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Philosophy
Review Essays of Academic, Professional & Technical Books in the Humanities & Sciences
Views into the Chinese Room: New Essays on Searle and Artificial Intelligence by John Preston, Mark Bishop (Oxford University Press) The most famous challenge to computational cognitive science and artificial intelligence is the philosopher John Searle's "Chinese Room" argument. Searle argued that, although machines can be devised to respond to input with the same output as would a mind, machines--unlike minds--lack understanding of the symbols they process. 19 essays by leading scientists and philosophers assess, renew, and respond to his challenge.
In the mid-1970s one of the USA's best-known philanthropic organizations, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, invested substantial funds in a programme designed to stimulate progress in a burgeoning cross-disciplinary study of the nature and workings of the mind: `cognitive science'. Although, with hindsight, it can be traced back to the 1950s, cognitive science came to public recognition (and was dubbed by the psychologist Christopher Longuet-Higgins) only in the early 1970s. It comprises a constellation of disciplines (the core members being psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience) which currently attempts to explain cognitive phenomena (thinking, reasoning, intelligence, perception, learning, understanding, belief, knowledge, memory, etc..) on the basis of hypotheses about the kinds of information-processing which support them. Motivated and underpinned by a certain philosophical perspective, the constellation subsequently broadened to include parts of or approaches to related fields like anthropology, archaeology, and sociology.
The University of California at Berkeley was one of the main beneficiaries of the Sloan Foundation's programme, as part of which prominent researchers were funded to travel around the country, lecturing at universities. How one of these researchers, a philosopher from UC Berkeley, came to be thought of as supplying the best-developed and most pointed threat to a core component of cognitive science is the story we have to tell. Although there is still tremendous controversy over its success, there is some consensus over the import of this `Chinese Room argument' (CRA), which John Searle first published in a paper entitled `Minds, Brains, and Programs'. The argument turns on an easily understood thought-experiment which mobilizes readily available intuitions. If sound, it undermines the official self-image of artificial intelligence (AI), one of the supposed foundations of much contemporary cognitive science. It may well also be contemporary philosophy's best-known argument.
Views into the Chinese Room was conceived as a forum in which to provide opportunities to restate the original argument and envisaged responses, to develop those responses, and to indicate lines of argument which Searle did not anticipate. Several contributors have honed and developed their arguments by reference to each other's contributions. Searle was not asked, or`given the opportunity here, to respond to the chapters in this volume. But although it's not supposed to contain the last word on the debate, the volume does not simply take stock. Rather, it attempts to latch onto a new phase of the debate, in which detailed analysis and unpicking of the arguments pro and con predominates over the original `replies' which Searle himself enumerated.
In preparing the volume, the editors became more aware than ever of a sort of consensus among cognitive scientists to the effect that the CRA is, and has been shown to be, bankrupt. Despite the fact that several notable `names' within the philosophy of mind agree with Searle, it's true that the negative consensus among computationalists has become, if anything, even more solid. Some prominent philosophers of mind declined to contribute on the grounds that the project would give further exposure to a woefully flawed piece of philosophizing. Even some who have contributed to the volume think of the CRA not just as flawed, but as pernicious and wholly undeserving of its fame.
Despite this consensus it is notable, however, that there is (still) little agreement about exactly how the argument goes wrong, or about what should be the exact response on behalf of computational cognitive science and Strong AI. We should probably find it extraordinary how much opinions can differ, and how wide the variety of topics which can be raised by, a scenario as apparently simple as the Chinese Room. But Searle's thought-experiment is a microcosm of much contemporary philosophy and cognitive science. Its importance, both philosophically and practically (in its impact on the self-image of current and proposed cognitive science research programmes) has ensured that it has been widely attacked (and defended), with almost religious fervour. It raises a host of issues about mind and mentality, language, meaning and understanding, intentionality, computers, cyborgs, and our self-conception. It can also be used to raise large methodological questions about how cognitive science should be done (computationalism versus `cognitive neuroscience', versus some more person-centred alternative?), as well as about what philosophy should be ('scientific'? or `analytic'? or perhaps `phenomenological'?). At the very least, it forces those involved in contemporary cognitive science into clarifying exactly what general theoretical theses they want to defend.
So far we've looked in an
informal way at the Chinese Room scenario-the thought-experiment-and some of the
conclusions Searle draws from it. As we shall see, Searle sets out the
underlying argument against Strong Al and computationalism in different ways on
different occasions. However, he never explicitly presents it as a piece of
reasoning about the thought-experimental scenario. If it were presented thus,
its premises would presumably be:
1. The person in the room has access only to the formal, syntactic features of
the symbols he or she is presented with.
2. To understand the Chinese input, the person in the room would need access to
the semantic features of those input symbols.
3. No set of formal or syntactical principles is sufficient for understanding.
But what exactly is this argument's conclusion? If the conclusion pertains only to the person in the room (if, for example, it's simply that the person in the room doesn't understand the Chinese input), then it's relevant to Strong Al only if that view makes a claim about the analogous part of a suitably programmed computer. It's often argued that Strong Al makes no such claim.
Exactly how is the Room supposed to be analogous to a computer? Searle says that when ensconced in the Chinese Room he `simply behaves] like a computer', is `simply an instantiation of the computer program', that he is the computer and that he has `everything that artificial intelligence can put into me by way of a program' (Searle 1980a: 418 (B69-70)).16 The English-language rules constitute the computer program, and the first two batches of symbols the database to which the program has access.
However, some commentators, such as Ned Block and John Haugeland, urge that the person in the room is analogous not to the computer, as Searle usually claims, but only to its central processing unit (CPU), the executive part of the computer which controls and coordinates everything else happening in the machine. Haugeland, for example, argues here that Searle fails to apply his own proposed criterion for adequate theories of mind, asking himself only what it would be like to be part of the Chinese-understanding system, rather than the system itself. These commentators then remind us that Strong Al's claim is not about the CPU, but about the computer as a whole, the entire system. However if, as Copeland points out in what he calls the `logical reply', the Chinese Room Argument is supposed to pertain to the system as a whole, then although germane, it isn't watertight. It would then be of the form: `No amount of symbol manipulation on the person's part will enable him to understand the Chinese input, therefore no amount of such manipulation will enable the wider system of which he is a part to understand that input'.
Since the conclusion is about a system that isn't even referred to in the premises, this Chinese Room Argument (as it stands) must be logically invalid. It commits, as Haugeland puts it, a part-whole fallacy.
As I mentioned, Searle never
presents the Chinese Room Argument in this way. In the abstract of his original
1980 article, he set it out as a derivation from axioms, thus:
(1) Intentionality in human beings (and animals) is a product of causal features
of the brain.
(2) Instantiating a computer program is never by itself a sufficient condition
of intentionality, therefore
(3) The explanation of how the brain produces intentionality cannot be that it
does so by instantiating a computer program.
(1) is supposed to entail:
(4) Any mechanism capable of producing intentionality must have causal powers
equal to those of the brain.
(In more recent work, Searle
explicitly says `threshold causal powers', since the brain may have more than is
necessary to produce mentality. And from (2) and (4) is supposed to follow:
(5i Any attempt literally to create intentionality artificially (strong AI)
could not succeed just by designing programs but would have to duplicate the
causal powers of the human brain. (Searle 1980a: 417, not reproduced in Boden)
The central argument of the original article, Searle tells us, is directed towards establishing axiom (2).
