Negotiating radial categories: Some mothers do have them

Posted on November 4, 2007 by Dominik Lukeš

Is It Possible To Be Half-Adopted?  Imagining someone giving away semen or an egg couldn’t possibly feel the same as imagining a parent giving a way a baby. Could it?
The friend who asked whether I consider Mrs. Ramirez to be adopted is adopted herself, something she doesn’t associate with rejection but rather with acceptance, being desired by and accepted into a family.
Sometimes it’s the fault of language, the lack of words yet invented to describe our lives, that makes it difficult to know and explain who and what we are.  Are you a mommy? A second mommy? An other mommy? Are you adopted? Are you biologically adopted?  What it all means to Betsy Ramirez will be up to Betsy herself to discover, to find the words for and to one day explain to her moms.

This is a perfect example of the negotiation of category boundaries. Lakoff in Women, fire and dangerous things spends a whole chapter analyzing the radial category of mother and this is an example of the same analysis happening in ‘nature’. Not much more to say.

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Collective cognition, culture, mind share and patterns of action

Posted on November 4, 2007 by Dominik Lukeš

Ubuntu: Just how popular is it? – Starry Hope Productions…Ubuntu has managed to gain a large portion of the Linux mind share, at least amongst the tech community.

Wikipedia: Mind share is the amount of attention required by something and the time spent thinking about something. It can also refer to the development of consumer awareness about a specific product or brand in hopes that they will buy the product or brand. One of the main objectives of advertising and promotion is to establish what is called mind share, or share of mind.

There’s an misalignment of concepts here that illustrates nicely the problems of locating collective concepts such as language, culture in the minds of the individuals. On the one hand, there is no doubt that to speak a language or to behave as a recognizable member of a culture, something has to be happening inside the individual (mostly but not exclusively the brain). However, our access to these concepts is mostly through the collective. Even notions such as ‘private language’ whether possible or not (and the theoretical ‘private culture’), are secondary and defined in contrast to their default framings as collective concepts.

It isn’t just a question of access. Theoretically, we could study the individual’s body/brain/mind to get to the bottom of how the collective is represented there. The problem is that this kind of reductionism would deprive us of an important level of description. This is similar to the fractal notion (as I understand it, anyway). It is possible to reduce anything to something else, but an important part of that original something is lost. So basically, when we’re describing the collective by reducing it to the neural or mental, we’re describing something functionally and essentially different than when we’re describing it as a collective phenomenon.

The Starry Hope analysis is particularly interesting because it uses purely collective measures to infer both a collective notion (popularity) and an individual notion (mind share). There are interesting folk theories of mental causality at play here.

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Phallic imagery in English-language comedy and the theory of image schemas

Posted on November 3, 2007 by Dominik Lukeš

Now, there’s no doubt in my mind whatsoever that George Lakoff’s theory of mental imagery (usually referred to via the concept of Image Schemas) describes a phenomenon that is profoundly real. However, the question remains what kind of reality it has. It exists and we see it all the time. But is it something that exists at the level of the neuron, the language system or is it just an epiphenomenon? What happens when a phrase evokes an image? Is an image generated every time? And if not, what happens to it when it’s not created? Is it stored somewhere in memory or is it drawn every time to fit the new situation? What does that look like inside the mind? What are the different levels of schematicity an image can have? How schematic can it be to still count as an image and how can we distinguish it from a simple representation (on the other end of the scale)? Funnily enough, the phallic imagery often evoked by English-language comedy (it presumably exists in all languages – but is not necessarily as pervasive, there) can point us in the direction of potential answers to these questions.

First, this kind of imagery is as ubiquitous as it is powerful. This is its latest appearance on the BBC’s prestigious Today programme and its retelling in this mildly scandalized Guardian blog:

Sexing up at the BBC? | Lost in Showbiz | Guardian Unlimited  It was all Barry Cryer’s fault. He was talking about Groucho Marx and told a joke which involved a man with 13 children going to see Marx. Marx said: ‘Why do you have so many?’ And the man said: ‘Because I love my wife.’ Replied Marx: ‘I love my cigar but I take it out now and then’.

