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Article 4770 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Language as Technology: A Phenomenological Study
Message-ID: <1992Mar28.052750.4420@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Date: 28 Mar 92 05:27:50 GMT
References: <1992Mar27.224344.7150@waikato.ac.nz> <1992Mar27.154137.6740@mp.cs.niu.edu> <1992Mar28.140324.7155@waikato.ac.nz>
Organization: Northern Illinois University
Lines: 48

In article <1992Mar28.140324.7155@waikato.ac.nz> rmarsh@waikato.ac.nz writes:
>In article <1992Mar27.154137.6740@mp.cs.niu.edu>, rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu 
>(Neil Rickert) writes:
>> 
>>  You use language for much more than communication.  You use it to construct
>> models.  It is these mental models which are essential to knowledge
>> acquisition.  No doubt mental models are possible without language, but they
>> would be much simpler than the models we construct with language.
>> 
>Are the mental models actually constructed using langauge, or merely
>labelled with it? I can bring to mind a picture of a dog. I know it is a
>dog because I have labelled it as such using my language, but the model in

 You very well may be able to think about a dog without essential language
use.  But without language I doubt you could think about the theory of
relativity; about gravitation; about the earth going around the sun rather
than the sun going around the earth.

>>  You use language to communicate to others in society.  But you also use
>> language to communicate with yourself, and this latter aspect is important.
>> As an example, much of your memory of past events is due to the fact that
>> you have used language to reconstruct (i.e. model) the events, and you have
>> reviewed (through thought) these language models many times, refreshing your
>> memory as you do so.  Without this ability most newly acquired knowledge
>> would evaporate within a relatively short time.
>> 
>This is almost certainly true for academic learning, that is things we
>learn through language in the first place, but what about episodic memory?
>I have a picture I can bring to mind of a woman's face. I have never met
>her, but I believe I will and that she is important to my future in some
>way. I have analysed the characteristics of this face many times (put
>linguistic labels to the features etc.), but now, rather than being able to
>recreate the picture more clearly, I find that I can no longer bring a high
>resolution image of my lady friend to mind.

  I'm not sure I understand your point.  Are you suggesting that because
you have built linguistic descriptions, you can no longer visualize the
face as well?  If this is your implication, consider the possibility that
you could never visualize the face very well, but had merely deceived
yourself into believing you could.  Now, confronted with your linguistic
descriptions, the imperfections of your visualization are suddenly obvious
and you no longer fall victim to this self deception.

-- 
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  Neil W. Rickert, Computer Science               <rickert@cs.niu.edu>
  Northern Illinois Univ.
  DeKalb, IL 60115                                   +1-815-753-6940


