Abstract :
Human beings are adept and drawing context-sensitive associations and inferences across a broad range of situations ranging from the mundane to the creative inferences that lead to scientific discovery. Such reasoning has a strong pragmatic character and is transacted with comparatively scarce cognitive assets. The question is how to get technology to reliably replicate this? The need for such technology is pressing. Paradoxically, the information explosion is leading to diminished awareness. Expertise is becoming ever more specialized: Individuals, groups, communities, enterprises are becoming increasingly insular. We need computational systems which have the capability to enhance our awareness, for example, by suggesting associations in context that we could make, but increasingly don’t, as we generally lack the cognitive resources to do so. The premiss behind this paper is that the technology has to manipulate context sensitive meanings which accord with those that we harbour. In other words, the “meanings” manipulated by the technology should be socio-cognitively motivated. A class of cognitively validated computational model called “semantic space” is introduced together with means for computing associations between words. It is argued that such associations can be usefully deployed to underpin human pragmatic reasoning. The paper concludes with some intriguing, highly speculative connections between semantic space and quantum mechanics.
