Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watdragon!violet.waterloo.edu!cpshelley
From: cpshelley@violet.waterloo.edu (cameron shelley)
Subject: Re: MORE THOUGHTS ON THE TURING TEST AND NATURAL LANGUAGE
Message-ID: <1991May29.130917.26459@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
Sender: news@watdragon.waterloo.edu (News Owner)
Organization: University of Waterloo
References: <9105290059.AA17541@lilac.berkeley.edu>
Date: Wed, 29 May 1991 13:09:17 GMT
Lines: 62

In article <9105290059.AA17541@lilac.berkeley.edu> ISSSSM@NUSVM.BITNET (Stephen Smoliar) writes:

[natural language not computable]

This reminds me of a couple of things.  The first is the notion of the
"third world" of science, as discussed by philosophers of science (umm ...
Popper, Lakatos, Kuhn(?)).  The idea is that what we often call
"the literature", ie. the body of knowledge on a subject (which no one
person knows in its entirety), has a sort of life of its own.  It is
part of what drives "programs of research".  Analogously, the entire
"body of language" is taken to have a life of its own, despite the
fact that no one speaker can use it all.  This is part of the problem
in defining what is meant by "language" or even "dialect".  In discussing
whether "language" has this or that property (and whether the property
is significant), you have to be careful to say precisely what you're
talking about: collective or individual, performance or competence.

The other thing that comes to mind is a recent remark I heard from
Richard Smolensky at a conference: that he is pursuing the view that
the relationship between competence and performance is one of
reconciling and optimizing the interaction among several, possibly
conflicting preferences.  In other words (and I hope he would find my
paraphrase apt), individual competence contains quite a number of
directives which may either act in concert or conflict (or not
interact at all) depending on circumstances.  Reconciling these
directives produces performance.  It sounds like he has some 
interesting work ahead of him.


>You do not even have to think of slang.  Disagreements arise all the time in
>the course of human dialog.  On most of these occasions, the problems are
>quickly resolved through a process of negotiation.  Such negotiations occur
>so frequently that we tend not to be aware that they are happening, but it
>is very unlikely that we would be able to communicate without them.

In light of my above remarks, this sounds like the subject of collective
(or at least multi-party) performance, although more at the social level
of language use.

>One of the greatest fallacies in the study of natural language is that most of
>the work can be done by isolating single sentences as objects of study.
>However, in "real life" we do not accept a sentence as input, analyze it,
>and furnish a reply sentence as output.  Real life is not so neatly structured.
>If we wish to consider the impact of language on how we get on in the world
>(which is to say how our use of language leads to phenomena which we are
>willing to call "human intelligence"), we had better stop asking myopic
>questions about the Turing computability of sentence recognition and start
>thinking about the relationship between language and behavior instead!  (This
>is not to say that we should all go back to Skinner's VERBAL BEHAVIOR, which
>is probably a bit too simplistic for our current view of the world.  Rather,
>it is a suggestion that it may be time to think about extrapolating on the
>early results of Brooks by asking in what directions we shall need to go before
>such robots can have language in their repertoire of tools.)

In defence of those studying single sentences , the technical difficulty
of parsing and producing individual utterances is important.  On the
other hand, the consideration of language behaviour in a wider sense is
indispensible (gee, IMHO) to prevent models from producing grammatical
fluff.

				Cam

