Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 13, No. 448.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
[1] From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk> (50)
Subject: the real and the usefully false
[2] From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk> (25)
Subject: CS as experimental science
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Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 09:29:59 +0000
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: the real and the usefully false
Yesterday I encountered this astonishing passage in Steven Pinker's new
book, Words and rules: The ingredients of language (London: Weidenfield and
Nicolson, 1999):
>Sentences are put together on an assembly line composed of mental modules,
>shown on the following page. [He refers to a diagram of boxes
>interconnected by arrows.] One is a storehouse of memorised words, the
>mental lexicon. Another is a team of rules that combine words and parts of
>words into bigger words, a component called morphology. A third is a team
>of rules that combine words and phrases into sentences, a component called
>syntax. .
He goes on to say that, "Many people are suspicious of box-and-arrow
diagrams of the mind" but immediately justifies the use of one: "In the
case of language, however, these components pop out as we tease apart the
phenomena...." (p. 22).
Excuse me, I think, they don't, and sentences are NOT put together as
described; there is no such storehouse, nor do we find teams of rules. You
may object to my objection by pointing out that this is a book for a
non-specialist audience, so we should excuse the throng of metaphors
milling about in a curiously industrial setting -- the General Motors model
of mind? "Sure, sure", I imagine him saying, "I know that this is only a
way of talking about what happens." Even so, I am distinctly bothered that
anyone, esp someone wearing the robes of expertise as he does, should
appear to forget that he is proposing a MODEL of what happens. As Nancy
Cartwright has in particular argued (in How the Laws of Physics Lie),
models however good are never true, and often in physics at least they are
very crude indeed -- thus the charming expression, which I am old enough
and American enough to appreciate, "tinkertoy modelling".
The basic problem, it seems to me, is not that he might deceive someone
into thinking that we actually had discovered what happens when we make
sentences (as opposed to coming up with a useful, even powerful way of
thinking about how we make sentences). That is a problem, and surely some
will be thus deceived, and it would have been a simple matter to prevent by
putting in a qualifying phrase here and there. But the bigger problem is
his success-orientated way of thinking, the drive toward solutions at the
expense of better questions -- a drive that is perhaps responsible for the
omission I object to? Perhaps, as a result of his work and that of others
we'll have a really fine linguistic processor that benefits us in all sorts
of ways, but scholarship, understanding won't be as well served.
You may recall Jerry Fodor's review of Pinker's previous book, How the Mind
Works (1988). Whatever you may think of Fodor's style of philosophy, he is
good at pointing out what we don't know, and I find that so much more
exhilirating than the unquestioned mental flowcharts.
Comments?
Yours,
WM
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Dr. Willard McCarty, Senior Lecturer, King's College London
voice: +44 (0)171 848 2784 fax: +44 (0)171 848 5081
<Willard.McCarty@kcl.ac.uk> <http://ilex.cc.kcl.ac.uk/wlm/>
maui gratia
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 09:30:23 +0000
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: CS as experimental science
"Computer science is an empirical discipline. We would have called it an
experimental science, but like astronomy, economics, and geology, some of
its unique forms of observation and experience do not fit a narrow
stereotype of the experimental method. Nonetheless, they are experiments.
Each new machine that is built is an experiment. Actually constructing the
machine poses a question to nature; and we listen for an answer by
observing the machine in operation and analysing it by all analytical and
measurement means available. Each new program that is built is an
experiment. It poses a question to nature, and its behaviour offers clues
to an answer. Neither machines nor programs are black boxes; they are
artefacts that have been designed , both hardware and software, and we can
open them up and look inside. We can relate their structure to their
behaviour and draw many lessons from a single experiment....
"We build computers and programs for many reasons.... But as basic
scientists we build machines and programs as a way of discovering new
phenomena and analysing phenomena we already know about.... [Society] needs
to understand that the phenomena surrounding computers are deep and
obscure, requiring much experimentation to assess their nature...."
Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon, "Computer science as empirical enquiry:
Symbols and search", in Margaret A Boden, ed., The Philosophy of Artificial
Intelligence, Oxford Readings in Philosophy (Oxford, 1990): pp. 105f.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Dr. Willard McCarty, Senior Lecturer, King's College London
voice: +44 (0)171 848 2784 fax: +44 (0)171 848 5081
<Willard.McCarty@kcl.ac.uk> <http://ilex.cc.kcl.ac.uk/wlm/>
maui gratia
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