75447
2712-9934
Technology and Language
2
1
2
2021
1-140
EDI
RUS
1-11
17344631600
0000-0002-2173-4084
Nordmann
Alfred
Institut für Philosophie, Darmstadt Technical University
nordmann@phil.tu-darmstadt.de
J-9548-2017
57210142445
0000-0002-7956-4647
Bylieva
Department of Social Science, Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University
Russia
In the Beginning was the Word
The problem of modernity haunts the Western tradition of philosophy and moves us from disenchantment and disempowerment of the word to its re-enchantment. If critical reasoning exorcised the magic power of the word, technological achievements of control reinstated it. More straightforwardly, perhaps, Russian thought traditionally viewed the word as a “technical” or “magical” artifact capable of changing the world. In the beginning was God‘s word but are also the words which open the world of nanotechnology and the digital worlds of software engineering. It is shown how the contributions to this special issue probe various aspects of the word as a technical artefact with technical functions.
10.48417/technolang.2021.01.01
Modernism
The redeeming word
Disenchantment and reenchantment
Words and things
Creativity of language
https://soctech.spbstu.ru/article/2021.2.1/
1-11.pdf
RAR
RUS
12-25
Ramming
Universität Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany
Calculating with Words: Perspectives from Philosophy of Media, Philosophy of Science, Linguistics and Cultural History
This essay pursues the title of the special issue In the Beginning was the Word - The Word as a Technical Artefact and asks if words can be (technical) artefacts. The following thesis will be defended: as long as words are spoken they are part of parole, of spoken language and cannot be an object. Words as some kind of res are signs, but signs as a class of objects cannot be subsumed under the class of artefacts at large. Words can only be treated as artefacts if they are elements of a formal system; to think of them as being somehow technical means requires to understand them without reference to language. Prima facie, this leads to a paradoxical conclusion: if they are words, uttered words, they are part of language; if words are technically produced material entities, artefacts, they are devoid of meaning and are, therefore, not words.
10.48417/technolang.2021.01.02
Word
Logical symbols
Formal systems
Notations
Written language
Algorithms
Goodman
Wittgenstein
https://soctech.spbstu.ru/article/2021.2.2/
12-25.pdf
RAR
RUS
26-36
Wilson
University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Decaying Words: The Metaphor of Evolution in Language Becomes Literal in a Canadian Forest
In 2009, two Canadian poets Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott travelled to five different ecosystems within the borders of British Columbia (BC). At each location, they left a copy of the canonical text of physical anthropology, Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), open to the elements, for one calendar year. The project, documented in the photographic book Decomp turned the poets’ usual mode of expression on its head: instead of manipulating words to create a final work of linguistic expression, the poets let nature dissolve the integrity of the book, leaving words and morphemes dangling in poetic fragments. The Decomp project allows us to reflect on the environmental influences on language, and the organic structure of language. The dominant metaphors that describe language come from the biological world, and from Darwin’s theory of evolution in particular. Languages can be said to evolve, mutate, grow, stagnate and even die. Like the words in Darwin’s text left to the elements, languages can be isolated by geographic factors and left to fossilize without continued exchange with other cultures (Doran 1954). In the forests B.C. the metaphorical mapping between biology and language becomes literal. We bear witness to the effects of entropy on the book and as the line between animate and inanimate agents blurs. As the poets piece together the fragments of Darwin’s prose in Decomp, we are confronted with such questions, confronted with the ephemeral nature of language and the acts of assembly we all perform every day in the face of linguistic change, and often, decay.
10.48417/technolang.2021.01.03
Evolution
Metaphor
Poetics
Materiality
Anthropology
Darwin
https://soctech.spbstu.ru/article/2021.2.3/
26-36.pdf
RAR
RUS
37-53
57336400800
0000-0002-9463-7613
Trimble
Walker
E-Quadrat Science and Education
Berlin, Germany
Claiming Infinity: Tokens and spells in the foundations of the Moscow Mathematical School
The Moscow Mathematical School, led by Dmitri Egorov, made tremendous strides in the development of set theory in the period around the Russian Revolutions. The concepts of transfinite sets and absolute infinity have long had a controversial association with religion, namely in the explicit theological statements of the founder of set theory, Georg Cantor. However, several recent studies have argued that the Moscow School was instrumentally shaped by a sect called the “Name Worshippers”. Here we examine more precisely what the Name Worshippers meant by naming, and how their semantics might have, and might have not, shaped the views of the Moscow School. This paper is a review and severe corrective of the book Naming Infinity by Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor, yet we also have our own analysis. Examining the Name Worshippers’ semantics as defined by themselves and their opponents argues for the greater theological influence being Cantor’s. However some aspects of their beliefs indicate that they tended to treat names as tokens, objects of incantation and instantiation. Finally, we show how this fascinating chapter in the history of theology and mathematics contributes to realistic versions of what contemporary neurologically-based semantics calls “meaning externalism” and a science of essences.
