Today I finally sent "Truisms and the Elements of Narrative" off for review to Cognition Journal. I wrote it very carefully but expect rejection anyway.
Update: And now I am an intellectual "empty nester". Not sure what to think about.
Update: rejected Jan 7 because the references [and hence topic] are too narrow for a general audience.
Monday, December 21, 2015
Thursday, December 17, 2015
Why didn't the Greeks figure out narrative structure?
I imagine that if, instead of measuring land, the ancient Egyptians had been challenged to program computers for automated reading, then the Greeks would have figured out "narrative patterns" long ago. Did it really have to wait for the advent of the computer?
Wednesday, December 16, 2015
Non Language Behaviors have rules too
When I write I become aware of certain aspects of how paragraphs tie together that follow rules just outside my conscious awareness. But I have managed to snag a couple.
Example 1: I am writing an article for publication and do not want to use the word "I" too many times in adjacent paragraphs. By chance I discover that if I move one occurance of "I" to the end of the first paragraph and the second "I" to the beginning of the second paragraph - then it works better as writing. It feels as if putting the two occurrences close together, makes them behave more like a single unit in terms of the flow of the writing.
Example 2: If you have two paragraphs and the first ends with a phrasing that is paralleled and re-used at the beginning of the second paragraph, then the two paragraphs flow together even if their content does not.
SO: what is this stuff? It is like a form of prosody, like some conventions of music.
Update: Maybe these are aesthetic rules that are slightly different. The search for parallelism is related to Truism 4.
Example 1: I am writing an article for publication and do not want to use the word "I" too many times in adjacent paragraphs. By chance I discover that if I move one occurance of "I" to the end of the first paragraph and the second "I" to the beginning of the second paragraph - then it works better as writing. It feels as if putting the two occurrences close together, makes them behave more like a single unit in terms of the flow of the writing.
Example 2: If you have two paragraphs and the first ends with a phrasing that is paralleled and re-used at the beginning of the second paragraph, then the two paragraphs flow together even if their content does not.
SO: what is this stuff? It is like a form of prosody, like some conventions of music.
Update: Maybe these are aesthetic rules that are slightly different. The search for parallelism is related to Truism 4.
Friday, December 11, 2015
Tuesday, December 8, 2015
Wondering about a missing truism
I have found that several truisms resemble well known scientific laws. But I know one form of scientific law that, so far, has not been "resembled" by a known truism. Anyway this form says: "the toe bone is connected to the foot bone, the foot bone is connected to the leg bone, the leg bone is connected to the knee bone, ......". We know this 'law' also as it appears in the definition of narrative continuity. It is certainly a rule of polyphony. So is this a missing truism of some sort?
Saturday, December 5, 2015
Walking in the Woods and Nested Frames of Reference
I like to head out for a walk on Saturday and Sunday mornings. I get in the car and head west or north of south, as the case may be, and I enjoy my time in the car. I usually have a treat like a donut and coffee and I spend the time thinking about theoretical questions. Often lately I think about proto semantics and truisms but I also think about "best models". These theoretical thoughts stay with me in the woods for a while until the necessity of watching my footing, choosing a direction, and looking around overwhelm the theorizing and force me to contemplate the present moment. But in one case there is an overlap between the theoretical musings and the practical aspects of finding my way through the woods - a shared interest in how do I find my footing and choose my path?
Put aside the 'larger' aspects of this question: why I am in this place? what direction I am headed? what is the best strategy for searching for rock piles [my basic motivation on weekend walks]? And consider the 'smaller' aspects of this question, as they help make the discussion as concrete as possible. These are the: where will I be in twenty feet? were will I take my next step? how shall my feet behave? I begin to get a sense of how these 'smaller' aspects of the question work.
Take for example the last two: where is my next step and how shall my feet react? I already know where I am headed in the next twenty feet, so I pick my next step as part of keeping an even stride and avoiding difficult footing. If I see no obstructions my legs go on automatic. If I do and place my next step with some amount of consciousness, I usually defer to my feet to solve the problem of adapting to the specifics of what it encounters under foot. If the foot is "surprised" it calls back to the leg to get a different strategy for its next step. In the same way, if I cannot find a good next step it calls back to the process for choosing the next twenty feet and asks for a 'reset' to a different strategy. If I find my path blocked entirely - say by open water - then I may call back up to a higher process to change strategy.
