HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: peeters@tasman.cc.utas.edu.au (bert peeters)
Subject: Re:synonymy 
Organization: University of Tasmania, Australia.
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1992 23:14:56 GMT

swann@divsun.unige.ch (SWANN Philip) writes:

>I would object to the assumption that synonymy is a property of
>human language. Trivially, if we believe that two expressions
>"mean the same thing" then we have some meaningful criteria to
>distinguish them and some reason for doing so and, unless you want
>to multiply abstract entities endlessly, they therefore do not "mean
>the same thing". More concretely, for any pair of human language
>expressions that you claim to be synonymous in a given context, I
>claim that I can produce another context in which they are not
>synonymous. Finally, while genuine synonymes *might* exist as
>transient phenomena in human language, surely one would quickly
>be driven out by the other for simple reasons of efficiency (would
>you want to keep two identical copies of the same procedure in
>a program?).

I absolutely agree with this statement (whether it is (part of) a
theory of meaning or not :-)...).

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr Bert Peeters                         Tel: +61 02 202344
Department of Modern Languages               002 202344
University of Tasmania at Hobart        Fax: 002 207813
GPO Box 252C                            Bert.Peeters@modlang.utas.edu.au
Hobart TAS 7001
Australia
Newsgroups: sci.cognitive,sci.philosophy.tech,sci.lang,sci.philosophy.meta
From: christo@psych.toronto.edu (Christopher Green)
Subject: Re: Commitment to logic; was ...
Organization: Department of Psychology, University of Toronto
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1992 21:43:21 GMT

In article <1992Nov17.175227.20588@athena.cs.uga.edu> mcovingt@aisun3.ai.uga.edu (Michael Covington) writes:
>
>Indeed.  Logical reasoning tells me that if I walk out in front of a bus,
>I'll get run over.  Does he mean that in the Far East this doesn't hold?

LOGIC tells you this?!?!? Astounding! I'd love to see that logic. I've
always thought this was contingent; true, but contingent. The things
you learn on the net...
>

-- 
Christopher D. Green                christo@psych.toronto.edu
Psychology Department               cgreen@lake.scar.utoronto.ca
University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A1
Xref: sparky sci.cognitive:756 sci.philosophy.tech:4234 sci.lang:8167
From: zeleny@scws7.harvard.edu (Michael Zeleny)
Newsgroups: sci.cognitive,sci.philosophy.tech,sci.lang
Subject: Re: Theories of meaning not relying solely on sym
Date: 24 Nov 92 04:18:15 GMT
Article-I.D.: husc3.1992Nov23.231816.17749
Organization: The Phallogocentric Cabal

In article <RJC.92Nov23111346@daiches.cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
rjc@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Richard Caley) writes:

>In article <1992Nov20.111124.17630@husc3.harvard.edu>, 
>Michael Zeleny (mz) writes:

>mz> I see no reason to suppose that the salient contextual features are
>mz> unique and irreproducible, in the sense you seem to suggest.

RC:
>One of them is the person hearing/reading the phrase. You can't rewind
>people to an earlier state and giving them two phrases at once is
>pointless unless you are one of the more sadistic variety of
>psycho-linguist :-).

Why does the recipient's response have anything to do with the meaning
of the message?  Suppose I put a letter in a bottle, and cast it on the
waters; are you going to tell me that my message is meaningless, until
and unless it gets read?

RC:
>There, I suspect, is the core of the difference between you and, so
>far as I can see, everyone else on this thread. You seem to want to
>divorce `language' from its human context.

Spare Aunt Sally, Caley.  My claim is just the opposite: that human
context can be represented.  You are the one who wants to divorce
language from its suprahuman value, by separating the words from the
concepts they express.

RC:
>					    If you do that hard enough,
>then indeed you _do_ get a formal language, however you also end up
>with something which is of no interest to anyone except formal
>language theorists, since you have no way of showing that any facts
>you might determine about your formalised language have any relevance
>to real language as she is spoke. You're just repeating all of the
>mistakes of the people who tried to deduce rules for English from an
>idealised Latin grammar, you haven't shown that you have a meaningful
>inverse transformation.

Wrong again.  I proceed by abduction, as well as by deduction.  My
considered expectation is that ultimately the formal and the descriptive
approaches will converge, yielding the sort of theory I characterized
elsewhere.  Bit that will not happen, until and unless the twin-headed
monster of Lockean conceptualism and Chomskian syntactical reductionism
gets its just deserts.

