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A while ago, I commented here[1] to the effect that there's a good fit between the treatment of meaning in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (PI) and

A while ago, I commented here[1] to the effect that there's a good fit between the treatment of meaning in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (PI) and the neural net / connectionist approach, calling it "decentralised, statistical, emergent" in contrast to more cognitivist ideas. I was challenged to justify my buzzword-laden characterisation, and I reproduce my response here as it seems relevant to your question: > Right at the start of PI, the "Augustinian picture" of meaning is set out: "words in language name objects - sentences are combinations of such names" a picture where "every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands." And so (later, #81) we "think that if anyone utters a sentence, and means or understands it, he is operating a calculus according to definite rules." This is the view of language which PI aims to - sorry, buzzword incoming - disrupt. > By contrast, PI puts the case that there is no central unifying model applicable to all instances of language use, rather: "I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all - but that they are related to one another in many different ways, and it is because of this relationship, or these relationships that we call them all language." (PI #65) > There follows a discussion of vagueness. In the Augustinian picture where the meaning of a word is an object, and a calculus of these objects is performed, it is difficult to avoid the consequence that meanings are exact. PI uses the example of defining the word "game": "How should we explain to someone what a game is? I imagine that we should describe games to him, and we might add: "This and similar things are called 'games'". And do we know any more about it ourselves? [...] But this is not ignorance. We do not know the boundaries because none have been drawn. [...] we can draw a boundary - for a special purpose. Does it take that to make the concept usable? Not at all! [...] One might say that the concept 'game' is a concept with blurred edges." > So much for "decentralised" and "statistical". As far as "emergent" goes, I think even with the large variance in readings of PI it's uncontroversial to say that it seeks to ground meaning and understanding in relation to "customs" or social practices rather than in some variety of metaphysical correspondence between language and reality required by different variations of the Augustinian picture. In this sense, meaning emerges from the use of words relative to these cultural forms. > Connectionism, as an investigative paradigm, (oops, buzzword!) is simpler (I believe) in that it doesn't require the identification of an actual realised model (or "mental mechanism") such as a neural encoding of a "language of thought" or cognitive frames, etc., in the brain - it "just" requires that a bunch of simple elements can result in complex rule-following behaviour without needing to explicitly encode the rules. Hopefully the quotes above will go some way to indicate how this programme is philosophically somewhat in tune with PI. > (Indeed the extensive sections on samples and teaching language games are eerily reminiscent of descriptions of training neural nets, now that I think of it... "How do I explain the meaning of 'regular', 'uniform', 'same' [...] if a person has not yet got the concepts? I shall teach him to use the words by means of examples and by practice - And when I do this I do not communicate less to him than I know myself." (PI #208)) 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10158214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10158214

