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argumentum ex joculo, i
Jul. 13th, 2010 08:36 amMaybe if I do little bits at a time.
Where are we twenty-one years after the crisis in the reductionism psychologies and anthropologies an older generation grew up with? I assume there is an answer to this.
Shweder defended his notion of cultural psychology in 1989 (see chapter 2 of Thinking through Cultures by pointing out the crisis in the foundations of general psychology and general anthropology…the quest for “an imagined deep and essential structure of the mind” was proving illusory.
Now we know a great deal more about underlying structures, and there seems to be a great deal more sophistication than there was about the reasons why laboratory conditions are not the right place to isolate the roots of human behavior. Culture and computational functions are mutually interpenetrating, which is why there is such a hoo-ha over what will happen when machines become “intentional persons, responding to, and directing their action at, their own mental objects or representations and undergoing transformation through participation in an evolving intentional world that it is the product of the mental representations that make it up.” In other words, when computers acquire culture, and start making up their own erroneous fictions about the world, as in so many science fiction stories. Presumably learning the meaning of a joke is part one of this process (and presumably there are science fiction stories about this, though I don’t read science fiction, so I don’t know). We will know that the Jeopardy-playing machine has made the leap when it follows up its answer with a new pun, and says, “That was funny, wasn’t it?” when no programmer has put anything like that response in its circuitry.
It won’t matter whether we think it was funny or not. It is the machine’s perception of incongruity that will matter. There is a whole set of cultural assumptions that go into the notion of the incongruous, which is why humor is so culturally specific: for example, intimate bodily functions provoke shame and discomfort that make them intrinsically humorous (but only in cultures in which they do not provoke such horror that transgressors are simply beaten senseless); accidental similarities in the shapes of words with dissimilar meanings allow for substitutions that amuse even as they cause pain at the reminder of the arbitrary structure of assignments of meaning; on and on and on, see Freud, or much better, don’t see Freud. All too often, he not only doesn’t see the problem, he doesn’t get the joke.
And the behavioralist who in 1987 announced the discovery of principles of the general processing mechanism that were comparable to Newton’s laws of gravitation was troubled by the fact that none of his mathematical models for stimulus and response worked out across categories. Each one required a different, as it were, epicycle, to get rid of the “noise” and “distortion” in the data.
The argument from humor, incidentally, is my own, not Shweder’s, so don’t blame him. Fools rush in where anthropologists fear to tread.
Where are we twenty-one years after the crisis in the reductionism psychologies and anthropologies an older generation grew up with? I assume there is an answer to this.
Shweder defended his notion of cultural psychology in 1989 (see chapter 2 of Thinking through Cultures by pointing out the crisis in the foundations of general psychology and general anthropology…the quest for “an imagined deep and essential structure of the mind” was proving illusory.
Now we know a great deal more about underlying structures, and there seems to be a great deal more sophistication than there was about the reasons why laboratory conditions are not the right place to isolate the roots of human behavior. Culture and computational functions are mutually interpenetrating, which is why there is such a hoo-ha over what will happen when machines become “intentional persons, responding to, and directing their action at, their own mental objects or representations and undergoing transformation through participation in an evolving intentional world that it is the product of the mental representations that make it up.” In other words, when computers acquire culture, and start making up their own erroneous fictions about the world, as in so many science fiction stories. Presumably learning the meaning of a joke is part one of this process (and presumably there are science fiction stories about this, though I don’t read science fiction, so I don’t know). We will know that the Jeopardy-playing machine has made the leap when it follows up its answer with a new pun, and says, “That was funny, wasn’t it?” when no programmer has put anything like that response in its circuitry.
It won’t matter whether we think it was funny or not. It is the machine’s perception of incongruity that will matter. There is a whole set of cultural assumptions that go into the notion of the incongruous, which is why humor is so culturally specific: for example, intimate bodily functions provoke shame and discomfort that make them intrinsically humorous (but only in cultures in which they do not provoke such horror that transgressors are simply beaten senseless); accidental similarities in the shapes of words with dissimilar meanings allow for substitutions that amuse even as they cause pain at the reminder of the arbitrary structure of assignments of meaning; on and on and on, see Freud, or much better, don’t see Freud. All too often, he not only doesn’t see the problem, he doesn’t get the joke.
And the behavioralist who in 1987 announced the discovery of principles of the general processing mechanism that were comparable to Newton’s laws of gravitation was troubled by the fact that none of his mathematical models for stimulus and response worked out across categories. Each one required a different, as it were, epicycle, to get rid of the “noise” and “distortion” in the data.
The argument from humor, incidentally, is my own, not Shweder’s, so don’t blame him. Fools rush in where anthropologists fear to tread.
