Triangulation Machinery, Poetry, and Politics

I was reading Muriel Rukeyser‘s poetry and marveling at some of the lucid yet novel constructions she employs. I was trying to avoid the grueling work of comparing and contrasting Biden’s speech on the anniversary of January 6th, 2021 with the responses from various Republican defenders of Trump. Both pulled into focus the effect of semantic and pragmatic framing as part of the poetic and political processes, respectively. Sorry, Muriel, I just compared your work to the slow boil of democracy.

Reaching in interlaced gods, animals, and men.
There is no background. The figures hold their peace
In a web of movement. There is no frustration,
Every gesture is taken, everything yields connections.

There is a theory about how language works that I’ve discussed here before. In this theory, from Donald Davidson primarily, the meaning of words and phrases are tied directly to a shared interrogation of what each person is trying to convey. Imagine a child observing a dog and a parent says “dog” and is fairly consistent with that usage across several different breeds that are presented to the child. The child may overuse the word, calling a cat a dog at some point, at which point the parent corrects the child with “cat” and the child proceeds along through this interrogatory process, triangulating in on the meaning of dog versus cat. Triangulation is Davidson’s term, reflecting three parties: two people discussing a thing or idea. In the case of human children, we also know that there are some innate preferences the child will apply during the triangulation process, like preferring “whole object” semantics to atomized ones, and assuming different words mean different things even when applied to the same object: so “canine” and “dog” must refer to the same object in slightly different ways since they are differing words, and indeed they do: dog IS-A canine but not vice-versa.… Read the rest

Randomness and Meaning

The impossibility of the Chinese Room has implications across the board for understanding what meaning means. Mark Walker’s paper “On the Intertranslatability of all Natural Languages” describes how the translation of words and phrases may be achieved:

  1. Through a simple correspondence scheme (word for word)
  2. Through “syntactic” expansion of the languages to accommodate concepts that have no obvious equivalence (“optometrist” => “doctor for eye problems”, etc.)
  3. Through incorporation of foreign words and phrases as “loan words”
  4. Through “semantic” expansion where the foreign word is defined through its coherence within a larger knowledge network.

An example for (4) is the word “lepton” where many languages do not have a corresponding concept and, in fact, the concept is dependent on a bulwark of advanced concepts from particle physics. There may be no way to create a superposition of the meanings of other words using (2) to adequately handle “lepton.”

These problems present again for trying to understand how children acquire meaning in learning a language. As Walker points out, language learning for a second language must involve the same kinds of steps as learning translations, so any simple correspondence theory has to be supplemented.

So how do we make adequate judgments about meanings and so rapidly learn words, often initially with a course granularity but later with increasingly sharp levels of focus? What procedure is required for expanding correspondence theories to operate in larger networks? Methods like Latent Semantic Analysis and Random Indexing show how this can be achieved in ways that are illuminating about human cognition. In each case, the methods provide insights into how relatively simple transformations of terms and their occurrence contexts can be viewed as providing a form of “triangulation” about the meaning of words.… Read the rest

Radical Triangulation

Donald Davidson argued that descriptive theories of semantics suffered from untenable complications that could, in turn, be solved by a holistic theory of meaning. Holism, in this sense, is due to the dependency of words and phrases as part of a complex linguistic interchange. He proposed “triangulation” as a solution, where we zero-in on a tentatively held belief about a word based on other beliefs about oneself, about others, and about the world we think we know.

This seems daringly obvious, but it is merely the starting point of the hard work of what mechanisms and steps are involved in fixing the meaning of words through triangulation. There are certainly some predispositions that are innate and fit nicely with triangulation. These are subsumed under The Principle of Charity and even the notion of the Intentional Stance in how we regard others like us.

Fixing meaning via model-making has some curious results. The language used to discuss aesthetics and art tends to borrow from other fields (“The narrative of the painting,” “The functional grammar of the architecture.”) Religious and spiritual terminology often has extremely porous models: I recently listened to Episcopalians discuss the meaning of “grace” for almost an hour with great glee but almost no progress; it was the belief that they were discussing something of ineffable greatness that was moving to them. Even seemingly simple scientific ideas become elaborately complex for both children and adults: we begin with atoms as billiard balls that mutate into mini solar systems that become vibrating clouds of probabilistic wave-particles around groups of properties in energetic suspension by virtual particle exchange.

Can we apply more formal models to the task of staking out this method of triangulation?… Read the rest