Notices by Downes 🍁 (downes@mastodon.social), page 23

@testpilot It's not about gaining followers. It's about chatting with whomever is in the space you're sharing.

@bryanalexander I don't think of Mastodon in terms of benefits. It's a community I can chat with. It is fluid and evolving. Sometimes there's a lot of activity; sometimes there's none. I like that the people here aren't trying to sell me things. I like that it's relaxed.

@bryanalexander @Mastodon can't complain

@Tdorey @econproph @cogdog @Otterscotter @ShorterPearson @katebowles @clhendricksbc @actualham

Just installed Tusky and actually I think it like it a bit more.

#introductions I live and work at the intersection between philosophy, computing, learning and media. I write a lot and share it all. I believe in kindness, openness, tolerance and the fullest expression of life. I am a free spirit and I resist authority. I work for the government. http://www.downes.ca

@katebowles I think intent is circular, though.

When I was a writer for the student newspaper i covered art exhibits & interviewed artists. One talked about how he had accidentally spilled drops of paint on his sculpture and wrote afterwords in his artist's statement that it represented disorder. Maybe a similar story is true of the bed. Who knows?

As happens so often, the 'intent' is a story we craft after the fact to explain why we did what we did quite accidentally or automatically.

@katebowles Yeah. We teach autocorrect syntax (aka correct spelling) and it gets things wrong. When we teach it semantics (aka meaning) it will still get things wrong.

Autocorrect is two generations worth of insight away from where we are.

@katebowles Anything - everything - can communicate something. I walk in the forest (true story) and look at the brush, the twigs, etc., to see what has happened here - rabbits use this as a pathway, a squirrel eats n nuts here, it's shady here most of the day, etc. Each thing in the world can tell a story.

But the bent twig doesn't have meaning, it doesn't represent the bear that walked by, it doesn't even convey that information. It's just a twig, and when I saw it, I thought of a bear.

@katebowles Hall mentions Wittgenstein's theory that language is a game. This post says it's a ritual. http://www.downes.ca/post/67404

It's only from a certain perspective that we can say the purpose of language is to convey meaning (reference, distinction, representation, etc).

Language is a game, it's a ritual, it's a song, it's a play, it's a handshake, it's a house, it's a chair.

@katebowles When I was young my monther was in the hospital and we would drive to visit her every day. We (three boys in the car with my father) would chant "East Castor River" every time we went over the bridge.

It was just a thing. We were not communicating anything. It was just ritual. The words did not *mean* 'East castor River' even though an observer would suggest that they meant exactly that.

...

@katebowles cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indeterminacy_of_translation

This story reminds me of Quine's account of 'Gavagai', which might stand for 'rabbit' or might stand for 'the stage of development of a rabbit'. In this case, 'diver' might refer to the store, or the transition from video to DVD. There's no way, really, to tell. Knowing that the word 'represents' or 'has meaning' does not help us at all. We may as well just say that she has learned to associate a unique sound with a variety of related phenomena.

@katebowles I think my issue with a lot of this stiff is that I take 'meaning' to be no more substantive a concept than 'spirit' or 'aether' or 'essence' - it's is used for its explanatory force, but it is a mythical black-box explanation.

@katebowles Reading now... https://faculty.washington.edu/pembina/all_articles/Hall1997.pdf

Here's the test/proof of what I'm proposing.

If you see/hear the word 'chair' at the same time you experience seeing a chair, does the word 'chair' stand for the object 'chair', or does the object 'chair' stand for the word 'chair'?

Because there's no way to say one way or another, we can't say that one represents the other.

We experience words the same way we experience chairs. They are physical symbols and audio sounds that often go together. These images and sounds are associated with other experiences that happen at the same time, though as we experience them over and over the association with other things becomes more and more abstract, Again, it doesn't make sense to say that a these images and sounds 'stand for' anything. And each person associates them with different experiences over time.

@econproph @lauraritchie though it's a very popular metaphor, I think that the idea that words are encodings is wrong.

A word is a thing we create, like a chair or a house. The words are related by association to our thoughts, but they don't stand for or represent our thoughts, no more than a chair 'stands for' our thought of sitting. It's not a representational relation; at best, it's a causal or functional relation.

All of information theory would disagree with this characterization, tho.

I am on the Great Wall of China. :)

@lauraritchie Chess is a agreata example, because meaning in chess notation is bounded. The expression 'E4' has a certain precise meaning. But even here, moving the pawn forward may signal a gambit, may signify the beginning of an attack, etc. Even so, all of these intentions can be expressed in the language of chess notation.

But as you rightly note (I think) human language is more like music than chess. What does a b-flat signify? What does it mean? This cannot be expressed in music notation.