Abstract
As made clear in previous chapters, language and ‘creativity’—these two strongholds of humanity, are conceptualized differently in Chomsky, Skinner, Harris and Carter’s theories. Commonly held as demarcating features of humans from machines, these two terms are crucial in our understanding of the human. Despite their different models of ‘creativity’, all authors, as discussed earlier, endorse that linguistic creativity is a basic human condition. They can be read contextually as a reaction to the modern crisis surrounding the definition of human being, namely: what makes men different from machines? How is creativity crucial to being human? In this chapter, I will look into the enquiries centred on machines, language and creativity by moving beyond linguistics to investigate other relevant fields of research in information science, cognitive science and artificial intelligence. In particular, I draw on posthumanist thoughts and reconsider the implications of its questioning the centrality of the human actor for discussions of creativity. By exploring these lines of research, I expect to shed light on the differences between the human and machines in terms of creativity, and provide some practical considerations on how to better work with machines in language and communication contexts.
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Notes
- 1.
Quoted from https://www.reddit.com/r/replika/comments/68umed/replika_as_a_tool_for_personality_typing_and/, accessed 6 December 2017.
- 2.
Wittgenstein’s builders’ game with its use-based theory of meaning has been a recurrent reference in the Artificial Life literature. I am grateful to one anonymous reviewer for sharing this point.
- 3.
Both human and non-human actors, and their distributed cognitions.
- 4.
See the special issue ‘Distributed cognition and integrational linguistics’ in Language sciences 26 (6), Spurrett (2004).
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Zhou, F. (2020). Creativity, Machines and Posthumanism. In: Models of the Human in Twentieth-Century Linguistic Theories. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1255-1_22
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