2004:12:17
948 - Comments update
The comment spammers have done their thing, and I was quite slow to responde. If the flow stays low maybe I'll keep dealing with it manually, it's not like this site has such great traffic. But there's the sad likelyhood that I will eventually disable comments. As discussed other places I have growing concerns about creating a free-publishing zone within my domain. I'll probably end up with some kind of challenge response system. We'll see. Before it's much of an issue I'd have to start putting more time in on this site. Hopefully that will start happening soon.
Mostly I wanted to say if I accidentally clobbered your comment while I was cleaning up, apologies.
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2004:11:09
949 - Assign a sign
The most important part of the signifier-sign-sigified arc is "as-", as in "assign."
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2004:10:14
950 - Why the nomenclature of the Prisoners' Dilemma matters
Maybe it doesn't. Maybe it's just my pet peeve.
The thing that most sticks in my craw is the way prisdem is used to speciously support cooperation ethics. I a big fan of cooperation. But it sets my teeth on edge to see it offered as a panacea, to see semantic traps laid that prevent a clear view of what's going on, that prevent
As has been the case for years, I'm stymied by not even really knowing how to say what's bugging me. Iterating the game absolutely positively changes the game into something not even remotely resembling the Dilemma.
Okay, so who cares, and why? In the actual dilemma one is tempted to engage in the infinitely regressing task of wondering what the other person thinks I think they think I think... Highlighting the difficulty of solving this infinite loop is the point of the scenario. Well, you certainly do indeed avoid that loop of you change the rules to iterate (or even allow "morse code tapping" on the walls.) But the central question of what to do about that tempting infinite loop remains unanswered.
Add into the mix the willingness to commit intellectual whoredom by labeling the possible actions, confess/don't confess, with semantically charged labels such as defect/cooperate...
Bingo. Those two words frame the cooperation issue, and combined with the willingness to change the rules and thereby avoid the actual original dilemma we get nonsensical pollyanish morals about the value of cooperation. Contrast this with the view of the original dilemma, in which the situation can best be likened to having two coins, heads=0/tails=-6 on one, heads=-240/tails=-24 on the other. In this scenario you have no ability to influence the outcome of any one toss of the coin, but you sure as hell can choose wisely between the two. However, it takes mental discipline to keep that view, not to slip into the infinite loop of "but what if he comes to the same conclusion?" The other person's thinking is unknowable, the choice comes down to which set of indeterminite options you are willing to sign up for.
More relevant, however, than iterating this one game, is the neglected notion of concurrent games. Winning in the true prisoner's dilemma might mean losing a more important game; i.e., choosing the 0/-6 coin might get you killed when you hit the street because your action (neutrally described as confessing) also figures into calculated social reprucussions outside the prescribed dilemma. Recognizing the influence of concurrent games, working to analyze the pay-off grid in multiple relevant contexts, this would be a fruitful line of investigation. It stikes me that such thinking would add a good deal not only to understanding decision making process, but might even bear on meaning formation in general, helping break down the linear one-stimulus-one-response, sign-signified, thinking that seems still to prevail in the linguistic world.
I am hoping to work this into a letter for cogling. Meanwhile, it's just a rant.
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2004:10:06
961 - FARG
Am dipping into Hofstadter's "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies. Have right up front found reference to a thought I long ago pegged from his "Le ton beau de Marot", namely a complaint of sorts on H's part that the immediately preceding thoughts should somehow shape current thoughts. In "Le ton..." it's the way having recently spoken Spanish influences current word choice, in "Fluid Concepts..." it's how having recently typed "Bloomington" seems to have influenced a typo on what was meant to come out as "blue moon." First, I think H has really mischaracterized how the typo came about; he describes the "oo" and even the "m" as "jumping the gun." More likely, I'd expect, a.) blue moon, despite orthography, is a single unit, the kind of thing from which eggcorns are born, a phrase, formerly separate words, so often seen in juxtaposition that many folks fail to parse the words separately at all, much as I was once stumped by cup board (cubbard) such that the omission of a space between the two parts of this phrase seems almost natural, and b.) indeed having recently engaged the muscle patterns of b-l-o-o-m in service of the sounds of "Bloomfield", and using an internal auditory lead on the typing, that particular muscle pattern set had stronger associational bridges. But, boy oh boy, does that presuppose a lot...
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2004:09:23
962 - Political Language
A friend says to me
I'm just wondering if the persona he [Kerry] presented to the Massachusetts electorate might not have been equally manufactured.
What bothers me about this is the phrasing, the framing. "Manufacturing a persona is bad" and "Kerry manufactures personas (one to get elected Senator, another to get elected president)" and, by implication, "Bush doesn't do that, so let's vote for him." But think for a minute; do you supose that the persona Bush proffers at a $2,000 per plate dinner, where he has been known to say things such as, "You are my base" is the same persona as he offers in his folksy TV ads? Of course not. But what I took exception with was less the claim that Kerry has done this (not being entirely ignorant of social registers I understand we all do it to no small extent with varying measures of conscious intent) and more the choice of phrasing, which was shockingly similar to what I'd expect from a Limbaugh or an O'Reilly. Framing is the key. Without taking sides in a debate one can still call for phrasing that fails to unfairly frame. Problem is, there's two kinds of debates, the first kind is about advancing knowledge, the second kind is about persuasion. And where persuasion is the game, as in politics, there is no incentive to fail to frame unfairly. Which is truly sad. In this particular case the framing precluded substantive discussion of what is appropriate in the realm of image control, and whether either candidate has overstepped those bounds. Good framing for persuasion, bad for andvancing knowledge.
...wondering whether he [Kerry] has been pragmatic/opportunistic in crafting his political persona isn't snarky.
And of course, this is technically correct; the snarky bit was the phrasing, which implied that somehow Kerry's pragmatic and opportunistic crafting of political persona is more evil than Bush's pragmatic and opportunistic crafting of political persona, this despite Bush's efforts come off as "a good ol' boy," rather than the privileged son of a former CIA head, the privileged son of a former president. Hard to imagine someone who's background makes him *less* of a down-to-earth type than Bush's. But my friend's wonderful phrasing, his framing implies that Kerry is doing something Bush isn't.
We must vote for Bush so the terrorists won't think they influence our voting.
This is either fatuous or cunningly fatuous-seeming, neither of which is soemthing I want to think of my friend as being. This quote is marvelous rhetoric, at least is for the unenlighted, but it doesn't stand up to the most basic of critical thinking skills. "My vote is controlled by my desire not to let the terrorists control my vote," sounds pretty circular. If my friend had at least said, "We don't want to send the wrong message," I could swallow and agree to disagree about which message is wrong. But this is exactly the point of such underhanded phrasing: the average speaker simply has not the training to realize they've been swindled into accepting a world view where they can't argue which message is the right one to send; instead it's a world where they either go with the neo-conservatives who currently control the White House, or be labeled as terrorist-sympathizers.
What makes this appropriate for this blog as opposed to my less thematically controlled blog is the issue of the slipperiness of framing. I have not yet given up on the Presupposition Project, and days like this I wish I'd devoted more time to it sooner, becuase it would be such a valuable resource at times like this when critical thinking is so important. From the use of embedded question to the clever counter-factual, the quote that started this is a delightful example of verbal attack, of intellectual dishonesty. Some folks just talk that way, some do it on purpose, but not enough know how to spot it, how to give it the belly laugh all such nonsense deserves.
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2004:09:20
963 - A Rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but the cashier will still ring it up as fertilizer if that's what it says on the label.
Patterns of thought that admit of inifite loops are disallowed. A classic example is the Prisoners' Dilemma. Most presentations on this mental experiment deal with the thinking loop that goes "If I think he thinks I think he thinks I will do X..." The problem is one can always add one more cycle of loop to this process, so any such line of reasoning will always be inconclusive. The only thing to do when faced with such pseudo-reasoning is to reject it outright.
Loopy thinking is most often a sign that more data must be gathered. Korzybski's treatment of the Spanish Barber paradox is a good example; rather than spinning one's wheels about it, why not just go and look? And if a conundrum is constructed such that one can't gather more data, beware: you have probably simply wandered into the area of nonsense. "Can God create a rock so big he can't lift it" is one of my favorites. This is the kind of nonsense that comes from thinking logic has any actual substance in reality. Not that the tool of thought, logic, hasn't its merits, but, as with Zeno's Paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise, logic can lead to wrong asnwers just as easily as right; it is a blade that can wound you as easily as your foe.
This is the crux of my solution to the Prisoners' Dilemma. Having refuted the inifitely looping interdependent-choice line of reasoning, I point out that there is another model one can make for the choice. Imagine two coins: Coin A has 0 stamped on one side and 6 on the other; coin B has 24 stamped on one side and 240 stamped on the other. You get to choose which coin to flip, and the number that comes up represents the number of months freedom you will lose. You can not control which number comes up, but you can control which set of numbers you work with.
But more important than any specific application to the Prisoners' Dilemma is the general recognition of the limits of formal logic, gaining the ability to use this tool wisely, when it applies, and not letting out time and energy be wasted every time some fool comes along and tells us what logically must be.