Whenever he presents what he thinks of as the underlying CRA's abstract logical structure, however, or the point of the Chinese Room scenario, Searle always does so as follows:
-
Programs are purely formal (syntactical).
-
Minds (human ones, at least) have semantics, mental (i.e.. semantic) contents.
-
Syntax by itself is neither the same as, nor sufficient for, semantic content.
Therefore,
4. Programs by themselves are not constitutive of nor sufficient for minds.
It's noteworthy that in such presentations of what we might call (following Searle, and Hauser 1997) `the Brutally Simple argument', the Chinese Room scenario is said merely to illustrate or remind us of the truth of premise (3), rather than to constitute the argument against Strong Al. That so many commentators took the scenario to constitute (i.e.. exhaust) the argument is why Searle felt able to say, in 1987:
[I]n all of the vast amount of literature that has grown up around the Chinese room argument, I cannot see that any of my critics have ever faced up to the sheer logical structure of the argument. Which of its axioms do they wish to deny? Which steps in the derivation do they wish to challenge?
Whether treated as the argument underlying the Chinese Room scenario, as a streamlined reformulation of that argument, or as a separate though related piece of reasoning, the Brutally Simple argument does attract its own
commentators. Dennett, perhaps the most determined critic of the Chinese Room Argument, has explicitly denied all three of its premises. In this volume, Copeland, Haugeland, and Hauser concern themselves explicitly with the Brutally Simple argument. Haugeland, for example, seeks to show that serious Al, while not committed to denying Searle's logical truth (that syntax is not sufficient for semantics), can respond to the CRA by denying that computer programs are purely syntactical. To do so, he outlines the conceptual foundations of Al in a way that takes account of the causal powers of programs and data.
Computers and Translation: A Translator's Guide edited by H. L. Somers (Benjamins Translation Library, 35: John Benjamins Publishing) This book is, broadly speaking, and as the title suggests, about computers and translators. It is not, however, a Computer Science book, nor does it have much to say about Translation Theory. Rather it is a book for translators and other professional linguists (technical writers, bilingual secretaries, language teachers even), which aims at clarifying, explaining and exemplifying the impact that computers have had and are having on their profession. It is about Machine Translation (MT), but it is also about Computer-Aided (or -Assisted) Translation (CAT), computer-based resources for translators, the past, present and future of translation and the computer.
Actually, there is a healthy discussion in the field just now about the appropriateness or otherwise of terms like the ones just used. The most widespread term, "Machine Translation", is felt by many to be misleading (who calls a computer a "machine" these days?) and unhelpful. But no really good alternative has presented itself. Terms like "translation technology" or "translation software" are perhaps more helpful in indicating that we are talking about computers, the latter term emphasising that we are more interested in computer programs than computer hardware as such. Replacing the word "translation" by something like "translator's" helps to take the focus away from translation as the end product and towards translation as a process' carried out by a human (the translator) using various tools, among which we are interested in only those that have something to do with computers.
The first seven chapters look at various uses to which a translator might put the computer while the second half of the book focuses more on MT. In Chapter 2 we describe the development of the ideas behind the translator's workstation, and look at some of the computer-based tools that can be made easily available to translators, with a special focus in Chapter 3 on one of these tools, the translation memory. Chapter 4 concerns the special place of terminology in the CAT scenario. Translators have always been aware of the need to access technical vocabulary and be sure that the terms chosen are correct and appropriate. As Lynne Bowker describes, computers can play a particularly useful role in this question, as term banks and other sources of terminology are available in various forms, both on-line and in the form of machine-readable dictionaries and thesauri.
A relatively new translation activity that has emerged in recent years goes under the name of software localization. In the early days of computers, most software (and hardware) that was produced was biased towards (American) English-speaking users. It has now been recognised that products aimed at a global market must be customized for local aspects of that global market. Software localization involves translating documentation, including on-line help files, but also often involves customizing the software itself, inasmuch as it contains language (for example, how to translate Press Y for Yes into French). In Chapter 5, Bert Esselink condenses some of the ideas from his comprehensive book on the subject, to give an indication of the problems involved, and some of the tools available to assist the translator in this specific task.
In today's commercially-oriented world, much translation work is motivated by commercial considerations. Socio-economic factors thus influence the development of MT and CAT systems, and it is the major European languages (English,
French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian) plus Japanese, Chinese, Korean and to a certain extent Arabic that have received attention from the developers. Bad luck if you work into (or out of) any of the several thousand other languages of the world. In Chapter 6 we look at the case of CAT and minority languages — an ironic term when one considers that the list of under-resourced languages includes several of the world's top 20 most spoken languages (Hindi, Bengali, MalaylIndonesian, Urdu, Punjabi, Telegu, Tamil, Marathi, Cantonese). We will consider what the prospects are for translators working in these languages (and other languages more reasonably described as "minority") and what kinds of computer-based tools and resources could be made available.
The next chapter looks at the place of computers in the academic world of translator training. Sara Laviosa considers the use of the computer in Translation Studies: in particular, this chapter looks at how computer-based corpora — collections of translated text — can be used to study trends in translation practice.
The remaining chapters focus more closely on MT. In Chapter 8, Doug Arnold explains why translation is hard for a computer. Readers of this book will have views on what aspects of translation are hard for humans, but Arnold points out that some aspects of language understanding in the first place, and then the rendering of what has been understood in a foreign language in the second place, present difficulties to computers which, after all, are basically sophisticated adding ma-chines. At least some of the difficulty is down to the nature of language itself, and in Chapter 9, Paul Bennett describes how the scientific study of language — linguistics — can help to provide some solutions to the problems.
The next three chapters focus on MT from the commercial point of view. In Chapter 10, John Hutchins, MT's unofficial historian and archivist-in-chief, details the current state of the art in commercially available MT and CAT software. Chapter 11 presents the developer's point of view. Co-authored by Laurie Gerber, formerly one of Systran's senior linguists, and Scott Bennett who, at the time of writing was a senior member of Logos's development team, and before that had helped oversee the productization of the Metal MT system by Siemens. In Chap-ter 12, Jin Yang and Elke Lange report on Systran's intriguing experiment in which they have made their MT system freely available on the World Wide Web. This contribution explains why the company is happy to see their product freely used, and reports on a period of close monitoring of the web-site, and users' feedback and opinions.
John White's chapter on how to evaluate MT will be essential reading for anyone thinking of MT or CAT tools as a solution to their translation needs, whether they be an individual freelancer, a small translation company or part of the translation department of a large company. White gives a practical and historical overview of what to evaluate, how to evaluate it, and, above all, some of the pitfalls to avoid.
The next three chapters address aspects of the practical use of MT. In Chapters 14 and 15 we look at two strategies for getting the best out of MT: Eric Nyberg, Terako Mitamura and Wolf Huijsen describe their approach to controlled language, explaining the basic idea behind the concept, and how it can be implemented within a translation scenario. An important feature of the controlled-language approach is the need to gain acceptance of the underlying idea from the authors of the texts to be translated, and to overcome the negative preconceptions of loss of author's creativity and the resulting sterility of textual form that the term controlled language inevitably invokes. While the controlled-language approach restricts the syntax and vocabulary of the texts to be translated in a pre- and proscriptive way, the sublanguage approach takes advantage of naturally occurring restrictions and preferences in the style and vocabulary of the texts. In Chapter 15 we look at the classical example of a successful sublanguage MT system — the Canadian Meteo system — and consider whether this was a "one-hit wonder" or whether the success of this experiment points the way for future MT success stories.