And the BBC broadcast a follow up story the following day discussing whether this story is apocryphal or not. And this example is far from unique. I was just watching the popular US show Two and a half men (which as far as I know is family friendly) and it contains an entire catalogue of penis jokes.

First, we need to consider what’s at stake here (no pun intended). There is a culturally sanctioned image of the penis (both erect and flaccid) and it’s insertion into the vagina. Sometimes parts of the penis or its ejaculate are emphasized and sometimes reference is made to intercourse or masturbation. Then we have the cultural construction of referring covertly to this image in certain kind of humorous discourse. All this alongside strict taboo restrictions on actually displaying an unobscured penis.

Second, we need to have a look at the kinds of mappings that are made between images. They can often be very inexact. There is no doubt that Groucho (or the author of the story) is referring to copulation and the act of his inserting a cigar into his mouth is equivalent to the insertion of the penis. However, there is a significant mismatch, as well. (A mixed metonymy, if you will). If the cigar is the penis and the mouth a vagina, how come Groucho loves the cigar? For the metonymic correspondence to be exact, he should be loving himself. But nobody, in these pedantic times (and are there any other times?) has, to my knowledge, raised that objection. The two dynamic images don’t match but they evoke extremely compatible situations and that is enough to produce unambiguous laughter. If somebody took the time and collected all the penis imagery in Two and half men, we would have a wonderful catalogue of image schemas of varying richness and their linguistic representations. What we would find there, I have no doubt, is many jokes similar to the one above and many much more subtle and ambiguous ones. But none of them would provide complete, detail-rich images of the penis. They would all focus on some part of the image, underscore this, deemphasize that. Then we should do a survey of the viewers and ask them to reflect on the kind of imagery they perceive.

So what kind of answer have we found here? Really, just a hint of one. Mental images are real, they are schematic and they can match without matching visually simply by evoking something else that matches. A proper inventory of image schemas in linguistic constructions is the next order of business.

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More meaningful than what? Populations and truth in social science

Posted on November 1, 2007 by Dominik Lukeš

WHNews: Pay Gap – No Pay Day As of 30th October, if you’re a woman and you go out to work, you’re working for nothing until the 31st December. The Fawcett Society and the union Unison have declared today ‘Women’s No Pay Day.’ They’ve worked out that, given an average 17 per cent pay gap and assuming women and men have been paid the same up to now – from now on till the end of the year women are giving their services for free. Fawcett’s Director Katherine Rake, Harriet Harman, Theresa May and Duncan Fisher from Fathers Direct discuss.

The interesting thing isn’t in this description but in the rationale Katherine Rake gave in the interview. She said that they are using the analogy of women working for free for over two months of the year because it is more meaningful to people than simply the fact that on average women are paid 17% less than men. Two related questions arise.

1. Is it really more meaningful? How do we measure the meaningfulness and impact of a description? Who is it more meanigful for? And what is the meaning it is full of? I suspect that the answers would be very complex. But perhaps she is simply referring to decision makers who might pay somebody less for any given day but would never not pay somebody at all for entire two months. So in a purely functionalist (meaning is action) sense, the second analogy is not more meaningful, it has a different meaning, which carries in it a commitment to different action. (Although these commitments are never as straightforward as the usual rhetoric suggests).

2. If the first point is valid then a more interesting question arises. How are the two different meanings different? Or better still how do the two statements differ in the sense that they end up carrying different meaning. From a purely mathematical prejudice, nothing happened. We simply restated one mathematical fact into another like 1/2 = 2/4. But the problem is that the original statement is a statement about populations whereas the second is a statement about individuals. And we know that groups don’t have the same properties as individuals but sometimes they mimic them (in a fractal self-similarity kind of way). This is an entirely open question: to what extent do social scientific truths about populations (groups of large sizes) apply to individuals (or groups of small sizes)? Does the fact that women earn 17% less than men mean that a woman is not being paid for two months out of every year? I suspect that it does in the sense on which a policy can be based but it doesn’t in the sense of a statement that we would consider a valid observation about the social world. Pragmatically, they may be the same thing but whereas policy decisions are generally not the foundational blocks of other premises about the world and statements purporting to be true about the world often are, it may matter quite a bit if universal properties of social groups are what we are interested in.

