COGS 2160 Lecture 7: PHIL2160_MidtermNotes
12 Feb 2019
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Behavior can"t just be explained in terms of stimulus-response. Information processing: (roughly): the manipulation of mental representations according to rules, to generate new representation. Words, signs, symbols represent (partly) because of conventions or agreements. Different representational formats: pictorial vs. verbal, imagistic vs. Jackendoff: language has an expressive power that images do not have. This expressive power derives in part from the combinatorial structure of language. Finite number of elements can be combined in various ways to convey different meanings. Property of human language use: linguistic productivity. Jackendoff: we store a finite number of words in memory, to create an indefinite number of sentences. That there is no upper bound on number of sentences we understand. This seems to be a feature of all human languages: we can build up new sentences by repeating the same operation on excising sentences. A recursive definition is one that includes the object itself in its definition.
