indispensably involves meaning, connections to the world, and some form of consciousness
for in it are effective awareness and freedom of a human being who makes choices and creates structures. [VW 410]
Jaspers argues that there is little chance to transfer a language of words into a language of signs; this is only possible if the topic is mathematical.
Since I want to use a logical system in conjunction with large amounts of commonsense knowledge, I would have to combine a language of signs—the language of logic—with an appropriate language of words that are derived from commonsense knowledge (current search-engine knowledge-graphs are estimated to contain more than eighteen billion data points). Subsequently, the word embeddings can then be used for capturing the meaning of words, which could be seen as being an implementation of Jaspers' claim:
The actual meaning of the words does not lie in them alone, but only in the movements of the sentences in which the words illuminate, delimit, and determine each other. [VW 409]
However, word embeddings could create their own reality that is void of existential meaning. Jaspers writes:
Through language, communication becomes possible, which does not occur in ignorant echo and involuntary imitation, but in the intention regarding topic and subject matter. [VW 412]
He cautions that:
What man once made a hard effort to understand through language remains a convenient way of speaking as words and sentences in the mouths of those who follow, who no longer understand. What used to be an expression of profundity turns into usability. People are being taken over by an enormous amount of void and distorted language: They allow themselves to be guided by such language, instead of by what is and what they are; they obtain their education in the form of being capable to speak instead in the form of factual know-how, as a cluster of speaking modes instead of as the formation of their being. [VW 429]
It should be noted that word embeddings can be seen as a statistical database based on the occurrence of words taken together with other words within a very large text corpus. Typically, the representation is a real-valued vector that encodes the meaning of the word in such a way that words that are closer in the vector space
to the problem. The right part of Figure 2 shows the context of a social contract: One side of the cards shows a beverage, namely beer or soda, and the other side shows the age of the person drinking that beverage. Thus, each card represents a person drinking a beverage. The rule now is: "If a person is under 21 years old, she is not allowed to drink beer." The task is again to check if the implication, this time the social rule, is fulfilled. In this case, 75% of the subjects usually find the correct solution quickly and effortlessly, irrespective of the fact that it is still a matter of recognizing the implication "If P, then Q." Researchers tend to believe that this difference in arriving at the correct inference is due to cognitive differences in processing abstract versus concrete challenges. Some researchers suggest that for tasks involving social reasoning different areas of the limbic system of the human brain are used in contrast to the ones used for other forms of reasoning.8
Numerous cognitive science experiments demonstrate that humans take the meaning of symbols into account during reasoning, which means that not only the symbols themselves but also their underlying meanings and associations are being considered. This ability to understand and use the meaning of symbols is an important part of cognition and is essential for effective reasoning. Hence, reasoning with an automated system would have to master this challenge.
Knowledge and Reasoning
In an effort of revisiting the relation between reasoning and knowledge I will briefly address an aspect of Karl Jaspers' thought regarding language. Jaspers brings up logicians of earlier centuries who differentiated between notiones communes and notiones generales, that is, between the essentialities that are communicated by way of words and abstract universal concepts that are communicated by way of using signs.9 Reasoning with the language of signs in the abstract case of the Wason task, can be done within a logical system, whereas reasoning with commonsense knowledge
8 Valerie E. Stone, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Neal Kroll, Robert T. Knight, "Selective Impairment of Reasoning About Social Exchange in A Patient With Bilateral Limbic System Damage," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99/17 (August 2002), 11531– 11536.
9 Karl Jaspers, Philosophische Logik, Erster Band: Von der Wahrheit, München, DE: R. Piper & Co. Verlag 1947, pp. 408-9, my translation. [Henceforth cited as VW]
