Logical Priority Research Articles

Language as program: A reassessment of the nature of descriptive linguistics

The purpose of this paper is to challenge one of the basic tenets of linguistics. The traditional view is that it is the business of linguists to describe language and languages—and/or to theorize about it and them. It is essentially a view of language as an object. While I remain solidly based in linguistics, I draw here on my experience in natural language processing (i.e. of putting English in computers as part of a model of a communicating mind) as I advocate the view that it is more insightful to view language not as object, but as procedure, as process, as program. Note that ‘program’ has no final ‘me’ to signify the sense of ‘computer program’. I invite you to come with me on an exploration of what is involved when someone produces (‘generates’) a sentence, to show why I advocate a model of language that is not static, but dynamic. The model is also, I shall argue, essentially generative (in the sense of ‘productive’) rather than interpretive. Thus a program whose essential design is as it is to enable it to run in one direction—i.e. to turn meanings into sounds—is consulted as the person trying to understand a text attempts the converse task. This is not just ‘to turn sound into meaning’, but to turn the performer's sounds back into the performer's meanings. Hence the logical priority of generation over interpretation. In this new view of language as program, it is no longer possible to draw a clear line between the material of linguistics and the algorithms that determine how we choose between linguistic options; one needs a more complete framework, which is inevitably also more complex, e.g. as described here.

Rebels and Rivals: The Contestive Spirit in The Canterbury Tales ed. by Susanna Greer Fein, David Raybin, Peter C. Braeger

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER oretical horizons and sufficient patience,Ratio andInvention will prove an exciting intellectual experience. R. W HANNING Columbia University SUSANNA GREER FEIN, DAVID RAYBIN, and PETER C. BRAEGER, eds. Rebels and Rivals: The Contestive Spirit in The Canterbury Tales. Studies in Medieval Culture, vol. 29. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1991. Pp. xxiv, 269. $32.95 cloth, $14.95 paper. This volume traces its history from a six-week Institute on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales held at the University ofConnecticut in the summer of 1987. The purpose of the institute, which was sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, was in part to reenergize Chaucer teachers faced with a real or threatened decline in institutional support for medieval studies. "Chaucer's Institute," as it came to be called after the conference coordinating office printed the badges that way, sounds like an impressive success in C. David Benson's account of it, "A Memoir of Chaucer's In­ stitute." The essays in the volume suggest the nature ofthat success, which is based not on unanimity of outlook or adherence to a particular the­ oretical school (or even commitment to consider theory important to Chaucer studies) but on a genial pluralism and a pleasure in writing about The Canterbury Tales. The disclosure of new knowledge is quite varied among these essays, but all are written in accessible language, are focused closely on the texts of the Tales, and take a respectful attitude toward the poet's intentions, in keeping with the goals of the institute (pp. xx-xxi). The volume is carefully edited, with a largely appreciative foreword by Derek Pearsall, an explanatory preface by the editors, and a common reference list and index for all the essays. These features make the volume easy to use and suit it for what I take to be one of its major purposes: to stimulate the thinking of teachers ofChaucer. The thematic thread that runs through the collection is that of strife among the pilgrims, a focus broad enough to accommodate many interests and approaches. Some contributors write about rivalries between Chaucer's characters, as does Bruce Kent Cowgill in his attempt to show the usually 124 REVIEWS undifferentiated Aleyn andJohn in The Reeve's Tale to be in fact rivals in their unfolding narrative. Some take the pilgrims' conflicts as conflicts between ideas, as do Frederick B.Jonassen'salignmentofthe Host with the values and perspectives of the body and the Parson with those of the spirit (and the Pardoner a naysayer to both), and Susan K. Hagen's assertion that the Wife of Bath's call to reject male authority is doomed by critics who accept the priority of logic over rhetoric (a position I find too dismissive of Alison's considerable gifts for a "male" style of hermeneutics and debate). Jay Ruud places ideas in contest, discussing the rich patina of scriptural allusion in The Summoner's Tale and arguing that the focus ofthe tale is on the spirit (and its perversion by FriarJohn in the tale) rather than on anger. Two essays are good examples ofclose formalist readings, and both reveal much about their subjects. William F Woods explores The Knight's Tale as an elaborate pattern of compositional effects. His "Up and Down, To and Fro" is about the way narrative elements in themselves quite inconsequen­ tialcan be seen to add upto a vision ofnaturalcycles, social hierarchies, and spiritual aspirations. Charles Owen provides a meticulous examination of the metrical, figural, andsyntacticpatterns in thefalcon'scomplaint in The Squire's Tale, and the emotional effects they produce, demonstrating the subtle complexity of a passage often among those "forgotten" in critical accounts of Chaucer's style and vision. Susanna Greer Fein is also a very close reader. She draws together the Reeve's cynical lines on aging in his prologue with the narrative trajectory of his tale and his competition with the Miller through the medieval trope of the Wheel oflife. The trope and the attitudes that explain its ubiquity are persuasively discussed and cleverly linked to the mill wheel that superin­ tends the Reeve's story. Her argument locates Chaucer subtly but firmly within a familiar iconic...

