Title: Language, reasoning, and commonsense knowledge
Speaker: Noah Goodman (Stanford University)
Date: Tues 9-3-2013
Time: 4:00 PM
Location: Singleton Auditorium, MIT 46-3002
Host: Prof. Joshua B. Tenenbaum; Tim O’Donnell
Human reasoning is a beautiful puzzle: it is productive,
extending to new situations without bound, and it is uncertain,
dealing gracefully with noisy evidence and shades of belief. Reasoning
is also a key window on cognition, providing some of our best evidence
about the structures that underly everyday, commonsense thought. I
will argue that the core representations that support reasoning can be
understood as a ‘probabilistic language of thought’, and that
reasoning is an approximation to probabilistic inference. I will
illustrate this claim with examples of reasoning about games and
property induction. However, I will suggest that the bridge between
the probabilistic language of thought and empirical data is a firm
understanding of natural language. I will sketch a model of natural
language pragmatics and semantics, and describe experimental evidence
from communication games and quantity implicature. I will then
describe how we can extend this framework to encompass vague language,
focussing on scalar adjectives (like “tall”). I will conclude by
coming back to reasoning, explaining two puzzling patterns: the
sorites paradox and the effect of additional premises when reasoning
general-to-specific. Time permitting, I will discuss possible
process-level implementations in a short coda.