Not quite a filler

This is really a note to self - not sure if I've made this point before, but i want to lodge an objection to the subject, or at least the idea that all sentences necessarily have a subject (as per the LFG crowd), or that subjects are necessarily agents (Baker) (assuming causation is at stake), or that the subject is a "grammaticised topic" (also LFG). my intuition is that these are all very eurocentric, possibly latincentric.

I'll follow that up when I get back to a library, but I haven't seen remotely testable evidence for any of this. I also find the failure of anyone to produce a principled account of the operation of the subject in Chinese - which however clumsily has nonetheless been plausibly challenged by Lee.

You know...

I just want to warn any readers - not that I have undue expectations - that my expertise in these matters is not necessarily great. Relatively great perhaps. Greater than many. But not great. it's hard to get great into a modest sentence, but I assure you that's what I was aiming at.

Knowledge is tricky. In fact, it's a minefield. Unbelievably, given that Plato draws our attention to Socrates' attempts at consciousness-raising in this regard a good two point five plus millennia ago, I have to feel that the philosophy department hasn't been doing particularly well on this question. Of course, there is another way to look at it; the philosophy department is still being funded to sort this question out, so they have been successful in fending off the need to pursue any new questions to think about for quite a while. If your idea of a stressful day is a nice quiet think, then obviously you don't need to be bothered with the stress of working out what to think about it.

It seems to me that the best overview of the problem is that we know something when we have sufficient evidence for it; that seems perfectly clear until you have to define sufficient and evidence & I'm certainly not going to try. My own feeling is that we only ever know things inside a closed framework & that the foundations of that framework, the axioms, are inevitably matters of faith. That's how it is. It's irritating for the scientists, but it shouldn't be. It makes the god-botherers feel superior to the scientists (that's what annoys the scientists really, no-one like being looked down on), but it shouldn't. There are many things that could be used as a basis for comparison between the two frameworks, (scientific & god-bothered) and in fact I imagine there's a sufficient plethora to support on-going dissent for a few more millennia. It's wouldn't hurt if we could raise the standard of debate though - eh, Richard, now, would it?

One thing that puzzles me though, and that's how it is that my pseudo-scientific colleagues in the linguistics faculty imagine that "falsification" is the last word in scientific methodology. Frankly, I haven't even found much evidence that they can do that successfully - there are honourable exceptions, mostly in the, guess where, cognitive science faculty - but even if they could, falsification isn't such a big deal. Popper is usually credited with it as a response to the problem of empiricism, which, simply put, is that induction requires the future to resemble the past so that the assumptions made from past experiment can be held as future laws. Falsification purports to do away with this by positing a one-time event, falsification, which mysteriously underwrites the future. Of course falsification relies on the future being the same as the present just as much as induction. Plus, as Noam demonstrates admirably through most of the sixties, a bit of countervailing evidence is no obstacle to a good theory. There are a large number of political and rhetorical strategies to ignore it. One thing is for sure; if linguistics IS a science, then it provides some of the best evidence that science is another human activity dependent largely on the vagaries of human behaviour; a love of fashion, a desire to be popular, the pursuit of power.

I like linguistics & it has achieved a lot; predicting population movements well in advance of DNA testing, for example. I like science & it would be insane to trivialise its achievements or its methodology. "Science is bunk", he typed into his computer wirelessly connected to the internet. Ho, ho, ho.

I don't like all the claims made for knowledge: it's too stressful. I haven't got the time to unpick the contingency in everything I study - but the authors have. That would be a kind of scholarship that I would like to see.

Damn

I spent all yesterday with the nagging feeling that there was something else I was supposed to be doing, and about 10 pm last night, I remembered what it was. So that's that. Now today I have a nagging feeling as I type that there is something else I am supposed to be doing. I wonder when I will work out what it is.

