Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
phrases, but I want to mean something fairly literal. That is, I think I made
my mistake because I was saying a phrase to myself in English, the phrase was
ambiguous, and I interpreted it wrongly.
I've been reading newspapers for at least fifteen years and Boston Sunday
Globe topic reviews for almost ten years. Stumbling upon the continuation
of an article and wanting to find its beginning is a routine I've been through
many hundreds of times. And at least a couple dozen of these episodes must
have occurred during my reading of the Sunday Globe's topic reviews.
Why did I know to turn to the “front” of the section? Not all articles in the
rest of the paper start at fronts of sections. I think at some point I noticed, and
articulated to myself, that the topic reviews start at the front of the topic review
section. So this was not the first time I've said “go to the front of the section”
to myself in my head in such a situation. This internal uttering-to-myself and
the actions I typically take in consequence of it must certainly have worn deep
grooves in my brain by now. You might think that it was so thoroughly “com-
piled” that it no longer resembled English. Yet still it was capable of this very
language-like underspecification of the situation. I still had to figure out what
the English phrase was referring to in this specific concrete situation, and even
though this figuring occurred perfectly automatically, smoothly, and routinely,
it was still problematic. I could still get it wrong.
So “the front of the section” was ambiguous in this situation. But all of
this still doesn't explain why, on the particular moment in question, it led me
to turn to C1 rather than C15. Before the Globe reformatted and publicized
its “Arts Etc”, I had never given any particular thought to the idea of the Sun-
day Globe having an “arts section”. In fact I clearly recall the first Sunday of
the new section: the front page of the paper - i.e., A1 - had an ad for it, and
despite the silly name I decided to give it a fair try. In fact it contained a use-
fularticleaboutSovietdissidentfilms,atopicthatinterestedme.Thematter
of “the Globe's new arts section” - in exactly those words - had thus been
on my mind. I don't want to conclude that the arts-section interpretation was
“stronger” than the topic-review-section interpretation, but whatever is oper-
ating as we constantly use background information to “fill in the details” of
utterances when determining their relevance to particular concrete situations
was operating here as well.
What I'm trying to figure out
Implicit in these stories are some ideas about representation and action.
