Bridging the Gap between Non-Symbolic and Symbolic Processing – How Could Human Being Acquire Language?

Issue title: New Frontiers in Scientific Discovery – Commemorating the Life and Work of Zdzislaw Pawlak

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Ohsuga, Setsuo

Affiliations: Emeritus Professor of University of Tokyo, Japan. E-mail: ohsuga@s01.itscom.net

Abstract: Information becomes more and more sophisticated with its ever-increasing use. Information sophistication relates closely to human intelligence. In order to ensure the common form of information, a symbolic language has been developed. It gradually progressed so that the representation of information of higher-level sophistication becomes possible. However, there is still a lot of information that cannot be captured by a language and has to be represented at very low level. A great effort is necessary for representing such information in a symbolic language because there is a large gap between non-symbolic and symbolic representations. This paper discusses two problems concerning bridging this gap, one from symbolic processing side and the other from nonsymbolic processing side. The former is the language aspect of activity called discovery. The latter concerns an evolutional process of language creation. Both are very important topics for explaining the process of sophisticating information.

Keywords: Language Acquirement, Knowledge Discovery, Symbolic and Non-Symbolic Processing

Journal: Fundamenta Informaticae, vol. 75, no. 1-4, pp. 385-406, 2007