In Chapter 16, Jeffrey Allen looks at the question of revising MT output, usually termed post-editing to distinguish it from the parallel task of revision often performed on human translations. Allen brings out some of the differences in these two tasks, and outlines some strategies and techniques to make the task easier and more efficient.
In the final chapter shows the use of MT and CAT tools in the teaching of translation, both to trainee translators, and to language students in general.
Philosophy and Linguistics edited
by Kumiko Murasugi
and Robert Stainton offers ten new
essays in areas of overlap between philosophy and theoretical linguistics.
Specific areas include semantics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of
linguistics, with papers on topics as diverse as the language of perception,
compositionality, situations, moral competence, and the notion of simplicity in
generative grammar. Of special interest is a section devoted to mixed quotation.
The papers are by top
scholars in the field: the contributors are Herman Cappelen, Susan Dwyer,
Reinaldo Elugardo, James Higginbotham, Ernie Lepore, Peter Ludlow, Adele
Mercier, Stephen Neale, Paul Pietroski, Francois Recanati, Robert Stainton and
Zoltan Gendler Szabo.
At the core of the essays in
Philosophy and Linguistics are questions
of logical form: a joint linguistic and philosophical investigation into the
syntax and semantics of various natural language constructions. The papers by
Higginbotham and Neale are concerned with the logical form of perceptual reports
and plural definite descriptions, respectively. The project of uncovering
logical form is supplemented by philosophical reflection on the limits of
semantics and on the methodology of linguistic research. The former are
represented here by a paper by Mercier on the problem of naming and a paper by
Recanati on how to accommodate context-dependence within semantics. The latter
are represented by Dwyer's paper on a possible application of Chomsky's innatism
in moral psychology and a paper by Ludlow on how to evaluate simplicity-claims
in linguistics.
The last section of the
volume contains a case study. In the first article, Cappelen and LePore offer a
paratactic analysis of sentences containing mixed quotation, like `Alice said
that life is "difficult" to understand: Their account is an elegant combination
of slightly modified versions of the Davidsonean semantics for direct and
indirect quotation. Since-as the authors argue-the rivals of the paratactic
account have no straightforward way of achieving a similar theoretical unity,
the paper can be seen as a new argument for a Davidsonean semantics for
propositional attitudes. The replies by Elugardo, Pietroski and Stainton contain
detailed criticism of the proposal and alternatives for the syntax, semantics
and pragmatics of mixed quotation.
The exchange about
mixed quotation illustrates two of the most striking features of many
contemporary debates in philosophy of language. First, the focus is a specific
linguistic phenomenon, but the analysis is used in support of general theses
about the interpretation of natural languages. Second, argument and criticism
are sensitive to detailed linguistic considerations. The discussion about
Cappelen and LePore's proposal brings together questions about logical form, the
limits of semantics and methodology, thereby exemplifying the current interplay
between philosophy and linguistics.
The collection is sure
to be of interest to scholars whose work bridges both linguistics and
philosophy, as well as to some philosophers of mind.
Robert Stainton holds a
Ph.D. in philosophy from the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. He
is currently Associate Professor at Carleton University in Ottawa. His previous
publications include Philosophical Perspectives on Language, and numerous
articles on philosophy and linguistics.
Excerpt:
Perhaps the most
exciting thing about recent philosophy of language is is openness towards
genuine linguistic problems. There was a time when philosophers could write
about semantics with no regard to what linguists would say about the expressions
they were considering. They had the excuse that questions about exactly how
natural languages manage to express what they do had not yet been investigated
in formal detail. When raising questions about the truth-conditions of a certain
type of sentence, they could simply suggest a formula in Logish4 (a mixture of
first-order logical symbolism and simplified English), replace the original
sentence with it and discuss this `translation' instead. Philosophers of
language these days ace required to call their translations `logical forms'. The
shift is not merely terminological. Philosophers today are supposed to think of
these formulae as-perhaps somewhat simplified-representations of the real
syntactic and semantic complexity of natural language sentences, and they are
supposed to show--or at least indicate--how these formulae are derivable from
acceptable rules and principles of syntax and semantics.
The fate of
Russell's theory can again be used to illustrate the reorientation of philosophy
of language in recent years. Most contemporary philosophers of language tend to
bracket Russell's reservations about the subtleties of `the' and take his theory
of description to be directly about the interpretation of natural language
sentences. According to this line, definite descriptions can be identified with
a certain type of quantificational device. What the Russellian quantificational
form of a sentence containing a definite description yields is neither a
characterization of a use of the sentence (as Strawson and with him the ordinary
language philosophers maintained), nor a useful proxy for the sentence (as Quine
and the ideal language tradition have argued), but a perspicuous presentation of
its exact truth-conditions. Some semanticists go even further. They argue that
for the Russellian account to be acceptable, it is not enough that all sentences
containing singular definite descriptions have Russellian truth-conditions. The
quantifier postulated by the Russellian must have syntactic reality: it must
appear on the level of the logical form. Its presence there must be
syntactically testable; it must be subject to the usual syntactic operations
that quantifier phrases can undergo.
Understanding
Russell in this way puts new burdens on a Russellian. How does the Russellian
analysis fare when one considers sentences with multiple quantifiers. modal
operators, propositional attitude verbs? Can one expand the Russellian account
to cover plural descriptions, generic descriptions or descriptions containing
mass nouns? What is the relationship between definite descriptions and anaphoric
pronouns that can often replace them within complex sentences? Such problems
would not exist for either Strawson or Quine. Strawson could argue that the
definite article is not employed in a singularly referring manner in most of
these complicated cases, so the Russellian theory narrowly construed says
nothing about the truth-conditions of uses of such sentences. Quine could argue
that there is no obvious need for incorporating all of this complexity into the
regimented language of science. The very point of philosophical analysis for him
is the elimination of some of the more obscure features of ordinary language.
But if one is interested in assigning truth-conditions to English sentences,
one cannot bypass the complications. Their presence is a fact of language to be
accounted for by the semanticist.
Should we think
of the current linguistic focus of much of philosophy of language as a sign of
`naturalizing' another branch of traditional philosophy? Some do. But it is not
obvious that the new interest in logical forma concern for harmonizing one's
views on reference, meaning and use with the results of linguistics-will yield
solutions to most philosophical problems about the nature of language. After
all, as linguistics matures, linguists increasingly turn their backs on the
foundational issues of their discipline.
If they defer to
philosophers who in turn defer to linguists in these matters, we can hardly
expect progress. One might hope, more modestly but perhaps still in harmony with
some version of naturalism, that the results of linguistics will sharpen our
understanding of the old problems and that they will provide new and interesting
constraints on philosophical reflection on them.
The Structure of Modern English: A Linguistic Introduction
is an extensive overture to formal aspects of modern English structure,
including: phonology, morphology, lexical and sentence semantics, syntax, and
pragmatics.
This text is for
advanced undergraduate and graduate students interested in contemporary English,
especially for those primary area of interest is English as a second language,
primary or secondary-school education, English stylistics, theoretical and
applied linguistics, or speech pathology. Focus is exclusively on English data,
providing an empirical explication of the structure of the language, rather than
exploring theoretical questions or theory for theory's sake. The text does use
linguistic theory but presupposes little or no background in linguistics or any
particular linguistic predilection.
