SUO: *Date 18 Feb 2002
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SUO WG Members,
Some people get together and whip up what they
no doubt fancy to be a new-fangled way of using
the string of characters "class", or "intent", or
the plus-sign "+", and if they can only get all of
their friends and family to sign up for it -- voila! --
they have ipso facto constituted themselves as what
is commonly referred to in the hermeneutics biz as
a "community of interpretation" (COI).
Happens all the time.
So long as this newfound community keeps their usages to themselves
it won't really constitute much of a problem for anybody else, but,
of course, that's not the usual way of things. Folks being folks,
they will naturally desire to go forth and multiply, either as
missionaries or as otherwise positioned lay people, and that,
of course, is when the real fun begins.
Which is where I came in ... if I rememo correctly:
| The Chair of a Mathematics Department
| sends a memo to the Faculty that says:
|
| The Curriculum Committee will meet in Room 432 at 1 today
| to evaluate the new teaching modules for teaching modules.
What really interests me about an example like this is the problem
that it presents for an intelligent interpreter, and by that token
the insight that I would gain from understanding how such an agent
might be able to accomplish what all such agents evidently achieve.
One way to address the message would be to enumerate the various and
sundry communities of interpretation that are implicitly invoked in
comprehending it, or expressed another way, the different types of
interpretive agents that it would take to understand this message.
In that spirit, let me personify the most typical characteristics of this problem
in the person of a prospective "knowledge agent" (KA), and in terms of what this
agent has to be able to do in order to be judged competent in understanding the
sense of the message. For simplicity in matters pronomial, let's say that our
KA is a "he" and that his name is "K". I think we can see right away that our
hero K will need the assistance of at least two further sorts of specialized
knowledge agents -- let us call these two after their principal professions
as the "pedagogical agent" (PA) and the "mathematical agent" (MA).
K's PA gives him the good sense to know what is probably meant by
the first appearance of the character string "teaching modules",
and K's MA tells him what is more especially intendered by the
second appearance of the character string "teaching modules".
Now, I think that everybody can appreciate what a fictitious way
of speaking this really is, all as a figurative way of trying to
say that a particular interpretive agent belongs to many diverse
interpretive communities at one and the same time. Nevertheless,
the figure does have its uses, in spite of, or maybe because of,
its obvious artificiality, and so I will continue to exploit it,
at least, on those occasions when nobody's at risk for taking
it too literally.
But that's already too much for a Monday.
Jon Awbrey
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