In the previous posts I recalled five categories of design explanation. I used the innocuous example of deciding to insert a large window into a living room. I explored how a client/reader might regard various explanations as either sensible or absurd. I wanted to avoid the language of truth and falsity, arguing that decisions and…More
Tag Archives: hermeneutics
The meta-reasoning illusion
The ability of an LLM to provide an account of the processes by which it came up with its results, as in the inventory table I showed in the last posting, is indeed convincing. But apparently it is an “illusion.” I can’t yet find an article on the subject, so I have come to rely…More
Urban AI and cybernetics
If you want to investigate how two entities relate to one another then it can be helpful to introduce a third that is somehow relevant to both. Architecture and cookery can be conjoined via the concept of taste — that kind of thing. In my blog posts to date I present language as providing a…More
What’s wrong with pluralism
I’ve had many conversations with chatGPT on subjects as diverse as writing computer code to comparing and contrasting ideas from philosophy. The performance is impressive. It is a little like talking with an extremely well-informed and patient tutor. It is also unlike that kind of pedagogic human-human interaction in several respects. It becomes obvious to…More
City stories
I am investigating the potential role of conversational AI in the city. Some planning theory asserts an inevitable link between words and urban space. Planning theorist Lieven Ameel summarises this state of professional urban intervention in a 2017 article. The paradigm shift from a top-down kind of planning towards a more dialogic, participatory and discursive…More
Benefits of artificial misinformation
Natural language processing (NLP) programs seem able to take as input words and phrases provided by a human operator and generate coherent sentences in response, simulating a kind of dialogue that some scholars (e.g. David Chalmers) think “hints of general intelligence.” I think that one aspect of that dialogue is to simulate how human interlocutors…More
The advocate
It is common in professional life to advocate on behalf of a client (student, patient, customer, group, special interest, idea). I recall as an architect in practice advocating for planning permission for a white corrugated iron clad holiday home. Whereas the local council wanted “natural” colours (olive green and brown) to blend in with the…More
Unclear thinking
It came upon a midnight clear. Clarity and its converse unclarity are in the air this season: as people seek clarity on what they can and cannot do during this phase of the pandemic. Clarity is about optics. Something is clear if the perception of it is unobstructed by darkness, fog, blur, glare, distortion or…More
Secret norms
“Normal” is an architectural term, according to the OED derived from the Latin noun norma which was a square of wood used by carpenters and masons for creating right angles. As known to any student of geometry, a line (or wall) is normal to another if it meets it at right angles. The term has…More
Hermeneutics and logic
Winfried Nöth’s highly useful Handbook of Semiotics has a chapter on hermeneutics. There I saw a cogent account of something I suspected all along — a statement about the similarity between Peirce’s description of abductive inference and hermeneutics (the art of interpretation as discussed by Hans-Georg Gadamer). “For [] hermeneutics, textual understanding (and human knowledge in general)…More