Contexts of meaning: The computational and the embodied mind (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Nature and Ontogenesis of Meaning
Chapter examines the nature of meaning and its ontogenesis by first exploring ontological and epistemological strategies that function as background to a broad understanding of the concept of meaning. In essence, the argument is that different ontological and epistemological strategies-here referred to as isolationist and systems strategies-for how to approach the "I mean"/"it means" matrix lead to different understandings of the fundamental nature of meaning. Further, it is argued that these strategies lead to alternative theories of mind; specifically the computational and the embodied mind.
Toward a Future Theory of Meaning Making
From the cell to the human brain, "reality" is always mediated. This postulate portrays living systems as "meaning making", because they must map sensed signals into signaling pathways through which representations and behavior are formed. In this paper, I present prolegomena to a future theory of meaning making, which is grounded in basic tenets of semiotics, while at the same time point to the way this prolegomenon may help us to understand meaning making stretching from the pre-linguistic realm upward. The idea of "meaning making" is grounded in the very basic fact that from the bacteria to the human being, reality is always mediated. Having a boundary with the environment and the need to operate on the environment are just two reasons explaining why living systems have developed various ways for representing certain portions of the environment and operating on these representations. In other words, meaning making in living systems is grounded in the basic fact that reality is always mediated and cannot be directly approached through "intuition" as clearly argued by Peirce (W2: 193). The representations formed by human and non-human organisms alike, are clearly not simple maps of "The" environment; The map is not the territory, the bacterium's representation of the environment cannot be confused with its environment and our own scientific models of reality, successful as they may be, involve only partial maps of reality. Therefore, the basic understanding of "meaning
The epigenesis of meaning in human beings, and possibly in robots
Minds and Machines, 2001
This article addresses a classical question: Can a machine use language meaningfully and if so, how can this be achieved? The first part of the paper is mainly philosophical. Since meaning implies intentionality on the part of the language user, artificial systems which obviously lack intentionality will be 'meaningless' (pace e.g. Dennett). There is, however, no good reason to assume that intentionality is an exclusively biological property (pace e.g. Searle) and thus a robot with bodily structures, interaction patterns and development similar to those of human beings would constitute a system possibly capable of meaning -a conjecture supported through a Wittgensteininspired thought experiment. The second part of the paper focuses on the empirical and constructive questions. Departing from the principle of epigenesis stating that during every state of development new structure arises on the basis of existing structure plus various sorts of interaction, a model of human cognitive and linguistic development is proposed according to which physical, social and linguistic interactions between the individual and the environment have their respective peaks in three consecutive stages of development: episodic, mimetic and symbolic. The transitions between these stages are qualitative, and bear a similarity to the stages in phylogenesis proposed by and . Following the principle of epigenetic development, robotogenesis could possibly recapitulate ontogenesis, leading to the emergence of intentionality, consciousness and meaning.