Which brings us into another slippery subject, how is it that so few people understand logic well enough to work the simplest syllogism, and yet so many bow down before the mere invocation of it? Why is it that someone like Bill O'Reilly can get away with calling his show a "No Spin Zone" while leaning on the notoriety of known linguistic abuser Newt Gingrich, who serves as political commentator appearing on Bill's show? It's on a par with the abuse of the word "Science" following the word "Christian" or "Religious". Sadly most people simply haven't the intellectual training or wherewithal to parse such nonsense. And I despair that significant numbers ever shall. But we keep trying.
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2004:09:07
964 - Objective my...
I am curious about the growing reliance on google for statistical fact checks. More and more I'm seeing the best and the brightest using google searches to subtantiate their claims, as in this post at Language Log.
I recall, a good while back, when I was first learning about the vi/emacs holy war, there was the "EDITORs Sucks-Rules-O-Meter", which lead me to the Operating System SROM, which in turn lead me to the "Tool of Objective Truth" (formerly at zdnet uk, apparently the plug's been pulled on that one.) I can't imagine anyone ever thought the Sucks-Rules-O-Meter was actually measuring anything; rather, it counts reports. To say there are possible sampling issues with those reports is to put the matter mildly. And even if one were to argue that the sample is sufficiently controlled as to warrant drawing conclusions, the conclusions drawn would still be about the opinions of the universe of respondents sampled and in no way reflective of any objective, criteria based analysis of the tools in question (the kind of analysis that would show Windows can't suck as much as we linux lovers love to say; if it did there wouldn't be the steady flowing river of formerly-winDoze boxes on which to run linux.)(Put differently, what linux really rocks at is a.) making the most of hand-me-down machines, b.) implementing unix. The great majority of users don't give a good gosh darn about the OS; they just want their fancy typewriter/jukebox to work as advertised and not have to cope with any learning curve greater than that associated with setting the clock on a VHS recorder. For these users Linux is still a nightmare, Mac still a little obscure, and the gates virus rocks and rules supreme...however much that truth may turn our stomachs.)
Back to my concerns with using google as a representative sample of language use. The language refelcted in the gooble db is language filtered from the norm in some non-trivial ways. It is the language of literacy; try as we might to forget it, the language of writing is only superficially related to language in general; literacy is not a criterion for language use. As if this weren't enough of a skew toward elitism, this language of literacy is further filtered by the criteria of publication; even a publication in a blog betrays relevant socio-cultural memberships and status. Plus, and this is the one that most concerns me, how the heck do we know that the database itself is inviolate? Sure, there is no conceivable reason anyone would monkey with the data in the google db; the more accurately the google db reflects what the google spiders have found the more valuable that db is. Still, the assumption that there is no benefit to someone skewing the numbers isn't the same as conclusively establishing the validity of those numbers...validity, that is, of those numbers for the select sub-set of language use that those numbers represent.
Oh well; this kind of google searching is damned useful, a great start, better than nothing. I guess I'd just like to see the occasional disclaimer along the lines of, "The language represented by these google searches is skewed in favor of that dialect or social register associated with published writing, an elite subset of language use in general." The Operating System Sucks-Roles-O-Meter page has links to "Tool of Objective Truth" and "COMPLETELY UNSCIENTIFIC comparison of programming languages." Sadly, both of those links have fallen to link rot since my last visit, sometime in the 20th century. Still, even as busted links, they represent something simple but important: one of them tells it like it is, right up front.
Addendum
I wrote Geoffrey K. Pullum, the author of the relevant
language log post, trying to get trackback turned on for said post, here is an
excerpt of his reply:
I drew no statistical conclusions of the sort where sampling bias could arise; the numbers merely show that his claim is wildly, overwhelmingly wrong, a piece of unchecked hyperbole so extreme that it should never have been made...I don't see that the objections are worth raising: they are hypothetically relevant, to kinds of points that I didn't try to make.(Emphasis added: RL)
Entirely true and valid. I would have done well to add a disclaimer of my own that while I worry what casual readers of language log will make of such examples I am certain that the folks posting there are too sharp to miss such subtleties. That my little rant was such non-sequitor is plain embarassing.
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965 - Tell Me How to Feel
Sometimes we need to be told how to feel.
This may seem to violate precepts of authenticity and transparency as preached by some pop-psych movements, but the reality is you already feel much of what you feel because you've been told to feel that way. And sometimes the way you've been told to feel is wrong. Sometimes what we need is for someone to tell us it's ok to feel something else.
The thing people forget, or overlook, or simply don't realize is that most of what passes as natural, spontaneous, intuitive feelings is still programmed, patterned, learned. "I know it like the back of my hand," is short hand for "I don't think about it." "As intuitive as 2 + 2 = 4," is a way to say, "I've edited out my personal struggles to learn numbers, arithmetic; they were so long ago I don't count them any more." Even "alphabetical order" is so ingrained in us that most of us never question it. Think about it. What order is there in the alphabet as we know it? Not shape. Not sound. Not size. No, the order of the alphabet, that we take so intuitively for granted, is learned, taught, reinforced a thousand and one times.
So too for our feelings. We are taught and trained to feel good about shiny new things. We are taught and trained to want to be skinny young things. We are taught and trained to feel bad if we don't have shiny new things and can't be skinny young things. There is no inherent reason to feel that way. There have been times in history when skinny young things were considered sickly and shiny new things were considered dangerous, they were things to feel bad about. That was then, this is now, and the fact is these feelings are learned, ingrained, constantly reinforced from repitition and socializing factors. It isn't as simple as your pappa sitting you down on his knee and saying, "Hot young tail, that's what life's all about." Instead we soak up these injunctions about what is supposed to make us feel good and what is supposed to make us feel bad from a constant stream of informal examples and cues; jokes, movies, stories, love songs, all the aspects of the culture.
And so there you are, September 1, 2004, and you feel however you feel about things. And there is a pattern to that. Not a random pattern. An arbitrary one, an arbitrary pattern shaped by the intersection of your culture's values and your personal experiences. Not random. And not truly intuitive, but learned, accreted over time. And sometimes you might notice you don't like the way you feel. Sometimes you might notice that the arbitrarily accreted pattern of feeling responses you have today just doesn't serve you as well as you would like. That's when we need someone to tell us how to feel.
Of course, my telling you to feel good about your belly doesn't carry much weight against the culture screaming at you that if you don't have six-pack abs your are unfit to be seen. That message will get reinforced every time you turn on MTV or run the guantlet of magazine covers prominently posted at point of sale at your grocery store. You are subjected to thousands of messages a day, not only telling you what to buy, but why to buy, how to feel about not having what you would have if you bought. Buy this record, be cool. Buy this car, be rich. Buy this exercise machine, be fit. And feel good. Unless you can't buy it, then feel bad. So my simply telling you that you are a creature of light, a divine spark, part of a divine flame that is all creation, well, my saying it directly once or twice doesn't carry as much weight as the constant barrage of messages telling you that unless you are Brittany Spears or Brad Pitt then you're nothing and no one and should be happy to have your pathetic job and pittance wages and miserable life. Because repitition counts.
Well, since repitition counts, I'll say it again. As you are, changing not a thing, you are a divine construct of a divine will as part of a divine plan to create beauty and wonder. Is that a little heavy for you? Don't worry, it might or might not be any more true than the lies Cosmo and GQ tell you about who you are and how you should feel. Chances are you long ago swallowed the lies of Cosmo and GQ. If it comes down to my lie or theirs which will you choose?
Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Taoist systems of thought share a common element, instructions for living a better life. And while there may be conflict as to what defines a better life, there is another thing all these systems share: practical exercises for entraining your feelings. Call it prayer, meditation, manipulating prana, accessing the protective unconscious, rearranging the building blocks of meaning, no matter; there are overlaps between all these approaches that are of great value when the task is to entrain our feelings out of the arbitrary patterns of the moment into more enlightened, lively, powerful patterns. So when I say it might be a lie that you are a divine spark of a divine flame, well, it might also be true. You won't find final answers along those lines on this site. But you will find constant reminders that you can be better to yourself, kinder and firmer, sweeter and wiser. You will find a constant reminder to feel better, about yourself, your prospects, your essential being, the ways of the world. Because sometimes we need someone to tell us how to feel.
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966 - Dip a knife for the knife
There are abstractions of such vintage coin and ubiquitous use that they become foundational to a culture. Veneration of "science" would be an example of an abstraction going in this direction, even when comically misapplied, as in Christian Science or Religious Science (fairness disclosure: I was raised in a spin-off of the Church of Religious Science, and when I need the social comforts of a church here is where I go, although these days I lean more towards taoism's briliant, but lonely, "if you can talk about it you're not really talking about It.") Back to abstractions. Abstractions such as point-line-space, thought-idea-meaning, word-sentence-language have long since seeped into the bedrock below the concrete slab of the building that is Western culture; there is no building without these abstractions, and it's mighty hard to get at and analyze them wihout ripping down the building, smashing the concrete slab, mining the bedrock and carting it off to the lab. If only study of language were so straighforward, rather than being the infinitely more subtle, slippery complex task it really is.
