News, mothballs

Regular readers - if there are any - will have been disappointed at the lack of updates and annoyed by the proliferation of spam comments. I have tightened things up so that spurious comments are harder to post and I'll gradually remove the ones that are already here.

As for new posts, I can't promise. I'm trying to get my PhD thesis written, so updates will be infrequent at best. If you use rss, please subscribe to my rss or atom feed so you will see when I do manage a new post without having to check back at the website.

Heuristics

I've been wondering about how to explain and define heuristics lately. I really like this from an interview with programmer Wil Shipley on drunkenblog:

Shipley: One of the rules of writing algorithms that I've recently been sort of toying with is that we (as programmers) spend too much time trying to find provably correct solutions, when what we need to do is write really fast heuristics that fail incredibly gracefully.

This is almost always how nature works. You don't have to have every cell in your eye working perfectly to be able to see. We can put together images with an incredible amount of damage to the mechanism, because it fails so gracefully and organically.

This is, I am convinced, the next generation of programming, and it's something we're already starting to see: for instance, vision algorithms today are modeled much more closely after the workings of the eye, and are much more successful than they were twenty years ago.

Interviewer: Wait wait wait, can you elaborate on this heuristics bit being the next big thing, because you just bent some people's brains. When I normally think of heuristics in computer science, I think of either "an educated guess" or "good enough".

I.E., a game programmer doesn't have to run out Pi to the Nth degree to calculate the slope of a hill in a physics engine, because they can get something 'good enough' for the screen using a rougher calculation... but hasn't it always been like that out of necessity?

Shipley: Heuristics (the way I'm using them) are basically algorithms that are not guaranteed to get the right answer all the time. Sometimes you can have a heuristic that gets you something close to the answer, and you (as the programmer) say, "This is close enough for government work."

This is a very old trick of programming, and it's a very powerful one on its own. Trying to make algorithms that never fail, and proving that they can never fail, is an entire branch of computer science and frankly one that I think is a dead end. Because that's not the way the world works.

When you look at biological systems, they are usually perfect machines; they have all these heuristics to deal with a variety of situations (hey, our core temperature is too hot, let's release sweat, which should cool us off) but none of them are anywhere near provably correct in all circumstances (hey, we're actually submerged in hot water, so sweat isn't effective in cooling us off). But they're good enough, and they fail gracefully.

You don't die immediately if sweating fails to cool you; you just grow uncomfortable and have to make a conscious response (hey, I think I'll get out of this hot tub now).

Programs need to be written this way. In the case of reading bar codes, you don't care if you read garbage a thousand times a second. It doesn't hurt you. If you write an algorithm that looks for barcodes everywhere in the image, even in the sky or in a face or a cup of coffee, it's not going to hurt anything. Eventually the user will hold up a valid barcode, it'll read it, the checksum will verify, and you're in business.

And the barcode recognizer doesn't have to understand every conceivable way a barcode can be screwed up. If the lighting is totally wrong, or the barcode is moving, the user has to take conscious action and, like, tilt the book differently or hold it still. But this kind of feedback is immediately evident, and it's totally natural.

Because I can try 1,000 times a second, I can give immediate feedback on whether I have a good enough image or not, so the user doesn't, like, take a picture, hold her breath for four seconds, have the software go "WRONG," try adjusting the book, take another picture, hold her breath...

Humans are incredibly good at trying new and random things when they get instant feedback. It's the basis of all learning for us, and it's an absolutely fundamental rule of UI design. (This is also the basis of the movement away from having modal dialogs that pop up and say, "Hey, you pressed a bad key!" If you have to pause and read and dismiss the dialog, the lesson you get is, "Stop trying to learn this program," not, "Try a different key."

The Mac and NeXTstep were pioneers in getting this right -- just beep if the user hits a wrong key, so if she wants she can lean on the whole keyboard and see if ANY keys are valid, and there's no punishment phase for it.)

...

Read the complete interview

If it isn't clear what all this has to do with pragmatics, wait for my PhD thesis...

definition of grice

In the post at logicandlanguage about Harman (see previous post here), I found a link to the Philosophical Lexicon, which defines grice thus:

grice, n. Conceptual intricacy.
"His examination of Hume is distinguished by
erudition and grice." Hence, griceful, adj.
and griceless, adj. "An obvious and griceless
polemic." pl. grouse: A multiplicity of
grice, fragmenting into great details, often in reply to
an original grice note.

Harman, inference and implication

Apologies for the long pause. Normal service -- whatever that might be-- is hereby resumed.

The third term is here. No teaching, so I should be dealing with a huge pile of marking and working on my PhD.

Does reading blog posts about the difference between inference and implication count?