It's curious how one's fingers (I am a really poor typist) have their own grammar. For example, in the last sentence of the previous paragraph I was thinking to finish with "...what that is" because, I might say, today's putatively undone thing has focus, so deserves the demonstrative pronoun. But when I looked down to perform my routine post-sentence check I noticed that my fingers had added their own view, so I had actually typed "...what that it is". Obviously it was tempting to expand that into a rococo scat on pronouns, but eventually I went with my fingers, rather than my brain. After all, I felt, the focus was a little bit overstated.

That is only the most proximate example of the phenomenon, which is just an instance of the extreme difficulty of devising adequate explanatory mechanisms for language. There is no doubt that the motor systems are involved, in speech as well as in writing, and in syntax, lexical choice, pronunciation, and spelling. Doubtless pragmatics as well, although a lot of that has to be handled elsewhere, but there's no reason why the motor systems can't intervene there as well. After all, they get the last say.

It's interesting to watch the recognition of this over time by the generativists. Initially, enormous resistance as the integrity of their grammar module was threatened. Then, sudden recognition that a whole bunch of potentially falsifying phenomena for their theory could be easily offloaded into some other "level" thus preserving their neat little bilevel theory. Epicycles, anyone?

Belief: A chemical reaction in the brain which causes people to say the equivalent of "this is true".

Faith: Belief + the knowledge that it's only a chemical reaction.

Knowledge: Belief + the belief that it isn't a chemical reaction.

Don't think about it too hard.

it's an amazing coincidence

By an amazing coincidence, just as I have started wrestling with the cybernetic & philosophic - I feel a bit like starting a crusade today, for consistency in adjectival ending - issues of artificial life, the NYT ran an article on viruses, which raises the specific issue of whether viruses are life or not, and the further issue of the complete absence of a technical, consistently applicable definition of life, and, even more amazingly, I read a brief report on planet searching which predicts the soon discovery of a planet that support life. I guess the author(s) of the second article hadn't read the first.

Wait, is it an amazing coincidence? This book will probably take a month to consume, and I read 4 papers a day, and all of them support science journalism. So in a month that's around 200 articles on science, and let's face it, artificial life, writ broadly, is a zeitgeisty sort of topic that's likely to attract the attention of science-desk editors (populist sorts of, hmm, guys, probably). You'd expect it to be well represented. So it's not an amazing coincidence. It would actually be an amazing uncoincidence if I hadn't run across at least a couple of related articles over the course of a as yet incomplete month. Not that amazing uncoincidences are particularly noticeable - do you think something can be amazing, and unnoticeable at the same time? I suspect not.

So, it's just a coincidence. But even coincidence has "amazing" built into it, to a degree. OK, so literally it looks like two things happening at the same time, "co" + "incident", but try it. "The traffic lights went read and coincidentally the cars stopped". "Coincidentally one car didn't stop and coincidentally hit the cars going through the intersection". Hmm. All those things happened at the same time, but there was no coincidence. Stopping at the red light was predictable. Not stopping wasn't predictable, but the accident as a result of not stopping was. I think I'll have to probe the semantics of concidence at a future time, because I have a bus to catch, but I've established that my reading material isn't coincident, which was the local purpose of the semantic investigation.

My reading actually characterises me, it characterises science journalism, it characterises media economics. If it were coincidence, it wouldn't characterise anything, this seems like the essential difference; things that happen at the same time may be characteristic, or they may be coincident.

Depending on whose point of view?

on with the show

If we conceive of intentionality as "representation of goals", I guess I don't have much of a quibble with that; although I think there is a lot of stuff hidden inside that phrase, not least because I feel that "goal" includes intention, which is prima facie not a good basis for a stable definition.

I've been reading up on AI & A-life recently (has AI as a term subsumed A-life?) so it's inevitable to end up wondering about the brain & the mind; it's also concomitant with interest in language. I have yet to read any satisfying linguistics in terms of the relationship between the brain and language. Chomsky's grammar module makes me laugh, but I guess it wan't a bad punt in 1957 and for all I know it makes him laugh now. Someone should write a book about Chomsky's linguistics; it seems that he progressed by grudgingly incorporating rival linguists' contributions, typically after a period in which they/their ideas were belittled. He demonstrated the behaviour of, say, Microsoft - placeholder here for any market leader - well in advance. Chomsky was a great rhetor though, and that is actually the fundamental skill of the public world, now conceived considerably more widely than it was when Aristotle wrote the textbook. Sigh. I've always been a sucker for good rhetoric. I still read Nietzsche with all my critical faculties turned off; fortunately once the reading stops the brain stutters back into gear.

