relationships

[Richard_Marken2]

[From Rick Marken (2002.10.07.1045)]

Bill Powers (2002.19.07.1038 MDT)]

>Rick Marken (2002.10.07.0900)--

>So you are a "word solipsist"? I am not. I think there is a reality
>underlying the perception of words (just as it, I assume, underlies the
>perception of everything) .

Fine. Now let's talk about this "physical reality." How do we know, for
example, that sound is carried by pressure waves in air?

I agree with your epistemology, as you know. I _assume_ that there is a reality
underlying my perceptions and that the nature of this reality is approximated by
successful models of that reality. But I don't _know_ that there is such a
reality. All I was saying to Bruce is that I am an equal opportunity "reality
assumer". I _assume_ that physical models approximate the reality (the v's in p =
f(v1...vn)) of which _all_ perception -- not just the perception of everything but
words -- is a function.

I don't believe that words have a special status as perceptions. If solipsism is
right then it's right for all perception, not just words. If solipsism is wrong
then it's wrong for all perceptions, not just all perceptions except words. At
least that's the _assumption_ I make. We will, indeed, never know. But I think
science operates _as though_ there were a reality out there and I think it has
operated rather successfully on that assumption. I can't see how speech science
could make much progress unless it made that assumption as well. And it seems to
me that where speech science has made this assumption it has made considerable
progress (as witness the speech recognition systems, limited as they are). It has
made this progress by assuming the acoustical model of the reality on which the
perception of words is based.

Best regards

Rick

···

--
Richard S. Marken, Ph.D.
The RAND Corporation
PO Box 2138
1700 Main Street
Santa Monica, CA 90407-2138
Tel: 310-393-0411 x7971
Fax: 310-451-7018
E-mail: rmarken@rand.org

[Bill_Powers1]

[From Bill Powers (2002.19.07.1038 MDT)]

Rick Marken (2002.10.07.0900)--

So you are a "word solipsist"? I am not. I think there is a reality
underlying the perception of words (just as it, I assume, underlies the
perception of everything) . And I think the way that reality maps into the
perception of words is surprising well understood, as demonstrated by the
remarkable success of word recognition systems. Of course, those systems
are not perfect; they are speaker dependent and reach only 97% accuracy on
the trained speaker. But that's probably because human speech recognition
occurs at many perceptual levels simultaneously. Word recognition programs
work mainly at the lower levels of perception. But they make a very
convincing case that the perception of words is based on aspects of the
auditory signal, a physical reality that exists independent of the hearer.

Fine. Now let's talk about this "physical reality." How do we know, for
example, that sound is carried by pressure waves in air? To answer that
question we have to investigate each term: pressure, waves, air. The basic
experiments are all in the literature, but unfortunately each one of them
involves instrument readings, and each instrument reading that purports to
correspond to some real entity must also be investigated. In the end, we
have nothing but a web of perceptions, with the reality being perceived in
each case being _postulated_ rather than observed. We never get to the
point where we can say "THIS meter reading and the thing it represents are
one and the same thing, so we are finally observing reality itself."

We are always looking at the meter readings, and never at the reality
itself.If you believe otherwise, here's the chalk and there's the
blackboard, so write down your proof. Dr. Johnson kicked a stone and said
to Bishop
Berkeley (as I remember reading), "Thus I refute you." But that is because
Dr. Johnson thought that "tangible" meant "real," which of course it does
not. It means detectable as the sensation of touch, a perception.

Best,

Bill P.

[Bill_Powers1]

[
From Bill Powers (2002.10.07.1243 MDT)]

Rick Marken (2002.10.07.1045)--

I agree with your epistemology, as you know. I _assume_ that there is a reality

underlying my perceptions and that the nature of this reality is
approximated by
successful models of that reality.

I don't want to make a big deal of epistemology -- it seldom makes any
difference -- but to me, what is interesting is that we _don't_ know if
"the nature of this reality is approximated by successful models
...". What successful models do is imitate the _projection_ of reality
into perceptual space, the space that human beings experience. Read
_flatland_ by A. Square to get the flavor of what reality is for beings who
have fewer dimensions of experience than the world in which they exist.

The best example I know of is a display at the Museum of Science and
Industry in Chicago (and probably in lots of similar museums). There is a
box about 10 feet long and maybe three feet square in cross-section,
mounted with the long axis horizontal. You can look with one eye into a
peephole at the end. What you see is a symmetrical geometric pattern make
of strings and other objects.

