Language: The Broken Bridge Between the Sciences and Humanities and How to Repair It

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Language The Broken Bridge Between the Sciences
and Humanities and How to Repair
It

• Simon D. Levy
• Washington Lee University
• Lexington, Virginia, USA

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The Two Cultures
Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked
the company how many of them could describe the
Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was
cold it was also negative. Yet I was asking
something which is the scientific equivalent of
Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?
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Consilience?
Every college student should be able to answer
the following question What is the relation
between science and the humanities, and how is it
important for human welfare? Only fluency
across the boundaries will provide a clear view
of the world as it really is.
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Comment 1 Respect the Classics, Man!
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pa?ta de d???µa?ete t? ?a??? ?ate?ete Omnia
autem probate quod bonum est tenete. Examine all
things hold fast to what is good.
--Thessalonians 521
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(No Transcript)
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Poetry Is What Gets Lost in Translation
????? a?e?de ?e? ?????ade?
??????? ????µe??? ? µ???' ??a?o?? a??e'
e???e p????? d' ?f??µ??? ????? ???d?
p???a?e? ????? a?t??? de ?e????a te??e
???ess?? ??????s? te p?s? ? ???? d' ete?e?et?
ß???? ? e? ?? d?
ta p??ta d?ast?t?? e??sa?te ?t?e?d?? te ?a?a?
a?d??? ?a? d??? ?????e??.
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????? a?e?de ?e?
?????ade? ???????
anger-ACC sing goddess-VOC
Peliasson-GEN Achilles-GEN
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Chapman (ca. 1600)
????? a?e?de ?e? ?????ade? ???????
Achilles banefull wrath resound, O Goddesse,
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Lattimore (1951)
????? a?e?de ?e? ?????ade? ???????
Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus son Achilleus
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Fitzgerald (1974)
????? a?e?de ?e? ?????ade? ???????
Anger be now your song, immortal one, Akhilleus
anger,
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Fitzgerald (1974)
????? a?e?de ?e? ?????ade? ???????
Anger be now your song, immortal one, Akhilleus
anger,
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Fagles (1990)
????? a?e?de ?e? ?????ade? ???????
Rage Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus son
Achilles,
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Reck (1994)
????? a?e?de ?e? ?????ade? ???????
Sing, Goddess, Achilles maniac rage
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I explained to my students what a profound
change has taken place virtually within my
lifetime and entirely within the life of my
grandmother, certainly. For centuries and
centuries everyone who'd been through university
in the West knew and shared Horace in Latin. They
shared it with all their contemporaries and with
all those generations that had come before. And
all that's gone now. One is isolated from
educated people of one's own time and, without
Latin (and to a slightly lesser extent Greek)
isolated from one's educated predecessors. I'm
sure there are and will be new compensating
countergains. But the loss is very sad to me. I
found it terribly hard to convey the beauty and
importance of Horace in translation. -- Richard
Garner (p.c.)
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But I HATE Memorization!
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What Does This Have to Do with Science?
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What Does This Have to Do with Science?
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Current Knowledge Will Soon Be Obsolete, So We
Have to Teach More of It
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Comment 2 Computer Science and Linguistics
Share a Common Foundation
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Can We Study Poetry Scientifically?
Excrement. That's what I think of Mr. J. Evans
Pritchard. We're not laying pipe, we're talking
about poetry.
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Recursion (Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch 2002)
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Recursion in Poetry
I met a traveller from an antique land Who said
Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the
desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a
shatter'd visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled
lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its
sculptor well those passions read Which yet
survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things, The
hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed. And
on the pedestal these words appear "My name is
Ozymandias, king of kings Look on my works, ye
mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains
round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless
and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far
away.
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I met a traveller from an antique land Who said
Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the
desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a
shatter'd visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled
lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its
sculptor well those passions read Which yet
survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things, The
hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed. And
on the pedestal these words appear "My name is
Ozymandias, king of kings Look on my works, ye
mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains
round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless
and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far
away.
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I met a traveller from an antique land Who said
Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the
desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a
shatter'd visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled
lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its
sculptor well those passions read Which yet
survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things, The
hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed. And
on the pedestal these words appear "My name is
Ozymandias, king of kings Look on my works, ye
mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains
round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless
and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far
away.
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I met a traveller from an antique land Who said
Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the
desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a
shatter'd visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled
lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its
sculptor well those passions read Which yet
survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things, The
hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed. And
on the pedestal these words appear "My name is
Ozymandias, king of kings Look on my works, ye
mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains
round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless
and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far
away.
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I met a traveller from an antique land Who said
Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the
desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a
shatter'd visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled
lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its
sculptor well those passions read Which yet
survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things, The
hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed. And
on the pedestal these words appear "My name is
Ozymandias, king of kings Look on my works, ye
mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains
round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless
and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far
away.
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Leaky Levels
In a biologically evolved object like the human
brain a clean separation between levels of
architecture and between software and hardware is
impossible. This is because, first of all, these
architectures we have been describing are all
"leaky" virtual machines. That is, the
underlying machine shows through when the surface
structures are stressed or under certain
situations. There are layers of representational
structures and representations from other layers
peek through at any given layer. --
Chandrasekaran and Josephson (1993)
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Language Ungrounded Metacircularity
Our evaluator for Lisp will be implemented as a
Lisp program. It may seem circular to think
about evaluating Lisp programs using an evaluator
that is itself implemented in Lisp. However,
evaluations is a process, so it is appropriate to
describe the evaluation process using Lisp,
which, after all, is our tool for describing
processes. An evaluator written in the same
language that it evaluates is said to be
metacircular. - Abelson Sussman (1996)
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Metacircularity
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Natural Languages vs. Programming Languages

• Ambiguity (British left waffles on Falkland
  Islands.)
• Fault-tolerance (Something is missing this
  sentence)
• Irregularity
• one two three four five six
• first second third fourth fifth sixth

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Prescriptivism vs. Insight A
Preposition Isnt Something to End a Sentence With
1. She looked up the number. 2. She looked the
number up. 3. She climbed up the hill. 4. She
climbed the hill up. (Fraser 1976)
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Parting Shots
I didnt want to turn out boys who in later life
had a deep love of literature, or who would talk
in middle age of the lure of language and their
love of words. Words said in that reverential
way that is somehow Welsh. - Alan Bennett, The
History Boys (2006)
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Potential Topics for Debate Discussion
1. Should everyone learn Latin Greek? 2. Can
modern linguistics give students greater
confidence mastery in their writing
speaking? 3. Are Latin Greek Euro-Centric, or
are they so other as to be novel for everyone?