Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 16, No. 76.
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, 17 Jun 2002 06:15:15 +0100
From: Willard McCarty <w.mccarty@btinternet.com>
Subject: attending from highly constrained language
In his justly famous book, The Tacit Dimension (1966; rpt Peter Smith,
1983), Michael Polanyi proposes that in an act of tacit knowing -- e.g. of
how to carve wood -- we *attend from* the instrument of our action (the
chisel) so that we may *attend to* its object (the wood). To follow my
example, clearly this instrument is highly constrained and so constraining,
yet in attending from it, being thus constrained, a Donatello (say) is
capable of the most marvellous things. (Was it Edward Johnston who said,
"Within the limits of my craft I have perfect freedom"?) My point is that
within the game, as it were, the rules having vanished from sight (though
not action), the constrained intelligence of the player is at least under
some conditions shaped rather than attenuated. To expand outward from the
game, or the practice of woodcarving, to ordinary life, Polanyi notes that
in the production of language a great deal of mechanical action is involved
and that should we pay direct attention to it we may even be unable to
speak at all. (I am reminded of the story about the millipede, who asked
how possibly he could coordinate so many legs so well, began to wonder
himself, as a result of which he lost the ability to walk and starved to
death.) In other words, the problem I'm after isn't only with highly
constrained language, it's with all means of expression.
Again, I raise the matter with respect to computing, specifically with
respect to computational metalanguage. Computing tools are very crude
instruments, very highly constraining. But how is this important? To what
degree is such a metalanguage like a chisel? What is involved in attending
from the computational instrument, and how may the object we get to (e.g. a
poem, an image) then be understood?
Yours,
WM
Dr Willard McCarty, Senior Lecturer,
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London,
Strand, London WC2R 2LS, U.K.,
+44 (0)20 7848-2784, ilex.cc.kcl.ac.uk/wlm/,
willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk, w.mccarty@btinternet.com
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