>--
>rjc@cogsci.ed.ac.uk				_O_
>						 |<

cordially,
mikhail zeleny@husc.harvard.edu
"Le cul des femmes est monotone comme l'esprit des hommes."
Newsgroups: sci.cognitive
From: swann@divsun.unige.ch (SWANN Philip)
Subject: Re: Theory of Meaning 
Organization: University of Geneva, Switzerland
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1992 09:23:28 GMT

In article <peeters.722041321@tasman>, peeters@tasman.cc.utas.edu.au (bert peeters) writes:

  The
> case was made worse by Swann's slip (Stich for Schiffer). I only
> found out who he had in mind by checking the library holdings under
> "title" rather than "author"....{deleted} And why he
> made the slip? Honestly, I do NOT know. I do not know either whether
> I really "calculated that he couldn't actually have meant what he
> did mean", so all that follows from there (including "this is why
> we don't need semantics" and including the smiley) is shaky. We do
> need theories of meaning, to avoid misunderstandings like this one.

Sorry, I thought the point would have been clear in the context of this
discussion. I assumed Peeters was familiar with both Stich and Schiffer
and their books. I also assumed he would have made the natural
psycholinguistic inference that the short hamming distance between the two
names made their retrieval unreliable (i.e. at some low level the wires
tend to get crossed) - or in folk terms, I didn't say what I meant because
of a slip of the tongue. I believe that all communication takes place in
this kind of noisy context-dependent way, so for Peeters to construct
a referential interpretation seemed to me to be a good example of
semantics imposing a simplistic and irrelevant theory on a *very*
complex phenomenon.


Philip Swann

Newsgroups: sci.cognitive,sci.philosophy.tech,sci.lang,sci.philosophy.meta
From: brewer@sol.cs.wmich.edu (Steve Brewer)
Subject: Re: Folk Theories of Meaning (was re: Theories of meaning not relying solely on sym)
Organization: W M U Fako de Sciencaj Studoj
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1992 13:40:24 GMT

In article <1992Nov16.122343.17501@husc3.harvard.edu> 
zeleny@husc10.harvard.edu (Michael Zeleny) writes:
>
>If you don't feel that being bound by
>logic is a *moral* obligation, would you still have any basis for a
>reasonable expectation that your tooting your car's horn at a bunch of
>Samoan Hell's Angels does not *mean* your informed consent for them to
>peel off your skin and rip out your heart?  Do you have a glimmer of
>understanding that your human rights are not worth the market value of
>the chemicals that comprise your anatomy, *if* there be no such things
>as matters of fact about meaning?

It seems to me that this statement mixes several immiscible issues.
Let us remember that human rights are based on a *committment* to 
logic.  We shouldn't believe that logic is fundamentally 'right' or
something.  Most evidence I've seen indicates that very few people
use logic or fundamentally rational thinking for most decision-making.
Miriam Solomon's paper on scientific validation suggests that the human
system, though illogical, may produce better results because of the
way knowledge construction occurs as a distributed system of dispersed
cognitive entities with different perspectives.  The system provides
better for both diversity in the common conceptual ecology (if I can steal
that term) and less duplication of effort.

Furthermore, remember that a committment to logic is a *western* ideal
that is not going to be applicable in many areas of the world.  In 
many places, doing something seemingly innocuous *would* result in
having your skin peeled off.  Do you believe that a simple lack of 
commitment to western logic makes these value systems bad or wrong 
somehow?  I don't believe that such a viewpoint is supportable.

-- 
Steven D. Brewer    brewer@cs.wmich.edu     *     99brewer@lab.cc.wmich.edu
                Department of Science Studies,  Western Michigan University
"Kiu regalas per ^stonoj, tiun oni dankas per bastonoj." D-ro L.L. Zamenhof
Xref: sparky sci.cognitive:755 sci.philosophy.tech:4233 sci.lang:8166
From: lansing@bend.ucsd.edu (Jeff Lansing)
Newsgroups: sci.cognitive,sci.philosophy.tech,sci.lang
Subject: Re: Theories of meaning not relying solely on sym
Date: 24 Nov 1992 02:48:48 GMT
Organization: Linguistics Department, UCSD
NNTP-Posting-Host: bend.ucsd.edu

In article <1992Nov17.092016.28202@news.unige.ch> swann@divsun.unige.ch (SWANN Philip) writes:
>
>... More concretely, for any pair of human language
>expressions that you claim to be synonymous in a given context, I
>claim that I can produce another context in which they are not
>synonymous.
>
I think that is exactly the purpose of synonymy, to pick out those contexts
in which the two expressions ``mean the same''. But why do we care about those
contexts? Because they tell us what the ``theme'' or ``point'' of what
that particular context is.

