Status Updates From Thinking without Words (Phi...

I just understood something: Clark’s functional compositionality (as opposed to Fodorian concatenative encoding) is the kind of compositionality that emerges at the level of interpreted meanings or forms, which is why it doesn’t have independently specifiable units or primitives. Compositionality is either a way of systematizing *language* or *interpretation*. Just thought about that, not that he talks about it

Finally one interesting point: an animal doesn’t think ~p constructed from p or vice versa, but thinks either _that_ the gazelle is present at x, or absent from x, without conceiving of any logical relation between the two. That means that the reason why the animal never thinks contradictions is that they don’t occur in nature. And Russell, I would add, thought the same thing of us (in Problems of Philosophy)

I’m so bored!!

“Versions of the minimalist approach that depend on the perception of affordances are difficult to apply, therefore, to types of thinking behavior that emerge in highly unfamiliar environments.”

“What Bermúdez calls nonlinguistic thought is just perception!” Really? Does imagistic thinking, empathetic or trial-and-error reasoning look like perception to you?