Related papers: Meaning as Use, Application, Employment, Purpose, …
This paper introduces a theory about the role of language in learning physics. The theory is developed in the context of physics students' and physicists' talking and writing about the subject of quantum mechanics. We found that physicists'…
In this note we suggest that difficulties encountered in natural language semantics are, for the most part, due to the use of mere symbol manipulation systems that are devoid of any content. In such systems, where there is hardly any link…
As interaction between autonomous agents, communication can be analyzed in game-theoretic terms. Meaning game is proposed to formalize the core of intended communication in which the sender sends a message and the receiver attempts to infer…
Physics as a discipline embeds conceptual meaning about the physical world in mathematical formalism. The meaning associated with mathematical symbols depends on context, and physicists can shift conceptual meaning by manipulating those…
Speech-acts can have literal meaning as well as pragmatic meaning, but these both involve consequences typically intended by a speaker. Speech-acts can also have unintentional meaning, in which what is conveyed goes above and beyond what…
Metaphors are part of everyday language and shape the way in which we conceptualize the world. Moreover, they play a multifaceted role in communication, making their understanding and generation a challenging task for language models (LMs).…
The sociological domain is different from the psychological one insofar as meaning can be communicated at the supra-individual level (Schutz, 1932; Luhmann, 1984). The computation of anticipatory systems enables us to distinguish between…
Dreams are highly valued in both Freudian psychoanalysis and less conservative clinical traditions. Text mining enables the extraction of meaning from writings in powerful and unexpected ways. In this work, we report methods, uses and…
The widespread success of large language models (LLMs) has been met with skepticism that they possess anything like human concepts or meanings. Contrary to claims that LLMs possess no meaning whatsoever, we argue that they likely capture…
I explore some of the issues that arise when trying to establish a connection between the underspecification hypothesis pursued in the NLP literature and work on ambiguity in semantics and in the psychological literature. A theory of…
"Natural Language," whether spoken and attended to by humans, or processed and generated by computers, requires networked structures that reflect creative processes in semantic, syntactic, phonetic, linguistic, social, emotional, and…
In the seminal essay, "On the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the physical sciences," physicist Eugene Wigner poses a fundamental philosophical question concerning the relationship between a physical system and our capacity to…
Text embeddings have become central to computational social science and psychology, enabling scalable measurement of meaning and mixed-method inference. Yet most representation learning is optimized and evaluated for prediction and…
The process of meaning composition, wherein smaller units like morphemes or words combine to form the meaning of phrases and sentences, is essential for human sentence comprehension. Despite extensive neurolinguistic research into the brain…
Wireless connectivity has traditionally been regarded as an opaque data pipe carrying messages, whose context-dependent meaning and effectiveness have been ignored. Nevertheless, in emerging cyber-physical and autonomous networked systems,…
It is a fact of our existence, that no matter where we are, we most often find ourselves either hearing, seeing, talking, or even engaged in design related activities. Despite this reality, the notion of 'design', and in particular…
Psychology has had difficulty accounting for the creative, context-sensitive manner in which concepts are used. We believe this stems from the view of concepts as identifiers rather than bridges between mind and world that participate in…
Referring is one of the most basic and prevalent uses of language. How do speakers choose from the wealth of referring expressions at their disposal? Rational theories of language use have come under attack for decades for not being able to…
Mathematics is an essential element of physics problem solving, but experts often fail to appreciate exactly how they use it. Math may be the language of science, but math-in-physics is a distinct dialect of that language. Physicists tend…
Philosophers frequently struggle with the relation of metaphysics to the everyday world, with its practical value, and with its relation to empirical science. This paper distinguishes several different models of the relation between…