According to recent studies in developmental psychology and neuroscience, symbolic language is essentially intersubjective. Empathetically relating to others renders possible the acquisition of linguistic constructs. Intersubjectivity develops in early ontogenetic life when interactions between mother and infant mutually shape their relatedness. Empirical findings suggest that the shared attent...

We report on the development of a robust parsing device which aims to provide a partial explanation for child language acquisition and help in the construction of better natural language processing systems. The backbone of the new approach is the synthesis of statistical and symbolic approaches to natural language.

This article proposes an ecologically based answer to why humans are the only animals who have developed a symbolic communication system. The first part of the argument claims that the Oldowan culture generated selective forces that lead to the evolution of anticipatory cognition, that is, the ability to mentally represent future needs and events. We argue that anticipatory cognition opened up ...

This paper presents a practical method of adding problem-specific notation to an established computer language. Our idea is to use unrestricted operator overloading as a tool to map the problem domain notation directly into an existing programming language. Our method introduces new operator symbols and function names into a host language by overloading existing usage. We extend the host progra...

A large body of literature has developed concerning the automatic parallelization of numerical programs, and a quite separate literature has developed concerning the parallelization of symbolic programs. Because many symbolic programs make heavy use of array data and iterative constructs, in addition to more \symbolic" language features like pointers and recursion, it is desirable to fuse these...

This essay is a contribution to the historical phenomenology of science, taking as its point of departure husserl’s later philosophy of science and Jacob klein’s seminal work on the emergence of the symbolic conception of number in european mathematics during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. since neither husserl nor klein applied their ideas to actual theories of modern mathematic...

Newell (1980; 1990) proposed that cognitive theories be developed in an effort to satisfy multiple criteria and to avoid theoretical myopia. He provided two overlapping lists of 13 criteria that the human cognitive architecture would have to satisfy in order to be functional. We have distilled these into 12 criteria: flexible behavior, real-time performance, adaptive behavior, vast knowledge ba...