Götterdämmerung

[Chris Jenkins]

Was passiert, wenn der einzige Weg, wie wir kommunizieren konnte, war durch Fremdsoftware nicht in der Lage zu verstehen, unsere Emotionen? Die digitale Kommunikation nicht Ton jetzt vermitteln, sich vorstellen, wenn sie verloren auch Nuancen in der Übersetzung?

Ich denke an das, weil ich die Gespräche in dieser Gruppe häufig brechen in zwei Menschen aneinander vorbei sprechen. Ich frage mich, wenn sie die anderen Lautsprecher verstehen überhaupt. Wenn unsere Worte verloren nicht nur ihr Ton, sondern auch ihre heimatlichen Dialekt; wenn sie etwas wurde noch der Sprecher nicht verstehen, bevor sie von einer anderen Person erhalten, würden wir in der Lage, überhaupt zu kommunizieren?

Ich wünschte, Fran waren hier, um zu wiegen; er würde haben Einblick Ich würde wertvoll wie ein englischer Muttersprachler, die so viel Zeit in einem Land mit einer anderen als seiner Muttersprache verbracht hat, zu finden. Gabby hat ähnliche Einsicht gegeben, wie viel Zeit sie in englischer Sprache bei uns verbringt, (und wie oft habe ich gefragt, ob ich einen Sinn in der Übersetzung verpasst), aber ich nehme an, sie werden meist nur Spaß meines schlecht übersetzt machen Deutsch. : D

[archytas]

The German sounds somewhat more hostile than the translation Chris.  There's some work on how tone of voice affects decision.  Argument content rarely does well. Voice to text converters I've tried always fail (slightly better if grandpa leaves his teeth in).  We do know bilingual (and multi) brains work differently than those with only one language.  And little AI programmes outperform us on old arcade games and most of us at chess.

When it comes to talking to machines, natural language has been a pisser - though I hear claims we may be getting round this.  Google translate and similar do a fair job, but if you translate to German and then back to English really significant nonsense comes out.  Spoken language is noise-ridden, and even then maybe only ten percent of what humans communicate face to face.

Though we like to think picking up on nuance and emotion is smart, this may be very misguided - especially as we are so easily conned by liars, psychopaths and narcissists.  Psychos do three times better with parole boards than ordinary criminals, suggesting something is lost in translation by worthies on parole boards.  My daughters were even more successful with me.

We have machines working on Identifying sickos and psychos based on language (text) use. The basic idea is to place some text from obvious to sickos, identify Which words, phrases, syntax and so on They use, then program the machine to spot them. We are doing something similar with facial recognition and gait analysis. The way we walk is like a fingerprint.

In emotional intelligence tests we find a lot of smart people (and dumb ones) do not get facial expressions as They are supposed to. Having seen many smiling assassins I'm not sure who is getting this wrong.

I'd Probably want to examine presuppositions on the bit lost in translation from the perspective did natural language is not as smart as we think anyway and May have a prime directive of confusion and deceit. And I miss Francis too.

  

On Sunday, March 1, 2015 at 12:56:27 AM UTC Chris Jenkins wrote:

What if the only way we could communicate was not understood by other software capable of emotions? Digital communication not convey tone now, imagine if they also lost nuance in translation?

I'm thinking about this because I have the conversations in this group often break into two people together to talk over. I wonder if the other speakers understand at all. If our words not only lost her tone, but also their native dialect; if it was something even the speaker does not understand before they can receive from another person, we would be able to communicate at all?

I wish Francisco were here to weigh; he would have insight I'd valuable as a native English speaker who has spent so much time in a country with a language other than their mother tongue to find. Gabby has been similar insight, how much time she spends in English with us, (and how many times have I asked if I missed a sense in translation), but I guess they are usually only fun poorly translated make my German , : D

[archytas]

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&q=%22computer+emotion%22&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C5&as_sdtp=

Gives an idea how much academic work is being done in the area.

[Chris Jenkins]

"Google translate and similar do a fair job, but if you translate to German and then back to English really significant nonsense comes out"

As is clearly demonstrated by the attached English translation. :D

And yet, I wonder how careful we would be with our words if we were consciously aware they always had to be fed through a translator to reach someone else. And then I wonder why we don't realize that they already are, even when we're speaking in the same "Mother Tongue" (I love how that translated). 

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[archytas]

We sort of do that in 'reducing' natural language suitable for code and compile.  The game 'Chinese whispers' may be something of an example of what you're on about. Our personal banter would not be possible if taken literally.  Much language is highly constrained by manners intended, as you say, to be translated by others we fear will mis-interpret.  

We have machines that are linking material we don't expect them to now.  I have long thought of this as 'spreadsheet-database reasoning' though most hearing the words think of some odious accounting-type stuff.  The machines can take far more into account than we manage.  Translation of a boring neo-liberal speech by Cameron to the correct German, or in reverse of one by Mutti into English is not anything like how both speeches would translate in me.  Machine translation might actually add a critique.

Clarity seems at work in your suggestion Chris.  I can translate 'I really like Gabby' into German, but we'd still have no idea what message I was really sending or how it was received.  Ich habe ein großes Bedürfnis translates as I have a great need, or I need a piss in patois.  We could think of a different kind of translation.

It's also possible to think of a site like this with instantaneous translation - we might then have to be more active readers on the possibility of mistranslation and learn more tolerance. 

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[allan...@gmail.com]

mein Deutsch ist nicht die beste. Ich habe festgestellt, Übersetzer haben sich in den Jahren verbessert. Ich wünschte, auch Francis war hier, als auch Vam, vielleicht haben Sie zu fragen konnte.

تجنب. القتل والاغتصاب واستعباد الآخرين
Avoid; murder, rape and enslavement of others

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[Chris Jenkins]

But ich mag Gabby! 

What I'm on about is the idea that the difference between our intended meaning and machine translation versus the difference between our intended meeting and what the listeners intuit our intended meaning to be may not be so great. We're aware of the loss of intention that can occur between languages, but less so the loss of intention that can occur between speaker and listener. 

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[Chris Jenkins]

Yes, I liked Vam too. Not too bad for a theistic sort. If Ian Pollard were here, we'd balance the God lovers out rather nicely. 

But see, again, that's why I miss Fran so much. He was a philosophical atheist who made you believe in God with the sincerity of his words. 

I think I'm going to email him. 

[archytas]

The machine world seeks clarity and lack of ambiguity - The Semantic Web has become a dynamic and enormous network of typed links between data

sets stored on different machines. These data sets are machine readable and unambiguously interpretable, thanks to their underlying standard representation languages.  Take this into the third world and you soon realise the human interface don't read or write any common language.  Our Boltzman Machines are into Adaptive Transferred-profile Likelihood Learning,which performs transformations on the representations to be transferred, so that they become more compatible with the target domain. At the same time,it learns supplementary knowledge about the target domain.  This follows Chris' idea on problems between human's trying to communicate with each other.  The machines just need less help.

The general area you are on about Chris, is studied as pragmatics.Pragmatics will have as its domain speakers' communicative intentions, the uses of language that require such intentions, and the strategies that hearers employ to determine what these intentions and acts are, so that they can understand what the speaker intends to communicate.

When a diplomat says yes, he means ‘perhaps’;

When he says perhaps, he means ‘no’;

When he says no, he is not a diplomat.

I'm more likely to think people don't listen much.  It would be good to find a way to stop people lying so much through PR and spin.  And just for clarity, I have defined pragmatics in the above but can come up with dozens more.  An this is before we think of such situations where one can talk with an African in her own language and translate it into French quite correctly and miss that French is a language of command in her culture and a whole load of preparation of people in inertial cultural or real violence before they speak.

On Sunday, March 1, 2015 at 6:17:20 AM UTC, Chris Jenkins wrote:

Yes, I liked Vam too. Not too bad for a theistic sort. If Ian Pollard were here, we'd balance the God lovers out rather nicely. 

But see, again, that's why I miss Fran so much. He was a philosophical atheist who made you believe in God with the sincerity of his words. 

I think I'm going to email him. 

2015-03-01 0:05 GMT-05:00 <allan...@gmail.com>:

mein Deutsch ist nicht die beste. Ich habe festgestellt, Übersetzer haben sich in den Jahren verbessert. Ich wünschte, auch Francis war hier, als auch Vam, vielleicht haben Sie zu fragen konnte.

تجنب. القتل والاغتصاب واستعباد الآخرين
Avoid; murder, rape and enslavement of others

-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Jenkins <digitalp...@gmail.com>
To: Minds-Eye <mind...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Sun, 01 Mar 2015 1:56 AM
Subject: Mind's Eye Götterdämmerung

Was passiert, wenn der einzige Weg, wie wir kommunizieren konnte, war durch Fremdsoftware nicht in der Lage zu verstehen, unsere Emotionen? Die digitale Kommunikation nicht Ton jetzt vermitteln, sich vorstellen, wenn sie verloren auch Nuancen in der Übersetzung?

Ich denke an das, weil ich die Gespräche in dieser Gruppe häufig brechen in zwei Menschen aneinander vorbei sprechen. Ich frage mich, wenn sie die anderen Lautsprecher verstehen überhaupt. Wenn unsere Worte verloren nicht nur ihr Ton, sondern auch ihre heimatlichen Dialekt; wenn sie etwas wurde noch der Sprecher nicht verstehen, bevor sie von einer anderen Person erhalten, würden wir in der Lage, überhaupt zu kommunizieren?

