Related papers: The "Fodor"-FODOR fallacy bites back
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…
Though humans seem to be remarkable learners, arguments in cognitive science and philosophy of mind have long maintained that learning something fundamentally new is impossible. Specifically, Jerry Fodor's arguments for radical concept…
Word sense disambiguation assumes word senses. Within the lexicography and linguistics literature, they are known to be very slippery entities. The paper looks at problems with existing accounts of `word sense' and describes the various…
Can artificial intelligence discover, from raw experience and without human supervision, concepts that humans have discovered? One challenge is that human concepts themselves are fluid: conceptual boundaries can shift, split, and merge as…
This paper synthesizes a series of formal proofs to construct a unified theory on the logical limits of the Symbol Grounding Problem. We distinguish between internal meaning (sense), which formal systems can possess via axioms, and external…
An inductive logic can be formulated in which the elements are not propositions or probability distributions, but information systems. The logic is complete for information systems with binary hypotheses, i.e., it applies to all such…
We revisit the issue of connections between two leading formalisms in nonmonotonic reasoning: autoepistemic logic and default logic. For each logic we develop a comprehensive semantic framework based on the notion of a belief pair. The set…
The development of logic has largely been through the 'deductive' paradigm: conclusions are inferred from established premisses. However, the use of logic in the context of both human and machine reasoning is typically through the dual…
Why is language vague? Vagueness may be explained and rationalized if it can be shown that vague language is more useful to speaker and hearer than precise language. In a well-known paper, Lipman proposes a game-theoretic account of…
Justification theory is a unifying framework for semantics of non-monotonic logics. It is built on the notion of a justification, which intuitively is a graph that explains the truth value of certain facts in a structure. Knowledge…
This paper argues that explainability is only one facet of a broader ideal that shapes our expectations towards artificial intelligence (AI). Fundamentally, the issue is to what extent AI exhibits systematicity--not merely in being…
As an ubiquitous method in natural language processing, word embeddings are extensively employed to map semantic properties of words into a dense vector representation. They capture semantic and syntactic relations among words but the…
This report first shows the equivalence bewteen several formulations of classical logic in intuitionistic logic (tertium non datur, reductio ad absurdum, Pierce's law). Then it establishes the correctness of the G\"odel-Kolmogorov…
We present a critical assessment of Piantadosi's (2023) claim that "Modern language models refute Chomsky's approach to language," focusing on four main points. First, despite the impressive performance and utility of large language models…
Convincing someone of the truth value of a premise requires understanding and articulating the core logical structure of the argument which proves or disproves the premise. Understanding the logical structure of an argument refers to…
A significant debate has emerged in response to a paper written by Steven Piantadosi (Piantadosi, 2023) and uploaded to the LingBuzz platform, the open archive for generative linguistics. Piantadosi's dismissal of Chomsky's approach is…
The purpose of this paper is twofold: (i) we argue that the structure of commonsense knowledge must be discovered, rather than invented; and (ii) we argue that natural language, which is the best known theory of our (shared) commonsense…
I discuss several aspects of information theory and its relationship to physics and neuroscience. The unifying thread of this somewhat chaotic essay is the concept of Kolmogorov or algorithmic complexity (Kolmogorov Complexity, for short).…
The definition is a common form of human expert knowledge, a building block of formal science and mathematics, a foundation for database theory and is supported in various forms in many knowledge representation and formal specification…
This paper is a reflexion on the computability of natural language semantics. It does not contain a new model or new results in the formal semantics of natural language: it is rather a computational analysis of the logical models and…