Relating Language to Perception, Action, and Feelings

Abstract

The world is a continuum, but words are discrete. Sensory organs map the continuous world to continuous mental models of sights, sounds, and motions. Muscles and bones move in a continuous range of positions, postures, forces, and speeds. Internal feelings of hunger, thirst, pains, pleasures, fears, and desires have a continuous range of variation. But discrete words and patterns of words cannot faithfully represent the continuum of perceptions, actions, and feelings. Peirce’s semiotics and Wittgenstein’s language games provide a framework for relating language to the world and to perceptions and actions in the world. Peirce analyzed signs and transformations of signs in networks of discrete symbols and in patterns of continuous images. Wittgenstein showed how language is integrated with every aspect of human activity. To implement their insights, the discrete networks of symbols must be mapped to continuous mathematics. This article is a summary of the methods and applications for mapping natural languages to conceptual graphs and continuous transformations. Those methods have been used to analyze and classify plot twists in narratives and the structure of expository texts.

An extended paper associated with this invited talk will appear in the Workshop Proceedings for the “Workshop on Modeling States, Events and Processes (MSEPS)”.