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From: lammens@sybil.cs.Buffalo.EDU (Joe Lammens)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: AI & Derrida (was: Re: Speech Act Interpretation:... (Unisys AI Seminar))
Message-ID: <11799@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU>
Date: 14 Oct 89 18:08:08 GMT
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In article <10791@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot Handelman) writes:
>
>Look, "deconstructing the deconstructionists" is as old as the hills. 

It's not me who declared everything to be a text and therefore
amenable to deconstruction, which seems to include writings on
deconstruction. They are definitely texts, no? If it is not justified
to deconstruct them than that confirms that deconstruction should be
limited to the domain of literary theory/criticism, and that it cannot
be sensibly applied outside of those domains.

>To deconstruct a text is not to show that
>a text has contradictions and is therefore meaningless. What a 
>deconstructionist tries to do is to restructure the priorities of a text by 
>analyzing the contradictory "awarenesses" and intentions which participate
>in its construction. 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. But the model is not good enough for
>natural languages, because "conveying intentions" or "understanding" is not 
>necessarily a priority of natural language. The kind of language that is
 ^^^^^^^^^^^
>described by these priorities is really a command language, as when, for
>example, the Feldwebel says "Raus!" and the POW obeys. It isn't really
>natural language at all. It's a kind of glorified Unix shell language.

That is an interesting explanation of deconstructionism. And you're
quite right about the necessarily, but I think work in NL
understanding usually assumes that the language in question *is*
primarily meant to convey "intentions" or "understanding". Although
I'm not sure about work in story-understanding in this respect. I
don't know of any work trying to interpret poetry, for instance. But
I'm sure you wouldn't want that :-). But your comment seems to imply
that what we are writing here (and also what deconstructionists write
about their theory) belongs to the domain of command languages, not
the natural languages, since the priorities are clearly "conveying
intentions" or "understanding" in this case, wouldn't you agree? I
would be perfectly happy with an NL understanding system that could
read and understand what we are writing here. If you want to call this
kind of discourse a glorified shell language, that is fine with me. As
long as we both know what we mean by it :-).

>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. Natural language does not assume that the relationship
>of speaker to recipient is that of master to slave. 

I think nobody doubts that.

>[...]
>And that's why I think that machine understanding of natural language has
>failed, and will continue to fail. 

Now here is what your postings were really about: you do not *believe*
that NL understanding in an AI system is possible, and you find that
Derrida's theories support your belief. The former is an interesting
proposition worthy of discussion, but I do not agree with the latter.
Or have I abducted the wrong intentions from your writings?

>This isn't to deny that machines can't
>be instructed to parse a limited subset of English, defined over a finite
>and knowable set of intentions. But this is no longer natural language. This
>language makes assumptions that are never made in natural language, one of
>which is that "I happen to be talking to a machine which has no real 
>understanding." 

I think the assumption in NL understanding work is exactly that the
machine does have (or could have) real understanding. But what does it
mean to have real understanding? That discussion has been going on at
length here and elsewhere, without any satisfactory outcome. 

>[...] If an artificer of intelligence is
>seriously interested in gaining some basic understanding of what it is
>he's supposed to be doing, I think that these expectations and "research
>goals" ought to be jettisoned, or, at least, laughed at. They are naive.

That sums up your presuppositions rather nicely.

Joe Lammens

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