Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 15, No. 317.
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: helmut.bonheim@uni-koeln.de (23)
Subject: Re: 15.313 language, habit and computation
[2] From: lachance@chass.utoronto.ca (Francois Lachance) (42)
Subject: Re: 15.313 language, habit and computation
[3] From: "Osher Doctorow" <osher@ix.netcom.com> (37)
Subject: Re: 15.313 language, habit and computation
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2001 10:01:37 +0100
From: helmut.bonheim@uni-koeln.de
Subject: Re: 15.313 language, habit and computation
Dear Willard McCarty,
I work in an institute that has linguists in it, and over the decades
we have remained on speaking terms. I think that they might offer a
clear answer to your question about whether food might be eager to
be eaten, in that "eager" is marked as a potential quality of the
animal world (including man) and (despite Shakespeares "eager
and a nipping air" in "Hamlet"). I know nothing about computers,
except that I use all three of mine at different times of the day, but
surely the very definition of "eager" would include a marker that
shows the adjective normally to have an association with sentient
beings (that is part of the "model" that each part of speech can be
considered to be), so that food -- being hardly sentient, even if it is
derived from an animal -- is barred from eagerness, except in a
poetic or dadaist context.
A while back I had a student to whom I showed an earlier message
of yours, which also had a suggestion of model-reference in it, and
he wrote quite a nice poem in a creative-writing course on that
basis. If I could remember who it was, I would send you a copy, for
in poetry, it is of course fashionable to make an impression by
means of rule-breaking.
Yours,
Helmut Bonheim
Univ. of Cologne
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2001 10:01:59 +0100
From: lachance@chass.utoronto.ca (Francois Lachance)
Subject: Re: 15.313 language, habit and computation
Dear W.
Seeing the crescent moon....
an observation grown metphorical (to write "waxing or wanning" would be
conceit) in the context of a missive about rules, habits and language.
a bit of copy and past / citation habit:
AUTHOR: Black, Max, 1909-
TITLE: Models and metaphors ; studies in language and
philosophy.
PUBLISHED: Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 1962 [i.e.
1963]
You seem to be juggling three activities (plus communication about the
activities), each with their own set of pragmatics to illuminate
(moonlight?) perceptual phenomenon with different ratios of the values
new/old or novel/familiar. Sorry for the highly mediated stacking of
levels here but the pair action/language gets recursive when we consider
speech acts. Rules formation has an impact on rule following. What does it
mean to formulate a rule? The three activities I counted: the observation
of routines, the following of routines and the communication about
observations and the the following of routines. There may be more (I have
a habit of distinguishing one set of three fingers raised as a "w" and a
set of three others raised as a "3" -- four fingers do not give rise to
the same sign play in ASL: a physical habit with computational and
cognitive dressing (ever notice the three peaks on the letter W? The
letter F seem downright wobbly in comparison. (Johanna Drucker _The
Alphabetic Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination))).
Is the question to what degree is interaction with computers a language
game that shifts the degree of novelty ascribed to the activity of
interacting with computers? Is this the obverse of the rules for
creativity and guidelines for imagination question?
The crescent must have been in the shape of a question mark...a
parenthesis closing (
) out of habit-breaking habit (
F, plays with forks
L, with broken tines
W, plays with mirrors
M, reflecting mountains
Some folks play with graphic software and typography, other folks play
with semanitc applications and typology, some folks play poet )( with or
without an electronic device )(
--
Francois Lachance, Scholar-at-large
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance/ivt.htm
per Interactivity ad Virtuality via Textuality
--[3]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2001 10:02:30 +0100
From: "Osher Doctorow" <osher@ix.netcom.com>
Subject: Re: 15.313 language, habit and computation
From: Osher Doctorow osher@ix.netcom.com, Sat. Oct. 13, 2001 2:40PM
WM has a fascinating question and comment(s) here.
I think that WM's remarking and observing the above things in the morning
may be an important fact, because the more conscious and/or attentive we are
to ourselves in respect to our mental lives and to our environments, the
more I think we become rule-bound rather than habit-bound in the intuitive
senses. I am not sure that consciousness toward our physical or
*materialistic* lives removes us from habit - I can visualize many scenarios
in which it does the reverse. We may well be facing the eternal anomaly or
paradox of materialism which has led many a philosopher to abandon
materialism altogether (Mahatma Gandhi, Socrates, Plato, etc. for starters).
The Golden Mean of Ancient Greece and Rome, *moderate materialism*, is
logically and empirically a rather poor solution to the anomaly.
It is true that some relativity operates here. We can describe rule-bound
behavior as largely habitual when we have followed such behavior in the
sufficiently long term, and even habitual behavior has some *unusual rules*
which tend to resemble the behaviors of apes and *lower dinizens* (except
for intuition - my cats are very psychic). It is commonly assumed that
fuzzy multivalued logicians are interested in such *unusual rules*, and I
know at least one U.S. government funded program which a major Western USA
University attempted to research wholeheartedly into such *unusual rules*
(the USA, however, may have a conflict of interest in this respect).
Vienna and the Czech Republic and Great Britain do much in this respect.
Since my life is spent in such research, I must tell members of Humanist
that apelike behavior and the thinking of *lower dinizens* (except ones like
my psychic cats) do not interest me at all - I have had enough of apes to
last me a lifetime. Fuzzy and/or multivalued logics are much more
interesting than *idiotic thinking*, and in fact generalize ordinary logics
and appear to underlie some of the most remarkable properties of the
physical universe (not to mention the conceptual universe).
Nobody, to my knowledge, has ever gone beyond Lord Francis Bacon in
understanding the disadvantages of habit. The Idols of the Tribe, the Idols
of the Marketplace, and all the other Idols, would on a Platonic-Socratic
planet lead immediately to a Nobel Prize. On the Earth, they lead to
academic courses taken by few, remembered by less even in the sciences and
humanities and even on the highest professional levels. It is indeed
morning, WM. It is indeed the morning of humanity.
Osher Doctorow
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