POSTSCRIPT (2012-01-21):  The logician Graham Priest remembers Dummett as follows:

It is clear that Dummett was one of the most important — perhaps the most important — British philosopher of the last half century. His work on the philosophy of language and metaphysics, inspired by themes in intuitionist logic, was truly groundbreaking. He took intuitionism from a somewhat esoteric doctrine in the philosophy of mathematics to a mainstream philosophical position.

Perhaps his greatest achievement, as far as I am concerned, was to demonstrate beyond doubt the intellectual respectability of a fully-fledged philosophical position based on a contemporary heterodox logic. Philosophers in the United Kingdom, even if they do not subscribe to Dummett’s views, no longer doubt the possibility of this. Dummett had an influence in Australia, too. It was quieter there than in the U.K., but the relevant philosophical lesson was amplified by logicians who endorsed heterodox logics of a different stripe (for which, I think, Dummett had little sympathy). The result has been much the same.

In the United States, though, Dummett had virtually no significant impact. Indeed, I am continually surprised how conservative philosophy in the United States is with regard to heterodox logics. It is still awaiting a Dummett to awaken it from its dogmatic logical slumbers.

Graham Priest, City University of New York Graduate Center, and the University of Melbourne (Australia)

References:

His Guardian obituary is here.  An index to posts about members of the Matherati can be found here.

M. Dummett [1977/2000]: Elements of Intuitionism. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1st edition 1977; 2nd edition 2000).

“Ah,” said Rowe, “there’s a difference between a man and a machine when it comes to praying.”   “Aye. The machine would do it better. It wouldn’t pray for things it oughtn’t pray for, and its thoughts wouldn’t wander.”

“Y-e-e-s. But the computer saying the words wouldn’t be the same . . .”

“Oh, I don’t know. If the words ‘O Lord, bless the Queen and her Ministers‘ are going to produce any tangible effects on the Government, it can’t matter who or what says them, can it?”

“Y-e-e-s, I see that. But if a man says the words he means them.”

“So does the computer. Or at any rate, it would take a damned complicated computer to say the words without meaning them. I mean, what do we mean by ‘mean’? If we want to know whether a man or a computer means ‘O Lord, bless the Queen and her Ministers,’ we look to see whether it’s grinning insincerely or ironically as it says the words. We try to find out whether it belongs to the Communist Party. We observe whether it simultaneously passes notes about lunch or fornication. If it passes all the tests of this sort, what other tests are there for telling if it means what it says? All the computers in my department, at any rate, would pray with great sincerity and single-mindedness. They’re devout wee things, computers.” (pages 109-110).

Reference:

Michael Frayn [1995/1965]: The Tin Men (London, UK: Penguin, originally published by William Collins, 1965)

Charles Leonard Hamblin (1922-1985) was an Australian philosopher and one of Australia’s first computer scientists. His main early contributions to computing, which date from the mid 1950s, were the development and application of reverse polish notation and the zero-address store. He was also the developer of one of the first computer languages, GEORGE. Since his death, his ideas have become influential in the design of computer interaction protocols, and are expected to shape the next generation of e-commerce and machine-communication systems.

Hamblin was born in 1922 and attended North Sydney Boys’ High School and Geelong Grammar. He then took degrees in Arts (Philosophy and Mathematics) and in Science (Physics), followed by an MA in Philosophy (First Class Honours) at Melbourne University, with his studies interrupted by work as a radar officer in the RAAF during World War II. Following the war, he gained a PhD at the London School of Economics, University of London on the topic, “Language and the Theory of Information”, apparently under Karl Popper (Hamblin 1957a). Hamblin’s thesis presented a critique of Shannon’s theory of information from a semantic perspective, and developed a possible-worlds semantics for question-response exchanges. Between 1955 and his death in 1985 he was a Lecturer and Professor in the School of Philosophy at New South Wales University of Technology (NSWUT), which later became the University of New South Wales (UNSW).

