LINGUIST List 2.744

Sat 02 Nov 1991

Misc: Think/Believe and Themself

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Directory

1. William J. Rapaport, Re: 2.736 Queries
2. "Barbara.Abbott", think/believe
3. Stephen P Spackman, themself

Message 1: Re: 2.736 Queries

	Date: Wed, 30 Oct 91 18:47:36 MST
	From: <jbarndenNMSU.Edu>
	Subject: think, believe
	In an AI project, I've recently started to consider
	(a) The differences between usage/meaning of the verbs
	``think'' and ``believe''.
	(b) The fact that ``think'' is often used as if it were speech
	verb, as in
	 John thought, ``Mary must have taken the car''.
	(c) The fact that the examples like the following are common:
	 I must be more careful next time, John thought
	 where there are no quotation marks but their use would be
	 appropriate.
	(d) As a sort of dual of (b), the fact that speech verbs are
	often used (metaphorically??) to portray thought, as in
	 I must be more careful next time, John said to himself.
	(e) The fact that ``think'' in certain contexts can be used to
	portray speech (as well as thinking), as in
	 I must be more careful next time, John thought aloud.
	I'd be very grateful for any pointers to work on any of (a) to
	(e), and would of
	course be glad to supply a listing of any pointers I receive.
	Pointers can be to any sort of literature (linguistic,
	psychological, philosophical, ...).
 ........
	-- John Barnden
John-
Take a look at:
Wiebe, Janyce M., & Rapaport, William J. (1988),
``A Computational Theory of Perspective and Reference in Narrative''
\fIProceedings of the 26th Annual Meeting of the Association for
Computational Linguistics\fP (\fISUNY Buffalo\fP)
(Morristown, NJ: Association for Computational Linguistics): 131-138.
Wiebe, Janyce M. (1990), ``Recognizing Subjective Sentences: A
Computational Investigation of Narrative Text,'' \fITechnical Report 90-03\fP
(Buffalo: SUNY Buffalo Department of Computer Science).
Janyce M. Wiebe, "References in Narrative Text," Nous, Special Issue on
Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence, Volume 25, Number 4,
September 1991
			William J. Rapaport
			Associate Professor of Computer Science
			Center for Cognitive Science
Dept. of Computer Science||internet: rapaportcs.buffalo.edu
SUNY Buffalo		 ||bitnet: rapaportsunybcs.bitnet
Buffalo, NY 14260	 ||uucp: {rutgers,uunet}!cs.buffalo.edu!rapaport
(716) 636-3193, 3180 ||fax: (716) 636-3464

John Barden asked for references on the relation between verbs of
saying and verbs of thought. One such is Zeno Vendler's 1972 book
"Res Cogitans: An essay in rational psychology". (Jerry Fodor
used some of Vendler's arguments to argue for his language of
thought hypothesis in a paper called "Propositional Attitudes",
in Monist, vol. 61, 1978.)

Yesterday I was discussing a prospective joint project with a (good
friend and) colleague; everything was framed in terms of "we" are
going to have to do this that and the other, even when discussing a
detail that was clearly going to fall to exactly one of us; so we
drifted (perhaps semi-consciously) into "hospital we". And then I
heard myself say, "So are we going to do this by ourself?".
stephen