PhD Philosophy, University of Georgia, 1979.
Dissertation: Analyticity, Meaning, Is and Ought: the Intensional Status of Evaluative Sentences.
Around 2010, began research and writing to develop some early work I had done on analyticity and lexical semantics. Most of that work is published here, and some at Philosophical Papers.
My first Lexical Pairs article (see below) extended Quine's matter-of-degree thesis on analyticity into cognitive psychology, providing an experimental paradigm for measuring and quantifying the intuitions of individuals, in their discrete speech acts, about the degree to which assertions of true declarative sentences are analytic or synthetic, and the degree to which they are necessarily or contingently true. These intuitions are the basis for lexical semantics. In this article, I reconciled truth-functional and structuralist insights into semantics, and showed how, as Barbara Partee once doubted, both approaches to semantics are “about the same thing”.
--- “The Co-Ascription of Ordered Lexical Pairs: a Cognitive-Science-Based Semantic Theory of Meaning and Reference: Part 1”. Academia-dot-edu; also at Philosophical Papers. August 2018.
My second Lexical Pairs article extended this lexical semantic theory into the cognitive neuroscience of language. Its major contention is that current work in this area of neuroscience is based on what I call a “conceptual hemianopsia” in which, in Fregean terms, meaning is ignored and semantics is taken to be equivalent to reference. This article of mine presents a fully-developed neurosemantic theory, i.e. a theory expressed at the level of Broadman Areas and fascicular connections among them, and the functionality associated with this architecture. I present this semantic theory (which I call nTM, a neural Theory of Meaning) as a replacement for the "semantic cores" of several neuroscience theories of language, including the Wernicke-Lichtheim-Geschwind Model, the Lemma Model, the Hub and Spoke Model, the Dual-Stream Model, and the Dual Coding Model.
--- “The Co-Ascription of Ordered Lexical Pairs: a Cognitive-Science-Based Semantic Theory of Meaning and Reference: Part 2”. Academia-dot-edu; also at Philosophical Papers. August 2019.
In my current work, I am extending this neurosemantic theory into a modified recurrent artificial neural network (rANN) theory, one which corrects the hemianopsia that ANN research has inherited from current neuroscience. I hope to provide an ANN version of nTM which is detailed enough to guide implementation work by ANN scientists and engineers.
I think the answer to Fermi's Paradox lies in the difficulty of developing non-biological intelligent individuals and societies that can separate themselves from their biological origins in hardwired aggression that cannot be overcome by cortical processes of rationality. The hope of describing, in abstraction from biological embodiments, the processes by which we produce and comprehend language and, more fundamentally, by which we think, is what has motivated my current attempts to develop nTM into a semantics which can be implemented as an ANN.
Career
1973 – 2008: Computer programming, later database design and support, for businesses. Over one-hundred articles published in major business IT magazines. Approximately a dozen presentations made at IT conferences.
Published two books and two patents on the management of time in relational databases.
--- Managing Time in Relational Databases. Morgan-Kaufmann, 2010.
--- Bitemporal Data: Theory and Practice. Morgan-Kaufmann, 2014.
--- Patent 8,219,522, resulting from a patent application filed on June 29, 2010, was granted on July 10, 2012. The continuation-in-part patent 8,713,073 resulting from an application filed on June 21, 2012, was granted on April 29, 2014.