Jeff Lansing
From: dmp@cs.bham.ac.uk (Donald Peterson)
Newsgroups: sci.cognitive
Subject: Philosophy Textbooks for Cog. Sci.
Date: 19 Nov 92 13:20:12 GMT
Organization: Cognitive Science, Birmingham, UK


In teaching the Philosophy of Mind in our Cognitive Science MSc
programme, I need to use a single collection of papers as a course
text. I currently use:

	William Lycan (1990) _Mind and Cognition:a Reader_, Blackwell.

Two other good ones are:

	Margaret Boden (1990), _The Philosophy of AI_, Oxford.

and

	David Rosenthal (1991) _The Nature of Mind_, Oxford.

If anyone knows of other good collections for the purpose, I'd be
interested to know about them. Such a collection needs to be broad, up
to date, and available in cheap paperback. 

I'd be interested also in collections of papers on the Philosophy of
Science for Cognitive Science. In particular I'd like to know of any
which include papers addressing issues of cognitive modelling --- the
use of computer models and whether and how they constitute a method of
investigating psychological reality.
From: iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski)
Newsgroups: sci.cognitive
Subject: Re: Silly Mnemonic Tricks
Date: 23 Nov 92 15:35:17 GMT
Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK

In article <1992Nov10.023134.30720@news.weeg.uiowa.edu> tlund@news.weeg.uiowa.edu (Thomas Lund) writes:
>GAMES magazine recently had a contest to make "modern" mnemonic devices.  Here
>are the winners ("Tricks for the Memories, GAMES, June, 1992)
>
>Gorbachev's khaki underwera always tends to ride up at long lines exiting
> boring Kremlin Meetings.  = the 15 ex Soviet Republics: Georgia, Hirgizia,
> Ukraine, Armenia, Turkmenia, Tadzhikistan, Russia, Uxbekistan, Azerbajan,
> Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Byerlorussia, Kazakhstan, and Moldavia.
>by Erik Hassing

... and so on.  I think this one will do to illustrate what I want to say.
I wonder how useful it is.  It produces fifteen letters in a certain order
-- the initial letters of the words in the sentence.  Are those fifteen
letters enough to reconstruct the names of the republics?  I doubt it.
Now the order.  It appears arbitrary to me.  (If I'm wrong, I hope
someone will say so.)  If the republics were sorted by area,
population or what have you, so that someone who already knows their
names could use the mnemonic to remember the order, that would be useful.
That is how, say, the jingle for the transistor colour codes works:
you already know the colours, you only need to memorise the order.

-- 
 `Haud yer wheesht!  Come oot o the man an gie him peace.' (The Glasgow Gospel)
Ivan A Derzhanski   (iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk;  iad@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu)
* Centre for Cognitive Science,  2 Buccleuch Place,  Edinburgh EH8 9LW,  UK
* Cowan House, Pollock Halls, 18 Holyrood Park Road, Edinburgh EH16 5BD, UK
Newsgroups: sci.cognitive,sci.philosophy.tech,sci.lang
From: brewer@sol.cs.wmich.edu (Steve Brewer)
Subject: Re: Theories of meaning not relying solely on sym
Organization: W M U Fako de Sciencaj Studoj
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 1992 18:36:59 GMT

Thanks to those who thoughtfully responded to my previous
posting (and even to those who responded otherwise).  Here are
a couple of quotes that seem to highlight the ontological
distinctions between my perspective and several other posters.
I'm still looking for insight regarding the unflagging certainty 
of validity that so many place in logic.

] From: mcovingt@aisun3.ai.uga.edu (Michael Covington)
] 
] Someone had asserted that "logic" was a peculiarity of Western culture.
] 
] I was trying to show the absurdity of this notion by taking a practical
] example: in a situation where "Western" logic tells me that if I step out
] in front of a bus I'll be killed, would he claim that in the Far East the
] same situation is not as dangerous because "Western" logic does not apply?

