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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))
Keywords: shared beliefs
Message-ID: <11830@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU>
Date: 15 Oct 89 18:05:27 GMT
References: <10791@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <5086@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> <1989Oct15.084247.25069@agate.berkeley.edu>
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Reply-To: lammens@sybil.cs.Buffalo.EDU (Joe Lammens)
Organization: SUNY/Buffalo Computer Science
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Come to think of it again, probably the only way one can hope to do
any kind of useful NL processing is to *assume* that the participants
in the conversation (be they human or machine) share a minimal set of
beliefs about the language they are using, the purpose of the
conversation, the world around them, etc (cp. Grice's Maxims for
instance). If not, communication will be pretty much impossible.
Perhaps that assumption is not made in deconstructionist theories,
which may be an interesting exercise but, as I posed before, not very
relevant to NL processing in AI. An interesting question is what to do
if one finds out that some of the beliefs assumed to be shared turn
out not to be, and how one finds out in the first place. Some of the
foregoing discussion seemed to amount to exactly this kind of discovery.

Joe Lammens

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