greg@hp-pcd.UUCP (Greg Goebel) (12/19/83)
#R:sri-arpa:-1460400:hp-pcd:18700004:000:6361
hp-pcd!greg Dec 18 10:00:00 1983
Subject: A humanities view of computers and natural language
From: Martin Giles <MADAGIL@SU-SIERRA.ARPA>
The following is a copy of an article on the Stanford Campus report,
7th December, 1983, in response to an article describing research at
Stanford. The University has just received a $21 million grant for
research in the fields of natural and computer languages.
Martin
[I have extracted a few relevant paragraphs from the following 13K-char
flame. Anyone wanting the full text can contact AIList-Request or FTP
it from <AILIST>COHN.TXT on SRI-AI. I will deleted it after a few weeks.
-- KIL]
Mail-From: J.JACKSON1 created at 10-Dec-83 10:29:54
Date: Sat 10 Dec 83 10:29:54-PST
From: Charlie Jackson <J.JACKSON1@LOTS-A>
Subject: F; (Gunning Fog Index 20.18); Cohn on Computer Language Study
To: bboard@LOTS-A
Following is a letter found in this week's Campus Report that proves
Humanities profs make as good flames as any CS hacker. Charlie
THE NATURE OF LANGUAGE IS ALREADY KNOWN WITHOUT COMPUTERS
Following is a response from Robert Greer Cohn, professor of French, to
the Nov. 30 Campus Report article on the study of computer and natural
language.
The ambitious program to investigate the nature of language in
connection with computers raises some far-reaching questions. If it is
to be a sort of Manhattan project, to outdo the Japanese in developing
machines that "think" and "communicate" in a sophisticated way, that is
one thing, and one may question how far a university should turn itself
towards such practical, essentially engineering, matters. If on the
other hand, they are serious about delving into the nature of languages
for the sake of disinterested truth, that is another pair of shoes.
Concerning the latter direction: no committee ever instituted
has made the kind of breakthrough individual genius alone can
accomplish. [...]
Do they want to know the nature of language? It is already
known.
The great breakthrough cam with Stephane Mallarme, who as Edmund
Wilson (and later Hugh Kenner) observed, was comparable only to Einstein
for revolutionary impact. He is responsible more than anyone, even
Nietzsche, for the 20th-century /episteme/, as most French first-rank
intellectuals agree (for example, Foucault, in "Les mots et les choses";
Sartre, in his preface to the "Poesies"' Roland Barthes who said in his
"Interview with Stephen Hearth," "All we do is repeat Mallarme";
Jakobson; Derrida; countless others).
In his "Notes" Mallarme saw the essence of language as
"fiction," which is to say it is based on paradox. In the terms of
Darwin, who describes it as "half art, half instinct," this means that
language, as related to all other reality (hypothetically nonlinguistic,
experimental) is "metaphorical" -- as we now say after Jakobson -- i.e.
above and below the horizontal line of on-going, spontaneous,
comparatively undammmed, life-flow or experience; later, as the medium
of whatever level of creativity, it bears this relation to the
conventional and rational real, sanity, sobriety, and so on.
In this sense Chomsky's view of language as innate and
determined is a half-truth and not very inspired. He would have been
better off if he had read and pondered, for example, Pascal, who three
centuries ago knew that "nature is itself only a first 'custom'"; or
Shakespeare: "The art itself is nature" (The Winter's Tale).
[...]
But we can't go into all the aspects of language here.
In terms of the project: since, on balance, it is unlikely the
effects will go the way of elite French thought on the subject, there
remains the probability that they will try to recast language, which is
at its best creatively free (as well as determined at its best by
organic totality, which gives it its ultimate meaning, coherence,
harmony), into the narrow mold of the computer, even at /its/ best.
[...]
COMPUTERS AND NEWSPEAK
In other words, there is no way to make a machine speak anything
other than newspeak, the language of /1984/. They may overcome that
flat dead robotic tone that our children enjoy -- by contrast, it gives
them the feeling that they are in command of life -- but the thought and
the style will be sprirtually inert. In that sense, the machines, or
the new language theories, will reflect their makers, who, in harnessing
themselves to a prefabricated goal, a program backed by a mental arms
race, will have been coopted and dehumanized. That flat (inner or
outer) tone is a direct result of cleaving to one-dimensionality, to the
dimension of the linear and "metonymic," the dimension of objectivity,
of technology and science, uninformed and uninspired by the creatively
free and whole-reflecting ("naive") vertical, or vibrant life itself.
That unidimensionality is visible in the immature personalities
of the zealots who push these programs: they are not much beyond
children in their Frankenstein eagerness to command the frightening
forces of the psyche, including sexuality, but more profoundly, life
itself, in its "existential" plenitude involving death.
People like that have their uses and can, with exemplary "tunnel
vision," get certain jobs done (like boring tunnels through miles of
rock). A group of them can come up with /engineering/ breakthroughs in
that sense, as in the case of the Manhattan project. But even that
follows the /creative/ breakthroughs of the Oppenheimers and Tellers and
Robert D. (the shepherd in France) and is rather pedestrian endeavor
under the management of some colonel.
When I tried to engage a leader of the project in discussion
about the nature of language, he refused, saying, "The humanities and
sciences are father apart than ever," clearly welcoming this
development. This is not only deplorable in itself; far worse,
according to the most accomplished mind on /their/ side of the fence in
this area; this man's widely-hailed thinking is doomed to a dead end,
because of its "unidimensionality!"
This is not the place to go into the whole saddening bent of
our times and the connection with totalitarianism, which is "integrated
systems" with a vengeance. But I doubt that this is what our founders
had in mind.
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