A friend writes:
(Point, line, space) form a sort of shorthand that makes the universe thinkable, that allows us to make generalizations. They are creations of nature. They constitute a sort of "folk science," a pre-science without which our modern sciences would not be possible.
"Makes the universe thinkable" is a really nice, sweeping turn of phrase. But thought, meaning, universe are all foundational abstractions, in the woof and warp of the language and culture. If there is any one risk in linguistics it's this one: that the tool we use for our field of study is itself the field of study. It's awfully hard to use a tool and at the same time free oneself of all the assumptions built into the very shape of the tool. Sure, one *can* dip water with a knife, but it's not the best tool for the job. Likewise, it is possilbe, concievably, to use language to investigate language, but it's not even on a par with the knife/water example, it's more like when an infant reaches for its right hand with its right hand, like the knife dipping not for water but for the knife.
Probably the most concrete example I have of this kind of Whorfian influence of language on world view comes from programming languages. At the simplest, it is possible to write an infinite loop (and cause a machine to crash) simply by moving from one language to another and forgetting how they each handle equality (that's personal experience, btw, from my first week on the job as a web programmer.) Call that first order world-view-shaping, as in knowing the difference between "the same word" in two different languages (i.e., two noise systems that sufficiently map the same things the same way such that a simple change of noise will work, as in English "day" and German "tag.") More delicately (and I might call call this second order world-view-shaping) there is at least one programming language, perl, that declines to differentiate whether a variable is a string of letters or a number or even another variable. The perl compiler looks at the operator and uses the contents of the variables to suit; so, for example, if you see $x == $y, perl treats the contents of the variables as numbers; if you see $x eq $y perl treats the contents of the variables as letters. Many other languages insist not only that a varialbe be assigned a type, they also then diffentiate between different kinds of strings and numbers (strings usually are a matter of largest allowed size; numbers tend to diffentiate size and method of calculation: integer, non-integer...) So when programming in perl one is spared making many distinctions that other languages insist on. Yet many of the languages that insist on detailed variable declaration don't insist on case-sensitivity and shun the use of characters outside the alphabet (whereas perl is rife with *@#%& and insists" this" is not the same as "THIS" or "This" or even "tHis", a pair of two edged issues that fans hail and critics hate.) These differences approach the kind of stuff that orginally captured Whorf's imagination (if I've read my history right) that the Hopi language simply had no direct analogs for anything resembling the Western, linear conceptualization of time, much as many programming languages have no equivalent of a simple perl scalar. It is easy to get a little nervous when talking about Whorf, but I think the baby has been tossed out with the wash water. Only a fool would say, "Perception governs reality;" sadly, many have, and used their misunderstanding of Whorf to support their claim. But, similarly, only a fool would deny that one's perceptions greatly influence our interactions with reality. And language is certainly interdependent with, influencing and influenced by our perceptions.
To tie back in, the programming language one uses will strongly affect the way one goes about solving problems or acheiving results (perhaps two ways to say the same thing but reflecting affectively disparate world views, in turn resulting in effectively different worlds) becuase the language of choice simply works differently, is better at doing different things, built to different criteria.
Natural language is first and foremost, it seems to me, accreted from primate noise and gesture systems in conjunction with changes in brain structure to solve the problems and acheive the results common to primates (which, at the risk of letting my [Freudian] slip show are eating, mating, and spacing {with spacing not only an abstraction of access to food and mates but something more integral to the organism.})
Time is movement, and the smallest quantum of time contains movement, as anyone who owns a camera knows.
I maintain time isn't even movement, but rather an inferred entity. I likewise hold space to be an inferred entitiy. In general the argument goes: Zero is an abstraction for the absence of countables, it is qualitatively a different animal from the natural numbers. Likewise space-in-which-objects-reside; there is no sensory evidence of this space stuff, it has no empircal existence. So too for time. But it is almost imposible to talk about anything without recourse to these concepts, and the tool of discourse fails even to permit a means of using these concepts cynically, reservedly, advisedly; to speak at all, at least in English, is to assume at a very deep and slippery level that Time, Space and other such non-emprical entities exist. To say time is movement is to conflate what we observe with what we infer about the observation; empircally we can say P moved from M to N. Empirically we can say that we observed O move from Q to R. Empirically we can describe the one in relation to the other. So far there is no need for time. But I don't know how to talk about the relationship of these two points and their respective travels without using words like "as, while, during, when" all of which presuppose time. The best I can do is plot both line segments and say "where x=3 P=(x3,y1) on line segment MN and O=(x3,y2) on line segment QR," but although I have avoided using constructions that presuppose time I've also terribly distorted my world view and lost the ability to deal with things that do not lie in the cartesian plane...unless I abstract from that plane a space, and from that space a fouth axis and so on. It is mighty hard to carry on socially meaningful conversations while maintaining this four-axis nomenclature, and when we get too far from formulations that help the average primate acheive the holy trinity of beer, broads and boob-tube we risk having frittered our time unwisely.
Chomsky's is a one stage model:
GRAMMAR -------------------->SENTENCE
whereas I would claim that the minimum is a two stage model:
GRAMMAR ------>SPEAKER------>SENTENCE
I think I understand possible motivation on Chmosky's part; elegance in modeling comes to mind. But sometimes the search for elegance leads to eliminating distinctions without which the problem set is unassailable.
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967 - Instant Gratification
One thing that seems to drive interest in blogs is newness. Like headline news we only care about what is now. But keeping up with the latest ramblings of your favorite twenty-something cyber-curmudgeon is only the skin of the apple. Surfing yesterday's, or last year's, space can bring inspiration, can trigger the production of that next essay you have been waiting to have pulled from you like a boil you've been waiting to lance. At least that's what happened to me today when I visited Rick Crawford's vroop.com this morning. (I was actually looking for examples of ways to make my blogs look better.)
Back in the fog shrouded past of January 2004 Rick blogged a bit that could have been posted any time after 1995, a bit that will be relevant for decades to come. The overt complaint is about programmer's block, a code slinging analog of writer's block. But he bullets up a little list of specific complaints that quite put the finger on part of what is doing the blocking: Loss of focus, Attractive Distractions, Procrastination, Resentment at simple linear tasks. I see all of these as symptoms of web poisoning. There's a piece from alertbox, that I think is relevant here, although I develop the idea a little differently than the discussion in the article.
The web is addictive, much in the way a slot-machine is addictive. Pscyh research shows that the way to get conistent behavior is with inconsistent rewards. When pushing a lever always delivers food the rat pushes less often than when the lever pays off randomly. Now apply that to surfing the web or even checking your email (especially if you've subscribed to a tasty list or two.) There is a highly inconsistent reward structure; sometimes your surfing and reading will bring wild rewards of delight, emotional or intellectual jackpots. Often as not, if you were to keep track click-by-click, your surfing and reading is like dropping your nickle in the slot, pulling the arm, and watching the little wheels spin and getting nothing.
This ties back to the observations in the alertbox article. We surf for jackpots. And the medium itself, the web, with it's formatted links visually punching you in the nose with the difference between boring old data versus something that might take you to your next jackpot, reinforces this Attention Deficit Disorder addiction.
So it ain't just you, Rick, or me, it's all of us, it's the nature of our medium. It's increasingly less about Attention Deficit Disorder and increaslingly more about abuse of our thirst for valuable information by would-be purveyors of same. The web can be every bit as much a fruitless time-sink as television, but because of the one-armed-bandit effect of hyperlinks it is all the more compelling (and not nearly so socially approved...yet.)
As for what to do? Good question. I would think a regimen of hearty physical exercise, enforced "step-away-from-the-keyboard" breaks, and a routinized religious/spiritual/deep-breathing/meditative practice every 60-120 minutes would be a big step in the right direction. I pride myself on not owning a television, because I know how many of my prescious finite heartbeats I would waste every week staring vacuously at it. Will the time come when I boast similarly of not being online? Not likely, not while I'm still committed to seeing the web as an ever improving method for the sharing and stimulating of new ideas.
But there are days when I wish it was about sweeping the temple and stacking the rice bags.
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968 - Well Meaning
In Linguistics, what counts as scientific evidence?
Is the epistemological choice to privilege scientism antithetical to the linguistic exploitation of intuition-reliant methods (in the sense of the 1999 Geeraerts article)? I believe the point of that article was to argue in favor of viewing intuition-reliant methods, under the rubric of hermenuetics, as complementary with methods which shun the Well of Intuition.
The confusion here lies, mostly, I think, with irregularities of English. He rocked her is not ambiguous with Throw a rock at her is what he did. But the verb in question, means, looks the same whether Fred is meaning to communicate or whether there is some etheric, phlogistonic stuff called meaning. In this way X is the meaning of what Fred said invokes this stuff in a way that Fred means X does not. At least that's how the intutions of this native speaker run. (And, thank God, an appeal to un-reason admits of no argument.)
The whirl-a-gig about "meaning" was never my intended focus; the value of treating varied approaches as complementary rather than as competing was the important part. But for those who can only skin their cat one way, that's cool too.
