Angus Fletcher
speaker
2,582 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 8 Jul
Angus Fletcher’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
A branch of that is known as hermeneutics or interpretation.
Computers can interpret texts.
Another way of thinking about interpretation is it's translating from one language to another, so translating from binary into ASCII or something like that.
Ever since the early 20th century, we were taught to apply interpretation to books.
And we were taught is that books are made of words.
Those words have meanings.
You interpret those meanings to develop themes.
The person who developed this, his name is I.A.
Richards.
He was a professor at Cambridge, then at Harvard.
He developed something called close reading.
So if you ever took a class, you spent a lot of time staring at a poem and were told to come up with like the symbolic structure of it or something like that.
So that's how we're taught to read and that's how a computer reads.
And when you read that way, first of all, you're always anxious because you think that there's got to be a right answer that you're missing and the teacher's going to tell you that you're doing it wrong and so on and so forth.
Because anytime you're in a logical system, there's always a true answer.
That's how logic works.
And I.A.
Richards famously said that this will finally solve the problem of what literature means.
We'll develop this and there will be no more discussions.
But when you're a child, how do you read literature?
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