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AIList Digest Volume 2 Issue 163
AIList Digest Thursday, 29 Nov 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 163
Today's Topics:
Philosophy - Dialectics,
Seminars - Aesthetic Experience (Berkeley) &
Phonetics, Discourse, Semantics (CSLI Stanford) &
The KEE Knowledge Engineering System (Stanford)
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Date: Tue, 27 Nov 84 20:42:29 est
From: FRAWLEY <20568%vax1%udel-cc-relay.delaware@udel-relay.ARPA>
Subject: Dialectics
Joel Isaacson (USC) and I (Frawley, Delaware) have recently exchanged, briefly,
ideas about DIALECTICS. Issacson is using dialectics in a theory of image
processing; I am using dialectics in my own work on Soviet theories of
language and cognition and the use of Soviet theories to explain
various quandaries about such things as language learning and text
processing. We thought it would be appropriate to have a general
discussion of dialectics on the AIList.
I have agreed to begin the discussion with a general introduction. Below are
some basic statements on what I see to be the nature and implications
of dialectics, along with some comments on how I see these ideas relating
to problems of language and cognition. I offer these ideas not as
definitive statements, but as a means to get the ball rolling on a
discussion of dialectics. We (Isaacson and I) would appreciate any
commentary, arguments, etc. that can be given.
1. What is, and Whence, Dialectics?
Dialectics is, first of all, a method. It is a method of analyzing any
phenomenon not in terms of the phenomenon as an isolated entity, but
in terms of the phenomenon in its opposition to other phenomena and how
the opposition of two phenomena give rise to a third phenomenon (the
classic thesis, antithesis, synthesis trichotomy from Hegel). This idea
of opposition can of course be traced back in Western philosophy to Plato
(who loved oppositions), but is more conveniently situated in the work
of Marx. Marx objected to both idealism and positivism: to the former
because it ultimately situated knowledge in one metaphysical entity
(e.g., the pre-programmed subject, as Kant and Piaget argue, or in the
world of pure forms, as Plato argued) and to the latter because it
situated knowledge wholly in terms of the object of knowledge (i.e.,
the world irrespective of the perceiving subject). Marx saw knowledge
only in the dialectical struggle of the perceiving subject and perceived
object which unify in their struggle to produce knowledge. Dialectics is
a way of walking between hopeless metaphysics (idealism) and hopeless
banality (the world). Thus, it does no good simply to talk about
either simple properties of the subject or of the object since
neither exists without the other and neither the subject nor the
object has any privileged status in epistemology. If an epistemology
privileges the subject at the expense of the object, one gets
Piagetian psychology; if one privileges the object at the expense of the
subject, one gets behaviorism, Carnap, or the early Wittgenstein.
2. What does dialectics imply (I use "dialectics" in the singular since
it is a totality, like the word "linguistics")?
First, it implies that knowledge is the activity of constant struggle.
What is primary in dialectics is not knowledge, but knowING. What is
primary in any dialectical epistemology is not knowledge structures,
but the BUILDING OF KNOWLEDGE. As Leontiev has said, heuristics are
more important than algorithms.
Second, it implies that development never ends. If knowing is a constant
struggle of opposites which unite in synthesis, and if that synthesis then
is opposed to something else and unites with it to produce another
synthesis, knowing never stops. We suffer, in developmental theory, from
a Piagetian epistemological blindness which views development as stopping
after logical operations: thereafter only mere learning occurs. When
studies have shown that only 50% of the U.S. population has achieved
logical operations, I begin to doubt Piaget and begin to side with
Luria, who has shown (Cognitive Development) that development, because
of its dialectical underpinnings, never stops.
Third, it implies that one must be a materialist. The subject is not
a metaphysical entity, but located in the world; the object is not
a metaphysical entity, but located in the world; the dialectical
synthesis of the two is not a metaphysical entity, but a process and
product conditioned by the material circumstances and nature of the
subject and object: dialectics secularizes knowing.
Fourth, it implies that one must always consider history. If knowing is
tied to dialectics in material circumstances, then one must also
realize that circumstances can only be historically given. As
Derrida has argued in his introduction to Husserl's Geometry, there
are no extra-systemic a priori ideas, only historical a priori ideas.
In this way, biological givens are also historically given because
both ontogenesis and phylogenesis are historical.
3. Two Psycholinguistic Implications of Dialectics
It is very chic these days to abandon linguistic competence in favor
of communicative competence by arguing that linguistic competence is
idealized and that communicative competence (pragmatics, speech acts,
intentionality, etc.) is "more real" because communicative competence
considers how language is used in the world. Dialectics shows that this
is a pseudo-argument.