In 1956, the University purchased a DEUCE computer manufactured by the English Electric Company (EEC), an early British computer manufacturer, and Hamblin, with his radar background, became involved in working with this machine. This was the second academic computer in Australia, after that of the University of Sydney. Hamblin soon became aware of the problems of (a) computing mathematical formulae containing brackets, and (b) the memory overhead in having dealing with memory stores each of which had its own name. One solution to the first problem was Jan Lukasiewicz’s Polish notation, which enables a writer of mathematical notation to instruct a reader the order in which to execute the operations (e.g. addition, multiplication, etc) without using brackets. Polish notation achieves this by having an operator (+, *, etc) precede the operands to which it applies, e.g., +ab, instead of the usual, a+b. Hamblin, with his training in formal logic, knew of Lukasiewicz’s work.

However, this does not solve the second problem. Hamblin realized that placing the operation symbol to the right of the operands (i.e., reversing the polish notation, as in ab+) would enable the machine to make use of a store which did not require an address – the current operation would always be conducted on the most-recent operands inserted and still remaining in the store. This store came to be called a stack, or last-in, first-out (LIFO) store. He implemented these ideas in a programming language for the DEUCE machine, a language he called GEORGE, for General Order Generator. This work was undertaken at a time when there were only a handful of programming languages, and indeed still some resistance to the idea of non-assemblor languages (due to their greater memory requirements). Hamblin’s work on the DEUCE machine at UNSW overlapped with that of Gordon Bell and Bob Brigham, who wrote a symbolic assembler and run-time system called SODA (or Symbolic Optimum DEUCE Assembly Program) (Brigham and Bell 1959). GEORGE used the SODA runtime library.

Hamblin presented his work at the first Australian conference on computing, which was held at the Weapon Research Establishment in Salisbury, South Australia, in June 1957 (Hamblin 1957b). Employees of the English Electric Company were present at this conference, and took his ideas back to England. As a consequence, Hamblin’s architecture was implemented in the company’s next machine, which came to be called the KDF9. The architecture of this machine even used Hamblin’s terminology. This machine was announced in 1960 and delivered (i.e. made available commercially) in 1963. Hamblin published his ideas in 1957 (Hamblin 1957b, 1957c) and 1962 (Hamblin 1962). An earlier paper (Burks et al. 1954) presented the same ideas in a more general notational framework, and that paper was briefly reviewed in the Journal of Symbolic Logic in 1955 (Nelson 1955). Hamblin may have seen the Burks paper, or (with greater probability) the JSL review, although neither of these articles is cited in his 1962 Computer Journal paper which presents RPN (Hamblin 1962). (When accessed on 2010-07-20, the catalogue of the Library of the University of New South Wales indicated that the UNSW Library did not currently carry the journal in which the Burks paper was published, Mathematical Tables and Other Aids to Computation; of course, the Library may have carried this journal in the past.)

Another computer, the American Burroughs B5000, announced in 1961 and delivered in 1963, also used a zero-address architecture, and also enabled reverse polish notation to be used for programming. R. S. Barton, one of the designers of the B5000, has written that he developed RPN independently of Hamblin, sometime in 1958 while reading a textbook on symbolic logic, and before he was aware of Hamblin’s work (Barton 1970). A decade after Hamblin first published his ideas, engineers at Hewlett-Packard (HP) developed a personal calculator, the 9100A Desktop Calculator, which used RPN. This calculator, the first in a long line by HP, was released in 1968, and it popularized RPN among the scientific and engineering communities; note, however, that early advertisements for the 9100A did not mention RPN.

Even if Hamblin’s work on RPN was not the first to be published that applied Polish Notation to a computational domain, people at the  time thought it was, as evidenced by the refereed publication of his 1962 paper in the Computer Journal, and Barton’s comments published in 1970.   Hamblin’s contribution to computer science was also recognized with an obituary in the Australian Computer Journal (Allen 1985) and in an influential history of British computing (Lavington 1980). In addition, GEORGE is listed in Bill Kinnersley’s comprehensive directory of computer languages, The Language List. In the 1960s, Hamblin also worked on implementing Tarski’s decision method for real closed fields (Tarski 1951), the first order theory of real numbers with addition and multiplication, and hired two programmers to assist in this project, Malcolm Newey and Vaughan Pratt. However, only in 1974 was it shown by Fischer and Rabin (1974) that the running time of this problem had an exponential lower bound.

