Hermeneutic Heretic

Media Blog on National Review Online
What the BBC is telling children about the 9/11 attacks [Tom Gross]

Here is what the BBC’s widely-read children’s section of their website (CBBC) is telling kids about the 9/11 attacks, the 6th anniversary of which falls today.

It is not quite the al-Qaeda view, but it almost is.

When I saw this intro I expected this to be another hawkish rant but was surprised that it wasn’t that far off. While I’m all for presenting the al-Qaeda point of view alongside others, the BBC did it without making it clear whose views it was presenting. Now, this is more interesting from an educational and cognitive than political point of view. I can see the editorial policy of the site is to present things simply without too many counterfactuals. While children may have problems processing some complex counterfactual sentences, they are not incapable of processing perspectives from about the age 6-8 (and writing about 9/11 for children younger than that is a waste of time). And the language of the text is convoluted anyway so a typical child would have trouble making any sense out of it.

The way America has got involved in conflicts in regions like the Middle East has made some people very angry, including a group called al-Qaeda - who are widely thought to have been behind the attacks.

Who on Earth would think this is child-friendly language? It requires rather a lot of attention and focus and navigation of mental spaces. How about: “Many people are angry because America often tries to influence what their countries do.” But even better, how about:

“It is often difficult to say why people do things. It is also difficult to say why some people hate other people. One explanation is … . The people who did 9/11 say they did it because … . The American president says it was because … . Some social scientists say it was because … . You will have to make a difficult decision about whose view you support.”

I’m sure this could be cleaned up further but miles better than a sentence with a complicated mental space structure, like the BBC’s:

When the attacks happened in 2001, there were a number of US troops in a country called Saudi Arabia, and the leader of al-Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, said he wanted them to leave.

I particularly like the “country called Saudi Arabia” as a nod to a text that is suitable for children in a sentence that clearly isn’t. Plus the comma before ’said’? Have they no shame? Children are good at processing stories, so tell them a story but this is a story summary for adults who already know what happened in a way that tries to look simple and isn’t.

BBC - Radio 4 - Today Programme Listen Again 11 Sept 2007 08:50 It’s the 50th anniversary of the British Computer Society. But what can we expect over the next half century? Will our levels of dependence on the internet and computers change?

One of the guests on the programme, Oliver Sparrow, made the following prediction:

“We will know whether there’s a transcendent bit to the human mind by 2050, we will know exactly what cognition is and how we think and probably be able to emulate it.”

Well, here’s an alternative prediction. No, we won’t! This prediction assumes a lot about both the nature of cognition and mind, e.g. that they are objective phenomena as described by the language of our daily speech and the language of experts, and about our ability to come to grips with it, e.g. that we can easily capture it through the same tools that we are used to capturing information about the accessible and the not so accessible world. But if we look at the last 50 years of computers and mind research, we should radically limit our expectations of the next 50 years. While computer power (or rather its transistor prerequisites as described by Moore’s law) as increased geometrically, our ability to emulate human cognition has increased almost not at all. Let’s look at expert systems. It has been over 40 years since ELIZA and we would be very hard put to find a system that can do much more than that, today. The same goes for machine translation. Speech recognition has not progressed almost at all in the last fifteen years. Sure, you can now dictate and have Word open at the same time but that’s just tweaking. Accuracy has increased by a guestimate of 20%, usability 10 times while computer power in the same time increased 256 times. The mind boggles why it took computers so long to even draw with humans at chess. Why couldn’t a regular calculator do it decades ago? Computer speed simply isn’t the answer. My speech recognition teacher said years ago that we need a change of paradigm rather than an increase in computer speed and he was right.

The complexity of human cognition is such that we don’t even know how complex it is, the factors of its social embeddedness are another unknown. My prediction is that we will be as far from being able to model cognition in 2050 as we are today unless we find a way of modelling it as it is rather than modelling it on the back of our incredibly reductionist description of it. Some of the work done on bottom-up robotics seems to point in the right way. Google’s stochastic processing of prestige is also pretty good. We can pretty much keep up wih the increase in the amount of information but I doubt that we will be able to achieve a corresponding increase of knowledge as defined by the speaker. He goes on to draw the following analogy:

If we look at the amount of knowledge that the human race produced and think of it as a nice simple analogy that you have a sheet of cloth about thousand stiches by a thousand stiches. Let’s call it a megabyte which is about a telephone directory’s worth of information. Everything humanity did in 1920 was a bedsheet to cover the Island of Mauritius, by 1940 it had got to Madagascar, by the 1950s it was the Congo, the whole of Africa by the 60s, all of the continents of the planet by the mid-1980s. By 1990 we had a duvet cover of information produced every year to cover the whole planet by 2020 we’ll have about 1800 planets’ worth of information.