Accompanying the text
is a pedagogically useful CD-ROM that is a complete interactive workbook with
numerous self-testing exercises. Additionally, the CD presents suggestions for
pedagogical applications of the material in the textbook in a teacher’s section.
English Sentence Analysis: An Introductory Course is a formal 10-week course
for students of English as a second language. It is designed for students of
linguistics and other formal language study with an analytical orientation The
CD-ROM provides much background information and drills for study. For example study
a chapter from the book. Exercises in each chapter and answers in the Key to
Exercises let you check your understanding. Then confirm your understanding with
the chapter exercises in the Practice Program on your PC.
Sign Language in Indo-Pakistan: A Description of a Signed Language by
Ulrike Zeshan provides the first formal description of sign language used by the
deaf in India and Pakistan. It pioneers cross-cultural sign language and
systematical analyzes the individual signs as well as showing the principles of
discourse organization. Highly original and important work.
Cooren's remarkable
book is destined to become one of the keystone texts of an emerging new school
of theorization and research: the investigation of organization as a phenomenon
of language. While the study of both organization and language have a long
tradition, the links between them have been tenuous, to the point that it could
often be said that they hardly existed at all. In the literature on organization
the theme of language figures very little, and language study, in turn, has
tended to be indifferent to issues of organization. Cooren's work, along with
that of his colleagues (many of them associated with the communication program
at the University of Montreal), is concerned to construct a causeway between the
two disciplines - or, to use the French expression, a passerelle. To understand
the full implication of Cooren's book it may be useful, in a preface, to fill in
some of the background to his thinking on this topic, along with that of his
colleagues.
It is of course almost
a truism to say that organization is a constructed reality, and that the uses of
language are fundamental to such a construction. Berger and Luckmann's The
Social Construction of Reality is, after all, now approaching the status of a
classic. But to say that organization is a "construction" of language-in-use,
while plausible, tends to leave the impression that its existence is entirely
contingent on intersubjective process. In such a view, organization exists only
in the consciousness of its members. Cooren's position could hardly be more
opposed to this idea. In his book, he sets out to demonstrate the contrary: that
organization is real –inter-objective, not inter-subjective.
The field of
organizational communication, that forms the backdrop to Cooren's exposition,
emerged`as an academic domain in the 1960s. It brought together two traditions
of research, the social psychology of work, and speech communication. Social
psychology is an established discipline everywhere. Speech communication, on the
other hand, is a field of study unique to the American educational system. Its
origin is in rhetoric and elocution and it has thus served to marry practical
concerns about effective expression in organizational contexts with a continuing
theoretical interest in the principles of rhetoric and argumentation. Over the
years, organizational communication scholars have explored phenomena of human
interaction in organizational contexts, including questions of effective
supervision, socialization of new members, leadership, negotiation of
hierarchical status, conflict resolution and organizational `climate.' Theirs is
an eclectic field that has freely borrowed from sociology concepts such as
discursive formation (Foucault) and structuration (Giddens), among others. One
issue that has been missing from this literature, however, is the one this book
addresses, namely the ontology of organization: what an organization is.
Cooren's work, which is primarily a study in speech act theory and its possible
interpretations, and thus addressed most evidently to students of language and
discourse, should nevertheless prove to be of great interest to organizational
scholars.
In taking up the
problem he has set himself, Cooren draws on a formidable arsenal of resources,
including speech act theory and its interpretations, Greimasian narrative
theory, rhetorical theory, and the translation theory of Latour and his
associates. These different disciplines might seem, superficially, to be quite
distinct from each other, but Cooren's contribution, and one of the reasons why
this is an important book, is in delving into the foundations of each of them to
reveal their deeper connections in a basic underlying logic of communication.
What emerges from his analysis is the centrality of the organizing function of
language. But Cooren's interpretation of language function leads us to a
reexamination, and ultimately the rejection, of the standard concept of the
relationship of language and communication: language as medium of expression. He
argues for a much more powerful role of language in human affairs: language no
longer as constructed, but language as constructor. Language, he contends, has
agency embedded within it, and can thus`act through the mediation of the people
who speak it. It is an argument, in other words, for looking at language
differently, as interobjectivity. It is because of the agencies of language that
organization is enabled to stabilize over time and be extended in space.
A central element in
the development of this alternative perspective on both communication and
organization is Derrida's critique of Austin's initial formulation of speech act
theory. Cooren elaborates on Derrida's objection to Austin's assumed primacy of
the speech situation and in doing so he invites us to set aside the
psychological conditions that may be attached to the accomplishment of acting in
and through speech and instead to look at the materialization of speech in text,
even when the text is inscribed in no more substantial a medium than the
Cooren's book, I would
suggest, is a `must read' for scholars in both language study and organizational
science. It represents a genuinely new approach to some old questions, and it
does so without ever abandoning the highest standards of academic scholarship.
The book is meticulously written, cogent and profound. It is destined, I
believe, to become one of those works that marks a transition in our way of
thinking about our fields.
James R. Taylor, Ph.D.
Pragmatic Meaning and Cognition by Sophia S.A Marmaridou
provides a good overview of philosophical and cognitive approaches to language
use and meaning. A synthesis of such approaches leads to a dynamic concept of
pragmatic meaning which is on the one hand grounded in cognition and motivated
by linguistic and cultural convention and, on the other, creates a framework for
studying the interactive and social dimensions of the development of meaning in
linguistic communication. Through an experientialist approach based on
connectionist models, the author shows that by internalizing pragmatic meaning
people become social agents who reproduce, challenge or change their social
parameters during interaction.
Pragmatic Meaning and Cognitionis suitable as a course book in
Pragmatics and Semantics and of interest to those concerned with cognitive
models and dynamic and social aspects of linguistic communication.
The present collection
of papers grew out of a panel on Particles and Propositional Attitude at the 6th
International Pragmatics Conference, Reims, July 19-24 1998.
We find it necessary to
comment briefly on our choice of the collocation 'pragmatic marker' in the title
Pragmatic Markers and Propositional Attitude.
The modifier
'pragmatic' is potentially more controversial than the head noun `marker'.
Although it is true that the kind of meaning encoded by what the editors of this
volume refer to as pragmatic markers frequently does not affect the truth
conditions of the proposition expressed by the utterance, we do not want to
leave the readers with the impression that we equate 'pragmatic' content and
'non-truth-conditional' content. We consider a study of the meaning of a given
linguistic item in a given utterance to belong to the domain of pragmatics,
because part of the utterance meaning of the item can only be derived as a
result of the addressee's extra-linguistic inferential processing of the
stimulus containing it. The lexically encoded meaning of the markers examined in
this book generally underdetermines the contribution of those markers to the
overall meaning communicated by the utterances in which they occur. The semantic
meaning of a marker equals its encoded meaning, but its encoded meaning only
represents a very useful (and occasionally quite necessary, so it seems)
constraint on the kinds of pragmatic, or extra-linguistic inferences that the
addressee processing an utterance will draw in his effort to comprehend the
message communicated. Pragmatically derived meaning affects the hearer's
recovery of explicitly communicated assumptions and implicitly communicated
assumptions alike. `Explicit' is not to be equated with `semantic', and
`implicit' is not to be equated with `pragmatic'. Following Relevance Theory,
the editors of this volume tie the semantics/pragmatics distinction to two
fundamentally different sorts of cognitive process in utterance interpretation,
namely the distinction between linguistic (semantic) decoding and
extra-linguistic (pragmatic) inference.