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Convention over logic: Limits of implicature

Posted on October 14, 2007 by Dominik Lukeš

Evening News 24 – Refuse fire near City Hall  Arsonists sparked an emergency response after setting light to a rubbish container near City Hall on Saturday evening.

The suspects started the fire shortly after 7pm on St Giles Street.

Two fire engines were sent to the scene and firefighters used hoses to extinguish the flames.

This is an online newspaper article in its entirety. What caught my attention was the use of the word ‘suspects’. By the rules of pragmatic implicature, this word is out of place in this context (we could even call it wrong or agrammatical). Suspects implies that the article is about people who have already been apprehended and it is not clear whether they had committed the crime (or legal restrictions require this unclarity). However, is we’re talking about the people who really committed the crime, even though they remain unknown, the word perpetrators or vandals or arsonists (as inthe introductory sentence) would be much more appropriate. In that case, there would be no confusion.

This created an interesting garden path text (flow of inference). When I caught sight of ‘suspects’ I had to go back to reread the article to make sure whether they had been caught or not. And I’m still not sure. This is a quick bit of online news rather than a published and copy-edited piece (although similar errors slip through anyway) so the source of the error could be in both directions: 1. the writer misspoke or 2. forgot to mention the arrests. The former is more likely but the latter is not impossible particularly if the arrests had already been mentioned elsewhere or are being kept out.

But what is the source of this slip? Quite obviously the implicature of the word ‘suspect’ was overridden by the constructional conventions of journalistic prose where ‘suspect’ is used to describe agents in crimes as a matter of course. To use the word ‘suspect’ is always safer and largely understandable so the pragmatic concerns can be shelved. So what we have here is a clash in constructional conventions which both enter into the cognitive modeling of the situation as described. In this case, the convention of genre-specific language use won over the the use where the logic of implicature is preserved. This is important to keep in mind when looking at pragmatics as equivalent to the study of logic.

The importance of convention in these cases reminded of the principle of ‘convention over configuration’ introduced by the programming framework Ruby on Rails:

"Convention over Configuration" means a developer only needs to specify unconventional aspects of the application. For example, if there’s a class Sale in the model, the corresponding table in the database is called sales by default. It is only if one deviates from this convention, such as calling the table "products_sold", that one needs to write code regarding these names.

This is exactly what happened in this case. The use of ‘suspect’ causes the reader (or rather some readers) to search for information about the implied arrest. When none is forthcoming other avenues of resolving the conflict need to be sought. However, even though the process can be described broadly algorithmically, it is really much fuzzier and parallel and could not be all that easily modeled through a conventional flowchart that would be appropriate for a computer language. But the analogy is striking nevertheless. Particularly, since we could see this RoR convention as an expression of a hypostasis of the underlying pragmatic principles of language.

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Indeterminacy in art criticism as frame negotiation

Posted on October 13, 2007 by Dominik Lukeš

On The Media: Transcript of "Not So Innocent" (October 5, 2007) RICHARD HALPERN: Right. There’s often a kind of loss of innocence that takes place in the paintings themselves, which reflect on a potential loss of innocence on the part of the viewer. I think an interesting example of that is Rockwell’s painting called The Art Critic. That’s a painting of a young man, a young art student in a museum, who’s studying a painting on the wall of a kind of amply-endowed Rubenesque lady. And he’s peering at it closely through a magnifying glass, looking at a brooch on the woman’s breast. He doesn’t notice that he’s actually looking at her chest at the same time, but the woman in the painting does notice and leers back at him.