Gillian at logicandlanguage.net comments on a point that Gilbert Harman makes in the first chapter of Change in View -- and which has been in the back of my mind all through working on my PhD:

When I was a graduate student at Princeton (many days ago), we used to joke that Gilbert Harman had only three kinds of question for visiting speakers:

• Aren't you ignoring < insert recent result in psychology >?


• Aren't you assuming that there is an analytic/synthetic distincton?


• So you say, < insert one of the speaker's claims >, but isn't that just conflating inference and implication?

...The following claims are ubiquitous and false:

• Logic is the study of the principles of reasoning.


• Logic tells you what you should infer from what you already believe.

Each overstates the responsibilities of logic, which is the study of what follows from what - implication relations between interpreted sentences; one can know the implication relations between sentences without knowing how to update one's beliefs.

Suppose, for example, that S believes the content of the sentences A and B, and comes to realise that they logically imply C. Does it follow that she should believe the content of C? No. Here are two counterexamples:

1. Suppose C is a contradiction. Then she should not accept it. What should she do instead? Perhaps give up belief in one of the premises, but which one? Logic does not answer the question - as we know from prolonged study of paradoxes - because logic only speaks of implication relations, not about belief revision.

2. Suppose she already believes not-C. Then she might make her beliefs consistent by giving up one of the premises, or by giving up not-C. Or she might suspend belief in all of the propositions and resolve to investigate the matter further at a later date.

Hence these questions about inference and belief revision - about what she should believe given i) what she already believes and ii) facts about implication - go beyond what logic will decide. That's not to say that logic is never relevant to reasoning or belief revision, but it isn't the science of reasoning and belief revision. It's the science of implication relations.

Convinced? Gil has a short and very clear discussion of this, and the pernicious consequences of ignoring it, in the second section of his new paper (co-authored with Sanjeev Kulkarni) for the Rutger's Epistemology conference.

Bush joke

This post is not directly related to relevance theory, but it does contain a good joke. In a previous version of this post, I broke with scholarly neutrality for these reasons. It would have made a considerable difference, and it's difficult to keep quiet about these things and stick to academic work when you are wondering if war or the destruction of the environment will end human civilisation first.

From William Gibson's blog:

President Bush goes to an elementary school to talk about the war.
After his talk, he offers to answer questions. One little boy puts up his hand and the president asks him his name.
"I'm Billy, sir."
"And what's your question, Billy?"
"I have three questions, sir. Why did the US invade Iraq without the support of the UN? Why are you President when Al Gore got more votes? And whatever happened to Osama Bin Laden?"
Just then the bell rings for recess. Bush announces that they'll continue after recess.
When they return, Bush asks, "OK, where were we? Question time! Who has a question?"
Another little boy raises his hand. The president asks his name.
"I'm Steve, sir."
"And what's your question, Steve?"
"I have five questions, sir. Why did the US invade Iraq without the support of the UN? Why are you President when Al Gore got more votes? Whatever happened to Osama Bin Laden? Why did the recess bell go off twenty minutes early? And what the heck happened to Billy?"

---

If you want overtly political stuff, go to my other blog. I'll keep politics out of this one from now on.

New papers relevant to relevance

Here are the latest additions to the online RT bibliography, courtesy of Franscisco Yus' posting to the relevance mailing list.

Andone, C. 2003) "Argumentative values of but in the discourse of economics." British and American Studies (Revista de Studii Britanice si Americane) 9: 211-218.

Escuder, A. (1996) "Relevance and translation in writing about environment." Georgica 4: 335-344.

Figueras Solanilla, C. (2002) "La jerarquia de la accesibilidad de las expresiones referenciales en español." Revista Española de Lingüística 32(1): 53-96.

Goerling, F. (1996) "Relevance and transculturation." Notes on Translation 10(3): 49-57.

Gutt, E.-A. (forthcoming) "Relevance-theoretic approaches to translation." In: Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd edition). Ed. K. Brown. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Kempf, S. (2000) "Who told the truth?" Notes on Translation 14(1): 34-46.

Meunier, J.-P. (1994) "Quelques aspects de l'evolution des theories de la communication: De la signification a la cognition." Degres 79-80: k1-k16.

Moeschler, J. (2004) "Intercultural pragmatics: A cognitive approach." Intercultural Pragmatics 1(1): 49-70.
http://www.degruyter.de/journals/intcultpragm/pdf/1_49.pdf

Murillo, S. (2004) "A relevance reassessment of reformulation markers." Journal of Pragmatics 36(11): 2059-2068.
(updated reference)

Pilkington, A. (2001) "Non-lexicalised concepts and degrees of effability: Poetic thoughts and the attraction of what is not in the dictionary." Belgian journal of Linguistics 15: 1-10.