In addition to
semantically encoded concepts there are also semantically encoded instructions
for the hearer to follow in order to derive intended cognitive effects,
including implicitly communicated ones; in the relevance-theoretic terminology
there is a procedural semantics alongside a conceptual semantics.
No article in the
present collection disputes the view of the semantics/pragmatics dichotomy
adumbrated here, and most authors are seen to explicitly share it with us.
It is far from
accidental that we did not let the term `discourse markers' appear in the title
of this book instead of `pragmatic markers'. For Bruce Fraser, `discourse
markers' constitute a subtype of pragmatic markers, specifically "an expression
which signals the relationship of the basic message to the foregoing discourse".
The connection between the notion `discourse marker' and textual functions is
highly salient in Deborah Schiffrin's account, for example, where she defines
discourse markers as sequentially dependent elements that bracket units of talk.
Indeed, 'discourse markers' is a term which has come to be associated
predominantly with discourse analysis and such markers are assumed to play a key
role in establishing coherence relations in discourse. The emphasis on
corpus-based data is a salient feature of discourse analysis and is therefore
also seen to prevail in studies which are professedly concerned with the
function of so-called discourse markers. Some of the papers included in this
volume do rely extensively on the use of corpora, but many of them rely mainly,
or even exclusively, on invented examples based on native user competence. More
importantly, however, the linguistic function of the majority of markers
examined in this volume has rarely been associated with the label `discourse
marker', and the same goes for most of the theoretical issues raised by the
authors. By choosing the term `pragmatic marker' instead of `discourse marker'
we believe we do not run the risk of evoking unintended connotations.
The focus of
this research is reference assignment, where the hearer must decide which
referent the speaker had in mind. Reference assignment has been approached from
many different angles: by linguists, logicians, philosophers, psychologists and
workers in the field of artificial intelligence. All are agreed that contextual
or background assumptions play a crucial role, but there is little agreement
about how they are selected, and, once selected, how exactly they are used.
Matsui argues, following recent work in relevance theory, that the role of
contextual assumptions in reference assignment is identical to their role in
other aspects of utterance interpretation. Thus, a detailed investigation of
reference assignment may provide a solution to a wide range of further problems
that arise in verbal understanding.
Within the domain of
reference assignment, Matsui focuses attention on the phenomenon of `bridging
reference'. on which there is a substantial literature in linguistics,
psycholinguistics and artificial intelligence. This is illustrated in (1) and
(2):
(1) I went into the
room, The window was open.
(2) John went walking at noon. The park was beautiful.
What interests Matsui
is the interpretation of the referential expressions `the window' in (1) and
`the park' in (2). In (1), although it is not explicitly stated in the first
clause that the room had a window, the natural assumption is that it did, and
that the window referred to in the second clause is the one in the room.
Similarly, in (2), although it is not explicitly stated in the first clause that
John went walking in a park, the natural assumption is that he did, and that the
park referred to in the second clause is the one where John went walking. Matsui
is interested in what makes these the natural assumptions, and what happens in
more complicated cases of the same general type.
The term `bridging' was
introduced by the psycholinguist Herb Clark to describe the process by which the
existence of a referent which has not itself been explicitly mentioned is
inferred from something which is explicitly mentioned - in (1) from the mention
of a room, and in (2) from the mention of the fact that John went walking. By
`inference' here, Matsui mean a non-demonstrative inference process of
hypothesis formation and evaluation. In (1), for instance, it is reasonable to
suppose that, in interpreting the referential expression `the window', the first
hypothesis to come to the hearer's mind will be that the window in question is
in the room just mentioned. In more complex cases, there may be several possible
hypotheses, and the hearer will have to choose between them. Matsui investigates
what determines the order in which hypotheses occur to the hearer, and how the
choice between them is made.
In this book, Matsui
draws the usual distinction between semantics (the theory of sentence meaning)
and pragmatics (the theory of how utterances are interpreted in context).
Pragmatic interpretation involves not only a knowledge of sentence meanings, but
also the ability to draw inferences based on contextual assumptions, or
knowledge of the world. Bridging, which involves going beyond what is explicitly
stated in the utterance, is clearly a pragmatic rather than a strictly semantic
phenomenon, and must be investigated by primarily pragmatic means. Matsui work
provides some important clarification to how meaning is made.
Definition occupies a
central place in all sciences and is a fundamental tool in logic, philosophy of
ideas and semantics; each of these areas view the activity of defining from a
different angle. In everyday communication, the result of this activity,
represented in the various forms of definition considered appropriate for their
objective, is also essential for establishing relationships between things and
ideas and their names for which purpose they are collected in glossaries,
dictionaries and other reference tools. Given these various viewpoints on what
is involved in defining and the wide range of uses of definitions, there is,
understandably, a great diversity of interpretations of what is meant by
defining and its product, the definition. There is, thus, no general agreement
about what a definition is, what knowledge it represents and conveys and what
quality criteria it must satisfy.
Defining and
definitions play an essential role in terminology and lexicography because they
are the conventional means for establishing the meaning of lexical items, or,
expressed differently, for connecting the concept with the word or term that
represents it. This crucial role, which lies at the root of language as a
symbolic system, is, however, viewed very differently by lexicographers and
terminologists. To judge by the many treatises on the subject, not only are
there different methods of defining and different resulting types of definition,
but even the limited objectives of lexicographical and terminological
definitions themselves seem far from clear. It would therefore appear to be
useful to step back from the specific concerns of lexicography and terminology
and consider the nature and functions of defining and definitions in those
sciences which have discussed this topic for the last two millennia.
The present collection
of essays on definitions from Plato and Aristotle to modern times, assembles
interesting, sometimes less widely known and, perhaps, unexpected texts. They
examine the subject from the point of view of philosophy, which is essential
for a theory of terminology seeking to establish the relationship between
concepts and terms. These essays deal mainly with theoretical issues but they
also consider the practice of defining and therefore serve as background to all
manner of studies in terminology. In addition they form a useful complement to
the better known discussions of definitions in lexicography.
Talking at Cross-Purposes. The Dynamics of Miscommunication by
Angeliki Tzanne
In my Introduction, I
stated that my main aim was to show that the occurrence of miscommunication in
discourse can be accounted for satisfactorily only when examined in relation to
the dynamics of social interaction. Additionally, I set out to show that
misunderstandings should be analysed not in terms of isolated turns or stages,
but as a process of meaning breaking and negotiating in the course of an
encounter. Finally, my intention was to investigate the relation between the
creation and development of misunderstandings and the participants'
considerations for their face in social interaction. As part of this last aim,
Tzanne sets out to examine the role of miscommunication in dynamic aspects of
interaction, such as challenging the authority of figures which are considered
by the society to be invested with power in a given situation.
With respect to the
overall aim of the book, Tzanne’s data provide evidence to support the claim
that, in general terms, the creation and development of miscommunication in
discourse relate closely to the dynamic nature in which talk-in-interaction
proceeds. This claim is based on the following findings.
