3 ms·
You can think of a language as an psychological object, a thing that can be described by a grammar and a dictionary. That's basically where linguistics started,
by rvense 3y ago
You can think of a language as an psychological object, a thing that can be described by a grammar and a dictionary. That's basically where linguistics started, and it's part of it. But some things about language are really best understood and described by looking at it as a thing that people do together, a situated, interactice activity.
And I think that part of the reason that both Eliza and GPT work so well is that the observer really, really wants it to, because that's a crucial part of how this activity is structured, as described by Grice and others:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle
- pyinstallwoes 3y agoI like to think of it as language is intelligence as a lifeform, and humans as a hostform. Language has operations and rules that construct the space of all possible thought, and not all languages are in the set of all possible thoughts. The host form navigates a coordinate space of a constrainted possible thoughts. Whenever a language is used to communicate across interface boundaries (bodies) then some level of mapping takes place to exchanging mutual possible thoughts.