So, I’m catching up on philosophy lately. This is a very large field that it would take years of diligent study just to gain an overview.
I know it’s not reasonable to study the cliff notes. You need to read the author and get a feel. And there are other issues; language drift, translations from the works original language which of course has drift, unique usage of words that doesn’t match the dictionary definition, poor writing ability, and more issues I’m sure. Then there are non-philosophical texts, fiction, that depend upon a certain idea. A kind of submarine philosophical proponent. Some streams of thought overlap or dovetail yet the authors never knew of each other. Or their language is just different enough to make them seem unique.
I imagine these arguments are structured or partially so having a family tree. My interest is in generating a road map, reducing the number of authors to read, highlighting tourist traps, and actual scenic vistas. I’m reluctant to trust this job to a person. Each has biases and it would take a considerable amount of time.
My favorite tool is the computer and I think that what I describe is a semantic engine. Most of the work these days on semantics focuses on web search, but I think this is a dramatic waste.
Semantics is the meaning of words. It’s relative is syntax, which is the spelling and grammar of words. Computers don’t understand semantics very well. English is a shitty language in a lot of ways. One word has multiple meanings and the other words, which also have multiple meanings, must be used to figure out what is intended. In a way, we are all computers that have been left on for 10+ years. So, it’s not much surprise that a device with inherent weaknesses that’s a few minutes or even weeks old can’t keep up.
What I want is a box to which I can input text and it will compare the sentence structure and word usage, compare to other related texts, and generate a detailed comparison. I want the computer to read the text and tell me what else is like it. If an argument is a rabbit hole I don’t care for I want to it to warn me before I spend all that time reading it. The computer can do in minutes or hours what would take me days or months. This is all pattern analysis on a huge scale.
Eventually, I want it to do more. It should “understand”. I don’t know what this means exactly. Perhaps, generate cliff notes of any text with links to other texts that seem related. To place a text in relation to other texts that are similar. A big one is finding similar texts that are unrelated in time and place.
Eh, I’m getting sloppy in the specs. I think this could be useful to people in general, as a research age, plagarism detector, redundant text detector,.. I don’t know.
Our society has an increasingly unreadable quantity of text available. We could use a tool to help navigate this vast sea of information. Teaching computers to understand language and navigate the memes seems the only way to do this.