10.48417/technolang.2021.01.04
History of mathematics
Theology
Transfinite sets
Absolute infinity
Name Worshippers
Georg Cantor
Dmitri Egorov
Pavel Florensky
Nikolai Luzin
https://soctech.spbstu.ru/article/2021.2.4/
37-53.pdf
RAR
RUS
54-66
Christiansen
Darmstadt Technical University, Darmstadt, Germany
Infinity: Divine Paradigm
“In the Beginning was the Word” provides the biblical reference to the word ‘Word,’ and ‘Infinity’ touches upon the traditional philosophical conventions that refer to God as the ‘Infinite’ and the creations of God as the ‘finites.’ Infinity as a technical artefact, engages the mind with its abstractness and metaphorical rendition as in Basic Metaphor of Infinity (BMI), but also with its concreteness as in programming, modelling and topography. ‘Infinity’ as a concept and as a numerical entity refers a quantified element to the qualitative divine - with the intention of comprehending concepts that are generally beyond the cognitive imaginative sphere of the human mind. The formality associated with mathematical proofs authenticates ideas that may seem or are abstract to pinpoint, including the notion that ‘nature speaks mathematics’ and nature as created by the creator embodies the paradigm of ‘Infinity’ as divine. Can ‘infinity’ then be conceptualised as a technical artefact by approaching it secularly with mathematics as the language to comprehend the theological cloud that engulfs it? The answer, perhaps will neither be a simple affirmation or an outright negation.
10.48417/technolang.2021.01.05
Infinity; Infinite as Concept or Entity; Mathematics; Theology; Cosmology
https://soctech.spbstu.ru/article/2021.2.5/
54-66.pdf
RAR
RUS
67-80
Coenen
Christopher
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany
Kazakova
Gubkin Russian State University, Bauman Moscow State Technical University, Moscow, Russia
Utopian Grammars of Human-Machine Interaction
In his essay in the inaugural issue of this journal, Alfred Nordmann suggests that we can speak of a language of mechanics and that machines – in which, according to Franz Reuleaux, movement is domesticated or civilized – can be conceived of as structures that enable the self-expression of things, or as elements of a grammar of things. He points out that the journal is dedicated to exploring interactions of the sphere of ideas (of which language is often seen as part of) with the sphere of technical practice and to fundamental reflection on ‘technology as language’ and on ‘language as technology’. In our article, we thus explore attempts to develop new grammars of human-machine interaction as they were made in literature and in engineering and labour studies in the early Soviet Union. We specifically discuss Alexei Gastev's thinking on labour, technology and poetry. We are interested in the utopian aspects of his grammar of things and bodies, and in the role of the body between technology and language. Given that the two are perhaps the two most common answers to the question of what makes us human and distinguishes us in or from the animal kingdom, experiments with the triangle of technology, language and human corporeality, such as Gastev’s ones, deserve attention beyond the historical context.