Although usually not credited, Hamblin was the originator of two other ideas which subsequently became important in Artificial Intelligence. Firstly, Hamblin appears to have been the first person to define a formal measure of plausibility, distinct from that of probability, in a paper published in 1959. Alternative formalisms for uncertainty have come to play a very important role in Artificial Intelligence, particularly in the design of knowledge-based systems, due to the failure of the standard Kolmogorov axioms of probability to adequately account for all forms of uncertainty and for its manipulation. One person particularly taken by Hamblin’s work in this area was the British economist, George Shackle, who in the 1940s and 1950s had developed a theory of decision-making under uncertainty based on the potential surprise of rival uncertain beliefs, and focusing on the best-case and worst-case outcomes of alternative decision-options (see pp. 97 – 100 of Shackle 1969). (Shackle’s theory, based on his real-world experience of government economic policy making and business investment decisions, differed from the Maximum Expected Utility theory of Leonard J. Savage which has unfortunately come to dominate mainstream economics.)

Secondly, Hamblin was the first person to propose an axiomatic account of time based on intervals, rather than points. This was in a paper published in 1969. An interval calculus for time was later proposed by James Allen (1984), and has been influential in AI, both as a basis for reasoning about time, and, when extended to multiple dimensions, as a basis for reasoning about space (Anger and Rodriguez 1991).

From the 1960s, Hamblin returned to work in philosophy, particularly the philosophy of argumentation, and wrote two very influential books. One of these, Fallacies, published in 1970, is a study of the classical logical fallacies, such as begging the question, which Hamblin examined by means of formal dialogue games. These are games between speakers who utter statements according to strict rules, and they were first studied by Aristotle. Being rule-governed, these games have gained the attention of computer scientists, and, from about 1989, they have been applied in a number of areas, including: natural language processing; human-machine interaction; the design of complex software; and for dialogues between autonomous software agents (McBurney and Parsons 2009). Interaction and communication protocols based on formal dialogue games are likely to form the basis for the next generation of e-commerce systems and systems supporting high-level machine-to-machine communications. Another of Hamblin’s books, Imperatives, published posthumously in 1987, has also been influential in recent work in computer science, in modeling and implementing delegation of tasks between software agents (Atkinson et al. 2008, Reed and Norman 2007, Norman and Reed 2010).

Hamblin was fluent in several languages, including ancient Greek and Latin. He was one of three fellow-students from his time at Geelong Grammar to become professors of philosophy (the others being David Armstrong and Michael Scriven). At the time of his death, he was apparently attempting to set text of Wittgenstein to music.

Charles Hamblin was a pioneer computer scientist and a prominent philosopher, whose influence on the subject is still being felt. His contributions to applied and theoretical computing show the deep links which Computer Science has had, and continues to have, with philosophy and logic.

References:

In addition to the works cited in the text above, I have also listed all of Hamblin’s publications known to me.

J. F. Allen [1984]: Towards a general theory of action and time. Artificial Intelligence, 23(2): 123-154.

M. W. Allen [1985]: Charles Hamblin (1922-1985). The Australian Computer Journal, 17(4): 194-195.

F. D. Anger and R. V. Rodriguez [1991]: Time, tense, and relativity revisited. In: B. Bouchon-Meunier, R. R. Yager and L. A. Zadeh (Editors): Uncertainty in Knowledge Bases: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Information Processing and Management of Uncertainty in Knowledge-Based Systems (IPMU 1990), pp. 286-295. Heidelberg, Germany: Springer.

K. Atkinson, R. Girle, P. McBurney and S. Parsons [2008]: Command dialogues. In: I. Rahwan and P. Moraitis (Editors): Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop in Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems (ArgMAS 2008). AAMAS 2008, Lisbon, Portugal.