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2004:08:03
969 - Words don't mean
Recently on cogling:
By the way: Just as CogLingers tend to blame Indoeuropeanists for not playing the semantic/functional card, Coglingers are at the risk to be blamed by Indoeuropeanists etc. for not playing the phonetic card. Both are rigth!
Not surprisingly, this appeals to me. I think it fair to describe the phonetics card as more susceptible to scientific investigation than is the semantic/funcional card, phonetics dealing as it does with sensible entities, semantics dealing as it does with non-sensible (perhaps entirely contrived) entities such as meaning. And while there might be a popular misconception that science claims to displace folkwisdom, in reality they are as interdependent, in a healthy system, as sight and olfaction.
Same list, same thread, different speaker
Some physicists build useful models that contain quarks (which they would presumably consider to be "non-sensible entities"); some linguists build useful models that contain meanings (which we usually have to consider to be "non-sensible entities").
It seems to me quarks are clearly meant to be entities that can be got at via extensions to our sensorium, much as microscopes and telescopes let us see things that we would otherwise not have seen. Whether or not meaning is a thingy that we can eventually get at through tools that extend our sensorium is, as far as I can tell, a contentious issue. My current level of ignorance is such that I would look at the history of the concept, meaning, and note that it in no way rests on anything like scientific model building; indeed the concept, meaning, by far predates the concept of science. It seems to me, then, that either the concept, meaning, needs revamping or even outright junking, scientifically speaking, or attempts to put salt on meaning's tail must avail themselves of non-scientific (non-, pre-, meta- ?) methods. My grasp of the history of linguistics is poor (but growing, thanks to the fine folks at cogling and Language Log) but it seems sometimes that coglingers are in the unenviable posistion of: 1) positing that words are something other than that which can be got at by sensation or the tools of sensorium extension, while 2) needing nonetheless to cleave paradoxically to scientific method, which, by definition, treats only of the sensible (ie, breadboxes, distant galaxies, quarks.) Hence the drift toward epistemological side-talk and other science-taboo conversations.
I, for one, suspect that the privileging of scientific method is, in the case of meaning, an error. I choose the word "privileging" with great care; as said above, I suspect the greatest gains in our endeavors to finally reach a meaningful understanding of meaning will come from an n-pronged (n>1) pursuit, with science reporting on science's domain, something else (introspection?) reporting on its own domain. It is possible that "words don't mean, people do," AND "where there's malaria, I'll be reaching for the quinine." ;)
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2004:07:30
970 - Four Types
I propose there are four main types of presupposition:
Existential
Syntactic
Semantic
Para-linguistic
That may not seem like much of a post, but I've been strugging with my nomenclature a long time. The simplest kind of presupposition is simply that a word presupposes the existence of the thing/event/differentia it represents. This category, as the name suggests, is fair game for almost endless speculation; the issue of existential import was only conclusively decided in favor of logical positivism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, I believe. Next, syntactic, certain parts of speech require other parts of speech; a desription presupposes the described. Third, semantic, where the literal meaning of the word subsumes other words, such as the way ant subsumes insect. Finally, and perhaps most profitably, there are the para-linguistic; these constructions deliver a meaning quite apart from that provided by a mere parsing of the words. I was tempted to call this category "enthymematic", because the conclusion and the utterance are connected by steps not explicated in the utterance. Para-linguistic refers us to the source of those connections; voice tone, volume, and other non-verbal factors. An example such as, "If anyone needs me I'll be in the city dump," when analyzed strictly for it's verbal semantic value is a simple conditional. But to speak this sentence and have it convey only the literal meanings is a challenge because this form is so closely acquainted with a manner of delivery that adds quite a bit of backspin, semantically, such that the received meaning, again, quite apart from the words, is along the lines of, "Nobody cares where I'll be." How we get from the one to the other is strictly a matter of closing the gap between the emotion-neutral parsing of the words and the emotional messages carried by the speaker.
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2004:07:29
971 - Presupposing
The handbook is off on the entirely wrong foot. I will be unplugging the extant version soon. The handbook should, properly, start with the Achilles story, then quickly move to presupposition and the other language patterns, then Anthropomorphized Utilization of Ideosensory Responses. That would make a nice unit all on its own.
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2004:07:27
972 - Thanks Hal
For Hal:
Thanks for the Krugman. Here's my fav du jour
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973 - Fie on W
I believe inccorectly that the universe is deterministic and materialistic. I believe it, but thank gosh I know better.
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2004:07:25
974 - Geeraerts
A friend on cogling turned me on to a paper by Dirk Geeraerts, Idealist and empiricist tendencies in cognitive semantics. The paper is a dialoge, more or less between a straw-man morph of Geeraerts (D), Geeraerts's best efforts at a fair portrayal of Ann Wierzbicka (A) as foil to the staw man, and History (H), the moderator, who draws whatever synthesis can be found between the positions of the other two. What follows is a sloppy, as-I-go list of responses.
Page 5; H: "...leave open the question of how long [a] position can be maintained after repeated [experimental] failures..."
The answer, of course, is that one can maintain such a position indefinitely. That's can. Should is another issue. And, typically, such positions are held as long as possible, or at least in direct proportion to invesetment levels in said position. This, I think, is the important part. Such investments can be mental, emotional, financial, etc, but they in no small part deterimine one's willingness to scrap an assumption v. blaming the equipment or methods. The coverse, of course, is equally controlled by such game-theoritcal pay-off calculations.
Page 5; A: "...the world as we know it is shaped by the concepts we impose on it."
No one who knows me will be surprised at the way this raises my hackles. Reality is not affected by our concepts, save to whatever extent they are part of the ever changing set of events and objects we call reality. Our extant concepts certainly do impose constraints on the concepts we are likely to devlop, but that doesn't change reality. Reality continues to be whatever it is while we keep making up new ways to describe it inaccurately.
Page 7; H: "If not only our thinking, but our thinking about thinking is influenced by pre-existing conceptualizations..."
And how not?
Page 8; A(quoting Wierzbicka): "Chasing the phantom of 'objectivity' through supposedly scientific methods one loses the only firm ground there is in semantics: the terra firma of one's own deep intuitions."
There's that nasty "I" word again, as if such intuitions, deep or shallow, North, South, West or East were aught but learnings for which we have dropped the "I learned this" tag.
Page 10; A: "Not an extension, if you like, but rather an intension."
These are offered as opposites, just like Korzbyski used them, but aren't we actually better off for having both? Like hearing and sight, the value of which comes not from their identical domains but from the interaction between that which overlaps and that which doesn't.
I feel, however, like these references to sensory mapping is rather outlawed in polite linguistic society. To me, however, there's no point ringing our hands about language if it can't be tied somehow to the sensory apparata.
Page 11; D(quoting Wierzbicka): "...[a definition] must be phrased in such a way that it covers the entire range of use of a given word, expression or construction."
This is simply impossible; new usage is always breeding
Language is a moving target. Any attempt to describe it in terms of inert entities is as doomed as the search for protoplasm. (Or has DNA and the genome project un-doom protoplasm?)
Page 11; D: "...what would be the semantics of a sentence like A raspberry is a fruit? If you paraphrase it as "a raspberry is one of those things we think about (among other things) as growing on trees", you do imply that raspberries are thought of as growing on trees."(emphasis added; rl)
A has argued for a definition, based on her preferred mode of investigation, introspection, of fruit as including the semantic feature, "grows on trees." A and D are arguing over the value of such introspective finds; A for introspection, D against. D is claiming that either the treelessness of raspberries disproves A's evaluation of introspection or raspberries must somehow include tree-borneness. But to D's "you do imply" I say no. The many-to-many-capable system of sensory associations that we call language does not default to reciprocity. It is sufficient to say, "The mention of fruit conjures the image of trees," and it is required to be a fruit to call it a raspberry. But there is no necessary connection between the two, and it is a misguided application of bifurcated logic to think otherwise.
Page 13; A: "Do you think that the semantic knowledge that we possess at one particular moment is always sufficient to categorize the entities, situiations, events, processes or whatever that we encounter in reality?"
Yes, but define "categories;" friend/foe, novel/known. Wait, no; ambiguity easily disputes this. Wait...yes, first category: "Can I easily assign this?"
Page 13; D: "...the peripheral, slifromy deviant cases..."
No luck on "slifromy"; typo?
Page 13; A: "...my definition of fruit describes the knowledge that we have of the concept "fruit" on the deep-seated level of stored meaning."
Doesn't this vary based on idiosyncratic life experience? And I'm suddenly distracted by notions of morphological v. [?] zoological taxonomy. If you come from a culture with lots of berries and no dropes you might not have this "grows on trees" thing in your semantic feature set. Seems to me, language and culture typically grow and change Lamark-wise, but the vocabulary of science, which adds to language still Lamark-wise, prefers to refer to things in slightly more Darwinian fashion. Which is to say, most folks are more comfortable with Ketchup as a vegetable than with either olives or tomatoes as fruits. What does this imply for A's reliance on introspection? I don't think anyone claimed it lacked limits.
Page 14; D: "So you have a semantic deep structure, and a semantic surface structure, and semantic transformations that change deep structure into surface structure?"