(1) The creation of
misunderstandings relates to the dynamic way in which conversation develops by
constructing its own interpretative context turn by turn. The tendency
participants display to interpret a linguistic item on the basis of directly
preceding discourse leads to misunderstandings if the item in question is meant
as a shift from the frame established by previous discourse in the exchange.
(2) The creation of
misunderstandings relates to the dynamic way in which social interaction
proceeds as a succession of frames (situated activities) and participants'
roles. Miscommunication arises when interlocutors fail to realize an intended
shift of a co-participant's role or a change of the hitherto operating activity.
(3) The development of
the misunderstandings examined in this work yields different combinations of
reparative steps. Each reparative step is constrained by steps taken previously
to it and at the same time contributes to the construction of the context on
whose basis other steps will be taken.
These findings lead to
the overall conclusion that miscommunication does not consist of a set of
isolated turns or stages, but that it constitutes a process of interrelated
steps, shaped dynamically as a series of participants' choices in the course of
an exchange. This implies that misunderstanding is the result of a joint effort
to communicate made by speaker and hearer, and that, as such, it should not be
considered to be the hearer's `failure to understand correctly' the speaker's
meaning. What Tzanne has attempted to show in this work, is that no one
participant should be thought of as being responsible for the creation of a
given misunderstanding, and that, consequently, `blame' which has been assigned
explicitly or implicitly to hearers by previous studies should be dissociated
from the occurrence of communicative breakdowns in talk-in-interaction.
With respect to the
development of misunderstandings, my data show that participants' choices of
reparative steps are affected primarily by people's need to ensure a smooth and
unchanging flow of the discourse situation in which they are engaged, and by
considerations for their own face as well as for that of their interlocutors.
The variety of repair strategies used in misunderstandings reveals that in
repair, participants are faced with two conflicting goals, restoring successful
communication and maintaining their own and others' positive public image (face)
in the encounter. As regards the relation between miscommunication and
participants' face considerations in interaction, my findings lead to the
conclusion that the amount of attention paid to the issue of saving face while
repairing a misunderstanding depends on the power relations holding between the
participants involved, with powerful speakers being the ones who show less
regard for face wants. Repair strategies which attempt to reconcile these
contrasting needs, together with misunderstandings which remain unresolved as a
result of participants' attending exclusively to face wants, indicate that,
overall, for interlocutors, face considerations appear to be more important than
the need to communicate successfully in interaction.
An interesting finding
that emerges from Tzanne’s data concerning face considerations and
miscommunication is that the notion of face appears to be related not only to
the stage of repair but also to the creation of misunderstandings. In
particular, Tzanne found that face considerations not only motivate
interlocutors' choices of repair strategies, but they also make people create
misunderstandings intentionally as a way of preserving or enhancing their
positive public image (face) in an encounter. Affecting misunderstanding can
function as a tease in a conversation between friends, or be used as a
face-saving strategy by an interlocutor whose positive image is seriously
threatened in a given encounter.
But the most
interesting use to which intentional misunderstandings are put is when they are
employed by the less powerful participants in an asymmetrical encounter as a
means of attacking the face of the powerful figure in this encounter. This
renders miscommunication a complex facework strategy, with the aid of which the
people who affect misunderstanding manage to undermine the face of their
interlocutor without seriously threatening their own. By contrast, as we have
seen, there are cases where this kind of facework results in enhancement rather
than in loss of the hearer's face. That misunderstandings are used as a facework
strategy used to challenge the source of authority in an encounter suggests that
miscommunication is closely related to the constant negotiation and change of
participants' goals, roles and relations in social interaction.
In addition to yielding
interesting findings concerning miscommunication per se, the present study of
the mechanisms of misunderstanding has general implications concerning discourse
processing in social encounters. These implications relate mainly to the process
of meaning-making in the course of an unfolding conversation and to the
influence of roles and activities on interpretation.
Unlike standard
attempts to address the so-called `hard problem' of consciousness, which assume
our understanding of consciousness is unproblematic, this book begins by
focusing on phenomenology and is devoted to clarifying the relations between
intentionality, propositional content and experience. In particular, it argues
that the subjectivity of experience cannot be understood in representationalist
terms. This is important, for it is because many philosophers fail to come to
terms with subjectivity that they are at a loss to provide a convincing solution
to the mind-body problem. In this light the metaphysical problem is revealed to
be a product ofthe misguided attempt to incorporate consciousness within an
object-based schema, inspired by physicalism. A similar problem arises in the
interpretation of quantum mechanics and this gives us further reason to look
beyond physicalism, in matters metaphysical. Thus the virtues of absolute
idealism are reexamined, as are the wider consequences of adopting its
understanding of truth within the philosophy of science. This book complements
the arguments and investigations of
The Presence of Mind, and develops insights first introduced in
Current Issues in Idealism.
Excerpt from Introduction by Lawrence K. Schmidt
Language lies at the
heart of philosophical hermeneutics and is a central theme in contemporary
philosophy. To honor Hans-Georg Gadamer's centennial, we decided to revisit the
question of language forty years after the publication of Truth and Method. In
that work language is the guide for envisioning a hermeneutic ontology. Gadamer
initiates these considerations by arguing that the hermeneutic object and the
execution and fulfillment of the hermeneutic event of understanding are
determined by linguisticality. In "Europa and die Oikoumene"
Gadamer notes that he chose the term Sprachlichkeit (linguisticality) to prevent
one from erroneously concluding that there is no common basis in the development
of different languages. This common root is an "impulse towards the word" in the
ontological structure of human being in the world. In Truth and Method Gadamer
writes: "The linguisticality of our experience of the world is prior to
everything that is known as an entity and is spoken of. As such it grounds the
universality of hermeneutics, so "Being that can be understood is language.”
Yet, as Gadamer relates
to Grondin, the third part of Truth and Method is to some extent an initial
investigation.' After the publication of Truth and Method several critical
questions concerning the concept of language were raised. In the last decades
Gadamer has hinted that he hoped to publish a book about language to present his
further thinking concerning this central topic; however, as yet we have only
indications in several of his essays.
To indicate some of
Gadamer's later thinking on language, this volume begins with two recent essays.
In "The Boundaries of Language" (1985) Gadamer clarifies his discussion with
Habermas, among others, concerning what does and does not count as language.
Returning to Aristotle's definition of humans in the Politics, Gadamer remarks
that understanding the beneficial distinguishes human language from animal
communication. To recognize the beneficial implies a distancing from one's own
position and a sense of the temporal. Yet such distancing can only occur in
human interaction, in our being with one another in the world. So the basic
structure of language is mutual agreement (Ubereinkommen) emerging from a
conversation.
If this is language,
what is not? Gadamer first considers laughing, again following Aristotle.
Laughing is not pre-linguistic, but is similar to language in that it requires
such a distancing relation to oneself in a social context. This type of
communication is termed by Gadamer the co-linguistic. Looking at the emergence
of language in children, Gadamer discovers the fundamental, transitional element
of communication to be a playing with one another and not the mere repeating of
sounds. In playing, one is taken up into the game and so begins to distance
oneself from one's own particular stance. The prosody of speaking plays a
developmental role and indicates that "the pre-linguistic is always already, in
a certain sense, underway towards the linguistic".