R. S. Barton [1970]: Ideas for computer systems organization: a personal survey. pp. 7-16 of: J. S. Jou (Editor): Software Engineering: Volume 1: Proceedings of the Third Symposium on Computer and Information Sciences held in Miami Beach, Florida, December 1969. New York, NY, USA: Academic Press.

R. C. Brigham and C. G. Bell [1959]: A Translation Routine for the DEUCE Computer. The Computer Journal, 2 (2): 76-84.

A. W. Burks, D. W. Warren and J. B. Wright [1954]: An analysis of a logical machine using paranthesis-free notation. Mathematical Tables and Other Aids to Computation, 8 (46): 53-57.

M. J. Fischer and M. O. Rabin [1974]: Super-exponential complexity of Pressburger arithmetic. Complexity of Computation, AMS-SIAM Proceedings. 7: 27-41.

R. J. Gillings and C. L. Hamblin [1964]: Babylonian reciprocal tables on UTECOM. Technology, 9 (2): 41-42, August 1964. An expanded version appeared in Australian Journal of Science, 27, 1964.

C. L. Hamblin [1957a]: Language and the Theory of Information. PhD Thesis, Logic and Scientific Method Programme, University of London, London, UK. Submitted October 1956, awarded 1957.

C. L. Hamblin [1957b]: An addressless coding scheme based on mathematical notation. Proceedings of the First Australian Conference on Computing and Data Processing, Salisbury, South Australia: Weapons Research Establishment, June 1957.

C. L. Hamblin [1957c]: Computer Languages. The Australian Journal of Science, 20: 135-139. Reprinted in The Australian Computer Journal, 17(4): 195-198 (November 1985).

C. L. Hamblin [1957d]: Review of: W. R. Ashby: Introduction to Cybernetics. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 35.

C. L. Hamblin [1958a]: Questions. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 36(3): 159-168.

C. L. Hamblin [1958b]: Review of: Time and Modality, by A. N. Prior. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 36: 232-234.

C. L. Hamblin [1958c]: Surprises, innovations and probabilities. Proceedings of the ANU Symposium on Surprise, Canberra, July 1958.

C. L. Hamblin [1958d]: Review of: Formal Analysis of Normative Systems, by A. R. Anderson. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 36.

C. L. Hamblin [1958e]: GEORGE Programming Manual. Duplicated, 1958. Revised and enlarged, 1959.

C. L. Hamblin [1959]: The Modal “Probably”. Mind, New Series, 68: 234-240.

C. L. Hamblin [1962]: Translation to and from Polish notation. Computer Journal, 5: 210-213.

C. L. Hamblin [1963]: Questions aren’t statements. Philosophy of Science, 30(1): 62-63.

C. L. Hamblin [1964a]: Has probability any foundations? Proceedings of the Symposium on Probability of the Statistical Society of New South Wales, May 1964. Reproduced in Science Yearbook, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 1964.

C. L. Hamblin [1964b]: Review of: Communication: A Logical Model, by D. Harrah. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 42.

C. L. Hamblin [1964c]: Review of: Analysis of Questions, by N. D. Belnap.Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 42.

C. L. Hamblin [1965]: Review of: A Preface to the Logic of Science, by P. Alexander. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 15(60): 360-362.

C. L. Hamblin [1966]: Elementary Formal Logic, a Programmed Course. (Sydney: Hicks Smith). Republished by Methuen, in London, UK, 1967. Also translated into Swedish by J. Mannerheim, under the title: Element”ar Logik, ein programmerad kurs. (Stockholm: Laromedelsf”orlagen, 1970).

C. L. Hamblin [1967a]: One-valued logic. Philosophical Quarterly, 17: 38-45.

C. L. Hamblin [1967b]: Questions, logic of. Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (New York: Collier Macmillan).

C. L. Hamblin [1967c]: An algorithm for polynomial operations. Computer Journal, 10.

C. L. Hamblin [1967d]: Review of: New Approaches to the Logical Theory of Interrogatives, by L. Aqvist. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 44.

