The quantitative and objective aspects of meaning
may not be enough for open-ended conversation with
humans. It may be necessary to represent the qual-
itative and subjective facets of concepts. Without
feeling the ineffable feelings behind things, it may be
impossible to truly understand the meaning of them
(Jakab, 2000), and no formal description will be the
same as true experience. This knowing-from-feeling
is known as qualia and is believed to be only possible
in conscious beings.
If we need to be conscious in order to understand,
then perhaps this is something we need to simulate
in our machines. Not everyone would agree that con-
sciousness can be simulated, or attribute conscious-
ness to animals. But if the feelings are subjective
then this aspect of meaning is not necessarily shared,
even between conscious beings. Therefore, as it is
only an internal ’revelation’ it may not be neces-
sary for establishing meaning between conversational
partners.
Conclusion
In order to initiate communication it seems several
abilities need to be in place, some of which are reliant
on each other. From the experience of teachers of an-
imals and impaired children, it seems that the most
important aspect is an interest in the teacher over
other stimuli. This is necessary to be able to guide
their attention and to encourage imitation. With-
out this present in our machines we cannot begin
to provide feedback on what we want the machine
to learn, which enables us to enforce a certain type
of categorisation (however it is represented) that is
shared by speakers of the language.
Acknowledgements
Thankyou to Kylie Witt, Deafblind Services Co-
ordinator for the Royal Institute for Deaf & Blind
Children Australia.
References
Baron-Cohen, S. (1995). Mindblindness: An Essay
on Autism and Theory of Mind. MIT Press,
Cambridge, MA.
Breazeal, C. (2002). Designing Sociable Robots.
MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Colligan, J. (1962). Teaching deaf-blind children.
Seminar of the Royal National Institute for the
Blind, Shrewsbury, England.
Deely, J. (2001). Umwelt. Semiotica 134, 1:125-135.
Harnad, S. (1990). The symbol grounding problem.
Semiotica 134, 42:335-346.
Harnad, S. (1996). The origin of words: A psy-
chophysical hypothesis. In Durham, W. and
Velichkovsky, B., (Eds.), Communicating Mean-
ing: Evolution and Development of Language.
Erlbaum.
Horwich, P. (2003). From meaning. In Richard, M.,
(Ed.), Meaning. Blackwell, Malden, MA.
Jakab, Z. (2000). Ineffability of qualia: A straight-
forward naturalistic explanation. Consciousness
and Cognition, 9:329-351.
Kozima, H. and Ito, A. (1997). The role of
shared-attention in human-computer conversa-
tion. In International Conference of Research
on Computational Linguistics (ROCLING-97),
pages 224-228, Taiwan.
Lovaas, O. (1977). The Autistic Child: Language
Development through Behaviour Modification.
Irvington Publishers Inc, New York.
Peirce, C. (1897). Logic as semiotic. In Buchler, J.,
(Ed.), Philosophical Writings of Peirce (1955).
Dover, New York.
Pepperberg, I. (1999). The Alex studies: cogni-
tive and communicative abilities of grey parrots.
Harvard University Press, Cambridge.
Reeves, B. and Nass, C. (1996). The Media Equa-
tion. Cambridge University Press, New York.
Savage-Rumbaugh, S. Rumbaugh, D. and Boysen,
S. (1980). Do apes use language? American
Scientist, 68:49-61.
Savage-Rumbaugh, S. (1994). Kanzi: The ape on
the brink of the human mind. John Wiley &
Sons, New York.
Searle, J. (1980). Minds, brains and programs. The
Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 3:417-424.
Steels, L. and Kaplan, F. (2001). Aibo’s first words:
the social learning of language and meaning.
Evolution of Communication, 4.
Steels, L. and Kaplan, F. (2002). Bootstrapping
grounded word semantics. Linguistic evolution
through language acquisition: formal and com-
putational models.
Tubbs, S. and Moss, S. (1994). Human Communi-
cation. McGraw-Hill, New York.
Wenburg, J. and Wilmont, W. (1973). The per-
sonal communication process. John Wiley &
Sons, New York.
Witt, K. (2004). Personal communication.
114