||We too have been given language, spoken and written, by others than ours

Some say that what makes the difference between human and machine writing—and what taints the latter—is that machines do not think, or intend, or mean. Their compositions, allowing that they do compose, are therefore not minded or mindful, and it is this lack that gives them their taint, as properly it should. Women’s writing is not different from men’s in this way, which is why those who took it to be tainted were illegitimately prejudiced; the prejudice about machine writing is by contrast accurately reflective of a real difference between it and writing done by human beings. This line is immediately plausible, but it depends upon, or is at least inextricably intertwined with, a high evaluation of the place of thought in human composition, oral and written, an evaluation difficult to defend in the face of ordinary empirical observation about how speech and writing happen among us. fromGhosts and Dolls[The Lamp]posted bychavenetat 12:22 AM -14 comments