Ram, A. (1990) "Knowledge goals: A theory of interestingness." In: Proceedings of the 12th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Cambridge, MA, August.
Available here

Recanati, F. (2003b) "Embedded implicatures." Philosophical Perspectives 17(1): 299-332.
Adobe Acrobat format:
http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~schlenke/Recanati-Embedded.pdf
Rich Text format:
Available here

Schank, R.C. (1979) "Interestingness: Controlling inferences." Artificial Intelligence 12: 273-297.

Silva, F.-A. (1996) "Lancando anzois: Uma analise cognitiva de processos mentais em traduçao." Revista de Estudos da Linguagem (RevEL) 4(2): 71-90.

Storto, L. (2004)  "Review of F. Recanati's Literal Meaning." The Linguist List 15.2535, 11-9-2004.
http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-2535.html

Yus, F. (forthcoming) "Relevance theory." In: Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd edition). Ed. K. Brown. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Ziv, Y. (1996b) "Pronominal reference to inferred antecedents." Belgian Journal of Linguistics 10: 55-67..

Meany

Arnold Zwicky, commenting on six inclusions in Richard Horsey's '101 Key Ideas in Linguistics', writes [see my item on this blog a few weeks ago, for a link to the original Zwicky post - Nick] :

"Ok, here's Horsey's list, in alphabetical order: Leonard Bloomfield, Noam Chomsky, Gottlob Frege, H. Paul Grice, Roman Jakobson, and Ferdinand de Saussure? Frege and Grice are the surprises, of course. Getting the other four is no great feat, but if you got both of these names, then you definitely have a Horsey take on things, and you get a dinner."

Well, I'm afraid I'm busy tonight, and I can think of better people to argue for the inclusion of Frege, but I do think Mr. Zwicky's being a bit of a meany begrudging a mention for Grice. Indeed, it seems to me that Grice's contributions to linguistics (via pragmatics)--not forgetting his contributions to the philosophy of language, and the influence this work has had on modern-day psychology and even cognitive science--make him pretty hard (not to say impossible) to leave out.

I wonder why Grice's importance is over-looked so often. I never met him, but he does seem to have been a fairly diffident chap. Perhaps that somehow lingers in his legacy. His ground-breaking paper 'Meaning', for example, was written in 1948, but Grice didn't deem it worthy of publication. Reliable reports (from Richards Grandy and Warner, two people who worked closely with Grice in his later years) have it that Peter Strawson had the article typed out (9 years later) and then submitted it without his knowledge, only informing him once it had been accepted.

Much of Grice's work was, quite simply, ahead of its time. Philosophers of language and pragmatists continue to build on the foundations he laid (still, perhaps, underestimating the extent of those foundations - more excavation required...). I recall psychologist Alan Leslie revealing at a workshop in Oxford a few years ago that it was 'Meaning' (1948, 1957) that sparked his interest in belief-desire psychology. Many of Grice's ideas on reason and rationality are reflected (not to say retrospectively endorsed) in recent work in cognitive science. Moreover, a forthcoming paper by Michael Tomasello and colleagues suggests that it was 'shared intentionality' and 'cooperation' that were the central factors in the evolution of human cognition. I must say that makes a nice change from cheating, deceiving and outmaneuvering (of which there's enough around at the moment).

Cooperative principle anyone?

(By Tim, despite what it says below.)

Update of RT bibliography

Francisco Yus has emailed the relevance list with additions to his online RT bibliography. Some of the papers are available online, including an article on relevance and conspiracy theories, which I will read and report back on (unless mysterious forces intervene), a Sperber and Wilson, a Wilson, and a Wilson and Sperber.

Casacuberta, D. and C. Figueras (1999) "The R files: applying relevance model to conspiracy theory fallacies." Journal of English Studies 1: 45-55.
Available here

Sperber, D. and D. Wilson (1990b) "Rhetoric and relevance." In: The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice. Eds. J. Bender and D. Wellbery. Stanford, C.A.: Stanford University Press, 140-156.=20
Available here

Wilson, D. (1994) "Relevance and understanding." In: Language and Understanding. Eds. G. Brown, K. Malmkj=E6r, A. Pollit and J. Williams. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 35-58.
Available here

Wilson, D. and D. Sperber (1998b) "Mood and the analysis of non-declarative sentences." In Pragmatics: Critical Concepts Vol. II. Ed. A. Kasher. London: Routlesge, 262-289.
Available here

I'm also intrigued by Vlad ?egarac's paper "Relevance theory and the in second language acquisition" in the current issue of Second Language Research (20(3): 193-211) but UCL doesn't take this journal, so whether I get to look at it probably depends on whether I can muster the energy to walk across Bloomsbury to Birkbeck or the Institute of Education and meet a whole new set of librarians. It's a lot to ask for something that's very far from what I'm supposed to be working on.