LAWS@SRI-AI.ARPA (11/30/84)
From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws <AIList-REQUEST@SRI-AI> AIList Digest Thursday, 29 Nov 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 163 Today's Topics: Philosophy - Dialectics, Seminars - Aesthetic Experience (Berkeley) & Phonetics, Discourse, Semantics (CSLI Stanford) & The KEE Knowledge Engineering System (Stanford) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 27 Nov 84 20:42:29 est From: FRAWLEY <20568%vax1%udel-cc-relay.delaware@udel-relay.ARPA> Subject: Dialectics Joel Isaacson (USC) and I (Frawley, Delaware) have recently exchanged, briefly, ideas about DIALECTICS. Issacson is using dialectics in a theory of image processing; I am using dialectics in my own work on Soviet theories of language and cognition and the use of Soviet theories to explain various quandaries about such things as language learning and text processing. We thought it would be appropriate to have a general discussion of dialectics on the AIList. I have agreed to begin the discussion with a general introduction. Below are some basic statements on what I see to be the nature and implications of dialectics, along with some comments on how I see these ideas relating to problems of language and cognition. I offer these ideas not as definitive statements, but as a means to get the ball rolling on a discussion of dialectics. We (Isaacson and I) would appreciate any commentary, arguments, etc. that can be given. 1. What is, and Whence, Dialectics? Dialectics is, first of all, a method. It is a method of analyzing any phenomenon not in terms of the phenomenon as an isolated entity, but in terms of the phenomenon in its opposition to other phenomena and how the opposition of two phenomena give rise to a third phenomenon (the classic thesis, antithesis, synthesis trichotomy from Hegel). This idea of opposition can of course be traced back in Western philosophy to Plato (who loved oppositions), but is more conveniently situated in the work of Marx. Marx objected to both idealism and positivism: to the former because it ultimately situated knowledge in one metaphysical entity (e.g., the pre-programmed subject, as Kant and Piaget argue, or in the world of pure forms, as Plato argued) and to the latter because it situated knowledge wholly in terms of the object of knowledge (i.e., the world irrespective of the perceiving subject). Marx saw knowledge only in the dialectical struggle of the perceiving subject and perceived object which unify in their struggle to produce knowledge. Dialectics is a way of walking between hopeless metaphysics (idealism) and hopeless banality (the world). Thus, it does no good simply to talk about either simple properties of the subject or of the object since neither exists without the other and neither the subject nor the object has any privileged status in epistemology. If an epistemology privileges the subject at the expense of the object, one gets Piagetian psychology; if one privileges the object at the expense of the subject, one gets behaviorism, Carnap, or the early Wittgenstein. 2. What does dialectics imply (I use "dialectics" in the singular since it is a totality, like the word "linguistics")? First, it implies that knowledge is the activity of constant struggle. What is primary in dialectics is not knowledge, but knowING. What is primary in any dialectical epistemology is not knowledge structures, but the BUILDING OF KNOWLEDGE. As Leontiev has said, heuristics are more important than algorithms. Second, it implies that development never ends. If knowing is a constant struggle of opposites which unite in synthesis, and if that synthesis then is opposed to something else and unites with it to produce another synthesis, knowing never stops. We suffer, in developmental theory, from a Piagetian epistemological blindness which views development as stopping after logical operations: thereafter only mere learning occurs. When studies have shown that only 50% of the U.S. population has achieved logical operations, I begin to doubt Piaget and begin to side with Luria, who has shown (Cognitive Development) that development, because of its dialectical underpinnings, never stops. Third, it implies that one must be a materialist. The subject is not a metaphysical entity, but located in the world; the object is not a metaphysical entity, but located in the world; the dialectical synthesis of the two is not a metaphysical entity, but a process and product conditioned by the material circumstances and nature of the subject and object: dialectics secularizes knowing. Fourth, it implies that one must always consider history. If knowing is tied to dialectics in material circumstances, then one must also realize that circumstances can only be historically given. As Derrida has argued in his introduction to Husserl's Geometry, there are no extra-systemic a priori ideas, only historical a priori ideas. In this way, biological givens are also historically given because both ontogenesis and phylogenesis are historical. 