Communicative competence still privileges the subject only, by giving
taxonomies of intentions which the subject felicitously deploys
"in the world." How is this done? That is the "real" question.
Pragmatics, in criticizing Chomskyan competence for being idealized
falls prey to its own criticisms since it still privileges the
subject and idealized linguistic knowledge just one step higher
than the sentence: communicative competence is another from of
idealism (for a very brief discussion, see my review in December 1984
issue of Language, p. 967).
Dialectics has another implication for theories of text processing.
It is typical in text theory to privilege either the subject or the
object: if privileging the former, one acconts for text processing
in terms of mental structures -- schemas, frames, scripts; if
privileging the latter, one accounts for text processing in terms
of the structure of the text -- rhetorical structure, propositional
hierarchies, complexity, etc. A dialectical model would ask how
schemas and text structure interact.
Dialectical considerations of text processing have implications for
AI. In Schank and Abelson's model, e.g., the script or frame is
seminal. From a dialectical model, the script is less important than
the ways by which the machine "decides" to access the script to
begin with: the knowledge structure is less important than the
procedures to deploy the knowledge structure since that is the
point where the machine as subject interacts with the text as
object.
Well, I've gone on perhaps too long for some preliminary statements
about dialectics, so I'll stop here. Any comments??
Bill Frawley
20568.ccvax1@udel
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Date: Wed, 28 Nov 84 17:13:33 pst
From: chertok%ucbcogsci@Berkeley (Paula Chertok)
Subject: Seminar - Aesthetic Experience (Berkeley)
BERKELEY COGNITIVE SCIENCE PROGRAM
Fall 1984
Cognitive Science Seminar -- IDS 237A
SPEAKER: Thomas G. Bever, Psychology Department,
Columbia University
TITLE: The Psychological basis of aesthetic experi-
ence: implications for linguistic nativism
TIME: Tuesday, December 4, 11 - 12:30
PLACE: 240 Bechtel Engineering Center
DISCUSSION: 12:30 - 2 in 200 Building T-4
ABSTRACT: We define the notion of Aesthetic Experience
as a formal relation between mental
representations: an aesthetic experience
involves at least two conflicting represen-
tations that are resolved by accessing a
third representation. Accessing the third
representation releases the same kind of
emotional energy as the 'aha' elation asso-
ciated with discovering the solution to a
problem. We show how this definition applies
to various artforms, music, literature,
dance. The fundamental aesthetic relation
is similar to the mental activities of a
child during normal cognitive development.
These considerations explain the function of
aesthetic experience: it elicits in adult-
hood the characteristic mental activity of
normal childhood.
The fundamental activity revealed by consid-
ering the formal nature of aesthetic experi-
ence involves developing and interrelating
mental representations. If we take THIS
capacity to be innate (which we surely
must), the question then arises whether we
can account for the phenomena that are usu-
ally argued to show the unique innateness of
language as a mental organ. These phenomena
include the emergence of a psychologically
real grammar, a critical period, cerebral
asymmetries. More formal linguistic
properties may be accounted for as partially
uncaused (necessary) and partially caused by
general properties of animal mind. The
aspects of language that may remain unex-
plained (and therefore non-trivially innate)
are the forms of the levels of representa-
tion.
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Date: Wed 28 Nov 84 17:24:47-PST
From: Dikran Karagueuzian <DIKRAN@SU-CSLI.ARPA>
Subject: Seminars - Phonetics, Discourse, Semantics (CSLI Stanford)
[Excerpted from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.]
ABSTRACT OF TODAY'S SEMINAR
``Parsing Acoustic Events''
This seminar addresses the problem of formulating a language-independent
representation of the acoustic aspects of natural, continuous speech from
which a general parser using language-specific grammars can recover
linguistic structure. This decomposition of the problem permits a
representation that is stable over utterance situations and provides
constraints that handle some of the difficulties associated with partially
obscured or ``incomplete'' information. A system will be described which
contains a grammar for parsing higher-level (phonological) events as well
as an explicit grammar for low-level acoustic events. It will be shown that
the same techniques for parsing syntactic strings apply in this domain. The
system thus provides a formal representation for physical signals and a way
to parse them as part of the larger task of extracting meaning from sound.