C. L. Hamblin [1969]: Starting and stopping. The Monist, 53: 410-425.

C. L. Hamblin [1970a]: Fallacies. London, UK: Methuen.

C. L. Hamblin [1970b]: The effect of when it’s said. Theoria, 36: 249-264.

C. L. Hamblin [1971a]: Mathematical models of dialogue. Theoria, 37: 130-155.

C. L. Hamblin [1971b]: Instants and intervals. Studium Generale, 24: 127-134.

C. L. Hamblin [1972a]: You and I. Analysis, 33: 1-4.

C. L. Hamblin [1972b]: Quandaries and the logic of rules. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 1: 74-85.

C. L. Hamblin [1973a]: Questions in Montague English. Foundations of Language, 10: 41-53.

C. L. Hamblin [1973b]: A felicitous fragment of the predicate calculus. Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic. 14: 433-446.

C. L. Hamblin [1974]: La logica dell’iniziare e del cessare. Italian translation by C. Pizzi of an unpublished article: The logic of starting and stopping. Pages 295-317 in: C. Pizzi (Editor): La Logica del Tempo. Torino: Bringhieri.

C. L. Hamblin [1975a]: Creswell’s colleague TLM. Nous, 9(2): 205-210.

C. L. Hamblin [1975b]: Saccherian arguments and the self-application of logic. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 53: 157-160.

C. L. Hamblin [1976]: An improved “Pons Asinorum”? Journal of the History of Philosophy, 14: 131-136.

C. L. Hamblin [1984]: Languages of Asia and the Pacific: A Phrasebook for Travellers and Students. (North Ryde, NSW: Angus and Robertson).

C. L. Hamblin [1987]: Imperatives. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell.

C. L. Hamblin and P. J. Staines [1992]: An extraordinarily simple theory of the syllogism. Logique et Analyse, 35: 81.

S. H. Lavington [1980]: Early British Computers: The Story of Vintage Computers and the People who Built Them. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

P. McBurney and S. Parsons [2009]: Dialogue games for agent argumentation. Chapter 13 in: I. Rahwan and G. Simari (Editors): Argumentation in Artificial Intelligence. Berlin, Germany: Springer, pp. 261-280.

R. J. Nelson [1955]: Review of: “An analysis of a logical machine using paranthesis-free notation” by Arthur W. Burks, Don. W. Warren and Jesse B. Wright, The Journal of Symbolic Logic, 20 (1): 70-71.

T. J. Norman and C. Reed [2010]: A logic of delegation. Artificial Intelligence, 174 (1): 51-71.

T. Pearcey [1994]: Australian Computing: The Second Generation. Published in: J. M. Bennett, R. Broomham, P. M. Murton, T. Pearcey and R. W. Rutledge (Editors): Computing in Australia: The Development of a Profession. Australian Computer Society.

C. A. Reed. and T. J. Norman [2007]: A formal characterisation of Hamblin’s action-state semantics. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 36 (4): 415-448.

G. L. S. Shackle [1969]: Decision Order and Time in Human Affairs. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Second Edition.

A. Tarski [1951]: A Decision Method for Elementary Algebra and Geometry. Berkeley, CA, USA: University of California Press.

R. A. Vowels [1978]: Introduction to PL/I, Algorithms and Structured Programming. Melbourne, 1978.

G. Williams [1985]: A shy blend of logic, maths and languages. (Obituary of Charles Hamblin). Sydney Morning Herald, 1985.

In compiling this biography, I am grateful for information and support received from: Gordon Bell, Jim Crosswhite, David Hitchcock, Jim Mackenzie, Vaughan Pratt, Michael Scriven, Phillip Staines, Robin Vowels, Doug Walton, and the family of the late Charles Hamblin. The views I express here are, of course, solely my own.

Copyright, 2003-2011.  All rights reserved.