Ich wünschte, Fran waren hier, um zu wiegen; er würde haben Einblick Ich würde wertvoll wie ein englischer Muttersprachler, die so viel Zeit in einem Land mit einer anderen als seiner Muttersprache verbracht hat, zu finden. Gabby hat ähnliche Einsicht gegeben, wie viel Zeit sie in englischer Sprache bei uns verbringt, (und wie oft habe ich gefragt, ob ich einen Sinn in der Übersetzung verpasst), aber ich nehme an, sie werden meist nur Spaß meines schlecht übersetzt machen Deutsch. : D

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[archytas]

Forget the above and email Francis.  I will then buy you some beer and drink it vicariously on your behalf.

[allan...@gmail.com]

You have my vote and support..

[allan...@gmail.com]

From my understand politician originally meant professional liar..  good luck with the PR and spin..

تجنب. القتل والاغتصاب واستعباد الآخرين
Avoid; murder, rape and enslavement of others

-----Original Message-----

From: archytas <nwt...@gmail.com>
To: mind...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Sun, 01 Mar 2015 9:32 AM
Subject: Re: Mind's Eye Götterdämmerung

The machine world seeks clarity and lack of ambiguity - The Semantic Web has become a dynamic and enormous network of typed links between data

sets stored on different machines. These data sets are machine readable and unambiguously interpretable, thanks to their underlying standard representation languages.  Take this into the third world and you soon realise the human interface don't read or write any common language.  Our Boltzman Machines are into Adaptive Transferred-profile Likelihood Learning,which performs transformations on the representations to be transferred, so that they become more compatible with the target domain. At the same time,it learns supplementary knowledge about the target domain.  This follows Chris' idea on problems between human's trying to communicate with each other.  The machines just need less help.

The general are you are on about Chris, is studied as pragmatics.Pragmatics will have as its domain speakers' communicative intentions, the uses of language that require such intentions, and the strategies that hearers employ to determine what these intentions and acts are, so that they can understand what the speaker intends to communicate.

When a diplomat says yes, he means ‘perhaps’;

When he says perhaps, he means ‘no’;

When he says no, he is not a diplomat.

I'm more likely to think people don't listen much.  It would be good to find a way to stop people lying so much through PR and spin.

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[Molly]

Both ideas are multi faceted when implemented, Chris. I once got good marks on a French to English translation project, where I took each French word of a poem and listed all the possible English words that might correspond in a translation, creating a chart for the whole poem, and then weaving several possible threads, each coming out differently, and some completely different from what I might interpret the original poem to mean. I then took to discovering all of the translators for the work of Andre Gide and reading the same works translated by different people. Again, the original Gide somewhat lost in each translation as each translator injects themselves and their view into the work.

For me, all of this simply calls for a necessary respect for the view of others, and an understanding that there is no one correct view. Consensus reality can give us a common, as Allan would say, moral compass or cultural norm, but as that changes over time and in a few generations may be totally unacceptable. We have many reasons to be patient with each other, for sure. That doesn't make it easy, does it? If I misinterpret you and respond in an aggressive manner, you are much less likely to continue to reach an understanding, unless of course, you enjoy aggressive banter.

Providing a space and conditions for people to work or converse cooperatively does not guarantee it will happen. As Neil continues to show us, there are effective skills that facilitate and still, this is no guarantee. When the folks in the room have not been chosen for their abilities to work as a team toward a common goal, the challenges of personality and translation come up. Given the longevity of this group, I wonder how much the challenges in our personal lives that aren't discussed enter in silently. Between the speaker and the listener, there seems no end to the factors that can limit understanding. And yet, it is possible that it can be instantaneous and without a word spoken. Fascinating.

[Gabby]

Heyo Chrissy, my eternal savior! I appreciate very much your attempt at saving whatever was never there. The ring is just a parable, but I will soon have gone full circle again.

And hey, I'd rather you accused me of foul language than belittling my language competence! Your German English sounds just like your American English by the way.

I find it noticeable how you come to think that the long gone Francis might be of help while I perceive others, who are presently active in this interpretations club, who are doing a much better job. Anyways.

I joined this group because of the topic keywords and the writing "Minds Eye", which in my eyes allowed for singular as well as plural interpretations due to the "oral markers". The vast majority of active posters was Americans, which I got to know as loud, dominant, aggressive. And their strategically silent, submissive, passive-aggressive counterparts of course. My aim was to not get worked up anymore by what I perceive here, which I haven't fully managed to reach yet. But I have learned so much already about the power of manipulation and distraction and emotional dependencies in what you'd think was banal online chatting ... amazing! I will still write up a little lessons learned micro article on the difference between the American and the German understanding of God and post it here.

In my opinion this place is not dead because Neil has adopted it as his personal writing playground, which no one objects to. That's fine with me and tells me I'm late with my project.

Greetings once more across the Atlantic!

[Chris Jenkins]

Ah, but I never belittled your language competence, Gabby! What I said in American English was that I wondered sometimes if I missed an intended meaning in the translation. And, inputting my American English into Google Translated German English was a perfect example of that; little of my intended meaning was originally clear to German speakers I reckon, and translating back to American English renders it not much more than gibberish. 

What does gibberish translate to in German?

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[gabbydott]

I don't know, but I would translate it as "Quatsch". Equally wobbly sound. :)

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[Chris Jenkins]

Brilliant! I'll be using that from now on. 

[archytas]

Quatsch is rather tame and an interesting example in your terms Chris.  I heard Schmarrn more often (Austria).  Inflexion, tone and the rest would be key - just as rubbish could be a nice response to a fairy tale story or rather nasty as from a finger-wagging harridan teacher.  Machines can interpret these these things over time.

On Sunday, March 1, 2015 at 7:08:56 PM UTC, Chris Jenkins wrote:

Brilliant! I'll be using that from now on. 

On Sun, Mar 1, 2015 at 2:05 PM, gabbydott <gabb...@gmail.com> wrote:

I don't know, but I would translate it as "Quatsch". Equally wobbly sound. :)

2015-03-01 20:01 GMT+01:00 Chris Jenkins <digitalp...@gmail.com>:

Ah, but I never belittled your language competence, Gabby! What I said in American English was that I wondered sometimes if I missed an intended meaning in the translation. And, inputting my American English into Google Translated German English was a perfect example of that; little of my intended meaning was originally clear to German speakers I reckon, and translating back to American English renders it not much more than gibberish. 

What does gibberish translate to in German?

On Sun, Mar 1, 2015 at 12:44 PM, Gabby <gabb...@gmail.com> wrote:

Heyo Chrissy, my eternal savior! I appreciate very much your attempt at saving whatever was never there. The ring is just a parable, but I will soon have gone full circle again.

And hey, I'd rather you accused me of foul language than belittling my language competence! Your German English sounds just like your American English by the way.

I find it noticeable how you come to think that the long gone Francis might be of help while I perceive others, who are presently active in this interpretations club, who are doing a much better job. Anyways.

I joined this group because of the topic keywords and the writing "Minds Eye", which in my eyes allowed for singular as well as plural interpretations due to the "oral markers". The vast majority of active posters was Americans, which I got to know as loud, dominant, aggressive. And their strategically silent, submissive, passive-aggressive counterparts of course. My aim was to not get worked up anymore by what I perceive here, which I haven't fully managed to reach yet. But I have learned so much already about the power of manipulation and distraction and emotional dependencies in what you'd think was banal online chatting ... amazing! I will still write up a little lessons learned micro article on the difference between the American and the German understanding of God and post it here.

In my opinion this place is not dead because Neil has adopted it as his personal writing playground, which no one objects to. That's fine with me and tells me I'm late with my project.

Greetings once more across the Atlantic!

Am Sonntag, 1. März 2015 01:56:27 UTC+1 schrieb Chris Jenkins:

Was passiert, wenn der einzige Weg, wie wir kommunizieren konnte, war durch Fremdsoftware nicht in der Lage zu verstehen, unsere Emotionen? Die digitale Kommunikation nicht Ton jetzt vermitteln, sich vorstellen, wenn sie verloren auch Nuancen in der Übersetzung?

Ich denke an das, weil ich die Gespräche in dieser Gruppe häufig brechen in zwei Menschen aneinander vorbei sprechen. Ich frage mich, wenn sie die anderen Lautsprecher verstehen überhaupt. Wenn unsere Worte verloren nicht nur ihr Ton, sondern auch ihre heimatlichen Dialekt; wenn sie etwas wurde noch der Sprecher nicht verstehen, bevor sie von einer anderen Person erhalten, würden wir in der Lage, überhaupt zu kommunizieren?

Ich wünschte, Fran waren hier, um zu wiegen; er würde haben Einblick Ich würde wertvoll wie ein englischer Muttersprachler, die so viel Zeit in einem Land mit einer anderen als seiner Muttersprache verbracht hat, zu finden. Gabby hat ähnliche Einsicht gegeben, wie viel Zeit sie in englischer Sprache bei uns verbringt, (und wie oft habe ich gefragt, ob ich einen Sinn in der Übersetzung verpasst), aber ich nehme an, sie werden meist nur Spaß meines schlecht übersetzt machen Deutsch. : D

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[Chris Jenkins]

Yes, I'm sure they eventually will. The Singularity and all that. I wonder if we'll achieve the same level of communication growth. 

