Related papers: Autocatalytic Theory of Meaning
Can a machine understand the meanings of natural language? Recent developments in the generative large language models (LLMs) of artificial intelligence have led to the belief that traditional philosophical assumptions about machine…
Contemporary semantic description of logic is based on the ontology of all possible interpretations, an insufficiently clear metaphysical concept. In this article, logic is described as the internal organization of language. Logical…
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…
As language models such as GPT-3 become increasingly successful at generating realistic text, questions about what purely text-based modeling can learn about the world have become more urgent. Is text purely syntactic, as skeptics argue? Or…
"Natural languages are programming languages for minds." Can we or should we take this slogan seriously? If so, how? Can answers be found by looking at the various "dynamic" treatments of natural language developed over the last decade or…
Our languages are in constant flux driven by external factors such as cultural, societal and technological changes, as well as by only partially understood internal motivations. Words acquire new meanings and lose old senses, new words are…
This paper presents a rich knowledge representation language aimed at formalizing causal knowledge. This language is used for accurately and directly formalizing common benchmark examples from the literature of actual causality. A…
Difficulties and discomfort with the interpretation of quantum mechanics are due to differences in language between it and classical physics. Analogies to The Special Theory of Relativity, which also required changes in the basic worldview…
Ordinary and transfinite recursion and induction and ZF set theory are used to construct from a fully interpreted object language and from an extra formula a new language. It is fully interpreted under a suitably defined interpretation.…
This is the first paper in a series in which we lay down the foundations of the theory of interpretations. We systematically study different types of interpretations and their properties. Some of these interpretations are known, while…
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…
Meaning cannot be based on dictionary definitions all the way down: at some point the circularity of definitions must be broken in some way, by grounding the meanings of certain words in sensorimotor categories learned from experience or…
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…
In the present paper, we try to propose a self-similar network theory for the basic understanding. By extending the natural languages to a kind of so called idealy sufficient language, we can proceed a few steps to the investigation of the…
Understanding the semantic relationships between terms is a fundamental task in natural language processing applications. While structured resources that can express those relationships in a formal way, such as ontologies, are still scarce,…
Formal Semantics and Distributional Semantics are two important semantic frameworks in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Cognitive Semantics belongs to the movement of Cognitive Linguistics, which is based on contemporary cognitive…
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…
This paper aims to provide an analysis of what it means when we say that a pair of theories, very generously construed, are equivalent in the sense that they are interdefinable. With regard to theories articulated in first order logic, we…
Analogical reasoning is an essential aspect of human cognition. In this paper, we summarize key theory about the processes underlying analogical reasoning from the cognitive science literature and relate it to current research in natural…
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'…