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

setmembership/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 ”

applered apple

apple (is) red

setsmembership/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 ”