Progress on the CBMM Challenge Questions: What is there? and Who is there?

Abstract:

Thrust 1 presents this week episode in our series of weekly discussions on progress on the CBMM challenge questions. The thrust is focused on the development of intelligence and on how to model it. It is therefore appropriate to step back and ask: what role do compositionality, probabilistic inference, and intuitive theories have to play in our understanding of understanding? Noah Goodman will start by discussing the Probabilistic Language of Thought hypothesis, including taking a quick tour of the web book probmods.org and the models repository forested.org. Noah will then ask how language interfaces with non-linguistic understanding, and how context mediates this interaction, sketching an architecture for natural language semantics and pragmatics, grounded in probabilistic intuitive theories. Noah plans to extend the basic architecture to figurative language, such as hyperbole, and argue that compositionality of thought it central but deeply buried in everyday language. This will be the motivation to ask what formal semantics and pragmatic effects we may need to engage with even for the (mostly non-linguistic) CBMM challenge.