By Gordon Hull
I’ve been looking (part 1, part 2) at a couple of articles by Lydia Liu (here and here) demonstrating a Wittgensteinian influence on the development of large language models. Specifically, Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the meaning of words as determined by their contexts and placement relative to other rules gets picked up by Margaret Masterman’s lab at Cambridge and then becomes integrated into the vector semantics models that underlie current LLMs. Along the way, Liu argues that the Masterman approach to language, which learns a lot from Chinese ideographs, in this sense goes farther than the Derridean critique of logocentrism. Here I want to transition to Derrida’s critique, not to criticize Liu’s account, but to see an additional point in Wittgenstein, one that Derrida takes further.
To recall, Liu notes that one effect of the Wittgenstein-Masterman approach is to overturn the logocentrism in Western writing, but that Masterman is doing something different from Derrida, who remains in the space of alphabetic writing:
“For Masterman, to overcome Western logocentrism means opening up the ideographic imagination beyond what is possible by the measure of alphabetical writing. This is important, as it follows that the scientist’s and philosopher’s reliance on conceptual categories derived from alphabetical writing in their commitment to logical precision and systematization as well as their deconstruction must likewise be subjected to post-Wittgensteinian critique” (Witt., 437)
As she adds a few pages later, “I am fully convinced that Masterman is the first modern philosopher to push the critique of Western metaphysics beyond what is possible by the measure of alphabetical writing, and, unlike deconstruction, her translingual philosophical innovation refuses to stay within the bounds of self-critique” (Witt., 444).
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