] From: zeleny@husc10.harvard.edu (Michael Zeleny)
] 
] The point is that a *correct* and
] *comprehensive* normative description will _ipso facto_ have full
] descriptive adequacy.  

Logic as a model for understanding rational decision making is not
peculiar to Western civilization.  However, I don't believe that a
committment to logic as the basis for rational thought is universal.
Most people are not using logic when they make most of their everyday
decisions (as examples posted by others show).  Indeed, most
scientists appear not to use logic for much of their decision making.  
Fitness is probably the ultimate arbiter of these processes, but even 
at a fundamental level it is evident why this must be so.

Here is my perspective, for what it is worth:

The reality that each person reacts to is a reality of their own
construction and an imperfect reflection of a larger socially
constructed reality.  Logic can function in this environment only
to the extent that internal models generated to explain phenomena
in the self-generated reality can be compared with observations made 
of the self-generated reality.  Logic between two individuals becomes
comparing one reality with another: a fundamentally invalid comparison.

Yes, a correct and comprehensive normative description *would*
have full descriptive adequacy, but how could such a thing really 
exist?  Just as we can agree that on such and such page of a book an
event occurs, we can agree that such and such observation of 'reality'
conforms to some parameter or set of parameters.  What we can
never know is whether the book is fact or fiction, whether both our
fundamental assumptions regarding the nature of the phenomenon and
our observations of that phenomenon are valid.  

Thoughtful responses and criticism welcomed.

-- 
Steven D. Brewer    brewer@cs.wmich.edu     *     99brewer@lab.cc.wmich.edu
                Department of Science Studies,  Western Michigan University
"Kiu regalas per ^stonoj, tiun oni dankas per bastonoj." D-ro L.L. Zamenhof
Newsgroups: sci.cognitive,sci.philosophy.tech,sci.lang
From: christo@psych.toronto.edu (Christopher Green)
Subject: Re: Theories of meaning not relying solely on sym
Keywords: genitalia synonyms
Organization: Department of Psychology, University of Toronto
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 1992 19:56:43 GMT

In article <1992Nov20.103115.23839@news.unige.ch> afzal@divsun.unige.ch writes:
>According to [1, pp. 161]:
>
>(3) You twat!
>(4) You prick!
>
>However, in such cases the ``euphemisms'' are not synonymous with the
>terms of which they are normally considered euphemisms.
>
Perhaps *dysphemisms* would be more appropriate. :-)

-- 
Christopher D. Green                christo@psych.toronto.edu
Psychology Department               cgreen@lake.scar.utoronto.ca
University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A1
Xref: sparky sci.cognitive:730 sci.philosophy.tech:4212 sci.lang:8146
From: afzal@divsun.unige.ch (Afzal Ballim)
Newsgroups: sci.cognitive,sci.philosophy.tech,sci.lang
Subject: Re: Theories of meaning not relying solely on sym
Keywords: genitalia synonyms
Date: 21 Nov 92 16:49:33 GMT
Reply-To: afzal@divsun.unige.ch
Organization: University of Geneva, Switzerland

In article <1992Nov21.121330.19649@infodev.cam.ac.uk>, etg10@cl.cam.ac.uk (Edmund Grimley-Evans) writes:
|> |> ``The degree of synonymy (or near synonymy) in the vocabulary for genitalia
|> |> and copulation has no parallel elsewhere in the English lexicon -- except in
|> |> the terms for `whore.' There are reportedly more than 1,200 terms for `vagina'
|> |> and more than 1,000 for `penis' (with or without testicles), 800 for
|> |> copulation, and 2,000 for whore...'
|> 
|> When people talk about "The English Language" or "The English Lexicon" they are
|> usually making a major Denkfehler. Speakers of the same dialect of English may
|> use very similar grammars, but when it comes to vocabulary there are huge
|> differences even between similarly-aged siblings. What possible significance can
|> these numbers have?

Certainly the claim that there is ``An English Lexicon'' is must be taken with
a pinch of salt. The only point of the ``numbers'' is (taking up Pat Healey's
earlier point) that taboo subjects breed large numbers of euphemisms, these
being the closest that one gets to synonymity (in the sense of universally
subtitutable) in real language.


