Semantic Processing Quotes

People never think about words, they only feel them.

The world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language.

We think only through the medium of words. Languages are true analytical methods. Algebra, which is adapted to its purpose in every species of expression, in the most simple, most exact, and best manner possible, is at the same time a language and an analytical method. The art of reasoning is nothing more than a language well arranged.

The reason that no computer program can ever be a mind is simply that a computer program is only syntactical, and minds are more than syntactical. Minds are semantical, in the sense that they have more than a formal structure, they have a content.

I'm interested in the way language is used to navigate the world around us.

When words do not enter as factors into a shared situation, either overtly or imaginatively, they operate as pure physical stimuli, not as having a meaning or intellectual value. They set activity running in a given groove, but there is no accompanying conscious purpose or meaning.

There has been a great gulf in psychological thought between the perception of space and objects on one hand and the perception of meaning on the other.

Working with language is a means by which we can identify the bullshit within ourselves (and others).