Mystery Number Three - Computational Linguistics and Talking Robots - page 57

4.3.1 M ODEL - THEORETIC RECONSTRUCTION OF REFERENCE

natural language expression

reference meta−language

set−theoretic model of the world

The model, the language analysis, and the reference relation between the ex-
pressions and the model are defined in a metalanguage - without any cognitive
agents and therefore without any agent-internal database. Furthermore, a com-
puter does not understand the logicians' metalanguage. Instead, it requires the
definition of procedural operations (cf. FoCL'99, Sect. 19.4; Schnelle 1988).
To reconstruct reference as a computational procedure, independent of any
metalanguage, the DBS robot is based on the following component structure: 4

4.3.2 I NTERFACES AND COMPONENTS OF AN AGENT WITH LANGUAGE

Cognitive Agent

central cognition

sign recognition
sign synthesis

theory of grammar

language component

pragmatics theory of language

context recognition

context component

context action

External Reality peripheral cognition

The agent is represented as a body in the real world with interfaces for recog-
nition and action. These provide the link between the agent-external reality
and the agent-internal cognition. Cognition is in large part a memory structure
which is divided into a language component for processing language data and
a context component for processing nonlanguage data. 5
The language and the context component code content the same way, namely
as proplets in a Word Bank, concatenated by the relations of functor-argument

4 Borrowed from NLC'06, 2.4.1. See 4.5.3 and 4.5.4 for a refined version.
5 The distinction between the theory of language and of grammar is emphasized in Lieb (1976).