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Newsletter Feb. 21, No. 17


                      C S L I   N E W S L E T T E R
_____________________________________________________________________________
February 21, 1985               Stanford                       Vol. 2, No. 17
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     A weekly publication of The Center for the Study of Language and
     Information, Ventura Hall, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305
                              ____________

         CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR *THIS* THURSDAY, February 21, 1985

   12 noon		TINLunch
     Ventura Hall       Donald Davidson's ``Communication and Convention''
     Conference Room    Discussion led by Douglas Edwards

   2:15 p.m.		CSLI Seminar
     Redwood Hall       ``Emotion: Theory and Language''   
     Room G-19          Helen Nissenbaum, CSLI
			Discussion led by Per-Kristian Halvorsen

   3:30 p.m.		Tea
     Ventura Hall		

   4:15 p.m.		CSLI Colloquium
     Redwood Hall       ``Quine and Rorty, Analysis and Deconstruction''
     Room G-19          Hilary Putnam, Harvard University
                            _________________

         CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR *NEXT* THURSDAY, February 28, 1985

   12 noon		TINLunch
     Ventura Hall       ``The Conway Paradox:  Its Solution in an 
     Conference Room    Epistemic Framework'' by Peter van Emde Boas,
			Jeroen Groenendijk, and Martin Stokhof
			Discussion led by Peter van Emde Boas
			(no abstract)

   2:15 p.m.		CSLI Seminar
     Redwood Hall       ``Literature and Meaning''
     Room G-19          Paul Schacht, CSLI
			
   3:30 p.m.		Tea
     Ventura Hall		

   4:15 p.m.		CSLI Colloquium
     Redwood Hall       No colloquium scheduled
                               ___________
                           CSLI LECTURE NOTES

      Please send future orders for Johan van Benthem's `Manual of
   Intensional Logic', the first of the CSLI Lecture Notes series, to
   David Brown.  His mail address is CSLI, Ventura Hall, Stanford 94305;
   his Net address is Brown@CSLI.  The price of a `Manual of Intensional
   Logic' is $5 plus tax, and it may also be purchased at the Stanford
   Bookstore.  When ordered through CSLI, a 25% discount is offered to
   all members of the CSLI community or in cases of three or more copies
   intended for instructional purposes.


Page 2                       CSLI Newsletter                February 21, 1985
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                          SUMMARY OF F4 MEETING

      At the meeting of project F4 on February 11, Bob Moore presented
   arguments for the representational approach to designing AI systems
   and modelling mental activities in humans.  Moore first noted the
   relative ease with which a human can acquire individual beliefs
   without disturbing very much of the rest of his mental state.  This
   supports the idea that distinct beliefs ought to be embodied
   more-or-less individually, since acquiring a new belief does not seem
   to require wholesale reorganization of one's mental state.  Moore went
   on to argue that the combinatorial structure of what can be believed
   suggests a similar combinatorial structure to how it is believed.  The
   idea is that the combinatorial structure of the sentences used to
   characterize belief states does not serve merely to distinguish one
   belief state from another; there are regularities in behavior that
   depend on that structure.  For instance, having a belief of the form
   ``if not P, then Q'' is associated with behavior appropriate to Q's
   being true when evidence of P's being false is presented, but not
   necessarily with behavior appropriate to P's being true when evidence
   of Q's being false is presented, even though ``if not P, then Q'' and
   ``if not Q, then P'' are equivalent under most interpretations of the
   conditional.  The fact that this and many other structural
   distinctions in sentences used to classify belief states correspond to
   systematic distinctions in behavior presents a prima facie case that
   the belief states themselves are similarly structured.  But, Moore
   argued, under a conception of representation sufficiently abstract to
   cover the kinds of ``representation'' actually used in computational
   models of mental states, the claim that mental states involve
   ``syntactic'' representations--a language of thought--probably comes
   to no more than this.  Moore concluded by noting that none of these
   arguments bear on the question of whether the language of thought is
   distinct from natural language, but that empirical considerations,
   such as the indexicality of natural language and the difficulty of
   stating principles of reasoning that apply directly to natural
   language, suggest that the two are distinct.



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