Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 593.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Mon, 15 Jan 2001 07:00:13 +0000
From: Ian Lancashire <ian.lancashire@sympatico.ca>
Subject: Re: 14.0585 lexicographical meditations: a sense of genre
This is a comment on Francois Lachance's intriguing questions,
especially to his suggestion that early language practice affects
our ability to distinguish early genres.
Philosophical writing, as a genre, redefined itself in the mid-to-late
17th century when philosophers decided they needed to define words
rather than things. Because philosophy then could not be separated from
science generally, the 1660 Royal Society helped "professionalize" language
in this way. It stole much fire from literary writing. It also forced
literary genres into being because, after all, poets were no
longer writing about either things (as encyclopedists did) or words
(an expertise philosophers laid new claim to). What was the poet's
"profession", then, but writing "drama," or "novels," or "essays"?
This isn't to say that the Renaissance didn't classify literary works.
Classical authors had already done so. This is only to suggest that
different criteria for generic distinctions were now put into play.
So I'm inclined to think the new "philosophical" genre led to a genre
shift generally.
Lexicography, for instance, developed out of bilingual dictionaries.
Though Johnson's 1755 dictionary separates senses, he belongs to the
"pre-computational" school because he believed that he was explaining
things in the world, not words. See his definition of definition. By
the time of the OED lexicographers, the transition from things to words
had been completed and was going on, largely unnoticed.
Some of our dictionaries today define "noun" as the name of a thing.
Of course names lack definitions; they are wholly denotational. This
kind of grammar is thought to be a starting place for children. We
do not realize that Shakespeare thought this way.
Ian Hacking wrote about some of these ideas as early as the 1970s.
The groundwork was laid for computational thinking long before the OED
and Turing.
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