Related papers: Meaning as Use, Application, Employment, Purpose, …
The use of the open and searchable Wittgenstein's Nachlass (The Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen (WAB)) has proved instrumental in the quest for a common thread of Wittgenstein's view on the connections between meaning, use…
Mathematics is a critical part of much scientific research. Physics in particular weaves math extensively into its instruction beginning in high school. Despite much research on the learning of both physics and math, the problem of how to…
The development of discursive knowledge presumes the communication of meaning as analytically different from the communication of information. Knowledge can then be considered as a meaning which makes a difference. Whereas the communication…
The explicit relationship among perception, communication, and design is being discussed in some detail, in order to relate it to characteristic details of the modeling of the world which defines the scientific and artistic activities of…
Some aspects of the physical nature of language are discussed. In particular, physical models of language must exist that are efficiently implementable. The existence requirement is essential because without physical models no communication…
As a celebration of the \emph{Tractatus} 100th anniversary it might be worth revisiting its relation to the later writings. From the former to the latter, David Pears recalls that ``everyone is aware of the holistic character of…
The mainstream view of meaning is that it is emergent, not fundamental, but some have disputed this, asserting that there is a more fundamental level of reality than that addressed by current physical theories, and that matter and meaning…
Physics makes powerful use of mathematics, yet the way this use is made is often poorly understood. Professionals closely integrate their mathematical symbology with physical meaning, resulting in a powerful and productive structure. But…
This document chronicles this author's attempt to explore how words come to mean what they do, with a particular focus on child language acquisition and what that means for models of language understanding.\footnote{I say \emph{historical}…
Notions like meaning, signal, intentionality, are difficult to relate to a physical word. I study a purely physical definition of "meaningful information", from which these notions can be derived. It is inspired by a model recently…
A formal theory of meaning (the process of knowledge accumulation) as multiplicative chaos is proposed. The epistemological process is understood as the process of subjective extraction of some knowledge from the incoming information. The…
Representations play a central role in the study of both biological and artificial intelligence, as well as philosophy of mind. Across neuroscience, computer science, and philosophy, a recurring theme is that representations not only carry…
Over the past 50 years many have debated what representation should be used to capture the meaning of natural language utterances. Recently new needs of such representations have been raised in research. Here I survey some of the…
Natural Language Processing prides itself to be an empirically-minded, if not outright empiricist field, and yet lately it seems to get itself into essentialist debates on issues of meaning and measurement ("Do Large Language Models…
Representing the semantics of linguistic items in a machine-interpretable form has been a major goal of Natural Language Processing since its earliest days. Among the range of different linguistic items, words have attracted the most…
Language understanding entails not just extracting the surface-level meaning of the linguistic input, but constructing rich mental models of the situation it describes. Here we propose that because processing within the brain's core…
We use language to communicate our thoughts. But is language merely the expression of thoughts, which are themselves produced by other, nonlinguistic parts of our minds? Or does language play a more transformative role in human cognition,…
Artificial intelligence systems exhibit many useful capabilities, but they appear to lack understanding. This essay describes how we could go about constructing a machine capable of understanding. As John Locke (1689) pointed out words are…
One goal of Artificial Intelligence is to learn meaningful representations for natural language expressions, but what this entails is not always clear. A variety of new linguistic behaviours present themselves embodied as computers,…
Ontologies enable knowledge sharing and interdisciplinary collaboration by providing standardized, structured vocabularies for diverse communities. While logical axioms are a cornerstone of ontology design, natural language elements such as…