Parental Autonomy

ABSTRACT We argue that in societies like our own the prevailing view that parents have both special responsibilities for and special rights over their children fails to give a proper understanding of the autonomy both of parents and of children. It is our claim that there is a logical priority of the separable interests of a child over the autonomy of its parents in the fulfilment of their special responsibilities for and the exercise of their special rights over their children. However, we believe that in acknowledging the child as a distinct locus of interests appropriate weight can still be given to parental autonomy. In particular, since raising a child is a long‐term commitment which plays a central role in the life‐plans of many adults it will be a legitimate exercise of an adult's autonomy strongly to influence the future of any children involved in such a plan. Such influence will be quite separate from paternalistic concern for those children. But the logical priority of the child's interests will at the same time show why parents are not entitled to behave proprietorially toward their children, even when paternalistic concern is called for.

Philosophy of Wolf Policies I: General Principles and Preliminary Exploration of Selected Norms

Abstract: We, as philosopher and biologist, here present some preliminary explorations of values and norms of importance in the wolf‐man relationship. The presentation is centered around problems as we see them from the modern wolf range in Norway, where there should be a mhed community of sheep, wolves, and men. At present we have 3.2 million sheep, 4.1 million men, and 5–10 wolves. The wolves are confined to a small area containing small scattered sheep farms. The owners, with local approval, do not accept the wolves. What norms should be considered in the process of changing this wolf/sheep ratio slightly in favor of wolves? How can we work today for a viable population of wolves? This article presents some general principles and philosophical methods for discussion in the spheres of ethical attitudes and opinions in norm conflicts concerning wolves. Important is an understanding of the logical priority of the normative system, and the need for it in a systemic analysis. This should be used extensively as an analytic tool in the many intricate problems of wolf management, some of which go all the way down to the rock bottom of philosopby and political ideology.

'Quality of life' and the analogy with the Nazis.

The introduction of 'quality of life' judgments into treatment decisions is viewed as pernicious by some who claim that these presuppose the Nazi position that those who are 'devoid of value' must be exterminated. 'Quality of life' judgments are said to deny the equal value of human beings and to assume that some lives are not 'worthy to be lived'. It is argued that the analogy misconstrues the senses of 'value' and 'quality' employed by Naziism and a 'quality of life' position. This leads the analogizers incorrectly to claim that both views assimilate the value of human beings to the value of their condition. A 'quality of life' position is grounded in recognition of the logical priority of the value of human beings as self-reflective evaluators and agents, which is a matter of kind, not degree. The 'quality of life' is explicated in terms of the standards of well-being of individuals, which are derived from their basic human needs and their individual priorities and goals. The use of 'quality of life' judgments is morally required to ensure that considerations of justice and individual autonomy govern treatment decisions. The purported analogy misconstrues the views of both the Nazi position and a 'quality of life' position and so is seriously misdirected.

