Related papers: The "Fodor"-FODOR fallacy bites back
Dictionaries are inherently circular in nature. A given word is linked to a set of alternative words (the definition) which in turn point to further descendants. Iterating through definitions in this way, one typically finds that…
Lexical semantics theories differ in advocating that the meaning of words is represented as an inference graph, a feature mapping or a vector space, thus raising the question: is it the case that one of these approaches is superior to the…
This paper proposes an alternative to standard first-order logic that seeks greater naturalness, generality, and semantic self-containment. The system removes the first-order restriction, avoids type hierarchies, and dispenses with external…
Much of philosophical logic and all of philosophy of language make empirical claims about the vernacular natural language. They presume semantics under which `and' and `or' are related by the dually paired distributive and absorption laws.…
In the concluding remarks of Ontological Promiscuity Hobbs (1985) made what we believe to be a very insightful observation: given that semantics is an attempt at specifying the relation between language and the world, if "one can assume a…
Ontologies formalise how the concepts from a given domain are interrelated. Despite their clear potential as a backbone for explainable AI, existing ontologies tend to be highly incomplete, which acts as a significant barrier to their more…
Our understanding about things is conceptual. By stating that we reason about objects, it is in fact not the objects but concepts referring to them that we manipulate. Now, so long just as we acknowledge infinitely extending notions such as…
First-Order Logic (FOL) is widely regarded as one of the most important foundations for knowledge representation. Nevertheless, in this paper, we argue that FOL has several critical issues for this purpose. Instead, we propose an…
Most definitions of ontology, viewed as a "specification of a conceptualization", agree on the fact that if an ontology can take different forms, it necessarily includes a vocabulary of terms and some specification of their meaning in…
Additive composition (Foltz et al, 1998; Landauer and Dumais, 1997; Mitchell and Lapata, 2010) is a widely used method for computing meanings of phrases, which takes the average of vector representations of the constituent words. In this…
This paper establishes a theoretical foundation for understanding the fundamental limits of AI explainability through algorithmic information theory. We formalize explainability as the approximation of complex models by simpler ones,…
Natural language understanding applications such as interactive planning and face-to-face translation require extensive inferencing. Many of these inferences are based on the meaning of particular open class words. Providing a…
Representing words by vectors, or embeddings, enables computational reasoning and is foundational to automating natural language tasks. For example, if word embeddings of similar words contain similar values, word similarity can be readily…
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…
Semantic theories of natural language associate meanings with utterances by providing meanings for lexical items and rules for determining the meaning of larger units given the meanings of their parts. Meanings are often assumed to combine…
"Information Processing" is a recently launched buzzword whose meaning is vague and obscure even for the majority of its users. The reason for this is the lack of a suitable definition for the term "information". In my attempt to amend this…
There is a strong demand for precise means for the comparison of logics in terms of expressiveness both from theoretical and from application areas. The aim of this paper is to propose a sufficiently general and reasonable formal criterion…
In the eyes of a rationalist like Descartes or Spinoza, human reasoning is flawless, marching toward uncovering ultimate truth. A few centuries later, however, culminating in the work of Kahneman and Tversky, human reasoning was portrayed…
The artificial intelligence received broad interpretation as a literary image. This approach did not have unambiguous refering to the scopes of logical studies and mathematical investigations. An author applied methods peculiar to the…
Tarski's semantic definition of truth is the composition of its extensional and intensional aspects. Abstract satisfaction, the core of the semantic definition of truth, is the basis for the theory of institutions (Goguen and Burstall). The…