The seminar will start with a question "What is language and how can You define it ?". Subsequently, we will see how men and women of past and present answered that question - from grammarians of ancient India all the way to most modern theories of phonetics, phonology, morphosyntax, semantics and pragmatics. Special focus will be put on theories of language acquisition, that is, on discussion the process by means of which maternal language is acquired by human children. All this to be able to end the seminar with an answer to the question: "Could artificial intelligences like GPT-X be ever able to understand the meaning of the word meaning ?"

 

What is "intelligence" and how is it defined by different people and different cultures ? Is there only one "general" intelligence thanks to which humans and machines solve problems or is it more appropriate to speak about combinations of "multiple intelligences" - emotional, intepersonal, intrapersonal, spatial, visual, logical, mathematical, bodily, moral, narrative, etc. ? Can we speak about intelligence independent of cultural and socio-economical context within which its acts and is embedded ? Do organic (OI) and artificial intelligence (AI) have something in common or are they fundamentally and unreconcilably different ? In order to explore potential answers to these questions, we will look into history of cognitive (psychology, anthropology) and computer  (informatics, cybernetics)  sciences, we will read stories about "idiot savants" and children raised in wilderness and briliant minds of the past in order to ultimately ask our own AI systems to tell them something about themselves.