The (Uncomputable!) Meaning of Ethically Charged Natural Language, for Robots, and Us, from Hypergraphical Inferential Semantics
No Thumbnail Available
Authors
Bringsjord, Selmer
Hendler, James A.
Govindarajulu, Naveen Sundar
Ghosh, Rikhiya
Giancola, Michael
Issue Date
2022-09-08
Type
Article
Language
Keywords
Alternative Title
Abstract
The year is 2030. A two-young-child, two-parent household, the Rubensteins, owns and employs a state-of-the-art household robot, Rodney. With the parents out, the children ask Rodney to perform some action ��
that violates a Rubensteinian ethical principle ����
. Rodney replies: (��1
) “Doing that would be (morally) wrong, kids.” The argument the children give Rodney in protest is that another household, the Müllers, also has a robot, Ralph; and the kids argue that he routinely performs ��
. As a matter of fact, Ralph’s doing ��
violates no Müllerian ethical principle ����
. Ralph’s response to the very same request from the children he tends is: (��2
) “Okay, doing that is (morally) fine, kids.” What is the meaning of the utterances made by Rodney and Ralph? We answer this question by presenting and employing a novel, formal, inferential theory of meaning in natural language: hypergraphical inferential semantics (ℋℐ��
), which is in the general spirit of proof-theoretic semantics, which is in turn antithetical to Montagovian model-theoretic semantics. ℋℐ��
, applied even to sentences logically simpler than ��1
and ��2
, implies that human-level natural language understanding (NLU) is Turing-uncomputable.
Description
Full Citation
Bringsjord, Selmer, James Hendler, Naveen Sundar Govindarajulu, Rikhiya Ghosh, and Michael Giancola. "The (Uncomputable!) Meaning of Ethically Charged Natural Language, for Robots, and Us, from Hypergraphical Inferential Semantics." In Towards Trustworthy Artificial Intelligent Systems, pp. 143-167. Springer, Cham, September 2022
Publisher
Springer, Cham