In one side of this box is a window from which you can see what is inside
the box from a different viewpoint. Through that window you see that there
is no geometric pattern. There are only strings going in many different
directions between blocks of wood. The appearance of a geometric pattern
results from losing one dimension of the world (depth) so there are many
different arrangements of strings that would look the same from the
peephole. Any variations of string placement that resulted in the same
visual projection onto the retina of one eye would, or course, be
invisible, since they would make no difference in what is seen.

Now suppose the world has one, or two, or more dimensions in addition to
the three that we experience. We would not see any changes in this world if
they left the three dimensions we see from our viewpoint the same. All of
our models, designed to replicate the three-dimensional appearance of what
we see, would of course behave correctly in those dimensions, but they
could be very different in the other, unperceived, dimensions, without our
knowing it, or indeed being able to discover the differences.

Eddington said, "The Universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is
stranger than we _can_ imagine."

Best,

Bill P.

···

But I don't _know_ that there is such a
reality. All I was saying to Bruce is that I am an equal opportunity "reality
assumer". I _assume_ that physical models approximate the reality (the
v's in p =
f(v1...vn)) of which _all_ perception -- not just the perception of
everything but
words -- is a function.

I don't believe that words have a special status as perceptions. If
solipsism is
right then it's right for all perception, not just words. If solipsism is
wrong
then it's wrong for all perceptions, not just all perceptions except words. At
least that's the _assumption_ I make. We will, indeed, never know. But I think
science operates _as though_ there were a reality out there and I think it has
operated rather successfully on that assumption. I can't see how speech
science
could make much progress unless it made that assumption as well. And it
seems to
me that where speech science has made this assumption it has made considerable
progress (as witness the speech recognition systems, limited as they are).
It has
made this progress by assuming the acoustical model of the reality on
which the
perception of words is based.

Best regards

Rick
--
Richard S. Marken, Ph.D.
The RAND Corporation
PO Box 2138
1700 Main Street
Santa Monica, CA 90407-2138
Tel: 310-393-0411 x7971
Fax: 310-451-7018
E-mail: rmarken@rand.org

[Richard_Marken2]

[From Rick Marken (2002.10.07.1400)]

Bill Powers (2002.10.07.1243 MDT)

I don't want to make a big deal of epistemology -- it seldom makes any
difference -- but to me, what is interesting is that we _don't_ know if
"the nature of this reality is approximated by successful models
...". What successful models do is imitate the _projection_ of reality
into perceptual space, the space that human beings experience. Read
_flatland_ by A. Square to get the flavor of what reality is for beings who
have fewer dimensions of experience than the world in which they exist.

This is an extremely cool point (I have read _Flatland_ and it makes your , and
Eddington's, point elegantly).

But I do think that human speech perception is most profitably studied in terms of
models of the reality that happens to be projected onto the perceptual space of
human beings.

Best regards

Rick

···

--
Richard S. Marken, Ph.D.
The RAND Corporation
PO Box 2138
1700 Main Street
Santa Monica, CA 90407-2138
Tel: 310-393-0411 x7971
Fax: 310-451-7018
E-mail: rmarken@rand.org

[bnhpct]

[From Bruce Nevin (2002.22.25 18:02 EDT)]

Rick Marken (2002.10.07.0900)–

While it’s true that a speaker is the most reliable source of the sound
waves that are heard as “rose” I believe it is also possible
that all kinds of physical processes (leaves rustling, brooks babbling,
etc.) could combine to produce the sound “rose”.

For our hypothetical speaker of Japanese the identical sound of the
babbling brook or rustling leaves would be the sound of the word
los meaning “woodtick” (or “wobble”). Where
then is the word rose? Or for that matter the word los? Do
you not see a difficulty with a naive realist position about words?
(“Naive” here is a technical term, not a pejorative.)

I think the way that reality maps into the
perception of words is surprising[ly] well understood, as demonstrated by
the remarkable success of word recognition systems. Of course, those
systems are not perfect; they are speaker dependent and reach only 97%
accuracy on the trained speaker.

These systems do not just rely on the sounds in the speech signal. They
rely upon a categorization of sounds as produced by the particular
speaker for certain words, plus a lexicon mapping their notion of the
phonemes of English onto candidate spellings. A representation of the
sounds produced by one speaker mapped onto letters and constrained by a
list of possibilities. Not quite so simple.

in your discussion of phonetics you say
“An oral stop consonant such as p, t, k, b, d, g is signaled by
silence in the speech signal”. You are saying here that
perception is a function of aspects of the acoustic speech signal; in the
case of stops it’s a silent period.