You have a young man, a kind of innocent, who doesn’t see what he’s looking at, but the painting does see. The painting isn’t innocent. And, in a way, that seems to me to spell out the relation between Rockwell’s viewers and the paintings themselves. The viewers may be innocent or may be in a state of denial or disavowal but the paintings themselves are very knowing and sophisticated. And they’re, they’re looking at us, in a way, more intently than we are at them.

There’s a strange certainty about most art and literary criticism. The discourse of the genre dictates that statements about artifacts are to be made in a particular manner that positions the audience into a place of inevitability of perspective. It is the object (painting, book, song…) that always tells of something and shows us something. Sometimes it’s the author, sometimes the audience ‘can’ see something. But it is rarely the critic who has any agency. S/he is always describing what is never what s/he perceives.

The above example of ‘activist’ criticism shows very clearly how the multiple mental spaces set up by the text interact. There is the space of people in the painting, there’s the space of the painting as painting, space of the viewers. Earlier the space of the painter was also established. However, it isn’t always clear which space is being referred to at any particular moment or rather what the boundaries of these spaces are. For instance, in the text in bold it isn’t clear whether the paintings stand metonymically for their author or speak directly of themselves. This indeterminacy of framing is not dissimilar to the indeterminacy that is the hallmark of art itself. Criticism is then a sort of meta-art (art here includes music, drama and literature) and similar standards can be applied to it.

Criticism is only one example of socially ritualized frame negotiation. It doesn’t stand apart from the work, artist, audience or the interaction the work, artist, audience has with the discursive space of the day. Criticism is an integral part of the artistic process at all levels. Creators and audiences take it into account (even if they ignore particular artifacts of criticism) and actively engage in it themselves (reminiscent of folk etymologies). The same applies to the political process, processes of language change. In all these instances, there is a ritualized parallel to the natural frame negotiation that goes on. The extent of how deep this frame negotiation can go is not quite clear yet but it may be guided to a large extent by the availability of given phenomena to introspection (as described well by Len Talmy).

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Utility of prejudice: Reducing freedom to cognition and vice versa

Posted on October 10, 2007 by Dominik Lukeš

Quote Details: William Hazlitt: Without the aid of… – The Quotations Page Without the aid of prejudice and custom I should not be able to find my way across the room. William Hazlitt English essayist (1778 – 1830)

It’s always disconcerting to find that something I’ve been saying for years has been said a long time ago. At least, I can be consoled by the fact that I can make sense of it with a whole lot of new language and conceptual aparati.

Here’s the radically antimodularist bottom line: the same principles that make it possible for us to recognize that a given instance of a chair is a chair and we can therefore exercise all of the properties associated with chairs (e.g. sit on it), viz principles of categorization and framing, that are responsible for issues like racial or gender prejudice. However, and that’s something Hazlit’s aphorism doesn’t recognize is the opposite process, one particularly dear to this blog, viz negotiation.

So here we have two acts of reductionism going against each other. On the one hand, we can reduce everything to the same process of categorization (incl. framing, metaphors, etc.), and on the other hand, any cognitive process can be subject to negotiation.

Without these two seemingly incompatible processes, life would be impossible. We can reject the inferior status of other races in the process of negotiation but at the same time we probably need to use a lot of distinguishing characteristics to classify people as belonging to a certain social group, for instance to avoid insult. Likewise, not all chairs will always readily accept our buttocks in the same predictable manner and still remain chairs. ‘Watch out! That chair was  designed by XY.’ somebody will cry out to remind you that not all of the ‘chair frame’ readily applies.

Thus our life is a constant battle between freedom of spirit and the determinism of prejudice. And without this dualism, we would die!

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Perspectives, views and child cognition

Posted on September 12, 2007 by Dominik Lukeš

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.

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Cognition, information, knowledge and the limits of serial computing

Posted on September 11, 2007 by Dominik Lukeš

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!”

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Poetry in blogs and cognitive persistence

Posted on September 6, 2007 by Dominik Lukeš

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.

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