Statement of thesis

1. There exists a strong analogy between quantum physical objects and our mental objects: thus the phenomena in the physical and those in the mental world are to be understood within the same framework. The apparent differences of mind and matter do not lie in the fundamental differences of the properties of both, but in the different manifestations of macroscopic matter and macroscopic mind owing to their different dispositions in quantum subtlety.

2. Analogous to particle-wave duality in quantum mechanics there is a symbol-concept or word-sense duality in language. Consequently there is an Uncertainty Principle in language, which in a sense agrees with the view of signs in Saussurean linguistics.

3. Natural language and common sense logic (which can be only embedded in natural language) can be described as quantum computational systems. Therefore evasiveness and ambiguity are a manifestation of the Uncertainty Principle. Furthermore, non-monotonicity, counterfactual conditionals and causality can be accommodated (or assimilated) in this framework.

4. In preliminary experiments with computer simulation, it can be shown that a quantum computational framework can be applied to classical and common sense logic. Furthermore, non-monotonic and counterfactual reasoning can be demonstrated as well.

5. Simple natural language tasks (syllogistic arguments, syntactic transformations, and translation on different corpora) are also simulated with quantum computational models. It can be shown that a quantum computational framework can indeed deliver very satisfactory results.

The logical dependency of chapters in this thesis is shown in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1: Logical dependency of chapters in this thesis.