--Meg Withgott
____________
ABSTRACT OF NEXT WEEK'S SEMINAR
``The Structures of Discourse Structure''
This talk will introduce a theory of discourse structure that attempts to
answer two rather simple questions, namely: What is discourse? What is
discourse structure? In this work (being done jointly with Sidner at BBN)
discourse structure will be seen to be intimately connected with two
nonlinguistic notions--intention and attention. Intentions will be seen to
play a primary role not only in providing a basis for explaining discourse
structure, but also in defining discourse coherence, and providing a coherent
notion of the term ``discourse'' itself. A main thesis of the theory is that
the structure of any discourse is a composite of three interacting
constituents: the structure of the actual sequence of utterances in the
discourse, a structure of intentions, and an attentional state. Each of these
constituents of discourse structure both affects and is affected by the
individual utterances in the discourse. The separation of discourse
structure into these three components allows us to generalize and simplify a
number of previous results and is essential to explaining certain discourse
phenomena. In particular, I will show how the different components contribute
to the proper treatment of various kinds of interruptions, as well as to
explanations of the use of certain types of referring expressions and of
various expressions that function directly to affect discourse structure.
--Barbara J. Grosz
____________
ABSTRACT OF NEXT WEEK'S TINLUNCH
Syntactic Features, Semantic Filtering, and Generative Power
There is a trade-off in linguistic description using grammars with a syntax
and a separate semantics, such as GPSG. One can often either use a
syntactic feature or appeal to semantic filtering to achieve the same ends.
Current GPSG countenances no semantic filtering, i.e. does not overgenerate
strings in the syntax and then let the semantics throw some away as
`uninterpretable'. In the Tinlunch I would like to discuss this position
in light of some work I did in my dissertation which looks like it requires
semantic filtering, and in light of a paper by Marsh & Partee which shows
that adding certain types of semantic filtering to a grammar greatly
increases the generative power. --Peter Sells
____________
CSLI WORKSHOP ON THE SEMANTICS OF PROGRAMS
Tuesday, December 4, 1984
Location: The Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society, Princeton CA
(a suburb of Half-Moon Bay)
There are long-standing traditions for the study of natural language
semantics and CSLI projects have been extending and reinterpreting them.
There is a briefer, but substantial, tradition for the study of the
semantics of programming languages. Over the past few months, there have
been a series of presentations and discussions about similarities and
differences between the semantic accounts of natural and computational
languages. Theories of natural language semantics have raised a number of
issues. The purpose of the workshop is to discuss how some of these
theories can give rise to better accounts of the relation between
programs/program executions and the world. Participation in the workshop
is by invitation only. If you are interested in being invited to the
workshop, contact Ole Lehrmann Madsen (Madsen at SU-CSLI). If you have any
questions regarding the workshop you may contact Terry Winograd (TW at
SU-SAIL) or Madsen.
____________
PH.D. PROPOSAL
On Tuesday, December 4, from 3:15 p.m. to 5:05 p.m., in Bldg. 200-217, Kurt
Queller will talk about ``Active Exploration with syntagmatic routines in
the child's construction of grammar: Some phonological perspectves.'' Based
on detailed longitudinal analysis of data from 3 one-year-olds, the proposed
dissertation will provide a typology of syntag-matic phonological routines
or ``word-recipes'' used by young children in bulding a repertoire of
pronounceable works. Then, it will show how individual children exploit
particular combinations of routines in constructing a coherent phonological
system. Extensive synchronic variability and changes over time will be
accounted for in terms of the child's systematic exploration of the options
implicit in the resulting system.
------------------------------
Date: Mon 26 Nov 84 11:15:02-PST
From: Paula Edmisten <Edmisten@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA>
Subject: Seminar - The KEE Knowledge Engineering System (Stanford)
[Forwarded from the SIGLUNCH distribution by Laws@SRI-AI.]
SPEAKER: Richard Fikes, Director
Knowledge Systems Research and Development
IntelliCorp, Inc.
ABSTRACT: The KEE System - An Integration of Knowledge-Based
Systems Technology
DATE: Friday, November 30, 1984
LOCATION: Chemistry Gazebo, between Physical and Organic Chemistry
TIME: 12:05
IntelliCorp has developed an integrated collection of representation,
reasoning, and interface facilities for building knowledge-based
systems called the Knowledge Engineering Environment (KEE). The
system's components include (1) a frame-based representation facility
incorporating features of UNITS, LOOPS, and KL-ONE that supports
taxonomic definition of object types, structured descriptions of
individual objects, and object-oriented programming; (2) a logic
language for asserting and deductively retrieving facts; (3) a
production rule language with user-controllable backward and forward
chainers that supports PROLOG-style logic programming; and (4) a
graphics work bench for creating display-based user interfaces. KEE
uses interactive graphics to facilitate the building, editing,
browsing, and testing of knowledge bases. A primary goal of the
overall design is to promote rapid prototyping and incremental
refinement of application systems. KEE has been commercially
available since August 1983, and has been used by customers to build a
wide range of application systems. In this talk I will give an
overview of the KEE system with particular emphasis on its
representation and reasoning facilities, and discuss ways in which the
system provides significant leverage for its users.
Paula
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End of AIList Digest
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