Newsgroups: bit.listserv.csg-l
Date:         Mon, 16 Nov 1992 10:59:53 EST
From:         Avery Andrews <andaling@FAC.ANU.EDU.AU>
Subject:      interfaces

[Avery Andrews 161128.1028]
  (Hank Folson (921114))

  I like the story about interfaces.  It strikes me from reading Beth
Preston's paper in interactionism that some netters have copies of,
that she goes along quite nicely for about 15 pages, then basically
collapses into an image of of discrete events chasing each other around
from outside to inside and back.  Maybe what PCT does instead could
be described as explaining howcome you get invariants (at various levels
of abstraction) maintained _at interfaces_.

  (Dag Forssell (921114.0001))

 I think I have a better sense of what you mean be `engineering science'
now.  I dont' think linguistics has any uniform approach to modelling -
my personal preference is to get as close to the engineering type as
possible.  E.g. when I sat down to think about how you could organize
getting yourself a beer, I fully expected to come up with an argument
for action-planning, bit it didn't work out that way at all.  But
in the area of grammar, I think that real modelling is premature.  My
parser, I would say, is not a model at all (it's an implementation
of a competence description), while Penni's Salix is an embryonic
model.  But should we work on it by trying to go down towards neurology,
or up towards integrating it into a fuller picture of what people are
doing when they are talking, figuring out how you can have formulas and
creativity, both obeying (more or less) grammatical generations, etc
It seems to me that `linguists' (including Penni, who finds it amusing
to be called one, hence the scare quotes) all think up is the way to go,
and that we are getting unduly criticized for this.  I re-recommend
that anyone who wants to complain about our approach to this stuff
ought to take on the excercise of modelling navigating your way
somewhere on the basis of a text.  As far as the linguistics end of it
goes, it could be done on the basis of what I managed to teach myself
about the subject in 12th grade in 1966-67 - this is not a boast about how
clever I am, but an indication of how little you need to know.
Mastering Shieber & Pereira's book on Prolog & Nat. Lang. Processing
would be quite enough.

The stuff about the effects of engineering on the mind is interesting --
I certainly thought that learning about surface integrals, etc. had an
effect on how I looked at things, tho without getting as far into it as
an engineer would.

Maybe I can say more about theories later, but other commitments are
building up.

  Bill Powers (921113.1000)

Gotta be quick, but I think I see a problem here.  You seem to be
assuming that first the words get connected with imagined perceptions, then
the imagined perceptions with actual ones, whereupon there is a
sort of `negotiation' process whereby the imagined perceptions can
be altered to a certain extent if they don't fit the actual ones.

The problem is that this alteration is constrained by the text:
if I say that you get to the top of the hill and there's a large
tree there, and you get to the top and see nothing but bare rock,
with not even a stump or a place where one might have been pulled
out, you really know that you've somehow got to the top of the
wrong hill, or I've been lying to you.

So given that there is a system of constraints connecting texts with
perceptions that might fit them, it's not clear that the imagined
perceptions are doing any work.  Why not just require that the actual
perceptions fit the text directly?  Or if not the spoken text,
some lightly edited variant thereof, such as a portion of a KB?

What's nasty about this is that in effect the reference `signals'
(the text) and the perceptions (images) are things of different kinds,
and we seem to be pretty clueless about how to model the required kind of
comparison process.  But it has to be done anyway, so why not get rid
of the middle-man?  Where the imagined perceptions actually do some
work, I think, is checking texts for consistency, which is a useful
way to make sure you're resolving ambiguities, etc. correctly.

Avery.Andrews@anu.edu.au