[Prev][Next][Index]

Newsletter Apr. 4, No. 23



                      C S L I   N E W S L E T T E R
_____________________________________________________________________________
April 4, 1985                   Stanford                       Vol. 2, No. 23
_____________________________________________________________________________
                               
     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, April 4, 1985

   12 noon		TINLunch
     Ventura Hall       ``Types, Translations, and Prepositions''
     Conference Room    by Mark Gawron, New York University
			Discussion will be led by Mark Gawron
			
   2:15 p.m.		CSLI Seminar
     Redwood Hall       ``Manipulating Models in Syllogistic Reasoning''
     Room G-19          Marilyn Ford, CSLI
			Tom Wasow will lead the discussion

   3:30 p.m.		Tea
     Ventura Hall		

   4:15 p.m.		CSLI Colloquium
     Redwood Hall       ``Two Cheers for Functional Role Semantics''
     Room G-19		Ned Block, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
                               ___________

           CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR *NEXT* THURSDAY, April 11, 1985

   12 noon		TINLunch
     Ventura Hall       ``Semantics for Natural Language:  Metaphysics
     Conference Room    for the Simple-minded?''                    
			Chris Menzel, CSLI
			(Abstract on page 2)
			
   2:15 p.m.		CSLI Seminar
     Redwood Hall       ``What if the World Were Really Quite Simple?''
     Room G-19          Alex Pentland, CSLI
			Discussion leader to be announced
			(Abstract on page 2)

   3:30 p.m.		Tea
     Ventura Hall		

   4:15 p.m.		CSLI Colloquium
     Redwood Hall       ``A Formal Theory of Innate Linguistic Knowledge''
     Room G-19		Janet Dean Fodor, University of Connecticut and CSLI
			(Abstract on page 3)



Page 2                       CSLI Newsletter	                April 4, 1985
_____________________________________________________________________________
                    ABSTRACT OF NEXT WEEK'S TINLUNCH
 ``Semantics for Natural Language:  Metaphysics for the Simple-minded?''

      What, exactly, is the connection between semantics and metaphysics?
   A semantical theory gives an account of the meaning of certain
   expressions in natural language, and, intuitively, the meaning of an
   expression has to do with the connection between the expression (or an
   utterance of it) and the world.  Thus, a simple-minded view might be
   that (as far as it goes) a correct semantical theory ipso facto yields
   the sober metaphysical truth about what there is.
      To the contrary, implicit in much work in semantics is the idea
   that all we should expect of a good theory is that it be, in Keenan's
   terms, descriptively adequate: it should provide a theoretical
   structure which preserves our judgments of logical truth and
   entailment, never mind the question of the literal metaphysical
   details of the structure (e.g., that the denotations of singular terms
   are complex sets of sets rather than individuals).
      For next week's TINlunch I will provide a framework for discussion
   by laying out the simple-minded view and its chief rival in somewhat
   more detail.  Being rather simple-minded myself, I'll attempt to
   defend a reasonable version of the former.  As grist for both
   philosophical mills I will draw upon recent work in intensional logic,
   Montague grammar, generalized quantifiers, the semantics of plurals,
   and situation semantics.				--Chris Menzel
                              ____________

                     ABSTRACT OF NEXT WEEK'S SEMINAR
             ``What if the World Were Really Quite Simple?''

      One of the major stumbling blocks for efforts in AI has been the
   apparent overwhelming complexity of the natural world; for instance,
   when an AI program tries to decide on a course of action (or the
   meaning of a sentence) it is often defeated by the incredible number
   of alternatives to consider.  Results such as those of Tversky,
   however, argue that people are able to use characteristics of the
   current situation to somehow "index" directly into the two or three
   most likely alternatives, so that deductive reasoning per se plays a
   relatively minor role.
      How could people accomplish such indexing?  One possibility is that
   the structure of our environment is really quite a bit simpler that it
   appears on the surface, and that people are able to use this structure
   to constrain their reasoning much more tightly than is done in current
   AI research.
      Is it possible that the world is really relatively simple?  In
   forming a scientific theory we may trade the size and complexity of
   description against the amount of error.  Because modern scientific
   endeavors have placed great emphasis on increasingly accurate
   description, very little effort has gone toward discovering a grain
   size of description at which the world may be relatively simply
   described while still maintaining a useful level of accuracy.
      I will argue that such a simple description of the world is
   plausible, discuss progress in discovering such a descriptive
   vocabulary, and comment on how knowledge of such a vocabulary might
   have a profound impact on AI and psychology.		--Alex Pentland


Page 3                       CSLI Newsletter                    April 4, 1985
_____________________________________________________________________________
                   ABSTRACT OF NEXT WEEK'S COLLOQUIUM
           ``A Formal Theory of Innate Linguistic Knowledge''

      I assume that an infant is innately provided with some sort of
   representational medium in which to record what he observes about his
   target language.  It has occasionally been suggested that the formal
   properties of this mental metalanguage could be the source of
   universal properties of natural languages.  This differs from the
   standard ( = substantive) approach, which assumes in addition that
   certain statements of this metalanguage are innately tagged as true.
      I propose to take the formal approach seriously.  The way to do so
   seems to be to try for a theory which accounts for ALL universals in
   this way, i.e., solely on the basis of what can and cannot be
   expressed in the metalanguage. The attempt is very informative, even
   if ultimately it fails.
      Success is certainly not guaranteed, for the formal theory
   overthrows many familiar assumptions. For instance, it can be shown to
   be incompatible (on standard assumptions about children and their
   linguistic input) with the existence of any constraints on rule
   application or on derivational representations. All the work of
   distinguishing well-formed from ill-formed sentences must be done by
   rules only. Constraints can determine the shape of the rules, but
   cannot tidy up after them if they overgenerate.
      It is easiest to see how to set about formulating grammars of this
   kind within the framework of GPSG, and it is encouraging that a number
   of universals do fall out as consequences of the GPSG formalism. But
   there are problems too. Syntactic features, in particular, create
   headaches for learnability.				--Janet Fodor

   [Note to attendees of the Berkeley Cognitive Science Seminars -- this
   is the same as the paper presented there on 3/19.]

                              ____________
                             NEW CSLI REPORT

      Report No. 14C, ``Aspectual Classes in Situation Semantics'' by
   Robin Cooper, has just been published. This analysis of certain tenses
   of English, using the theory of situation semantics, may be obtained
   by writing to Dikran@SU-CSLI or Dikran Karagueuzian, CSLI, Ventura
   Hall, Stanford, CA 94305.






-------