The problem is that information and knowledge are very different. Information is a property of matter (inkblots on paper, magnetic charge of hard drive platters, etc.) while knowledge is a property of individual human beings embedded in the situational constraints of their social existence. Or possibly, it’s a property of the social group that can be shared and enacted by its individual human members. The maintenance of information requires relatively little effort (keep the books dusted and the CD-ROMs safe), the maintenance of knowledge requires tremendous cognitive (remembering, organizing, communicating) and social (putting into context, speaking to the right people, maintaining prestige, …) effort. Just like with the speed of computers not being commensurate with their ability to emulate cognition (let alone social cognition), the amount of information available (encoded in some storage devices) is not commensurate with the “amount” of knowledge, in least because it’s not even certain that knowledge can be measured or even that it can ‘increase’ rather than just being shifted around and refocused.

Let’s illustrate on this debate itself. The one thing we already do know about the mind and cognition, is that the mind is not at all like a computer: it doesn’t have memory that works as a storage or repository of information, and it does not apply serial algorithms to the information it works on. It is not independent of the body in which it exists and it is most certainly not something that can be easily transferred from one context to another. The problem with this ‘information’ is that it is the knowledge only of a limited group of people in the AI, NLP and general cognitive science community, and even the communities and individuals that do ‘possess’ this knowledge are not sure how to act on it. Kurt Vonnegut expressed it best: “Hi ho!”

Just Say No “Nonetheless I took the tomatoes away.”

This is only partially a hermeneutic post.

It’s so rare to see poetry in blogs (unless they’re poets’ blogs which I don’t read) but this last line in a post, turned it into a poem. It reminded me of my favorite poem by Vladimír Holan about a Russian soldier and him walking by the lake killing fish with handgranades.

But what I found introspectively interesting how reading that last line completely changed the rhythm (and meaning) of the entire post spanning 427 words. What about the post (and texts in general) persists in the mind that can be profiled and made generally salient? I can’t quite even imagine how we would go about studying this but we’ll need to.

On The Media
In the parlance of Republican-primary politics, “sanctuary� – as in sanctuary city – has become a bad word.

…

GEOFFREY NUNBERG: Well, sometime around 2005, 2006, you begin to hear people on the right using the word, not for these cities and movements that aimed at providing specifically political asylum, but rather to cities that said, look, we just don’t think it’s our business to have our local officials helping the INS.

We don’t want to discourage witnesses from coming forth in criminal cases. We don’t want to discourage parents from bringing their children to emergency rooms. We don’t want to discourage children from coming to school.

So using sanctuary to describe these cities would be sort of like saying that the military, because of its don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy, has become a sanctuary for homosexuals [BOB LAUGHS]because you’re not supposed to be there but we’re not going to ask whether that’s what you’re doing or not.

BOB GARFIELD: Mitt Romney has seized on this word “sanctuary.” Do you think sanctuary is the word that he’s actually trying to communicate or is he trying to use it as a kind of a code for something even more offensive to conservatives?

GEOFFREY NUNBERG: Well, I think sanctuary is very closely related to amnesty. It evokes that word “illegal,” which is used as a noun only to describe people’s immigration status. You don’t say that Jack Abramoff was an illegal because he lobbied illegally, for example.

And, in fact, the word “illegal” has always been used in just that way. It was first introduced in the English language by the British in the 1930s and early ’40s to describe Jews who illegally emigrated to Palestine.

There are some questions here we may want to ask of Nunberg. On the one hand this sort of lexical reframing is perfectly common and  there is nothing strange about it (as much as  we may disagree with its politics).  Why do we then need a linguist to explain it to us? Nunberg’s intervention is problematic in two senses. First, his description of the process is more of a description of a folk theory of the appropriateness of mappings than a real linguistic theory. And second, the all too common assumption of an expert mantle provides legitimacy to statements that are politically engaged. I’m not trying to criticize a fellow linguist (a much more successful one, to boot) for getting engaged in politics. I’m all for that and I agree with his criticism. But this engagement is not linguistics in the sense of disengaged inquiry into the workings of language and communication. It is just engagement in frame negotiation where certain features of the process of language change are hypostasized and exposed to explicit negotiation. This, just like the subject under investigation, is extremely common.

In fact, the last paragraph is engaging in exactly the same “smear campaign” by connotation that the Romney’s of the world like so much. But reminding us that something was first used against Jews is certainly not a neutral context setter.

Again, I disagree with neither Nunberg’s linguistics nor his politics but there’s more to the story than that (as there so often is).

Anil Dash: Cats Can Has Grammar
The core behavior has existed for some time; “Image macro” is a generic term for this kind of folk art, and cats have always featured heavily in these types of Internet in-jokes. But a few distinct categories have sprung up that have helped amplify and popularize the phenomenon.

