We’re starting the new semester of LEC talks with a short talk from Cem Bozsahin, an old friend of the LEC who is passing through Edinburgh. This will be a dry run for a talk at the Philosophy and Theory of AI conference, so we can expect the meeting to take substantially less than an hour even with discussion.

NOTE: WE WILL BE IN ROOM B21, 7 GEORGE SQUARE

Tuesday, 17th September, 11 am.

Cem Bozsahin
Cognitive Science Department,
METU Informatics Institute, Ankara

Natural Recursion Doesn’t Work that Way

All hierarchicaly organized observed behaviors are instances of recursion by value. Recursion by name can be shown to be more powerful than recursion by value: the former has infinite types, the latter does not.

Any animal that can plan has recursion, so that that kind of recursion is probably not unique to humans. Humans appear to have a certain kind of recursion which is unique, the kind that works with embedded push-down automaton, and that is probably not unique to language.

Therefore it is unhelpful to build entire conception of recursion in natural language and humans on a much powerful notion of recursion than needed, and on purely syntactic terms rather than conceptual or semantic, including theories about its evolution.

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