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[archytas]

Most human communication probably isn't directly conscious, so maybe there's some unconscious hope.  Something of what Gabby said on 'wobbly' goes on in the machines.  Fuzzy Description Logics (DLs) can be used to represent and reason with vague knowledge. This family of logical formalisms is very diverse, each member being characterized by a specific choice of constructors,axioms, and triangular norms, which are used to specify the semantics.They form the base language for many large-scale knowledge bases, like Snomed CT and the Gene Ontology, but  their largest success to date is the language OWL as the standard ontology language for the Semantic Web. DLs essentially allow to state relations between concepts, which represent subsets of a specific domain containing exactly those domain elements that share certain properties. Roles correspond to binary relations that allow to state connections between concepts.

In their classical form, however, DLs are not well-suited for representing and reasoning with the vagueness and imprecision that are endemic to many knowledge domains, e.g. in the bio-medical fields. One of the most common symptoms of diseases is the presence of fever, which is characterized by a high body

temperature. Clearly, it is not possible to precisely distinguish high body temperatures from non-high body temperatures. In order to appropriately represent this knowledge, it is necessary to use a formalism capable of handling imprecision. Fuzzy variants of DLs have been introduced as a means of handling imprecise

terminological knowledge. This is achieved by interpreting concepts as fuzzy sets. In a nutshell, a fuzzy set associates with every element of the universe a value from the interval [0, 1], which expresses its degree of membership to the set. This makes it possible to express, e.g. that 38◦C is a high body temperature to

degree 0.7, while 39◦C belongs to the same concept with degree 1.

Of course, one hardly puts this kind of linguistic and mathematical effort in with humans.  One cannot reliably determine whether they are switched on or merely programmed like an attack dog with a spleen problem.  I can see the point in translation for the machine, but humans are so stupid they choose the wrong end of the stick, even when correctly marked.

The ability to manage vague and imprecise knowledge is a desired feature of intelligent systems to be used in the biological and medical domains, among many others.Studying the complexity of reasoning with different fuzzy DLs allows us to discern which of these may be suitable formalisms for implementing a fuzzy knowledge representation and reasoning system. Anyone who thinks the machines aren't as smart as us should compare argument here with the chats one can have with a modern database.

http://lat.inf.tu-dresden.de/research/papers/2015/BoDP-AI15.pdf

[archytas]

Humans tend to think they do argument well - even those failed by schools.  It's interesting most people have little clue what argument itself is about.  Few get very far when asked to explain how they argue and the 'smarter' fall back on some simple rhetoric training they had on fallacies and the like.

Argumentation is a highly interdisciplinary field with links to psychology, linguistics, philosophy, legal theory, and formal logic. Since the advent of the computer age, formal models of argument have been materialized in different systems that implement — or at least support — creation, evaluation, and judgement of arguments. Dung's idea of evaluating arguments on an abstract level by taking only their inter-relationships into account, not only has been shown to underlie many of the earlier approaches for argumentation, but also uniformly captures several non-monotonic logics. This located Argumentation as a sub-discipline of Artificial Intelligence. .

One particular feature of abstract argumentation frameworks is their simple structure. In fact, abstract argumentation frameworks are just directed graphs where vertices play the role of arguments and edges indicate a certain conflict between the two connected arguments. These argumentation frameworks are usually derived during an instantiation process where structured arguments are investigated with respect to their ability to contradict other such arguments; the actual notion of “contradicting” can be instantiated in many different forms. Having generated the framework in such a way, the process of “conflict-resolution”, i.e., the search for jointly acceptable sets of arguments, is then delegated to semantics which operate on the abstract level. Thus, semantics for argumentation frameworks have also been referred to as calculi of opposition.

Stripping our argument for easier translation is not the way we are going in our chats with machines and with humans still leaves problems with the knowledge and dispositions of the recipients - including whether they will try at all, especially if a world-view they are comfortable with is challenged.

[gabbydott]

Which is why I find the God view so interesting. All rhetorics and comfort zone exodus talking automatically ends here.

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[archytas]

A blizzard just started here as I read that Gabby.  Must be a sign.  The machines don't get god, though they could work on such as AI religious guides.

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[gabbydott]

Not my problem. Sunshine here.

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[archytas]

Just thought you might have sent it.  

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[allan...@gmail.com]

(",)

تجنب. القتل والاغتصاب واستعباد الآخرين
Avoid; murder, rape and enslavement of others

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To: mind...@googlegroups.com

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[gabbydott]

Timidly lurking out of your rat hole to see if Big Daddy has left some crumbs for you? But no, in Neil's ecosystem the coffee machine owners in no way resemble King Mice! Silly me!

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[frantheman]

I'm still here - in some sense anyway. More passive, thoughtful, watching, listening and thinking. As they say on Facebook; it's complicated. There's such a volume of stuff out on the web now that I find my reluctance to contribute to it growing ever stronger in the past years. Do I have anything to say that thousands are others aren't saying? Is any attempt we make to say something not drowned out in a cacophony of of puppies, selfies, mindless chatter and incivility? In a world where significance seems to have become dependent on reduction to a viral hash-tagged tweet, or a five-second video on Vine, what happens to depth, complexity, the possibility of real interaction? Has communication finally reduced itself to atomic brevity and superficiality? Otherwise - tl;dr. 

"There is always an easy solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible, and wrong." What Menken actually said was a little different; "Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong" (The Divine Afflatus, 1917). Even within the same language quotational drift occurs. Interpretative drift is a constitutive element of discourse. Our communication is always a hit-and-miss thing, or maybe, better, a constantly creative process. What you say, what I understand. Each of us culturally in our own particular place, but sharing enough to bring some kind of communication into being - a wonderful, organic, continually self-creating kind of thing, with all sorts of levels, eddies, side-effects. An orchestral symphonic symbolic performance of memes and tropes. And that's just when it's carried out between people who "share" a common language.

Accurate, one-to-one translation/conveyance of meaning is impossible; even between two speakers of the same language. Communication becomes something else, something independent. The German theorist, Niklas Luhmann, has some interesting ideas in this area. It's a deeply counter-intuitive way of seeing things - and useful as an instrument to challenge one's own assumptions, even if you don't go all the way with him.

Nobody - as far as I know - has translated Luhmann's major works from German into English. Understandably - it's hard enough trying to figure out what exactly he's saying in one language without trying to express it in another, and when you move to his discussions and arguments with Habermas (another German master of the complicated obtuse) ... forgeddaboudit!

Though translation programmes have improved in the past decade, they're still a long way from being good. Because "meaning"/"sense" is always contextual (human subjective contextual), therefore always fluid and shifting. This is more than just "fuzzy logic." I suspect we will need genuine AI as the basis of operating systems to make them really work. Two people from different lingusitic backrounds with very limited vocabularies can communicate better - agree that they have achieved some kind of understanding - than a programme which has access to comprehensive dictionaries.

For the past months I've been formally studying - in the academic sense - in German. Kulturwissenschaft at that. It's a weird experience - there's stuff I can understand better in English, other stuff works better in German. There isn't even a good translation of the subject I'm doing my Masters in. A literal English translation of Kulturwissenschaft would be "cultural science" but English academia generally calls it "cultural studies." Which, when you think about it, means something else. Well, it's a post-modernist phenomenon anyway, which, arguably, allows one to be multidimensional with reference to meaning!

And sometimes it can be enormously productive to take an ordinary, everyday word in a particular language and twist it, mine it, pummel it, rape it, alienate it. Poets do this all the time. Sometimes even academics (a pretty mediocre lot for the most part) manage it. The use of the German word Verstehen ["to understand"] is one example.

[gabbydott]

Cheers Francis!

 
Schonhaltung or schon Haltung. The break makes the difference. And your medical knowledge bridges the gap.

Actually "overs", short form of "overstand", was my initial key word that got me looking deeper/higher into language construction long time ago. I was deeply impressed by what I had learned about Jamaican itations and Rastafari poltitical poetry. In your case the ability to do religious contextualization of language items certainly helps when studying Kulturwissenschaften. Viel Erfolg!

--

[frantheman]

I and I sometimes overstand. Sometimes don't! And does ver-stehen have the same relationship to standing as sich vertun has to doing?

[archytas]

You will be 'pleased' to know that  Stanford University Press has published a number of Luhmann's books in English: Social Systems (1995), Observations on Modernity (1998), Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy (1998), Art as a Social System (2000), The Reality of the Mass Media (2000), Theories of Distinction: Redescribing the Descriptions of Modernity (2002), and A Systems Theory of Religion (2012) - plus his last two volume monstrosity,  Anyone wanting a look at this particular goobledegook could look for free here -http://www.anci.ch/_media/beitrag/ancilla2006_66_kjaer_systems.pdf

My view is most of this material and all of economics beyond a few counting tricks is supplication and jobsworth.

[Molly]

So good to see you here again, Francis. I know what you mean about wondering if putting anything meaningful into words is possible. Know this, your words here have brightened at least a few hearts.  Thank you.

[gabbydott]

What a question, Francis! Here is basically everything you can get about "verstehen" in ist linguistic context:

http://www.dwds.de/?view=1&qu=verstehen

 I guess you are interested in the tipping point when the sensuous meaning "I am standing in this with both my feet" transgressed to the field where it became an expression for the process of intellectual comprehension:

 in-stân besagt 'in einem gegenstande stehen, fuszen, zuhause sein', under-standen, under-stân 'dazwischen d. h. mitten darin stehen'. wenn nun noch, ob auch ganz vereinzelt, ein nhd. bestehen (th. 1, 1672) in demselben sinne gebraucht wird, so würde es die anschauung vertreten 'einen gegenstand umstehen, bestehen, in seiner gewalt haben' (ahd. bi-standan vgl. umbi-: griech. ἀμφι-). von diesem ausgangspunkte läszt sich der übergang von dem sinnlichen auf das geistige gebiet verstehen, wie uns die ähnlich entwickelten bildungen be-greifen und ver-nehmen noch heute semasiologisch durchsichtig sind.