Hume's Conditions for Causation: Further to Gray and Imlay

119. HUME'S CONDITIONS FOR' CAUSATION: FURTHER TO GRAY AND IMLAY As part of his second proof of the existence of God, Descartes in Meditations III argues a causal premise derived from the nature of time. He argues it follows from the nature of time "that, in order to be conserved in each moment in which it endures, a substance has need of the same power and action as would be necessary to produce and create it anew, supposing it did not yet exist; so that the light of nature shows us clearly that the distinction between creation and conservation is solely a distinction of reason." The nature of time to which he refers allows only a finite divisibility into durationless moments, each of which is entirely independent of every other. In the ultimate analysis , nothing true of one moment is deducible from what is true of any other, even what happens to be eternally true. The doctrine of the creation of the eternal verities is of a piece with this conception of time, and following with it from the conception of the divinity as sheer omnipotence, points to Hume's view that experience is the only guide to the world. It would seem to be Descartes' view, that nothing at a given time can stand in the necessary relation it must have to be a cause of something at another time; or, only something outside time can be a cause, for whose operation things in time can serve as but occasions. To what extent this dialectic in fact led to later occasionalist views is an historical question we need not consider. My only suggestion here concerns Hume's réponse to the occasionalists . With all but psychological necessity eliminated from his analysis of causation, Hume effectively argues the familiar case that occasional causes are the only causes by arguing the finite divisibility of time. In the literature only Laporte has held that for Descartes time is infinitely divisible and in this sense continuous. The separability of the parts of time, he 120. thought, suffice for their independence and contingency. But if time is continuous, its parts are inseparable; as Gueroult correctly observes, by discontinuity is meant con2 tingence, independence and separability. In addition, if a moment had duration, light would not be propagated instant aneously, thus according to Descartes upsetting his entire 3 physics. Gueroult maintains, rather, that Descartes' view of time is determined by his view of motion. Whatever the historical and logical priorities, there clearly is a connection between the above and what Bergson called the cinematographic conception of motion as a succession of static objects. It is a conception that precludes events as such. Motion occurs only in time, never at the moment, and occurs as a result of the re-creation of matter with regularly differing spatial relations. Due to metaphysical consideration expressed in theological terms, especially with reference to the immutability and simplicity of divine ways, this recreation of matter is constrained in certain ways, some of which we pick out as conditions for what was later called occasional causation. Put very simply, only what is constantly conjoined can stand in this relation; and that there should be instances of constant conjunction follows from the metaphysical considerations. With Hume's elimination of these metaphysical considerations, the status of the conditions , which he takes over as conditions for causation simpliciter, becomes problematic. But a recent challenge to Hume's program is still more problematic. The contention is that there is a case in which Hume's conditions necessary fo constant conjunction cannot all be satisfied. Even worse, i is a case in which his analysis ought to be conspicuously successful, viz. collision, which Hume like Descartes con4 ceives in cinematographic terms. The aim of this paper is to show that Hume's analysis stands against the challenge. Consider the following diagram which illustrates the positions (A3, A_...) of two balls (x,y) at successive moments (t_, t.,...)· 121. A3 A2 A1 A B -B1 B2 B3 fc0 T T T ©© © G®©T©T h fc3 fc4 fc5 H Robert Gray's thesis is that in at least one case of causation, collision which results in...

The Erotics of Retrospection: Historytelling, Audience Response, and the Strategies of Desire

T _HE RESEMBLANCE between historiography and literature invites contrary interpretations. We may assume that life itself has such qualities as epic breadth and tragic depth and that, therefore, the structure of history has given rise to literary genres. Or else we may assume that all narratives follow the generic patterns of myth and literature and that, therefore, the structures of historiography ultimately stem from the human imagination. I will sidestep the question of temporal priority between stories and histories. Why argue which came first and smash both the chicken and the egg under the spinning wheels of just another history that may turn out to be fiction? Concerning logical priority, however, I wish to suggest that storytellers and historytellers alike are agents of the erotics of retrospection and that, ultimately, similar strategies of desire may determine how we react to the past and act upon the future. A central theme in Hayden White's Metahistory (1973) will serve as my point of departure. This highly stimulating (and highly controversial) book adopts Northrop Frye's map of the literary landscape with its four familiar points of generic compass: tragedy, comedy, romance, and satire. White claims that historians use one of these four types of plot structure as part of their explanatory strategies. As he puts it in a more recent book, Tropics of Discourse (1978), the reader of a historiographical narrative experiences the effect of having the events in the story explained to him . . . when he has perceived the class or type to which the story that he is reading belongs. I think White could have correlated historical and literary works more persuasively if he had tried to explore just how we come to perceive the genre of a particular narrative. In other words, he could-and, I think, should-have pondered the typical audience response to each of the four mythoi or plot structures that he has adopted from Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (1957). Now, it is no secret that critics radically disagree about what constitutes the objective generic traits of literary works. Their best hope