3. Two Psycholinguistic Implications of Dialectics It is very chic these days to abandon linguistic competence in favor of communicative competence by arguing that linguistic competence is idealized and that communicative competence (pragmatics, speech acts, intentionality, etc.) is "more real" because communicative competence considers how language is used in the world. Dialectics shows that this is a pseudo-argument. Communicative competence still privileges the subject only, by giving taxonomies of intentions which the subject felicitously deploys "in the world." How is this done? That is the "real" question. Pragmatics, in criticizing Chomskyan competence for being idealized falls prey to its own criticisms since it still privileges the subject and idealized linguistic knowledge just one step higher than the sentence: communicative competence is another from of idealism (for a very brief discussion, see my review in December 1984 issue of Language, p. 967). Dialectics has another implication for theories of text processing. It is typical in text theory to privilege either the subject or the object: if privileging the former, one acconts for text processing in terms of mental structures -- schemas, frames, scripts; if privileging the latter, one accounts for text processing in terms of the structure of the text -- rhetorical structure, propositional hierarchies, complexity, etc. A dialectical model would ask how schemas and text structure interact. Dialectical considerations of text processing have implications for AI. In Schank and Abelson's model, e.g., the script or frame is seminal. From a dialectical model, the script is less important than the ways by which the machine "decides" to access the script to begin with: the knowledge structure is less important than the procedures to deploy the knowledge structure since that is the point where the machine as subject interacts with the text as object. Well, I've gone on perhaps too long for some preliminary statements about dialectics, so I'll stop here. Any comments?? Bill Frawley 20568.ccvax1@udel ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 28 Nov 84 17:13:33 pst From: chertok%ucbcogsci@Berkeley (Paula Chertok) Subject: Seminar - Aesthetic Experience (Berkeley) BERKELEY COGNITIVE SCIENCE PROGRAM Fall 1984 Cognitive Science Seminar -- IDS 237A SPEAKER: Thomas G. Bever, Psychology Department, Columbia University TITLE: The Psychological basis of aesthetic experi- ence: implications for linguistic nativism TIME: Tuesday, December 4, 11 - 12:30 PLACE: 240 Bechtel Engineering Center DISCUSSION: 12:30 - 2 in 200 Building T-4 ABSTRACT: We define the notion of Aesthetic Experience as a formal relation between mental representations: an aesthetic experience involves at least two conflicting represen- tations that are resolved by accessing a third representation. Accessing the third representation releases the same kind of emotional energy as the 'aha' elation asso- ciated with discovering the solution to a problem. We show how this definition applies to various artforms, music, literature, dance. The fundamental aesthetic relation is similar to the mental activities of a child during normal cognitive development. These considerations explain the function of aesthetic experience: it elicits in adult- hood the characteristic mental activity of normal childhood. The fundamental activity revealed by consid- ering the formal nature of aesthetic experi- ence involves developing and interrelating mental representations. If we take THIS capacity to be innate (which we surely must), the question then arises whether we can account for the phenomena that are usu- ally argued to show the unique innateness of language as a mental organ. These phenomena include the emergence of a psychologically real grammar, a critical period, cerebral asymmetries. More formal linguistic properties may be accounted for as partially uncaused (necessary) and partially caused by general properties of animal mind. The aspects of language that may remain unex- plained (and therefore non-trivially innate) are the forms of the levels of representa- tion. ------------------------------ Date: Wed 28 Nov 84 17:24:47-PST From: Dikran Karagueuzian <DIKRAN@SU-CSLI.ARPA> Subject: Seminars - Phonetics, Discourse, Semantics (CSLI Stanford) [Excerpted from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.] ABSTRACT OF TODAY'S SEMINAR ``Parsing Acoustic Events'' This seminar addresses the problem of formulating a language-independent representation of the acoustic aspects of natural, continuous speech from which a general parser using language-specific grammars can recover linguistic structure. This decomposition of the problem permits a representation that is stable over utterance situations and provides constraints that handle some of the difficulties associated with partially obscured or ``incomplete'' information. A system will be described which contains a grammar for parsing higher-level (phonological) events as well as an explicit grammar for low-level acoustic events. It will be shown that the same techniques for parsing syntactic strings apply in this domain. The system thus provides a formal representation for physical signals and a way to parse them as part of the larger task of extracting meaning from sound. --Meg Withgott ____________ ABSTRACT OF NEXT WEEK'S SEMINAR ``The Structures of Discourse Structure'' This talk will introduce a theory of discourse structure that attempts to answer two rather simple questions, namely: What is discourse? What is discourse structure? In this work (being done jointly with Sidner at BBN) discourse structure will be seen to be intimately connected with two nonlinguistic notions--intention and attention. Intentions will be seen to play a primary role not only in providing a basis for explaining discourse structure, but also in defining discourse coherence, and providing a coherent notion of the term ``discourse'' itself. A main thesis of