 
You can also see what the "ver"-prefix can do and has done to the root words and vice versa: http://www.dwds.de/?view=1&qu=ver

 
And to do something "aus Versehen" would be an example of how an educated Minds Eyer would justify their mistake. ;)

[archytas]

Interesting dictionaries Gabby.  You actually sound a bit like Luhmann in this tense and grammar version.  We could send all our messages to you in order to get the genuine and objective version of whatever we meant to say, though I'm sure you might resist the censorship implications of the new Gabbledegook.  Understanding transitions from sensual to intellectual and various aspects of nuance has long been part of racist and classist presupposition in intelligence.

The verstehen problematic includes the idea that we should not expect to treat language in our theoretical expectations, as 'naive' participants have their own assumptions and hypotheses of which researchers themselves may be ignorant.  One thus goes for more 'ethno' approaches such as ethnomethodology.  The literature is generally boring, not unlike dictionaries.  I suppose we enter the learning hoping to stand on the shoulders of giants, but few enter these educational processes on a voluntary basis.  Science, with its objective outcomes, should be easy to teach, yet is not.  In Chris' 'strip the language for easy interpretation' terms, what could be easier than teaching people simple standardisation like "measuring a meniscus"?  You can demonstrate the doing to explain the word and necessary actions.  Now send the little dears off to do some titration.  Simples!  Yet much gets in the way even of this kind of simple instruction.  Many kids aren't even considered fit to enter the laboratory and, indeed, even fit to have such simple pointed instruments as a compass to learn a bit of geometry (owing to stabbings, self-harm and so on).

Gabby's spin is a delight, even if I get a vision of her standing with two feet in a rabbit hole, and was waiting for the barb at the end, which came here with a smile.  AI can catch these patterns.  Most of us in this game have noticed we are after machine intelligence because we despair of the glib internet world Francis describes.and that defeasible logic loses all beauty contests with Chris holding up a craft beer.  The despair on human rationality and the libidinal biologically bound trivial is a motivator, perhaps once found in science cutting out the Idols Gabby has an undeclared better version of she has forgotten, in trying to get machines to do what humans have always failed at - argument properly informed by Reason and 'big data' approaches not constrained to selling us another planet-burning widget.  One thing I think we have been very bad at is grasping frames of ideology, including why people generally act in them.  This was the big theme in both Luhmann and Habermas, who did nothing on how we might live without the violence of poverty and needing to make livings.  There is no grasp of Gabby as the existential cash girl she described herself as.  One can model all of us in fuzzy sets on such lines, not unlike her idea of the trace of people's histories to the 'moment'.  Socrates was described by his wife as a good-looking waster, not much good at putting food on the family table and helping with childcare.  We neglect what argument is and why anyone else would want to listen to it.  The dogs watch me, concerned only that I finish and enter their rationality of being off the lead along the riverbank.

There is an old joke about standing in something on both feet.  This is a punishment in hell, standing in excrement up to one's neck.  This, of course, is for the tea break.  One spends the rest of the day standing on one's hands.

 

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[archytas]

Language is very like quantum and cosmos - one can get in very small or look to the bigger frame.  Whether we are looking at what actually matters seems to get left out.

[allan...@gmail.com]

Language is always important and difficult to use correctly.

تجنب. القتل والاغتصاب واستعباد الآخرين
Avoid; murder, rape and enslavement of others

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[archytas]

That's true - yet part of the 'correct' use is regurgitating what has already been assumed correct like scrolls and academic text.  Even people who can do the 'academic' don't seem to be able to say much that matters to them.

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[frantheman]

One of my professors has suggested that I do a research paper next semester on the reception of Habermas' thinking about society in the English-speaking (academic) world, Neil. I'm internally resisting because I find him so long-winded, obtuse, boring, and self-important (a typical German academic in other words). I can think of about a hundred things I'd rather do than immerse myself in his writings - like cleaning the windows in my flat for instance.

Fundamentally, Habermas is also a typical German philosopher (like Leibnitz and Hegel) in that he believes he lives in the best possible world - that of centre-left North European liberal democracy (though, should he in his dotage find the way to this group, he would probably deny this and condemn us all from his self-appointed position as the doyen of German ivory-tower intellectuals). I would argue that there may have been a moment when he was perhaps partially right, but this moment has gone.

In a longer historical context of the past 250 years, there was a moment when the rationalist liberal bourgeois spirit seemed to be reaching some kind of fruition in the West - between the end of WWII and the beginning of the 80s. Then came Reagan, Thatcher, and the religious orthodoxy of neo-liberal economics and the moment was lost. What I believe happened was that the old (and some new) elites had finally recovered enough power over the basic decency of New Deal, social-democratic, open, liberal (in the true sense) democracy to once more rearrange things to their own maximised benefit. This is the central point made by Piketty in Capital in the Twenty-First Century. No wonder he has been so viciously attacked by various acolytes of neo-liberal economic orthodoxy. Since then, Habermas' "unfinished project" of western liberalism has been continuously - and purposely - unravelled, often leaving the forms intact while killing the living substance.

Much as I would like to see it, I find myself despairing more and more over the possibility of the kind of decent rational discourse Chris is pleading for. It's possible - sometimes - in microcosmic areas like this forum (though even here it can be easily sabotaged). There's one way of telling the narrative of the history of ideas in the past 250 years which goes like this: Once upon a time there was a dream of rational and reasoned discourse. It was called the Enlightenment. It soon became tainted by the virus of Romanticism and it turned into Modernity, which came with lots of unpleasant features like nationalism and fascism. It has now almost completely disappeared, constantly castigated by braying apologists of nationalist, ideological, or religious certainty before ultimately drowning in a sea of triviality.

Of course, that's only one way of telling the story. I don't think I'd like to live in a platonic republic ruled by philosopher-kings and Robespierre, Saint-Just, and the Committee of Public Safety justified the Terror with an appeal to Reason. As humans we are more than just our rationality. This is what makes real communication so difficult - but also so rich and fascinating. What we need, perhaps, is less certainty and self-righteousness, more decency, respect, and listening.

[Chris Jenkins]

I'm so happy right now. :) This conversation is excellent. 

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[archytas]

Just hold up the beer Chris, preferably in the company of pretty women.

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[allan...@gmail.com]

Good to see the old crew coming back..

تجنب. القتل والاغتصاب واستعباد الآخرين
Avoid; murder, rape and enslavement of others

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[archytas]

Habermas was essential research methods reading here, often in the context of the alleged debate he was having with the postmodernists and post-structuralists.  His ideas on science were truly schoolboy and uppity, clearly conceiving of it as a kind of half-learning.  Critical Theory more generally was quite popular in our business schools, alongside Foucault and other saints like Derrida.  The basic idea was you couldn't be a positivist, the debate so stupid you could add 'like Popper' to that - he was clearly no positivist at all.  Durkhein, Mauss, Weber, Marx, Soddy, ED Morel and lots more from 100 years ago is more radical - even Adam Smith and Andrew George.

Lots has been written on Habermas' impact in the English speaking world - e.g. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2777774?sid=21105532000851&uid=4&uid=2&uid=3738032 - so if you wanted an easy paper ... I could help with the window washing!

None of this stuff looks like argument to me at all.  Must cook tea.

[archytas]

It's all about books that tell you at the beginning that it's all about power - and 900 pages later conclude it's all about power.  The reader, of course, merely loses the will to live between these statements.

[gabbydott]

Much as I would like to see it, I find myself despairing more and more over the possibility of the kind of decent rational discourse Chris is pleading for.

 

Hm? Chris was pleading for you and Habermas is pleading for "herrschaftsfreier Diskurs", so not all hope is lost. ;)

Western liberalism is the concept that I find needs further problematization. This is what I would see you working on. I am often astounded how differently the idea of "liberal" is taken in English speaking countries.

[frantheman]

Habermas is fine with "herrschaftsfreier Diskurs" as long as he has the "Herrschaft"! :-)

I came at Habermas sideways this semester; I was doing pretty intensive work on the historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler, in particular his monumental five-volume Deutsche Sozialgeschichte 1770-1989, and you can't work on Wehler without having to look at Habermas. The two of them met as kids in the Hitler-Jugend in Gummersbach, where Habermas was Wehler's Gruppenführer, and remained friends and close associates all their lives - coming to each other's defence in many of those vicious intellectual fights German academics are so fond of (e.g. the Sonderweg discussion, or the Historikerstreit).

Both Habermas and Wehler are proponents of what is called in German the bürgerliche Gesellschaft. To come back to a major theme of this thread, this is a term which it is very difficult to accurately translate into English without losing much of its meaning in German and adding things in English which are not there in German. There is, in fact, no real English word for bürgerlich; conventionally the French term bourgeois is used. But bourgeois has many negative connotations in English (particularly since the 60s, when it was almost exclusively used in a pejorative Marxist sense) - bürgerlich is used in German in a much more varied, and often matter-of-fact fashion. "Middle class" could also be used, but that's a term that can also be problematic. "Civil society" also captures some of its meaning in a more neutral sense. When I use the term "liberal democracy," or "western liberalism" in English, I think the German translation for what I am trying to describe is bürgerliche Gesellschaft. And when I speak of "New Deal, social-democratic, open, liberal (in the true sense) democracy," it's basically an attempt to describe what German much more concisely calls soziale Marktwirtschaft.

