Finding Meaning in Cognitive Psychology
Dr. Arthur Glenberg
Department of Psychology
University of Wisconsin-Madison
glenberg@facstaff.wisc.edu
2:30 pm Fri. Oct. 21 in 2310 Computer Sciences and Statistics Bldg.
Although meaning should be a central concept in cognitive psychology, we appear
to have abandoned serious discussion of how concepts might be represented and
how they might take on meaning. In the first part of this talk I will discuss
problems associated with standard accounts of meaning, namely feature lists and
accounts such as frames which model relations as propositions. In the second
part of the talk I will outline a different approach to representation, one
that is embodied rather than being based on abstract symbols found in
artificial symbol manipulation systems such as computers. An embodied approach
is based on a consideration of the biological facts of our history and current
functioning. Considerations of embodied meaning help to overcome the symbol
grounding problem and lead to new constructs. One such construct is "mesh"
within a spatial-functional medium as an alternative to the concept of
association. One implication of this view is that AI, in the sense of getting
computers to think in the same way that people do, is impossible without
building perception/action systems at the same time.