- #31
honestrosewater
Gold Member
- 2,133
- 6
Hahaha, where to start...
I didn't mean my computer reference to spawn a discussion about artificial intelligence, and I honestly don't want to touch that at the moment.
My point is simply that the hearer does not necessarily have access to the experience, or even the intentions, of the speaker. That is my problem with the suggestion that a hearer's interpretation of an utterance requires knowledge of the speaker's experience. Hearers simply don't usually have such knowledge, yet that has not stopped them from interpreting utterances for thousands of years.
The definitions and theories that I was referring to are those of several related fields: linguistics, semiotics, logic, model theory, philosophy of language, and possibly even some communication or information theory to get a better model of communication and its obstacles (though various fields of linguistics will cover this to some extent). I gave some relevant links in my posts already. You can also google or search Wikipedia for the things that I just mentioned to get started, if you're seriously curious. I also suggest that you look up some info about syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. That seems to be what you are interested in now, especially pragmatics.
Note that an instance of communication involves more than one meaning. This is what I was referring to earlier with my question about mappings. Take the communication of a single message from a speaker to a hearer as your prototypical communication instance. Assigning the message a single meaning does not work. (Just try it.) You have to consider the speaker's intended meaning in addition to, and separate from, the hearer's interpreted meaning. (There are more meanings, but they can be ignored here.)
A good example of this is that Evo's interpreted meaning of my "See: Is Paris the capital of France?" message seems to not match my intended meaning. (I say "seems" because of course I don't know the intended meaning of the messages that Evo has communicated either. It's a whole bunch of assumptions, this language and communication thing.) I do now see another interpretation that I hadn't seen before. I wasn't instructing you to go see some reference material that is titled "Is Paris the capital of France?". I meant "Is Paris the capital of France?" to be a demonstration, an example, of what I had just described: an utterance that I believed would be interpreted as a question by a competent English speaker but to which, when I uttered it, I did not desire an answer. (There is that colon convention again. It strikes me as an appositional use (where the phrase following the colon is equal to a phrase preceding the colon) similar to but more emphatic than the comma-signaled one.)
(Parenthetically (
), I usually try to be consistent about those things, even more so since I've started programming, though I am kind of rushing through these posts. I would have expressed the directive sentence as "See 'Is Paris the Capital of France?'." (with context-appropriate quotation delimiters). There are a few different common conventions for this kind of thing, the formatting of direct discourse and such, so I suppose it shouldn't be surprising that misunderstandings arise there.)
There is no reason to assume that there exists any meaning in the formal parts of a message, whatever that would mean. You can assume, as I think makes the most sense, that the meaning of a message is defined by the interpretation that is assigned to the message's formal parts, or syntax.
And even assigning an interpretation (or mapping either way, whichever way you're going) does not require conscious experience, or at least not by any argument that I've seen or can imagine. I don't know why it is so difficult to separate language from consciousness, especially, considering your remarks about something lacking in computers, phenomenal consciousness. But, woops, it looks like it's time to not get sidetracked.
I think there just needs to be a lot more separating going on here. First, separate conscious thought from language. Then, within language, separate form from meaning. And separate syntactic form from surface form. And separate out all of the different meanings and contexts. And also separate speaker from hearer, or sender from receiver. And separate them from the channel and the channel from the message. And keep going. language is complex.
P.S. Yay! I understood my first argument in French! (Unless you count "Je suis! Grrr..." as an argument.)
I didn't mean my computer reference to spawn a discussion about artificial intelligence, and I honestly don't want to touch that at the moment.
My point is simply that the hearer does not necessarily have access to the experience, or even the intentions, of the speaker. That is my problem with the suggestion that a hearer's interpretation of an utterance requires knowledge of the speaker's experience. Hearers simply don't usually have such knowledge, yet that has not stopped them from interpreting utterances for thousands of years.
The definitions and theories that I was referring to are those of several related fields: linguistics, semiotics, logic, model theory, philosophy of language, and possibly even some communication or information theory to get a better model of communication and its obstacles (though various fields of linguistics will cover this to some extent). I gave some relevant links in my posts already. You can also google or search Wikipedia for the things that I just mentioned to get started, if you're seriously curious. I also suggest that you look up some info about syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. That seems to be what you are interested in now, especially pragmatics.
Note that an instance of communication involves more than one meaning. This is what I was referring to earlier with my question about mappings. Take the communication of a single message from a speaker to a hearer as your prototypical communication instance. Assigning the message a single meaning does not work. (Just try it.) You have to consider the speaker's intended meaning in addition to, and separate from, the hearer's interpreted meaning. (There are more meanings, but they can be ignored here.)
A good example of this is that Evo's interpreted meaning of my "See: Is Paris the capital of France?" message seems to not match my intended meaning. (I say "seems" because of course I don't know the intended meaning of the messages that Evo has communicated either. It's a whole bunch of assumptions, this language and communication thing.) I do now see another interpretation that I hadn't seen before. I wasn't instructing you to go see some reference material that is titled "Is Paris the capital of France?". I meant "Is Paris the capital of France?" to be a demonstration, an example, of what I had just described: an utterance that I believed would be interpreted as a question by a competent English speaker but to which, when I uttered it, I did not desire an answer. (There is that colon convention again. It strikes me as an appositional use (where the phrase following the colon is equal to a phrase preceding the colon) similar to but more emphatic than the comma-signaled one.)
(Parenthetically (
), I usually try to be consistent about those things, even more so since I've started programming, though I am kind of rushing through these posts. I would have expressed the directive sentence as "See 'Is Paris the Capital of France?'." (with context-appropriate quotation delimiters). There are a few different common conventions for this kind of thing, the formatting of direct discourse and such, so I suppose it shouldn't be surprising that misunderstandings arise there.)There is no reason to assume that there exists any meaning in the formal parts of a message, whatever that would mean. You can assume, as I think makes the most sense, that the meaning of a message is defined by the interpretation that is assigned to the message's formal parts, or syntax.
And even assigning an interpretation (or mapping either way, whichever way you're going) does not require conscious experience, or at least not by any argument that I've seen or can imagine. I don't know why it is so difficult to separate language from consciousness, especially, considering your remarks about something lacking in computers, phenomenal consciousness. But, woops, it looks like it's time to not get sidetracked.
I think there just needs to be a lot more separating going on here. First, separate conscious thought from language. Then, within language, separate form from meaning. And separate syntactic form from surface form. And separate out all of the different meanings and contexts. And also separate speaker from hearer, or sender from receiver. And separate them from the channel and the channel from the message. And keep going. language is complex.
P.S. Yay! I understood my first argument in French! (Unless you count "Je suis! Grrr..." as an argument.)
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