bnevin@CCH.BBN.COM (Bruce E. Nevin) (01/06/88)
[Excerpted from the NL-KR Digest. Bruce mentions fundamental difficulties in the study of lingistics and psychology. Are there similar viewpoints on AI? Roger Schank mentions at least one in his recent AI Magazine article: If AI is the study of uniquely human capabilities, then any algorithm derived from AI negates its own domain. -- KIL] The status of linguistics as a science has been a vexed question for a very long time. There are a number of good reasons. Probably the central one is this: in all other sciences and in mathematics, you can rely on the shared understanding of natural language to provide a metalanguage for your specialized notations and argumentation. In linguistics you cannot without begging fundamental questions that define the field. There is an exactly parallel difficulty in psychology: a psychological model must account for the investigator on the same terms as it accounts for the object of investigation. The carefully crafted suspension of subjectivity that is so crucial to experimental method becomes unattainable when subjectivity itself is the subject. (See Winograd's recent work, e.g. _Understanding Computers and Cognition_ for reasons why computer modelling of natural language is not possible, on the usual construal of what computer modelling is. I have references to work that gets around this "Framer Problem" if you are interested.) [...]