Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 38, No. 321.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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        Date: 2025-01-14 11:24:51+00:00
        From: William Benzon <bbenzon@mindspring.com>
        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 38.319: AI, poetry and readers

OK, good enough, Jim.

But let’s step back a moment. In what sense do words, that is to say, the word
forms, the signifiers, carry intention, or anything at all? They’re not buckets
into which something can be poured. Paul de Man made this point in, I believe,
his essay, “Form and Intent in the American New Criticism.” A cognitive
linguist, Michael Reddy, examined this kind of talk under the rubric of the
Conduit Metaphor, which is the idea that we communicate by passing meaning
through a conduit. But as you know, it doesn’t work like that at all. Sure,
telephone wires carry an electrical signal, but that’s just a transduction of
the speech signal. There’s no meaning in that signal at all. Rather, as you
know, the meaning, the signifieds, are supplied by the listener on the other end
of the phone conversation.

On this, see my post: The Conduit Metaphor and the Intentionalist Debate in
Literary Criticism, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-conduit-
metaphor-and-intentionalist.html

This “intention” we talk about as critics is thus a Big Myth we invoke to give
the sheen of understanding where we have very little. At best it’s something
that somehow exists in the relationship between a mind and some external
phenomenon on which they mind is focused.

So, yes, I agree, the words, by which I mean nothing more than the signifieds,
the words are all that the reader has. In the situation I was talking about –
where there are no words from some original author in the final text –  I don’t
see that the source author’s intention carries any more intention than my act of
directing the production of a poem from an AI.

For reference, the blog post which is the inspiration for this exchange: PT in
the Classroom, Part 2: Escape to America, https://new-
savanna.blogspot.com/2024/12/gpt-in-classroom-part-2-escape-to.html

I also have a number of posts on what I call “the word illusion,” by which I
mean the practice of talking about the whole signifier/signified bundle in
contexts where only the signifier exists. See: The Word Illusion in Literary
Criticism, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-word-illusion-in-
literary-criticism.html

BB

> On Jan 14, 2025, at 3:38 AM, Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:
>
>
>              Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 38, No. 319.
>        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
>                      Hosted by DH-Cologne
>                       www.dhhumanist.org
>                Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
>
>
>        Date: 2025-01-13 06:54:50+00:00
>        From: James Rovira <jamesrovira@gmail.com>
>        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 38.316: AI, poetry and readers
>
> Bill -
>
> I said the following in the post you quote: "But in that case, the lines come
> from another source, so any 'intention' would be from the human source of the
> original poetry, not the AI that assembled the lines."
>
> That ascribes intention to the author of a poem, which means I'm not ignoring
> intention. I said elsewhere, in other responses, that words themselves carry
> intention. I mean literally the words themselves, either spoken or written.
>
> I agree that programmers and/or a program's user carry intention as well.
>
> That intention isn't directly communicated, however. The text output, the
words
> themselves, are all that the reader has.
>
> Jim R



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