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Grice and Speech-Act Theory
2025/09/10

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The meaning of a sentence is not contained in the sentence. There are many examples showing this to be the case, for example, "You can't park here," which "could be making a prediction about their addressee's parking abilities, ordering them to move their car, explaining a local law, or improvising a work of fiction." Wittgenstein would say "meaning is use". Paul Grice offers a slightly different account, based on the communicator's intent, or to use J.L. Austin's terminology: speech acts. "Which kind of speech act one performs depends on which kind of response one communicatively intends to produce in an addressee." This article expands on Grice's theory and looks at competing theories, helping readers think more deeply about what we mean when we mean things.

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The web has a new system for making AI companies pay up
Emma Roth, The Verge, 2025/09/10

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As this article notes, Really Simple Licensing (RSL) "builds upon the robots.txt protocol (to) add licensing and royalty terms to their robots.txt file." But publishers are simply inventing rights they do not actually have. As I have commented before, publishers can ask for royalty payments, but if the use of their content is deemed fair use (or fail dealing) companies have no requirement to pay them.

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Students not being able to access essential digital tools is still a problem
Livia Scott, WonkHe, 2025/09/10

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It creates an interesting change of perspective when you realize that one of the "tools" is the university campus. "The bad news is, for yet another year, a growing number of students not only do not have access to a suitable device and this rises to almost half (49 per cent) among international students. Significant portions of students surveyed (36 per cent) have avoided campus due to travel costs, two thirds reported wifi issues both on and off campus (up from 55 per cent last year) and nearly half (45 per cent) had trouble accessing vital digital systems needed to complete their learning." I still think it would be a good investment for communities to offer local access to higher powered computers in (let's call them, say) Community Access Centres or (say) libraries, especially for the purposes of study and local enterprise development.

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DNA-based Neural Network Learns from Examples to Solve Problems
California Institute of Technology, 2025/09/10

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This reserach just underlines this main point: "The ability to learn is found on many scales: Our brains rewire themselves to integrate new information, our immune systems chemically encode information about encounters with pathogens for the future, and even single-celled bacteria learn simple information about chemical gradients and use it to navigate toward food. Learning is a key component of intelligence, whether natural or artificial." The paper, by Kevin M. Cherry and Lulu Qian, is called Supervised learning in DNA neural networks.

     

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We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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