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5 - Some problems with the notion of literal meanings
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- By David E. Rumelhart, Stanford University
- Edited by Andrew Ortony, Northwestern University, Illinois
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- Book:
- Metaphor and Thought
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 26 November 1993, pp 71-82
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Summary
In his paper, Professor Sadock brings to the fore a fundamental dilemma of semantic analysis as practiced by many linguists and modern philosophers. The approach adopted by these workers is committed to the existence of a sharp distinction between what an utterance might mean (that is, its literal meaning) and what that utterance is, or can be, used to convey. (See, for example, Searle's chapter [this volume] which emphasizes the distinction between “sentence meaning” and “utterance meaning.”) To a linguist interested in form-meaning pairs, or to a philosopher interested in truth conditions on expressions, this distinction might be crucial. In these cases, the concern is to build a theory of literal meaning and to assign conveyed meanings to the application of unspecified psychological processes not specific to language. As a psychologist I find myself primarily interested in the mechanisms whereby meanings are conveyed. Whatever role “literal meanings” (as defined by these linguists and philosophers) might play in the comprehension of language (that is, in the determination of what some utterance conveys), psychological theory must concern itself with conveyed meanings.
Sadock, arguing from a linguistic perspective, makes an interesting comparison between what he calls figurative and what he calls conventional language use. His analysis leads him to conclude that “conventional” and “figurative” do not form two well-defined categories of utterances as implied by most theories of language. Rather a particular utterance may be more-or-less figurative and more-or-less conventional.
10 - Toward a microstructural account of human reasoning
- Edited by Stella Vosniadou, Andrew Ortony
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- Book:
- Similarity and Analogical Reasoning
- Published online:
- 22 October 2009
- Print publication:
- 28 July 1989, pp 298-312
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Summary
For the past several years my colleagues and I have been analyzing what we call parallel distributed processing (PDP) systems and looking at what we call the microstructure of cognition (cf. McClelland, Rumelhart, & the PDP Research Group, 1986; Rumelhart, McClelland, & the PDP Research Group, 1986). In this work we developed computational models of cognitive processes based on principles of “brainstyle” processing. The major focus of this work has been in perception, memory retrieval, and learning. The question remains as to how this work extends to the domains of “higher mental processes.” We have made one attempt to show how our PDP models can be used to account for schemalike effects (Rumelhart, Smolensky, McClelland, & Hinton, 1986). This chapter is designed to push those ideas further and to sketch an account of reasoning from a PDP perspective. I will proceed by first describing the basic theoretical structure of the PDP approach. I will then give a brief account of the reasoning process and finally show how it can be seen as resulting from a parallel distributed processing system.
Parallel distributed processing
Cognitive psychology/information processing has become the dominant approach to the understanding of higher mental processes over the past 25 years or so. The computer has provided, among other things, the primary conceptual tools that have allowed cognitive psychology to succeed. These tools have been powerful and have offered a conceptualization of mind that has proven both more rigorous and more powerful than any that have preceded it.