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theory of unlimited semiosis would simply portray the very peculiar universe of a category of literary open works, to which FW belongs, whose aim is to stimulate an ideal reader affected by an ideal insomnia to perform free, uncontrolled, infinite readings. The problem is, however, more serious than that. The most recent studies in artificial intelligence show that the model of unlimited semiosis, even though duly tamed and reduced to local manageable formats, for experimental reasons, is the only one which can explain how language is produced and understood. |
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4. Joyce and the Encyclopedia |
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Two semantic models are today competing to explain how human beings produce and understand texts: the dictionary model and the encyclopedia model. According to the dictionary model a language is a series of items explained by a concise definition, usually composed by a finite set of semantic universals, that cannot be further analyzed. In this perspective man means "animal human adult male." Such items can be combined according to a finite set of syntactical rules. A sentence such as this man is a pig is scored as nonsensical. The dictionary model is undoubtedly pretty artificial, but many linguists and analytical philosophers for a long time believed that, since it depicts the competence of an average stupid human being, it could at least work to give semantic instructions to intelligent machines. Unfortunately, the researches in AI have proved that, with a dictionary-like competence, the machines cannot emulate even a stupid human being. In order to understand a text, a machine must be provided with information structured in the format of an encyclopedia. |
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The encyclopedia model is based on the assumption that every item of a language must be interpreted by every other possible linguistic item which, according to some previous cultural conventions, can be associated with it. Every sign can be interpreted by another sign that functions as its interpretant. The interpretants of the verbal item man can be a synonym, a simple definition, a long explanation which takes into account the biological nature of human beings, the history of our species, every piece of information connected with the past, present, and future of mankind, every inference that can be drawn from the very idea of man. One of the first and more influential models proposed by AI was the model of Ross Quillian that I largely used in Eco 1976 (2.12 and p. 123), in order to suggest how our cultural competence should be postulated. Quillian's model was based on a mass of nodes interconnected by |
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