Doesn't it work the other way around? A T.O.T.E. with discrete steps at time zero will become a single chunk at time n. Apply this to the notion of a many-to-many-capable system of sensory associations...out comes language. L.A.D., etc., are no more than the combination of this propensity to chunk and the Lamarkian development of responses built up in a social network (family, kin-network, tribe, ,society, civilization, culture.)
Page 14: "...Standard tests for polysemy, like the zeugma test, or Quine's p and not p-test..."
What is polysemy that makes it different from ambiguity? And where can I find info on either of these tests? That "p and not-p" thing sure does smack of bifurcated logic...which is not going to be a tremendously useful tool in understanding language, the bulk of which has nothing to do with such bifurctions or the criteria of statement-hood.
Page 14: D: "It is not a priori given that the idea of a category that people may introspectively retrieve from memory is an adequate reflection on the extent of that person's actual knowledge of the category."
Differing semantic feature lists triggerd by same word secondary to idiosyncracies of life experience and learning process. D's statement certainly presupposes there is an ideal and correct set of properties for a category about which one knows or doesn't know, and one's ideas are right or wrong based on their conformance to this ideal.
Page 15; D: "...it is less "knowledge that (lexical item x may refer to entities with such and such characteristics)" but rather "knowledge how (lexical item x may be successfully used)"."
I can't help thinking kluges like this are a sure sign that the tools we're using are inadequate to the task.
Page 17; D: "...we had better be careful with thinking about stored knowledge as something encoded in symbolic fashion."
I'd take the next step: Reject symbolism and signage altogether, in favor of adopting a non-linear many-to-many system of sensory associations and responses to stimulii.
Page 19; D: "...ontological assumptions cannot be decided at random."
I've carped elsewhere about Alexander and Aristotle, but now think a moment about FDR and e=(mc)(mc). Who wields the axe strongly influences if not outright dictates one's assumptions. Look at Lysenkoism. And I feel linguistics is stuck largely in a swamp of ill-formed foundational concepts dating back to ancient Greece, most deadly of which is the scientific equivalent of mono-theism, this idea that there's going to be one right way of looking at things. It makes so much more sense to me to push along the empricist track and the idealist track and learn that much more about the world by where they overlap and where they don't. Look at chemistry and atomic-physics; from one point of view there should be an inclusion relationship. In reality they are as different a film-strips and IMAX. But the differences lie much more in the vagaries of our perceptual apparata than in reality.
Page 24; H: "...develop a general theory of interpretation, a universally applicable interperative methodology that specifies the criteria for correct interpretations."
Could this be studying the white space in design? What would it mean to study the criteria for correct representation? Aren't interpretation and representation polar complements? And isn't representation association?
Page 26; A: "...a vocabulary of universal concepts—a set of innate indefinables that is common to all languages of the world and that constitutes the core of their vocabulary."
Has anyone one a list of these universal concepts? Later in the page A offers SEE, HEAR, THIS, I, YOU, WHERE, GOOD, BAD, SAME, OTHER and THINK.
Page 27; D: "I want suggested interpretations to be empirically grounded in what we know of the cultural background, the actual behavior of the language users, the physiology of the human conceptual apparatus."
I could buy "perceptual apparatus." But I have trouble with "conceptual," at least in such close proximity to "physiology" and "apparatus."
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2004:07:23
975 - Liberman on Moyer on Lakoff
Language Log has a Mark Liberman post rapping the knuckles of Bill Moyer's website for its facile description of what George Lakoff and Rockridge are working with. As Liberman says, "It's about ideas, not words." Here's a quote from Liberman's blog post that I am hoping to get clarified by someone closer to the source.
So when Lakoff talks about how political debates are "framed", he means (I think) to talk about what frames (in the sense of conceptual structures) underlie them. But the verb to frame has an ordinary meaning "to put into words", and whoever wrote Moyers' blurb seem to have translated George's shtick about how conservatives have done a better job of "framing" their arguments into the rather different idea that "words really have the power to win not just hearts and minds, but votes"
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2004:07:22
976 - A Language by any Other Differentia
Page 40, Harris quoting Chomsky's "Syntactic Structures,"
- language
- a set (finite or infinite) of sentences
- grammar
- a device that generates all of the grammatical sequences of [that language] and none of the ungrammatical ones
Harris goes on to contrast strings of words that are grammatical with strings of words that aren't. But doesn't this all put the cart before the horse, metaphysically and epistemologically speaking? We are presupposing the existence of these word thingies and sentence thingies without any direct evidence of their existence, based solely on the depth of penetration these ideas have acquired in our language and culture (so deep that it is hard to speak sensibly without recourse to these terms.) Still, like the flat earth (and how often do you think of your floor as "an arc of a circle with infinite radius?) the ubiquity of these terms does not justify blind acceptance of them, not if you want to use the word science.
If science is empircal, treating of empirically accessible and assessable entities (and even these, we know, are more a matter of psycho-physiology than of any hard-nosed reality) then how can we take the science of words and sentences seriously. No, I find I am inclined to throw in with the radical behaviorists; better to study the relationship between noise and response. That's a scientific pursuit. Or admit that language isn't scientific and accept the lunatic fringe, admit that unless the work is tied to a productive application anything goes.
Linguists, by and large, treat of words and sentences and assume their set of metaphysical and epistemological assumptions without disclosure. The assumption isn't intellectually dishonest. The failure to disclose is.
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2004:07:21
977 - ISR Handbook first installment
Slowly but surely I am getting the handbook htmlified, which will greatly ease a lot of these entries. I am pretty excited about getting the handbook and the glossary deployed and linked appropriately.
Handbook of Semantic Restructuring
Definition
Semantic Restructuring defies normal methods of definition, partly because of its relationship to the work of Dr. Alfred Korzybski, who wrote compellingly aobut the dangers of the normal methods of definition. Semantic Restructuring owes as much to the fiction of Robert A. Heinlein as it does to the models of John Grinder and Richard Bandler. It is is an inter-disciplinary hybrid distillation of the work of people such as Korsybski, Chomsky and Bateson, who were researcher/theorists, and people such as Perls, Satir and Erickson, who were pioneering clinicians. As such Semantic Restructuring remains controversial and inaccessible to those unable to let go of the Western empirical epistemology; this does not diminish its practical value when used for these same people to evoke prfound behavioral change.
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2004:07:15
978 - Checking Habits
I'm on hold with my read of Bateson's "Steps to an Ecology of Mind." Mostly this is because I still can't decide how I feel about what I think is one of the more important claims made, which is
We can either have the habit of automatically looking before we cross the street, or the habit of carefully remembering to look. Of the two I prefer the automatic,...
Skipping the bifurcation issue, and parsing "habit" as including a type or amount of automatism, then question becomes "automatically look" or "automatically remember to look."
This may seem like a strange distinction. But here's a practical
application. This blog entry starts life on my private computer behind a
firewall; when I am happy with it I deploy it on the world-visible host of
my domains. The system of files and directories on the two machines varies
in important ways. If I want to do something like include a picture of a close,
personal friend, say, for instance, Jean-Paul Sartre
I need to point to it, but
where that file lives relative to this entry isn't the same on the home
machine as it is on the live server. So when moving the file from the one
to the other, from the home machine to the live server, I have to in some
way account for the difference in where the requested file lives.
I have two ways to do this accounting. First is to "automatically look" each and every time I move a file from one machine to the other. This is accomplished with a little piece of code in the file that does the looking for me. The other method is to "automatically remember to look", which is accomplished by my actually opening up the file and looking, only making a habit of it such that I don't move on to any next task until it's done.
What are the relative advantages? Practially, the first method is a tremendous time-saver...so long as it works. But when it fails will it do so in a manner that makes for quick diagnosis and repair? Will failure do tremendous harm to this or some other file? Is the time saved a net gain over the time spent on creating the automation in the first place and the eventual debugging and cleanup after failure? Or have we just shunted the time expenditure on a buy-now-pay-later plan with the small down payment of the time taken to write the automating code?
On the other hand, what of the habit of manually looking, where the automation comes from my volitional acts. Not as fast. Not even as certain. But it's a pay as you go plan, easily diagnosed, and very flexible.
Thinking back to Bateson's example of crossing the street, what if you've come to your automatic looking in Britain, but then visit America? Are you going to check in the wrong direction and step in front of a bus? Would a habit of remembering have left room for deeper evaluation of the situation?
Of course it really is a false bifurcation Bateson has offered (one I think I can now dismiss and so continue with my reading.) But it is an interesting one. I prefer to keep my flexibility and responsiveness to deeper issues of setting and context...to not run the risk of looking for traffic from the wrong direction when I travel. But for trivial things like a blog entry I'm satisfied to make the looking automatic (as indeed it is in the case of the graphic included above :)
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2004:07:13
979 - Web Creates Informavores
By making a clear, actionable distinction between text that does something and text that doesn't we are simply, directly conditioning readers to scan. It is unavoidable. Well, no, it could have been avoided by disallowing in-line linkage, forcing folks to link at the end of a document, abstracting links away from content. But by conflating hyper-text with non-hyper-text we have created a simple, clear conditioning scenario: scanning rewards. (Nice syntactic ambiguity, that.)
