Re: John Sowa's comments:
. Instead of a single principle of the psyche that covers all living things,
Aristotle
> defined a hierarchy of six functions, each of which is a prerequisite for
all
> the rest: nutrition, perception, desire, locomotion, imagery, and
> reason. He maintained that plants have a psyche that is limited to the
> nutritive function, sponges to the first three functions, worms to the
> first four, and the higher nonhuman animals to the first five. In
> having reason, the human psyche requires all the others as prerequisites.
> Aristotle's theory is consistent with Lakoff and Johnson's criterion
> for a theory of embodied mind: "There is no such fully autonomous faculty
> of reason separate from and independent of bodily capacities such as
> perception and movement. The evidence supports, instead, an
> evolutionary view, in which reason uses and grows out of bodily
capacities." (p. 17)
> (01)
The notion that the meaning of words and reasoning ability grows from
imagery based on remembered sensorimotor experience has gained some
experimental support via Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI),
reported recently by Tom Mitchell and Marcel Just Of Carnegie-Mellon:
http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2008/May/may29_brainmeaning.shtml (02)
>From the summary there (I haven't seen the full article yet) they seems to
say that their results support the idea that thinking of words activates the
same areas of the brain that are involved in performing actions labeled by
those words, including actions that are characteristic of what is done with
physical objects. The images presented in the web summary don't strike me
as compelling, but they say it is statistically significant, and they are
just starting this line of inquiry. It looks like it could provide some real
evidence for linguistic functions. (03)
This seems to me to resemble the notion of Procedural Semantics" as a theory
of meaning proposed by Woods that I mentioned in an earlier note:
William Woods "Meaning and Links" in the Winter 2007 issue of AI
Magazine (vol. 28 no. 4):
"In this theory the meaning of a noun is a procedure for recognizing or
generating instances, the meaning of a proposition is a procedure for
determining if it is true or false, and the meaning of an action is the
ability to do the action or to tell if it has been done." (04)
Pat (05)
Patrick Cassidy
MICRA, Inc.
908-561-3416
cell: 908-565-4053
cassidy@xxxxxxxxx (06)
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-
> bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John F. Sowa
> Sent: Tuesday, June 03, 2008 11:49 AM
> To: [ontolog-forum]
> Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Data Models v. Ontologies (again)
>
> Antoinette,
>
> That is an extremely important consideration:
>
> > How about Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things by George Lakoff as
> > prototype for, say embodied semantic model. Love to see a thread
> > go on this.
>
> People like well-defined pigeonholes for classifying everything
> -- including other people. Lakoff is a healthy corrective to the
> tendency among many ontologists to set up a definitive, a priori,
> all-encompassing, formally defined set of precise pigeonholes. He
> likes to state his views in a way that irritate people who accept
> the prevailing ways of thinking and talking. I enjoy that.
>
> Unfortunately, Lakoff himself creates a set of pigeonholes that
> are just as strict as anybody else's. Even worse, he often talks
> about revolutionary new ways of thinking that all seem to begin
> with himself and his best buddies. As an example, following is
> a review I wrote of one of his books:
>
> http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/lakoff.htm
> Review of Lakoff & Johnson
>
> The title is _Philosophy in the Flesh: The embodied mind and its
> challenge to Western thought_. As I said in the review, I think it
> makes many important points, but I find Lakoff's style irritating.
> At the end of this note is the concluding section of my review.
>
> To return to the earlier book by Lakoff, I would say that it very
> rightly criticizes (and I would even say *demolishes*) the idea
> that a fixed, rigid hierarchy is possible. That view is opposed
> to certain logicians who were strongly influenced by Frege, Russell,
> Carnap, and the early Wittgenstein.
>
> But there are equally competent logicians, especially Peirce,
> Whitehead, and the later Wittgenstein, for whom those points are
> obvious. For this group, Lakoff's remarks would not be disturbing
> in the slightest. On the contrary, they would be obvious.
>
> John Sowa
> _______________________________________________________________________
>
> From the ending of http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/lakoff.htm
>
> A glaring omission in a book on embodied minds that discusses Aristotle
> is the failure to mention Aristotle's theory of the psyche, which is
> the
> earliest and one of the best characterizations of the embodied mind.
> Aristotle defined the psyche as the logos or principle that determines
> what it is for something to be a living entity. Instead of a single
> principle of the psyche that covers all living things, Aristotle
> defined
> a hierarchy of six functions, each of which is a prerequisite for all
> the rest: nutrition, perception, desire, locomotion, imagery, and
> reason. He maintained that plants have a psyche that is limited to the
> nutritive function, sponges to the first three functions, worms to the
> first four, and the higher nonhuman animals to the first five. In
> having
> reason, the human psyche requires all the others as prerequisites.
> Aristotle's theory is consistent with Lakoff and Johnson's criterion
> for
> a theory of embodied mind: "There is no such fully autonomous faculty
> of
> reason separate from and independent of bodily capacities such as
> perception and movement. The evidence supports, instead, an
> evolutionary
> view, in which reason uses and grows out of bodily capacities." (p. 17)
>
> Aristotle's hierarchy bears a striking resemblance to the levels of
> competence that Rodney Brooks (1986) defined for mobile robots:
> avoiding, wandering, exploring, mapping, noticing, reasoning, planning,
> and anticipating. Since all of Brooks's robots have locomotion,
> Aristotle's theory predicts that they must also have nutrition (the
> ability to recharge their batteries), perception (at least at the level
> of touch), and desire (a preference that determines goals). The first
> four functions are sufficient to support the competence levels of
> avoiding, wandering, and exploring. Imagery is necessary to support
> mapping and noticing, and thought is necessary to support reasoning,
> planning, and anticipating. The lower levels of Aristotle's hierarchy,
> which he applied to sponges and clams, could support sedentary agents,
> such as thermostats and alarm clocks.
>
> The most irritating feature of the book is the authors' repeated claims
> of novelty, either for themselves or for their colleagues. A typical
> example is the following paragraph from page 10:
>
> Cognitive science is the scientific discipline that studies
> conceptual systems. It is a relatively new discipline, having
> been founded in the 1970s. Yet in a short time it has made
> startling discoveries. It has discovered, first of all, that
> most of our thought is unconscious, not in the Freudian sense
> of being repressed, but in the sense that it operates beneath
> the level of cognitive awareness, inaccessible to consciousness
> and operating too quickly to be focussed on.
>
> By dismissing Freud's theory of the unconscious as irrelevant, the
> authors try to make the recent work sound more "startling". Yet the
> literature contains well-documented examples of prior art. Among the
> best is William James's two-volume textbook _The Principles of
> Psychology_, which, in 1890, devoted many pages to the processes that
> operate beneath the level of cognitive awareness. James supported his
> presentation with explicit citations of experimental evidence,
> including
> reaction-time studies. On the cover of the 1965 reprint, one of the
> reviewers remarked "Rereading James brings a sense of perspective and
> even a little humility to our regard for more modern achievements".
>
> In summary, this book makes an important contribution to the ongoing
> debates about the roles of syntax, semantics, and world knowledge in
> language understanding and their dependency on the physical world and
> the human mechanisms for perceiving, interpreting, and interacting with
> the world. Its major weakness is its tendency to exclude other
> perspectives, such as Aristotle's, which can accommodate both formal
> logic and a theory of embodied mind. Although the authors frequently
> use
> the word neural, none of their discussion depends on the actual
> structure or method of operation of a neuron. NTL [Neural Theory of
> Language] could with equal justification be considered an acronym for a
> Neoaristotelian Theory of Language.
>
>
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