2006
One of the many puzzles philosophy is dealing with is how meaning comes about. An increasing number of investigations in cognitive science indicate that the body plays a central role in grounding the meaning of concepts and language. Particularly there are many indications that our abilities to move, perceive and act upon the world are directly related to our capacity
Symbols and Computation: A Critique of the Computational Theory of Mind
Minds and Machines 9: 347-381 1999, 1999
Over the past several decades, the philosophical community has witnessed the emergence of an important new paradigm for understanding the mind.1 The paradigm is that of machine computation, and its influence has been felt not only in philosophy, but also in all of the empirical disciplines devoted to the study of cognition. Of the several strategies for applying the resources provided by computer and cognitive science to the philosophy of mind, the one that has gained the most attention from philosophers has been the ‘Computational Theory of Mind’ (CTM). CTM was first articulated by Hilary Putnam (1960, 1961), but finds perhaps its most consistent and enduring advocate in Jerry Fodor (1975, 1980, 1981, 1987, 1990, 1994). It is this theory, and not any broader interpretations of what it would be for the mind to be a computer, that I wish to address in this paper. What I shall argue here is that the notion of ‘symbolic representation’ employed by CTM is fundamentally unsuited to providing an explanation of the intentionality of mental states (a major goal of CTM), and that this result undercuts a second major goal of CTM, sometimes refered to as the ‘vindication of intentional psychology.’ This line of argument is related to the discussions of ‘derived intentionality’ by Searle (1980, 1983, 1984) and Sayre (1986, 1987). But whereas those discussions seem to be concerned with the causal dependence of familiar sorts of symbolic representation upon meaningbestowing acts, my claim is rather that there is not one but several notions of ‘meaning’ to be had, and that the notions that are applicable to symbols are conceptually dependent upon the notion that is applicable to mental states in the fashion that Aristotle refered to as paronymy. That is, an analysis of the notions of ‘meaning’ applicable to symbols reveals that they contain presuppositions about meaningful mental states, much as Aristotle’s analysis of the sense of ‘healthy’ that is applied to foods reveals that it means ‘conducive to having a healthy body,’ and hence any attempt to explain ‘mental semantics’ in terms of the semantics of symbols is doomed to circularity and regress. I shall argue, however, that this does not have the consequence that computationalism is bankrupt as a paradigm for cognitive science, as it is possible to reconstruct CTM in a fashion that avoids these difficulties and makes it a viable research framework for psychology, albeit at the cost of losing its claims to explain intentionality and to vindicate intentional psychology. I have argued elsewhere (Horst, 1996) that local special sciences such as psychology do not require vindication in the form of demonstrating their reducibility to more fundamental theories, and hence failure to make good on these philosophical promises need not compromise the broad range of work in empirical cognitive science motivated by the computer paradigm in ways that do not depend on these problematic treatments of symbols.
On Meaning: A Biosemiotic Approach
A life form and its environment constitute an essential unit, a microcosm. This microcosm is sustained by a privileged dialectic relationship in which the embedded agent- an entity endowed with a particular physical architecture- and its specific environment, coupled, mutually influence each other. Identical principles rule both the basic forms of semiotic organisation and the upper forms. When we distinguish these two levels of semiotic structuring we are distinguishing the semiotic relations that involve a stimulus-response relationship, which is dyadic in nature, from those that involve a more complex relationship where the capacity of symbolically encoding allows organisms to go beyond the immediacy of sensory awareness. However in all instances of semiotic structuring, there is the presence of a living system that evolves in an environment individuating and assigning a value to typical environmental features. Acknowledging this fact is crucial: the inquiry into how elemental life forms interact with their environments leads to the identification of the fundamental role played by the physical architecture of the agent and sheds light on the semiotic process that is common to all life forms, ultimately highlighting the very nature of meaning and reality. Keywords Semiosis - Individuation - Meaning - Identity - Reality
Emergence and Evolution of Meaning
TripleC: Communication-Cognition-Cooperation, 2013
The category of meaning is first traced forwards starting from the origin of the Universe itself and its grounding in pre-geometry; then it is traced backwards from the sense-interactions within the world to the interpretation of the corresponding reality. Different from many former approaches in the theories of information and also in biosemiotics in our progressive perspective, we show: on the one hand, that the forms of meaning emerge alongside with information and energy; on the other, that information can be visualised as being always meaningful -in a sense to be clarified, which extends Floridi's General Definition of Information -rather than meaning showing up as a later specification of information within social systems only. In the regressive perspective the category of meaning is explored starting from the manifestation of reality in its own level of interaction. Based upon the physical constraints of the manifestation through electromagnetic waves generated by an object of observation, which constitutes the basis of animal vision, we analyse the limits of the meaning-offer of such manifestation. This allows us: (1) to compare the efficiency of natural evolution in the reception of such meaning-offer; (2) to analyse the conditions for developing a hermeneutical agency able to acknowledge the reality underlying its manifestation. Hence, what we actually do -through this dual perspective -is to follow the strict line of the Unified Theory of Information in the sense of Hofkirchner, visualising information and energy as two different categorical aspects of one and the same underlying primordial structure.