{"id":2691,"date":"2010-12-24T20:57:52","date_gmt":"2010-12-24T20:57:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=2691"},"modified":"2010-12-24T20:57:52","modified_gmt":"2010-12-24T20:57:52","slug":"dialogs-over-actions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2010\/12\/dialogs-over-actions\/","title":{"rendered":"Dialogs over actions"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the post below<\/a>, I mentioned the challenge for knowledge engineers of representing know-how, a task which may require explicit representation of actions, and sometimes also of utterances over actions.\u00a0 The know-how involved in steering a large sailing ship with its diverse crew surely includes the knowledge of who to ask (or to command) to do what, when, and how to respond when these requests (or commands) are ignored, or fail to be executed successfully or timeously.
\nOne might imagine epistemology – the philosophy of knowledge – would be of help here.\u00a0 Philosophers, however, have been seduced since Aristotle with propositions (factual statements about the world having truth values), largely ignoring actions, and their representation.\u00a0\u00a0 Philosophers of language have also mostly focused on speech acts – utterances which act to change the world – rather than on utterances about actions themselves.\u00a0 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\u00a0 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.\u00a0 With only a few exceptions (Thomas Reid 1788, Adolf Reinach 1913, Juergen Habermas 1981, Charles Hamblin 1987), philosophers of language have mostly ignored utterances\u00a0 about actions.
\nConsider the following two statements:<\/p>\n

I promise you to wash the car.<\/em>
\nI command you to wash the car.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The two statements have almost identical English syntax.\u00a0\u00a0 Yet their meanings, and the intentions of their speakers, are very distinct.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 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.
\nLinguists 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.\u00a0 For neither of these two expressions does it make sense to speak of\u00a0 their truth value:\u00a0 a promise may be questioned as to its sincerity, or its feasibility, or its appropriateness, etc, but not its truth or falsity;\u00a0 likewise, a command\u00a0 may be questioned as to its legal validity, or its feasibility, or its morality, etc, but also not its truth or falsity.
\nFor utterances about actions, such as promises, requests, entreaties and commands, truth-value semantics makes no sense.\u00a0 Instead, we generally need to consider two pragmatic aspects.\u00a0 The first is uptake<\/em>, 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).\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Once uptaken, a second pragmatic aspect comes into play:\u00a0 the power to revoke or retract<\/em> the social commitment to execute the action.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The revocation power also does not necessarily lie with the uptaker, as commands readily indicate.
\nWhy would a computer scientist be interested in such humanistic arcana?\u00a0 The more tasks we delegate to intelligent machines, the more they need to co-ordinate actions with others of like kind.\u00a0 Such co-ordination requires conversations comprising utterances over actions, and, for success, these require agreed syntax, semantics and pragmatics.\u00a0 To give just one example:\u00a0 the use of intelligent devices by soldiers have made the modern battlefield a place of overwhelming information collection, analysis and communication.\u00a0 Lots of this communication can be done by intelligent software agents, which is why the US military, inter alia<\/em>, sponsors research applying the philosophy of language and the\u00a0 philosophy of argumentation to machine communications.
\nMeanwhile, the philistine British Government intends to cease funding tertiary education in the arts and the humanities. \u00a0 Even utilitarians should object to this.
\nReferences:<\/em>
\nJuergen\u00a0 Habermas [1984\/1981]:\u00a0\u00a0 The Theory of Communicative Action:\u00a0 Volume 1:\u00a0 Reason and the Rationalization of Society<\/em>.\u00a0 London, UK:\u00a0 Heinemann.\u00a0\u00a0 (Translation by T. McCarthy of:\u00a0 Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns, Band I,\u00a0 Handlungsrationalitat und gesellschaftliche Rationalisierung<\/em>. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, Germany, 1981.)
\nCharles\u00a0 L. Hamblin [1987]:\u00a0 Imperatives<\/em>. Oxford, UK:\u00a0 Basil Blackwell.
\nP. McBurney and S. Parsons [2007]: Retraction and revocation in agent deliberation dialogs. Argumentation<\/em>, 21 (3): 269-289.
\n <\/span>
\nAdolph Reinach [1913]:\u00a0 Die apriorischen Grundlagen des b\u00fcrgerlichen Rechtes.\u00a0 Jahrbuch f\u00fcr Philosophie und ph\u00e4nomenologische Forschung<\/em>, 1: 685-847.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the post below, I mentioned the challenge for knowledge engineers of representing know-how, a task which may require explicit representation of actions, and sometimes also of utterances over actions.\u00a0 The know-how involved in steering a large sailing ship with its diverse crew surely includes the knowledge of who to ask (or to command) to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,13,15,23,60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-argumentation","category-computer-science","category-computing-as-interaction","category-decision-theory","category-philosophy-of-language","p1","y2010","m12","d24","h20"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2691"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2691\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}