20 papers · ranked by Valyu relevance
Hope Kean, Alexander Fung, Paris Jaggers, Jason Chen + 6 more
Humans are endowed with a powerful capacity for both inductive and deductive logical thought: we easily form generalizations based on a few examples and draw conclusions from known premises. Humans also arguably have the most sophisticated communication system in the animal kingdom: natural language allows us to…
S. Romano, A. Salles, M. Amalric, S. Dehaene + 2 more
Probabilistic proposals of Language of Thoughts (LoTs) can explain learning across different domains as statistical inference over a compositionally structured hypothesis space. While frameworks may differ on how a LoT may be implemented computationally, they all share the property that they are built from a set of…
Amitabha Das Gupta
This paper seeks to show that human cognition cannot be characterised purely in mentalistic term. It has a bodily basis and cognition is thus the product of the interplay between mind, body, and brain. This is how the idea of embodiment and its importance is realised and gets its foothold in both philosophy and…
Hope Kean, Alexander Fung, Paris Jaggers, Jason Chen + 6 more
Humans are endowed with a powerful capacity for both inductive and deductive logical thought: we easily form generalizations based on a few examples and draw conclusions from known premises. Humans also arguably have the most sophisticated communication system in the animal kingdom: natural language allows us to…
Jordan Zlatev, Johan Blomberg
We discuss four interconnected issues that we believe have hindered investigations into how language may affect thinking. These have had a tendency to reappear in the debate concerning linguistic relativity over the past decades, despite numerous empirical findings. The first is the claim that it is impossible to…
Panos Athanasopoulos, Emanuel Bylund, Daniel Casasanto, Guillaume Thierry
'Guillaume Thierry'] The time has come, perhaps, to go beyond merely acknowledging that language is a core manifestation of the workings of the human mind and that it relates interactively to all aspects of thinking. The issue, thus, is not to decide whether language and human thought may be ineluctably linked (they…
Francesco Ferretti
This paper focuses on the idea that pantomime is a privileged lens for investigating the origin of language in a naturalistic framework. Two reasons support this claim. The first one concerns the motivated and iconic character of pantomime compared to the arbitrary and abstract features of linguistic signs emphasized…
Jeffrey S. Bowers, Christopher W. Pleydell-Pearce, Anne Castles
Participants read aloud swear words, euphemisms of the swear words, and neutral stimuli while their autonomic activity was measured by electrodermal activity. The key finding was that autonomic responses to swear words were larger than to euphemisms and neutral stimuli. It is argued that the heightened response to…
Aviva Berkovich-Ohana, Niv Noy, Michal Harel, Edna Furman-Haran + 2 more
Human brain imaging typically employs structured and controlled tasks to avoid variable and inconsistent activation patterns. Here we argue against this assumption by showing that an extremely open-ended, high level cognitive task-loosely defined as “abstract thinking” leads to a precise, and highly consistent…
Prakash Mondal
Language and thought are intimately related to one another, but the level or degree of connectedness between language and thought is not clear due to the fact that the influence of language over thought can be more context-specific or general (see Zlatev and Blomberg, ). This reflects general assumptions from the…
Robert M. Worden
A unified theory of language combines a Bayesian cognitive linguistic model of language processing, with the proposal that language evolved by sexual selection for the display of intelligence. The theory accounts for the major facts of language, including its great speed and expressivity, and much data on language…
Anna A. Ivanova, Zachary Mineroff, Vitor Zimmerer, Nancy Kanwisher + 2 more
Consistent with longstanding findings from neuropsychology, several brain regions in left frontal and temporal cortex respond robustly and selectively to language [1]. These regions, often referred to as the “language network”, respond more strongly to meaningful stimuli (like words and sentences) than to stimuli…
Robert M. Worden
This paper distinguishes between narrow language (syntax and semantics) and full language, as it permeates our lives. Full language includes dialogue pragmatics, the human Theory of Mind, selfesteem and social emotions. Narrow language and full language both depend on a fast, powerful, preconscious Bayesian…
David J. Chalmers
Language Models Authors: ['David J. Chalmers'] In favor of a positive answer, Aristotle says, "The soul never thinks without an image." Aquinas says, "There's nothing in the intellect that wasn't previously in the senses." Hume says, "All our simple ideas in their first appearance are derived from simple impressions."…
Shimon Edelman
What does it mean to know language? Since the Chomskian revolution, one popular answer to this question has been: to possess a generative grammar that exclusively licenses certain syntactic structures. Decades later, not even an approximation to such a grammar, for any language, has been formulated; the idea that…
Alice Luo, Jintian Luo, Michael Murphy
Thought disorder, characterized by disruptions in syntactic and semantic elements in language, is a core symptom of psychotic disorders. Understanding this language impairment is key to uncovering the underlying neuropathology and predicting treatment outcomes for individuals with schizophrenia and other psychotic…
Yael Benn, Anna A. Ivanova, Oliver Clark, Zachary Mineroff + 4 more
The relationship between language and human thought is the subject of long-standing debate. One specific claim implicates language in feature-based categorization. According to this view, language resources facilitate object categorization based on a certain feature (e.g., color). Specifically, it is hypothesized that…
Casey Kennington
This document chronicles this author's attempt to explore how words come to mean what they do, with a particular focus on child language acquisition and what that means for models of language understanding.1 I explain the setting for child language learning, how embodiment—being able to perceive and enact in the world…
Joël Colloc
The feasibility of autonomous artificial thinking systems needs to compare the way the human beings acquire their information and develops the thought with the current capacities of the autonomous information systems. Our model uses four hierarchies: the hierarchy of information systems, the cognitive hierarchy, the…
Authors not listed
The Socratic method, grounded in iterative questioning and critical dialogue, offers a compelling framework for leveraging large language models (LLMs) to advance scientific reasoning and discovery in chemistry and materials science. In this paper, we explore how Socratic principles can be integrated into prompt…