Okay, I'm going to wave the white flag and say that what we should do is
all get together a few days early for the conference next March, in
Memphis, and discuss all these issues in high-bandwidth mode!
But one last positive thought. A response to your remark:
So let's look at the mappings from throne or stump to chair . . . . A
throne does not have four legs but it is used for sitting. Which way do
you want to go? Or, if someone is currently sitting on the stump, how
do you want to go on that one?
It isn't just the representation but also how you operate on the
representation . . . .
I agree completely! This is exactly the way I think of it, and it is
part of what I am calling "distributed semantics" because the thing that
we refer to as the "meaning" of the term [chair] cannot be pinned down
in a precise way, but is a result of all the interactions between the
atom that represents [chair] and the many things that can interact with
it. It is the fact that the entire system is capable of visualizing a
stump as a chair (it visualises the operation of [sitting] applied to
the stump, and the result is a perfectly reasonable scenario) that makes
the "meaning" of chair not be localizable.
There are innumerable objects in the universe that I could apply that
[sitting] operation to (although some are difficult, such as individual
atoms), so almost anything could be a chair. But then, do we say that
[chair] is defined as anything that we can apply the [sitting] action to?
Hell no! What about using [squatting]? If the king of the jungle
squats on a tree stump, is the stump a throne? Yup. What about
[dancing]? If some chairs are used by a dance troupe performing in
local park, and the point of the dance is that all of the moves take
place on chairs, BUT one of the chairs is actually a tree stump, is the
stump a chair? Kind of.
And so on. This is all about the boundaries between concepts (about
which the cog psychologists have much to say), and if remember correctly
Barsalou even has a theory along these lines.
So, do wonder if we are not saying siilar things, but in different language.
Richard Loosemore
-----
This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email
To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to:
http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=48906135-ba92de
