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Symbol Grounding
In cognitive science and semantics, the symbol grounding problem concerns how it is that words ( symbols in general) get their meanings, and hence is closely related to the problem of what meaning itself really is. The problem of meaning is in turn related to the problem of how it is that mental states are meaningful, hence to the problem of consciousness: what is the connection between certain physical systems and the contents of subjective experiences. Background Referents Gottlob Frege distinguished a referent (the thing that a word refers to) and the word's meaning. This is most clearly illustrated using the proper names of concrete individuals, but it is also true of names of kinds of things and of abstract properties: (1) "Tony Blair", (2) "the prime minister of the UK during the year 2004", and (3) "Cherie Blair's husband" all have the same referent, but not the same meaning. Some have suggested that the meaning of a (referring) word is the rule or features that one ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hilary Putnam
Hilary Whitehall Putnam (; July 31, 1926 – March 13, 2016) was an American philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist, and a major figure in analytic philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. He made significant contributions to philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science. Outside philosophy, Putnam contributed to mathematics and computer science. Together with Martin Davis he developed the Davis–Putnam algorithm for the Boolean satisfiability problem and he helped demonstrate the unsolvability of Hilbert's tenth problem. Putnam was known for his willingness to apply equal scrutiny to his own philosophical positions as to those of others, subjecting each position to rigorous analysis until he exposed its flaws. As a result, he acquired a reputation for frequently changing his positions. In philosophy of mind, Putnam is known for his argument against the type-identity of mental and physical states based on ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Affordance
Affordance is what the environment offers the individual. American psychologist James J. Gibson coined the term in his 1966 book, ''The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems'', and it occurs in many of his earlier essays. However, his best-known definition is taken from his seminal 1979 book, ''The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception'': The word is used in a variety of fields: perceptual psychology, cognitive psychology, environmental psychology, criminology, industrial design, human–computer interaction (HCI), interaction design, user-centered design, communication studies, instructional design, science, technology and society (STS), sports science and artificial intelligence. Original development Gibson developed the concept of affordance over many years, culminating in his final book, ''The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception'' in 1979. He defined an affordance as what the environment provides or furnishes the animal. Notably, Gibson compares an affordan ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Turing Test
The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1950, is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Turing proposed that a human evaluator would judge natural language conversations between a human and a machine designed to generate human-like responses. The evaluator would be aware that one of the two partners in conversation was a machine, and all participants would be separated from one another. The conversation would be limited to a text-only channel, such as a computer keyboard and screen, so the result would not depend on the machine's ability to render words as speech. If the evaluator could not reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine would be said to have passed the test. The test results would not depend on the machine's ability to give correct answers to questions, only on how closely its answers resembled those a human would give. The test was intr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Aaron Woods
William Aaron Woods (born June 17, 1942), generally known as Bill Woods, is a researcher in natural language processing, continuous speech understanding, knowledge representation, and knowledge-based search technology. He is currently a Software Engineer at Google. Education Woods received a Bachelor's degree from Ohio Wesleyan University (1964) and a Master's (1965) and Ph.D. (1968) in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University, where he then served as an Assistant Professor and later as a Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Computer Science. Research Woods built one of the first natural language question answering systems (LUNAR) to answer questions about the Apollo 11 moon rocks for the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center while he was at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At BBN, he was a Principal Scientist and manager of the Artificial Intelligence Department in the '70's and early '80's. He was the principal investigator for BBN's early work in nat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Philip N
Philip, also Phillip, is a male given name, derived from the Greek (''Philippos'', lit. "horse-loving" or "fond of horses"), from a compound of (''philos'', "dear", "loved", "loving") and (''hippos'', "horse"). Prominent Philips who popularized the name include kings of Macedonia and one of the apostles of early Christianity. ''Philip'' has many alternative spellings. One derivation often used as a surname is Phillips. It was also found during ancient Greek times with two Ps as Philippides and Philippos. It has many diminutive (or even hypocoristic) forms including Phil, Philly, Lip, Pip, Pep or Peps. There are also feminine forms such as Philippine and Philippa. Antiquity Kings of Macedon * Philip I of Macedon * Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great * Philip III of Macedon, half-brother of Alexander the Great * Philip IV of Macedon * Philip V of Macedon New Testament * Philip the Apostle * Philip the Evangelist Others * Philippus of Croton (c. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stevan Harnad
