Two Approaches to Commonsense Inferencing for Discourse Analysis

Abs t rac t : The dominant philosophy regarding the formalization of Commonsense Inferencing in the physical domain consists in the exploitation of the "tarskian" scheme axiomatization <-> interpretation borrowed from mathematical logic. The commonsense postulates constitute the axiomatization, and the real world provides the "model" for this axiomatization. The observation of the effective activity of linguistic communication and of the commonsense inferencing processes which are involved in it show the unacceptability of this scheme. An alternative is proposed, where the notion of "conceptual category" plays a principal role, and where the principle of logical adequation of an axiomatization to a model is replaced by a notion of "projection" of a conceptual structure onto the observed reality.