I recently began educating myself about human language acquisition (a rabbit hole I was pursuing from another book, Behave). I learnt that there's two main schools of thought—the "innate instinct" model (Chomsky et al) and its alternative, the "usage-based" model, which posits that language is "an embodied and social human behaviour and seeks explanations in that context". Here's an open-access paper[1] that summarizes and contrasts both the models. And if you, like me, find the "innate instinct" model to be an unsatisfying explanation, check out the following works: - Michael Tomasello.…
Although the article makes no mention of them, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's research on conceptual metaphor[0] seems to be intricately tied to this, somehow. I recently read two books by them: Metaphors We Live By (see Peter Norvig's description here[1]), and Philosophy In The Flesh[2] and found the ideas in them on how humans use metaphors to make sese of things very interesting and intuitive. It actually left me wondering when and how AI would use these insights. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_metaphor [1] http://norvig.com/mwlb.html - because it stays focused on language…
I believe bringing the concept of a fact into question will do more harm than good. A phone book is _not merely_ a set of facts, but also a set of agreements. Surely one can look inside the phone and disagree with one's own listing. If one were to dive into an API and find that it mistakenly calls an undefined function, or typos abound, in this case the API would need to be changed because it has become less functional. It may be rendered useless. A phonebook cannot be rendered useless if even all the numbers are incorrect; though I doubt such a philosophical argument need be presented…
This naive belief in rationality on her part is troubling. It reminds me the simplicity of XVIII century enlightenment thinkers. No wonder that Nielsen, being accustomed with how DNNs work. represents the opposite view. "Rationality" is at best a filter of rule constraints applied to small part of solutions that reach consciousness in any solution-seeking process. As we know eg. from Lakoff and Johnson ('metaphors we live by' etc.) most of reasoning is actually done using our sensory faculties, mostly spatial, which barely guarantee any kind of correctness. If you try to be rational and…
Original sources by Ward Cunningham are not too hard to come by... > I became interested in the way metaphors influence how we think, after reading George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's Metaphors We Live By. An important idea is that we reason by analogy with the metaphors that have entered our language. > I coined the debt metaphor to explain the refactoring that we were doing on the WyCash product. This was an early product done in DigiTalk Smalltalk, and it was important to me that we accumulate the learnings we did about the application over time by modifying the program to to look as if we…
This reminds me of the book Metaphors We Live By, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo363799...). Edit: of course it's mentioned in both the article and the talk, no wonder it's so relevant :) It discusses how metaphors in language fundamentally shape how we think and behave, even when we aren't aware of them. For example, in the second chapter they write about the concept "Time is money": == (this is a quote, including the italics for emphasis) TIME IS MONEY You're wasting my time. This gadget will save you hours. I don't have the…
A nitpick: People in English departments would probably call this a "rhetorical analysis," since "literary analysis" usually refers to fiction. I would say that Graham tends to have the modernist tendency to cut anything superfluous; to quote Milan Kundera in _Encounter_, "Almost all great modern artists mean to do away with 'filler,' do away with whatever comes from habit, whatever keeps them from getting directly and exclusively at the essential (the essential: the thing the artist himself, and only he, is able to say)." Kundera, like Graham, is very good at doing this in his nonfiction;…
To me it seems that this connotation is very deeply embedded in Western culture (but not only Western culture, compare for example yin and yang) and doesn't actually have much to do with race, and more with day and night, light and darkness and the fact that humans are not a nocturnal species and darkness can be dangerous to us. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-and-white_dualism this is traceable to the Ancient Near East and listed in the Pythagorean Table of Opposites for example, so it goes much further back than the Atlantic slave trade. I do not think that it would be…
You've identified a key misunderstanding - conflict resolution between individuals is nothing like conflict resolution between nations. Our metaphors for nations in the Lakoffian sense[1] erroneously guide us toward the conclusion that "countries are people". Countries "want" this or "dislike" that is specifically an example of personification identified in chapter seven. This is a dangerously leaky abstraction that when taken for granted lead to the naive conclusions you've identified like nations calling each other up and resolving some misunderstanding. Partially, the fact that…
I don't think it's the intuition. I think it's the part where people are explicitly and implicitly taught to avoid metaphors, since they are considered bad analogues and "window dressing on top of objective literal truths". The sad part it, Lakoff and Johnson already provided a good counter-argument that thesis in the eighties with their landmark 'Metaphors We Live By,' suggesting that metaphors are the main way humans make sense of the world, almost as if they are the fundamental intuition you refer to. Since then then the proof for this case has only been piling up. Especially in the…