Translation is difficult, because languages both define and are defined by culture. What's the German for leadership? Führung. So what's the German for leader? Führer. But because of German history, there are major difficulties with using that word, particularly in a German context. In English there's no problem with calling Angela Merkel the "German leader." But deutsche Führer or Führerin? Good luck with that one! Or, taking a feminist turn - the most common German translation for authority (in the sense of power/control) is Herrschaft. How about Frau-schaft? Or even Frau schafft! 

Language is tricky - translation even more so. 

[gabbydott]

Actually I have been thinking of this book here: http://www.amazon.de/Geschichte-Westens-Die-Zeit-Gegenwart/dp/3406669867/ref=sr_1_14?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1425546635&sr=1-14&keywords=deutsche+geschichte

But then you can tell by the mere look at the cover that I'm "historically" a West-Berliner and therefore bound to be biased in that direction.

My son is writing his Leistungskurs Politische Weltkunde Klausur on the German Grundgesetz at this very moment and he has been very much educated in the above mentioned spirit. I tried not to mess up his preparation this time by bringing up some very different truths. I see them less based in language though, which helps me to learn to keep my mouth shut when it's time to listen.

[archytas]

I never found the order I searched for but always a sinister and well-planned disorder that increases in the hands of those who hold power while the others who clamor for a more kindly world a world with less hunger and more hopefulness die of torture in the prisons. Don’t come any closer there’s a stench of carrion surrounding me. Claribel Alegría, “From the Bridge” 

Events of massive, public suffering defy quantitative analysis. How can one really understand statistics citing the death of six million Jews or graphs of thirdworld starvation? Do numbers really reveal the agony, the interruption, the questions that these victims put to the meaning and nature of our individual lives and life as a whole? Rebecca Chopp, The Praxis of Suffering

If only I had a graduate student bright enough to tell me he'd rather wash windows than read Habermas.  At least I could say in return that reading Habermas probably equips one only as a window cleaner,  Rawls would probably be the equivalent in English.  The terms do not translate easily Francis, yet one finds people saying the same things.  Indeed, the importation of the 'great names' looks a lot like the way we import loony-tune experts to 'help' with such as 'satanic abuse'.

http://ir.nmu.org.ua/bitstream/handle/123456789/133648/86154a0de3b41902f6fd8200c20f6207.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y - takes an anthropological run at social issues and has the virtue of being free.  There are, of course, so many approaches, so much to read, that one ends up doing nothing else.

Winkler is published in English, though not the book at the end of Gabby's link.  If one compares what he says with standard BBC history fodder, still stuck in Kings and Queens, then German history looks a lot more honest.  In fact, there is plenty of work like Winkler's in English and we just get the dross on television.  It is tempting to ask undergraduates (any students) to read some of the more realistic material - pretty much a total re-education.  Yet, if you do manage to get into Gabby-listening mode, a lot of them already know they have been fed crap.  And one has to ask what erudition has done for oneself and how you end up teaching people who are becoming debt-serfs, and why we have to keep threatening them that this is the only way to avoid poverty through life.  Go postmodern and one should ask why you still get to mark the work.  Generally, all text has a core academic narrative leading you by the nose.

This form of the academy strikes me as a diversion from the consideration of practical change.  For a start, most people are excluded from it because they are not literate enough, much as we have made innumeracy a bar to science.  Much as we need real history and need it across general literature (so 'Good Queen Bess' might actually be seen inspiring troops after the battles were won and not paying the sailors), and we need to see what we are really doing in the world, this involves realising we have been had and live under a control fraud that includes much academic learning we have sunk costs in.  Habermas cannot 'work' unless we change money structures and find a way to get work done without poverty as a motivator.  Yet one can learn to teach his stuff in the current system.  One can be very content, 5,000 words into an elaboration of his work as phenomenological structuralism for a conference in Vigo, knowing it has sod all to do with anything other than a free personal trip to Vigo.  I did a joke sketch there instead.

Somewhere in all this we are scared to death of looking at how the world is run.  

On Thursday, March 5, 2015 at 9:44:45 AM UTC, Gabby wrote:

Actually I have been thinking of this book here: http://www.amazon.de/Geschichte-Westens-Die-Zeit-Gegenwart/dp/3406669867/ref=sr_1_14?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1425546635&sr=1-14&keywords=deutsche+geschichte.  

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[Allan H]

Trying to figure out how to create changes very difficult.. Most people never get beyond finger pointing   and condemning those ah strive to make a better world..

تجنب. القتل والاغتصاب واستعباد الآخرين
Avoid; murder, rape and enslavement of others

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Subject: Re: Mind's Eye Re: Götterdämmerung

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[archytas]

Francis mentioned that anyone devising reflexive theory needs to reflect on their own position.  I think this frame is missed almost entirely, yet it is easy enough to spot that a lot of very wordy people make comfortable livings inside the Establishment zoo. It's rare to find students who understand there are many arguments and that most of the time we just follow what was done the day before.

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[allan...@gmail.com]

Following what was done the day before is both very tiring and boring..

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[Don Johnson]

Very much enjoying the commentary. Gabby, I have read that the divide between what is classical-liberalism and modern-liberalism in the States began during FDR's administration. Campiagn speeches by Hoover and Roosevelt were both peppered with classical-liberal rhetoric. Indeed, there was some competition to see who would be the most fiscally conservative. FDR won. Then came the New Deal and unprecedented goverment spending and involvement in everyday life. Thus changing the public's view on what "liberalism" was all about. Now we have a neoclassical liberalism called Libertarianism. It will be interesting to see how this will be perverted in the decades to come as no doubt it will be if we ever get a President elected on this ticket. 

Nice to see the old crew at it again. 

dj

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[archytas]

Good to see you too Don.  I'm not much into the nuances of translation stuff, partly because I lack Gabby's skills and Francis' patience.  There are many versions of Chris' 'make the language simple enough for translation' angle - one here is called the 'Crystal Method' and is taught to our bullshit bureaucrats, so they can confuse us with smaller words.  We scientists got the 'Fog Index', screwed as soon as you use an equation or start talking about attribution tests and extreme value analysis.

I see another kind of 'translation'.  Habermas is actually quite easy compared with other Germans like Gunter Ludwig on how scientific theories come about.  Russell and Whitehead wrote three volumes on why one and one make two and, eventually, were wrong.  Things get relative when we try to ground stuff in origin (I was told to remove the word 'stuff' from my thesis as it was too common a word).  I translate this complex social stuff into a long line of philosophical effort.

There is no 'start' or 'origin'.  If I mention the pre-Socratics and the pyrrhonists, I know they were much influenced from Persia and India.  They at least knew argument can nearly always be made in several different ways that are very difficult to choose between.  One gets a line from this stuff to Descartes and that 'I am thinking therefore I am' stuff - I'm more of an I woke up and am still here bloke.  Socrates and Bacon more or less said public opinion ain't worth shit and Descartes continued this in radical doubt, supposedly grounded on not being able to deny one's own presence.  Actually, there being thoughts does not imply a thinker, and if you doubt everything you are, in fact, doubting nothing and have made doubt into something that can't ground itself.  Wittgenstein eventually says we have been arguing over the same terrain for centuries, not resolved anything and thus must be bewitched by the language we are using.  So we should know more about language.

This turns into what we now call social epistemology, away from the individual introspective sole thinker to something more social.  Marx is a classic example and the discipline of sociology.  One can split this in many ways, though the standard differences are as follows:

" The classical approach could be realized in at least two forms. One would emphasize the traditional epistemic goal of acquiring true beliefs. It would study social practices in terms of their impact on the truth-values of agents' beliefs. A second version of the classical approach would focus on the epistemic goal of having justified or rational beliefs. Applied to the social realm, it might concentrate, for example, on when a cognitive agent is justified or warranted in accepting the statements and opinions of others. Proponents of the anti-classical approach have little or no use for concepts like truth and justification. In addressing the social dimensions of knowledge, they understand "knowledge" as simply what is believed, or what beliefs are "institutionalized" in this or that community, culture, or context. They seek to identify the social forces and influences responsible for knowledge production so conceived. Social epistemology is theoretically significant because of the central role of society in the knowledge-forming process. It also has practical importance because of its possible role in the redesign of information-related social institutions."

 Karl Marx's theory of ideology could well be considered a type of social epistemology. On one interpretation of Marx's conception of "ideology", an ideology is a set of beliefs, a world-view, or a form of consciousness that is in some fashion false or delusive. The cause of these beliefs, and perhaps of their delusiveness, is the social situation and interests of the believers. Since the theory of ideology, so described, is concerned with the truth and falsity of beliefs, it might even be considered a form of classical social epistemology.
Karl Mannheim (1936) extended Marx's theory of ideology into a sociology of knowledge. He classed forms of consciousness as ideological when the thoughts of a social group can be traced to the group's social situation or "life conditions". Critical theory aims at emancipation and enlightenment by making agents aware of hidden coercion in their environment, enabling them to determine where their true interests lie. Beliefs that agents would agree upon in the ideal speech situation are ipso facto true beliefs (Habermas and Luhmann 1971: 139, 224). Here a social communicational device is treated as a type of epistemic standard.