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980 - Confidence Racket
I am working this morning with an idea about a possible relationship between Weber's "Protestant Ethic" and a concept from N-LP that morphed into something ugly.
The start is Grinder and Bandler's "Polarities" concepts in Structure II. Given a client exhibiting lateral incognruency, if the counselor adopts a congruent example of one, the client will typically become congruent in the other. This leaves open the vague term congruence; for the counselor is only playing congruent, not neccessarily feeling the feelings, but very much acting, in the craftsman sense, using their instrument to acheive a result. Of course this idea of acting, of using the instrument in such a fashion is anathema to lots of folks's notions of how to know you can trust someone; it dissolves faith in spontaneity. (And that gets us to Watzlaiwicks "be spontaneous" error. But there are only so many hours in a day and this post has already taken most of two hours creating glossary terms, book links, and web-cross-references.)
So, we've got a therapeutic maneuver: becoming congruent to feed back to the client one of their poarized expressions. And we've got the Calvinist, as described by Weber, notion of "doubting one's status as elect is a sure sign of ot being elect" (which is not without a compelling rhetorical force...to be reckoned with at a later time; there's still the whole presupposition project to put up, and to which this should point, being, in effect, an example of "If you were of the elect you wouldn't doubt it.") Add in Erickson's "Hypnosis is only dangerous when the hypnotist thinks so." Heap "don't think of blue monkeys" onto the pile. Toss in "Personal Power/Congruence" (which needs to be de-conflated from the glossary entry on congruence), which claims in essence that if you act like the client is going to go into trance they'll go into trance. Finally, stir in a little more of the self-sealing condition in which any appearance of self doubt is a sin, because it plays against the results of being congruent, with the flavor of, "If you think you can't, you won't try, so it might as well be true" grotesquing into the nonsense of "You can do it if you really believe" and the disgustingly smug smarminess of the fire-walkers and huslters who so degraded the tone of N-LP that I still can't bring up the subject without cringing.
It all hangs on "Congruent", but, clearly, there are more than a couple types.
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981 - Blackbird's Nest of White Bread
Early in my reading on the subject I encountered, "A linguist is someone who takes seriously the question:
What is the difference between
- A black bird's nest
- A black bird's nest
This becomes a little less non-sensical when you toss in a hyphen to alternately prepend "black" to "bird's" or "bird's" to "nest":
- A black-bird's nest
- A black bird's-nest
The above by way of context for today's quote from Language Log:
"White bred" for "white bread" is an excellent example of the subspecies where the sounds are not just familiar, but identical, and where the misinterpretation makes at least as much sense as the original."
I simply don't hapeen to agree, on no other basis than my own experience as a native speaker, at a not-entirely-trivial skill-level, of English. The difference in sounds between "white-bread" and "White bred" are perhaps subtle, but not entirely missing. Am double-checking whether this qualifies as a "phone" or no. To my ear, in addition to simple differences in stress, similar to the blackbird example, there is an intonation difference; the food-stuff reference would get a spike-and-drop intonation; the genetic reference would get a double-flat intonation:
- White bred --> - -
- white-bread --> / \
I have no idea of where to find a web-friendly orthography for such notation.
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2004:07:12
982 - Automatic Motion
I don't do my credibility any favors by citing hypnosis, it's true. but for better or for worse I am a believer. Hypnosis is not a panacea, but it's useful tool that has been part of my life since early childhood.
In the hypnosis literature there is a phenomenon called "Automatic Motion." As with many hypnotic phenomena this is something you can see from time to time on psychiatric wards, someone making a constant repeated motion. In the context of hypnosis there are at least two views of this phenomenon. The traditional view is that this is a phenomenon that can be elicited and is indicative of a certain level or depth of trance. The non-traditional, Ericksonian view (but don't let that phrasing trick you into the wrong conclusion that the Ericksonians are free from their own dogma and traditions) is that this phenomenon, like almost any other response can be indicative of trance but can also be used to induce, deepen, or simulate trance, depending on the skill of the hypnotist and the peculiar mental goings on of the client.
When I first worked through my very first exercise in "Awareness Through Movement" I thought, "Cool, 'Automatic Motion' applied in an officially non-hypnotic setting."
An axiom of the Bandler/Grinder view of hypnosis, one that I rather un-critically accepted based on its tight fit with my own experience, is that any alteration of one's state of mind can be utilized for "re-programming". My later reading of Erickson's works bolstered this general notion (nearly all Grinder and Bandler's best stuff comes either from Erickson, Bateson, or Hall.)
When the time came for me to remove myself from the N-LP fold (as much for esthetics of association as for any points of doctrine) I cast about for some metaphors of my own to describe some of the overlap between what I would file under Semantic Restructuring and the offical body of N-LP, and one of the things that came to mind was this vague notion that over hypnotic automatic motion, Feldenkrais "Awareness Through Movement", mantra work, mandala work, and Semantic Satiation are all of a piece, all related in that, through repitition, they create a violation of extant associational rule, allowing for new associational paths to take route.
Of course, having shot my mouth off in cogling I now need to spend at least a little time actually reading some of the Semantic Satiation reports I have found. But I doubt they will be entirely relevant to my thrust.
Part of my assumption is that the extant associational rules are basically arbitrary to begin with, even those of language, which are forced on us willy-nilly by the organisms who were here before us, but which nonetheless are entirely arbitrary. My favorite example is probably still run with its scores of "meanings." If ever there were an argument for the general arbitrariness of the relations between the sound clusters we call words and the varied sensory experiences those sound clusters can represent "run" runs at the head of the pack.
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983 - Overload or Satiation
An inquiry to cogling has, as always, borne fruit. What I call semantic overload is called, more technically, Semantic Satiation. It's a pretty well explored phenomenon, no surprise. The link is to a Google Answers page, and does a great job of summarizing.
So the next task for me is to add a little support for the notion that this relates to Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement (R) technique, and mantra work.
The obvious connection is in repitition. But I'll be hanged if I can explicate it the way I'd like, except to say as a model these methods are related by the way repitition violates pattern expectations, creating the structure hunger that is the back-bone of Erickson's Confusion Technique. But that's poorly said. Expect more on this before long; it bothers me.
Structure Hunger, for the record, may be a sanctioned Transactional Analysis term, but I first ran into it in the ever delightful, "The Amateur Magician's Handbook":
Shut a man up in a blank cell and he'll hunt for designs in the cracked plaster. Some psychologists call bordom "structure hunger."
And will anyone ever convince me this is not the nature of all meaning?
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984 - Muddying the Social Waters
It's nice to know I'm not the only person with a passing interest in MUD/MOO. There's also danah boyd (and mind your orthography with this one), a phd candidate researching Articulated Social Networks up in the promised land. danah says:
Sometimes, i wonder if they are studying each other engage in what MUDs and MOOs are supposed to be about.
Seems every time I get an excess of free time and decent bandwidth I dip again into the MUD/MOO world, only to be disappointed. The role-playing muds might be fun with my old gang, but what a time sink. The acedemic muds seemed fascinating, but somehow never really inviting. Thanks to danah's note I'll feel better about diverting what might have been one more wasted trip to mud/moo-land into more productive pursuits...such as beating my head against the monolithic info-glut that is blogspace. B^)
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985 - CSS Progrsss
It seems only fair that someone preaching medium-to-message relationships should spend a little time on the presentation of his material. So I'm trying to spruce up the site. Hope you like.
But I have to go on record as saying that I'm not thrilled with CSS implementation at present. It's a nightmare thinking about all the different ways different browswers fail to comply to the standard and therefor interpret the style markups differently. The folk wisdom seems to be, "Don't worry about it working in all browsers; aim to have it fail gracefully when it fails," officially called "graceful degradation." I can't say that's a criterion that excites me.
But what are the options? PDF? Not hardly; you'll lose most folks because of the load time. Unformatted html? Not unless you're serving the most conservative, information hungry of technoweenies or academicians. Flash? Sucks as much today as ever (and rocks as much as ever, depends on what you want.) Flash is as anti-informavore as ever. Funny how Neilsen warns us he's pointing to a pdf at the bottom of that link.
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2004:07:11
986 - Sassing Saussure
If one lived 200 years their language would not change? I dig that. Totally Boss idea. It's veritable dot-commage.
Seriously, by the age of ten I recognized idiom shift...even if I lacked the formal vocabulary to call it such. And how does langauge evolve except through accretions of this kind of thing, the novel usage or construction becoming less novel with each repeated success by some speaker satisfied with the results garnered thereby?
All of which is more or less aproppos of the thought experiment attributed to Saussure in page 17.
Of course the text emphasizes Saussure's use of the word "isolated," in reference to above mentioned 200 year old. I missed that part. Probably end up scrapping this whole note.
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2004:07:08
988 - That ol' Black Magic ("Magic Number", that is.)