-- 
Afzal Ballim	             |BITNET,EARN,MHS,X.400: afzal@divsun.unige.ch
 ISSCO, University of Geneva |UUCP: mcsun!divsun.unige.ch!afzal
 54 route des Acacias	     |JANET: afzal%divsun.unige.ch@uk.ac.ean-relay
 CH-1227 GENEVA,Switzerland  |CSNET,ARPA: afzal%divsun.unige.ch@relay.cs.net
Xref: sparky sci.cognitive:633 sci.philosophy.tech:4107 sci.lang:8035
Newsgroups: sci.cognitive,sci.philosophy.tech,sci.lang
Subject: Re: Theories of meaning not relying solely on symbolic representation
From: gal2@ellis.uchicago.edu (Jacob Galley)
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 1992 01:12:56 GMT
Reply-To: gal2@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago Computing Organizations

In article <1992Nov11.153723.16796@news.unige.ch>,
swann@divsun.unige.ch (SWANN Philip) writes:
>Perhaps you can explain why such a bizarre thing as a theory of
>meaning should exist? What would it look like? What would it be used
>for? What would it mean?  (could it mean anything?)

In an attempt to stem the sniveling, I'm going to reveal my own
reasons for wanting to find a grand unified theory of meaning.

First I should clarify exactly what I "mean" by `meaning' in this
technical sense. For me, the noun `meaning' refers to the convertion
of stimuli into understanding or comprehension of the stimuli -- or to
the product of such a convertion. The verb `to mean' refers to the
typical way to comprehend a certain set of stimuli. This definition
follows from the assumptions that (1) linguistic stimuli convey the
same sort of meaning as all other kinds of stimuli, and (2) the
meaning of all kinds of stimuli are represented in the same way. One
could say that meaning is what cognition works on/with.

(A wee bit of vague, crudely worded evidence for this claim: people
are more likely to recall an item from knowledge than to recall the
stimuli from which they inferred that knowledge. Also, people are very
good at integrating all the stimuli from their senses, linguistic
faculty and memory into a unified item of knowledge.)

It seems reasonable to approach this problem with the assumption that
knowledge consists of the same STUFF as meaning. This would allow a
humanly intelligent system to amend incoming meaning to its already
standing base of knowledge without much further work. It would also
facilitate the production of utterances.

So IF it turns out that this is the correct way to conceive of
meaning, AND that knowledge can be construed as lots of items (?) of
meaning, THEN we will have come a long way toward understanding human
cognition.

As always, feedback is encouraged,
Jake.
--
Reinheitsgebot <-- "Keep your laws off my beer!" <-- gal2@midway.uchicago.edu
Newsgroups: sci.cognitive
From: swann@divsun.unige.ch (SWANN Philip)
Subject: Theory of Meaning 
Organization: University of Geneva, Switzerland
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 1992 16:37:51 GMT

Having read the last few postings, I'm going to re-start this
thread in sci.cognitive only.

(1) The original poster asked for alternatives to the formal
    and logical theories of semantics, specifically alternatives that
    tackled the symbol grounding problem. He was clearly looking
    for a general theory of meaning (i.e. a semiotics), not a
    particular theory of meaning (such as model theory).

(2) IMHO, the best place to start from is Wittgenstein, since he
    questions the very possibility of such a general theory. There
    are plenty of reasons for scepticism: "meaning" has all the
    flavour of a worn out concept that is falling apart under our
    very eyes. What Wittgenstein points towards is a biological and
    social account of semiotics within which the idea of "meaning"
    is reduced to a place-holder status (along with other mentalistic
    terms). Lots of people (most of whom have never heard of Wittgenstein)
    are working in this direction.

(3) This, it seems to me, is a key issue in cognitive science.

(4) Bert Peeters, as a semanticist, takes me to task for giving
    Stephen Stich instead of Stephen Schiffer as the author of
    "Remnants of Meaning" and accuses me of thereby refering to
    a non-existent entity. I knew what I meant, he knew what I
    meant and furthermore we both know why I made the slip. But as a
    theoretician he makes a lot of assumptions about how proper
    names work and calculates that I can't actually have meant
    what I did mean. Of course he doesn't actually believe the
    results of his own calculations... This is why we don't need
    semantics (;-)).

 Philip Swann
Newsgroups: sci.cognitive,comp.ai.philosophy,bionet.neuroscience