Two things are happening here. First, the very thing Anil Dash is describing. A “grammar” of LOLCats is emerging. However, this is a cognitive construction grammar rather than a traditional grammar in that it doesn’t provide generative (in the broad sense) but rather an inventory of conventionalized units have both highly schematic form and meaning (actually the distance between the semantic and formal poles is very narrow). Anil Dash’s descriptions of the grammar of LOL are actually very close to what a construction grammar would look like. Actually, construction grammar could probably take some lessons from him:

• I’M IN UR X Ying your Z.
• Invisible Item.
• Kitty Pidgin

These are three descriptions of rules a reader might recognize a lolcat utterance. (And it is possible, as Anil Dash notes, to get them wrong.) The interesting thing about it is that he uses a different format for each of the lolcat grammar constructions. And always the one that is most appropriate for recognition and storage. So, wonder I, should construction grammarians adopt the same approach (and run the risk of being accused of not being scientific enough) or should we even consider the fact that these rules may be “stored” in our brains differently? Some as paradigmatic constructions, some imagistic or scriptic, and yet others as schematic formulae such as those applied to the recognition or application of a genre or even a foreign tongue. Another thing, we could probably study how these rules are acquired, spread and developed.

Which brings us to the second point. The act of Mr Dash himself.

I was having a conversation with Ben and Ben a few weeks ago where I suggested this consistent grammar for lolcats could be a “cweeole”. Knowing a bit more about such things now, I realize this isn’t a creole but more likely a pidgin language, used to help cats talk to humans. And since “pidgin” is already a cutesy spelling of a mispronunciation, there doesn’t seem to be any really cute way to rename it to reflect its uniqueness. “Kitty pidgin” might be the closest thing we have to a name for this new language.

There’s a consistent visual vocabulary to the construct, as well. If it ain’t Impact or Arial Black or some other nondescript sans serif font, it ain’t lolcat. White letters with a black outline are a must. But codifying a design guide for lolcats is well beyond my abilities.

Anil Dash is engaging in frame negotiation and acting as an agent similar to those described by Labov (and Asch) who is a significant vector in the spread  of a symbolic system. He is doing the same job linguists do but unlike many linguists, his work is intended to interact with the system itself (and it no doubt does). I’ve described something similar in the arena of fanfiction where along some incredible creative writing there also emerged a considerable body of critical opinion which contributed to the solidification of subgenres and offered a feedback loop to the spontaneously emerging classifications (Uberfic, Slash, etc.). Construction linguists need to investigate what role this kind of behavior plays in the functioning of “natural” languages where the tendency has generally been to neglect the human agency and imply an agency of the “system”. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing but it does ignore something I’m finding more and more evidence for. Next, I’d like to determine how frequent that evidence is and what persistence and salience it has (since frequency isn’t necessarily the only determining factor).

YouTube - Miss Teen USA 2007 - South Carolina answers a question
Miss Teen USA 2007 - Ms. South Carolina answers a question

It is all too easy to make fun of speakers like this. But most commenters on YouTube (and elsewhere) got it wrong.

ChrisKangaroo It is obviuos that she has no idea what a map is and therefore, she is unable to answer

Or rather, like the speaker above applied the less apt folk theory of linguistic coherence. I.e. things have to make sense. This folk theory got a lot of play around the internets including http://mapsforus.org, the Tube map, and BoingB oing’s transcription of it into verse.

A much more balanced view including a transcript (reformatted here from the original verse) was provided by an anonymous commenter on BoingBoing:

“I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some… People out there in our nation don’t have maps, and I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and the Iraq … everywhere like “such as”… and I believe that they should our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S. or should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future for us.”

…

My translation/explanation:

I believe when she started to answer the question, she knew what the question was asking, but probably second-guessed herself into thinking it was more likely that it stated that people from other nations couldn’t locate the U.S. on a map. Thus, she switched her answer around to match that train of thought, concluding that those people couldn’t locate the U.S. on a map primarily because they simply lack maps, and secondarily because they lack proper education, which the U.S. should assist with.

I suspect that Anonymous got it just about right. However, there’s more of the story to be told. Her speech is marked by a constant search for coherence and the possible cohesive links just come too fast for her to process them in a very stressful situation. She is basically trying to integrate a question with several publicly available frames. But these frames come with linguistic structures attached to them and these structures can be reminiscent of other structures that then evoke other (possibly different) framings. (I’m just now playing with the notion of frames as constructions - just gave a talk at NDCL 2 on this topic).

The speaker is using stock phrases (more than likely as a result of explicit training) such as “I personally believe” and more open ended constructions such as “should help” and “out education” that can be integrated with very many constructional clichés of the public political discourse. That is what set her off on the path of the US helping others even though she started with the frame of the US needing help. But every intonation unit of her speech is rife with the quest for coherence. She uses all the right devices to establish it both internally and externally but ultimately fails.

Of course, discursively and intellectually the situation is completely corrupt. The questioner doesn’t give her any space to negotiate the conceptual and linguistic space. The problem with the ridicule isn’t just the picking on the helpless (others can probably do better) but the linguistic and cognitive naivety of the taunters. This speech says nothing about the intelligence of the woman nor her ability to address this issue. It was simply the best she could do in that situation. This should remind us of the fragility of language and cognition.

But having said that, this Quiet Library video is very funny (or at least the first part):