"A science of human intelligence is indeed possible," writes Pierre Levy in a post last year, "but on the condition that we solve the problem of the mathematical modelling of language. I am speaking here of a complete scientific modelling of language, one that would not be limited to the purely logical and syntactic aspects or to statistical correlations of corpora of texts, but would be capable of expressing semantic relationships formed between units of meaning, and doing so in an algebraic, generative mode." I think we can agree that Facebook isn't this. Where the question gets hard is when we ask whether this is what we need. Is a scientific modelling of language, or of thought, possible? Is it desirable? Would we find this language physically instantiated in the human brain?
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