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\u2019s notice, I submit a comical and whimsical topic.\u00a0 \u2018Yogi Berra Logic\u2019.<\/p>\n
For those unfamiliar with Yogi Berra<\/a>, a brief biographical sketch is in order.\u00a0 Berra is a retired baseball player and manager. \u00a0Born 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.\u00a0 He also seems to be both a genuinely good guy as well as an honorable man, as seen by his .<\/p>\n 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<\/a>.\u00a0 According to the article in Wikipedia, Yogi-isms are \u2018\u2026either an apparently obvious tautology or a paradoxical contradiction.\u2019<\/p>\n For the moment, let\u2019s not worry about whether this characterization is correct or whether the Yogi-isms described as \u00a0tautologies<\/a> are rather examples of circular reasoning<\/a> or of begging the question,<\/a> or whether the ones described as paradoxes are, in fact, not true paradoxes but ironies. \u00a0\u00a0It 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.<\/p>\n As an example of a Yogi-ism consider the following quote<\/a>, attributed to Yogi when he explained why he no longer went to Ruggeri\u2019s restaurant in St Louis:<\/p>\n Clearly this quote is funny (if you\u2019re not laughing then stop reading, you don\u2019t have a well-developed sense of humor and will only be harmed by the remainder of this post), but is it nonsensical?<\/p>\n Well, that depends on the context and meaning of the words \u2018Nobody\u2019 and \u2018crowded\u2019.\u00a0 Returning to the ideas of essentials and accidentals, let us view the words \u2018nobody\u2019 and \u2018crowd\u2019 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.\u00a0 Next try to match these accidental terms more accurately to the groups that they most likely represent.<\/p>\n Cool = the set of people who Yogi Berra regards as important to him.\u00a0 Maybe they are friends and family.\u00a0 Maybe they are baseball players.\u00a0 Maybe they are authentic Italian people who eat at Ruggeri\u2019s because they like the food.<\/p>\n Jerks = the set of people who Yogi Berra regards as useless or unimportant to him.\u00a0 Maybe they are enemies.\u00a0 Maybe they are pitchers (he is quoted<\/a> as saying that \u2018all pitchers are either liars or crybabies\u2019).\u00a0 Maybe they are image-conscious Yuppies who began eating at Ruggeri\u2019s when it became known that he ate there and they thought it would be cool to be exposed to ethnic flavor.<\/p>\n Whatever the reasons Yogi had for dividing people up into these two groups, the Yogi-ism can now be translated into<\/p>\n Of course now the saying makes perfect sense (more precisely, it is intelligible), but it isn\u2019t funny at all.\u00a0 In addition, it makes clear a division of people into groups when, perhaps, the wise and polite thing is to not state this explicitly.<\/p>\n Is this what Yogi meant?\u00a0 Am I attributing to much intelligence to a baseball player?\u00a0 I don\u2019t think so, and I am willing to bet that neither do you.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Even a baseball player has this ability.\u00a0 Furthermore, being humorous is a clear sign of intelligence, and Yogi is clearly funny.<\/p>\n 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 \u2018Everyone knows what that means.\u00a0 Why are you going on about it?\u2019<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 How would such an AI determine context?\u00a0 How would it resolve an obvious non sequitur by recognizing that \u2018nobody\u2019 refers to one group and \u2018crowd\u2019 refers to another?\u00a0 How would it be able to draw from Berra\u2019s background as a baseball player or proud Italian-American to offer reasonable inferences as to who would be in each group?<\/p>\n So, at the end of the day, I remain as skeptical of AI taking over as always.\u00a0 I understand that there are theoretical analyses of high sophistication in the science of Artificial Intelligence, but I am reminded of another Yogi-ism<\/a>:<\/p>\n 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\u2019s notice,… Read more ><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aristotle2digital.blogwyrm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
Nobody goes there anymore.\u00a0 It\u2019s too crowded.<\/span><\/h3>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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Nobody from the Cool group goes there anymore.\u00a0 It\u2019s too crowded with Jerks.<\/span><\/h3>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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In theory there is no difference between theory and practice.\u00a0 In practice, there is.<\/span><\/h3>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"