[lit-ideas] Re: Very Like A Whale Disimplicature
- From: "Donal McEvoy" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> (Redacted sender "donalmcevoyuk" for DMARC)
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2016 12:34:26 +0000 (UTC)
HAMLET
Or like a whale?
LORD POLONIUS
Very like a whale.
Donal McEvoy comments:
I have it on good authority that actually whales are diehard falsificationists,
and have been since the late Jurassic.
----
I would think that by uttering what he does, Polonius is sticking to the old
etymology of 'very': 'verily'; it seems ungrammatical otherwise.>
But it wouldn't be ungrammatical otherwise just as it wouldn't be very
ungrammatical otherwise.
As to the intended meaning, scholars might start with a statistical analysis of
"very" in Shakespeare broken down into a scale of likelihood as to whether
"very" meant "verily". That's all the help I'm giving.
Can whales deploy disimplicatures? This would need close and careful
understanding of whale "meaning", perhaps beyond any we currently have.
A Popper thesis is that only humans have access to W3. He also views access to
W3 as key to the development of human language (and perhaps even acquisition at
even a very early stage). This first thesis is vulnerable to falsification by
way of an account of whale "meaning" that indicates whales are exchanging
W3-type content and not merely signaling. It is the level at which whales are
communicating that is most important, and it is in terms of this "level" that
we might assess the plausibility of whether they are using implicatures,
disimplicatures, metaphors and synecdoche etc.
DL
On Thursday, 28 April 2016, 10:57, Luigi Speranza
<dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
We are considering J. Osborne's play and the disimplicatures in the slightly
disjointed dialogue, typical of his unique style:
HAMLET:
Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel?
LORD POLONIUS
By the mass, and 'tis like a camel, indeed.
HAMLET
Methinks it is like a weasel.
LORD POLONIUS
It is backed like a weasel.
HAMLET
Or like a whale?
LORD POLONIUS
Very like a whale.
Donal McEvoy comments:
I have it on good authority that actually whales are diehard falsificationists,
and have been since the late Jurassic.
----
I would think that by uttering what he does, Polonius is sticking to the old
etymology of 'very': 'verily'; it seems ungrammatical otherwise. It is
difficult, if not impossible, to FALSIFY that a cloud is very like a whale, but
according to McEvoy, a whale could!
When vacationing in Darien, Conn., Long Island Sound, English philosopher and
sportsman H. P. Grice set himself one goal: to record close-up audio and video
data of sperm whales passing one another coda clicks, which Grice believes
contain coded information, "possibly a language, with their attending "spermy"
implicatures, as I shall call them."
Sperm whales use coda clicks most often during socializing. "This gave me the
initial hypothesis," the philosopher said in an interview, "since we also use
disimplicature during socialising."
These coda clicks sound unremarkable, like a popgun firing in quick succession.
But when the clicks are viewed on a spectrogram, a visual representation of an
audio signal, each reveals a remarkably complex pattern. Inside these clicks
are a series of shorter clicks, each lasting a few thousandths of a second, and
so on.
The more we focus in on a click, the more detailed it becomes.
And sperm whales can repeat these millisecond-long clicks, which suggests,
Grice says, that this is
"some form of communication."
We know little about sperm whale clicks and behaviou because not everybody owns
a summer house in Darien and also because sperm whales are "too large to put in
a laboratory" and, until recently, few researchers have been willing to study
the animals up close in the wild. Who could blame Grice for indulging on his
adventurous side?
Darien's sperm whales are the world’s largest predators.
They have eight-inch-long teeth and can grow as long as 60 feet and weigh up to
110,000 pounds.
Their vocalisations are the loudest animal sounds on the planet.
The pressure waves can blow out human eardrums and conceivably rupture lungs.
Diving with them was considered suicide.
As a result, most research on sperm whales’ communication has been conducted
from a boat -- in Grice's case, his boat anchored at the Darien Boat Club,
walking distance from his cottage.
This revealed some fascinating facts.
Sperm whales live in close-knit societies.
They are raised by matriarchal units that can include three generations,
They appear to share regional dialects and family nicknames.
But studying the animals from the deck of a boat can also be limiting.
Grice could analyze their clicks but couldn't at first see how the whales’
interactions change in response to those clicks, which is crucial for
understanding how they communicate, i. e., implicate and disimplicate.
