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> people who didn't know how to read in college and had to study English to learn how to read You seem to be suggesting that liberal arts majors didn't know ho

> people who didn't know how to read in college and had to study English to learn how to read You seem to be suggesting that liberal arts majors didn't know how to read in college. At the very least, English majors. I'm confused why you think extensive study of language would be attractive to someone who didn't know how to read.

PaulHoule 4y ago
There is communication and there is anti-communication. The study of language is frequently a dead end, witness how structuralism and post-structuralism became irrelevant. Linguistics is a “science” in the Kuhnian sense that the community can pose and solve problems but it has nothing to say about how machines can understand language or how people can communicate better. If you get PhD in physics you learn how to do quantum mechanics which lets you explain why matter is solid or why sodium has a yellow spectral doublet. If you get a PhD in English you learn to read Finnegan’s Wake and pretend that you understood it. Both are hurdles that divide one group from another but one of those is a useful skill and the other one isn’t. In Japan there are popular books about postwar French philosophy that make a lot of sense when translated to English. A major enterprise of the humanities in the anglophone world is the obscurification of French philosophy which starts with the (usually) bad translations but continues in the way people talk about the subject. (E.g. outsiders to the humanities often think there is something morally wrong about Derrida but don’t understand at all what his game is or that there are other authors like Badiou who play the same game at a much more evolved level.)
- michaelmior 4y ago
  > it has nothing to say about how machines can understand language or how people can communicate better. There's an entire subfield of computational linguistics that would disagree with you. > pretend that you understood it This seems to suggest that no one who claims to have understanding does, which seems like a large claim. > one of those is a useful skill and the other one isn’t. I strongly disagree that understanding language is any more useless than understanding quantum mechanics, but based on your stance as I understand it, I can't imagine either of us will have any success in convincing the other.
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    Language in the abstract is one thing, James Joyce is another. So far as computational linguistics is concerned there is a long term fight which is something like large language models 99 - Noam Chomsky 1. That is, the productive half of computational linguistics solidly rejects the dominant paradigm of the rest of the field.

PaulHoule 4y ago

There is communication and there is anti-communication. The study of language is frequently a dead end, witness how structuralism and post-structuralism became irrelevant. Linguistics is a “science” in the Kuhnian sense that the community can pose and solve problems but it has nothing to say about how machines can understand language or how people can communicate better. If you get PhD in physics you learn how to do quantum mechanics which lets you explain why matter is solid or why sodium has a yellow spectral doublet. If you get a PhD in English you learn to read Finnegan’s Wake and pretend that you understood it. Both are hurdles that divide one group from another but one of those is a useful skill and the other one isn’t. In Japan there are popular books about postwar French philosophy that make a lot of sense when translated to English. A major enterprise of the humanities in the anglophone world is the obscurification of French philosophy which starts with the (usually) bad translations but continues in the way people talk about the subject. (E.g. outsiders to the humanities often think there is something morally wrong about Derrida but don’t understand at all what his game is or that there are other authors like Badiou who play the same game at a much more evolved level.)

michaelmior 4y ago
> it has nothing to say about how machines can understand language or how people can communicate better. There's an entire subfield of computational linguistics that would disagree with you. > pretend that you understood it This seems to suggest that no one who claims to have understanding does, which seems like a large claim. > one of those is a useful skill and the other one isn’t. I strongly disagree that understanding language is any more useless than understanding quantum mechanics, but based on your stance as I understand it, I can't imagine either of us will have any success in convincing the other.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  Language in the abstract is one thing, James Joyce is another. So far as computational linguistics is concerned there is a long term fight which is something like large language models 99 - Noam Chomsky 1. That is, the productive half of computational linguistics solidly rejects the dominant paradigm of the rest of the field.