Events at CSLI

The purpose of this ongoing initiative is to bring together researchers interested in contacts between logic, philosophy, mathematics, computer science, linguistics, cognitive science, and economics to discuss new dimensions emerging today, such as knowledge, information, computation, and interactive agency.

The workshop continues a tradition of discussion-oriented outreach meetings aimed at fostering community across disciplines and universities, including senior and junior participants.

For detailed info please see: http://www-logic.stanford.edu/events/CSLI2015/CSLI2015.xhtml 

CHALLENGES AND SUPPORT FOR VERB LEARNING

Abstract:

Young children the world over appear to expect that a verb presented in a transitive frame surrounded by nouns maps onto a causative meaning and is best associated with an event involving an agent and a patient. At the same time, however, they struggle when a verb appears in an intransitive frame in which two conjoined nouns occupying the subject position. This contrast in performance between the two syntactic environments has been replicated time and again across labs, and has led some researchers to conclude that the fault lies in children’s underdeveloped syntactic representations or in the heuristics they deploy to assign semantic roles to a verb’s arguments. However, I will present the results of a set of word learning studies demonstrating that not only do adults also flounder when presented with a novel verb in an intransitive frame, but when children are provided with semantic support for the form-meaning mapping in the form of an additional informative lexical item or distributional evidence concerning the intended interpretation of the syntactic frame in the discourse, they fare much better with the intransitive frame. These findings suggest that the problem may not be an immature grammar, but rather lack of sufficient information to narrow down the hypothesis space. Verb learning calls upon children’s syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic knowledge. When these aspects of the linguistic system work in concert, mapping form to meaning is facilitated.

Proust and Consciousness

The Center for the Explanation of Consciousness at CSLI and the Stanford Humanities Center present a workshop on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Consciousness today at 5:00 PM. All are welcome to attend.

Matthew Smith, DLCL, Stanford 

"The Rise of the Neural Subject"

Abstract:

    How did we come to think of the self not as soul, psyche, or mind but as brain and nervous system?  Though much talked about in recent popular-science books such as V. S. Ramachandran’s The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human, Patricia Churchland’s Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain, and Joseph LeDoux’s The Synaptic Self, the idea is hardly recent.  An understanding of its history may help us to better understand its present and future.

    After sketching a broad history of the formation of this conception of the self, this talk will pay particular attention to cultural transformations in Western Europe and the United States in the mid-19th century.  Concentrating on the period around 1870, we will find that works of art (such as Richard Wagner’s operas, Émile Zola’s novels, and the emergence of Victorian “sensation drama”) combined with neurological research (by Hermann von Helmholtz, Julius Bernstein, and George Miller Beard) to inspire a new conception of consciousness and personhood—a conception we may call the neural subject.

Refreshments will be served.

Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center Radway Workshops Program, and the Center for the Explanation of Consciousness, CSLI.