One might imagine epistemology – the philosophy of knowledge – would be of help here.  Philosophers, however, have been seduced since Aristotle with propositions (factual statements about the world having truth values), largely ignoring actions, and their representation.   Philosophers of language have also mostly focused on speech acts – utterances which act to change the world – rather than on utterances about actions themselves.  Even among speech act theorists the obsession with propositions is strong, with attempts to analyze utterances which are demonstrably not propositions (eg, commands) by means of implicit assertive statements – propositions  asserting something about the world, where “the world” is extended to include internal mental states and intangible social relations between people – which these utterances allegedly imply.  With only a few exceptions (Thomas Reid 1788, Adolf Reinach 1913, Juergen Habermas 1981, Charles Hamblin 1987), philosophers of language have mostly ignored utterances  about actions.

Consider the following two statements:

I promise you to wash the car.

I command you to wash the car.

The two statements have almost identical English syntax.   Yet their meanings, and the intentions of their speakers, are very distinct.  For a start, the action of washing the car would be done by different people – the speaker and the hearer, respectively (assuming for the moment that the command is validly issued, and accepted).  Similarly, the power to retract or revoke the action of washing the car rests with different people – with the hearer (as the recipient of the promise) and the speaker (as the commander), respectively.

Linguists generally use “semantics” to refer to the real-world referants of syntactically-correct expressions, while “pragmatics” refers to other aspects of the meaning and use of an expression not related to their relationship (or not) to things in the world, such as the speaker’s intentions.  For neither of these two expressions does it make sense to speak of  their truth value:  a promise may be questioned as to its sincerity, or its feasibility, or its appropriateness, etc, but not its truth or falsity;  likewise, a command  may be questioned as to its legal validity, or its feasibility, or its morality, etc, but also not its truth or falsity.

For utterances about actions, such as promises, requests, entreaties and commands, truth-value semantics makes no sense.  Instead, we generally need to consider two pragmatic aspects.  The first is uptake, the acceptance of the utterance by the hearer (an aspect first identified by Reid and by Reinach), an acceptance which generally creates a social commitment to execute the action described in the utterance by one or other party to the conversation (speaker or hearer).    Once uptaken, a second pragmatic aspect comes into play:  the power to revoke or retract the social commitment to execute the action.  This revocation power does not necessarily lie with the original speaker; only the recipient of a promise may cancel it, for example, and not the original promiser.  The revocation power also does not necessarily lie with the uptaker, as commands readily indicate.

Why would a computer scientist be interested in such humanistic arcana?  The more tasks we delegate to intelligent machines, the more they need to co-ordinate actions with others of like kind.  Such co-ordination requires conversations comprising utterances over actions, and, for success, these require agreed syntax, semantics and pragmatics.  To give just one example:  the use of intelligent devices by soldiers have made the modern battlefield a place of overwhelming information collection, analysis and communication.  Lots of this communication can be done by intelligent software agents, which is why the US military, inter alia, sponsors research applying the philosophy of language and the  philosophy of argumentation to machine communications.

Meanwhile, the philistine British Government intends to cease funding tertiary education in the arts and the humanities.   Even utilitarians should object to this.

References:

Juergen  Habermas [1984/1981]:   The Theory of Communicative Action:  Volume 1:  Reason and the Rationalization of Society.  London, UK:  Heinemann.   (Translation by T. McCarthy of:  Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns, Band I,  Handlungsrationalitat und gesellschaftliche Rationalisierung. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, Germany, 1981.)

Charles  L. Hamblin [1987]:  Imperatives. Oxford, UK:  Basil Blackwell.

P. McBurney and S. Parsons [2007]: Retraction and revocation in agent deliberation dialogs. Argumentation, 21 (3): 269-289.

Adolph Reinach [1913]:  Die apriorischen Grundlagen des bürgerlichen Rechtes.  Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, 1: 685-847.

Sport is international phatic but also a crucial Australian (male) vehicle. It enables not just short, passing greetings but allows for what may seem like deep, passionate and meaningful conversations but which in the end are unmemorable, empty, producing nothing and enhancing no one.

