translation

Chapter Captain: Richard Belew - rik at cogsci.ucsd.edu

Parts: [ 1 2 3 4 5 6 ]

Changes to this chapter are available as an RSS Feed.

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Precis

First some context on where I think this chapter fits into the arguments of the larger book, CodeV1:

Lessig presents "translation" as a  key mechanism he recommends for bringing forward constitutional values into the modern age, "...finding a current reading of the original Constitution that preserves its original meaning in the present context."  Since its ability to remain consistent in the face of a changing world is an essential feature making the Law central to social life, a mechanism that allows our Constitution to adapt generally, and to technological innovations in particular, is certainly key.

The reason  Chapter 9 (or more precisely, the body of Lessig's larger legal theory  summarized in this chapter)  plays an essential role in Code is because, unlike the the physics describing our "real" world,  c-World obeys an artificial physics defined by maleable code.  This means that we are especially likely to find places where tacit assumptions underlying Constitutional laws are at odds with our modern life as it is increasingly lived in the c-World.  The deconstruction of "home" as a physical location and "privacy" as a personal value arising in Olmstead and then Katz is only going to get worse.  As Stewart Bratcher puts it:

... it is likely that at least part of what have traditionally been thought of as constitutional rights are not actually rights at all, but rather provide only additional liberties because of the frictions of real space technology. These "frictions" do not become constitutional principles, and code will likely be a mechanism that removes this friction from technology.

The 'translation' metaphor

Lessig selects the term "translation"  in analogy to the process of translating from a natural language document in one language to some foreign.  I'm not sure this analogy entirely works for me (the metaphor of keeping a piano tuned as it is moved from one concert hall to another is also provacative!) and Lessig seems to have some problems with this analogy himself.  Certainly the process of constitutional interpretation is about moving from one natural language document (the Constitution) to a new document (the current court's opinion), but the fact that they are both in the same language (English) certainly changes important features?  The fact that for some translations the foreign language translation is roughly contemporaneous with the original work makes at least  these modern translations easier in this respect?  Conversely, translation of ancient documents into their modern vernacular seems especially relevant to the problem of historical interpretation that must be part of translation.  But the key feature of real translations is that they are clearly creative works themselves. (The fact that the intellectual property of the translation is itself protectable via copyright law is a lovely self-referential aspect in this context:)  It seems to me that imaginative creativity similar to that we value in foreign language translators would be criticized in a judicial ruling?

In any case, an important CodeV1 to CodeV2 update from the point of view of cognitive linguistics might be to connect notions of linguistic translation to the more modern conversation on the "framing" of political opinions by modern spin masters.   Certainly the "frame of mind" of the translator, as well as that of the original author and of potential, subsequent readers (in the new language, or in the new times) all must be considered when we analyze the translation process.  (I am struck how the same verb "frame" is used with respect to constitutional language construction and modern political discourse!) The role the Frank Luntz has played in helping to shape the current neo-conservative success is widely reported. Together with George Lakoff's metaphor theoretic analyses of framing (c.f.  "Don't Think of an Elephant! "), these show how sophisticated and politically relevant metaphor analysis has become, and largely since the first edition of Code.

Connections to other parts of Code

There are a number of references this chapter makes to other places in Code I have tried to enumerate them below, because I think this might help provide good "thread heads" for discussion about the relation between this chapter and others.

• Chapter2: the governmentSearchWorm example is a good, concrete hypothetical to me.  As an investigator in machine learning, and with recent examples like the data mining of airline passenger data in search of terrorists as examples, I am quite confident no such technology will ever be demonstrated to have no false positives. The fact that any governmentSearchWorm would always run a risk of unreasonably involving innocent individuals makes the ideal case entirely unrealistic for me, but perhaps that's asking too much of hypotheticals?
• Definition of c-World?
• "As I argue in Part 4 [constitutional change is costly..."
• "I return to [how to embrace constitutional values] in chapter 15..."

Hint to organizers: I would like to get higher "resolution" to these hyperlinks; that's what makes hypermedia great!

Hint to organizers:   Maybe we can also create a set of "inverted" hyperlinks, too: where does Chapter9 arise in other chapters?

Connections to modern politics

Several current political questions have occurred to me in response to issues raised  by this chapter that perhaps might of interest to participants on this Wiki:

1. What are the cases relevant to Code most likely to reach the Supreme Court in the next couple of decades?
2. How/can we anticipate  members of the current Supreme Court opinions' on these issues?
   
3. What would be good questions to ask of the many upcoming Supreme Court nominees coming down the pike?

(If these discussions interest you, but are viewed as tangential to the CodeV2 rewrite, we can take them elsewhere.) 

Your opinions?

These are simply my primary reactions to the chapter. The organizers of this re-writing event have stated general goals for it elsewhere. I am most certainly not a legal scholar, and so feel at a real disadvantage with respect to what I take to be a chapter primarily focused on legal theory.  So let me know what you think.   As  Bratcher says:

Little has been written on the relationship between existing constitutional theories and how they will be able to incorporate or fail to incorporate cyberspace and technological change into the analysis. The work of Professor Lessig is an important exception to that general lack of scholarship.... As our lives increasingly shift toward the cyberworld, it can be expected that other constitutional scholars will follow Lessig in exploring the relationship between the constitution and cyberspace.

If we're successful, perhaps we can extend the contribution made by the original chapter.

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About me

I consider myself primarily a computer scientist,  now part of the Cognitive Science department at UC San Diego. My primary research focus is "adaptive knowledge representation," so I study good old-fashioned (deductive) artificial intelligence knowledge representation techniques, modern (inductive) machine learning  techniques, and especially how the benefits of both representations might be combined.  I apply these techniques to large corpora of natural language, e.g., to build search engines, and so like all students of language have interest in changing notions of what  words "mean."  I've therefore always been interested in other social systems that I think also embody adaptive knowledge representation. The process of Science is one, I think financial accounting systems might be a second, but the process of the Law is certainly a third.  I'm most engageed by Code's descriptions of OpenSource as a transformational dynamic that (i'm convinced) will take software development to unprecident scales.  My current interest is in how these mechanisms interact with genomic-enabled biology, from the "public" Human Genome project through highly proprietary BigPharma.  I agreed to captain this chapter because the process of constitutional change seems close to the core of how representation in a Common Law tradition adapts itself.