Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 13
Figuratively Speaking
A man's life of any worth is a continual allegory—and very few
eyes can see the mystery of his life—a life like the
scriptures—figurative.
J. Keats letter to G. and G. Keats,
(14th February-3rd May 1819)
13.1
The Problem with Reference
Dr. David Billinge, a Computer Science lecturer at Portsmouth University, gives
regular pre-concert lectures at the local Guildhall. His interest in music and language
raised the question of how the communication of the emotional content of music
can be justified using referential semantics. This was particularly puzzling because
emotions do not have any externally shared reference points. This apparent lack of
external references for emotion raises the interesting primary question, “How can
the semantics of emotion ever be established?”
I will describe in this chapter, drawn from David Billinge's work, our initial
hypothesis into the potential consistency of a response to music by two or more
people and explain why we view these responses as private and knowable only by
the respondent. Despite this, people do discuss music and so David and I adopted
a position that people communicate using 'tropic' or figurative language. But why
would a figurative language help?
We developed a model of the discourse based upon our initial hypothesis as well
as a simple diagrammatic language that people can use to talk about music and its
emotional content. A functional model evolved from these diagrams, and a working
model in a schematic programming language was constructed. With this model we
can show that some kind of communication is possible, in principle, with private
referencing. One conclusion is that such private referencing could be an underlying
mechanism for other creative acts.
The basic question we are exploring here is, '
Is it possible for people to have a
mutually consistent response to the world given only internal and private references?
'
This chapter describes the conceptual and computer model we constructed that shows
that communication is possible with such a virtual referencing semantics.
The above question arose from our work in trying to analyse the nature of people's
descriptions of musical effect. The original purpose of this analysis was to find a set
