The Dictionary as Mirror of the Mind Stevan Harnad with collaborators: Alexandre Blondin-Massé Guillaume Chicoisne Yassine Gargouri Odile Marcotte Olivier Picard
What is cognition? The activity of whatever mechanism generates performance capacity: human (and human-like, animal, machine) know-how and "know-that"
According to Computationalism: Cognition is just a form computation i.e., formal symbol manipulation
The Symbol Grounding Problem The Chinese/Chinese dictionary-go-round
Hence Cognition is not just computation Meaning is not just definition
Dynamical systems and sensorimotor grounding
Concepts: Formal vs. Mental (Neural)
What are concepts? Categories and names of categories
What are categories? To categorize is to do the right thing with the right kind of thing.
A cognizer is an autonomous sensorimotor system that categorizes
Miscategorization has consequences
Categories are classes of objects, events, properties, actions, or states with invariant features some (all? most? many? enough?) of them sensorimotor features discernible by a categorizer allowing the categorizer to categorize correctly
Categories have extensions and intensions
set membership/inclusion
Vanishing intersections : Categories are not just sensorimotor either
Category Acquisition Implicit and explicit learning
Implicit vs Explicit Learning =+ ++ …
Names and propositions
=+ ZEBRA = HORSE + STRIPES
apple red apple apple (is) red
sets membership/inclusion
Doing, naming, describing and defining Using a word and defining a word
Definition and introspection Cognitive science is making the implicit explicit
Our brains contain an implicit dictionary that enables us to name things and to use words and (sometimes) to define the words we use
Category Learning and Categorical Perception
Inborn and learned sensorimotor invariants
Cangelosi & Harnad 2002 Implicit vs Explicit Learning
=+ ZEBRA = HORSE + STRIPES