Three Levels of Thought

Peter Gärdenfors proposes that there are three levels of abstraction for modeling thought:

Symbolic: logic, expert systems, Prolog, Cyc, good old-fashioned AI, theorem proving
Spatial: geometry, feature spaces, conceptual spaces, semantic spaces, information retrieval, vector space models, latent semantic analysis, machine learning
Connectionist: neural networks, Hebbian theory, associationism, perceptrons, neuroscience

These levels might be compared to modeling physics at [...]

The Theoretical Foundation of Statistical Semantics

George Furnas defines Statistical Semantics as the study of “how the statistical patterns of human word usage can be used to figure out what people mean, at least to a level sufficient for information access”. Experiments show that statistical semantics works and it has many applications, but we may wonder why it works. How is [...]