Arches are part of nature. They just need a keystone to support the two sides.
What's the relationship between cooperation and understanding? I ask because I've been reading a paper about simulating cooperation that studies the way verbal cooperation aids understanding. (Carl Vogel, "Interaction of Levels ofCooperation and Group Cohesion in a Social Model of Language Evolution") The simulation took a naïve form, as is commonly imposed by efforts to mimic human interactions on a computer. When you think how much computational effort is required to support a machine playing chess or Jeopardy, you realize that it will be some time before even sophisticated ape interactions can be simulated, let alone plausible human conversations. Even so, these small efforts encourage a thought. Language is the keystone that brings cooperation and understanding together.
Generative linguistics tends to focus on the arch's understanding side. Chomsky and disciples even deny that language arose as a means of communication, putting all stress on the private understanding that comes from thinking syntactically. Language was later externalized and permitted cooperation.
The cooperative side has its energetic supporters too. Michael Tomasello is a leading spokesman for this side of the arch. For this school, language certainly began as a means of working together, changing from a gestural system of control to one of joint activity. Tomasello has been outspoken in his rejection of the idea that there are any language-specific universals, Chomsky's grail.
My own biases lean to the cooperative/communicative leg, but the other side has its points as well, and my explorations into speech origins persuade me that the only way to see the dynamics of language's evolutionary origins is to take it whole, with cooperation propping up understanding and understanding supporting cooperation.
The simulation uses "understand" in its narrowest sense of knowing the meaning of a word, as in table focuses attention on a table. But as I say, circumstances force them into a naïve approach, and language expands to expand one's understanding. There are a variety of things one can say while looking at a table, "Look at that table," being the most bland. Substitute the word monstrosity and understanding becomes a matter of shared taste. Use Pembroke and understanding requires some knowledge of the history of table making. Use bargain and a knowledge of prices becomes important. Thus, understanding words is much more than a vocabulary test. Dictionaries are the beginning, not the end point of understanding a word.
The simulation also uses cooperation in the narrow sense of explaining a word's meaning, as in 'this thing [tapping on it] is a table.' But again, we see that whenever verbal cooperation expands understanding it goes into the nature of words. "Why do you say monstrosity," seems likely to provoke some account of the speaker's taste. "You call a $200 card table a bargain," should also lead to learning.
Thus, we see the dynamics of language growth depend on both cooperation and understanding. Understanding why a $200 card table is a bargain depends on the cooperation of somebody who already understands. Meanwhile, cooperation requires s a common core language and a individual difference between speakers. As a minimal difference two speakers share a common language and one of the speakers also knows one extra usage. If the two speakers cooperate, both of them can end up knowing the same things. More likely, both speakers know different things and if they cooperate both can understand more than either of them could on their own.
This growth, of course, is the great mystery of human success. We know so much more than any other species, and yet we are born knowing so very little about the world. How do we do it? We are smarter than the apes, but there is a relationship between their intelligence and ours that enables us to recognize what apes are thinking. Their social behavior is also familiar and intelligible. At the individual level that may be enough to get by. But the success of the group reflects the combination of brains and community into a unit that makes the difference.Language connects those two elements and the resulting power has spread us around the world, taking the knowledge of our ancestors with us.
You write
There is an assumption underlying chess playing programs, Jeopardy, and your comments about them, that you are certain that the stored program computer architecture form a suitable starting point for understanding the role of language cooperation and understanding.
Perhaps we should remember the words of the Irish yokel, who, when asked by a stranger the way to Balimoney thought for a moment and responded "If I was going to Balimoney I wouldn't start from here."
The whole stored program computer philosophy resolves around the concept of a task which can be precisely predefined as a global model, and written as an algorithm. I am sure you will agree that both chess playing systems - and the programs in your ipod depend on the role of "intelligent designers". and both relate to activities which have no relevance to the origins on language on the African plains.
Forty five years ago I was a naive newcomer to the computer world, having been very much involved in complex manual information processing activities. I was asked to familiarise myself with a vast sales accounting system (say 250,000 customers varying from private households to the U.S. Air Force, and say 5,000 different products aimed at about a dozen different markets). All the time there were new customers, contract changes, and old customers dropped out, which the products and sales promotions were changing to meet the real world market. Any solution needed to be simple enough to be able to process tens ot thousands of transaction a day on late 1960s computers. No knowing any better I used my knowledge of mentally working in non-computerised information systems to come up with a "simple" solution, modelling how I thought the sales staff modelled the problems in their heads.
The starting point was "language." Sales staff needed to be in active control of the system and they could only control it if they fully understood what the computer was doing for them. What was needed was a contracts language which was simple but flexible enough to cover any reasonable contract - and - most importantly, was symmetrical. The sales staff would use the language to tell the computer what they wanted it to do, and the computer could tell then, IN THE SAME LANGUAGE, what it was doing for them.
The reaction to my suggestion was - "That's research" - sales staff are not clever enough to tell the computer what they want it to do - they need very clever people such as programmers and systems analysts (the priesthood of computing!) to act as intermediaries.
Shortly afterwards I became the ideas man on a future planning team of an innovative computer company. Within a few months John Pinkerton and David Caminer (the pioneers of UK computing who built the Leo computers) rushed me into research to look at the design of a revolutionary new type of information processing "white box" system which generalised the contract processing language to handle a very wide range of open-ended problems. The elements of the system were sets and partitions of sets, used recursively, to allow any level of nesting. Processing was by a very simple "decision making routine" which had a small window on the knowledge base (equivalent to human short term memory). The approach takes incomplete, fuzzy and missing information in its stride, and for many tasks results were obtained by the decision making routine without anything that looked a bit like a task specific program.
So why haven't you heard of CODIL, which was the name of the symmetrical information language. It's a sad story which I describe on my blog, www.trapped-by-the-box.blogspot.com, but basically, exceptional claims need exceptional proof, which in turn needs exceptional funding to provide. The problem was that funding is provided by an establishment who knows that the stored program computer must be the only possible way forward (look how much money and careers depend on the technology) and where by now all the population under retirement age will have been taught (brain washed?) at school that writing programs is the way forward.
At a deeper philosophical level, there is another difficulty. Humans are the most intelligent animals we know, and so there is a danger that we put ourselves at the centre of the "intelligence universe" in the same way that our ancestors put the earth at the centre of the physical universe. As we are "so clever" the mechanism that makes us intelligent must "of course" be very sophisticated and hard to find - and so all simple solutions must be rejected.
In fact all my research does is to move the focus of"intelligence" from the processing algorithms (which are very simple) to the communication language - with the concept of recursion (which can easily be mapped onto a network model) playing an important part. In as far as one can identify "intelligence" it is in the way that statements in the communication language interact with each other. Of particular interest the Decision Making Unit algorithm is probably simple enough to be looked at in evolutionary terms. The approach also suggests that intelligence as we see it, and distinguish it from other animals, is a result of the development of an effective communication language.
Having abandoned the research many years ago (following a family suicide and the failure to get research grants) I recently decide to look online to see what had happened in the intervening years. In case anyone is interested I am in the process of setting up a blog, www.trapped-by-the-box.blogspot.com, which discusses the research, and includes information on publications and a working demonstration system.
Posted by: www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawkyQS5sJI490gt15Sj58MbwLOMW2LgSwoY | May 09, 2011 at 03:28 PM
I hadn't realised how my signature would appear in the above post until it did and I had no intention of being anonymous.
Chris Reynolds (also posts as HertfordshireChris)
Trapped By the Box
Posted by: CodilLanguage | May 10, 2011 at 01:47 AM