Mind, Language, Machine

Abstract

Today there is no more exciting field of inquiry than that variegated and largely disunified one concerned with investigating human language. In so far as it can be defined as a discipline, it draws relentlessly on the resources of many other disciplines with which it shares interests. Recently the interests of language theorists and researchers have overlapped fruitfully with those of various kinds of computer scientists and psychologists, whose interests in turn appear to be melding in the development of the hybrid discipline of a general cognitive science. As Philip N. Johnson-Laird observes,

During the past decade, there has grown up a confederation of disciplines — linguistics, philosophy of mind, cognitive anthropology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and psychology itself — whose practitioners have realized that they are converging on the same set of problems and even independently invoking the same explanatory ideas. The so-called cognitive sciences have sometimes seemed like six subjects in search of an interdisciplinary synthesis; if that synthesis does not yet exist, it is certainly necessary to invent it.¹