By Gordon Hull
In previous posts (one, two, three), I’ve been exploring the issue of what I’m calling the implicit normativity in language models, especially those that have been trained with RLHF (reinforcement learning with human feedback). In the most recent one, I argued that LLMs are dependent on what Derrida called iterability in language, which most generally means that any given unit of language, to be language, has to be repeatable and intelligible as language, in indefinitely many other contexts. Here I want to pursue that thought a little further, in the context of Derrida’s (in)famous exchange with John Searle’s speech act theory.
Searle begins his “What is a Speech Act” essay innocently enough, with “a typical speech situation involving a speaker, a hearer, and an utterance by the speaker.”
That is enough for Derrida! In Limited, Inc., he responds by accusing Searle over and over of falling for intentionality, on the one hand, and for illicitly assuming that a given speech situation is “typical,” on the other.
Let’s look at intentionality first. In responding to Searle, Derrida explains that he finds himself “to be in many respects quite close to Austin, both interested in and indebted to his problematic” and that “when I do raise questions or objections, it is always at points where I recognize in Austin’s theory presuppositions which are the most tenacious and the most central presuppositions of the continental metaphysical tradition” (38). Derrida means by this a reliance on things like subjectivity and representation – the sorts of things that Foucault is getting at when he complains in the 1960s about philosophies of “the subject” (think: Sartre and phenomenology). Derrida is involved in the same general effort against phenomenology, though he adds a page later that he thinks the archaeological Foucault falls into this tendency to treat speech acts or discursive events in a “fundamentally moralistic” way (39). No doubt Searle is relieved to know that he belongs in the same camp as Foucault. In any case, Derrida explicitly says a few pages later that “the entire substratum of Sarl’s discourse, is phenomenological in character” (56) in that it is over-reliant on intentionality.
Recent Comments