Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 444.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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        Date: 2026-05-04 06:47:16+00:00
        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
        Subject: using words well

In The Telling (1972), Laura Riding Jackson writes against what she
calls "the new hybrid scientific-philosophic thinking" (p. 12) which has
made words "subject to a weird logic of physicality, as if we the
speakers and orderers of words had died, all, but left the words
behind". The result, she says, is "a jargon of mingled scientific and
philosophic and ordinary parlance formed without the least aspiring
desire to use words well: holding that it is from science that truth
must come... [as if] no more than axioms of scientific common-sense"
are to remain. One could date the project back to Thomas Sprat's The
History of the Royal Society of London For the Improving of Natural
Knowledge (1667), to his influential argument for

> a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions;
> clear senses; a native easiness: bringing all things as near the
> Mathematical plainness, as they can: and preferring the language of
> Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants, before that, of Wits, or
> Scholars. (p. 113)

but of course the roots of it go back much further and --here is my
point--the effects wash into this day. Witness the easy way in which
deep, rich and mysterious words such as 'learning' are casually used as
if they named that which can be implemented algorithmically. I put
single quotation marks around such words to indicate more and closer
attention is required.

That indeed is where Humanist comes in, among other places and media
where critical questioning can and should be exercised. The flow of
announcements that comprises most of what is published here is not out
of place. It serves a valuable function, to let us know what's happening
in a sufficiently slow trickle to invite thought. But it's the
(after)thought about it which counts.

About 'learning'. I go back to a seminar held in 1987 by Ragaswamy
Narasimhan, the doyen or Bhisma ("mighty one") of computer science 
in India. He began by proposing that we consider, with only chalk and a 
chalk-board at his disposal, the semantic field of this word 'learning' by 
thinking about how children learn, then attempting to apply it to the design 
of an artifically intelligent system. What would be required to realise such
a system, he asked. (I tell the story at greater length in Hart Cohen,
Ujjwal Jana and Myra Gurney, eds. Digital Humanities in the India Rim:
Contemporary Scholarship in Australia and India. London: Open Book, 2024.)

Of course this makes the engineer's challenge much, much greater. But
isn't this our job?

All best,
WM


--
Willard McCarty, Professor em., King's College London;
Editor, Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts, Sciences
and Humanities (tinyurl.com/Berghahn-IRASH),
Humanist (dhhumanist.org);
www.mccarty.org.uk


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