Glen/Marcus -
As usual, I am enjoying watching your semantic and conceptual fencing
match here. The flash of parry, riposte, counter-riposte can be
blinding but engaging. The content, when I feel I have parsed it down
all the way is usually enlightening and informative.
Rather than try to join in and thus create a bit of a melee, I will try
to stand back and lob a few things onto the ground of the discussion.
Firstly, my own throwdown of "rhetoric" was intended to be very
specific. I believe that you both took it to be a bit more broad than
intended. I specifically meant rhetoric as "language intended to
persuade". I hold this specifically distinct from "language intended to
inform" and "language used to think or contemplate". Unfortunately I
discovered that in fact the formal definition of rhetoric includes "to
inform" as well as "to persuade"
I believe that both of you are primarily using language intended to
inform in this (and most if not all) discussions in this forum. But I
also believe that MOST public discourse is fundamentally rhetorical.
Noam Chomsky might be the closest to a public figure outside of hard
sciences who seems able to refrain from deliberately conflating
persuasive and informational language.
My point in this pivots around Marcus' point here of "Listeners, bear
some responsibility too". In my general experience, but acutely
informed by our recent elections, MOST listeners seek out persuasive
rhetoric which supports their existing beliefs... and ignore or at least
are fairly unaware of the difference of that from informational
rhetoric. They are not seeking to understand or even learn more, they
are seeking to confirm existing biases and to adopt convincing rhetoric
to flail their opponents with.
I particularly appreciate the discussions the two of you share with the
rest of us here, but there are many (or at least several) others who
seem to maintain a similar level of honest intent to inform and/or
explore rather than simply persuade.
Touching briefly onthe OP or is it OT, I thnk that both SAI and GAI may
be a severe travesty in our culture to whatever extent we "listeners"
don't take responsibility. Will AI become the new speechwriters?
Have they already? I think that Artificial Wisdom will come much later
than effective Artificial Intelligence and would seem to need to grow
out of GAI rathr than SAI.
Carry On,
- Steve
Glen write:
"Their interpretation of their distributed artifact is decoupled from, abstracted
from, their audience's interpretation of the same artifact. And they bear some
responsibility for that decoupling."
Listeners bear responsibility too.
Marcus
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