Unmemorable?! Really?   What Australian could forget Norman May’s shouted “Gold! Gold for Australia! Gold!” commentary at the end of the men’s 400-metre swimming medley at the 1980 Olympics in Moscow.  Only a churlish gradgrind could fail to be enhanced by hearing this.   And what Australian of a certain age could forget the inimitable footie commentary of Rex Mossop, including, for example, such statements as,  “That’s the second consecutive time he’s done that in a row one straight after the other.” Mossop’s heat-of-the-moment sporting talk was commemorated with his many winning places in playwright Alex Buzo’s Australian Indoor Tautology Pennant, an annual competition held, as I recall,  in Wagga Wagga, Gin Gin and Woy Woy (although not in Woop Woop or in The Never Never), before moving internationally to exotic locations such as Pago Pago, Xai Xai and Baden Baden.  Unmemorable, Mr Tatz?  Enhancing no one?  Really?  To be clear, these are not memorable sporting events, but memorable sporting commentary.   And all I’ve mentioned so far is sporting talk, not the great writers on baseball, on golf, on cricket, on swimming,  . . .

But as well as misunderstanding what talk about sport is about and why it is meaningful, Tatz is wrong on another score.   He says:

But why so much natter and clatter about sport? Eco’s answer is that sport “is the maximum aberration of ‘phatic’ speech”, which is really a negation of speech.

Phatic speech is meaningless speech, as in “G’day, how’s it going?” or “have a nice day” or “catch you later” — small talk phrases intended to produce a sense of sociability, sometimes uttered in the hope that it will lead to further and more real intercourse, but human enough even if the converse goes no further.

Phatic communications are about establishing and maintaining relationships between people.  Such a purpose is the very essence of speech communication, not its negation.  Tatz, I fear, has fallen into the trap of so many computer scientists – to focus on the syntax of messages, and completely ignore their semantics and pragmatics.    The syntax of messages concerns their surface form, their logical structure, their obedience (or not) to rules which determine whether they are legal and well-formed statements (or not) in the language they purport to arise from.  The semantics of utterances concerns their truth or falsity, in so far they describe real objects in some world (perhaps the one we all live in, or some past, future or imagined world),  while their pragmatics concerns those aspects of their meaning unrelated to their truth status (for example, who has power to revoke or retract them).

I have discussed this syntax-is-all-there-is mistake before.    I believe the root causes of this mistaken view are two-fold: the mis-guided focus of philosophers these last two centuries on propositions to the exclusion of other types of utterances and statements (of which profound error Terry Eagleton has shown himself guilty), and the mis-guided view that we now live in some form of Information Society, a view which wrongly focuses attention on the information  transferred by utterances to the exclusion of any other functions that utterances may serve or any other things we agents (people and machines) may be doing and aiming to do when we talk.   If you don’t believe me about the potentially complex functionality of utterances, even when viewed as nothing more than the communication of factual propositions, then read this simple example.

If communications were only about the transfer of explicit information, then life would be immensely less interesting.  It would also not be human life, for we would be no more intelligent than desktop computers passing HTTP requests and responses to one another.

For instance, under the direction of John Fox, the Advanced Computation Laboratory at Europe’s largest medical research charity, Cancer Research UK (formerly, the Imperial Cancer Research Fund) applied Toulmin’s model of argument in computer systems they built and deployed in the 1990s to handle conflicting arguments in some domain.  An example was a system for advising medical practitioners with the arguments for and against prescribing a particular drug to a patient with a particular medical history and disease presentation.  One company commercializing these ideas in medicine is Infermed.    Other applications include the automated prediction of chemical properties such as toxicity (see for example, the work of Lhasa Ltd), and dynamic optimization of extraction processes in mining.

For me, Toulmin’s most influential work was was his book Cosmopolis, which identified and deconstructed the main biases evident in contemporary western culture since the work of Descartes:

• A bias for the written over the oral
• A bias for the universal over the particular
• A bias for the general over the local
• A bias for the timeless over the timely.

Formal logic as a theory of human reasoning can be seen as example of these biases at work. In contrast, argumentation theory attempts to reclaim the theory of reasoning from formal logic with an approach able to deal with conflicts and gaps, and with special cases, and less subject to such biases.    Norm’s dispute with Larry Teabag is a recent example of resistance to the puritanical, Descartian desire to impose abstract formalisms onto practical reasoning quite contrary to local and particular sense.