Repetition, Repression, and Return: Great Expectations and the Study of Plot

HAT FOLLOWS is intended primarily as a discourse on // a concept which has mostly gone unhonored in modern criticism, no doubt because it appears to belong to the popular, even the commercial side of literature. Reading for the plot, we were taught, is a low form of activity. Long caught in valuations set by a criticism conceived for the lyric, the study of narrative has more recently found its way back to a quasi-Aristotelian view of the logical priority of plot in narrative forms. In the wake of Russian Formalism, French narratology has made us sensitive to the functional logic of actions, to the workings of sequence and transformation in the constitution of recognizable narrative units, to the presence of codes of narration that demand decoding in consecutive, irreversible order.' Plot as I understand it, however, suggests a focus somewhat more specific than the questions of structure, discourse, and narrativity addressed by most narratology. We may want to conceive of plot less as a structure than as a structuring operation, used, or made necessary, by those meanings that develop only through sequence and succession: an interpretative operation specific to narrative signification. The word any dictionary tells us, covers a range of meanings, from the bounded piece of land, through the ground plan of a building, the chart or map, the outline of a literary work, to the sense (separately derived from the French complot) of the scheme or secret machination, to the accomplishment of some purpose, usually illegal. All these meanings, I think, usefully cohere in our common sense of plot: it is not only the outline of a narrative, demarcating its boundaries, it also suggests its intention of meaning, the direction of its scheme or machination for accomplishing a purpose. Plots have not only design, but intentionality as well. Some narratives clearly give us a sense of in higher degree than others. Our identification of this sense of plottedness may provide a more concrete and analyzable way into the question of plots than an abstract definition of the subject, and a way that necessarily finds its focus in the readership of in the reader's recogni-

INTERPRETATION AND INTENTION

ONE Literary interpretation is central to the social institution which is constituted by the writing and reading of literary works. It is not identical with criticism, for criticism is an amorphous concept covering many types of different interest while interpretation is specifically concerned with understanding. In so far as any further comments on a literary work must be based on its proper understanding, interpretation must be said to be prior to criticism; considered as one of its parts, it is the most basic part. Literary interpretation can be divided into two logically separate stages: identification and explanation . Identification has logical priority over explanation. It is necessary to subsume an object under a description in order to place it on one's conceptual map. The most important motivation for placing an object in this way is that it provides one with a source of information about how the object can be expected to behave. Thus identification is a necessary step in the attempt to deal with an object in a rational way. If one classifies an object as a stone, one assumes that it will turn out to possess properties and conform to the behaviour which one has come to accept as normal for stones. One would therefore refrain from kicking it or lifting it (if it was big), since this might result in a broken toe or a damaged spine.

The Basis of Semantic Structure

The Concept of the whole utterance, we are inclined to to believe, is basic in meaning-theory. But any theory which locates a conceptual base must show how items in the super-structure relate to that base, and so for theories of meaning. There are units of meaning both larger and smaller than whole utterances: narrative, in which several whole utterances follow one another in some organized fashion, seems relatively unproblematic, but the relations of meaningful parts of utterances to the utterances themselves remains unclear. Grice's theory of meaning secures the logical priority of whole utterances, and in addition, lends itself to an attractive and theoretically fruitful view of the relations between whole utterances and their meaningful parts; or so I shall try to demonstrate.

Perception: A Philosophical Symposium by F. N. Sibley

168 BOOK REVIEWS Perception: A Philosophiccil Symposium. By F. N. SIBLEY. London: Methuen and Company, 1971. (Distributed in the United States by Barnes and Noble, Inc.). Pp. vii and 193. This book is the proceedings of a colloquium held at the University of Lancaster some five years ago. There are four major papers published substantially as presented at the colloquium and four responses, some more detailed than others. Some of the participants, like G. J. Warnock, William Kneale, Godfrey Vesey and Bernard Williams, are philosophers important in mid-century British analytic philosophy. This is a very technical work and in its present published form probably of interest only to those philosophers actually involved with the current discussions regarding perception theory. The papers and responses contained in the book are a logical development of the concerns about perception expressed by philosophers like Russell, Moore, and others central to the foundation of analytic philosophy in the beginning of the present century. Hovering behind three of the major papers is the ghost of the sense datum theories so common to epistemological accounts of perception by analytic philosophers a quarter century ago. That the concern with sense datum theories is now moribund is apparent from only a cursory reading of this book, which represents current work by analytic philosophers. Given the disdain with which the sense datum theory is viewed today, it is difficult for the contemporary student of epistemology to realize why it was so thoroughly and tenaciously held by so many not so long ago. Although there are no explicit refutations of the sense datum theories in these papers, nevertheless the theory's demise has prompted new problems, especially the claim that the " acquisition of beliefs " is a necessary condition for an adequate analysis of perception. This " epistemic " or " propositional " view of perception plays an explicit role in the papers by G. J. Warnock, J. W. Roxbee Cox, and F. N. Sibley. On an unrelated topic, Brian O'Shaughnessy's paper provides a new yet fairly difficult analysis entitled " The Temporal Ordering of Perception and Reaction." O'Shaughnessy's analysis appears a bit out of place, given the " epistemic " theme considered in some form or other in the other three papers. Since these three papers have a common theme, the major part of this review will be devoted to them. In his paper entitled " On What is Seen," Warnock discusses the nature of some of the insights regarding perception theory attributed to the late John Austin. That Austin was no friend of the sense datum theory is well known by anyone even vaguely familiar with his work. Using Austin's remarks from Sense and Sensibilia as a spring board, Warnock continues the demolition of the appearance/reality distinction made by representative realists, and a fortiori by advocates of the sense datum position. Warnock BOOK REVIEWS 169 spends much time in discussion of the validity of the following argument form: A sees X. XisP. # AseesP. Insofar as the conclusion attributes the property "P" to what is perceived as "X ", this implies that an epistemic dimension is part of the perception process. Throughout his discussion, I suspect that Warnock has blurred the important and useful distinction found in Aquinas between the object of perception known via the sensus communis (which I take to be a composite of proper and common sensibles), and the object known via the vis cogitativa (which I take to be an awareness of an individual object as a concretum-what both Aristotle and Aquinas refer to as the " incidental object of sense ") . I find this Thomistic distinction quite useful although it is commonly blurred in contemporary discussions of perception theory. Interestingly enough, in responding to Warnock, D. M. Taylor attributes the same structural blur to Warnock's analysis which I have suggested (cf. p. 18 ff.). The second and third papers and their corresponding responses explicitly deal with questions concerning the epistemic nature of perception. Insofar as Sibley's "Analysing Seeing" is in some sense a more general treatment of this problem, editorially it could well have been placed before Roxbee Cox's "An Analysis of Perceiving in Terms of the Causation of Beliefs." Given the logical priority of Sibley...