A silence may also ‘signal’ the end (either end) of an utterance, or a
pause. It can be part of a stop consonant only if followed and/or
preceded by 50ms formant transitions such as those that I described. But
the identical sound (silence plus formant transitions) may be any of
several phonemes. One example is that which Bill quoted from the chapter
I sent him. Another: we perceive a d in rider and a t in
writer but the difference (in many dialects) resides not in the
vicinity of the (brief) silence of the medial flap, or in the formant
transitions, but in the length of the preceding vowel. Where is the
phoneme /d/ or the phoneme /t/? Do you not see a difficulty with a naive
realist position about phonemes? Such a position was most cogently
advanced by Bernard Bloch in papers published in 1948 and 1952. He argued
that the only data for defining phonemes must be the sounds of speech,
and it must be possible to define phonemic contrasts on the basis of
contrasted occurrences of these sounds (their ‘distribution’). This
position was effectively demolished by Noam Chomsky in various papers
encapsulated in 1964 in his book Current Issues in Linguistic
Theory.
The fundamental data for defining the phonemes, as shown by Harris in the
1940s (and agreed by Chomsky, in footnotes at least), are language users’
perceptions that some pairs of utterances are repetitions, and others are
not. Utterances can be segmented into sequential segments and/or
concurrent features, and the differences between the utterances (those
that are not repetitions) can be located in particular segments or
features. By various operations of substitution (and testing again with
native speakers) and shifting of phonetic detail from one segment to
another (as in the vowel length of writer/rider turning out to
distinguish one consonant from another, rather than introducing a
distinction between vowels) one can arrive at a representation for a
least set of ‘phonemes’. These are not real things found directly in the
sounds of speech. They are representations for the distinctions between
utterances that native speakers of the language make in the first place.
It has long been known that there are always alternative ways of
representing these distinctions as “the phonemes” of a given
language (Yuen-Ren Chao (1934), “The non-uniqueness of phonemic
solutions of phonetic systems”, Bulletin of the Institute of
History and Philology, Academia Sinica, Vol. IV, Part 4, 363-97;
Repr. in Martin Joos (1957), Readings in Linguistics). This was a
paradoxical problem for those linguists who assumed that phonemic
contrasts could be found “objectively” in the sounds of a
language. They cannot. They can only be found in the judgements of native
speakers as to which utterances are repetitions and which are not.
Words (and phonemes locating the contrasts between them) exist only as
controlled perceptions. Sounds or writings are means of controlling those
perceptions, but absent the controlling native speaker they are only
noises or meaningless strings of marks like chgi’wa:lujan’u’asjuy, not
words. The noises and marks have, we presume, some reality apart
from our perception of them; the words which language users may control
by means of them subsist only as controlled perceptions. They have no
other reality.

    /Bruce

Nevin

···

At 09:02 AM 10/7/2002 -0500, Richard Marken wrote:

[Richard_Marken2]

[From Rick Marken (2002.10.08.0930)]

Bruce Nevin (2002.22.25 18:02 EDT) –
For our hypothetical speaker of Japanese the identical sound of the
babbling brook or rustling leaves would be the sound of the word
los
meaning “woodtick” (or “wobble”). Where then is the word rose?

Call the physical variable – the babbling brook and rustling leaves –
x. The Japanese speaker apparently has a perceptual function that
transforms x into the perception “los”. The English speaker has a perceptual
function that transforms the same physical variable, x , into “rose”.
“Los” and “rose” are perceptions that exist only if 1) x is present
and 2) the listener has a perceptual function that produces “los” or “rose”
as a function of x. So where is “rose”? It is only at the output of a perceptual
function that produces “rose” as a function of x.

Or for that matter the word los? Do you not
see a difficulty with a naive realist position about words?
I would say that my position is “constructivist” rather than “realist”.
What we experience (perceive) is a perceptual construction, p, based on
physical reality, x; p = f(x). The constructor is the perceptual function,
f(). Given a particular physical reality, x, what we experience depends
on the perceptual function(s) we have which take x as an argument.