Habermas, Jurgen and Luhmann, Niklas (1971), Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie – Was Leistet die Systemforschung?  Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

I could easily extend this to a book so tedious that Francis would be smashing windows rather than cleaning them.  I have read loads of this stuff, only to conclude the mechanisms involved more or less avoid the human condition.   In the 1930s, Ludwik Fleck (1896–1961), a Polish-Jewish microbiologist, developed the first system of the historical philosophy and sociology of science. Fleck claimed that cognition is a collective activity, since it is only possible on the basis of a certain body of knowledge acquired from other people. When people begin to exchange ideas, a thought collective arises, bonded by a specific mood, and as a result of a series of understandings and misunderstandings a peculiar thought style is developed. When a thought style becomes sufficiently sophisticated, the collective divides itself into an esoteric circle (professionals) and an exoteric circle (laymen). A thought style consists of the active elements, which shape ways in which members of the collective see and think about the world, and of the passive elements, the sum of which is perceived as an “objective reality”. What we call “facts”, are social constructs: only what is true to culture is true to nature. Thought styles are often incommensurable: what is a fact to the members of a thought collective A sometimes does not exist to the members of a thought collective B, and a thought that is significant and true to the members of A may sometimes be false or meaningless for members of B.

The story goes on and on.  Most people get more or less no chance to learn any of it.  Fleck's ideas in brief are in“Crisis in Science. Towards a Free and More Human Science”, in R. S. Cohen and Th. Schnelle (eds.), 1986, pp. 153–158.

One of the big questions is how we can translate much of this into something that translates to quick understanding and doesn't lead to a bunch of Guardians replacing current control as in Soviet Paradise or neo-liberalism under the US military umbrella.

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[allan...@gmail.com]

What publisher are you planning to use?

تجنب. القتل والاغتصاب واستعباد الآخرين
Avoid; murder, rape and enslavement of others

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To: mind...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Sat, 07 Mar 2015 12:54 PM
Subject: Re: Mind's Eye Re: Götterdämmerung

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[frantheman]

 What a wonderful overview, Neil! I envy your capacity to cook down the huge amount of controversy involving epistemology, sociology, ideology, modernism and post-modernism into a few comprehensible paragraphs.

 

Personally, I find myself suspended between the kind of modernism proposed by Habermas and the various post-modernist critiques of it. Not always an easy (or consistent) position, I'm trying to figure out a way to construct a hammock on the basis of this suspension which allows me to comfortably swing from one to the other as I please. And didn't someone once comment that consistency is the privilege of small minds?

 

If critical theory has established anything, it's that the old metaphysical arguments about ontology and "das Ding in sich" are just a waste of time. We can't ultimately get out of our skins; our knowledge is human knowledge, worked out and communicated in human terms, and as such it will always have a cultural and societal framework. Such frameworks are dynamic, interacting with each other, growing, changing ... organic really - which is no wonder, given that humans are organic beings. "Pure" rationality is a chimera, because as humans we can only think in human categories. Should we ever encounter aliens, I suspect that the intercommunication would be difficult, frustrating and endlessly fascinating, because they might very well structure their thinking according to other categories (that's why they can travel faster than light, by the way, their way of doing logic doesn't see the problem of e=mc² – they just take the interdimensional back-way through their granny’s garden. That is if we don’t kill them first, or they run away from us in horror to call the inter-stellar exterminators to come and deal with us because we’re not fit to be let loose on civilized galactic society). And, of course, one of the major – perhaps the major characteristic of the inevitable human context of our knowledge is language.

 

Habermas is wonderfully attractive in his appeal for reasonable and reasoned discourse on societal issues - this conviction that it is possible through dialogue and mutual understanding to reach conclusions which will actually make things better. In the end, of course, he's a good old-fashioned bourgeois liberal who believes in "progress". The problem with him is that he is convinced that his position (and the post-WWII western German society in which he lived in, and which he has worked on forming all his adult life) is the superior position (as I said before - typical German philosopher). I become ever more suspicious of people who know that they're right - and that everyone else is consequently less right - or to put it more bluntly, wrong. 

 

This is where the post-modernists gleefully point their fingers at him. Denying others absolute truth, he implicitly and pragmatically claims it for himself. (It’s also why he can’t stand them!) On the other hand, the various post-modernist turns run the risk (and are repeatedly accused) of falling into complete laissez-faire multi-culti, anything-goes relativism. If our truth-values – to which our moral values belong – are societally, historically and culturally conditioned, what right do I have to claim my moral values are better than yours? Weren’t the niggers better off as slaves on the plantation, being looked after by a kind and paternalistic massa, than being condemned to living a constant life of danger, deprivation, drugs and depression in some run-down project in contemporary decrepit Detroit? Or let’s not even bother with spurious justifications, let’s go all the way to social Darwinism; the strong do as they will, and the weak suffer as they must. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, Amen.

 

So, at the moment, this is where I find myself intellectually at the moment, gently swinging in my hammock between these two positions. Descartes may have found his answer to doubt in his own affirmation of his self-cognitive rationality (though Dan Dennett believes he can define this out of existence), but it’s still a big step to the conviction of the ultimate rightness of the particular positions one espouses. Maybe the recognition of the conditionality of our own premises, and the openness to the possibility of their correctibility – while not automatically offering them up as being completely conjectural and relative - is the real prerequisite for meaningful discourse. Or as Oliver Cromwell (normally not someone over-inclined to questioning his own righteousness) once asked the Assembly of the Church of Scotland, “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken!”  Of course, that still leaves the question open; how can you even begin to discuss with people who know they’re right?

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[frantheman]

Sheldon Cooper of The Big Bang Theory justifies his claim always to be right thus: "If I were wrong I would know it!"

...

[gabbydott]

Hey Francis, allow me to tell you where I see your hammock ultimately swing to: to stillstand as the final endlösung. No, nowadays we try to get out of the who-is-more-right-to-be-considered-righteous by taking the 360 degree approach. One man alone is not the island he used to think himself of. And there is more to knowledge that language will ever be able to depict along the axes of coordinates of paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations. I always had the feeling that "Eastern liberalism" never had a problem with that.

And hey Don, I still need to look up a lot of your tag words to make them accessible in my context.

[gabbydott]

For us women this is what we are typically confronted with and have developed various work-arounds. We fear the divorce solicitor for she is telling us how we have built our belief system on trusting our feelings.

--

[archytas]

I suppose the collected works of Habermas and Luhmann would be about the size of a big wardrobe.  I am not a believer, though find Habermas very tempting,  "Descartes" (thought of in a long line that might include Molly and Orn) is about the pursuit of truth and this continues in social epistemology, dropping the solus ipse to a considerable extent - we certainly no longer hew to rigid introspectionism - though we can ask 'did we ever'?  Molly and Orn don't work as people like that, though stand up well as examples of people trying for something I have deep respect for (there are some key epistemic issues in this - resolvable I think in terms of people who want peace and justice).  

"Whereas Descartes thought that truth should be pursued only by the proper conduct of "reason," specifically, the doxastic agent's own reason, social epistemology acknowledges what everyone except a radical skeptic will admit, namely, that quests for truth are commonly influenced, for better or for worse, by institutional arrangements that massively affect what doxastic agents hear (or fail to hear) from others. To maximize prospects for successful pursuits of truth, this variable cannot sensibly be neglected."

This paragraph could do with some Chris-style 'stripping for translation'!  Doxastic agents!  It is surely 'bleedin' obvious' we are people of cultures.  At risk of Gabby's wrath, I will mention again these cultures are Bacon's Idols.  Feminism is a good example of a social epistemology in bringing out the male domination of control fraud knowledge.  

The message, eventually, after reading several wardrobes,, is that we are largely being being had through culturally transmitted control frauds.  The questions really concern how we could do something better and how we can tell people they are being conned (a very difficult matter).  Debates on epistemology that people can't understand, framed in academic ways of making livings, involving complex literacy and numeracy, hardly form anything easily translatable - the ways of making academic livings also control frauds.

If one looks at a small area like forensic science, where on might assume well understood science would produce easily translatable facts, we get a lot of human corruption.  The proper function of forensic science is to extract the truth. This function, unfortunately, is not well served by current practice. Saks et al. (2001: 28) write: "As it is practised today, forensic science does not extract the truth reliably. Forensic science expert evidence that is erroneous (that is, honest mistakes) and fraudulent (deliberate misrepresentation) has been found to be one of the major causes, and perhaps the leading cause, of erroneous convictions of innocent persons." One rogue scientist engaged in rampant falsification for 15 years, and another faked more than 100 autopsies on unexamined bodies and falsified dozens of toxicology and blood reports (Kelly and Wearne 1998; Koppl 2006, Other Internet Resources). Shocking cases are found in more than one country. 

Kelly, J. F. and Wearne, P. (1998), Tainting Evidence: Inside the Scandals at the FBI Crime Lab, New York: The Free Press.

Koppl, Roger (2005), "Epistemic Systems," Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology, 2 (2): 91–106.

We are affected by this in very practical ways.  My contention is most of the problems could be brought to obvious light.  We are 'allowed' the epistemological, but not practical action.  Francis' hammock is in the right place, the metaphor replete with the quiescence involved in framing oneself as an academic (which Francis obviously isn't in the best sense I can mean that).  I once 'fitted up' a paedophile for other crimes - he had committed them, so technically it wasn't a fit up.  The institutional and legal barriers were too big to fight and still are.  It got him off the streets for a couple of years, though he continued after release.  Ugly Ray Terret has just been retrospectively convicted and given 25 years.  One might think we could address the issues of social epistemology through practical examples everyone can grasp.  Indeed, Kopl tries.  Yet the ideologies of soaked-up knowledge, various COWDUNGS (conventional wisdoms of dominant groups) make this an act of heretic courage.  There are still people who can't take the idea that, say, if born in the Muslim world they would be Muslim.