In his conclusion the
important dimension of the trans- linguistic is broached. What enters languages
is surrounded by what has not been said. All languages may be expanded to
include what has not yet been thought and expressed. The conversation that we
are, is an infinite task. So the trans-linguistic indicates the universality of
the hermeneutic dimension. The conversation is always underway to find the
correct word.
"Towards a
Phenomenology of Ritual and Language" may be an initial sketch of part of
Gadamer's planned work on language. It is a long essay explicating four major
themes in Gadamer's consideration of language. First, language is concealed from
our thinking even though it has moved to the center of philosophic discourse. It
is hidden since one has understood language as the naming of an object already
known. In adopting the methodology of modern natural sciences, one has
overlooked the central connection of language and thinking. In following
Heidegger's thinking, Gadamer adopted as his theme this question of the close
relation between word and concept, language and thinking. He finds there is no
first word, a first naming of an object known, but rather that "Language exists,
however, only in the with-one-another of the conversation". The study of
language as conversation must include a rhetoric based upon the subject matter
(Sache), where one examines how one is lead by and to the subject matter in
answering the question of the conversation. Speaking occurs in the finitude of
human being and so implies an unending quest for the correct word.
The second section
considers the root of linguisticality in human rituals. Using the terms,
together-with (Mitsamt) and with-one-another (Miteinander), Gadamer identifies
the difference between animal communication and human language. Although a
mixture of the together-with and with-one-another, humans alone have the freedom
to distance themselves from the constraints of nature. The fundamental form of
such distancing is questioning. A question implies a direction of meaning. This
is the root of all pointing and naming and not an already understood
objectification. Gadamer notes that his previous discussions of language and
linguisticality did not consider enough the life-world context of speaking and
language. The communality of the conversation has its roots in the communality
of the ritual. In the ritual one acts not individually, or even with one
another, but as a whole. One distances oneself from oneself in being taken up
into the whole with others, as in play. Language, as the development of mutual
agreement, emerges from the roots of ritual. Such communality is contrasted to
Nietzsche's will to power and indicates Gadamer's difference to Derrida.
Thirdly, Gadamer
examines how literature, a work of art in language, comes from this life-world
ground of language in rituals. The connection is the telling of sagas or myths.
Here one discovers the transition from speaking to writing. The storytelling art
emerges from a ritual context of the constitution of mutual identification.
Gadamer refers to the famous scene in the Odyssey where all are gathered
together and hear the singer's tale of the Trojan horse. The telling of myths
held the community together, could overcome differences, and created the bond of
mutual agreement. The written form was long prepared for in variations of
storytelling, and the written was at first read aloud. New possibilities
occurred in the written work of art. Its task was to create the same sort of
involvement in the reader as the listener experienced in the presence of the
storyteller. The reader was to be taken up into the story, losing himself or
herself in the saying of the story.
In the final and
longest section, Gadamer develops the connection between the life-world basis of
language in ritual and the conceptuality of thinking and philosophic language.
Language is not merely the vocalization of thought, but in different languages
we discover, Gadamer says quoting Kleist, "the refinement of thoughts through
speaking" (GW 8, 427). Each cultural tradition expresses its way of thinking in
the language that carries this tradition. Referring to Heidegger, Gadamer
recounts the concealment of Greek concepts through their translation into Latin
and the solidification of this way of thinking in the philosophic concepts of
Western philosophy. To understand the development of concepts from living
language Gadamer examines the relationship between rituals and philosophic
language. We are returned to the with-one-another of live conversation. In such
a conversation, following Plato, thinking should be understood as the
reawakening recollection of what is meant in conceptual differentiations. What
is thought and said in such a conversation is too narrowly construed if it is
thought to defend a final foundation for a concept. One needs to consider the
priority of language games in the move towards conceptuality. Gadamer
concentrates on the rationality of practical reason to demonstrate the growth of
the rational from its roots in the lived with one another. The discussion of
rituals enables us to understand the rational and normative as what is found to
be appropriate in "the many inter-weavings of ethos and logos through which the
human is integrated into the unpredictable play of the world" (GW 8, 438). What
is correct in a particular concept is not determined by a correspondence to
given rules, but by being the proper application of the common, lived experience
of that language community.
Our discussion of
language and linguistically in Gadamer's later thought begins with Jean
Grondin's discussion of "Play, Festival, and Ritual in Gadamer." In reviewing
these three central images Grondin elaborates upon a theme he finds running
through Gadamer's thought, the immemorial. The concept of play demonstrates the
limits of the objectifiable and the phenomenon of being taken up into an
artwork, and for us the sense of being taken up into the language of the
conversation. In the image of the festival the accomplishment and temporality of
understanding is discovered in the repetition of the celebration. One is taken
up into the whole of the festival, and although there may be variations in its
execution and different persons participating, it is nevertheless the same
festival. So the "festival celebrates the enduring in the perishing." Rituals
help constitute a tradition and one's participation in that tradition. The
concept of the ritual illustrates aspects of a tradition that cannot be
objectively known but that still affect us more than we know. Grondin finds that
the concept of ritual more clearly presents what Gadamer meant by tradition in
Truth and Method. It points to the immemorial as what lies hidden from reason,
is not ever completely graspable in concepts, but makes reason itself possible.
In "On the Hermeneutic
Understanding of Language: Word, Conversation, and Subject Matter," Istvdn Feher
carefully examines the concept of linguisticality in Gadamer's thought. After
differentiating Gadamer's turn towards language from the analytic "linguistic
turn," he examines how language functions as the universal medium of
understanding. What can be understood is language, and the human universe is
thereby linguistically constituted, since there is no place outside from which
one can view the world. The basis for this is discovered in the linguisticality
of experience itself. Following Heidegger, we first hear not sense data but a
linguistically structured something, the crackling fire. Feher then considers
how language and the subject matter under discussion belong together. What is
understood is the speculative self-presentation of the subject matter in
language. This view is contrasted to the view of linguistic philosophy. The
subject matter that speculatively appears in language belongs also to the
community whose conversation constitutes that language. Further, this appearing
brings truth to the word. So the truth of a subject matter is embodied in the
word of language as the conversation that finds the right word.
John Sallis, in "The
Hermeneutics of Translation," explores one of Gadamer's central images for
understanding in Truth and Method, the act of translating. Gadamer's discussion
of translation centers on the particular case of translating between two
languages. Sallis notes that Gadamer follows Locke's determination of
translation as the transposition of meaning from one language to another, but
disagrees that this transposition preserves a correspondence of meaning. For
Gadamer, all translation is interpretation. Quoting Gadamer in "Lesen ist wie
Obersetzen" that every translation is like a betrayal, Sallis concentrates not
on the necessary loss, but on those rare situations where one could speak, with
Gadamer, of a gain. Through an examination of two cases in Schlegel's
translation of Shakespeare, Sallis uncovers complications that interrupt "the
would-be pure circulation" of meaning at the root of the concept of translation.
One case "is a certain non-reciprocity," where the translation contains more
than the original and so prevents the appropriateness of a counter-translation
without loss. The second case "is what might be called over-translation," where
a term is translated throughout a text with a meaning that it attains only at
the end of that discourse. The generative determination in the original is lost
in the translation. Although there are indications in Truth and Method that
begin to question the classical idea of translation as transposing meaning, it
is really in the previously mentioned essay that Gadamer exerts "a stronger
thrust . . . toward unsettling the classical determination." Gadamer worries
that in the case of poetry, even if a conceptual transposition were correct, the
translation would fail if it did not transpose the prosody from the inner voice
of the poet to the inner ear of the reader. Sallis closes by hinting how this
might allow another reading of the Critias, where the force of words and not
their meaning is noticed in reference to speaking about translation.
