Mystery Number One - Computational Linguistics and Talking Robots - page 22

3. a set of agent-internal (cognitive) surface-meaning pairs established by
convention and stored in memory, whereby the internal surfaces corre-
spond to the external ones, and
4. an agent-internal algorithm which constructs complex meanings from ele-
mentary ones by establishing semantic relations between them.

The definition implies that the cognition of agents in a language community is
as important for the definition of natural language as the unanalyzed external
surfaces. This may be shown by “lost languages” (FoCL'99, Sect. 5.3).
Imagine the discovery of clay tablets left behind by an unknown people per-
ished long ago. Even though the external surfaces of their language are still
present in form of the glyphs on the tablets, the language as a means of com-
municating meaningful content is lost. The only way to revive the language at
least in part is to reconstruct the knowledge of the original speakers - which
was part of their cognition and is now part of the cognition of the scientists. 14
The requirements of 2.2.3 are minimal. They are sufficient, however, to dis-
tinguish natural language communication from other forms:

2.2.4 F ORMS OF COMMUNICATION WITHOUT NATURAL LANGUAGE

• endocrinic messaging by means of hormones,

• exocrinic messaging by means of pheromones, for example in ants, 15 and

the use of samples, for example in bees communicating a source of pollen.
These forms of communication differ from natural language because they lack
a set of external surfaces with corresponding internal surface-meaning pairs
established by convention. 16
From a functional point of view, the mechanism described by MoC-1 has the
following advantages for communication:

•

2.2.5 A DVANTAGES FOLLOWING FROM M O C-1

1. The modality-free internal meanings attached to the internal surfaces are
not restricted by the modality of the external surfaces.

14 Thereby, knowledge of the word form meanings and the algorithm for their composition alone is not
sufficient for a complete, successful interpretation. What is needed in addition is the archaeologists'
knowledge of the context of use.
15 E. O. Wilson (1998, p. 229) describes the body of an ant worker as “a walking battery of exocrinic
glands.”
16 Another example of not constituting a language is the macros used in programming languages. De-
fined ad hoc by the programmer as names for pieces of code, they are (program-)internal abbrevia-
tions. As such they do not require any external surfaces agreed on by convention and are not used for
inter-agent communication. Nevertheless, as abbreviation devices, macros model an important ability
of natural language.