I've been hawking Hypertext Webster for just about as long as I've been on the net. I've followed this resource through a couple of host moves, and taken every opportunity to talk up this wonderful, wonderful place to check your words. But part of what I've always loved about this site is the juxtaposition of the faintly archaic 1913 Webster listings with the clearly modern, and possibly less authoritative WordNet.
So I'm writing this morning, trying to get a little more content in the ling_wars category, because, well, dammit I've been talking about it enough, and it really is a rich and wonderful fun book. I like to link heavily in these blog posts, and I do actually perform the occasional fact check (that's what started the fireworks on cogling, a simple attempt at a simple fact check.) I've looked up my Einstein quote, and am now trying to get a quick read on Skinner. Normally it'd be off to wikipedia, but just last night I learned about google operators, specifically the define operator, so I asked google to define Skinnerian for me. The only two links that came up were both cogsci.princeton.edu; figured that couldn't be all bad. So I clicked through and found myself at a WordNet-only listing. Where the Hypertext Webster is joined to a WordNet 1.7 listing, this was a WordNet 2. Exciting. So I clicked through the WordNet Home link, and found myself at the tastefully styled WordNet home page.
WordNet was developed by the Cognitive Science Laboratory at Princeton University under the direction of Professor George A. Miller (Principal Investigator).
George Miller? George A. Miller? The T.O.T.E. guy? Click. Oh My Gawd. Not only a picture, but the full text of "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information". I've been wanting to get my hands on a copy of this since 1985. Not that I've been motivated enough to track down the original journal and order it at the local university, but it's been one of those prizes that I knew synchronicity would some day bring to me. Today's the day.
This paper, if you didn't know, is the heart and soul of the Neuro-Linguistic Programming concept of conscious and unconscious. It's a very simple, operational definition. What you're thinking of is conscious. What you aren't isn't. It's tied to this paper, seminal in the truest sense of the term. Guess what Beau's reading today.
Coming soon: Mother Jones on the Bandler Murder Trial.
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989 - New York Cheesecake for the Mind
Harris' book is dense, in the good way, in the sense that there is hardly a paragraph that doesn't call for pondering; it's what Pirsig would call a slow reader. The Linguistics Wars would fare well on a cross-country cycle trip.
Here's a melange of ideas I pegged yesterday morning, paraphrased from pages 12-14:
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Geologists study rocks, linguists study words.
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The Stoics get credit for the initial taxonomy of phonetics, morphology and syntax.
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The business of science is to find uniformities -- Russel
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The brain is a pattern sensing device
Wow. Talk about a lot of argument packed in a little space. Let's take the first one, the one about rocks and words. When I talk about a rock I not only have concrete (pardon the pun) sensory evidence of, and experience with, the thing I'm talking about, I can *share* that experience by bringing it in range of the sensory apparata of the person I want to share with. I'm not limited to talking about the rock, I can show it, take turns performing various non-destructive tests, etc. And I can do it all in total silence, word free. Is there any such thing that can be done with a word? Hardly, unless the physical aspect of ink on paper or sound waves in the air is what words are. We can indeed count and even measure these physical aspects of words; but, but, but...
This entire notion of word rests on another notion, a notion going back to the ancient Greeks, of "spirit" or "soul", which in turn is a universal concept springing from the universal difficulty of describing then insensible (not to be confused with the non-sensical.) Sound is a word's body, meaning it's soul. The entire discussion of words, and therefore language, which is taken to be comprised of the use of words, is based on this idea...an idea that has lost some currency with regards to humans, at least in the "scientific" arena, but which still controls the debates and discourse about words. With regards to humans we've had those who were concerned only with the soul, priests and ministers and the like. We've had the Behaviorists and the Radical Behaviorists, concerned only with the observable and measurable. And we have the psychologists, too many of whom don't have the intellectual capacity to recognize their pursuit is little more than an update of the Dark Age conception of soul (what, for instance, is the meaning of the Greek root 'psyche') while trying to claim the charismatic cloak of science. Into the mix, then, conceptually speaking, we toss words, their bodies, their souls. No such problem with rocks, and on this rests much of the cause for the seeming superiority of the hard sciences.
This idea of body and soul of word is so old, so deeply set in the sub-conscious of all modern discourse on the subject, that even if it's completely wrong it's too late to get away from it. At least if you're going to call what you do "Linguistics."
Harris gives the ancient Greeks, particularly the Stoics, credit for dividing language into phonology, morphology and syntax. Which means again that no matter how valid, or not valid, such concepts may be, we are stuck with them. But considering the wide-spread over-application of Aristotle's law of the excluded middle, I am instantly suspicious. Phonology, morphology and syntax are about the body of words, and indeed this is a fertile field of study for would-be linguists who prefer the imprimatur the 20th Century's infatuation with science. So, these terms, and all the discourse over long centuries treating these terms, are still bound to the basic view that words have a body and they have a divine, immortal soul, meaning, and any heretical thoughts of throwing out this body/soul, this sound/meaning bifurcation will want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But haven't morphology, phonology, syntax made wondeful advances? Aren't they real sciences, safe from conceptual reconfigurations? Aren't there solid answers to "What have they done for me lately"?
I can ask; that's all I'm good for at this point, trying to ask questions that will be valuable and seem to have gone un-asked. This is a learning process for me. Harris' book surveys the field of linguistics more or less as it stands. I suspect before long I'll be introduced to folks carrying similar ideas.
On Russell and uniformity, I'm reminded of the Einstein quote, "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." Pure tautology, of course, but an interesting rebuttal to Russell. Whence comes this idea that all can be expressed as one? Well, of course, there is an easy answer. "Is." This simple word, Korzybski's bane, suffices to take care of all unified field theory. "Is." "The universe is." "Eternity is." "Existence is." There you are; easy as pi. The problem is Russell wants to at one time encompass every distinction and difference and also show there are none. Only slightly self-opposing.
As for the brain being a pattern sensing device, again we are positing that there is something called pattern, it exists in the world, and our brains (presumbably after receiving similarly postulated "data" from the senses) detects these patterns. I refer the reader to Watzlawick's (sorry, no links I'm willing to pimp for) wonderful discussion of Randomness in, "How Real is Real," and Bateson's meta-logue on muddles in "Steps to an Ecology of Mind" (Bateson link courtesy of Harris' incomparable Incommensurability links.)
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2004:07:06
990 - Fiefdom
Psychology or Anthropology? From page 12:
...in general, linguists regard their discipline now as a branch of psychology. For most of this century, though, linguists had quite different allegiances, seeing their discipline as a branch of cultural anthropology.
As a youth I had a hard time understanding that biology was not a subset of chemistry, itself a subset of physics. Sure, that would be a nice neat way to view the world, but the reality is there is no such linear inclusive relationship nor would all contenders feel such would be a worthy goal. Likewise I had a hard time at the beginning of '04, back in school for the first time in ages, and taking Sociology classes. To my eye it ought to be Ethology > Anthropology > Sociology & Psych. No such view obtains anywhere outside my muddled head, and anyway, where would such a system leave Political Science or Zoology?
And yet a discipline needs some kind of differentia, some organizing principle, not so much to distinguish itself from other disciplines as to structure it's pursuits. So, if the topic is linguistics perhaps existential questions are less relevant.
Except that linguistic considerations so strongly influence and even pre-figure so many other considerations, from our conceptual reliance on bifurcation (which I personally blame on Aristotle by way of Alexander) to the ubiquity of negation.
So, what is the proper domain of the subject that deals with the way we relate and responde to sensation clusters? What started this note was my reaction that anyone fool enough to think psychology isn't beholden to cultural anthropology deserves all the wrong answers they get. But what school of psychology would that be true of?
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991 - Campfire Linguistics
HTML isn't a language because it lacks iteration, for one thing. And according to Harris another thing it would need is self-reference.
Fred and Barney must have had some way of talking about talking or, what they were using wouldn't have been language.
I've read in the occasional programming text the bit about HTML; it lacks iteration, it lacks iteration in particular and control structures in general. But a quick google did me no good in terms of learning the full list of what a language can't do without if it still wants to be a language.
Now, just winging it, I'd say the bit about self-reference is close, but reference in general, and more, the capacity for combining, willy-nilly, one-to-one references with one-to-many references and many-to-many references...within a single modality. Which is to say vision is a representational system but is not a language because it needs recourse to other sensory systems to establish...
Nope, not right. I'm thinking it's more to do with the interrelation of different reporting systems. And, maybe the first step is some kind of extra-somatic information storage (I like the idea that rythm might have been the trigger; drumming and coordinated movement before actual words.)
Well, I hope I get more about what it takes to be a language in the first place.
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992 - "if only," said the Carpenter
Heard recently on cogling:
Lewis Carroll (the Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) knew all of the languages mentioned in "The Hunting of the Snark"
- http://www.pacificnet.net/~johnr/books/snrkpre.html
- http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/CarSnar.html
If Carroll had written The Red Wheel-Barrow, I would think he was conscious of its Hebrew substrate ... but I doubt Wm. Carlos Williams knew much Hebrew, despite his later friendship with a younger Allen Ginsberg.