Nicholas Davey's
contribution, "On the Other Side of Writing: Thoughts on Gadamer's Notion of
Schriftlichkeit," raises the question of how to understand Gadamer's concept of
textuality, especially in the sense of the art of writing. To accomplish this he
juxtaposes two theses in Gadamer's discussion of writing. The first is Gadamer's
contention that the written word, especially in the eminent text, is
inexhaustible. In the process of understanding a text, there is not one meaning
established, for example by the author's intention, according to which any
interpretation may be judged. The ideality of the word transports the written
beyond the contingencies of its act of being written down. A correct
interpretation hears some of what was being said, but, in Davey's words, "the
full meaning is always with held." The second thesis is that the written is an
alienated form of speech, so that for the written to be understood it must be
brought into the living voice. The symbols of writing relinquish aspects of the
spoken, so that "the speculative dimension of listening" that hears the unsaid
in the saying can be lost, if the reader is unable to bring the text to speak.
To bring to speak, Davey notes, does not mean just to read a text out loud, but
to be taken up by the text's saying so that the text effects "a fusion or,
rather, a hermeneutic transposition of horizons." The juxtaposition of these is
to expose the inner and outer aspects of the activity of writing and not to
devalue the act of writing. Davey argues for a hermeneutics of the practice of
writing by way of an examination of Hegel and a dialectic of the without and the
within of language. Language is without in being independent of any
subjectivity, in its ideality. It is within in shaping one's historically
effected consciousness. The resolution is found in the speculative event of
understanding. Davey discovers such a speculative event not only in listening to
what a text that speaks says, but also in the practice of writing itself.
P. Christopher Smith,
in "Plato's Khora as a Linguistic Index of Groundlessness," conducts a careful
reading of part of the Timaeus "against the grain" in order to elaborate a
tension between two forms of language. One is the muthos of Homeric
storytelling, a temporal sequencing of events in audible speech, correlated with
Gadamer's concept of linguisticality. The second is logos as the demonstration
for onlookers in writing, a spatial disposition into static classes, correlated
to textuality (Schriftlichkeit). To clarify these two forms of language and
establish the context in which the khora, the groundless, is first spoken of,
Smith notes that at the beginning of Critias's telling of the tale of Atlantis,
there is a discussion of writing (21e-23c). Here we are told that the temporal
sequence in a tale is inexact and must be evaluated against the logical sequence
of written records. When Timaeus begins, his distinction (28a) between the
unchanging and changing mirrors the distinction between what is best written
about and what is best told. Smith examines how Timaeus's exposition shifts
between these two forms of language as it progresses. Timaeus, the
mathematician, wants to present all in the logical, written order but reaches a
specific limit in the move to spatialize the temporal and visualize the
acoustical, "of which `he khora' is the linguistic index." In distinction to
Gadamer, Smith argues that the "`unaccustomed argument"' of 48d-a is different
from that announced at 53c, which is more logical. Here, in the discussion of
the khora, there is a type of thing that "eludes our insight, and it can only be
told about in a muthos or story." The problem is how one is to speak of this
"wherefrom" that is named the khora. This requires a type of "illegitimate
thinking." Unlike Gadamer's constructive reading, Smith, in his deconstructive
reading, emphasizes the danger of things lapsing into the indeterminacy of the
khora. Here Timaeus can only continue by speaking mythically. So the khora
functions as a linguistic index of groundlessness, and Timaeus finds himself
pushed back "into the narrative and temporal origins of language from which his
spatialized optical thought is but a derivative abstraction."
In "Participation and
Ritual: Dewey and Gadamer on Language," Lawrence Schmidt examines the
similarities between each philosopher's understanding of language. The
participatory nature of language in Dewey is examined by raising a question
concerning the discovery of significance in a series of events that establishes
the use of tools. Schmidt worries that such linguistic understanding would
appear to be possible without the participation of others, contrary to Dewey's
thesis. After briefly noting two other discussions of this situation, he turns
to Gadamer's discussion of the coemergence of language and experience.
Linguisticality is examined as the basis for Gadamer's universal claim: being
that can be understood is language. So for Gadamer any understanding of the
significance of a series of events would already involve language. It is then
asked whether this includes too much as language. Gadamer's discussion of the
boundaries of language is examined to differentiate between human language and
animal communication. The communal nature of language is rooted in Gadamer's
discussion of rituals, which mirrors Dewey's sense of participation.
In "A Written History
of Effects: From Concept to Application," Ben Vedder is not worried about the
emergence of concepts from the linguisticality of the life-world, but about how
one should approach the interpretation of texts thus developed. He begins with
an examination of Gadamer's descriptive concept of the effect of history or
effective history. From Gadamer's discussion of the conditions that allow for
understanding texts, Vedder examines the requirements for textual research
within these conditions, what he calls "historically effected research." The aim
is to discover how the content of a text effects another text. Due to the
history of effect at work in the interpreter's own consciousness, there cannot
be an ontologically neutral position from which interpretation can occur;
rather, there is a necessary ambiguity involved in determining how a text has
been effected by other texts. The meaning of a text can be approached by means
of all the other "texts which are produced by the power of expression of the
`original text'." And we also know that such historical critical research is
itself historically conditioned by the effect of history on the interpreters. So
although no research can claim to have the answer, and one knows other
interpretations will follow, "the point is to empirically trace effects in such
a way that relations between texts become visible." Vedder next incorporates the
recipient, arguing the recipient is necessary for the effect of history to
occur, for the text's matter to be able to effect. So research on the history of
effects must also consider the social context that influences reception, for
example, institutions that canonize texts. Because the reception of a text, or
part of it, effects another text, research on effects becomes intertextual
research. But such research is more than the mere tracing of textual relations,
it needs to investigate the "history of the truth of a text-by studying the
radiance of its power of expression."
This collection on language and linguisticality in philosophical hermeneutics closes with a discussion of some practical implications of the human way of being that is distinguished by linguisticality. In "The Enigma of Health: Gadamer at Century's End," Fred Dallmayr examines Gadamer's reflections in The Enigma of Health on the art of healing in modern western society. Modern medicine is in a precarious position between two ways of dealing with the world. One is the modern scientific way that calculates, controls, and is "capable of replacing the natural by the artificial." The other concerns the "exercise and cultivation of practical judgment." Health is unique since it cannot be technically engineered. Although disease may be combated, the physician must aid nature in its restorative process. "Human health participates in the general selfmaintenance and self-balancing of nature at large," which Gadamer finds expressed in the Phaedrus. Dallmayr then demonstrates how the conclusions drawn from health reflect general themes in Gadamer's thinking as a whole, discussing Gadamer's treatment of judgment in Truth and Method, the mimetic relation in art, and nature as energeia. After noting the affinities of Gadamer's thought to Heidegger's and Adorno's, Dallmayr concludes by developing the broader social and political consequences of this discussion. Human freedom needs to be defended from technical control. We must learn to again listen to the language of things and not dominate them through the rationality of science. He notes that, without explicit reference, Gadamer's thoughts on "non-mastery and natural recovery" are similar to ideas in Buddhism and Taoism.
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