Another instance of Descartian autism is the widespread deletion of economic history from gradaute programs in economics and the associated priviliging of deductive reasoning in abstract mathematical models over other forms of argument (eg, narrative accounts, laboratory and field experiments, field samples and surveys, computer simulation, etc) in economic theory.  One consequence of this autism is the Great Moral Failure of Macroeconomics in the Great World Recession of 2008-onwards.

References:

S. E. Toulmin [1958]:  The Uses of Argument.  Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 

S. E. Toulmin [1990]: Cosmopolis:  The Hidden Agenda of Modernity.  Chicago, IL, USA: University of Chicago Press.

Technorati Tags: Stephen Toulmin, argumentation, logic

All performatives imply propositions.  There’s no point in my operating a performative like, say, promising, or cursing, unless I have certain beliefs about the nature of reality: that there is indeed such an institution as promising, that I am able to perform it, and so on.  The performative and the propositional work into each other.  

Before commenting on the substance here (ie, religion), some words on Eagleton’s evident mis-understanding of speech act theory and the philosophy of language, a mis-understanding that should have been clear if he tested his words against his own experiences of life.  His statement concerns performatives – utterances which potentially change the state of the world by their being uttered.  Examples include promises, commands, threats, entreaties, prayers, various legal declarations (eg, that a certain couple are now wed),  etc.  But mere propositional statements (that some description of the world is true) may also change the state of the world by the mere fact of being uttered.

First sentence:  “All performatives imply propositions.”  Well, no, Professor E., not at all.  All rationally-uttered, effectively-executed performatives may be used by rational observers to infer propositions.   But different participants and observers in a dialog (speaker, intended audience, over-hearers) may infer different propositions from the very same utterance.  Worse than that, none, some, or indeed all of these inferred propositions may be true.   All manner of propositional content (including none, some and lots) may be intended to be stated or believed by the speaker of a performative utterance, even when that utterance is not effective in changing the state of the world.   Moreover, utterances which change the state of the world may do so in ways not intended or even not predicted by the speaker.

Even when an utterance is itself just a proposition and not intended to change the state of the world, inferring what proposition the speaker intended to state and – a separate question, this - what propositions are true as a result of the utterance, are non-trivial reasoning tasks with the possibility of no definitive solutions, as this example makes clear.

Second sentence:  “There’s no point in my operating a performative like, say, promising, or cursing, unless I have certain beliefs about the nature of reality: that there is indeed such an institution as promising, that I am able to perform it, and so on.”   This statement too is in error.    First, it only makes sense if it applies to rational speakers of performatives (eg, those seeking to achieve some goal), since performatives may be uttered for for any reasons or none at all.   Otherwise, parrots would be allowed to be speakers of performatives.   Second, malicious or deceiving or whimsical speakers may have goals, for which performative utterances not based on reality may be very effective and thus appropriate.  Third, even if we assume a speaker is not malicious, whimsical or being intentionally-deceptive, he or she may make a performative utterance in order to FORM a belief about reality, rather than starting from one.  I may promise you to do some task in order to find out if you desire that task to be done, or to discover if that task be feasible, or to discover if you believe that task to be feasible, or to discover if you are willing to indicate to me that you believe that task to be feasible, or to discover if you are willing to let me think that you believe that task to be feasible, or to allow you to form the belief that you have led me to believe that you believe that task to be feasible, and so on, ad infinitum.

Third sentence: “The performative and the propositional work into each other.”  They may do so, but not necessarily.  As the analysis above makes clear, there is no necessary connection between a performative utterance and any particular proposition believed by the speaker or by the intended hearer, or by any over-hearer.  How could there be such a necessary connection when an infinite number of propositions  may be validly inferred from any performative utterance, as I just showed?

So three erroneous statements in three sentences:   Quite an achievement!   I guess some charitable allowance should be given for the fact that these remarks were in a spoken interview and presumably made off-the-cuff.  But one wonders if the good Prof. E. has ever played poker or bridge, or ever negotiated with a plumber, or ever been in business, or ever instructed any recalcitrant child to do something they don’t wish to.

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