with a dynamically changing environment is not amenable to symbolic interpretation of the sort espoused by the cognitive science of recent decades. Planning and representation, central to symbolic theories, are claimed to be irrelevant in everyday human activity. We will contest these claims, as well as their proponents ' characterizations of the symbol-system viewpoint. We will show that a number of existing symbolic systems perform well in temporally demanding tasks embedded in complex environments, whereas the systems usually regarded as exemplifying SA are thoroughly symbolic (and representational), and, to the extent that they are limited in these respects, have doubtful prospects for extension to complex tasks. As our title suggests, we propose that the goals set forth by the proponents of SA can be attained only within the framework of symbolic systems. The main body of empirical evidence supporting our view resides in the numerous symbol systems constructed in the past 35 years that have successfully simulated broad areas of human cognition. During the past few years a point of view has emerged in artificial intelligence, often under the label of "situated action " (henceforth, SA), that denies that intelligent systems are correctly characterized as physical symbol systems, and especially denies that symbolic processing lies at the heart of

A theoretical framework for grounding language is introduced that provides a computational path from sensing and motor action to words and speech acts. The approach combines concepts from semiotics and schema theory to develop a holistic approach to linguistic meaning. Schemas serve as structured beliefs that are grounded in an agent’s physical environment through a causal-predictive cycle of action and perception. Words and basic speech acts are interpreted in terms of grounded schemas. The framework reflects lessons learned from implementations of several language processing robots. It provides a basis for the analysis and design of situated, multimodal communication systems that straddle symbolic and non-symbolic realms.

Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? The question invites two standard replies. Some accept the boundaries of skin and skull, and say that what is outside the body is outside the mind. Others are impressed by arguments suggesting that the meaning of our words ‘just

This paper has two objectives. First, we will argue that the mutability of conceptual fea- tures can be represented as a single, multiple-valued dimension. We will show that the fea- tures of a concept can be reliably ordered with respect to the degree to which people are willing to transform the feature while retaining the integrity of a representation; i.e., that a number of conceptual tasks, all of which require people to transform conceptual features, produce similar orderings. Following Medin and Shoben (1988), these tasks have in common that they ask people to consider an object that is missing a feature but is otherwise intact (e.g., a real chair without a seat)

Abstract not found

Ahn and Lassaline [Ahn, W., Lassaline, M.E., 1995. Causal structure in categorization.

... This paper makes two claims: first, psychologism is true, and thus a natural behaviorist analysis of intelligence that is incompatible with psychologism is false. Second, the standard arguments against behaviorism are inadequate to defeat this natural behaviorist analysis of intelligence or to establish psychologism. While psychologism is of course anathema to behaviorists, it also seems wrong-headed to many philosophers who would not classify themselves as behaviorists. For example, Michael Dummett says: If a Martian could learn to speak a human language, or a robot be devised to behave in just the ways that are essential to a language speaker, an implicit knowledge of the correct theory of meaning for the language could be attributed to the Martian or the robot with as much right as to a human speaker, even though their internal mechanisms were entirely different. (Dummett, 1976) Dummett's view seems to be that what is relevant to the possession of a certain mental state is a matter of actual and potential behavior, and that internal processing is not relevant except to the extent that internal processing affects actual and potential behavior. I think that this Dummettian claim contains an important grain of truth, a grain that many philosophers wrongly take to be incompatible with psychologism. This grain of truth can be elucidated as follows. Suppose we meet Martians, and find them to be behaviorally indistinguishable from humans. We learn their languages and they learn ours, and we develop deep commercial and cultural relations with them. We contribute to their journals and enjoy their movies, and vice versa. Then Martian and human psychologists compare notes, only to find that in underlying psychological mechanisms the Martians are very different from us. The M...

Consciousness and intentionality are perhaps the two central phenomena in the philosophy of mind. Human beings are conscious beings: there is something it is like to be us. Human beings are intentional beings: we represent what is going on in the world. Correspondingly, our specific mental states, such as perceptions and thoughts, very often have

this paper, is whether the domain of operation of aspect markers, i.e., their `cognitive scope', is limited to semantic representations or whether, and to what extent, aspect markers can also operate on other types of `meaning' representations. In section 2, I will show that, like negation, aspect can operate on conversational implicata and that aspect operators are not sensitive to differences (if any) in the representational format of semantic and pragmatic information. Section 3 is concerned with another type of `meaning', viz., with LOGICAL entailments. I will put forward evidence from English and Belhare (a Tibeto-Burman language of Nepal; cf. Bickel, in press) that logical entailments of verbs are in some cases outside the scope of aspect operators. This suggests that aspect operators are sensitive to a distinction between two types of contextually nondefeasible meaning, viz. semantic and logical information. The observation that aspect markers cannot operate on some types of logical entailments provides in section 4 a simple account of a long-standing issue in Slavic aspectology, viz., the controversy whether verbs like ponimat' `to understand (imperfective)' and