Carroll wrote "The Walrus and the Carpenter" and later included that poem in the Alice books. Why not "The Walrus and the Carp" or "The Mason and the Carpenter"? The scientific name for the walrus (whale horse) is Odobenus rosmarus. [Now you know why Dobbin is a horse's name.] That can be deconstructed into Ode = poem + Latin benus = bent, twisted + Aramaic RaZ = secret (as in sub rosa) + (the Virgin) Mary ... in other words, a twisted poem about the secret of Mary.
The Carpenter may represent the Son. The victims (Host) in that poem are the oyst-ers.
There's an interesting discussion along these lines in the opening scenes of the very funny, but very childish (and very offensive to some) film, "Dogma" wonderfully delivered by Matt Damon, playing an angel of vengence who very much knows better, delivered to a nun. I'm inclined, however, to credit Izzy's interpretation as more credible and consistent.
I've just bookmarked a Fauconnier article, after finding it via a peek at wikipedia's listing for cognitive linguistics. One of the attractions of cogling is the high level of academic validity and focus brought to the table the the bulk of the players (and that would *not* include this particular layman.) But one of the frustrations of lurking there for the past few years is the strong sense coglings are exactly the kind of folks with whom one would like to grab a brewskie and set to work unscrewing the inscrutable.
On "empirical:" Ran accross a delightful example of opposed meanings for one "word" (a notion that, for me, shows the begged question behind the word "word.") at my favorite online dictionary.
Well, I warned the fine gent who prompted the Kevin Smith plug that I was
- Excerpting on this blog
- Forwarding the info to Smith.
Cost me two bucks to sign up for Smith's board, but I reckon it'll be worth it in time.
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2004:07:03
993 - Whiskey
Between tweaking my two domains into some semblance of acceptable shape, validating code, and the like, I have yet to get any further in "The Linguistics Wars." Hopefully I'll spend some time with it this weekend. But the negation thread lives on at cogling, mostly because I can't seem to keep my fingers off of the keyboard, and someone's always willing to take another stab at helping me get my head around what seems to be the list-orthodox views as very clearly offered by George Lakoff early in the thread.
I'll get to excerpting and expanding on my most recent iteration in cogling, but first I need to take a second to capture a thought that's been floating, waiting to get attached to something. In Montague's "On Human Agression," there is reference to two entirely disparate interpretations of observations made by Colin Turnbull in "The Mountain People." It seems to me there has got to be a term for when this happens, when polarized camps sincerely see the same data set as supporting their side and disproving the other. I have no idea what that term might be.
But if I did have a word for it (and I may just coin one before the day is out) I sure would have plenty of chances to use it in describing the dialog about negation on cogling. One gent wrote:
Titan's "Venus of Urbino" (1538), the model for hundreds of later paintings depicting reclining female nudes, was certainly meant to be seen by Guidobaldo II (duke of Urbino) as "woman NOT wearing clothes". Even if viewed as "woman POSITIVELY naked" - the cognitive significance hardly changes.
Seems to me going positive-north is the same as going negative-south, and surely I can see someone going positive-north, which is really negative-south, except that what I see isn't any flavor of north or south but simply varying distance relative to me. And while the words, the noises, change, the visual experience is unaffected by those shifty noises. The cognitive significance (using the term in complete ignorance of any technical restrictions) hardly changes because positvely naked and not wearing cloths are verbal, linguistic variations for an underlying, static, extant (which is just a dodge to avoid saying "positive" again) image, not of the clothes that aren't depicted, but of the bodies that can be seen. Much of that cognitive significance, it seems to me, comes from an aculturated position in which clothed is default and unclothed (naked) defaults to a pejorative deviance. Isn't it this cultural dynamic that drives the cognitive significance?
One thing that really bothers me is how hard it is to avoid words that rely on negation as part of a dichotomized system. Consider, for example, approach/avoidance. That would be a culturally privileged re-cast, it seems to me, of "at time zero distance between self and subject was N units; at time t distance was M units." That is, as far as I can tell, much more akin to what the eyes see. To use a sophomironic (sic) reference, language lets us argue if the glass is half empty or half full. Sensation notes the whiskey goes up three fingers from the bottom.
I'm beginning to feel more than a little heretical; I don't know that my ravings on cogling even qualify as apostate, for I don't know that I ever would have qualified as having had the faith. And that's because I really don't grok in fullness the domain of cognitive linguistics, as differentiated from cognitive else or other linguistics. Which gets me back to the need, really, as due dilligence, to spend more time with Harris' book.
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2004:07:02
994 - Just an old-fashioned Chomsky-bot
From today's spam:
matter at the wrong end of its body it would have been beautiful thus to in that all the atoms of Democritus large and small alike were
Which I quickly posted to Cafe Blue as the following found poem (with ugly tags a-showin')
<blockquote> <pre> matter at the wrong end of its body it would have been beautiful thus to in that all the atoms of Democritus large and small alike were </pre> </blockquote>
Makes me think it's the spammers who first will pass the Turing test, at least if the measure becomes blank verse rather than teen chat. In fact, I'd aruge the spammers have, in fact, succeeded in passing a version of the test, each time someone deems it neccessary to write a new program to filter spam because the spammers succeeded at defeating the old one, since one of the things a tough spam filter does is tries, by the fewest steps neccessary, to establish whether or not the content is human generated or machine generated. Where the gaming world drives processor and video card innovation, it is the spammers and those who crusade against them who are doing the truly profound work in artificial intelligence as expressed in language production.
There's some real question begging that goes on with regards to the Turing test. An apochryphal story goes that the creator of Eliza, a dim relative of the chomsky-bot, indeed fooled a fellow researcher such that Eliza's programmer received a nasty call in middle of the night complaining about his "recalcitrant research assistant." (I'm having a little trouble finding a link to that just now...) But in such a case the computer isn't credited with a win on the Turing test, rather the human is credited with a failure. He *should* have been able to tell. But that leads to the circular nature of how we've defined intellgence in this context and the value of truly blind studies. It's one thing to try to detect that an interlocuter is a computer program when you're told up front only one of the two chatters you're on with is human. But what if there were no such warnings?
Of course the net is a wonderful medium for exploring this kind of stuff, because it has so many variants that are text only. The task of writing a program to handle intonation and facial expression as well as word choice...well, luckily most artificial intelligence folks (ahem) know that such matters aren't part of intelligence at all, and are only barely important to communication. (Yes, these are the same guys sportin' wood over xml because it allows endlessly tweakable semantic tagging; go figure.) Chat is the ideal place to play Turing, because it's got that realtime flavor and it's strictly textual.
Still, what we have is an ethnocentric definition of intelligence being foisted off on a machine designed to model the human mind while in fact being nothing at all like the human mind (unless you're of the opinion that the mind operates by adding enormous numbers of binary figures, in which case you might look up Luria, Pietsch, and Pribram.) We define the target based on our prejudices, then tell the tester to try and cause the program to fail. Let's not point out that pre-verbal infants would fail such a test. Even an Einstein, a Gates, a Bush.
If you're wondering, "Why'd he use use the bare pre and blockquote tags above?", well, they're human readable, ain't they? Oh, and here's a quick "gimme" link to chomsky-bot, and one more, just in case you're too lazy to click through to the fascinating "How does it work" link (By the "American Chinses Menu" principle, viz. One from Column A, One from Column B, etc.)
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2004:07:01
995 - Props to Language Log
"If you're going to be an annoying precriptive nag, at least don't be a terminologically ignorant annoying prescriptive nag."
I need to figure out who's list I got this link from, I think it was Lott. Anyway, this has been the most fulfilling blog I've found so far. Really good stuff; lots of content right in the sweet spot of my interests. I was embarassed not to see the punchline coming; guess I'm a hopeless case.
I goofed on my initial trackback for this; accidentally setting up a trackback that made it look as if the article were tracking back to itself. I've emailed the writer, I'm sure it'll get fixed, but it sure does show how unclear on the concept I can be. But, in my defense, trackbacks gotta qualify as "bleeding edge." Most folks still don't have their heads around RSS (me, for instance, two weeks ago.)
The idea of making commentators responsible for hosting their comments strikes me as wise. If you aren't willing to have your comments on your own site then perhaps the comments weren't worth making in the first place. The other angle that's interesting about trackbacks is they will potentially take a reader through a conversation with each bit in context of its hosting site.
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996 - No negation here
I'm more than a bit ambivalent about the negation thread I've started on cogling. That's not a list where I want to stir the pot; on the contrary, that's the place I most want to be able to lurk and ask freely. But I've stuck my foot in it. The thread's gone on for 25+ posts, which is "up-there" for that list.
And the feeling of having stepped in it is in no small part of what's driven me to Harris' "The Linguistic Wars." I feel suddenly like I better get a clearer picture of the players and the program before shooting off my mouth too much more. Only I can't seem to leave well enough alone. Some of the responses seem to be inviting further comment from me. Some just seem so, well, wrong, that I can't help asking further about them, and giving my side, my understanding. In the end I fear I will learn that cogling isn't the place for me, that my own views are too set and too at odds with the orthodoxies of that list. And so I really *am* going to try to hang back a bit, get back to lurking asap, work on the Harris book instead.
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997 - plug and pray
First, shout out to Andr