Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
code telegrapher) and computationally modeled and executed. In contrast,
human activity in semantic selection from a source and interpretation
at the destination exceeds computational modeling. Despite Shannon's
reservations—seldom directly cited—information theory became a main
source for communication studies (Fiske 1990, 1), uncritically assimilat-
ing Shannon's mathematical theory of communication to Weaver's inter-
pretation (Weaver 1949; Tidline 2004). The gestalt of the computer is
acutely manifested in cognitive science, with its insistence that “theories
of the mind should be expressed in a form that can be modeled in a com-
puter program” (Johnson-Laird 1988, 52), without recourse to intuition,
and in the influential linguistic modeling of the comprehension of utter-
ances as a formal system or automaton (Sperber and Wilson 1986). Even
a significant critique of cognitive science, for the absence of intentionality
from computational systems, saw “no reason in principle why we couldn't
give a machine the capacity to understand English, since in an important
sense our bodies with our brains are precisely such machines,” although
not while “the operation of the machine is defined solely in terms of com-
putational processes over formally defined elements” (Searle 1980, 422).
We can detect a trace of a Cartesian inheritance in such comments: when
the mind is detached from the body “the Cartesians situate the human
spirit in the pineal gland, as if it were an observatory” (Vico 1710/1988,
88). Semiotic phenomena may become difficult to interpret when they
are separated from physical human presence, and operation over for-
mally differentiated elements is intrinsic to a definition of an information
machine (Minsky 1967) that has not yet been supplanted
(Herken 1995;
Cockshott and Michaelson 2007). Drawing on the convergence of infor-
mation theory and Saussurean linguistics, the argument here indicates a
strong theoretical possibility that human mental labor is irreducible to
computational models in the production and comprehension of written
utterances.
Therefore, it is possible subtly but significantly to shift the perspec-
tive on communication and computational models and their embodi-
ments in modern information technologies. Rather than being received
as substitutes for or simulacra of human intelligence, such technologies
can be regarded as the products of human mental and productive labor,
building on historically accumulated understandings and technologies.
