To handle these words right in any context, one must understand the relationship of the scoop to the shape it imposes on the material it is used to manipulate. More importantly, one must understand from the context when the usual assumptions about this relationship no longer hold. The question concerning meaning and reference has to do with a philosophical problem that is far beyond our present scope, namely the extent to which meaning is parasitic on reference. To many, it seems unlikely that a baby could learn a language in any useful sense without ever establishing an association between the words in it and objects in the environment. Just how much processing of meaning and interpretation is possible for such a device is open to considerable doubt.
Language processing is done, at worst, with characters and, at best, with meanings.
Occasionally, programs have been written that manipulate toy blocks or the pieces on a chess board, and which talk about these objects using natural language, but these experiments have been too small to tell us anything about the importance of a genuine ability to refer to things. This will be taken up again in section . Workers in artificial intelligence and computational linguistics are often at odds on the extent to which computer programs intended to mimic human performance for practical reasons need to use human methods. On the other hand, divining the intended interpretation of a text requires second-guessing the intentions of its author in the given context, a task that seems essentially to require a human point of view. There is an essentially bottom-up quality to the translation problem as usually seen by those that attempt to automate it.