Interesting but I don’t see at all how this is solving the grounding problem.
The use of variables themselves as a basic unit is a give away that the bridging of the gap is assumed. For example, a human starts understanding the concept of a cup by using it way before it has a word for it. The border between the embodied knowledge and the abstract syntactic one is when a word is attached to the ‘meaning’ of the cup that is already there. As Henri Bergson puts it, you can try to find the meaning of the poem in the words and the letters, but you will fail. You are examining the symbol and not the meaning. The symbol/variable can also be observed to be arbitrary. I can say ‘Give me this cup’ or ‘Give me this broindogoing’ as long as we have agreed what ‘broindogoing’ means. If we haven’t and there is no already defined variable in use in your mind I would have to find a way to direct you to an experience of what a cup is.
You might say. There are variables in the human mind that are under words. I would say there are ‘representations’ but they don’t seem to be of an abstract syntactic kind. There seems to be something like a low resolution analogy or metaphor in the technical sense of the words. If you think I am just speculating I would claim that there is plenty of evidence surfacing that the ‘intellect’ which is the system that you are attempting to generalise as the whole of the human mind is grafted on top, and is dependant on, an underlying system of a different, not yet understood, architecture. I recommend, as an introduction to the alternative view to your own, the book ‘The Master and His Emissary’ by Iain McGilChrist for the biological, medical and to a certain extend philosophical evidence.
Interesting but I don’t see at all how this is solving the grounding problem.
The use of variables themselves as a basic unit is a give away that the bridging of the gap is assumed. For example, a human starts understanding the concept of a cup by using it way before it has a word for it. The border between the embodied knowledge and the abstract syntactic one is when a word is attached to the ‘meaning’ of the cup that is already there. As Henri Bergson puts it, you can try to find the meaning of the poem in the words and the letters, but you will fail. You are examining the symbol and not the meaning. The symbol/variable can also be observed to be arbitrary. I can say ‘Give me this cup’ or ‘Give me this broindogoing’ as long as we have agreed what ‘broindogoing’ means. If we haven’t and there is no already defined variable in use in your mind I would have to find a way to direct you to an experience of what a cup is.
You might say. There are variables in the human mind that are under words. I would say there are ‘representations’ but they don’t seem to be of an abstract syntactic kind. There seems to be something like a low resolution analogy or metaphor in the technical sense of the words. If you think I am just speculating I would claim that there is plenty of evidence surfacing that the ‘intellect’ which is the system that you are attempting to generalise as the whole of the human mind is grafted on top, and is dependant on, an underlying system of a different, not yet understood, architecture. I recommend, as an introduction to the alternative view to your own, the book ‘The Master and His Emissary’ by Iain McGilChrist for the biological, medical and to a certain extend philosophical evidence.