No subject

[George Lakoff]

Response to Harlan:

By ``content'' I have in mind cases like the following:

(1) Color: The nature and distribution of color categories has been
shown to depend on the neurophysiology of color vision.
This is not just a matter of computation by the neurons, but of what
they are hooked up to. (See my Women, Fire, and
Dangerous Things, pp. 24 - 30.)

(2) Basic-level categories, whose properties depend on gestalt
perception, motor programs, and imagining capacity.
Here we have not just a
matter of abstract computation but again a matter of how the neurons
doing the computing are hooked up to the body.

(3) Spatial relations, e.g., in, out, to, from, through, over, and
all others. Here the visual system, rather than the olfactory system,
will count. Again, simply looking at abstract computations doesn't
help.

(4) Emotional concepts, like anger, which are partly understood
via complex metaphorical mappings, but which are constrained by
phsyiology. See Women, Fire, Case study 1.

(5) Cultural concepts, like marriage.

(6) Scientific concepts like relativity.

I simply do not see how pure computation tells us anything whatever
about the content of the concepts -- not just what inference patterns
they occur in relative to other concepts, but the nature of, say,
GREEN as opposed to ACROSS or SCARED, as well as the various
properties of the concepts, e.g., their prototype structure, their
place in the basic-level hierarchy, their associated mental images,
whether they are metaphorically
constituted and if so how they are understood, etc.

As a cognitive scientist, I am concerned with all these issues
and a myriad of other ones of greater complexity. Discussions of
abstract computability issues, as interesting as they are
in themselves, just don't help here.  
I am interested in connectionism partly because it holds out the
promise of insight into the neural grounding of concepts
and into the thousands of issues in conceptual analysis
that require an understanding of such grounding.

Turing computability is a technical issue and is of some technical
interest, but has nothing whatever to say to the visceral
issues concerning the content of concepts.

                                       George