Continuing on with the theme of language (natural and otherwise) and expanding on how we take for granted the ability of humans to shift contexts, usually on a moment’s notice, I submit a comical and whimsical topic. ‘Yogi Berra Logic’.
For those unfamiliar with Yogi Berra, a brief biographical sketch is in order. Berra is a retired baseball player and manager. Born of Italian immigrants, Berra quit school after the eighth grade and, eventually got into major league baseball. He played for the New York Yankees from 1946-1965 as catcher and outfielder, and is generally regarded as one of the best catchers in the history of baseball. He also seems to be both a genuinely good guy as well as an honorable man, as seen by his .
But Yogi Berra is perhaps best remembered these days for a collection of colorful and, at least on the surface, nonsensical sayings called Yogi-isms. According to the article in Wikipedia, Yogi-isms are ‘…either an apparently obvious tautology or a paradoxical contradiction.’
For the moment, let’s not worry about whether this characterization is correct or whether the Yogi-isms described as tautologies are rather examples of circular reasoning or of begging the question, or whether the ones described as paradoxes are, in fact, not true paradoxes but ironies. It suffices to state that the idea the editor of Wikipedia was trying to convey is that Yogi-isms are pithy and witty but are devoid of much or all meaning. I would like to challenge that assessment.
As an example of a Yogi-ism consider the following quote, attributed to Yogi when he explained why he no longer went to Ruggeri’s restaurant in St Louis:
Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.
Clearly this quote is funny (if you’re not laughing then stop reading, you don’t have a well-developed sense of humor and will only be harmed by the remainder of this post), but is it nonsensical?
Well, that depends on the context and meaning of the words ‘Nobody’ and ‘crowded’. Returning to the ideas of essentials and accidentals, let us view the words ‘nobody’ and ‘crowd’ not as essential terms applying to all humanity (i.e., everybody, nobody, some, few, many) but as accidental names referring to two different subsets or categories of humanity. Next try to match these accidental terms more accurately to the groups that they most likely represent.
Cool = the set of people who Yogi Berra regards as important to him. Maybe they are friends and family. Maybe they are baseball players. Maybe they are authentic Italian people who eat at Ruggeri’s because they like the food.
Jerks = the set of people who Yogi Berra regards as useless or unimportant to him. Maybe they are enemies. Maybe they are pitchers (he is quoted as saying that ‘all pitchers are either liars or crybabies’). Maybe they are image-conscious Yuppies who began eating at Ruggeri’s when it became known that he ate there and they thought it would be cool to be exposed to ethnic flavor.
Whatever the reasons Yogi had for dividing people up into these two groups, the Yogi-ism can now be translated into
Nobody from the Cool group goes there anymore. It’s too crowded with Jerks.
Of course now the saying makes perfect sense (more precisely, it is intelligible), but it isn’t funny at all. In addition, it makes clear a division of people into groups when, perhaps, the wise and polite thing is to not state this explicitly.
Is this what Yogi meant? Am I attributing to much intelligence to a baseball player? I don’t think so, and I am willing to bet that neither do you. As discussed in earlier posts, the common ability of humans to speak and to learn language requires a fundamental capacity to tell essentials from accidentals. Even a baseball player has this ability. Furthermore, being humorous is a clear sign of intelligence, and Yogi is clearly funny.
In addition, I am also willing to bet that, before you read this analysis, you thought to yourself or muttered under your breath something to the effect of ‘Everyone knows what that means. Why are you going on about it?’
But the reason, I am running on about it is that it is difficult to understand how a machine intelligence would be able to parse that Yogi-ism in such a fashion to draw the meaning. How would such an AI determine context? How would it resolve an obvious non sequitur by recognizing that ‘nobody’ refers to one group and ‘crowd’ refers to another? How would it be able to draw from Berra’s background as a baseball player or proud Italian-American to offer reasonable inferences as to who would be in each group?
So, at the end of the day, I remain as skeptical of AI taking over as always. I understand that there are theoretical analyses of high sophistication in the science of Artificial Intelligence, but I am reminded of another Yogi-ism:
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.