10.48417/technolang.2021.01.06
Alexei Gastev
engineering and labour studies
poetry
human-machine interaction utopianism
biomechanics
avant-garde
https://soctech.spbstu.ru/article/2021.2.6/
67-80.pdf
RAR
RUS
81-97
Kazarina
Samara National Research University, Samara, Russia
A word at the limit
The article discusses the reasons for the pronounced interest of cubo-futurists in the possibilities of the poetic word and the nature of their experiments with linguistic material. The author proceeds from the fact that for the artists of the early Russian avant-garde, the laws of language and the system of cultural conventions are an artificially created barrier that protects the sphere of human existence from the surplus of naturally emanating energy. This protects society from shocks, but at the same time deprives it of the opportunity to develop. All the poets of the “Gilea” group saw as their most important task the elimination of this gap between objective reality and the sphere of semiosis, but the most convincing solutions were offered by Vladimir Mayakovsky, Velimir Khlebnikov and Alexei Kruchenykh. The purpose of this article is to characterize the strategies developed by these artists for overcoming the linguistic dogma of the previous culture and to determine the range of possibilities for the future. A structural-semiotic approach to the analysis of avant-garde texts was used. In this way it can be shown that the poetic work with words and the variants proposed by the three authors proceeded in different directions and was in many respects mutually exclusive. While the poetics of Mayakovsky assumed the convergence of words and things, Khlebnikov's experiments were carried out to balance both, and Kruchenykh’s zaum creativity took the word out of any control, except for the author's will. Even if different poets used the same words to denote the genres and types of creativity they discovered, they were talking about dissimilar phenomena. This is demonstrated by comparing the zaum of Khlebnikov with the zaum of Kruchenykh. Each of the creative projects proposed by the three poets was an experiment to identify certain limiting possibilities of the word, therefore, in the work of all three poets it did not lose its meaning.
10.48417/technolang.2021.01.07
Cubo-futurism
"Gilea"
Semiosis
Universe
Creative strategy
Zaum
Suprematism
https://soctech.spbstu.ru/article/2021.2.7/
81-97.pdf
RAR
RUS
98-121
Vorotnikova
Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University (SPbPU), St. Petersburg, Russia
Karlin
Sergey
University of veterinary and pharmaceutical sciences Brno, Brno, Czech republic
Non-linguistic systems as a way to make a password secure but memorable
This article is based on the study of ways to create a secure password by integrating symbols from non-linguistic sign systems, in order to combine cryptographic strength and ease of memorization. This is relevant, as the old ways of complicating the password become obsolete, in view of their triviality and, as a result, susceptibility to hacking. Our research is based on the use of a system of symbols from various fields of interest (chemistry, programming, music, etc.) in the password. We take into account the individual preferences of users, so that it would be easier for them to build an associative chain when remembering a password, and also considered the susceptibility of passwords obtained using the password techniques we proposed to the most common cyber-attacks. The respondents created one password on their own, and the second with the help of the proposed methods. The complexity and security of the password was estimated in terms of entropy, as well as using specialized programs. Using the proposed methods reduced the number of insecure keys.
10.48417/technolang.2021.01.08
Password
Entropy
Reliability
Cyber Attacks
Cryptographic Strength
Symbol Systems
Passphrase
Keys
Hacking
Symbol
https://soctech.spbstu.ru/article/2021.2.8/
98-121.pdf
RAR
RUS
122-133
Belyaeva
Berlin, Germany
The Technical Transformation of the Literary Epigraph
In this article, the author analyzes 2000 literary epigraphs over a certain period of their existence in terms of their transformation due to the development of social thought and technological progress. The development of printed, information and computer technologies, as well as the changes that have taken place over the centuries in public consciousness, have led to the appearance of new epigraphic types of texts, as well as epigraphic discourses. If the epigraph itself is a technology for directing the reader’s attention, it functions differently when it employs quotations from published texts, audio-visual sources, or invented quotes. The survey of technical possibilities demonstrates the staying power of the literary epigraph.
10.48417/technolang.2021.01.09
Literary Epigraph
Gloss
Flash Epigraph
Epigraphic Text
Creolized Text
https://soctech.spbstu.ru/article/2021.2.9/
122-133.pdf
COR
RUS
135-140
Froy
University of Antwerp, Antwerpen, Belgium
‘A Few Words of Welcome’
This paper examines the contemporary absence of hospitality. Is today’s absent hospitality to be understood as a moral disaster, and a failure of responsibility? Or should we think of the silence in place of yesterday (or tomorrow’s) ‘welcome’ as the exemplary mode of hospitality. Through a polemical reading of Jacques Derrida’s texts on hospitality, it is possible to argue that – far from representing a dereliction of the word ‘welcome’, the contemporary silence on the question of hospitality can be interpreted as the zenith of hospitality itself. Whether this silence stands for the final word on hospitality is, however, a question which remains unresolved.
10.48417/technolang.2021.01.10
Hospitality
Derrida
Technology
Welcome
Host
https://soctech.spbstu.ru/article/2021.2.10/
135-140.pdf