ABSTRACT
Knowledge representation is too complicated to be well-served by the traditional semantic approach (e.g., Katz, 1972; Winston, 1977). The problems encountered by Rumelhart and McClelland (1986), as pointed out by Fodor and Pylyshyn (1988), are endemic to the model employed. Eco (1976, 1984) and others have urged that we see all systematically-generated information as parts of a “science of signs”, semiotics. The three-faceted semiotic structure embraces information from the genetic level to language — and production. Semiotics fits modern neurolinguistic approaches (e.g., Dingwall, 1980) and neurophysiological theorizing (Arnold, 1984; Black et al, 1988; Posner & Keele, 1968). It also enables us to employ “holographic models” (Pribram, 1971) — and to extend our models to higher level processes (Leven, 1987a, 1987b; Levine, 1986). Ultimately, both internal and interpersonal interactions are discursive.
And this is what I have been trying to do…: identify and mathematize the relevant abstract patterns… in a scientific study of meaning and information. In terms of this definition, what is presented here is mathematics. It just does not look like it (yet).
Keith Devlin, Logic and Information, p. 294.