What these sorts of behaviors suggest to me is that there is a hierarchy of linked decision/action processes where each process determines a strategy and defers the tactics to a sub process. If the sub process encounters problems it calls back up to the parent and requests a new strategy. A process is a tactic for its parent and sets a strategy for its children. But it is of particular interest that this hierarchy is not simply a cognitive structure. There are specific perceptual aspects to each different level: I see twenty feet into the wood, I see beyond that to the larger "lay of the land", I see within it to where my feet will be placed. I perceive the footing with the same foot that is doing the stepping. The hierarchy is not just of cognition and of perception but of actuation as well.
Each process has a strategy given to it and sets a tactic by selecting a sub process. Each process has an input perceptual aspect and an output actuation aspect.
So that is it. This is not good writing but I hope it makes the point: handling the next twenty feet is done based on what I perceive in the next twenty feet and its actuation is to select a direction for the next step. Sub perception and sub actuations are deferred to and handled by the 'tactic' which is its own process. Thus no single process is responsible for the whole hierarchy; rather each part of the hierarchy takes responsibility for part of the perception and actuation needed for the task.
Put aside the 'larger' aspects of this question: why I am in this place? what direction I am headed? what is the best strategy for searching for rock piles [my basic motivation on weekend walks]? And consider the 'smaller' aspects of this question, as they help make the discussion as concrete as possible. These are the: where will I be in twenty feet? were will I take my next step? how shall my feet behave? I begin to get a sense of how these 'smaller' aspects of the question work.
Take for example the last two: where is my next step and how shall my feet react? I already know where I am headed in the next twenty feet, so I pick my next step as part of keeping an even stride and avoiding difficult footing. If I see no obstructions my legs go on automatic. If I do and place my next step with some amount of consciousness, I usually defer to my feet to solve the problem of adapting to the specifics of what it encounters under foot. If the foot is "surprised" it calls back to the leg to get a different strategy for its next step. In the same way, if I cannot find a good next step it calls back to the process for choosing the next twenty feet and asks for a 'reset' to a different strategy. If I find my path blocked entirely - say by open water - then I may call back up to a higher process to change strategy.
What these sorts of behaviors suggest to me is that there is a hierarchy of linked decision/action processes where each process determines a strategy and defers the tactics to a sub process. If the sub process encounters problems it calls back up to the parent and requests a new strategy. A process is a tactic for its parent and sets a strategy for its children. But it is of particular interest that this hierarchy is not simply a cognitive structure. There are specific perceptual aspects to each different level: I see twenty feet into the wood, I see beyond that to the larger "lay of the land", I see within it to where my feet will be placed. I perceive the footing with the same foot that is doing the stepping. The hierarchy is not just of cognition and of perception but of actuation as well.
Each process has a strategy given to it and sets a tactic by selecting a sub process. Each process has an input perceptual aspect and an output actuation aspect.
So that is it. This is not good writing but I hope it makes the point: handling the next twenty feet is done based on what I perceive in the next twenty feet and its actuation is to select a direction for the next step. Sub perception and sub actuations are deferred to and handled by the 'tactic' which is its own process. Thus no single process is responsible for the whole hierarchy; rather each part of the hierarchy takes responsibility for part of the perception and actuation needed for the task.
Friday, December 4, 2015
Evidence for Truism 8
Consider the following phrases (the last col say if the phrase is ok, not ok, or awkward.
The explanation is that the first 4 rows are about an event. By default we assume the event went well (Truism 8A) but the assumption is implicit. So row 1 is ok and row 2 is awkward. It contradicts something only weakly assumed. But the last 4 rows all are about the quality of the event explicitly. So the "and it was bad" and "but it was good" don't work at all.
Truism 8B applies to the last 4 rows and makes it implicit that the result is good. This aligns perfectly with the last column: you say "and" and expect good, and say "but" and expect bad.
Update: The difference between "awkward" and "not ok" is that row 2 embodies two assumptions (both 8A and 8B) while row 6 embodies only one of the truisms. It makes sense that one implicit assumption generates more expectation than two do.
she cooked
|
and
|
it was good
|
ok
|
she cooked
|
and
|
it was bad
|
faintly awkward
|
she cooked
|
but
|
it was good
|
not ok
|
she cooked
|
but
|
it was bad
|
ok
|
she cooked carefully
|
and
|
it was good
|
ok
|
she cooked carefully
|
and
|
it was bad
|
not ok
|
she cooked carefully
|
but
|
it was good
|
not ok
|
she cooked carefully
|
but
|
it was bad
|
ok
|
Truism 8B applies to the last 4 rows and makes it implicit that the result is good. This aligns perfectly with the last column: you say "and" and expect good, and say "but" and expect bad.