In the West we are dominated by neo-liberalism and economic blather.  Even if we vote to change this, as the Greeks just have, what can any politicians do confronted with the 'smoke filled rooms' they enter off the corridors of power with warnings that anything other than austerity will lead to disaster?  Economics is largely a lie through which dominance is exerted and the West (now largely under the US military umbrella) 'stays ahead' - and who sensibly would not want this shield against even worse domination from elsewhere?

There have been people talking about positive money, democratic foreign policy and radical democracy for more than 100 years.  Yet in politics we get to vote for main parties making jawbs-groaf promises within neo-liberalism, corrupt banking and utterly false notions on how growth is achieved and what it should be.  The real dialogue is made invisible, and Francis' hammock, if right in immanent academic consideration, is part of bearing witness before the crash.  I'm not suggesting Francis is doing this

We need to think global and beyond.  Yet look what globalisation has done so far and what we fear leaders will do whatever they spout.

[archytas]

'the axes of coordinates of paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations' - very Lyotard - living at the intersections of many competing language-games.  Trusting feelings has long been the mug's game, though there seems no gender split on this particular dumbness.  Lyotard was keen to say he wasn't giving up on truth and justice and prefaced 'postmodernity is incredulity towards metanarratives' with 'oversimplifying to the extreme'.  In anthropology, language explanations are now considered in terms of what can be seen in day-to-day practices.  Elizabeth Anderson characterizes feminist epistemology as properly belonging within social epistemology, describing it as “the branch of social epistemology that investigates the influence of socially constructed conceptions and norms of gender and gender-specific interests and experiences on the production of knowledge”

Anderson, Elizabeth, 1995a. “Feminist Epistemology: An Interpretation and a Defense,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 10(3): 50–84.

I seem to remember being told I should have true feelings of some kind.  This was not good advice and there seems to have been no world for me to live in like that.

...

[frantheman]

Don't worry, Neil, I haven't sold out and swallowed the academic bait with hook, line and sinker! There is, as you often and rightly point out, an immense amount of waffle in the whole academic business, frequently clothing platitudes, or very small ideas in pages of obfusticating gobbledegook, all of it referenced with hundreds of footnotes to show everyone how clever and diligent you are. 

But, as I mentioned earlier, I have - after a break of nearly 30 years - once more formally engaged with the academic world, and am just finishing the first semester of a Masters programme in cultural studies. However I'm fortunate that I have no great ambitions to make a career out of it, nor am I compelled to do so. I still work at an honest job to make a living, though I have been able to cut down my working hours to the extent that I now get by with doing eight night-shifts per month, looking after four chronically seriously ill children. - - 

- - (short pause in writing this to detach a seven year hellion from her respirator and monitor so that she can go to the bathroom, followed by a discussion in sign-language (she's deaf), making it clear to her that she must go back to sleep as it's only two thirty in the morning and she has to go to school tomorrow. She may have many health issues, but for all that she's a typical seven year old, with an infinite capacity for negotiation about stuff she doesn't feel like doing) - -

- - Furthermore, I am immensely fortunate to live in a country where third level education - at state universities (and the Fernuniversität Hagen is a fully recognised state university on the Open University model) is nearly completely free - it costs me € 300 per semester ... read it and weep, American readers! Now that my daughters are independently earning their own living,I've no one to look after except myself, which makes it all financially possible without having to go into horrific debt or live on bread and water in an unheated garret.

Cultural Studies is an unusual beast. It was invented around thirty to forty years ago by Literature Departments to stave off their widely perceived danger of drifting into terminal irrelevance and extinction. In Hagen it's organised jointly by the (German) Literature Department and the History Department (which identifies strongly with a sociological approach to history and regards Max Weber as being only marginally inferior to God). As someone embarking on this intellectual journey, I do feel a certain need to try to identify my own particular standpoint with respect to all the diverse intellectual/academic directions, currents, schools and outlooks which one encounters in this area. All the more so as the specific subject of the Masters programme glories in the title "European Modernity." Sort of, "everything you wanted to know about the past two hundred and fifty years but were afraid to ask ... or answer." 

The more I read in this whole area, the more I find myself being stimulated and excited by the various turns in postmodernist thinking. Lyotard's scepticism regarding metanarratives (which you mentioned) echoes with me, as does a lot of stuff that Frederic Jameson writes - his analyses of particular works of modern architecture are great. Of course there's an awful lot of pretentious academic wanking around too, but at the moment I'm still at the stage of enjoying having my mind and concepts extended. If only there weren't such annoying things such as exams and reaserch papers (I'm currently trying to finish one on the protoindustrial development of the textile industry in the Duchy of Berg from 1700 to 1820 ... yawn!), but that's the price I have to pay for getting formally involved in the academic business once more.

Of course I'm not going to save the world with any of this, but there is a great feeling of liberation in studying just for fun. And I can now once more officially regard myself as a student, which means I don't have to get up early in the morning if I don't feel like it. And maybe do all kinds of other mad stuff ...

...

[archytas]

Warrington won today Francis - still gives me a lift, though the game is trivial.  I know you are a man of action old friend.  I was once Chair of the Textiles Institute special interest group on personnel and yawn easily on mention of thread.  Shall I treat you to the link between statistical work on yarn snapping and climate change?  Definitely a yawn yarn to most.  Attribution studies and on to extreme value analysis.

The academic game has many flaws, yet can still be a place free of the tour of instruments of torture.  I remember being in an exam board that had just decided to fail a student called Tony.  He was a fairly heavy drug user and Hell's Angel - nice enough guy.  I had to protest on the grounds he was the only candidate who had got the answer right.  He hadn't done the linear program and his answer was a sketch on one side of A4.  The linear program couldn't give an answer in real world conditions, whereas Tony's system did.  It was a '12 Angry Men' situation and everyone hated me for bringing them around to my point of view, which was that failing our brightest student on the grounds of thinking for himself and getting the right answer was miserably pathetic.

Actual business history is pretty much a no no in managerial teaching.  The history of Microsoft and Apple starts in entrepreneurial garages, not the years of military research and who got privileged to develop it commercially.  The American writer Steve Fraser is quite good at pointing to the State in so-called US free trade.  In Britain we might examine the Indian and now Afghan drug trade and the money trails, the abolition of slavery and vast payments to the owners, trackable to the likes of the Cameron family.  The non-neutrality of money-capital is fascinating, though one must forget this to teach economics as though no human interests are involved.  There are some old seminary tales related to this concerning what the public can be allowed to know.

There are many comforts in scholarship, not unlike the thrill of finding the bad guys and bringing them to book - yet also tinged with the realization much worse than one is allowed to investigate is present.  Quite how we come to be existential wage-serfs and allow global arbitrage to play us off one against the other, and what libidinal economy might be behind this is a fascinating study. Not much training for the world of bullshit jobs though.  And not without irony when one considers the use of The Road to Serfdom by vile neo-liberalism and neo-classical economics.

The world, needing big answers, is chronically petty. Yet big solutions are often fascist, the most petty ideology of all.  Science blundered into the atom and destructive energy we were otherwise shielded from.  We have no fusion reactor, just 'better' bombs and probably light-speed weaponry.  Biology now allows us to remove harmful elements through techniques like the three parent baby (removing problems in mitochondrial DNA) - we select eggs without obvious disability problems for fertilisation - yet moral problems remain.

Epistemologies can have tolerance built-in, yet will still reach points of decision on what is the best option.  My own view now is that much argument takes place by excluding notions of data - and it is very difficult to pin down what data is.  Is Habermas 'theoretical' and Piketty 'empirical'?  I can advance some pretty complex arguments on empirical adequacy, but for now would say the evidence for Habermas is more or less all around us and Piketty is restricted to a few old archives.  The assertion that we must be empirical generally comes from people who cannot explain what this means and are unaware how they have come to theoretically construct the assertion.

I came across the social model of disability years ago.  I don't see it as a viable model for disability, though get the point.  It makes a great deal of sense in terms of wider society and how a few disable so many others.  What is not present in our vapid, cooing newsrooms seems good data on this.  Economics with no idea how much work needs doing and the planet can support would be data in an analysis of the disabling of rationality.  Gabby is now barred from career progression as this ends at 45 for women (newsroom droning in background).  But what is such career progress anyway - to become the Director responsible for not investigating child sexual abuse?  I'm reading David Graeber's 'The Utopia of Rules: on technology, stupidity and the secret joys of bureaucracy' at the moment, solely to get some relief from GabbyAllanGate.  The academy still offers similar relief from three of Bacon's main Idols, though one is on stage in the Idol of the Theatre.  At least one is guaranteed some reasonable feedback, which partly comes from the literature itself and someone bothered to articulate her protocols of experience.

Chris' point is lost in translation here.  I would prescribe a week drinking with Geordies, who sound like Scots with their heads bashed in.  I never understand a word, but seem to fit in.  Habermas translates to technological solutions, odd as he had it that technology is ideology.  This would involve the removal of the allocation class, positive money, new forms of work not forced on us by poverty fears-reality and the embodiment of expert knowledge in machines.  Religion creeps in here, as this would be a jubilee event on debt and debt peonage. We might even be able to move on from 'another brick in the wall' education and economics as war by other means.  Meanwhile, Dan Sperber writes on how argument actually prevents argument.  Part of the data here is most people can't even hack what is on offer in schools or that social epistemology is telling them they live in delusion.

...