akozak 8y ago
NLP via word associations might get you closer to capturing meaning in a Wittgensteinian conception than other methods (I happen to think the PI should be required reading for people studying NLP). But he would probably say the inputs into an NLP model would need to capture a much wider range of human culture and behavior beyond co-occurrences and symbols. And even if you had a very complete model - for him "meaning" something through an utterance was likely something inextricably linked with being human engaged in social acts. (See: the private language argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_language_argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_language_argument)
- azeirah 8y ago
  One thing I learned from reading Wittgenstein is that language is far more than speech and words. If you want to understand language, or rather "communication" in a Wittgensteinian-way, I think you'd have better luck analysing YouTube videos, where body language, environment, context, intonation, prosody, implicit emotion, etc is far more visible, rather than just analysing text. It's such a weird, but somewhat freeing perspective on language, where I once thought that the for instance the whistle language is absolutely fascinating and perplexing, it just makes perfect normal sense to me now. As long as you can recognize the human through the medium, there is room for language, and that's so cool! There's so much room for playing with communication and interaction I never thought about thanks to his writing, it also really makes me understand Jazz as a "language" way better, I never understood the almost pretentious way people talked about Jazz, "it's different, hard to explain if you never experienced it for yourself!", it really, truly is a conversation in music, super interesting.
- ttctciyf 8y ago
  > he would probably say the inputs into an NLP model would need to capture a much wider range of human culture and behavior I get what you're saying - that something deserving the name "language" way outstrips the simple word embedding strategies in TFA, right? and I wholeheartedly agree - but my point is that the position of PI, at least as I read it, is fundamentally opposed to the idea that modeling - what he calls "a mental mechanism" - is how language proceeds. This is one of the major points of divergence between PI and the Tractatus (which posits an explicit correspondence or modeling relation between language and the world.) The most explicit formulation of this that comes to mind is in PI #689: > "There must surely be a further, different connexion between my talk and N, for otherwise I should still not have meant HIM." > Certainly such a connexion exists. Only not as you imagine it: namely by means of a mental mechanism. The point is very much that PI's emergent view of meaning is quite in tune with the connectionist sentiment that a bunch of simple elements (i.e. neurons, either in the brain or in some AI project) can exhibit the rule learning and rule following capacities at the centre of PI's treatment of language, without any model of the elements of language needing to be explicitly encoded. The degree to which such a model may or may not exist, embedded within the parameterisation of a language-capable set of neural components, is an interesting question. But even granting its "existence" I think the point would be that the basic properties of the set of components, coupled with the training and samples provide the capability and the "model," if we want to grant its existence, is effectively a by-product - epiphenomenal if you like. :)

akozak 8y ago

NLP via word associations might get you closer to capturing meaning in a Wittgensteinian conception than other methods (I happen to think the PI should be required reading for people studying NLP). But he would probably say the inputs into an NLP model would need to capture a much wider range of human culture and behavior beyond co-occurrences and symbols. And even if you had a very complete model - for him "meaning" something through an utterance was likely something inextricably linked with being human engaged in social acts. (See: the private language argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_language_argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_language_argument)

azeirah 8y ago
One thing I learned from reading Wittgenstein is that language is far more than speech and words. If you want to understand language, or rather "communication" in a Wittgensteinian-way, I think you'd have better luck analysing YouTube videos, where body language, environment, context, intonation, prosody, implicit emotion, etc is far more visible, rather than just analysing text. It's such a weird, but somewhat freeing perspective on language, where I once thought that the for instance the whistle language is absolutely fascinating and perplexing, it just makes perfect normal sense to me now. As long as you can recognize the human through the medium, there is room for language, and that's so cool! There's so much room for playing with communication and interaction I never thought about thanks to his writing, it also really makes me understand Jazz as a "language" way better, I never understood the almost pretentious way people talked about Jazz, "it's different, hard to explain if you never experienced it for yourself!", it really, truly is a conversation in music, super interesting.
ttctciyf 8y ago
> he would probably say the inputs into an NLP model would need to capture a much wider range of human culture and behavior I get what you're saying - that something deserving the name "language" way outstrips the simple word embedding strategies in TFA, right? and I wholeheartedly agree - but my point is that the position of PI, at least as I read it, is fundamentally opposed to the idea that modeling - what he calls "a mental mechanism" - is how language proceeds. This is one of the major points of divergence between PI and the Tractatus (which posits an explicit correspondence or modeling relation between language and the world.) The most explicit formulation of this that comes to mind is in PI #689: > "There must surely be a further, different connexion between my talk and N, for otherwise I should still not have meant HIM." > Certainly such a connexion exists. Only not as you imagine it: namely by means of a mental mechanism. The point is very much that PI's emergent view of meaning is quite in tune with the connectionist sentiment that a bunch of simple elements (i.e. neurons, either in the brain or in some AI project) can exhibit the rule learning and rule following capacities at the centre of PI's treatment of language, without any model of the elements of language needing to be explicitly encoded. The degree to which such a model may or may not exist, embedded within the parameterisation of a language-capable set of neural components, is an interesting question. But even granting its "existence" I think the point would be that the basic properties of the set of components, coupled with the training and samples provide the capability and the "model," if we want to grant its existence, is effectively a by-product - epiphenomenal if you like. :)