Update: The difference between "awkward" and "not ok" is that row 2 embodies two assumptions (both 8A and 8B) while row 6 embodies only one of the truisms. It makes sense that one implicit assumption generates more expectation than two do.
Oops I meant "cancel" not "flout"... or was it "hedge"???
I guess I got it wrong. Too bad the correct term 'cancel' has such in-appropriate connotation. In fact it means an active reversal, not the removal of redundancy as it means in arithmetic.
You're both wrong! It is hedge.
You're both wrong! It is hedge.
Wednesday, December 2, 2015
The 'story' as noun type
I was thinking that 'story', as a noun type, has certain verbs associated to it:
person-tell->story
story-listened by->person
story-believed by->person
The persistent forms are:
story_/told
person_/affect of story
person_/permanent affect of story
Also we have attributes of story that do not arise as persistent states after actions:
story_/true
[I suppose this can only occur when there in a storyB that is about a storyA.]
And maybe a new operator {} for 'about'. 'Cept I am not sure how to use this. I can see how if a person believes a story then the content, what the story is 'about', becomes part of the person's reaction to circumstances that bring up similar content. Or, in a purely linguistic context, would add to the person's truism repository. Let's think about this a bit.
Not that I plan to write about "truth" but: people who become sufficiently enlightened (I guess like Frege and Ramsay) realize that saying a sentence is "true" does not add to to the meaning of the original expression. But they make a serious logical "type" error when they overlook that "X is true" is a meta statement about X. Its meaning does not "add to" the meaning of X, as it is of a different type. As a meta statement "X is true" does indeed have content. It is just that when this is projected back into the original statement the projection has no content. In other words there is a failure to respect the algebra of 'about'.
One minor note about "truth": as a mathematician I was quite interested in the definition of truth and was well aware of it having multiple varieties. A=A is not true in the same way as "my name is Peter". I guess Kant probably got some of these varieties of truth correct. One variety I found to be most pleasing was this one: a statement is "true" if its consequences are already known. [In a system of propositions, "closed" under some set of operations: a new proposition can be considered "true" when it, together with the operations and the existing propositions can only generate other propositions that are already in the system.]. I never met a serious mathematician who was confident they understood all these possibilities. There are a lot of amateurish approaches that pretend "truth" is a single, well understood concept.
person-tell->story
story-listened by->person
story-believed by->person
The persistent forms are:
story_/told
person_/affect of story
person_/permanent affect of story
Also we have attributes of story that do not arise as persistent states after actions:
story_/true
[I suppose this can only occur when there in a storyB that is about a storyA.]
And maybe a new operator {} for 'about'. 'Cept I am not sure how to use this. I can see how if a person believes a story then the content, what the story is 'about', becomes part of the person's reaction to circumstances that bring up similar content. Or, in a purely linguistic context, would add to the person's truism repository. Let's think about this a bit.
Not that I plan to write about "truth" but: people who become sufficiently enlightened (I guess like Frege and Ramsay) realize that saying a sentence is "true" does not add to to the meaning of the original expression. But they make a serious logical "type" error when they overlook that "X is true" is a meta statement about X. Its meaning does not "add to" the meaning of X, as it is of a different type. As a meta statement "X is true" does indeed have content. It is just that when this is projected back into the original statement the projection has no content. In other words there is a failure to respect the algebra of 'about'.
One minor note about "truth": as a mathematician I was quite interested in the definition of truth and was well aware of it having multiple varieties. A=A is not true in the same way as "my name is Peter". I guess Kant probably got some of these varieties of truth correct. One variety I found to be most pleasing was this one: a statement is "true" if its consequences are already known. [In a system of propositions, "closed" under some set of operations: a new proposition can be considered "true" when it, together with the operations and the existing propositions can only generate other propositions that are already in the system.]. I never met a serious mathematician who was confident they understood all these possibilities. There are a lot of amateurish approaches that pretend "truth" is a single, well understood concept.
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