the theory is that the structure of any discourse is a composite of three interacting constituents: the structure of the actual sequence of utterances in the discourse, a structure of intentions, and an attentional state. Each of these constituents of discourse structure both affects and is affected by the individual utterances in the discourse. The separation of discourse structure into these three components allows us to generalize and simplify a number of previous results and is essential to explaining certain discourse phenomena. In particular, I will show how the different components contribute to the proper treatment of various kinds of interruptions, as well as to explanations of the use of certain types of referring expressions and of various expressions that function directly to affect discourse structure. --Barbara J. Grosz ____________ ABSTRACT OF NEXT WEEK'S TINLUNCH Syntactic Features, Semantic Filtering, and Generative Power There is a trade-off in linguistic description using grammars with a syntax and a separate semantics, such as GPSG. One can often either use a syntactic feature or appeal to semantic filtering to achieve the same ends. Current GPSG countenances no semantic filtering, i.e. does not overgenerate strings in the syntax and then let the semantics throw some away as `uninterpretable'. In the Tinlunch I would like to discuss this position in light of some work I did in my dissertation which looks like it requires semantic filtering, and in light of a paper by Marsh & Partee which shows that adding certain types of semantic filtering to a grammar greatly increases the generative power. --Peter Sells ____________ CSLI WORKSHOP ON THE SEMANTICS OF PROGRAMS Tuesday, December 4, 1984 Location: The Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society, Princeton CA (a suburb of Half-Moon Bay) There are long-standing traditions for the study of natural language semantics and CSLI projects have been extending and reinterpreting them. There is a briefer, but substantial, tradition for the study of the semantics of programming languages. Over the past few months, there have been a series of presentations and discussions about similarities and differences between the semantic accounts of natural and computational languages. Theories of natural language semantics have raised a number of issues. The purpose of the workshop is to discuss how some of these theories can give rise to better accounts of the relation between programs/program executions and the world. Participation in the workshop is by invitation only. If you are interested in being invited to the workshop, contact Ole Lehrmann Madsen (Madsen at SU-CSLI). If you have any questions regarding the workshop you may contact Terry Winograd (TW at SU-SAIL) or Madsen. ____________ PH.D. PROPOSAL On Tuesday, December 4, from 3:15 p.m. to 5:05 p.m., in Bldg. 200-217, Kurt Queller will talk about ``Active Exploration with syntagmatic routines in the child's construction of grammar: Some phonological perspectves.'' Based on detailed longitudinal analysis of data from 3 one-year-olds, the proposed dissertation will provide a typology of syntag-matic phonological routines or ``word-recipes'' used by young children in bulding a repertoire of pronounceable works. Then, it will show how individual children exploit particular combinations of routines in constructing a coherent phonological system. Extensive synchronic variability and changes over time will be accounted for in terms of the child's systematic exploration of the options implicit in the resulting system. ------------------------------ Date: Mon 26 Nov 84 11:15:02-PST From: Paula Edmisten <Edmisten@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA> Subject: Seminar - The KEE Knowledge Engineering System (Stanford) [Forwarded from the SIGLUNCH distribution by Laws@SRI-AI.] SPEAKER: Richard Fikes, Director Knowledge Systems Research and Development IntelliCorp, Inc. ABSTRACT: The KEE System - An Integration of Knowledge-Based Systems Technology DATE: Friday, November 30, 1984 LOCATION: Chemistry Gazebo, between Physical and Organic Chemistry TIME: 12:05 IntelliCorp has developed an integrated collection of representation, reasoning, and interface facilities for building knowledge-based systems called the Knowledge Engineering Environment (KEE). The system's components include (1) a frame-based representation facility incorporating features of UNITS, LOOPS, and KL-ONE that supports taxonomic definition of object types, structured descriptions of individual objects, and object-oriented programming; (2) a logic language for asserting and deductively retrieving facts; (3) a production rule language with user-controllable backward and forward chainers that supports PROLOG-style logic programming; and (4) a graphics work bench for creating display-based user interfaces. KEE uses interactive graphics to facilitate the building, editing, browsing, and testing of knowledge bases. A primary goal of the overall design is to promote rapid prototyping and incremental refinement of application systems. KEE has been commercially available since August 1983, and has been used by customers to build a wide range of application systems. In this talk I will give an overview of the KEE system with particular emphasis on its representation and reasoning facilities, and discuss ways in which the system provides significant leverage for its users. Paula ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ********************