Title: Language, reasoning, and commonsense knowledge<\/p>\n
Speaker: Noah Goodman (Stanford University)<\/p>\n
Date: Tues 9-3-2013<\/p>\n
Time: 4:00 PM<\/p>\n
Location: Singleton Auditorium, MIT 46-3002<\/p>\n
Host: Prof. Joshua B. Tenenbaum; Tim O’Donnell<\/p>\n
Human reasoning is a beautiful puzzle: it is productive,
\nextending to new situations without bound, and it is uncertain,
\ndealing gracefully with noisy evidence and shades of belief. Reasoning
\nis also a key window on cognition, providing some of our best evidence
\nabout the structures that underly everyday, commonsense thought. I
\nwill argue that the core representations that support reasoning can be
\nunderstood as a ‘probabilistic language of thought’, and that
\nreasoning is an approximation to probabilistic inference. I will
\nillustrate this claim with examples of reasoning about games and
\nproperty induction. However, I will suggest that the bridge between
\nthe probabilistic language of thought and empirical data is a firm
\nunderstanding of natural language. I will sketch a model of natural
\nlanguage pragmatics and semantics, and describe experimental evidence
\nfrom communication games and quantity implicature. I will then
\ndescribe how we can extend this framework to encompass vague language,
\nfocussing on scalar adjectives (like “tall”). I will conclude by
\ncoming back to reasoning, explaining two puzzling patterns: the
\nsorites paradox and the effect of additional premises when reasoning
\ngeneral-to-specific. Time permitting, I will discuss possible
\nprocess-level implementations in a short coda.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-talks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5273"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5273\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5287,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5273\/revisions\/5287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}