Re: Borland, Diamondback and QC

From: Kirk Halgren (khalgren_at_sti.nasa.gov)
Date: 08/30/04 

Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2004 17:02:49 -0400

"Bob Dawson" <bdawson@idtdna.com> wrote in message
news:4133786f$1@newsgroups.borland.com...
> "Derek Davidson" wrote
> > that much effort into it, at least admit it instead of chastising
> > others for being unable to read your intentions.
>
> Language and communication are inherently a bit slippery, so the attempt
to
> make a communication definitively specific and determinate (impossible to
> misinterpret) is ultimately self-defeating--it results in totally
unreadable
> legalese (in law), and esoteric traditions of endless hermeneutic
> reinterpretation (literature and religion).

<snip>

I couldn't agree more. Meaning is not contained entirely in vocabulary, but
resides between the writer's world view and the reader's. This was the rock
on which foundered the early hype of AI automatic translation engines.

Did you ever see the Benny Hill skit comparing the two renditions of the
phrase, "What is this thing called love?"-the first was played straight,
overacted in the fashion of Master Thespian (Jon Lovitz' character from
Saturday Night Live), and the second was delivered in a high pitched female
voice (Cockney accent): "What's this thing called, luv?"

Maybe you had to see it. In any event, one's own history of meanings
generated can't help but bias your interpretation based on your history.
This is why the phrase "objective journalism" is inherently oxymoronic,
irretrievably so. Even with the best of intentions, your parsing engine
steers you in certain directions, into familiar neighborhoods. Perhaps
those are the ones the writer intended, perhaps not.

See Buddhism, zen for more details or Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem for the
formal mathematical treatment.

Kirk Halgren

"England and America are two countries separated by the same language."
 -- George Bernard Shaw

"Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind."
-- Harvard Lampoon's parody of Time magazine