In this book, Nirenburg and Raskin present an important body of work in computational linguistics that they and their colleagues have been developing over the past 20 years. For a unifying perspective, they organize their assumptions, theories, and techniques around the theme of ontological semantics. Along the way, they critique many alternative views of semantics, which they distinguish from their own. Their analyses contribute to a much-needed debate about the history and future of computational linguistics, but to preserve some balance, teachers and students should keep a few of the alternatives on their reference shelf. The book is divided into two parts: a philosophical part I and a practical part II. The first part consists of an introductory chapter 1 and four chapters that survey important but controversial issues about linguistics, both theoretical and computational. In those chapters, the authors make a good case for their version of ontological semantics, but the alternatives are not treated in detail. In part II, the authors present their text-meaning representation (TMR) and demonstrate how it is used in language analysis. Any discussion of technical material must use some notation, and TMR is sufficiently flexible to illustrate a wide range of semantic-based methods that could be adapted to many other formalisms. For most readers, part II would be the more important. Chapter 1 is a good 25-page overview of computational linguistics with an emphasis on semantics. Students and novices, however, need examples, and none are given until chapter 6. The authors suggest that ‘‘a well-prepared and/or uninterested reader’’ skip the remainder of part I and go straight to chapter 6, which begins with an excellent five-page example. The authors follow that advice when they teach courses from this text. In Chapter 2, the authors present their ‘‘Prolegomena to the Philosophy of Linguistics.’’ Their ideas are well taken, and some are as old as Socrates: Examine the assumptions, challenge conventional wisdom, and test conclusions against experience. The basis of their approach is what they call the four components of a scientific theory:

Ontological semantics

This paper is about the phenomenon of encoding, more specifically about the encoded extension of agency. The question of code most often emerges from contemporary concerns about the way digital encoding is seen to be transforming our lives in fundamental ways, yet seems to operate ‘under the surface’ as it were. In this essay I suggest that the performative outcomes of digital encoding are best understood within a more general horizon of the phenomenon of encoding – that is to say as norm- or rule-governed material enactments accepted (or taken for granted) as the necessary conditions for becoming. Encoded material enactments translate/extend agency, but never exactly. I argue that such encoded extensions are insecure, come at a cost and are performative. To illustrate this I present a brief discussion of some specific historical transitions in the encoding of human agency: from speech to writing, to mechanical writing, and finally to electronic writing. In each of these translations I aim to show that agency is translated/extended in ways that have many unexpected performative outcomes. Specifically, through a discussion of the digital encoding of writing, as reuse, I want to suggest the proposition that all agency is always borrowed (or ‘plagiarized’) – i.e. it is never originally human. As encoded beings we are never authors, we are rather more or less skilful reusers. To extend agency we have to submit to the demands of encoding and kidnap that encoding simultaneously – enabling constraints in Butler’s language. Our originality, if there is any, is in our skill at kidnapping the code and turning it into an extension of our agency, that is to say, our skill at resignification – to be original we need to be skilful ‘parasites’, as suggested by Serres.

The Enframing of Code Agency, Originality and the Plagiarist

During the last fi fteen years, a standard way of defending deconstruction has been to endow it with an “ethical motivation.” According to this line of argument, Derridaʼs undermining of metaphysical presuppositions and totalizing systems emanates from an ethical concern to respect “the Other.” The most prominent advocates for such a perspective are Robert Bernasconi, Drucilla Cornell, and Simon Critchley, to whom I will return further on, since their readings exemplify the account of deconstruction I take issue with in this essay. What these readings have in common is that they attempt to assimilate Derridaʼs thinking of alterity to Emmanuel Levinasʼs ethical metaphysics. Consequently, they understand deconstruction in terms of an “aspiration to a non-violent relationship to the Other,” as Cornell puts it in her book The Philosophy of the Limit [62]. Such an approach certainly makes sense from within a Levinasian framework, where the Other answers to the Good and recalls us to an originary ethics. “War presupposes peace, the antecedent and non-allergic presence of the Other,” Levinas asserts in his central work Totality and Infi nity [199/173–74]. As I will argue, however, the idea of a primary peace is incompatible with deconstructive thinking. In Derridaʼs work, there is no support for positing the other as primordially Good or for prescribing a nonviolent relationship to him or her or it. On the contrary, Derridaʼs notion of alterity is inextricable from a notion of constitutive violence. Violence does not supervene upon a peaceful Other but marks the possibility of every relation, as my epigraph makes clear. The epigraph is from Derridaʼs early essay “Violence and Metaphysics,” but we shall see how his thinking is continually informed by the notion of a constitutive violence, all the way up to his work on questions of justice, hospitality, and democracy. A recurrent topos in contemporary discourse is to locate a “turn” toward the ethical in Derridaʼs later texts. Such a narrative is misleading not only because it fails to consider that ethical questions have been a major concern for Derrida ever since his fi rst books, but also because it disregards how the “logic” of deconstruction transforms the fundamental axioms that inform the discussion of ethics. The appropriation of Derrida as an “ethical” philosopher rests on the inability to understand his complex logic

The Necessity of Discrimination: Disjoining Derrida and Levinas

In the wake of the Mobius spiralling of relativism and reflexivity, much of the theoretically inclined literature within human geography has turned to the motifs of difference and otherness as a possible basis for fostering a coming together and rapprochement of previously incommensurate theoretical-practices. Much of this effort has been undertaken in an explicit attempt to maintain political, moral, and ethical responsibility in the face of a dangerous slide into passive nihilism and indifference. In the first half of the paper I argue that the attempt to forge a universal currency which would enable difference to circulate freely within contemporary human geography is flawed for three interrelated reasons. First, by working through a libidinal economy of negation it forces difference to conform to the Same. Specifically, difference is captured as so-many standard deviations from the Norm. Second, this apparatus of capture is predestined to yield a state of confusion, imprecision, and indistinction whic...

Deconstruction on the Move: From Libidinal Economy to Liminal Materialism

Essays in African land law

This volume represents the first sustained effort to relate Derrida's work to the Western philosophical tradition from Plato to Heidegger. Bringing together twelve essays by twelve leading Derridean philosophers and an important paper by Derrida previously unpublished in English, the collection retrieves the significance of deconstruction for philosophy.

Ralph Flores

Papers

Deconstruction and philosophy : the texts of Jacques Derrida