On equilibrium thermodynamics of open systems and the phase rule (A reply to D. S. Korzhinskii)

The recent comments of Korzhinskii (1966) concerning our discussion (1964) of his expanded formal treatment of thermodynamic equilibrium in open geological systems are analyzed. It is shown that these comments in themselves serve to further substantiate the salient points of our 1964 discussion which may be summed up in the following statements. (1) The classical thermodynamic treatment of reversible processes is a perfectly adequate formalism for dealing with states of chemical equilibrium. Since only equilibrium states of open systems are considered by Korzhinskii, it is literally impossible for his treatment to expand upon classical thermodynamics. His treatment, in fact, represents only a severely limited version of that due to Gibbs. (2) This leaves only one possible legitimate reason for introducing the formalities of the Korzhinskii treatment ( G 0 and a new phase rule for open systems), and this may be put in the form of a question: “Do they provide insight into the petrological analyses of those rock systems to which they apply?” We stress the fact that this question is necessarily irrelevant since the petrologist must always replace it with one of higher logical priority, viz. “Is the rock system which I wish to analyze in terms of G 0 and the Korzhinskii phase rule an open system in equilibrium?” If the answer is affirmative, what further insight is necessary? If the answer is negative, the Korzhinskii treatment does not apply. If the answer is in doubt (as it will be most commonly) there is no formalism rooted in the thermodynamics of reversible processes which bears on the problem.

Relation of Cervical Cancer to Early Marriage and Childbearing

RESOURCES are not always available for unlimited cytologic examinations of women in a given population once a year for carcinoma of the cervix. It is extremely important, therefore, to identify the high-risk patient so that a logical priority can be allotted for population screening. It is important to know the relative risk of the disease according not only to age but also to a multitude of factors that may influence the risk. It is difficult, if not impossible, to get accurate data on the sexual activity of a large group of women. It is possible, however, to get accurate data . . .

Albert Camus and the Rights of Man

Previous articleNext article No AccessDiscussionAlbert Camus and the Rights of ManThomas Landon ThorsonThomas Landon Thorson Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Ethics Volume 74, Number 4Jul., 1964 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/291504 Views: 17Total views on this site Copyright 1964 University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

"Social Determination" in the Writings of Negro Scholars

Absolute truth is, at best, a regulative ideal, a goal infinitely remote that man would approach with ever increasing hope. All knowledge is conditioned by incompleteness of development and by perspectives which the plastic human organism acquires in intraction with environment. Negro scholars propound a knowledge reflecting resentment of the caste-like status forced upon their group. Bias is not deliberate, but there exists an unconscious attitude of immediate group defense. This narrows the scholar's angle of vision. His knowledge is affected in "form" and in "content." Analytical categories are preferred to morphological, environment to heredity. Exceptions have logical priority over quantitative majorities. Range of validity is narrowed, since the mentality of the opponent is not understood through sympathetic interchange of attitudes.