Review, Language as a Cognitive Process

The Philosophical Review, 1981

Harvester Studies in Cognitive Science is a new series which will explore the nature of knowledge by way of a distinctive theoretical approach one that takes account of the complex structures and interacting processes that make thought and action possible. Intelligence can be studied from the point of view of psychology, philosophy, linguistics, pedagogy and artificial intelligence, and all these different emphases will be represented within the series. Original 1978 book contents with format changes and other modifications Page numbers below refer to the 1978 printed edition, not preserved in this version. Detailed 1978 contents List (below)(originally pages v-ix) (New) List of Figures (Chapters 6 to 9) (Added 2015) Preface to 1978 Edition (pp. x-xiii) Acknowledgments (pp. xiv-xvi) Chapter 1: Introduction and Overview (pp. 1-21) (Minor formatting changes 15 Jan 2002) Chapter 1 Endnotes Chapter 2: What are the aims of science? (pp 22-62) (Minor formatting changes 15 Jan 2002. Notes added Nov 2001, 2008, 2016) Chapter 2 Endnotes; Notes on Chapter 2 added after 2001 Chapter 3: Science and Philosophy (pp. 63-83) (Minor formatting changes 15 Jan 2002) Chapter 4: What is conceptual analysis? (pp. 84-102) (Minor formatting changes 15 Jan 2002) Chapter 4 Endnotes Chapter 5: Are computers really relevant? (pp. 103-111) (Notes added at end,

2008

2004

Even though many words have been written within this thesis in order to justify a symmetric access to (linguistic) knowledge both from a production and from a comprehension perspective, the story of these pages should point out that there could be much more work from the comprehension side than from the production one. I suppose this to be true because of two (minimalist, cf. 2.2.2) fundamental points: 1. we should produce something ONLY when we are sure that we comprehended our knowledge fragment, that is, we tried to evaluate if it is coherent, robust, complete and interesting and therefore worth producing; 2. this is because the complexity of the world is so high (due to the huge “space of the problem”, cf. §1.4), that producing something runs the risk of simply being ignored (best case) or making others waste their precious time trying to comprehend our (incomplete) knowledge fragment (worst case); Following these rules of thumb, I spent almost-four-years just comprehending the ...

s Mind as Machine is the most comprehensive account of the history of the cognitive sciences yet to appear. The book has been ten years in the making, and one is tempted to view it as the culmination of Boden's prolific career as a cognitive scientist herself, her magnum opus. Boden, who is at the Centre for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex (a unit she founded in 1987), has authored or edited no fewer than ten books on topics in and related to cognitive science (mainly artificial intelligence), and has published well over sixty articles and reviews on the subject. Although the book is presented as a history of cognitive science, her aim is twofold: she wishes to provide not only a historical account of the field, but also a better sense of what cognitive science actually is. These two aims are for her inextricably linked: one cannot properly understand cognitive science without a historical perspective. In her past work, Boden has often posed questions in cognitive science from both philosophical and historical perspectives. Given the cross-disciplinary nature of her work, Boden's new book has potential appeal for cognitive scientists as well as historians. Anyone interested in the history of twentieth-century brain and behaviour sciences will find it valuable, given that we have very few historical treatments of cognitive science available to us, and the book also has promise as a reference for university courses -though a potential obstacle here is its hefty price tag.

Metascience, 1996

OGNITIVE science is the most eclectic of disciplines, and until recently it has been held together by the computational metaphor--the OGNITIVE SCIENCE gence" f'lrst saw print. John McCarthy seems to have invented it, though he says he may have heard it from someone else. In an earlier attempt to solicit papers on the topic he had used the "more respectable" term "automata studies", but (not surprisingly) had received papers on automata theory.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2020

Artificial Intelligence, 2001

For me, this is an exciting time to be a cognitive scientist and a cognitive linguist. Cognitive Linguistics has developed rapidly and with enormous success over the past two decades, providing a cognitively based account of language. When results in cognitive linguistics are taken together with results in the other cognitive sciences, a radically new view of the mind and language-and their relation to the brain-emerges. As a result, the original formalist nativist paradigm of cognitive science as it developed in the 1960s and early 1970s has been stood on its head. I was one of the originators of that paradigm, among the researchers first bringing formal logic as an account of natural language semantics into linguistics in the early 1960s. The hope then was to fit logic and Chomskyan transformational generative grammar into a unified approach to language and mind. The formalist nativist paradigm that subsequently developed tried to fulfill that dream, with the hope of merging Anglo-American analytic philosophy with formal logic, generative grammar, early AI, cognitive psychology, and cognitive anthropology. By the mid-1970s, it was clear that the formalist nativist paradigm did not fit the facts.

1989

2009

Abstract We present computational linguistics techniques which can help researchers dealing with the increasing amount of available digital text, focusing on potential use in the history of science. We examine two tasks: automatically extracting terms from documents and identifying relations between the terms. We show that the two tasks can be performed reliably and fast, and that new terms and relations can be identified automatically.