I've caught so many red herrings in that lot that I'm not sure which one to pick out & fry.

OK, how about this...

from the NYT today comes, Which is correct "He was one of those teachers who prefer to do rather than show" OR "He was one of those teachers who prefers to do rather than show"?

There isn't much doubt that the latter version is taking root in the language community and will probably supplant the former, which is actually prescriptively correct. Mind you, I think the 3rd-person "s" is going to die out in the next 50 years (good riddance), so the "wrong" version will end up being homologous with the "right" version.

Anyway, the reason that the 1st version is right is that the phrase-structure (simplified to the relevant elements) of the sentence is:

(S(N(He)

(VP(V(was)

NP(one of those teachers

(S (N(who=teachers)

(VP(V(prefer) COMP(to do rather than show)))))))

not:

(S(N(He)

(S (N(who=he)

(VP(V(prefers) COMP(to do rather than show))))

(VP(V(was)

NP(one of those teachers))))

I have to work out a way to do these trees in this environment, but hopefully that's clear enough for now. I could also say that the relative pronoun "who" refers to "teachers", which being a plural noun needs the plural, no "s", verb form. Or I could say that the dependent clause hangs off "teachers", not "he". I find it easier to see grammar in diagrams, myself.

This happens, IMO (= not empirically given), because "He" is the topic of both the independent and the dependent clause and "prefer" is really the first substantial verb, so it's not unreasonable to associate the two. It is quite natural. After all, one of the definitions of "Subject" is "grammaticalised topic" (that obviously has problems when you consider languages with a separate grammaticalised topic & subject, such as Korean, but that's for another day). In fact, the producer of the "wrong" sentence could defend it with reference to the meta-rule (which purports to apply to all languages). Clearly in English the proximity of the plural non-topic noun is supposed to override the meta-rule.

I'll have to get back to this later. Life supervenes.

aimlessly

It'd be pretty hard to set up a blog by pure aimlessness - maybe the million monkeys could manage it - so the real aim is, if you accept that intention and genuineness (genuinity? - no, I don't mean authenticity, at least I don't think I mean authenticity - OK, spell check doesn't like genuinity, which means something) are at least semi-plausible concepts is to try to write something every day for a year. No matter what.

Writer's block - who needs it? There's plenty of wittering in the wild world today, and I'm not charging you to read this lot, so it's not doing much harm. All the trees killed to bring this to you are already dead.

Topics, random. Parentheticals, numerous. Pronouncements, without conviction. Noise, silent.

Mind you, as well as the vaunted aim, I'm hoping for some side effects. Speaking as the world's second worst procrastinator - and you know who you are - I've often managed to get quite a lot done while putting off something else. And with all due respect, if this gets put off while I achieve something else, good luck to me.

Intention, it suddenly seems, it not so simple. I mean, I do honestly intend to write here every day, but I also plan, apparently, to not write here every day. Or at the very least, I'm reckless, about it, in the sense that I can see the possibility of it happening, and I'm quite happy about that. This is a way of channelling the procrastinatory impulse - either it produces this (yay, success) or it produces something else (yay, success). That almost seems like cheating. Boy, spell check really hates me.

I'm kind of sceptical about intention. I would say, we do what we do and we talk about intention afterwards, a kind of watered down free will. Or we confuse it with fantasy, some mental configuration of the present or past which places itself in the future.

Perhaps I can narrow it down a bit by saying intention is a mental configuration now, which refers to the future - a future - and simultaneously expresses an opinion that that particular future is preferable to some, or all, other futures. A positively-weighted image of the future; well, OK. That doesn't end the problems, mind you. But it'll do for now.