Language and Thought, Center for Brains, Minds and Machines
Patrick H. Winston:
The 'combinator capability' [that differenciates humans from Neanderthals and primates] allows description, and once you got description there's a trail that can lead you all the way up to the 'strong story hypothesis'
[+/- min 18:40]
Story understanding is very fundamental to any real understanding of human intelligence.
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Steven Pinker:
Example: The story of how How doctors killed President Garfield
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What makes conceptual development possible, and what makes it so hard?
How is it, we are the only animals who can think thoughts formulated on concepts like cancer or infinity or wisdom or carborator? What makes this possible? The acquisition of concepts, possible?
Cognitive science has the theoretical and methodological tools to answer both questions.
Probably the most seminal work on this classical set of issues has happened at MIT, both in the linguistics department (Chomsky) and the AI department and the brain and cognitive science department.
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On language understanding and intelligence.
To use a conceptual system you need to run through a logic. We are trying to figure out the blueprint of this logic.
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Q&A:
Q: – On the many levels of meaning (literal meanings, enriched meanings...): How does this affect your research when you work with young children and you test their understanding of number words? In these tasks you have to give them full sentences, you have to ask them things like: "Can you give me two cookies..."
A: – Susan Carey answers.
A: – Gennaro Chierchia answers.
Q: – Do you see any role for the more logical part of the vocabulary. Whether you think that it really needs to be modeled in a precise way to make sense of people understanding stories?
A: – Patrick Winston answers. "How can we humans make ourselves smarter? – If we want to make ourselves smarter, draw pictures and talk, because we have tremendous problem solving power in our visual and linguistics systems. So, to make ourselves smarter, we have to engage these systems, and one way to engage them is to draw pictures and talk. You can't do that when you're answering your email. You can only do that when you're taking notes, with a pencil and drawing, and engaging your language system. The miracle of human language and visual processing systems."
Q: – On language as a vehicle of thought. Language learning is partly like mapping. There's another idea that working in linguistics suggests, that is that natural language IS the language of thought.
A: – Steven Pinker answers. "It's very unlikely that any language that we speak, is a language of thought. There are a lot of experiments that show that. The actual sentences that we speak don't make the kinds of distinctions that are relevant for inference. I'm very skeptical of the idea for which language, as it's ordinarily understood, is what we think in. Although I do think that there is a representation that, in some regards, is language-like. It makes categorical distinctions, it is hierarchically structured, that is very closely related, though not identical to what we think as the semantic representations that align sentences."
A: – Susan Carey answers. "Another problem with identifying language with thought is that, if you do so, you stipulate that other animals can't think. But it partly depends what you mean by 'thought', as what you mean by 'language', because other animals have very powerful abstract conceptual representations, that they can draw inferences over. They have many of the same core cognition systems that human babies do. So you'd have to define that as not thought if you want to make that stipulation.
Gennaro Chierchia adds: "We really work on the functional architecture of language, and that involves such interesting words as: and - or - if - any - not - even - only - 'ing'... And that is where you find what is the most common throughout the languages of the world and also where some key dimensions of variotions take place."
Q: – Susan Carey: "Can animals represent the conditional. Do they have anything like the concept 'not' or 'or'? The evidence is probably yes, but not clear."
Patrick Winston: "I think there is an inner language and I think it came before communication. partly because, there's no point in saying anything if you don't have anything to say. And I think our external language emerged in part because we're social animals and our external language is of great benefit in thinking because I think there's a great deal of creativity in creative misunderstanding of what other people say. But I think there are computational reasons why the inner language ought to be simpler, more economical, because we have to compare things, we have to match them, and it would be extraordinarily difficult from a computational point of view, to try to do that with the raw uncannonicalized language stream. So we can't match a story in the newspaper to Cinderella and say, 'oh that's a Cinderella story', unless we have reduced the story and Cinderella to a kind of inner language in which there's movement through space, there's a capacity to express emotion, there's a capacity to express social relationships... And I think that those kinds of things constitute the inner language, and when they're rendered in simple form they make possible this kind of analogizing and precedent-based reasoning that is fundamental to human thought, and I'll bet you pansies don't do it because they'd be a lot smarter if they did."
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The importance of analogies. Analogy is extremely important to create new representational resources. But it doesn't mean we understand how it works. (Carey and Chierchia)
On metaphors and on how analogical the human mind is. Every sentence has some kind of concrete image behind it. (Pinker)