Stevan Robert Harnad (Hernád István Róbert, Hesslein István, born June 2, 1945, Budapest) is a Hungarian-born cognitive scientist based in Montreal, Canada. Education Harnad was born in Budapest, Hungary. He did his undergraduate work at McGill University and his graduate work at Princeton University's Department of Psychology. Harnad completed his Master of Arts degree in Psychology from McGill University in 1969, his Doctor of Philosophy degree from Princeton University in 1992. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by University of Liège in 2013. Research Harnad's research interests are in cognitive science, open access and animal sentience. He is currently professor of psychology at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), McGill University, and professor emeritus of cognitive science at the University of Southampton. Elected external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2001 (resigned in protest, 8 October 2016), he was Canada Research Chair in cognit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jerry Fodor
Jerry Alan Fodor (; April 22, 1935 – November 29, 2017) was an American philosopher and the author of many crucial works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. His writings in these fields laid the groundwork for the modularity of mind and the language of thought hypotheses, and he is recognized as having had "an enormous influence on virtually every portion of the philosophy of mind literature since 1960." Until his death in 2017 he held the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Rutgers University. Fodor was known for his provocative and sometimes polemical style of argumentation. He argued that mental states, such as beliefs and desires, are relations between individuals and mental representations. He maintained that these representations can only be correctly explained in terms of a language of thought (LOT) in the mind. Furthermore, this language of thought itself is an actually existing thing that is codified in the br ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Natural Language
In neuropsychology, linguistics, and philosophy of language, a natural language or ordinary language is any language that has evolved naturally in humans through use and repetition without conscious planning or premeditation. Natural languages can take different forms, such as speech or signing. They are distinguished from constructed and formal languages such as those used to program computers or to study logic. Defining natural language Natural language can be broadly defined as different from * artificial and constructed languages, e.g. computer programming languages * constructed international auxiliary languages * non-human communication systems in nature such as whale and other marine mammal vocalizations or honey bees' waggle dance. All varieties of world languages are natural languages, including those that are associated with linguistic prescriptivism or language regulation. ( Nonstandard dialects can be viewed as a wild type in comparison with stan ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Contextualism
Contextualism, also known as epistemic contextualism, is a family of views in philosophy which emphasize the ''context'' in which an action, utterance, or expression occurs. Proponents of contextualism argue that, in some important respect, the action, utterance, or expression can only be understood relative to that context.Price (2008). Contextualist views hold that philosophically controversial concepts, such as "meaning P", "knowing that P", "having a reason to A", and possibly even "being true" or "being right" only have meaning relative to a specified context. Other philosophers contend that context-dependence leads to complete relativism. In ethics, "contextualist" views are often closely associated with situational ethics, or with moral relativism. Contextualism in architecture is a theory of design where modern building types are harmonized with urban forms usual to a traditional city. In epistemology, contextualism is the treatment of the word 'knows' as context-sens ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Constructivist Epistemology
Constructivism is a view in the philosophy of science that maintains that scientific knowledge is constructed by the scientific community, which seeks to measure and construct models of the natural world. According to the constructivist, natural science, therefore, consists of mental constructs that aim to explain sensory experience and measurements. According to constructivists, the world is independent of human minds, but knowledge of the world is always a human and social construction. Constructivism opposes the philosophy of objectivism, embracing the belief that a human can come to know the truth about the natural world not mediated by scientific approximations with different degrees of validity and accuracy. According to constructivists, there is no single valid methodology in science but rather a diversity of useful methods. Etymology The term originates from psychology, education, and social constructivism. The expression "constructivist epistemology" was first us ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Psychologism
Psychologism is a family of philosophical positions, according to which certain psychological facts, laws, or entities play a central role in grounding or explaining certain non-psychological facts, laws, or entities. The word was coined by Johann Eduard Erdmann as ''Psychologismus'', being translated into English as ''psychologism''.'' Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy''Psychologism Definition The '' Oxford English Dictionary'' defines ''psychologism'' as: "The view or doctrine that a theory of psychology or ideas forms the basis of an account of metaphysics, epistemology, or meaning; (sometimes) spec. the explanation or derivation of mathematical or logical laws in terms of psychological facts." Psychologism in epistemology, the idea that its problems "can be solved satisfactorily by the psychological study of the development of mental processes", was argued in John Locke's ''An Essay Concerning Human Understanding'' (1690). Other forms of psychologism are logical psychol ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
