ABSTRACT
Linguistics.—The term interpretation is employed in cognitive science to refer to very different concepts, depending on the discipline and the paradigm. In artificial intelligence (AI) and philosophy, the predominant acceptation comes from logical semantics (→SEMANTICS), where a crucial distinction is made between semantic interpretation and syntactic interpretation (→SYNTAX). Semantic interpretation maps a truth value to each proposition in a formal system (→LOGIC). A proposition is said to be valid in a formal system if it receives the value true in all interpretations. Syntactic interpretation makes the meaning of a proposition be the result of a transcoding process. This obviously implies that the syntactic and semantic levels are separate, but also that the interpreted language and the transcoding language are compatible (→LANGUAGE).