Grice was willing to get in the water with the whales knowing he faced one
minor probem: the disruptive gurgle of scuba gear scares the animals away.
They avoid submarines and robots.
Rebreathers, which recycle the divers’ exhaled breath into breathable air, are
relatively quiet but also expensive, finicky and too difficult to deploy on a
moment’s notice when pods approach.
The best option for studying the disimplicatures of sperm whales is free
diving.
This is what it sounds like: diving dozens, sometimes hundreds of feet, on a
single breath of air.
After a chance, bone-rattling encounter with a pod of sperm whales off the
coast of Darien, Grice became fascinated by clicks.
Two years later Grice started working with Strawson, a former tutees of his and
a world-champion free diver and underwater photographer, and the pair formed a
volunteer-run cetacean communication research project called "In defence of a
dogma".
(I am now a member of their group.)
Grice HELD HIs BREATH AND SWAM DEEPER, 10, 20, 30 feet.
He heard a thunderous crack, then another, so loud they vibrated his chest.
Below his kicking feet, two sperm whales emerged from the shadows, each as long
as a school bus.
The cracking was coming from the whales.
It's a form of sonar called echolocation that species of dolphins, whales and
other cetaceans use to “see” underwater.
With these vocalizations, that Grice called clicks, the whales are snapping
three-dimensional images of Grice's body, and those of Dtrawson, his diving
companions, from the inside out — scanning us to see if they were a threat, or
if they were food.
As they kicked down deeper, within just a few feet of the mother whale’s gaping
mouth, the click patterns changed, becoming slower, softer.
They sounded to Grice like “coda clicks,” the sounds sperm whales use to
identify themselves to others in the pod.
"The whales were probably introducing themselves to us."
They were saying hello.
When Grice and Dtrawson entered the water wearing only a wet suit, mask and
fins, the notoriously shy whales didn’t scatter or attack.
They were curious, and welcomed the divers into the pods for hours, circling
them and peppering them with communication clicks.
Free diving has another big advantage. It is totally silent, allowing Grice and
Strawson to record a clear audio signal of whale vocalisations and their
disimplicatures.
Not everyone is a fan of this approach, but then not everyone is a Griceist.
Every few months Grice got an angry note from Popperian institutional
researchers claiming Grice's data was "unscientific," and that he was harassing
the Darien animals, or that he was a hack.
He and Strawson insisted they are not trying to subvert the scientific system.
They want to work within it.
But the current pace of research is far too slow and its approach is too timid.
In the past 150 years, humans have killed off about 70 percent of the sperm
whale population.
Around 360,000 remain, some off the Darien boat club.
That number is expected to decline, perhaps precipitously, as the ocean warms
and acidifies.
Sperm whales’ brains are the largest ever known, around six times the size of
Grice's.
They have an oversize neocortex and a profusion of highly developed neurons
called spindle cells that, in humans, govern things like emotional suffering,
compassion and speech.
“We finally have the technology and methods to significantly increase our
understanding of one of the planet’s most intelligent animals,” said Gricd.
"We can’t just sit here and do nothing. You’ve got to get in the water!”
Outsiders, Grice pointed out, were often behind the biggest advancements in
science.
"You think of Einstein or Newton," Grice said.
“They were math guys working regular jobs who set out to prove a crazy idea.”
Here’s the “crazy” part of Grice's idea.
He believes that sonar artifacts (like images) might be embedded in these
vocalizations — that because these animals are already viewing their world
through echoes, they may also be able to send these echoed images to one
another.
Grice tested, alla Popper, his disimplicatural theory by capturing these
clicks, sending them back to the animals, and seeing if they repeat them.
Next, Grice created artificial clicks containing three-dimensional sonographic
images of things in our world — a tree, a human — and send these as well,
prompting, perhaps, a kind of dialogue.
While all almost all cetacean experts agree that the whales’ clicks are a form
of communication, most are sceptical, at best, that we will be able to
understand, and even join, these conversations. Grice ain't.
"Yes, I realize that the idea of talking to sperm whales sounds nuts."
"It certainly sounded ludicrous to me when Grice convinced me otherwise,"
Strawson.
This wasn’t just a philosophical and scientific epiphany but also an emotional
one.
You ou can’t share that disimplicatural connection on the deck of a boat.
You’ve got to get in the water.
Cheers,
Speranza
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