Burghard B. Rieger
Understanding is Meaning Constitution.
Perception-based processing of natural language texts.
In: Wang, Paul P. (ed.): Proceedings of the 7th Joint Conference on Information Science
(JCIS-03), Rsearch Triangle Park (Duke UP) 2003, pp. 13-18
Abstract
The alliance of logics and linguistics as mediated by (language) philosophy and
(discrete) mathematics has long been (and partly still is) dominating the way in what (notational)
terms natural languages structures and their functions are to be explicated and how cognitive processes
of
understanding should be modeled. As it is common practice in cognitive modeling and formal
semantics to identify real world entities with the structures that represent them, this identification
is rather more hiding instead of revealing what enables a sign structure to represent and stand for
(or symbolize) something else. Some of the problems such models encounter are due to the declarative
formats employed (symbolic, compositional, propositional) and the
procedures chosen
(rule-based, modular, deterministic) in depicting and manipulating the entities (elements, structures,
relations, functions, and processes) which are to represent the (world, linguistic, situational) knowledge
considered conditional for the explicative comprehension of how natural languages serve the purposes
they do.
Other than these declarative models of cognitive processes which operate on symbol
representations and essentially static knowledge bases, procedural approaches strive to come to
grips with the dynamics of cognition as a multi-layered process that allows to cope with the
variability and vagueness, adaptivity and learning, emergence and plasticity of knowledge
and understanding. Procedural modeling employs (numerical or subsymbolic, distributed,
non-propositional) formats whose (parallel, pattern-based, quantitative) computation may result
in (the emergence of) entities which are the outcome rather than presuppositions of
processing, and whose modeling is a form of realization rather than simulation.
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