From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!gatech!gatech!dscatl!gwinnett!depsych!rc Tue Nov 26 12:31:42 EST 1991
Article 1520 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: rc@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richard Carlson)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Natural languages are formal systems?
Message-ID: <9myTBB1w164w@depsych.Gwinnett.COM>
Date: 22 Nov 91 20:26:43 GMT
Lines: 73

Mikhail Zeleny writes:
>You are mistaken in assuming that I am referring to some kind of "Personal
>Semantic Relation"; the relation I have in mind is as public as any
>arithmetical relation.  Indeed, no personal semantics is of any use in
>communication; the cardinal sin of de Saussure consists in treating
>concepts as mental entities.  So on the assumption that the semantical
>relation M described above is captured in a sufficiently rich language,
>containing at least the elementary arithmetic, the G\"odel trick certainly
>goes through.  For a reasoned presentation of the thesis that English is a
>formal language, see Montague's classic paper.

As I read the material about "formal semantics," which seems to be
at the heart of "Anglo-American" or "analytic" philosophy, it
looked to me as if the whole thing was based on a careless error
so egregious that calling it sophomoric would be understating it,
namely the notion that natural languages are similar to
mathematical systems in the important ways that relate to the
"meanings" these systems convey.  I thought perhaps the
Anglo-American philosophers just weren't aware of Saussure --
after all this is an age of specialization and John Stuart Mill
was the last human being who knew everything that was knowable in
his time -- but that didn't seem right since philosophers aren't
exactly specialists, or aren't supposed to be, and structuralist
linguistics is part of the general intellectual culture which can
be safely supposed to belong to the average educated person --
physician, attorney, engineer, humanist or scientist -- even if
sh/e reads nothing much more general than the New York Review.

The above paragraph by Mr. Zeleny reassures me that there was no
oversight or carelessness.  (I was really beginning to think that
the intellectual world was as primitive and silly as scholars in
an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel.)  It isn't a thoughtless
assumption.  They know about Saussure and they have arguments as
to why English (or French or Chinese) is a formal system.

Why is it a mistake to treat concepts as mental entities?  That's
what they seem to be.

The pride and joy of structuralist linguistics is Jacobson's
structuralist phonology.  It is as precise and testable as a
theory in physics and perhaps the only really universal,
cross-culturally valid phenomenon, describing the phonemes that
may exist in any language the way the periodic table describes
elements, in the "human sciences."  It is based on Saussure's
basic notions of the bipolarity of human language.  It reveals the
individual "phonemes" of a language to be not primitive building
blocks or units, but themselves comprised of "features" which are
"distinctive."  The human phonetic system is about as well
understood as any aspect of reality and seems to be a good
candidate to serve as a model for other, as yet not fully grasped,
aspects of language.  And it is not a "formal"-looking system but
a dynamic _structure_ built on the kind of bipolar oppositions
Saussure said we would find in every aspect of natural language.

>If you "don't believe" in formal semantics, you should either stay out of
>technical conversations in this subject, or offer an alternative theory
>(Wittgensteinians needn't apply, as their views would exclude AI anyway).

Structuralism and post-structuralism also offer little comfort to
a notion of AI that sees Hal in the immediate future.  It may be
necessary to construct an entire virtual reality which the machine
would have to "know" in order to do more than emulate human
beings, whether behind closed doors or not.  But so what?  Why is
it an important issue whether human thought can be easily
duplicated or not?  Certainly using computers as analogues of the
brain will be as useful heuristically as the telephone exchange
metaphor once was, and in ten years will seem just as silly.

--
Richard Carlson        |    rc@depsych.gwinnett.COM
Midtown Medical Center |    {rutgers,ogicse,gatech}!emory!gwinnett!depsych!rc
Atlanta, Georgia       |
(404) 881-6877         |