[Molly]

Cheers, Francis, to all the mad stuff you are doing!

...

[archytas]

One of the missing themes in social epistemology is that people might have already worked out the 'great theory of coerced oppression' themselves.  The theory then just tells everyone what they knew from experience.  Huge numbers of people think the stuff naive in the face of obvious power.  We then kow-tow like dogs in a pack or chimps under the alpha (a 'political appointee').  Teaching is a kind of suppressing fire in this view.  A lot of biological metaphors make sense here.  Insect consensus, the ability of parasites in control, leadership bringing sex and huge biological change - and I defy anyone to listen to primate chatter without recognizing Parliament.

Windows 7 comes in home, professional and ultimate.  Any disk version you buy actually has all the versions on it and a small bit of program gives you access to all versions (but you still need the MS product key to activate).  Humans may be held in something like this condition, switched off from Molly's higher planes.  One sees this all over the plant and animal world, plus cascade genetics and the managing HOX genes (snakes could have legs etc) - some developmental switch makes most of the difference, not the actual genes. Bees can actually reprogram themselves between nurse and forager.

I do sometimes wonder if we could bring human change by identifying the micro-organism that rules us, like drunken ants staggering to their doom at lunar noon under fungal influence!  Habermas ain't the antidote, though he does tell us someone else has thought some of it through as we might have guessed.  I think machines can help much more than we admit.  Though we also separate the machines from matters like love and caring for a deaf child.

...

[allan...@gmail.com]

Primate chatter makes more sense.

I have little to no doubt that you can create a program or programs to mimic human behavior. Hopefully eliminating poor behavior in getting hung up in endless loops . .. which can be of great advantage.. at the same time it can get trapped in loops from which it can not escape making the same error endlessly.. another human trait.

Just because you can mimic human thinking and logic flawlessly.  The real problem is is logic can not create a soul.. probably because so little is known or understood..  to me that is the major problem with Artificial intelligence.

 

تجنب. القتل والاغتصاب واستعباد الآخرين
Avoid; murder, rape and enslavement of others

-----Original Message-----
From: archytas <nwt...@gmail.com>
To: mind...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Mon, 09 Mar 2015 1:58 PM
Subject: Re: Mind's Eye Re: Götterdämmerung

--

[gabbydott]

But you could help to build a repository of meaningful content for the soul, at least in our context here. This is what I suggested before. If you want to, I can go back and find that posting for you.

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[archytas]

We don't actually know that either Allan - though this may be because we know so little on souls.  If they are emergent properties of us, it is possible to think that might so arise in a thinking machine.  We might, as mind, enter these machines too and souls change in emergence from the new situation. The famous retranslation of "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak' as "the vodka is good but the meat is rotten" illustrates the difficulties encountered (Russian-English).

...

[archytas]

So could you.  Even my machines have a 'this didn't work before' routine and 'try something else'.  Would a reboot help?

...

[archytas]

Of course, one cannot get far in AI without defining what an intelligent agent is.  Maybe AI is soul, seeking to free itself from our biology or Gabby's stuck time loop?

[archytas]

It is illuminating to consider logics in the light of their ontological and epistemological commitments. Ontological commitments have to do with the nature of reality. For example, propositional logic assumes that there are facts that either hold or do not in the world. Each fact

can be in one of two states: true or false. First-order logic assumes more: namely, that the world consists of objects with certain relations between them that do or do not hold. Special-purpose logics make still further ontological commitments; for example, temporal logic assumes that the world is ordered by a set of time points or intervals, and includes built-in mechanisms for reasoning about time.  Epistemological commitments have to do with the possible states of knowledge an agent can have using various types of logic. In both propositional and first-order logic, a sentence represents a fact and the agent either believes the sentence to be true, believes it to be false, or is unable to conclude either way. These logics therefore have three possible states of belief regarding any sentence. Systems using probability theory, on the other hand, can have any degree of belief, ranging from 0 (total disbelief) to 1 (total belief). FUZZY LOGIC  can have degrees of belief in a sentence, and also allow degrees of truth, a fact need not be true or false in the world, but can be true to a certain degree.

Lost in translation, one might seek refuge in soul or inner peace, much as the first refuge of the scoundrel is patriotism.  There are other escape mechanisms including scholarship.

On Sunday, March 1, 2015 at 12:56:27 AM UTC, Chris Jenkins wrote:

Was passiert, wenn der einzige Weg, wie wir kommunizieren konnte, war durch Fremdsoftware nicht in der Lage zu verstehen, unsere Emotionen? Die digitale Kommunikation nicht Ton jetzt vermitteln, sich vorstellen, wenn sie verloren auch Nuancen in der Übersetzung?

Ich denke an das, weil ich die Gespräche in dieser Gruppe häufig brechen in zwei Menschen aneinander vorbei sprechen. Ich frage mich, wenn sie die anderen Lautsprecher verstehen überhaupt. Wenn unsere Worte verloren nicht nur ihr Ton, sondern auch ihre heimatlichen Dialekt; wenn sie etwas wurde noch der Sprecher nicht verstehen, bevor sie von einer anderen Person erhalten, würden wir in der Lage, überhaupt zu kommunizieren?

Ich wünschte, Fran waren hier, um zu wiegen; er würde haben Einblick Ich würde wertvoll wie ein englischer Muttersprachler, die so viel Zeit in einem Land mit einer anderen als seiner Muttersprache verbracht hat, zu finden. Gabby hat ähnli

...

[gabbydott]

I have defined Allan (Al, if you prefer the short form) as the intelligent agent who wants to see his idea of Soul sort of fleshed out. Why not? Building a project glossary is not so unusual. Allan seems to be most interested so might as well let him start a test ballon in which he tries to identify his idea of soul in what we say and put his findings in an extra thread or extra glossary software, if he wishes. We could give him feedback and make suggestions for alterations and in the end have a product called "Allan's Soul Dictionary (ASD)" and would all be happy ever after...

--

[RP Singh]

Gabby, Allan already has a soul dictionary--- view his sig line.

--

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[gabbydott]

Soul is avoiding the self-evidently wrong? That's it, you mean?

[RP Singh]

Maybe Gabby.

[archytas]

LOL RP - genius!

...

[archytas]

Also genius Gabby.  If only we had realised we were working on ALlan's Intelligence all along!  This explains why our machines throw darts at German ladies and the high level of our coffee budget,  Lovely spot.  We once had a typewriter with a broken 'l' key and used the capital 'i' instead.  Did you know an Englishman beat the German held joke telling record (21) with 26 in a minute?  I would laugh if you had a sense of humour, rather than cunning plan to get the record back ... and I may contact the United Nations to get dots put on capital 'i's.

There was, of course, knowledge before humans, a point elaborated by John Searle.  Socially constructed knowledge is still generally claimed by social constructivist authors.

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[archytas]

Translation is difficult because, in the general case, it requires in-depth understanding of the text, and that requires in-depth understanding of the situation that is being communicated.This is true even for very simple texts—even "texts" of one word. Consider the word "Open" on the door of a store.' It communicates the idea that the store is accepting customers at the moment. Now consider the same word "Open" on a large banner outside a newly constructed store. It means that the store is now in daily operation, but readers of this sign would not feel misled if the store closed at night without removing the banner. The two signs use the identical word to convey different meanings. In some other languages, the same word or phrase would be used in both cases, but in German, the sign on the door would be "Offen" while the banner would read "Neu Eroffnet." The problem is that different languages categorize the world differently. A majority of the situations that are covered by the English word "open" are also covered by the German word "offen," but the boundaries of the category differ across languages. In English, we extend the basic meaning of "open" to cover open markets, open questions, and open job offerings. In German, the extensions are different. Job offerings are "freie," not open, but the concepts of loose ice, private firms, and blank checks all use a form of "offen."To do translation well, a translator (human or machine) must read the original text, understand the situation to which it is referring, and find a corresponding text in the target language that does a good job of describing the same or a similar situation. Often this involves a choice. For example, the English word "you" can be translated into French as either the formal "vous" or the informal "tu." There is just no way that one can refer to the concept of "you" in French without also making a choice of formal or informal. Translators (both machine and human) sometimes find it difficult to make this choice 

Gabby will know better than me. Rather than produce 'Crystal Text', we have built in more tolerance into our machines.  Political correctness and manners provide a dis-junction between intentionality (what one might want to say) and what can be said.  I am not sure how we cope with this in AI - though there is work on this as context. 

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[archytas]

In the technical sense, a discourse or text is any string of language, usually one that is more than TEXT one sentence long. Novels, weather reports, textbooks, conversations, and almost all nontrivial uses of language are discourses. So far we have largely ignored the problems of discourse, preferring to dissect language into individual sentences that can be studied in vitro.  We also study sentences in their native habitat.To produce discourse, a speaker must go through the standard steps of intention, generation,  and synthesis. Discourse understanding includes perception, analysis (and thus syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic interpretation), disambiguation, and incorporation. The hearer's state of knowledge plays a crucial part in arriving at an understanding—two agents with different knowledge

may well understand the same text differently. The difference between what someone says and what might be understood is the hearer's understanding of the text. At least six types of knowledge come into play in arriving at an understanding:

1. General knowledge about the world.

2. General knowledge about the structure of coherent discourse.

3. General knowledge about syntax and semantics.

4. Specific knowledge about the situation being discussed.

5. Specific knowledge about the beliefs of the characters.

6. Specific knowledge about the beliefs of the speaker.

Machines can learn, if I say 'Gabby has big boots', that I may not be referring to foot size.

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