LEHMAN, F. K. (F. K. L. Chit Hlaing) (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).
THE COMPUTATIONAL STRUCTURE OF KNOWLEDGE AND ITS RELATION TO REAL TIME BEHAVIOUR.

I shall present a condensed version of my longer on the formal (computational?) structure of the relations amongst knowledge domains and, more generally, 'encyclopaedic knowledge' in roughly the sense of Sperber. My specific motivation is the proposition that any real-time, observable event is likely to be organised by more than a single Knowledge structure. In particular, this view makes it clear that a great deal of what we often talk about as evidence for the difference between ideal models and real behaviour has to do with such competing structurings of events; also I am motivated by the increasing importance in areas of cognitive science of 'Event Theory', especially concerning the difference between 'tense theory' semantics and a semantics of time based upon mode-and-aspect. Finally, note that this bears centrally upon the Instantiation Problem focused on at the at AAA '01 panel on cognitive anthropology. I mean that, with respect to conceptual categories as I dealt with the matter there, I can show clearly how and why the proposition that category definitions are fuzzy, defined relatively to prototypes or open-ended in the sense of Wittgenstein's 'family resemblance' theory, need not be taken so seriously as to take us in the direction of intellectual nihilism about specifying knowledge and cognition explicitly.