I think the way that reality maps into the perception
of words is surprising[ly] well understood, as demonstrated by the remarkable
success of word recognition systems. Of course, those systems are not perfect;
they are speaker dependent and reach only 97% accuracy on the trained speaker.
These systems do not just rely on the sounds in the speech signal. They
rely upon a categorization of sounds as produced by the particular speaker
for certain words, plus a lexicon mapping their notion of the phonemes
of English onto candidate spellings. A representation of the sounds produced
by one speaker mapped onto letters and constrained by a list of possibilities.
Not quite so simple.
Of course it’s not simple. But the process starts with the speech signal.
That data is the basis of the categorization, which is a perceptual process.
in your discussion of phonetics you say
“An oral stop consonant such as p, t, k, b, d, g is signaled by silence
in the speech signal”. You are saying here that perception is a function
of aspects of the acoustic speech signal; in the case of stops it’s a silent
period.
A silence may also ‘signal’ the end (either end) of an utterance, or a
pause. It can be part of a stop consonant only if followed and/or preceded
by 50ms formant transitions such as those that I described. But the identical
sound (silence plus formant transitions) may be any of several phonemes.
One example is that which Bill quoted from the chapter I sent him. Another:
we perceive a d in rider and a t in
writer but the difference
(in many dialects) resides not in the vicinity of the (brief) silence of
the medial flap, or in the formant transitions, but in the length of the
preceding vowel. Where is the phoneme /d/ or the phoneme /t/? Do you not
see a difficulty with a naive realist position about phonemes?
I certainly do see a difficulty with a naive realist position. The naive
realist would say that /d/ and /t/ correspond to specific physical components
of the sound wave. My constructivist position is quite different. It says
that it’s perceptual functions that produce /d/ and /t/. This means that
quite different physical variables could give rise to the same perception.
So /d/ might be produced by quite different physical realities, x. For
example, if f() were the simple sum of two inputs and /d/ corresponded
to 4, then /d/ would be produced when the inputs were 1,3, 2,2 or 3,1.
So different physical realities result in the same perception. With two
different functions, f1() and f2() it’s also possible to get two different
perceptions from the same physical reality; this is what happens which
“ambiguous perceptions” like the “wife/mother-in-law illusion” described
in my “Control Theory Glasses” paper.
Words (and phonemes locating the contrasts between
them) exist only as controlled perceptions.
Well, they (like everything else we know) exist only as perceptions.
They are not always controlled, as when someone is reading or talking to
you.
Sounds or writings are means of controlling those
perceptions, but absent the controlling native speaker they are only noises
or meaningless strings of marks like chgi’wa:lujan’u’asjuy, not words.
Yes. But this is true of everything, not just words. If there is no system
there to perceive physical reality, then the perceptions don’t exist.
Best regards

Rick

···

–

Richard S. Marken, Ph.D.

The RAND Corporation

PO Box 2138

1700 Main Street

Santa Monica, CA 90407-2138

Tel: 310-393-0411 x7971

Fax: 310-451-7018

E-mail: rmarken@rand.org

[Bill_Powers1]

[From Bill Powers (2002.10.08.0844 MDT)]

Bruce Nevin (2002.22.25 18:02 EDT)–

Words (and phonemes locating the
contrasts between them) exist only as controlled perceptions. Sounds or
writings are means of controlling those perceptions, but absent the
controlling native speaker they are only noises or meaningless strings of
marks like chgi’wa:lujan’u’asjuy, not words. The noises and marks have,
we presume, some reality apart from our perception of them; the
words which language users may control by means of them subsist only as
controlled perceptions. They have no other reality.

This is agreeable to me, but of course once a sound recording has been
made it is like a permanent utterance that can be mechanically replayed
even without any human agent present to recreate it. So in this sense
it’s like printed words, or artifacts like pencils and chairs and
lemonade, the reality of which at one level is a matter of physics, and
at another a matter of human perceptual organization.

Best,

Bill P.

···

    /Bruce

Nevin

[bnhpct]

[From Bruce Nevin (2002.10.01 22:28 EDT)]

Bill Williams UMKC 1 October 2002 0:30 AM CST –

···

At 08:45 AM 10/1/2002 +0300, William Williams wrote:

Both can be disturbances. But, if they are disturbances, they are different

types of disturbances.

Whether they are disturbances or not is determined by the one who is disturbed (or not). Also, what kind they are. Even if the buzzing fly and the nattering moron had performed the Test, identified your CV, and then continued to disturb your control of what they had determined to be your CV, they would not thereby determine that it is a disturbance. They cause the disturbance, but they don’t cause it to be a disturbance.

I think the Test is commonplace. What PCT does is make it systematic. People disturb others’ controlled variables all the time, obviously, usually by accident. Often they observe that they have disturbed a controlled variable. (Oops! Excuse me!) Sometimes they do so for the sake of finding out what the other person is controlling. Kids do this a lot. Sometimes kids continue to disturb your control of what they have identified as your CV. Various reasons for this have been proposed. (1) Testing boundaries: The person controls a variable that matters to them, but the ‘rules’ for the variable are unclear, or are inconsistently applied. (2) Getting even