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From: lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Greg Lee)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: AI & Derrida (was: Re: Speech Act Interpretation:... (Unisys AI Seminar))
Message-ID: <5086@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu>
Date: 12 Oct 89 13:13:48 GMT
References: <10791@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Organization: University of Hawaii
Lines: 39

From article <10791@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>, by eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot Handelman):
" ... A simple priority, for example, is that "a text exists 
" in order to convey the intention of its author." This model is good enough
" for Unix shell commands. When I say "ls" my immediate intention is to make
""ls" do whatever it's defined as doing. ...

Maybe you're debugging ls, to figure out just what it is defined as
doing.  The response you get from ls depends on who you are -- root
or not, person who has a right to expect a response (permissions)
or not.

" Natural language is partly constructed through an awareness that the recipient
" of the message WILL interpret and restructure the text according to his
" particular priorities.

I see a difference in degree of complexity, but no difference in kind.

" Natural language does not assume that the relationship
" of speaker to recipient is that of master to slave. And whatever assumptions
" are made of the recipient are partly determinants of the shape of natural
" language. ...

I think I understand the game here.  It's to make natural language
seem as impenetrable as possible and computer language seem very
simple -- to load the dice in favor of obscurantism.  But you
oversimplified your pragmatic account of `ls', which was already,
I suppose, the most primitive example of communication with
a computer that occurred to you.  And you overcomplicate your
account of natural language.  *Sometimes* specific assumptions
about the hearer's circumstances partly determine the form of
natural language expressions, sure.  But if this pragmatic
dependency were crucial to human communication, you'd have no
idea what I'm (trying to) say now.  If you will note the use
of `this' and `now' in the preceding sentence, you will see that
the context required for the interpretation of such deictic
expressions can be established with just a few sentences, and
can probably be analyzed syntactically rather than pragmatically.

				Greg, lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu