(It is hard to be - or become - number one in search engine optimization, and it is even harder to stay there because everyone is trying to knock you off the top.)
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Organic Search - SEO - on markets in Sweden, Europe, North - South AMERICA, Asia and Africa.
[International] Search Engine Optimization as self-assertion at any price, ultimately with life as a stake - often through blowing one's own trumpet... As von Clausewitz wrote: "Do not try to inform and enlighten me that you are not interested to be the leader and shine, whether in war or at the war academy, nor elsewhere."
We are elaborating whether reason - in coalition with others, or isolation as a source of entrepreneurial activity - using individual talent and intuition - is the most fruitful? The consummate philosopher David Hume stated: "'tis not reason, which carries the prize, but concinnity and eloquence." Both creative SEO avenues offer peer review screening of a half-baked text.
Reason is more efficient in evaluating good arguments than in producing them, and reason is first and foremost a social competence. However, reason can bring intellectual benefits as the case of science well illustrates, by and through interaction with others. Reason is not a superpower implausibly grafted onto an animal mind; it is, rather, a well-integrated component of the extraordinarily developed mind that characterizes the human animal.
Alas, Descartes justified his rejection of everything he had learned from others by expressing a general disdain for collective achievements. The best work, he maintained, is made by a single master. What one may learn from books, he considered, “is not as close to the truth, composed as it is of the opinions of many different people, as the simple reasoning that any man of good sense can produce about things in his purview”.
Why did Descartes decide to trust only his own mind? Did he believe himself to be endowed with unique reasoning capabilities? On the contrary, he maintained that “the power of judging correctly and of distinguishing the true from the false (which is properly what is called good sense or reason) is naturally equal in all men”. But if we humans are all endowed with this power of distinguishing truth from falsity, how is it that we disagree so much on what is true?
Martin Luther stated that “Reason is by nature a harmful whore. But she shall not harm me, if only I resist her. See to it that you hold reason in check and do not follow her beautiful cogitations. Throw dirt in her face and make her ugly.” In another context, the same Luther described reason, much more conventionally, as “the inventor and mentor of all the arts, medicines, laws, and of whatever wisdom, power, virtue, and glory men possess in this life” and as “the essential difference by which man is distinguished from the animals and other things”.
Perhaps Luther avoided a reason discussion for religious propaganda objectives, but still, if we were to put reason on trial, both the prosecution and the defense could make an extraordinary case. The defense would argue that humans err by not reasoning enough. The prosecution would argue that they err by reasoning too much. The defense and the prosecution could also produce compelling narratives to bolster their case. Galileo is supposed to have declared after looking through his telescope, "In the sciences, the authority of a thousand is not worth as much as the humble reasoning of a single individual." A guiding imperative here is valuing the conflicting insights arising from the reasoning of many individuals approaching problems - and opportunities - from different vantage points. Hard truths about reason and SEO reasoning! Einstein, centuries later, got at the same idea when twenty-eight scholars contributed essays to a 1931 book titled "A Hundred Authors Against Einstein" that declared his theory of general relativity wrong. He is supposed to have replied that if he was wrong, then one author with conclusine evidence to disprove the theory would have been sufficient. SEO - Search Engine Optimization - has in itself become like general relativity: anyone who claims to fully understand it doesn't. How do these theories, this corpora, on reasoning affect our design of an optimal international SEO - Search Engine Optimization - structure? "A scientist must go where the evidence leads," the old adage runs. There is humility in following the evidence, and it frees you from the preconceptions that can cloud observations and insight. Much the same can be said for adulthood, a good definition of which might be "the point at which you have gathered enough experience that your models have a high success rate in forecasting reality". Let go of prejudices. Wield William of Occam's razor and seek the simplest explanation for Search Engine Optimization success: GREAT CONTENT / A TRUE NARRATIVE / FACTS / EXCITEMENT / EXPECTANCY / AUTHENTICITY / NATURAL LANGUAGE / MERGE - SYNTAX-DRIVEN WORDCHAIN STIMULUS. Be willing to abandon SEO models that fail, which some inevitably do when they collide with our imperfect grasp of facts and the laws of nature. Nature always wins; a nature red in tooth and claw. In truth, most Search Engine Optimization successes on the Net stem from a confluence of multiple causes. No city or company has ever erected a statue to a critic, albeit, I do not hesitate to advice against "techies" coming out of their Ivory Towers with computer models of ever more complexity - at times "drivelling idiocy and feculent garbage" - often ratten sincere SEO efforts on the Net. They are still using a few words. To call them ideas is an exaggeration. They are impulses masquerading as a philosophy. At times they are piling flimsy evidence on dubious argument to produce technologically correct hokum. The critic has "a duty" to tell the truth. Salvaging truth is the most vital - and criticism is not a noble calling, however, Boutique Ekman prefers to set about rigorously pursuing evidence rather than likes. Evidence doesn't care about approval. This applies to all evidence. The data we have on Search Engine Optimization is substantial and from it we can infer many things. Our mountains of metadata - or megadata - about which SEO approches have worked in the past is crucial for our Wordsmith / Draughtsman assignments on behalf of clients: our raison d'etre - "Reason for Being". "Keep safe the bridges of dialogue/and take care to understand and keep/the different reasons and languages of your children," as a Spanish poet wrote a long time ago. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google, were and are linguists - not computer hacks initially. Therein lies the truthfulness and success of Google. However, present search engines are models of the past - not even of the absolut present, nor of the future. The climate of intellectual opinion during the post-internet boom years of the 1990s also have to be taken into account. The Silicon Valley intelligentsia, disillusioned by the bust and its aftermath, contemptuous of the system which had given rise to it and which condemned many brilliant web developers to a grey life and unemployment, during which Google and its peer competitors, if any - arrogant in their own powers of reason - fell easy prey to their own propaganda. In power they followed it through ruthlessly to its logical conclusion - with strong hearts schooled in adversity. Google search is undoubtedly one of the best business models of all time, providing Alphabet with whopping profit margins. Might Generative AI shift the overall picture? It provides answers, not links, hence less granularity for advertisers. Could Google's search business turn from a blessing to a curse? Will Generative AI sustain enhanced innovation - making good products better? Will exercise of raw Google power sustain its model - or will its power be in decline? How can we come to possess a complete, applicable, and accurate knowledge about the future, sort of looking-around-the-corner knowledge? We have dealt with a knowledge of things and people as they were at a given moment of time. The phenomena of life which appear in the formal encyclopedias can be regarded as frozen in mid-passage. The immense accumulation of data globally as we have seen on the internet - on an ever increasing scale - would be virtually all strategic web- and commercial intelligence required were it not for the element of motion in human events. The obvious fact is that practically nothing known to man stands completely still, and that the most important characteristic of man's struggle for existence is the fact of change. Knowledge devised to fit the requirements of political / digital / commercial strategy must everlastingly take into account this fact of change. A freedom fighter in Afghanistan may turn into a rebel / a terrorist, a king may have left this earth but simultaneously someone else arises to the reign. As a matter of fact, the direction of change is sometimes more important to know about than the absolutes of quantity, extent, effect, et cetera. This matter of direction is one of highest significance. Outside the realm of politics, things change as [funda-mentally]; contemplate the demises of Kodak, Polaroid, Motorola, Nokia. Some of the things we try to understand are infinitely complex – they are not understandable even in principle. We tolerate [this] complexity by failing to recognize it. That is the illusion of understanding. Rather than asking how we tolerate complexity, we will ask how to manage it. Planned obsolescence is one means of managing change. Firms view changes as a response to an expected and reasoned demand calculation. “In summe, in what matter soever, there is place for addition and subtraction, there is place for Reason; and where these have no place, there Reason has nothing at all to do," as Thomas Hobbes formulated it in Leviathan. What is an excellent product or service today, is probably not a similar ditto tomorrow. In times of change learners inherit the earth; the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists. Practical people - the many; hoi pollo - focus on the next moment and leave the centuries to dreamers, consciously incapable of anticipating the future. If we could learn from history - some say - what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us. Can we demonstrate, perhaps, that the future will conform to the past, or at least offer some evidence that it will probably do so? No, but we can conclude that the past is a valuable guide to the future. Why can one expect certain events to be followed by certain other events, but reply to this only by stating that they have generally been found to do so? Can some evidence be provided for the principle that the future will resemble the past, or can we just offer but evidence that it had done so in the past? Expectations and predictions are a matter of habit, and extrapolating from what has been observed is something that we are sensibly prone to do. However, in general, even reasonable and dialectic people are incapable of anticipating with gusto and presto a complex future. The fact is that it is more a matter of instinct than of logic that we use the past as a guide to the future. It is even fortunate for us that we are naturally inclined to extrapolate from experience - rather than using abstract reasoning - because our lives depend on our ability to do so; though, as the saying goes, "The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there." In the context of forecasting and predictability, we might even be dramatically compelled to quote Blaise Pascal: "It is not certain that we shall see tomorrow; but it is certainly possible that we shall not." Most people would rather die than think and plan ahead. In fact they do. "Prediction is difficult, especially about the future," as the nuclear physicist Niels Bohr formulated it. The idea of the future being different from the present is so repugnant to our conventional modes of thought and behaviour that we, most of us, offer a great resistance to acting on it in practice. Research show that the average expert, on the basis of a 20-year forecasting tournament, is "roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee". But the future can indeed be foreseen, at least in the near term. And, crucially, prophecy is not a divine gift, but a skill that can be practised and improved. Excellent forecasters are clever, on average, but by no means geniuses. More important than sheer intelligence is mental attitude. Humility in the face of a complex world makes excellent forecasters subtle thinkers. Excellent forecasters do have a healthy appetite for information, a willingness to revisit their predictions in light of new information, and the ability to synthesize material from sources with very different outlooks on the world. They think in fine gradations. Excellent forecasters have a "growth mindset": a mix of determination, self-reflection and willingness to learn from one's mistakes. The best forecasters are less interested in whether they are right or wrong than in why they are right or wrong. They are always looking for ways to improve their performance. In other words, prediction is not only possible, it is teachable. In another sense our historical intuition and broad assessment of search engines might be more reliable than any Google strategist. In light of our reasoning above, we would certainly admonish our clients to look at, e.g., Perplexity, Duckduckgo, Privacywall, Qwant, Yahoo, Bing, et al. They offer some startling advantages, for sure. When we search for "search engine optimization + country" the following picture emerges: ***** https://www.bing.com/search?q=international+search+engine+optimization+europe&qs=n&form=QBRE&sp=-1&ghc=1&lq=0&pq=international+search+engine+optimization+europe&sc=10-47&sk=&cvid=78012929635E4DFB9BF34DCA904A249B&ghsh=0&ghacc=0&ghpl= "international search engine optimization europe" - on www.bing.com will rank www.wordchain.online and www.boutique-ekman.com as No 1, 4 & 11. ***** https://search.yahoo.com/search?p=international+search+engine+optimization+usa&fr=yfp-t-s&fr2=p%3Afp%2Cm%3Asa%2Cct%3Ahistory%2Ckt%3Anone&ei=UTF-8&fp=1&mkr=13 "international search engine optimization usa" - on www.yahoo.com will rank www.wordchain.online and www.boutique-ekman.com as No 1, 2 & 14. ***** https://duckduckgo.com/?q=international+search+engine+optimization+africa&t=h_&ia=web "international search engine optimization africa" on www.duckduckgo.com will rank www.wordchain.online and www.boutique-ekman.com as No 1 & 2. ***** https://www.qwant.com/?q=international+search+engine+optimization+sweden&t=web "international search engine optimization sweden" on www.qwant.com will rank www.wordchain.online and www.boutique-ekman.com as No 1 & 2. ***** https://www.privacywall.org/search/secure?q=international+search+engine+optimization+asia "international search engine optimization asia" on www.privacywall.org will rank www.wordchain.online and www.boutique-ekman.com as No 1 & 2. ***** https://www.google.com/search?q=international+search+engine+optimization+sweden+europe+asia+africa+usa+china&oq=&aqs=chrome.4.35i39i362l8.2687409j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 "international search engine optimization sweden europe asia africa usa china" on www.google.com will rank www.wordchain.online as No 1. ***** Do we need to make a great Lamento to any bewildered Cauchemar des coalitions of Search Engine Optimization firms in a Pacto de silentio? I do not think so! Were history confined to the mechanical repetition of the past, no transformation would ever have occurred. Should we look to the past to illuminate the present, rather than into the future? In George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-four," the Party proclaimed that "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past". Just possibly, extraordinary times could provide the jolt the world needs to be bolder. You need to apply electric-shock treatment to the prevailing mindset. We have to own the future, not try to reheat the past. "Who wants to drive a car looking at [the] rear-view mirror?" Markets look forward. Search Engine Optimization is about tomorrow. We are not, however, tossing coins or applying a stochastic approach to the future ; au contraire. Plato, the sovereign of all times and the author of around 35 philosophical dialogues, combines analytical skills with great powers of reasoning to produce a well-structured solution that deals emphatically with counter-arguments. The Academy of his produced many influential Sophists - always keen to describe and reject clever but empty reasoning. In Plato's allegory of the cave, the shadows are the prisoners' reality, but are not accurate representations of the real world. The shadows represent the fragment of reality that we can normally perceive through our senses, while the objects under the sun represent the true forms of objects that we can only perceive through reason. It explores the theme of belief versus knowledge.
The two words “reasoning” and “inference” are often treated as synonyms. We might state that reasoning is only one way of performing inferences, and not such a reliable way at that. We might pose a question: Is this process – attending to reasons – the only way to pursue the goal of extracting new information from information that we already possess? Of course not! After all, even animals form expectations about the future. Their life depends on these expectations being on the whole correct. Since the future cannot be perceived, it is through inference that animals must form expectations. It is quite implausible, however, that, in so doing, animals attend to reasons. Reason has recently entered the world of politics on a great scale - perhaps not for the first time since Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and the latter's namesake J. Stuart Mill. As long as the idea of a political spectrum has existed, there have been complaints that a single axis is inadequate to reflect the complexity of multifaceted civic matters. In Israel - the Holy Land and the Middle East's only democracy - the Supreme Court ruled that the Minister of Interior acted "in an unreasonable way" regarding the construction of a football stadium. Legal experts cite the case as one of the earliest examples of the court's nullifying a government decision on the grounds of "reasonableness". The current Prime Minister (2024) is set to pass an amendment which would give the government immunity from the reasonable standard. The new amendment - if enacted - contravenes the very principle of democracy: the separation of executive and judicial powers. Reasonableness, argues a law professor at the Hebrew University, is not a legal standard: it is "a linguistic construct invented by the court." Israel meanwhile lurches closer to constitutional chaos, perhaps interrupted only by missile strikes that shatter language, as well as lives and buildings. Also in America there has been a pivot towards reasonableness. In the "Chevron Case," the U.S. Supreme Court upheld as reasonable a Reagan administration regulation that interpreted the Clean Air Act to allow the Environmental Protection Agency to define the term "stationary source" to mean whole industrial plants. This nearly 40-year-old precedent instructs judges to defer to government-agency interpretations of ambiguous laws as long as their readings are reasonable. To further entangle both Israel and the United States in this web of words and actions, the U.S. State Department recently - May 2024 - reported and declared it is "reasonable to assess" that weapons used by Israel in Gaza have been "inconsistent" with its human-rights-law obligations or other practices to reduce civilian harm. In Voltaire's "Candide" the protagonist confesses, "there is reason to complain a little of what passeth in our world; the Father possess all, and the people nothing. It is a masterpiece of reason and justice." The sarcasm shines through. In Dante's "Inferno" the main character speaks of: "Languages diverse, horrible dialects, Accents of anger, words of agony, Voices high and hoarse, For those who were condemned for their lust, Who followed their personal passion instead of reason." If they - linguistic / Search Engine Optimization researchers - consider themselves a seperate, superior species hiding in the abnormal evolutionary environment that the internet trenches provide, we might return to Plato for clarifying SEO strides: "Strictly a Science;" also "an Art." -Whately's Elements of Logic. Indeed ought we not to regard all Art as applied Science; unless we are willing, with "the multitude," to consider Art as "guessing and aiming well?" The scientific method encourages reasonable caution. Which path will we choose? We need to employ our powers of observation and deduction to their fullest extent in order to discern it. Science is like a detective story; in our case a word detective story. We collect a trove of confounding data - structurally cohesive. Our general inference may seem outlandish. We start to reason from the mystery end of the trench rather than the familiar-analogues end. Whole new vistas of exploration open before us. We might use an artificial-intelligence approach called "word embedding" to assess the linguistic environment. However, if there was such a thing as just following the rules ... then everyone would write the best content and top all search engines. We do apply an algorithm to detect the presence of relevant words - and we undertake our own detective work. We broaden the story to touch on things that people cannot escape, like their bodies and circumstances. Hermeneutics is the science of inquiring into the nature of meaning as we find it in literary texts. According to Plato there is a Form - or Idea - for every single linguistic term. There are many features of things that resemble each other. It is implausible to claim that the only way to account for these resemblances is that human beings use the same words to name them. In general and overall, our Search Engine Optimization vision set out within our website / webtext is often "more desirable than to be hoped for". Our AI - Artificial Intelligence - approach, best described as stylometry, involves tracking the frequency and distribution of particular words, phrases and grammatical quirks; at best an inexact science. Terminology, linguistics, semantics, heuristics, morphology, philology, etymology, et cetera. The latter two - Philology, the science of language and all aspects of human speech; Etymology, the science of the origin and evolution of a word's semantic meaning across time, including its constituent morphemes and phonemes - often play a vital, even crucial, role in our recent successful international search engine optimization assignments. Many linguistic shifts make for an all-encompassing confusion. Samuel Johnson wrote that at any given moment, "some words are budding, and some falling away ... a whole life cannot be spent upon syntax and etymology, and ... even a whole life would not be sufficient". Well, it is easy for a man to state that given his consummate writing and vast knowledge, unsurpassed of his time - and not as an active Head of a Search Engine Optimization team. Neglecting historical evolution comes with a price rather than a prize, and the inherent codes and meanings come not only from the present-day movers and shakers but also from those from the cover of Time. As our struggles demonstrate, the full import of a bit of word-changing research can take many years to become clear. One of the hallmarks of a lot of superior SEO work is patience. Our SEO model is not [necessarily] competing with other dittos; it is completing. As much as the three Abrahamic religions lay claim to one saviour, many SEO professionals claim that construing and implementing backlinks is the thing, others that content is all-mighty. As professionals we regularly make high-stakes decisions in non-routine circumstances. We have faith in an "iterative design" - due to panta rhei; things are evolving over time. Search Engine Optimization is all about the people, and those people - talented, knowledgeable, experienced - can not be manufactured. We do not view people as good or bad, but as "probability distributions" around a mean - woven thoroughly by evolution. Human brains are intricately constructed, the process of millions of years of natural selection. The advances in computation has provided us with a new way of thinking about knowledge. The appearance of competence should never become more important than the evidence of it. The desire to grab attention seems to incentivize stylistic sin. Key-board warriors might embellish a product or service into something more powerful than accurate: popular and attractive. Here we meet a porous line between fact and opinion. Academia is out of the window. The rubber meets the road, for good or ill. Worth buying or trying; but not worth going to buy or try. Are we being blown out of our socks? The human use of human beings? With any large - or important - text one needs to peruse the percolating message thoroughly. A joint, deliberate and collaborative pursuit of context can accomplish the previously unaccomplished. The words, the sentence, the screen display can be the same but alter the emphasis - lean a little harder on this word, push a little on that one - and the message is transformed. Our best evaluators of Search Engine Optimization usually, often, almost always leave behind an impeccable progeny that will top international search engines. In this world - by our own evolving definitions - a large dose of rationality is needed, albeit it does not exist. In this world of ours, scepticism is a form of wisdom. When it comes to Search Engine Optimization, we always focus on maximizing strengths rather than fixing weaknesses - and we get paid for our experience. Many SEO constructs are often plausible rather than proven - advanced in an exuberant prose style, often outstripping evidence, and setting new records in the noble sport of substituting dialectics for sophistry. Boutique Ekman not only closes gaps in Search Engine Optimization / SEO - we seal them. Big Data promises massive statistical analyses, though, the richer your database is might also mean there are more ways there are to be mislead by the data. Without the right analytical methods - and the experience, talent, grit - more data just gives a more precise estimate of the wrong thing. Advances in Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning often trigger real worries about human obsolescence. Yet progress has proved slow, mainly because it is often hard to make sense of records. Generative AI contribute to the growing mountain of shallow content with the same fervour as earlier AI models, churning out words, battling each other to produce lacklustre text. This might imply typing rather than writing. It is clear that "the whole comprises the parts, and the parts compose the whole" - as much as Jack London formulated this: "The strength of the wolf is the pack, and the strength of the pack is the wolf." Search Engine Optimization is only as effective as its dissemination... Even the best-designed disseminative system - like Google - cannot persuade busy people to observe rankings - and content - unless it affects the decisions they are about to make. Who cares about our SEO-efforts and endeavours, honestly? Your experiences are the work of nerve cells. You are feelings, chains of reasoning, good and less good habits, anxieties, moods, and more. Our research consistently shows that giving a reason when you ask for something makes it 90% more likely for a person to say yes - even when the reason you give is not completely logical or valid. The human brain gets primed to say yes when a request is immediately followed up by some reasoning. Interesting! Giving a reason - and clarity - and you have a very persuasive act. However, never forget, in Search Engine Optimization constructs - any hyperbole is unnecessary. There are obvious differences, although, between ourselves and others. In the use of data on large cohorts of people, the benefits of stratification is clear. A great many SEO efforts can be likened to an iceberg. It is mostly underwater. Its full size is unknown. We might describe it - as Lenin described his ditto political one (with some reservation and moderation): "A state of partial war. It involves the elastic and opportunistic use of a wide variety of tactics, including deception, concealed penetration, subversion, and psychological warfare." Camouflage is the by-product of an evolutionary arms race between groups. How good are camouflage tactics? In literature a character you do not see can make a bigger impression than those you do. Anton Chekhov was an expert in devising this kind of absentee. George Bernard Shaw stated: "Some people see things as they are and say, 'Why?' I dream of things that never were and say, 'Why not?'" We should be cautious to build an alternative version of reality, however, and be careful to separate fact from rumour or surmise, but... In truth, the term premium content is a nebulous thing. AI / SEO experts are often intentionally opaque so as to gull clients into paying more for their [supposed] expertise. Using advanced terms is a form of "in-group signalling" - and, perhaps, "the curse of knowledge". Waves of innovation often create giants, however, some of the frenzy around AI may fizzle out and die down. Word choice matters intensely, and the brevity of the text is often inversely proportional to its significance. Odi et amo! When advising clients we operate "in behalf of" the companies - expressly for their benefit - rather than merely "on behalf of" them. We look at nature. We look at evolution. We might even investigate and apply proto-language from which a number of attested languages are believed to have descended by evolution. The progress from proto-languages to languages such as we speak today may have gone through a phase of fragmenting conventionalized verbal expressions or communicative gestures, as an utterance became divided into its component parts or a complex gesture into simpler significant gestures. This is a counterintuitive assumption since it is simpler to suppose that the separate words came first and their combination into a sentence followed later. We might argue that language does not just name things and the meaning (or lack of meaning) of things, but that all things and their attendant meanings derive from language. Things perceived and things thought, as well as the relationships among them, are determined by the words that language lends them. Meaning is a social convention, and the scope of a certain meaning is the projection of a collective imagination of that convention. Meaning happens in the act of using language, both in the utterances of the speaker and in the reception of those utterances by the listener. Humans' love of crispy things - rooted in an evolutionary preference since crunchiness is often an indicator of freshness - makes us balance texts to satisfy the intended target group. Understanding human evolution in detail is always at heart. No one builds a legacy by standing still - and people's feelings influence their behaviour, which is the holy grail of all SEO endeavours. It would be easy to say that "knowing your onions is important" and "persistence in the face of adversity is a virtue," however, the SEO longevity of a website escape its velocity. The mysterious threads that connect art and ideas to applications are a veritable Aladdin's cave for linguistic / Search Engine Optimization researchers. As Salmand Rushdie wrote: "Without art our ability to think, to see freshly, and to renew our world, wither and die." "Hurry up and wait" is a perennial maxim of military life. "What is important is seldom urgent," declared Dwight D. Eisenhower, adding, "and what is urgent is seldom important." Contradictionary and tellingly, yourself being neither an Army Commander nor a President, we admonish you as a corporate leader the right - indeed the duty - to implement the most effective, important and urgent SEO program for your company. Your competitors are street-smart, hungry and ruthless; do not look lethargic and lazy given that perspective. You will have to make a choice for the future: step up or step aside. Those SEO wordings cannot be true in the future that do not have causes for their being in the future. But you always assume that the Search Engine Optimization Intelligence people have some secret skill not available to ordinary mortals. A fraught game of linguistic chess has the SEO industry on the edge of its seat. You can't, however, in any circumstances substitute emotion for - or with - reason. You can't have a story that lack gravitas. You can't have an "empty jugglery of words", albeit rather being praised for using words that "still in the future shine like stars". We might call this "the struggle of narrative itself against the constraints of the rules of evidence, which seek to arrest its flow and blunt its force". It would be a mistake to berate ourselves for not being ideal casual reasoners. Think about what it would take to make correct casual inferences in every situation. You would need to know everything about what the universe is like and you would need complete knowledge about how things change. Because the world is complex and because there are so many ways that things change, both kinds of knowledge are guaranteed to be far from perfect: incomplete, uncertain, and imprecise. Much of the functionality of the human brain is still a total mystery due to its complexity. For inquiring, for reflecting, for reasoning, for demonstrating, language is obviously the essential tool. As SEO creators and strategists we are Instigators of Change, arousing - or even fomenting - an alteration of perspective. Copying general advice becomes a paradox captured in the skewed symmetry amongst technical SEO experts. Better, Fallentis semita vitae - "live by keeping out of rivals' ways" - remaining singular combined with uniqueness on a secluded journey. There is no escaping the fact that some of our SEO predictions have proved spookily accurate - following an instinctively semantic course rather than a purely grammatically dogmatic ditto. We take a plain approach to a subject far too often wreathed in language that seems to obscure - rather than to demonstrate - the truth; however, any reputational expectations must be viewed in a contemporary context. Using our modus operandi and ditto modus vivendi give Boutique-Ekman the opportunity to claim - with pictorial evidence - that our model is successful. This without hyperbole, albeit with dogmatic tone and gravitas. Contemplate the performance hence and to date, and the enormous potential for the future. Tortuous semantics and/or torturous verbiage repeated verbatim ad nauseam. Separating cause and effect presents perennial problems when assessing superior and impeccably formulated SEO, although, precise, vivid prose is seldom a "pie in the sky". "ALLS' WELL THAT ENDS WELL."
Alas, Descartes justified his rejection of everything he had learned from others by expressing a general disdain for collective achievements. The best work, he maintained, is made by a single master. What one may learn from books, he considered, “is not as close to the truth, composed as it is of the opinions of many different people, as the simple reasoning that any man of good sense can produce about things in his purview”.
Why did Descartes decide to trust only his own mind? Did he believe himself to be endowed with unique reasoning capabilities? On the contrary, he maintained that “the power of judging correctly and of distinguishing the true from the false (which is properly what is called good sense or reason) is naturally equal in all men”. But if we humans are all endowed with this power of distinguishing truth from falsity, how is it that we disagree so much on what is true?
Martin Luther stated that “Reason is by nature a harmful whore. But she shall not harm me, if only I resist her. See to it that you hold reason in check and do not follow her beautiful cogitations. Throw dirt in her face and make her ugly.” In another context, the same Luther described reason, much more conventionally, as “the inventor and mentor of all the arts, medicines, laws, and of whatever wisdom, power, virtue, and glory men possess in this life” and as “the essential difference by which man is distinguished from the animals and other things”.
Perhaps Luther avoided a reason discussion for religious propaganda objectives, but still, if we were to put reason on trial, both the prosecution and the defense could make an extraordinary case. The defense would argue that humans err by not reasoning enough. The prosecution would argue that they err by reasoning too much. The defense and the prosecution could also produce compelling narratives to bolster their case. Galileo is supposed to have declared after looking through his telescope, "In the sciences, the authority of a thousand is not worth as much as the humble reasoning of a single individual." A guiding imperative here is valuing the conflicting insights arising from the reasoning of many individuals approaching problems - and opportunities - from different vantage points. Hard truths about reason and SEO reasoning! Einstein, centuries later, got at the same idea when twenty-eight scholars contributed essays to a 1931 book titled "A Hundred Authors Against Einstein" that declared his theory of general relativity wrong. He is supposed to have replied that if he was wrong, then one author with conclusine evidence to disprove the theory would have been sufficient. SEO - Search Engine Optimization - has in itself become like general relativity: anyone who claims to fully understand it doesn't. How do these theories, this corpora, on reasoning affect our design of an optimal international SEO - Search Engine Optimization - structure? "A scientist must go where the evidence leads," the old adage runs. There is humility in following the evidence, and it frees you from the preconceptions that can cloud observations and insight. Much the same can be said for adulthood, a good definition of which might be "the point at which you have gathered enough experience that your models have a high success rate in forecasting reality". Let go of prejudices. Wield William of Occam's razor and seek the simplest explanation for Search Engine Optimization success: GREAT CONTENT / A TRUE NARRATIVE / FACTS / EXCITEMENT / EXPECTANCY / AUTHENTICITY / NATURAL LANGUAGE / MERGE - SYNTAX-DRIVEN WORDCHAIN STIMULUS. Be willing to abandon SEO models that fail, which some inevitably do when they collide with our imperfect grasp of facts and the laws of nature. Nature always wins; a nature red in tooth and claw. In truth, most Search Engine Optimization successes on the Net stem from a confluence of multiple causes. No city or company has ever erected a statue to a critic, albeit, I do not hesitate to advice against "techies" coming out of their Ivory Towers with computer models of ever more complexity - at times "drivelling idiocy and feculent garbage" - often ratten sincere SEO efforts on the Net. They are still using a few words. To call them ideas is an exaggeration. They are impulses masquerading as a philosophy. At times they are piling flimsy evidence on dubious argument to produce technologically correct hokum. The critic has "a duty" to tell the truth. Salvaging truth is the most vital - and criticism is not a noble calling, however, Boutique Ekman prefers to set about rigorously pursuing evidence rather than likes. Evidence doesn't care about approval. This applies to all evidence. The data we have on Search Engine Optimization is substantial and from it we can infer many things. Our mountains of metadata - or megadata - about which SEO approches have worked in the past is crucial for our Wordsmith / Draughtsman assignments on behalf of clients: our raison d'etre - "Reason for Being". "Keep safe the bridges of dialogue/and take care to understand and keep/the different reasons and languages of your children," as a Spanish poet wrote a long time ago. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google, were and are linguists - not computer hacks initially. Therein lies the truthfulness and success of Google. However, present search engines are models of the past - not even of the absolut present, nor of the future. The climate of intellectual opinion during the post-internet boom years of the 1990s also have to be taken into account. The Silicon Valley intelligentsia, disillusioned by the bust and its aftermath, contemptuous of the system which had given rise to it and which condemned many brilliant web developers to a grey life and unemployment, during which Google and its peer competitors, if any - arrogant in their own powers of reason - fell easy prey to their own propaganda. In power they followed it through ruthlessly to its logical conclusion - with strong hearts schooled in adversity. Google search is undoubtedly one of the best business models of all time, providing Alphabet with whopping profit margins. Might Generative AI shift the overall picture? It provides answers, not links, hence less granularity for advertisers. Could Google's search business turn from a blessing to a curse? Will Generative AI sustain enhanced innovation - making good products better? Will exercise of raw Google power sustain its model - or will its power be in decline? How can we come to possess a complete, applicable, and accurate knowledge about the future, sort of looking-around-the-corner knowledge? We have dealt with a knowledge of things and people as they were at a given moment of time. The phenomena of life which appear in the formal encyclopedias can be regarded as frozen in mid-passage. The immense accumulation of data globally as we have seen on the internet - on an ever increasing scale - would be virtually all strategic web- and commercial intelligence required were it not for the element of motion in human events. The obvious fact is that practically nothing known to man stands completely still, and that the most important characteristic of man's struggle for existence is the fact of change. Knowledge devised to fit the requirements of political / digital / commercial strategy must everlastingly take into account this fact of change. A freedom fighter in Afghanistan may turn into a rebel / a terrorist, a king may have left this earth but simultaneously someone else arises to the reign. As a matter of fact, the direction of change is sometimes more important to know about than the absolutes of quantity, extent, effect, et cetera. This matter of direction is one of highest significance. Outside the realm of politics, things change as [funda-mentally]; contemplate the demises of Kodak, Polaroid, Motorola, Nokia. Some of the things we try to understand are infinitely complex – they are not understandable even in principle. We tolerate [this] complexity by failing to recognize it. That is the illusion of understanding. Rather than asking how we tolerate complexity, we will ask how to manage it. Planned obsolescence is one means of managing change. Firms view changes as a response to an expected and reasoned demand calculation. “In summe, in what matter soever, there is place for addition and subtraction, there is place for Reason; and where these have no place, there Reason has nothing at all to do," as Thomas Hobbes formulated it in Leviathan. What is an excellent product or service today, is probably not a similar ditto tomorrow. In times of change learners inherit the earth; the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists. Practical people - the many; hoi pollo - focus on the next moment and leave the centuries to dreamers, consciously incapable of anticipating the future. If we could learn from history - some say - what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us. Can we demonstrate, perhaps, that the future will conform to the past, or at least offer some evidence that it will probably do so? No, but we can conclude that the past is a valuable guide to the future. Why can one expect certain events to be followed by certain other events, but reply to this only by stating that they have generally been found to do so? Can some evidence be provided for the principle that the future will resemble the past, or can we just offer but evidence that it had done so in the past? Expectations and predictions are a matter of habit, and extrapolating from what has been observed is something that we are sensibly prone to do. However, in general, even reasonable and dialectic people are incapable of anticipating with gusto and presto a complex future. The fact is that it is more a matter of instinct than of logic that we use the past as a guide to the future. It is even fortunate for us that we are naturally inclined to extrapolate from experience - rather than using abstract reasoning - because our lives depend on our ability to do so; though, as the saying goes, "The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there." In the context of forecasting and predictability, we might even be dramatically compelled to quote Blaise Pascal: "It is not certain that we shall see tomorrow; but it is certainly possible that we shall not." Most people would rather die than think and plan ahead. In fact they do. "Prediction is difficult, especially about the future," as the nuclear physicist Niels Bohr formulated it. The idea of the future being different from the present is so repugnant to our conventional modes of thought and behaviour that we, most of us, offer a great resistance to acting on it in practice. Research show that the average expert, on the basis of a 20-year forecasting tournament, is "roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee". But the future can indeed be foreseen, at least in the near term. And, crucially, prophecy is not a divine gift, but a skill that can be practised and improved. Excellent forecasters are clever, on average, but by no means geniuses. More important than sheer intelligence is mental attitude. Humility in the face of a complex world makes excellent forecasters subtle thinkers. Excellent forecasters do have a healthy appetite for information, a willingness to revisit their predictions in light of new information, and the ability to synthesize material from sources with very different outlooks on the world. They think in fine gradations. Excellent forecasters have a "growth mindset": a mix of determination, self-reflection and willingness to learn from one's mistakes. The best forecasters are less interested in whether they are right or wrong than in why they are right or wrong. They are always looking for ways to improve their performance. In other words, prediction is not only possible, it is teachable. In another sense our historical intuition and broad assessment of search engines might be more reliable than any Google strategist. In light of our reasoning above, we would certainly admonish our clients to look at, e.g., Perplexity, Duckduckgo, Privacywall, Qwant, Yahoo, Bing, et al. They offer some startling advantages, for sure. When we search for "search engine optimization + country" the following picture emerges: ***** https://www.bing.com/search?q=international+search+engine+optimization+europe&qs=n&form=QBRE&sp=-1&ghc=1&lq=0&pq=international+search+engine+optimization+europe&sc=10-47&sk=&cvid=78012929635E4DFB9BF34DCA904A249B&ghsh=0&ghacc=0&ghpl= "international search engine optimization europe" - on www.bing.com will rank www.wordchain.online and www.boutique-ekman.com as No 1, 4 & 11. ***** https://search.yahoo.com/search?p=international+search+engine+optimization+usa&fr=yfp-t-s&fr2=p%3Afp%2Cm%3Asa%2Cct%3Ahistory%2Ckt%3Anone&ei=UTF-8&fp=1&mkr=13 "international search engine optimization usa" - on www.yahoo.com will rank www.wordchain.online and www.boutique-ekman.com as No 1, 2 & 14. ***** https://duckduckgo.com/?q=international+search+engine+optimization+africa&t=h_&ia=web "international search engine optimization africa" on www.duckduckgo.com will rank www.wordchain.online and www.boutique-ekman.com as No 1 & 2. ***** https://www.qwant.com/?q=international+search+engine+optimization+sweden&t=web "international search engine optimization sweden" on www.qwant.com will rank www.wordchain.online and www.boutique-ekman.com as No 1 & 2. ***** https://www.privacywall.org/search/secure?q=international+search+engine+optimization+asia "international search engine optimization asia" on www.privacywall.org will rank www.wordchain.online and www.boutique-ekman.com as No 1 & 2. ***** https://www.google.com/search?q=international+search+engine+optimization+sweden+europe+asia+africa+usa+china&oq=&aqs=chrome.4.35i39i362l8.2687409j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 "international search engine optimization sweden europe asia africa usa china" on www.google.com will rank www.wordchain.online as No 1. ***** Do we need to make a great Lamento to any bewildered Cauchemar des coalitions of Search Engine Optimization firms in a Pacto de silentio? I do not think so! Were history confined to the mechanical repetition of the past, no transformation would ever have occurred. Should we look to the past to illuminate the present, rather than into the future? In George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-four," the Party proclaimed that "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past". Just possibly, extraordinary times could provide the jolt the world needs to be bolder. You need to apply electric-shock treatment to the prevailing mindset. We have to own the future, not try to reheat the past. "Who wants to drive a car looking at [the] rear-view mirror?" Markets look forward. Search Engine Optimization is about tomorrow. We are not, however, tossing coins or applying a stochastic approach to the future ; au contraire. Plato, the sovereign of all times and the author of around 35 philosophical dialogues, combines analytical skills with great powers of reasoning to produce a well-structured solution that deals emphatically with counter-arguments. The Academy of his produced many influential Sophists - always keen to describe and reject clever but empty reasoning. In Plato's allegory of the cave, the shadows are the prisoners' reality, but are not accurate representations of the real world. The shadows represent the fragment of reality that we can normally perceive through our senses, while the objects under the sun represent the true forms of objects that we can only perceive through reason. It explores the theme of belief versus knowledge.
The two words “reasoning” and “inference” are often treated as synonyms. We might state that reasoning is only one way of performing inferences, and not such a reliable way at that. We might pose a question: Is this process – attending to reasons – the only way to pursue the goal of extracting new information from information that we already possess? Of course not! After all, even animals form expectations about the future. Their life depends on these expectations being on the whole correct. Since the future cannot be perceived, it is through inference that animals must form expectations. It is quite implausible, however, that, in so doing, animals attend to reasons. Reason has recently entered the world of politics on a great scale - perhaps not for the first time since Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and the latter's namesake J. Stuart Mill. As long as the idea of a political spectrum has existed, there have been complaints that a single axis is inadequate to reflect the complexity of multifaceted civic matters. In Israel - the Holy Land and the Middle East's only democracy - the Supreme Court ruled that the Minister of Interior acted "in an unreasonable way" regarding the construction of a football stadium. Legal experts cite the case as one of the earliest examples of the court's nullifying a government decision on the grounds of "reasonableness". The current Prime Minister (2024) is set to pass an amendment which would give the government immunity from the reasonable standard. The new amendment - if enacted - contravenes the very principle of democracy: the separation of executive and judicial powers. Reasonableness, argues a law professor at the Hebrew University, is not a legal standard: it is "a linguistic construct invented by the court." Israel meanwhile lurches closer to constitutional chaos, perhaps interrupted only by missile strikes that shatter language, as well as lives and buildings. Also in America there has been a pivot towards reasonableness. In the "Chevron Case," the U.S. Supreme Court upheld as reasonable a Reagan administration regulation that interpreted the Clean Air Act to allow the Environmental Protection Agency to define the term "stationary source" to mean whole industrial plants. This nearly 40-year-old precedent instructs judges to defer to government-agency interpretations of ambiguous laws as long as their readings are reasonable. To further entangle both Israel and the United States in this web of words and actions, the U.S. State Department recently - May 2024 - reported and declared it is "reasonable to assess" that weapons used by Israel in Gaza have been "inconsistent" with its human-rights-law obligations or other practices to reduce civilian harm. In Voltaire's "Candide" the protagonist confesses, "there is reason to complain a little of what passeth in our world; the Father possess all, and the people nothing. It is a masterpiece of reason and justice." The sarcasm shines through. In Dante's "Inferno" the main character speaks of: "Languages diverse, horrible dialects, Accents of anger, words of agony, Voices high and hoarse, For those who were condemned for their lust, Who followed their personal passion instead of reason." If they - linguistic / Search Engine Optimization researchers - consider themselves a seperate, superior species hiding in the abnormal evolutionary environment that the internet trenches provide, we might return to Plato for clarifying SEO strides: "Strictly a Science;" also "an Art." -Whately's Elements of Logic. Indeed ought we not to regard all Art as applied Science; unless we are willing, with "the multitude," to consider Art as "guessing and aiming well?" The scientific method encourages reasonable caution. Which path will we choose? We need to employ our powers of observation and deduction to their fullest extent in order to discern it. Science is like a detective story; in our case a word detective story. We collect a trove of confounding data - structurally cohesive. Our general inference may seem outlandish. We start to reason from the mystery end of the trench rather than the familiar-analogues end. Whole new vistas of exploration open before us. We might use an artificial-intelligence approach called "word embedding" to assess the linguistic environment. However, if there was such a thing as just following the rules ... then everyone would write the best content and top all search engines. We do apply an algorithm to detect the presence of relevant words - and we undertake our own detective work. We broaden the story to touch on things that people cannot escape, like their bodies and circumstances. Hermeneutics is the science of inquiring into the nature of meaning as we find it in literary texts. According to Plato there is a Form - or Idea - for every single linguistic term. There are many features of things that resemble each other. It is implausible to claim that the only way to account for these resemblances is that human beings use the same words to name them. In general and overall, our Search Engine Optimization vision set out within our website / webtext is often "more desirable than to be hoped for". Our AI - Artificial Intelligence - approach, best described as stylometry, involves tracking the frequency and distribution of particular words, phrases and grammatical quirks; at best an inexact science. Terminology, linguistics, semantics, heuristics, morphology, philology, etymology, et cetera. The latter two - Philology, the science of language and all aspects of human speech; Etymology, the science of the origin and evolution of a word's semantic meaning across time, including its constituent morphemes and phonemes - often play a vital, even crucial, role in our recent successful international search engine optimization assignments. Many linguistic shifts make for an all-encompassing confusion. Samuel Johnson wrote that at any given moment, "some words are budding, and some falling away ... a whole life cannot be spent upon syntax and etymology, and ... even a whole life would not be sufficient". Well, it is easy for a man to state that given his consummate writing and vast knowledge, unsurpassed of his time - and not as an active Head of a Search Engine Optimization team. Neglecting historical evolution comes with a price rather than a prize, and the inherent codes and meanings come not only from the present-day movers and shakers but also from those from the cover of Time. As our struggles demonstrate, the full import of a bit of word-changing research can take many years to become clear. One of the hallmarks of a lot of superior SEO work is patience. Our SEO model is not [necessarily] competing with other dittos; it is completing. As much as the three Abrahamic religions lay claim to one saviour, many SEO professionals claim that construing and implementing backlinks is the thing, others that content is all-mighty. As professionals we regularly make high-stakes decisions in non-routine circumstances. We have faith in an "iterative design" - due to panta rhei; things are evolving over time. Search Engine Optimization is all about the people, and those people - talented, knowledgeable, experienced - can not be manufactured. We do not view people as good or bad, but as "probability distributions" around a mean - woven thoroughly by evolution. Human brains are intricately constructed, the process of millions of years of natural selection. The advances in computation has provided us with a new way of thinking about knowledge. The appearance of competence should never become more important than the evidence of it. The desire to grab attention seems to incentivize stylistic sin. Key-board warriors might embellish a product or service into something more powerful than accurate: popular and attractive. Here we meet a porous line between fact and opinion. Academia is out of the window. The rubber meets the road, for good or ill. Worth buying or trying; but not worth going to buy or try. Are we being blown out of our socks? The human use of human beings? With any large - or important - text one needs to peruse the percolating message thoroughly. A joint, deliberate and collaborative pursuit of context can accomplish the previously unaccomplished. The words, the sentence, the screen display can be the same but alter the emphasis - lean a little harder on this word, push a little on that one - and the message is transformed. Our best evaluators of Search Engine Optimization usually, often, almost always leave behind an impeccable progeny that will top international search engines. In this world - by our own evolving definitions - a large dose of rationality is needed, albeit it does not exist. In this world of ours, scepticism is a form of wisdom. When it comes to Search Engine Optimization, we always focus on maximizing strengths rather than fixing weaknesses - and we get paid for our experience. Many SEO constructs are often plausible rather than proven - advanced in an exuberant prose style, often outstripping evidence, and setting new records in the noble sport of substituting dialectics for sophistry. Boutique Ekman not only closes gaps in Search Engine Optimization / SEO - we seal them. Big Data promises massive statistical analyses, though, the richer your database is might also mean there are more ways there are to be mislead by the data. Without the right analytical methods - and the experience, talent, grit - more data just gives a more precise estimate of the wrong thing. Advances in Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning often trigger real worries about human obsolescence. Yet progress has proved slow, mainly because it is often hard to make sense of records. Generative AI contribute to the growing mountain of shallow content with the same fervour as earlier AI models, churning out words, battling each other to produce lacklustre text. This might imply typing rather than writing. It is clear that "the whole comprises the parts, and the parts compose the whole" - as much as Jack London formulated this: "The strength of the wolf is the pack, and the strength of the pack is the wolf." Search Engine Optimization is only as effective as its dissemination... Even the best-designed disseminative system - like Google - cannot persuade busy people to observe rankings - and content - unless it affects the decisions they are about to make. Who cares about our SEO-efforts and endeavours, honestly? Your experiences are the work of nerve cells. You are feelings, chains of reasoning, good and less good habits, anxieties, moods, and more. Our research consistently shows that giving a reason when you ask for something makes it 90% more likely for a person to say yes - even when the reason you give is not completely logical or valid. The human brain gets primed to say yes when a request is immediately followed up by some reasoning. Interesting! Giving a reason - and clarity - and you have a very persuasive act. However, never forget, in Search Engine Optimization constructs - any hyperbole is unnecessary. There are obvious differences, although, between ourselves and others. In the use of data on large cohorts of people, the benefits of stratification is clear. A great many SEO efforts can be likened to an iceberg. It is mostly underwater. Its full size is unknown. We might describe it - as Lenin described his ditto political one (with some reservation and moderation): "A state of partial war. It involves the elastic and opportunistic use of a wide variety of tactics, including deception, concealed penetration, subversion, and psychological warfare." Camouflage is the by-product of an evolutionary arms race between groups. How good are camouflage tactics? In literature a character you do not see can make a bigger impression than those you do. Anton Chekhov was an expert in devising this kind of absentee. George Bernard Shaw stated: "Some people see things as they are and say, 'Why?' I dream of things that never were and say, 'Why not?'" We should be cautious to build an alternative version of reality, however, and be careful to separate fact from rumour or surmise, but... In truth, the term premium content is a nebulous thing. AI / SEO experts are often intentionally opaque so as to gull clients into paying more for their [supposed] expertise. Using advanced terms is a form of "in-group signalling" - and, perhaps, "the curse of knowledge". Waves of innovation often create giants, however, some of the frenzy around AI may fizzle out and die down. Word choice matters intensely, and the brevity of the text is often inversely proportional to its significance. Odi et amo! When advising clients we operate "in behalf of" the companies - expressly for their benefit - rather than merely "on behalf of" them. We look at nature. We look at evolution. We might even investigate and apply proto-language from which a number of attested languages are believed to have descended by evolution. The progress from proto-languages to languages such as we speak today may have gone through a phase of fragmenting conventionalized verbal expressions or communicative gestures, as an utterance became divided into its component parts or a complex gesture into simpler significant gestures. This is a counterintuitive assumption since it is simpler to suppose that the separate words came first and their combination into a sentence followed later. We might argue that language does not just name things and the meaning (or lack of meaning) of things, but that all things and their attendant meanings derive from language. Things perceived and things thought, as well as the relationships among them, are determined by the words that language lends them. Meaning is a social convention, and the scope of a certain meaning is the projection of a collective imagination of that convention. Meaning happens in the act of using language, both in the utterances of the speaker and in the reception of those utterances by the listener. Humans' love of crispy things - rooted in an evolutionary preference since crunchiness is often an indicator of freshness - makes us balance texts to satisfy the intended target group. Understanding human evolution in detail is always at heart. No one builds a legacy by standing still - and people's feelings influence their behaviour, which is the holy grail of all SEO endeavours. It would be easy to say that "knowing your onions is important" and "persistence in the face of adversity is a virtue," however, the SEO longevity of a website escape its velocity. The mysterious threads that connect art and ideas to applications are a veritable Aladdin's cave for linguistic / Search Engine Optimization researchers. As Salmand Rushdie wrote: "Without art our ability to think, to see freshly, and to renew our world, wither and die." "Hurry up and wait" is a perennial maxim of military life. "What is important is seldom urgent," declared Dwight D. Eisenhower, adding, "and what is urgent is seldom important." Contradictionary and tellingly, yourself being neither an Army Commander nor a President, we admonish you as a corporate leader the right - indeed the duty - to implement the most effective, important and urgent SEO program for your company. Your competitors are street-smart, hungry and ruthless; do not look lethargic and lazy given that perspective. You will have to make a choice for the future: step up or step aside. Those SEO wordings cannot be true in the future that do not have causes for their being in the future. But you always assume that the Search Engine Optimization Intelligence people have some secret skill not available to ordinary mortals. A fraught game of linguistic chess has the SEO industry on the edge of its seat. You can't, however, in any circumstances substitute emotion for - or with - reason. You can't have a story that lack gravitas. You can't have an "empty jugglery of words", albeit rather being praised for using words that "still in the future shine like stars". We might call this "the struggle of narrative itself against the constraints of the rules of evidence, which seek to arrest its flow and blunt its force". It would be a mistake to berate ourselves for not being ideal casual reasoners. Think about what it would take to make correct casual inferences in every situation. You would need to know everything about what the universe is like and you would need complete knowledge about how things change. Because the world is complex and because there are so many ways that things change, both kinds of knowledge are guaranteed to be far from perfect: incomplete, uncertain, and imprecise. Much of the functionality of the human brain is still a total mystery due to its complexity. For inquiring, for reflecting, for reasoning, for demonstrating, language is obviously the essential tool. As SEO creators and strategists we are Instigators of Change, arousing - or even fomenting - an alteration of perspective. Copying general advice becomes a paradox captured in the skewed symmetry amongst technical SEO experts. Better, Fallentis semita vitae - "live by keeping out of rivals' ways" - remaining singular combined with uniqueness on a secluded journey. There is no escaping the fact that some of our SEO predictions have proved spookily accurate - following an instinctively semantic course rather than a purely grammatically dogmatic ditto. We take a plain approach to a subject far too often wreathed in language that seems to obscure - rather than to demonstrate - the truth; however, any reputational expectations must be viewed in a contemporary context. Using our modus operandi and ditto modus vivendi give Boutique-Ekman the opportunity to claim - with pictorial evidence - that our model is successful. This without hyperbole, albeit with dogmatic tone and gravitas. Contemplate the performance hence and to date, and the enormous potential for the future. Tortuous semantics and/or torturous verbiage repeated verbatim ad nauseam. Separating cause and effect presents perennial problems when assessing superior and impeccably formulated SEO, although, precise, vivid prose is seldom a "pie in the sky". "ALLS' WELL THAT ENDS WELL."
CG Ekman contemplating whether search engine optimization abstraction - i.e., building models - is a necessary prelude to SEO clarity. Theorists do not ask for words to explain equations; they ask for equations to explain words...
This is what St. Augustine calls "making truth" - veritatem facere. "Language not as a limit, but as a light" and "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world," as Ludwig Wittgenstein phrazed things.
Language is always evolving and the adaptations are even more profound when they come as a result of new speakers hailing from different linguistic worlds. In addition, science change what we mean by words.
We intend to take part in the severe contest between intelligence (artificial and human), which presses forward and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress. The pain passes in SEO, albeit the beauty remains.
"THE EVOLUTIONARY BRAIN IN SEARCH OF ITSELF."
René Descartes
Martin Luther
Galileo Galilei
Albert Einstein
This is a photograph of Albert Einstein’s untidy desk taken the day after his death. After and beyond physics comes metaphysics; i. e., philosophy. One of the values of philosophy is that throughout its history it has prefigured science, legal and other ones. In turn, I believe, science is well served by recognizing that historical effort. The fact is that the history of philosophy is more the history of a sharply inquisitive cast of mind than the history of a sharply defined discipline.
The traditional image of it as a sort of meditative science or pure thought, strangely cut off from other subjects, is largely a trick of the historical light. The illusion is created by the way in which knowledge tends to be labelled, chopped up and re-labelled. Philosophical work is regularly spirited away and adopted by other disciplines. Yesterday's moral philosophy becomes tomorrow's jurisprudence or welfare economics; yesterday's philosophy of mind becomes tomorrow's cognitive science.
And the road runs in both directions: new inquiries in other disciplines prompt new questions for the philosophically curious. Tomorrow's economics will be meat for the moral philosophers of the day after. One effect of these shifting boundaries is that philosophical thinking can easily seem to be unusually useless, even for an intellectual enterprise. This is largely because any corner of it that comes generally to be regarded as useful ceases to be called philosophy. Hence the illusory appearance that philosophers never make progress. Who remembers, by the way, that Sir Isaac Newton was not a professor of physics, but indeed, a professor of natural philosophy?
As being interested in words and their origin-s, we hence investigate the words nature and physics. "The first of mortals and their children followed nature, uncorrupted, and enjoyed the nature of things in common," says Seneca. He further stated, "The 'nature of things' which they enjoyed is nature. The nature they followed is primarily their own, still unspoiled, phusis."
The noun phusis hardly mean anything more in Greek than "beginning, coming-to-be", as when Empedocles says, "there is neither a phusis nor an end of all mortal things." Aristotle is trying his hand at one in his famous definition: "whatever each thing is like (hoion hekaston esti) when its process of coming-to-be is complete, that we call the phusis of each thing." On this view a thing's phusis would be what it grows into at maturity.
Like all philosophers, Aristotle gives words the definitions which will be most useful for his own purpose, and the history of his own language is one of the few subjects in which he was not a distinguished pioneer. The pre-Socratic Greek philosophers had had the idea of taking all the things they knew or believed in - gods, men, animals, plants, minerals, what you will - and impounding them under a single name; in fact, of regarding Everything as a thing, turning this amorphous and heterogeneous collection into an object or pseudo-object. And for some reason the name they chose for it was phusis.
However, the hierarchy of meanings is not like the hierarchy of things. That sense of the word which refers to the most ancient thing need not be the most ancient sense; that which refers to an all-embracing thing need not be the all-embracing sense. The thing we mean by nature is by no means the semantic trunk on which all the meanings grow; the sense nature is by no means the semantic trunk on which all the meanings grow. It is itself only one of the branches.
In the real world everything is of course continuously "interfered with" by everything else; total mutual interference (Kant's thorough-going reciprocity) is of the essence of nature. What keeps the contrast alive, however, is the daily experience of men as practical, not speculative, beings. Nature, as "the given", the thing we start from, the thing we have not yet "done anything about", is a persistent sense. Nature for us is all that is not man-made; the natural state of anything is its state when not modified by man. When we deplore the human interferences, then the nature which they have altered is of course the unspoiled, the uncorrupted; when we approve of them, it is the raw, the unimproved, the savage.
Inevitably this contrast is represented in all the languages we have had to consider. Things may be in a satisfactory condition either by nature (phusei) or by art (technē), as in Plato's Republic. A death which occurs of itself, vithout external violence, is a natural (kata phusin) death. Quintilian says that in oratory natura can do much without training, but training can do little without natura. The nature in question is of course the "given" capacity in the pupil, what the teacher finds to work upon.
What man shares with (the rest of) nature, what he has only because he is a creature and not because he is a special creature, is natural in contradistinction to his specific, specially created, differentia. Thus, paradoxically but not unintelligibly, man could be most natural (most united with the rest of nature) in those states and activities which are least rational. And we may perhaps add to this that the specifically human, the exercise and domination of reason, is achieved in each man only by effort. Nature here is a given which ought to be conquered and whose persistence is bad, alongside the pious idea that sexual desire is natural because it is not specifically human.
The theory that art imitates the general, not the individual, that the nature to be imitated is really the natures of whole classes is of course a doctrine of generality pertinent to SEO - Search Engine Optimization: "nothing can please many and please long" except by "just representations of general nature". We might conclude that "The law of nature" is conceived as an absolute moral standard against which all undertakings in SEO - Search Engine Optimization - must be judged and to which they ought to confirm.
Aristotle upheld the strange maxim that even the characters in a tragedy should, before everything else, be good. Pope speaks of "Where nature moves and rapture warms the mind". As everyone knows the Latin word gravis means "heavy". Thence, as always in SEO - Search Engine Optimization - we dare to state:
O PASSI GRAVIORA!
Tatiana Alderon is responsible for our "Wordchain" SEO undertakings in Eastern Europe..
Johann Kielmannsegg is manager of our SEO management in Europe.
Jasmine Blanchbois is responsible for our SEO undertakings in South Asia.
Colleen Yang is responsible for our SEO undertakings in East Asia.
Nellie AdamsVice President - Boutique Ekman.
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You are not alone in feeling vox clamantis in deserto - solitaire - climbing the SEO mountain.
我们提供任何有价值的网站的真相; 和同上的文字.
私たちは、価値のあるウェブサイトに関する真実を提供します。 と同文のテキスト。
우리는 가치있는 웹 사이트에 대한 진실을 제공합니다. 및 동감 텍스트.
What can be seen is not asked about... Prima facie?
私たちは、価値のあるウェブサイトに関する真実を提供します。 と同文のテキスト。
우리는 가치있는 웹 사이트에 대한 진실을 제공합니다. 및 동감 텍스트.
What can be seen is not asked about... Prima facie?
.jpg "Search Engine Optimization - SEO. Sweden, Europe, USA")
Every business is in the trust business. What can you do to increase the value of your word? It is the insights of science which will provide us with the common language we need to make sense of human intelligence, actions, behaviour in general.
The truth of human life is not to be found in history, albeit in literature and in the words - and worlds - of ordinary people. History is an illusion caused by the passage of time, and that time is an illusion caused by the passage of history.
A word of caution: The past, alas, only takes us so far. History never repeats itself, though it does rhyme, as Mark Twain is believed to have said. The past is a mess - also in Search Engine Optimization. The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.
Instead, what is required is forward thinking and imagination: open-source intelligence collection, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and supercomputing. Harnessing imagination is the true lesson from SEO history.
In Search Engine Optimization / SEO nothing is true and everything is possible. Et alors?
Let us know and hear your opinion. Please! We're interested.
- A great many of our largest SEO - Search Engine Optimization - assignments on behalf of clients have been consummated in the Caribbean - in isolation as a source of entrepreneurial activity - using individual talent and intuition. It is common to treat loneliness and solitude as synonyms, but they are not. What is negatively portrayed as one state can be positively reframed as the other. In a noisy and crowded world people should make time to be by oneself, away from attention-grabbing stimuli. Elective isolation / solitude - above all in natural settings - affords space for reflection and creativity. It can open the door to "peak experiences" such as wonder, awe, harmony, even ecstasy. William Wordsworth famously "wandered lonely as a cloud" and the Roman General Coriolanus described going into isolated exile as a "lonely dragon" retreating to his lair. Contemplate the time and effort saved by avoiding the often askant, amper and nefarious competition with other fellow earthlings through elective isolation... Nietzsche gave us something nobody else could: the precise nuance of solitaire, "standing alone and living independently, sure of the future."
- As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said: "Our present generation of talents live their lives in the full glare of publicity, which blights creativity like toxic rain." (This was expressed in 1825...)
- In solitude you can't take other people's advice. Trust your gut and follow your instincts. The worst Search Engine Optimization - SEO - texts are texts that are written by committee. Trying to incorporate a multitude of different perspectives mostly imbues literary gibberish amidst a Niagara of opinions. Quot homines, tot sententiae.
- Move forward, rue fate yet embrace words that are your metier. An internet text needs to be a single, good vision - full of joie de vivre.
Internet Text (SEO) Search Engine Optimization Firm - Boutique Ekman S.A. - Chairman CG Ekman (The Ultimate WordChain Detective) being interviewed regarding the optimal international Search Engine Optimization (SEO) formula.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) and SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO) STRATEGY WITH WORDCHAIN APPLICATIONS!
Science change what we mean by linguistics, semantics, communication. Crunching words through a machine to glean their linguistic complexity is, however, an imperfect science.
The results of a great many SEO studies chime with experience: The language of Artificial Intelligence / Search Engine Optimization specialists lies somewhere between the clunky and the incomprehensible. Be prepared: "The label on a dog-food tin isn't for the dog; it's for the person buying it."
It all sounds magisterial in its circularity, albeit reveals a generative artificial intelligence wanderlust, and nobody can add to this obvious absurdity. Perhaps, as is often the case in life, motives are so mixed that even active participants themselves cannot disentangle them. The boot is now on the other foot and no debt of gratitude exists.
What if we could use many more predictors, gather much more data about each of them, spot relationship patterns that no human could detect, and model these patterns to achieve better prediction? This, in essence, is the promise of AI.
What AI does involves no magic and no understanding; it is mere pattern finding. While we must admire the power of machine learning, we should remember that it will probably take some time for an AI to understand why a person who lives in a tropical climate will not miss a pair of snow boots.
However, a machine-learning algorithm will most likely find significant signal in combinations of variables that might otherwise be missed. Fortunately, the greater accuracy of the machine-learning programs does not come at the expense of other identifiable goals that decision-makers might pursue.
Simplicity and noiselessness of mechanical prediction techniques are sizeable advantages for most AI systems in the design of SEO - Search Engine Optimization - models. Simple rules that are merely sensible typically do better than human judgement. The advantages of some AI models over human judgement is not just the absence of noise but also the ability to exploit much more information.
Here we try to offer suggestions for the improvement of human judgement, not to argue for the "displacement of people by machines". Albeit, one key insight has emerged from recent research: people are not systematically suspicious of algorithms. When given a choice between taking advice from a human and an algorithm, for instance, they often prefer the algorithm.
As humans, we are keenly aware that we make mistakes, but that is a privilege we are not prepared to share. We expect machines to be perfect. In general, when there is a lot of data, machine-learning algorithms will do better than humans and better than simple models.
Perhaps AI - Artificial Intelligence - in combination with SEO - Search Engine Optimization - is like a butterfly; the more you chase it, the more it will evade you. However, if you notice the other things around you it will gently come and sit on your sholder.
Might we "externalize" a task - an Artificial Intelligence / Search Engine Optimization assignment - rather than merely outsourcing it? "Just in time" instead of "Just in case" - the shaping of a stepping-stone strategy / Gradatim Ferociter?
The evidence of pundits run amok amongst AI / SEO-specialists is there - so isolated in their ivory tower that they can barely communicate with mere colleagues rather than clients. A growing ocean of non-sense content is competing with supposedly extraterrestrial artificial intelligence in a never-ending battle of attention seeking.
Sometimes a party must sail against the wind. We cannot afford to drift or lie at anchor, as sweeteners matter less when other things taste better. We all - most of us; at times - share a very common trait: Naïveté. All AI / SEO missions require a keen psychological insight into the complexity of human nature. Behaviour might change if models were tested, but perhaps not necessarily tried.
Views of the future affect it today - in a reflexive manner - and predicting future experience is what really matters in a "rational expectations hypothesis".
The WordChain Detective efforts continue unabated, undiminished and undeterred. We must tie the knot in each separate and exceptional situation, but first we have to find the dots. We believe and have faith in Artificial Intelligence and Search Engine Optimization as a combination, and make her a realist. She tends to see the world as it is, showing authenticity in the sense of being the real thing and not a pretender.
LLMs (Large Language Models) are a form of "generative" AI, which, taken literally, means they make things up to solve new problems. They do this by producing probability distributions for chunks of characters, or tokens. The fundamental problem is that language models are probabilistic, while truth is not.
If the probability distribution of the words is flat, i.e., many words have similar likelihoods of being chosen, this means that there is less certainty as to which is most likely. That is a clue that it might be guessing, rather than using information it has been prompted with and therefore "knows" to be true.
How do we get AI systems to reliably do what their human users intend and nothing else? Producing language used to be a uniquely human capability. LLMs' convincing textual outputs make it all too easy to anthropomorphize them, to assume that LLMs also operate, reason and understand like humans do.
LLMs need help getting better at reasoning and planning. We are therefore turning to a long-standing source of inspiration in the field of AI - the human brain. The average adult can reason and plan far better than the best LLMs, despite using less power and much less data. AI needs better learning algorithms, and we know they are possible because your brain has them. Human expertise will remain essential for the foreseeable future.
As is true for many professions, fashionable trends and conservatism when confronting the unfamiliar are evident throughout the scientific community. Some of that conservatism stems from a laudable instinct. As mentioned before - and worth repeating - the scientific method encourages reasonable caution.
The Net, Artificial Intelligence, and Search Engine Optimization in particular, present themselves as subtle, fleeting, ambiguous. We - you and I - need to employ our powers of observation and deduction to their fullest extent in order to discern the truth of applied AI / SEO. The lessons are gleaning.
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CG Ekman
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In carrying out a vast amount of enormously complicated business we must be foresighted. We should be prepared for the future; we should put every effort into being well-girded for its contingencies; we must not be caught off balance by an unexpected happening. In the perfect grand Search Engine Optimization and Digital Marketing Intelligence strategy nothing that happens can have been unexpected. The knowledge at issue is sometimes, or often, speculative; the obtaining of it puts a very high premium on the seeker's power of evaluation and reasoned extrapolition.
Not just anyone can hold a professional job in a Search Engine Optimization and Digital Marketing Intelligence organisation. My point is that a digital business intelligence organisation is a strange and wonderful collection of devoted specialists molded into a vigorous producing unit. That employees in such organisations, and within industry at large, must be loyal and discrete goes without saying.
When a Search Engine Optimization and Digital Marketing Intelligence producer - or a Search Engine Optimization / Artificial and Digital Marketing Intelligence Group as Boutique Ekman - realizes that there is no sense in forwarding to a commercial client / consumer / customer knowledge which does not correspond to preconceptions, then Intelligence is through. At this point there is neither tactical- or strategic Search Engine Optimization or Digital Marketing Intelligence and the client is out on his own with no more to guide him than the indications of the tea leaf and the crystal ball. He may do well with them, but for the long haul I would place my money elsewhere.
Without discarding intuition as invariably a false friend, I would urge the consumer to use it with a full knowledge of its frailties. When the findings of the Search Engine Optimization and Digital Marketing Intelligence arm are regularly ignored by the consumer, and this because of consumer intuition, he should recognize that he is turning his back on the two instruments which Western man has so successfully deployed, since Aristotle steadily enlarged his horizon of knowledge - the instruments of reason and scientific method.
By using its backlog of experience it (Search Engine Optimization / Digital Marketing Intelligence) can anticipate - even create - consumer demand for a new product, but only by maintaining the quality can it expect continuous acceptance. Like many a producer of consumers' goods, Search Engine Optimization and Digital Marketing Intelligence will have its greatest marketing success when its product bears the unmistakable signs of superior research, cautious development, sound design, and careful production.
Unless the kind of knowledge here under discussion is complete, accurate, and timely, and unless it is applicable to a problem (or an opportunity) which is up or coming up, it is useless. In this proposition is recognized the fact that Search Engine Optimization and Digital Marketing Intelligence is not knowledge for knowledge's sake alone, but that it is knowledge for the practical matter of taking action.
Knowledge or truth is not the final objective or aim of the Company, Corporation or Business; it is victory in markets, domestic and global. Business is a struggle, in essence like warfare. We should be effective, primarily; and efficient if possible. The Search Engine Optimization and Digital Marketing Intelligence division or staff should be considered sub-contractors to top management; the consumer-s of the Search Engine Optimization and Digital Marketing Intelligence product.
Boldness is crucial in business, however, defining boldness solely by vision and imagination is almost always a mistake. None of the top-ranking corporate winners of today would have made it to the internet ascending-heights had they not successfully executed plans they laid out years earlier. Linking vision to execution is the essence of a good strategy. The visions of some folks have definitely affected the world and the world belongs to people with something to do, say or write, however, as Arthur Schopenhauer advised us to remember: "Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world."
"Ambitious but doable" is a first requirement for a realistic vision. A second is to strive for simplicity and pragmatism. If the goal is inherently complex - like entering the Chinese market utilizing existing subcontractors from a dozen Western countries - what is needed is to break it down into smaller, closer steps, while resisting the temptation to add complications as the strategy develops.
Entering Asian markets, for example China's (I ought to know, having undertaken extensive university and industry research - as well as marketing/sales negotiations - there as a young graduate back in the mid-1980's as mentioned before, and worth repeating), one does not assume that boldness requires an entirely new product or approach. Sometimes innovative new paths - such as using Baidu in the vernacular - branch off from existing ways of doing things; and, perhaps, the sooner the better.
One might ask how to build on the past, but at the same time challenge the things and procedures that do not need to be there any more. If things - optimizing marketing and sales through, for example, wise and prudent SEO - come off, it will provide further proof that to succeed, you do not always have to aim for the stars. Sometimes, you simply have to come up with a different way of using what is right there under your feet - and on the Net. "What we look for is here, and nowhere else," as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote a long, long time ago.
KNOWLEDGEABLE LINGUISTICS AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE!
Language, as we argue often and elsewhere, matters immensely. Sloppy use robs terms of their meaning. It also shapes perceptions; even public perceptions... Language is the foundation of civilization; it is the glue that holds the people together. It is the first weapon drawn in a conflict, whether legal, commercial or political.
Humans form non-kin communities that do not involve direct control or acqaintance with others; we have science and mathematics and seek ultimate explanations. The introduction of language must surely be among the most important factors explaining how these remarkable capacities came to us. This conclusion makes sense on independent grounds. You cannot speculate and think about matters far and near unless you have some way of constructing an unlimited number of complex thoughts that you can detach from current circumstances and use to range over arbitrary times and circumstances.
Language gives you this capacity. You cannot organize and construct projects involving cooperation between individuals unless you have a way of planning well into the future, providing for contingencies, and assigning specific roles; language gives you that. So one reason to be interested in the science of language is because it tells us what natural languages are, what gives us, but no other creatures, language, and what explains the introduction of language and the beginnings of our remarkable cognitive capacities.
The science of language is an objective natural science that treats language as a biologically based system that evolved in a single individual and was genetically transmitted to progeny. Evolution of this sort – very different from the usual gradualist stories about evolution of complex systems – nicely explains how language came about. And there are important implications of the fact that language is a “natural object”, and that it came about by means of evolution.
One implication of the idea that the evolutionary introduction of language may have made us the distinctive species we are is that it – perhaps by itself – explains what is human about human nature. If this is so, there is a naturalistic – not religious, and not merely speculative – account of our distinctiveness and its origin. If so, and assuming that a creature’s fundamental needs are based on its nature, we might be able to find a naturalistic basis for views about “the Good Life for this kind of Creature”.
Rationalism consists of a set of proposals – a procedure, strategy, or methodology – for studying the human mind, and language in particular. The methodology is not chosen at random; it is adopted because rationalists believe that it offers the best way to proceed in constructing a naturalistic science of mind and language, a science that while it differs from physics and chemistry in its subject matter is, like them, a natural science.
It is assumed [by some] there exist two sets of observations about language and its use, and about how language and other human mental capacities develop in the infant and child. One is called the “poverty of the stimulus” observations and applies to all cognitive domains such as vision, audition, facial and object recognition, and so on. The other, the “creative aspect of language use”, is specific to language. We wonder if humans develop a language automatically, that is, if much of the human mind’s structure and “content” must somehow be fixed or innate? The answer is most likely a big yes.
It is also reasonable to hold that humans really are free in the ways in which they use language, and also to hold that if one wants a natural science of language, the only way to get it is to focus entirely on the nature, development, and operations of a person’s “language organ”, not on the uses to which its resources are put as they appear in a person’s linguistic actions and behaviours.
Perhaps the science of language should in some measure be a science of linguistic behaviour and how the mind relates to the world outside the head? These asumptions and the methodology for the study of mind dominate current research in psychology, philosophy, and related cognitive sciences. We might insist that the only methodology appropriate for developing a theory of language is that which is also employed in chemistry and physics. The study of language differs only in subject matter and experimental techniques from other naturalistic scientific endeavour.
We can acknowledge that language is a very useful cognitive tool that can serve many roles and that has given humans extraordinary cognitive advantages, compared to other creatures. We might, however, resist the idea that language evolved because it improved the human capacity to communicate; further against the idea that language is some kind of social invention, an institution that was put together by us to help us serve our needs, and transmitted to the young by some kind of training or social inculcation.
Now let us take language. What is its characteristic use? Well, probably 99.9 per cent of its use is internal to the mind. You can not go a minute without talking to yourself. It takes an incredible act of will not to talk to yourself. It is perfectly true that language is used for communication. But everything you do is used for communication – your hairstyle, your mannerism, your walk, and so on and so forth. So sure, language is also used for communication.
How can we compare animal and human communication? There is a kind of taxonomy of animal cries, and human language does not even fit the taxonomy in any of the senses. Whatever those things are, they are apparently a code (cues, signals, signs); alas, there is no relationship to human language. That is not so surprising: apparently, our nearest surviving relatives are about 6-8-10 million years apart in evolutionary time; so you would not expect to find anything like human language. So animals do have communication systems, but they do not seem to have anything like a language.
There was a sudden “great leap forward” – an outburst of creative energy – in an instant of evolutionary time, during perhaps ten thousand years or so. Some small genetic change led to the rewiring of the brain that made this human capacity available. And with it came the entire range of creative options that are available to humans within a theory of mind – a second-order theory of mind, so you know that somebody is trying to make you think what somebody else wants you to think...
It is very hard to imagine how any of this could go on without language; at least, we can not think of any way of doing it without a language. And most of it is thinking and planning and interpreting; it is internal. This genetic change – this mutation in the brain creating language capabilities – must have taken place in a person, not in a group. It had to have happened in a single person. Something happened in a person that that person transmitted to its offspring. This mutation – or modification – must have had some selectional advantage.
Adding, merging, creating syntax, experiencing syllogism mean to take mental objects [or concepts of some sort], already constructed, and make bigger mental objects out of them. As soon as you have this capacity, you have an infinite variety of hierarchically structured expressions [and thoughts] available to you.
So it is conceivable that that is as far as the evolution of language is concerned. And the reason we continue to primarily use language to think [within] ourselves is that that is the way it got started, less than one hundred thousand years ago. And, after all, sixty or seventy thousand years [and maybe up to a hundred thousand] is not a lot of time from an evolutionary point of view; it is [virtually] an instant.
Now, there are a lot of more complicated theories, but there is no justification for any of them. So, for example, a common theory is that somehow, some mutation made it possible to construct two-word sentences; and that gave a memory advantage because you could eliminate this big number of lexical items from memory.
So that had selectional advantages. And then something came along and we had three-word sentences and then a series of mutations led to five...; finally you got complete syntax, because it goes to infinity. This somehow constituted an evolutionary advantage for that individual and his or her offspring.
There are many arguments and evidence against thinking that the language and arithmatic capacities are related, albeit, it is not very clear what the evidence purports. The evidence is, in part, dissociations. You can get neural dysfunction in which you lose one capacity and keep the other. However, that is not going to tell you anything, because it does not distinguish competence from performance. It may be that those neural deficiencies have to do with using the capacity.
So to take an analogy, there are dissociations in reading a language. But nobody thinks that there is a special reading part of the brain. It is just that there is a way of using language in reading, and that way can be damaged; but the language is still there. And it could be the same thing for arithmatic. As a matter of fact, it could turn out that, whatever language is, it is just distributed in different parts of the brain.
There are so many possibilities that the evidence just does not show very much. So what we are left with is speculation, but when you do not have enough evidence, you pick the simplest explanation. And the simplest explanation that happens to conform to all the evidence we have is that it (reading) is just an offshoot of language derived by imposing a specific restriction on syntax.
In fact, there are other specific restrictions, which are much more modern. So take what are called “formal languages”, say ... arithmatic, or programming systems, or whatever. They are kind of like natural language, but they are so recent and so self-conscious that we know that they are not really much like the biological object, human language.
In natural language, you do use edge properties for scope; and you do it through internal syntax. Formal languages do not have internal syntax; but they have got to have something that is going to be interpreted as scope. So you use the same device you do in natural language; you put it on the outside with the restricted variables, and so on.
There are things that just flow from having a system with syntax inside you; and probably the same is true of music, and many other things. We got this capacity that came along and gives us extraordinary options for planning, interpretation and thought. And it just starts feeding into everything else.
The evolution of human language has got to be one of the hardest topics to study. Yet somehow we feel that we have got to understand it, or we can not go further. It is a highly irrational approach to inquiry; something that we might think of as pure science, science that aims at basic structures, without regard to applications. This is a huge step in the sciences and, in fact, a step only very recently taken.
Our tradition has been strictly descriptive behaviourism, but now the fundamental biological question arises: what are the properties of this language system that are specific to it? How is it different from walking, say – what specific properties make a system, unlike other systems, a linguistic one?
That question is, why do biological systems have these properties – why these properties, and not other properties? This was recognized to be a problem even back around Darwin’s time. Even natural selection – it is perfectly understood, it is obvious from the logic of it – even natural selection alone cannot do anything; it has to work within some kind of prescribed channel of physical and chemical possibilities, and that has to be a restrictive channel.
The basic questions of what is specific to language really have to do with issues that go beyond those of explanatory adequacy [that is, with Plato’s Problem, or explaining the poverty of the stimulus facts for language acquisition]. “We should consider what is natural not in things depraved but in those which are rightly ordered according to nature,” as Aristotle advised us.
But if language is not rooted in nature, but in accident and history. There is a possibility, which is not unreasonable, given what we know about human evolution. It seems that the language system developed quite suddenly. If so, a long process of historical accidentis is ruled out, and we can begin to look for an explanation elsewhere – perhaps, as Turing thought, in chemistry or physics.
And there are, of course, lots of instances of what François Jacob calls “bricolage”, or tinkering: at any particular point, nature does the best it can with what is at hand. You get paths in evolution that get stuck up here and go from there and not start over and go somewhere else. Language is a pretty intricate system with highly specific principles that has no analogue anywhere else in the world, and this might lead to the end of any discussion of the central problems of biology of language – what is specific to it, how did it get there?
We have agreed that only humans have language, and language is part of communication [systems]. It has been said that Koko the gorilla knew over 1,000 signs based on American Sign Language, and used them to do everything from asking for food to joking around. Her trainer thought Koko went further still, signing in novel ways and showing complex emotions. However, linguists and experts in sign languages pointed out that these have complex grammars, equivalent to spoken languages in expressiveness. Koko’s ability fell well short of a fluent human signer, in particular when it came to syntax, an infinite capacity.
We have a debate over whether emoji constitute a language. If anything, emoji are too good at communicating to count. They are blunt and literal. A smiling emoji means a smile. Nearly all words in a human language, by contrast, are arbitrary. A dog does not make a sound like “dog”. Form has no connection to meaning.
With a few joking exceptions, emoji are like gesture and tone of voice, in that their form and meaning are inextricable; they are almost impossible to to misunderstand because they are universal and obvious. Indeed emoji are so popular because they do in writing what gesture and tone do for speech.
But attempts to “translate” (most historically known literal translations were made at a time when the derivation of the word was still understood, coming from trans-ferre, to bring across) novels into emoji are mere amusements. No one without previous knowledge of the plot could possibly understand them.
No language in the world merely strings relevant signs together like emoji, or communicates at the tourist-abroad level of pointing and making exaggerated facial expressions. That gorillas lack syntax should not blind humans to their magnificence. But the fact that Koko could communicate should not mislead observers into thinking she possessed language. Homo sapiens is an ever more impressive primate, too.
Nothing would work in the absence of communication. Flowers must communicate with bees in order for pollination to be successful. Male songbird must communicate with females if they are to mate and rear young. Lions on a cooperative hunt must communicate with each other about how they will attack their prey.
A human infant must communicate with its parents so that the needs of both are met. Great orators must use their communicative skills to captivate and manipulate the emotions of their audience. Computer programmers must design software to communicate with their hardware. And who knows, perhaps there are extraterrestrials trying to communicate with us at this very moment, although perhaps more successfully with some of us mere mortals than with others.
But why do birds sing rather than speak? Why do not human infants scream and cry when they are content as peas in a pod, but coo and gurgle when they are angry, annoyed, or in pain? These are questions about design, and what is true of all communication systems that work is that they have specific design features. The design features of a communication system are the result of a complex interaction between the constraints of the system and demands of the job required.
For natural communication systems, such as those observed in the plant and animal kingdoms, constraints can be seen at several levels including neurobiological, physiological, and psychological. These constraints are important, for they determine the relative success of the organism in responding to socioecologically relevant stimuli in the environment.
For all organisms, including humans, communication provides a vehicle for conveying information and for expressing to others what has been perceived. But organisms differ with regard to what they can convey and what they can perceive. Consequently, there are a diversity of communication systems in the natural world.
These perspectives or problems are not hierarchically structured. They represent a coherent theoretical and methodological framwork for both studying and explaining communication. Current understanding of communication exceeds many other areas of natural behaviour because the question “Why?” has been addressed thoroughly.
A close look at what we know about human language suggests that our understanding of mechanism and ontogeny is sophisticated, whereas our understanding of function and phylogeny is relatively poor. By the phylogeny of language, we are referring to the evolutionary changes in communicative structure and function preceding the emergence of language in modern humans - i e, Homo sapiens sapiens.
In fact, rarely have researchers asked whether language should be considered an adaptation and, if so, what its fitness consequences are for members of the species. There are at least four reasons for this omission. First, for some linguists, the analytical lens focuses exclusively on the problem of syntax.
Those working on this aspect of language show little interest in the fact that syntactic structure provides humans with an extraordinary communicative tool and, as a result, show little interest in the evolutionary pressures that may have led to this form of communication rather than some other form.
Second, language is sometimes conceived as a trait that is detached from our biology – most of the interesting features of language are the result of cultural processes. Clearly, anything that is not part of our biology cannot be an adaptation, sensu strictu. Third, interest in the evolutionary origins of language has concentrated on syntax and the computational machinery that it appears to require, a machinery considered a unique feature of modern humans.
Without precursors, it makes little sense to talk about gradual evolution by natural selection. Last, evolutionary thinking has generally played a minor role in the social sciences. This statement is certainly true of most researchers working on human language. The study of human language requires a good dose of medicine flavoured with functional and phylogenetic ingredients.
Because human language is communicated via auditory and visual channels, the design features of our own communication system can be directly compared to the design features of other animals without the complications of different sensory modalities. We may search for a working definition of communication, and here are a few known dittos:
-Communication occurs when the action of or cue by one organism is perceived by and thus alters the probability pattern of behaviour in another organism in a fashion adaptive to either one or both of the participants.
-Communication is the transfer of information via signals sent in a channel between a sender and a receiver. The occurrence of communication is recognized by a difference in the behaviour of the reputed receiver in two situations that differ only in the presence or absence of the reputed signal. The effect of a signal may be to prevent a change in the receiver’s output, or to maintain a specific internal behavioural state of readiness.
-The term “true communication” is restricted to cases in which the transmitting organism engages in behaviour that is adaptive principally because it generates a signal and the interaction mediated by the signal is adaptive to the receiving organism as well.
-The process in which actors use specially designed signals or displays to modify the behaviour of reactors.
-The term is used in a narrower sense, to refer to the behaviours by which one member of a species conveys information to another member of the species.
-Communication is a matter of casual influence. The communicator [must] construct an internal representation of the external world, and then ... carry out some symbolic behaviour that conveys the content of that representation. The recipient must first perceive the symbolic behaviour, i e construct its internal representation, and then from it recover a further internal representation of the state that it signifies. This final step depends on access to the arbitrary conventions governing the interpretation of the symbolic behaviour.
-Human communication includes forms of verbal communication such as speech, written language and sign language. It comprises nonverbal modes that do not invoke language proper, but that nevertheless constitute extremely important aspects of how we communicate. As we interact, we make various gestures – some vocal and audible, others nonvocal like patterns of eye contact and movements of the face and the body. Whether intentional or not, these behaviours carry a great deal of communicative significance.
The concepts of information and signal form integral components of most definitions of communication, including communication on the internet. Information is a feature of an interaction (i e, not an abstraction that can be discussed in the absence of some specific context between sender and perceiver).
Signals carry certain kinds of informational content, which can be manipulated by the sender and differentially acted upon by the perceiver. Signals have been designed to serve particular functions, and the function they serve must be evaluated in light of both production and perception constraints.
Constraints on the system include the energetic cost associated with generating the cheliped display, and for purposes of clarity we have to draw a technical distinction between cues and signals. Cues, like signals, represent potential sources of information. Cues, however, differ from signals in two important ways.
First, cues – also on a website or in a standardized e-mail – tend to be permanently ON, whereas signals are more plastic and can be in an ON and OFF state. A beautiful scenery in a website would be a cue, an urgent symbol (!) in an e-mail would constitute a signal. A second distinction is necessary between cues and signals on the one hand, and what we might call signs. Having an SSL secured website, showing https:// rather than http://, might to some indicate a sign of heightened security and hence solidity.
In addition to his theory of natural selection, the comparative method is what made Darwin great. His major works are packed with comparisons based on detailed studies and anecdotal observations. The comparative method is not without problems. The problems are most acute when phylogenetic relationships are poorly documental and when variables or traits are codes as present versus absent. We will not question Darwin’s belief that the structure and function of language were shaped by problems associated with mating and survival – albeit, we ought to contemplate how this affect our electronic communicative behaviour and endeavour.
The presence – absence distinction is at the heart of most discussions of language evolution. Although there is nothing theoretically misguided about this distinction, it must be used with caution. This is particularly the case in comparative studies of communication, where the units of comparison commonly differ between subjects and knowledge of the communication system is typically asymmetric for the subjects being compared.
For example, it is often stated that a fundamental difference between human language and nonhuman communication is that the former has access to an infinite set of meaningful utterances whereas the latter is more restricted. The difference in expressiveness lies in the fact that language makes use of the combinatorial power of syntax whereas other communicative forms lack syntax. Although this distinction is currently accurate, it is perhaps premature in a predictive perspective.
Predicting short- and long-term future linguistic experience will be essential, crucial and of utmost importance. Who can claim to be a true scenario-planning expert? We, as a Digital Marketing Intelligence Group, value structure above all, without being completely averse to deviations from the tried and true. Response is not the same as creation – the latter looms larger over our thoughts – and we can never duck reality over time, especially not when it is coming broadside.
Being positive, though, is, as always, an argumentum e silentio. An endless stream of new discoveries makes science thrilling. But, as any seasoned researcher knows, such novelties are worthless unless they can be replicated. Often, however, replication does not get done as thoroughly as it should be – or even at all. For, as any seasoned researcher also knows, replication is rarely the stuff careers are built on; studies conducted with that goal may even struggle to get published in peer-reviewed journals.
A scientist / philosopher, Wilhelm Roscher, has explicitly stated that for science the development of peoples is in principle always the same; and the category of appropriation, both of economic and scientific resources, is older than that of legitimacy.
The economic instability and political divisions - i e, constructive, creative competition - sometimes or often associated with business management- and computer linguistics (think Facebook and Cambridge Analytica) have caused some sharp minds to think of them as a curse, not a blessing. But economic thinking on this issue is also prone to division and swings in sentiment. Is business management- and computer linguistic science in fact marred by reverse casuality?
Our knowledge, and especially our scientific knowledge, progresses by unjustified (and unjustifiable) anticipations, by guesses, by tentative solutions to our problems; in a word by conjectures. Not only our knowledge, but also our aims and our standards grow through an unending process of trial and error, which must be subjected to critical tests.
A theory of experience may – and should – assign to our observations the equally modest and almost equally important role of tests which may help us in the discovery of our mistakes. Though, it should stress our fallibility, albeit, not resign itself to scepticism. It is vitally important to stress the fact that knowledge can grow and that science can progress – just because we can learn from our mistakes.
Anything that can not be reached by meagre knowledge and wisdom is beyond scientific control: it lays in the realm of genius, which rises above all rules. (Being aware that a tomato is in fact a berry is knowledge; not putting it in a fruit salad would be considered wisdom: a small reminder for those who can not differentiate between these two words.)
I share with many the penchant for delving into the genius of the past and asking how a similar knowledge spirit might guide the future. Knowledge is somewhat paradoxical. It is most productive when freely available. But the incentive to create it depends on the ability to restrict its use. The former consideration justifies dissemination. The latter justfies control. How, then, is this balance working?
Historically, knowledge has been [considered] dangerous. One anti-intellectual diatribe published in 1526 went so far as to pronounce knowledge “the very pestilence, that putteth all mankind to ruine and hath made us subjecte to so many kindes of sinne”. Better, wrote the author, “to be Idiotes, and knowe nothinge” than to have one’s head filled with pernicious ideas.
But although such thoroughgoing scepticism was an understandable reaction to the plethora of “knowledge” then on offer, it was a hard philosophy to stick to and nobody really did stick to it. It was more plausible to employ the weapons of Scepticism in a strictly limited way. Sceptical arguments were generally used to undermine outdated or overambitious claims to knowledge, not to attack all intellectual activity.
Globalization has been helping to spread useful knowledge. This analysis sheds light on the contemporary landscape of innovation, on the current diffusion of knowledge, on the role of global value chains and on the impact of competition and use of knowledge and language. Knowledgeable technology is the process of turning the magical into the mundane, and rivalry is the best fuel for scientific language exploration.
Most people spend a lot of time inspecting a brochure’s first few pages and hardly look at distracting websites. But as time wear on, their attention starts to flag, and then it collapses completely. It is hard to accuse these people of being lazy or ignorant. They really want to pay attention and absorb information, but their attention fails them.
Communications are written by experts. Most experts love the opportunity to demonstrate their expertise, especially when their contribution is acknowledged. Contributing to the community of knowledge is in our collaborative nature. These experts feel like everyone must understand what they write because the expert does. This is the curse of knowledge.
It is a result of participation in the community of knowledge – the failure to separate what is in one’s own head from what is in the heads of others. The consummate philosopher Immanuel Kant believed that the ways things really are will always remain hidden from our view. All we can ever know is the appearance of things.
So perhaps the best we can hope is that science gives us verisimilitudinous knowledge of the universe; that is, gives us a narrative that appears to describe reality. What seems is the sensory veneer of what we see, what we hear, what people say, what people do. What is hides beneath what seems. For truth is not what happens, but how and why what happens happens.
Ignorance is not bliss, but it does not have to be a misery. For humans, ignorance is inevitable. It is our natural state. There is too much complexity in the world for any individual to master. Ignorance can be frustrating, but the problem is not ignorance per se. It is the trouble we get by not recognizing it.
Criticism of our conjectures is of decisive importance: by bringing out our mistakes it makes us understand the difficulties of the problem (and/or opportunity) which we are trying to solve. This is how we become better acquainted with our problem (and/or opportunity), and able to propose more mature solutions; steps forward that take us nearer to the truth.
Truth is not manifest, as a rule. We may raise questions, albeit, give no answers. The simple truth is that truth is often hard to come by, and that once found it may easily be lost again. Erroneous beliefs may have an astonishing power to survive, in defiance of experience.
I am mainly dealing with the structure of business, industrial and marketing organizations in a comparative and systematic manner, at the risk of falling under the anathema “Dilettantes compare”. I do so in order to remind us all that thinking, writing and judging – being creative overall - if it is to be of any value, must always be and remain comparative, open and in the context of time, historical events and business / social development. Striking the right balance between “thinking and doing” is important, and I would henceforth like to “bend the arc towards doing”. Eilt sehr. Sofort am Schirm. Zugreifen! Time is of essence; Tempus fugit.
The human mind is both brilliant and pathetic. We have mastered fire, created democratic institutions, stood on the moon, and sequenced our genome. And yet each of us is error prone, sometimes irrational, and often ignorant. How we think is helpful to understand why we think. Thought could have evolved to serve several functions.
The function of thought could be to represent the world – to construct a model in our heads that corresponds in critical ways to the way the world is. Or thought could be there to make language possible so we can communicate with others. Or thought could be there for problem-solving or decision-making.
Or maybe it evolved for a specific purpose such as building tools or showing off to potential mates (evolution dictates that there is no more important action than mating; some say that if life has any purpose, surely it is to propagate). All of these ideas may have something to them, but thought surely evolved to serve a larger purpose, a purpose common to all three proposals: Thought is for action!
Thinking evolved as an extension of the ability to act effectively; it evolved to make us better at doing what is necessary to achieve our goals. Thought allows us to select from among a set of possible actions by predicting the effects of each action and by imagining how the world would be if we had taken different actions in the past.
One reason to believe that this is why we think is that action came before thought. Even the earliest organisms were capable of action. Single-celled organisms that arose early in the evolutionary cycle ate and moved and reproduced. They did things; they acted on the world and changed it. Evolution selected those organisms whose actions best supported their survival. And the organisms whose actions were most effective were the ones best tuned to the changing conditions of a complex world.
The best tools for identifying the appropriate action in a given circumstance are mental faculties that can process information. Visual systems must be able to do a fair amount of sophisticated processing to distinguish a rat from a leaf. Other mental processes are also critical for selecting the appropriate action. Memory can help indicate which actions have been most effective under similar conditions in the past, and reasoning can help predict what will happen under new conditions.
Some - or many, even most – business and marketing institutions are trapped in financial constructs that makes it hard to pursue missions intelligently, albeit, it is not flesh and blood that make us fathers. Being [critical] of everyone enable us – as a Search Engine Optimization and Digital Marketing Group – to be impartial, utilizing oratio obliqua; explicit and implicit, verbal and non-verbal.
You need to own – or create – great content to differentiate yourself in the market, and it is like anything else; perseverance seems to pay off. The market gives no quarter - you need technological and/or linguistic advantages - and be reminded that while the amateur may feel like your friend, there is joy in developing expertise and craftmanship. Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end. Peel that onion of reality!
Science shows us regularly that our intuitions are mistaken. Science is constantly learning something new, and more often than not such learning means jettisoning wrong ideas. That is why science often clashes with common sense – our intuition, for example, wants Earth to be flat and still, and time to be the same everywhere. None of this is true.
Perhaps our difficulty in dealing with impermanence (or the passing of time) is at the root of our anxiety and suffering. It might have been in order to escape from this anxiety that the Greek philosopher Parmenides denied time’s existence, Plato imagined a world of ideas outside it and Hegel spoke of the moment in which the spirit transcends temporality.
In our emotional fog – with a temporal structure far removed from our intuition – perhaps, ultimately, we end up losing our own sense of time; and the emotional dimension of time is not the film of mist that prevents us from apprehending its nature objectively.
“Here-and-now” is a well-defined notion in science, but “now” on its own is not. If we call reality that which exists now, what is reality after we have realized that there is not a well-defined “now” everywhere.
The very grammar we use to talk about things, in which verbs have only a past, future and present tense, is inadequate to describe the ways of nature. Is our perception of time illusory? No, not necessarily, however it indicates that what we perceive as time may not be a simple and elementary aspect of nature, but rather a complex phenomenon with many layers, each needing to be addressed by a different chapter of science.
The full complexity of what we perceive as the flow of time has to be understood by studying the structure of our brain: evolution has shaped our brain into a machine that feeds off memory in order to anticipate the future. Time remains – also for explorers of Digital Marketing Intelligence and Search Engine Optimization – a mystery; a mystery that relates to issues of our individual identity and natural consciousness.
How do we reach a perfect symmetry between search engine optimization, artificial intelligence, machine learning, overall digital marketing and management control? To combine purpose and means is to create. Art is the capacity to create. Theory is the representation of art by way of concepts. This constitutes the whole of art, with two exceptions: talent, which is fundamental to everything, and practice – neither of which can be the product of theory. In short, even the most realistic theory can never match reality. (We will look into established rules with prescriptive powers of business management / digital linguistics research at a later section of study.)
We are not exploring the difficulties – the friction – of having decisions implemented due to uncertainty, ignorance, confusion, fatigue, error and countless other imponderables inferring with the effective application of business and digital marketing development. We are not [yet] investigating one important element in business / digital development – chance – subject to theoretical analysis. What depends upon a few persons is, in great measure, to be ascribed to chance, or secret and unknown causes; what arises from a great number may often be accounted for by determinate and known causes.
Most men / women are neither capable of achieving intellectual mastery over complex areas of human activity, nor much interested in it. People are happy just to carry on carrying on. To help them through the confusion of business / digital marketing development and application, initiative and required means demand relatively firm guides.
How are these to be provided? Experience goes a long way, as does a comprehensive and scientific analysis of Homo sapiens, and of human nature as it is. Understanding [reality] as such is what matters most to us. Any logical and intellectual symmetry achieved at the expence of reality will not do.
The realm of business and computer linguistic science – of Digital Marketing Intelligence – extends wherever in psychology our intellect discovers a resource that can serve our battle. What [motivational] resource? Your initial guess is – I would say hesitantly – decidedly not as good as mine... The future lies not just in predicting our outermost behaviours, but understanding our innermost ones.
I am obsessed by this type of Digital Marketing Intelligence. It has taken years – or decades – to understand what is at stake. The great Digital Marketing Intelligence of the world must demonstrate that it / we will “serve” and not “dominate” in the scheme of things. I have seen and noticed among journalists and a few pundits the sentence that, “international search engine optimization is complex to a degree, however, it is not rocket science.”
I think this judgement, by these people, is wrong and misguided. Already the competition, which will increase, demands future natural, organic algorithms and linguistic capabilities so complicated that no one person completely understands them. Rather, different people understands different aspects of them. The complexity of human invention – and writing; think Tolstoy, Dostoyevski, et al – pales in comparison to the complexity of the natural world.
We, as a communications partner, are helping clients transform their marketing model to face digital disruption and the threat of new entrants. At present the mystified theme du jour of a new technology priesthood is “artificial intelligence”, however, we would opt instead for the more limited “machine intelligence”.
When people hear the term AI, they often think about a robot taking over the world, albeit it is about increasing the efficiency of what we do across the board. Every part of our business is always being augmented by these new capabilities. Strategic distraction over denominations are not needed when content is paramount.
We must bear in mind that “artificial intelligence” is a misnomer, albeit instead perhaps call it “collective intelligence”. All AI algorithms need to be trained using reams of human-generated examples – i e, machine learning. Unless they know what the right answers (provided by humans) are meant to be, algorithms cannot translate languages, understand speech or recognize objects in images. Data provided by humans can thus be seen as a form of labour which powers AI.
We might compare AI giving Michelangelo modern sculpturing tools like laser measurement tools and X-rays to detect flaws in the marble; a more hybrid approach with substance and depth over surface.
Initially – in the 1950s – academic researchers were looking for a way to imbue machines with human-like “general” intelligence, including complex reasoning. But that remains a distant aspiration. AI/ML is about to make humans more efficient, not to take them out of the process entirely.
Buying AI/ML takes time, can feel like hard work, and the results are often imperfect, however, artificial intelligence / machine learning is likely to have a bigger impact than anything since the advent of computers, and its consequences could be far more disruptive. Being both powerful and relatively cheap, it will spread faster than computers did and touch every industry.
We used wrongly to believe that “situational understanding could be delivered on a computer screen”, albeit, we have learnt the hard way it can not. Sometimes you have to be there to understand. We advocate the merits of understanding the world both through the data and through personal experience. Numbers will never tell the full story of what internet and life on Earth is all about. Hard logic and personal impressions work best when they reinforce and correct each other.
Representing the semantics of linguistic items in a machine-interpretable form has been a major goal of Natural Language Processing since its earliest days. Among the range of different linguistic items, words have attracted the most research attention. However, word representations have an important limitation: they conflate different meanings of a word into a single vector. Representations of word senses have the potential to overcome this inherent limitation.
Indeed, the representation of individual word senses and concepts has recently gained in popularity with several experimental results showing that a considerable performance improvement can be achieved across different NLP applications upon moving from word level to the deeper sense and concept levels. Another interesting point regarding the representation of concepts and word senses is that these models can be seamlessly applied to other linguistic items, such as words, phrases and sentences.
Personally, I chiefly write for ourselves and a few global multinationals – less than ten in numbers: from USA, Japan, China, England, France, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden and Russia – being as linguistically stringent and creative as possible. Each project is seldom a “quicky”, but rather comprises long periods of “writing slowly”, following the template of marketing success by “the well-told story erasing scepticism by wrapping [its] meaning inside an emotion”.
Speed in itself will never be taken as an index of progress or success with ourselves! Commencement, on the other hand, of a creative writing assignment could - and perhaps should - be both rapid and immediate.
Our corporate authors and digital art directors cover most sectors on this planet in a timely fashion. However - one wonders - can any one person be an expert on all the writing and linguistic systems in the contemporary digital world? Let us explore humanity’s greatest invention, putting it in context of today’s convoluted internet verbosity.
WRITING
Writing is perhaps humanity's greatest invention. Without it there would be no history and no civilization as we know it. How, when, where and why did writing evolve? Do alphabets function better than hieroglyphs? Are we today, in the computer age, moving towards a "universal language" of signs and symbols?
The details will make the whole full, and thence you will be able to reach your ultimate telos - with an intact kudos - soon; very soon. "N'en parlez jamais; pensez y toujour" ("Speak of it never; think of it always") as the famous philosopher Michel Gambetta wrote it down a long time ago.
See you at the top!
Not just anyone can hold a professional job in a Search Engine Optimization and Digital Marketing Intelligence organisation. My point is that a digital business intelligence organisation is a strange and wonderful collection of devoted specialists molded into a vigorous producing unit. That employees in such organisations, and within industry at large, must be loyal and discrete goes without saying.
When a Search Engine Optimization and Digital Marketing Intelligence producer - or a Search Engine Optimization / Artificial and Digital Marketing Intelligence Group as Boutique Ekman - realizes that there is no sense in forwarding to a commercial client / consumer / customer knowledge which does not correspond to preconceptions, then Intelligence is through. At this point there is neither tactical- or strategic Search Engine Optimization or Digital Marketing Intelligence and the client is out on his own with no more to guide him than the indications of the tea leaf and the crystal ball. He may do well with them, but for the long haul I would place my money elsewhere.
Without discarding intuition as invariably a false friend, I would urge the consumer to use it with a full knowledge of its frailties. When the findings of the Search Engine Optimization and Digital Marketing Intelligence arm are regularly ignored by the consumer, and this because of consumer intuition, he should recognize that he is turning his back on the two instruments which Western man has so successfully deployed, since Aristotle steadily enlarged his horizon of knowledge - the instruments of reason and scientific method.
By using its backlog of experience it (Search Engine Optimization / Digital Marketing Intelligence) can anticipate - even create - consumer demand for a new product, but only by maintaining the quality can it expect continuous acceptance. Like many a producer of consumers' goods, Search Engine Optimization and Digital Marketing Intelligence will have its greatest marketing success when its product bears the unmistakable signs of superior research, cautious development, sound design, and careful production.
Unless the kind of knowledge here under discussion is complete, accurate, and timely, and unless it is applicable to a problem (or an opportunity) which is up or coming up, it is useless. In this proposition is recognized the fact that Search Engine Optimization and Digital Marketing Intelligence is not knowledge for knowledge's sake alone, but that it is knowledge for the practical matter of taking action.
Knowledge or truth is not the final objective or aim of the Company, Corporation or Business; it is victory in markets, domestic and global. Business is a struggle, in essence like warfare. We should be effective, primarily; and efficient if possible. The Search Engine Optimization and Digital Marketing Intelligence division or staff should be considered sub-contractors to top management; the consumer-s of the Search Engine Optimization and Digital Marketing Intelligence product.
Boldness is crucial in business, however, defining boldness solely by vision and imagination is almost always a mistake. None of the top-ranking corporate winners of today would have made it to the internet ascending-heights had they not successfully executed plans they laid out years earlier. Linking vision to execution is the essence of a good strategy. The visions of some folks have definitely affected the world and the world belongs to people with something to do, say or write, however, as Arthur Schopenhauer advised us to remember: "Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world."
"Ambitious but doable" is a first requirement for a realistic vision. A second is to strive for simplicity and pragmatism. If the goal is inherently complex - like entering the Chinese market utilizing existing subcontractors from a dozen Western countries - what is needed is to break it down into smaller, closer steps, while resisting the temptation to add complications as the strategy develops.
Entering Asian markets, for example China's (I ought to know, having undertaken extensive university and industry research - as well as marketing/sales negotiations - there as a young graduate back in the mid-1980's as mentioned before, and worth repeating), one does not assume that boldness requires an entirely new product or approach. Sometimes innovative new paths - such as using Baidu in the vernacular - branch off from existing ways of doing things; and, perhaps, the sooner the better.
One might ask how to build on the past, but at the same time challenge the things and procedures that do not need to be there any more. If things - optimizing marketing and sales through, for example, wise and prudent SEO - come off, it will provide further proof that to succeed, you do not always have to aim for the stars. Sometimes, you simply have to come up with a different way of using what is right there under your feet - and on the Net. "What we look for is here, and nowhere else," as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote a long, long time ago.
KNOWLEDGEABLE LINGUISTICS AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE!
Language, as we argue often and elsewhere, matters immensely. Sloppy use robs terms of their meaning. It also shapes perceptions; even public perceptions... Language is the foundation of civilization; it is the glue that holds the people together. It is the first weapon drawn in a conflict, whether legal, commercial or political.
Humans form non-kin communities that do not involve direct control or acqaintance with others; we have science and mathematics and seek ultimate explanations. The introduction of language must surely be among the most important factors explaining how these remarkable capacities came to us. This conclusion makes sense on independent grounds. You cannot speculate and think about matters far and near unless you have some way of constructing an unlimited number of complex thoughts that you can detach from current circumstances and use to range over arbitrary times and circumstances.
Language gives you this capacity. You cannot organize and construct projects involving cooperation between individuals unless you have a way of planning well into the future, providing for contingencies, and assigning specific roles; language gives you that. So one reason to be interested in the science of language is because it tells us what natural languages are, what gives us, but no other creatures, language, and what explains the introduction of language and the beginnings of our remarkable cognitive capacities.
The science of language is an objective natural science that treats language as a biologically based system that evolved in a single individual and was genetically transmitted to progeny. Evolution of this sort – very different from the usual gradualist stories about evolution of complex systems – nicely explains how language came about. And there are important implications of the fact that language is a “natural object”, and that it came about by means of evolution.
One implication of the idea that the evolutionary introduction of language may have made us the distinctive species we are is that it – perhaps by itself – explains what is human about human nature. If this is so, there is a naturalistic – not religious, and not merely speculative – account of our distinctiveness and its origin. If so, and assuming that a creature’s fundamental needs are based on its nature, we might be able to find a naturalistic basis for views about “the Good Life for this kind of Creature”.
Rationalism consists of a set of proposals – a procedure, strategy, or methodology – for studying the human mind, and language in particular. The methodology is not chosen at random; it is adopted because rationalists believe that it offers the best way to proceed in constructing a naturalistic science of mind and language, a science that while it differs from physics and chemistry in its subject matter is, like them, a natural science.
It is assumed [by some] there exist two sets of observations about language and its use, and about how language and other human mental capacities develop in the infant and child. One is called the “poverty of the stimulus” observations and applies to all cognitive domains such as vision, audition, facial and object recognition, and so on. The other, the “creative aspect of language use”, is specific to language. We wonder if humans develop a language automatically, that is, if much of the human mind’s structure and “content” must somehow be fixed or innate? The answer is most likely a big yes.
It is also reasonable to hold that humans really are free in the ways in which they use language, and also to hold that if one wants a natural science of language, the only way to get it is to focus entirely on the nature, development, and operations of a person’s “language organ”, not on the uses to which its resources are put as they appear in a person’s linguistic actions and behaviours.
Perhaps the science of language should in some measure be a science of linguistic behaviour and how the mind relates to the world outside the head? These asumptions and the methodology for the study of mind dominate current research in psychology, philosophy, and related cognitive sciences. We might insist that the only methodology appropriate for developing a theory of language is that which is also employed in chemistry and physics. The study of language differs only in subject matter and experimental techniques from other naturalistic scientific endeavour.
We can acknowledge that language is a very useful cognitive tool that can serve many roles and that has given humans extraordinary cognitive advantages, compared to other creatures. We might, however, resist the idea that language evolved because it improved the human capacity to communicate; further against the idea that language is some kind of social invention, an institution that was put together by us to help us serve our needs, and transmitted to the young by some kind of training or social inculcation.
Now let us take language. What is its characteristic use? Well, probably 99.9 per cent of its use is internal to the mind. You can not go a minute without talking to yourself. It takes an incredible act of will not to talk to yourself. It is perfectly true that language is used for communication. But everything you do is used for communication – your hairstyle, your mannerism, your walk, and so on and so forth. So sure, language is also used for communication.
How can we compare animal and human communication? There is a kind of taxonomy of animal cries, and human language does not even fit the taxonomy in any of the senses. Whatever those things are, they are apparently a code (cues, signals, signs); alas, there is no relationship to human language. That is not so surprising: apparently, our nearest surviving relatives are about 6-8-10 million years apart in evolutionary time; so you would not expect to find anything like human language. So animals do have communication systems, but they do not seem to have anything like a language.
There was a sudden “great leap forward” – an outburst of creative energy – in an instant of evolutionary time, during perhaps ten thousand years or so. Some small genetic change led to the rewiring of the brain that made this human capacity available. And with it came the entire range of creative options that are available to humans within a theory of mind – a second-order theory of mind, so you know that somebody is trying to make you think what somebody else wants you to think...
It is very hard to imagine how any of this could go on without language; at least, we can not think of any way of doing it without a language. And most of it is thinking and planning and interpreting; it is internal. This genetic change – this mutation in the brain creating language capabilities – must have taken place in a person, not in a group. It had to have happened in a single person. Something happened in a person that that person transmitted to its offspring. This mutation – or modification – must have had some selectional advantage.
Adding, merging, creating syntax, experiencing syllogism mean to take mental objects [or concepts of some sort], already constructed, and make bigger mental objects out of them. As soon as you have this capacity, you have an infinite variety of hierarchically structured expressions [and thoughts] available to you.
So it is conceivable that that is as far as the evolution of language is concerned. And the reason we continue to primarily use language to think [within] ourselves is that that is the way it got started, less than one hundred thousand years ago. And, after all, sixty or seventy thousand years [and maybe up to a hundred thousand] is not a lot of time from an evolutionary point of view; it is [virtually] an instant.
Now, there are a lot of more complicated theories, but there is no justification for any of them. So, for example, a common theory is that somehow, some mutation made it possible to construct two-word sentences; and that gave a memory advantage because you could eliminate this big number of lexical items from memory.
So that had selectional advantages. And then something came along and we had three-word sentences and then a series of mutations led to five...; finally you got complete syntax, because it goes to infinity. This somehow constituted an evolutionary advantage for that individual and his or her offspring.
There are many arguments and evidence against thinking that the language and arithmatic capacities are related, albeit, it is not very clear what the evidence purports. The evidence is, in part, dissociations. You can get neural dysfunction in which you lose one capacity and keep the other. However, that is not going to tell you anything, because it does not distinguish competence from performance. It may be that those neural deficiencies have to do with using the capacity.
So to take an analogy, there are dissociations in reading a language. But nobody thinks that there is a special reading part of the brain. It is just that there is a way of using language in reading, and that way can be damaged; but the language is still there. And it could be the same thing for arithmatic. As a matter of fact, it could turn out that, whatever language is, it is just distributed in different parts of the brain.
There are so many possibilities that the evidence just does not show very much. So what we are left with is speculation, but when you do not have enough evidence, you pick the simplest explanation. And the simplest explanation that happens to conform to all the evidence we have is that it (reading) is just an offshoot of language derived by imposing a specific restriction on syntax.
In fact, there are other specific restrictions, which are much more modern. So take what are called “formal languages”, say ... arithmatic, or programming systems, or whatever. They are kind of like natural language, but they are so recent and so self-conscious that we know that they are not really much like the biological object, human language.
In natural language, you do use edge properties for scope; and you do it through internal syntax. Formal languages do not have internal syntax; but they have got to have something that is going to be interpreted as scope. So you use the same device you do in natural language; you put it on the outside with the restricted variables, and so on.
There are things that just flow from having a system with syntax inside you; and probably the same is true of music, and many other things. We got this capacity that came along and gives us extraordinary options for planning, interpretation and thought. And it just starts feeding into everything else.
The evolution of human language has got to be one of the hardest topics to study. Yet somehow we feel that we have got to understand it, or we can not go further. It is a highly irrational approach to inquiry; something that we might think of as pure science, science that aims at basic structures, without regard to applications. This is a huge step in the sciences and, in fact, a step only very recently taken.
Our tradition has been strictly descriptive behaviourism, but now the fundamental biological question arises: what are the properties of this language system that are specific to it? How is it different from walking, say – what specific properties make a system, unlike other systems, a linguistic one?
That question is, why do biological systems have these properties – why these properties, and not other properties? This was recognized to be a problem even back around Darwin’s time. Even natural selection – it is perfectly understood, it is obvious from the logic of it – even natural selection alone cannot do anything; it has to work within some kind of prescribed channel of physical and chemical possibilities, and that has to be a restrictive channel.
The basic questions of what is specific to language really have to do with issues that go beyond those of explanatory adequacy [that is, with Plato’s Problem, or explaining the poverty of the stimulus facts for language acquisition]. “We should consider what is natural not in things depraved but in those which are rightly ordered according to nature,” as Aristotle advised us.
But if language is not rooted in nature, but in accident and history. There is a possibility, which is not unreasonable, given what we know about human evolution. It seems that the language system developed quite suddenly. If so, a long process of historical accidentis is ruled out, and we can begin to look for an explanation elsewhere – perhaps, as Turing thought, in chemistry or physics.
And there are, of course, lots of instances of what François Jacob calls “bricolage”, or tinkering: at any particular point, nature does the best it can with what is at hand. You get paths in evolution that get stuck up here and go from there and not start over and go somewhere else. Language is a pretty intricate system with highly specific principles that has no analogue anywhere else in the world, and this might lead to the end of any discussion of the central problems of biology of language – what is specific to it, how did it get there?
We have agreed that only humans have language, and language is part of communication [systems]. It has been said that Koko the gorilla knew over 1,000 signs based on American Sign Language, and used them to do everything from asking for food to joking around. Her trainer thought Koko went further still, signing in novel ways and showing complex emotions. However, linguists and experts in sign languages pointed out that these have complex grammars, equivalent to spoken languages in expressiveness. Koko’s ability fell well short of a fluent human signer, in particular when it came to syntax, an infinite capacity.
We have a debate over whether emoji constitute a language. If anything, emoji are too good at communicating to count. They are blunt and literal. A smiling emoji means a smile. Nearly all words in a human language, by contrast, are arbitrary. A dog does not make a sound like “dog”. Form has no connection to meaning.
With a few joking exceptions, emoji are like gesture and tone of voice, in that their form and meaning are inextricable; they are almost impossible to to misunderstand because they are universal and obvious. Indeed emoji are so popular because they do in writing what gesture and tone do for speech.
But attempts to “translate” (most historically known literal translations were made at a time when the derivation of the word was still understood, coming from trans-ferre, to bring across) novels into emoji are mere amusements. No one without previous knowledge of the plot could possibly understand them.
No language in the world merely strings relevant signs together like emoji, or communicates at the tourist-abroad level of pointing and making exaggerated facial expressions. That gorillas lack syntax should not blind humans to their magnificence. But the fact that Koko could communicate should not mislead observers into thinking she possessed language. Homo sapiens is an ever more impressive primate, too.
Nothing would work in the absence of communication. Flowers must communicate with bees in order for pollination to be successful. Male songbird must communicate with females if they are to mate and rear young. Lions on a cooperative hunt must communicate with each other about how they will attack their prey.
A human infant must communicate with its parents so that the needs of both are met. Great orators must use their communicative skills to captivate and manipulate the emotions of their audience. Computer programmers must design software to communicate with their hardware. And who knows, perhaps there are extraterrestrials trying to communicate with us at this very moment, although perhaps more successfully with some of us mere mortals than with others.
But why do birds sing rather than speak? Why do not human infants scream and cry when they are content as peas in a pod, but coo and gurgle when they are angry, annoyed, or in pain? These are questions about design, and what is true of all communication systems that work is that they have specific design features. The design features of a communication system are the result of a complex interaction between the constraints of the system and demands of the job required.
For natural communication systems, such as those observed in the plant and animal kingdoms, constraints can be seen at several levels including neurobiological, physiological, and psychological. These constraints are important, for they determine the relative success of the organism in responding to socioecologically relevant stimuli in the environment.
For all organisms, including humans, communication provides a vehicle for conveying information and for expressing to others what has been perceived. But organisms differ with regard to what they can convey and what they can perceive. Consequently, there are a diversity of communication systems in the natural world.
These perspectives or problems are not hierarchically structured. They represent a coherent theoretical and methodological framwork for both studying and explaining communication. Current understanding of communication exceeds many other areas of natural behaviour because the question “Why?” has been addressed thoroughly.
A close look at what we know about human language suggests that our understanding of mechanism and ontogeny is sophisticated, whereas our understanding of function and phylogeny is relatively poor. By the phylogeny of language, we are referring to the evolutionary changes in communicative structure and function preceding the emergence of language in modern humans - i e, Homo sapiens sapiens.
In fact, rarely have researchers asked whether language should be considered an adaptation and, if so, what its fitness consequences are for members of the species. There are at least four reasons for this omission. First, for some linguists, the analytical lens focuses exclusively on the problem of syntax.
Those working on this aspect of language show little interest in the fact that syntactic structure provides humans with an extraordinary communicative tool and, as a result, show little interest in the evolutionary pressures that may have led to this form of communication rather than some other form.
Second, language is sometimes conceived as a trait that is detached from our biology – most of the interesting features of language are the result of cultural processes. Clearly, anything that is not part of our biology cannot be an adaptation, sensu strictu. Third, interest in the evolutionary origins of language has concentrated on syntax and the computational machinery that it appears to require, a machinery considered a unique feature of modern humans.
Without precursors, it makes little sense to talk about gradual evolution by natural selection. Last, evolutionary thinking has generally played a minor role in the social sciences. This statement is certainly true of most researchers working on human language. The study of human language requires a good dose of medicine flavoured with functional and phylogenetic ingredients.
Because human language is communicated via auditory and visual channels, the design features of our own communication system can be directly compared to the design features of other animals without the complications of different sensory modalities. We may search for a working definition of communication, and here are a few known dittos:
-Communication occurs when the action of or cue by one organism is perceived by and thus alters the probability pattern of behaviour in another organism in a fashion adaptive to either one or both of the participants.
-Communication is the transfer of information via signals sent in a channel between a sender and a receiver. The occurrence of communication is recognized by a difference in the behaviour of the reputed receiver in two situations that differ only in the presence or absence of the reputed signal. The effect of a signal may be to prevent a change in the receiver’s output, or to maintain a specific internal behavioural state of readiness.
-The term “true communication” is restricted to cases in which the transmitting organism engages in behaviour that is adaptive principally because it generates a signal and the interaction mediated by the signal is adaptive to the receiving organism as well.
-The process in which actors use specially designed signals or displays to modify the behaviour of reactors.
-The term is used in a narrower sense, to refer to the behaviours by which one member of a species conveys information to another member of the species.
-Communication is a matter of casual influence. The communicator [must] construct an internal representation of the external world, and then ... carry out some symbolic behaviour that conveys the content of that representation. The recipient must first perceive the symbolic behaviour, i e construct its internal representation, and then from it recover a further internal representation of the state that it signifies. This final step depends on access to the arbitrary conventions governing the interpretation of the symbolic behaviour.
-Human communication includes forms of verbal communication such as speech, written language and sign language. It comprises nonverbal modes that do not invoke language proper, but that nevertheless constitute extremely important aspects of how we communicate. As we interact, we make various gestures – some vocal and audible, others nonvocal like patterns of eye contact and movements of the face and the body. Whether intentional or not, these behaviours carry a great deal of communicative significance.
The concepts of information and signal form integral components of most definitions of communication, including communication on the internet. Information is a feature of an interaction (i e, not an abstraction that can be discussed in the absence of some specific context between sender and perceiver).
Signals carry certain kinds of informational content, which can be manipulated by the sender and differentially acted upon by the perceiver. Signals have been designed to serve particular functions, and the function they serve must be evaluated in light of both production and perception constraints.
Constraints on the system include the energetic cost associated with generating the cheliped display, and for purposes of clarity we have to draw a technical distinction between cues and signals. Cues, like signals, represent potential sources of information. Cues, however, differ from signals in two important ways.
First, cues – also on a website or in a standardized e-mail – tend to be permanently ON, whereas signals are more plastic and can be in an ON and OFF state. A beautiful scenery in a website would be a cue, an urgent symbol (!) in an e-mail would constitute a signal. A second distinction is necessary between cues and signals on the one hand, and what we might call signs. Having an SSL secured website, showing https:// rather than http://, might to some indicate a sign of heightened security and hence solidity.
In addition to his theory of natural selection, the comparative method is what made Darwin great. His major works are packed with comparisons based on detailed studies and anecdotal observations. The comparative method is not without problems. The problems are most acute when phylogenetic relationships are poorly documental and when variables or traits are codes as present versus absent. We will not question Darwin’s belief that the structure and function of language were shaped by problems associated with mating and survival – albeit, we ought to contemplate how this affect our electronic communicative behaviour and endeavour.
The presence – absence distinction is at the heart of most discussions of language evolution. Although there is nothing theoretically misguided about this distinction, it must be used with caution. This is particularly the case in comparative studies of communication, where the units of comparison commonly differ between subjects and knowledge of the communication system is typically asymmetric for the subjects being compared.
For example, it is often stated that a fundamental difference between human language and nonhuman communication is that the former has access to an infinite set of meaningful utterances whereas the latter is more restricted. The difference in expressiveness lies in the fact that language makes use of the combinatorial power of syntax whereas other communicative forms lack syntax. Although this distinction is currently accurate, it is perhaps premature in a predictive perspective.
Predicting short- and long-term future linguistic experience will be essential, crucial and of utmost importance. Who can claim to be a true scenario-planning expert? We, as a Digital Marketing Intelligence Group, value structure above all, without being completely averse to deviations from the tried and true. Response is not the same as creation – the latter looms larger over our thoughts – and we can never duck reality over time, especially not when it is coming broadside.
Being positive, though, is, as always, an argumentum e silentio. An endless stream of new discoveries makes science thrilling. But, as any seasoned researcher knows, such novelties are worthless unless they can be replicated. Often, however, replication does not get done as thoroughly as it should be – or even at all. For, as any seasoned researcher also knows, replication is rarely the stuff careers are built on; studies conducted with that goal may even struggle to get published in peer-reviewed journals.
A scientist / philosopher, Wilhelm Roscher, has explicitly stated that for science the development of peoples is in principle always the same; and the category of appropriation, both of economic and scientific resources, is older than that of legitimacy.
The economic instability and political divisions - i e, constructive, creative competition - sometimes or often associated with business management- and computer linguistics (think Facebook and Cambridge Analytica) have caused some sharp minds to think of them as a curse, not a blessing. But economic thinking on this issue is also prone to division and swings in sentiment. Is business management- and computer linguistic science in fact marred by reverse casuality?
Our knowledge, and especially our scientific knowledge, progresses by unjustified (and unjustifiable) anticipations, by guesses, by tentative solutions to our problems; in a word by conjectures. Not only our knowledge, but also our aims and our standards grow through an unending process of trial and error, which must be subjected to critical tests.
A theory of experience may – and should – assign to our observations the equally modest and almost equally important role of tests which may help us in the discovery of our mistakes. Though, it should stress our fallibility, albeit, not resign itself to scepticism. It is vitally important to stress the fact that knowledge can grow and that science can progress – just because we can learn from our mistakes.
Anything that can not be reached by meagre knowledge and wisdom is beyond scientific control: it lays in the realm of genius, which rises above all rules. (Being aware that a tomato is in fact a berry is knowledge; not putting it in a fruit salad would be considered wisdom: a small reminder for those who can not differentiate between these two words.)
I share with many the penchant for delving into the genius of the past and asking how a similar knowledge spirit might guide the future. Knowledge is somewhat paradoxical. It is most productive when freely available. But the incentive to create it depends on the ability to restrict its use. The former consideration justifies dissemination. The latter justfies control. How, then, is this balance working?
Historically, knowledge has been [considered] dangerous. One anti-intellectual diatribe published in 1526 went so far as to pronounce knowledge “the very pestilence, that putteth all mankind to ruine and hath made us subjecte to so many kindes of sinne”. Better, wrote the author, “to be Idiotes, and knowe nothinge” than to have one’s head filled with pernicious ideas.
But although such thoroughgoing scepticism was an understandable reaction to the plethora of “knowledge” then on offer, it was a hard philosophy to stick to and nobody really did stick to it. It was more plausible to employ the weapons of Scepticism in a strictly limited way. Sceptical arguments were generally used to undermine outdated or overambitious claims to knowledge, not to attack all intellectual activity.
Globalization has been helping to spread useful knowledge. This analysis sheds light on the contemporary landscape of innovation, on the current diffusion of knowledge, on the role of global value chains and on the impact of competition and use of knowledge and language. Knowledgeable technology is the process of turning the magical into the mundane, and rivalry is the best fuel for scientific language exploration.
Most people spend a lot of time inspecting a brochure’s first few pages and hardly look at distracting websites. But as time wear on, their attention starts to flag, and then it collapses completely. It is hard to accuse these people of being lazy or ignorant. They really want to pay attention and absorb information, but their attention fails them.
Communications are written by experts. Most experts love the opportunity to demonstrate their expertise, especially when their contribution is acknowledged. Contributing to the community of knowledge is in our collaborative nature. These experts feel like everyone must understand what they write because the expert does. This is the curse of knowledge.
It is a result of participation in the community of knowledge – the failure to separate what is in one’s own head from what is in the heads of others. The consummate philosopher Immanuel Kant believed that the ways things really are will always remain hidden from our view. All we can ever know is the appearance of things.
So perhaps the best we can hope is that science gives us verisimilitudinous knowledge of the universe; that is, gives us a narrative that appears to describe reality. What seems is the sensory veneer of what we see, what we hear, what people say, what people do. What is hides beneath what seems. For truth is not what happens, but how and why what happens happens.
Ignorance is not bliss, but it does not have to be a misery. For humans, ignorance is inevitable. It is our natural state. There is too much complexity in the world for any individual to master. Ignorance can be frustrating, but the problem is not ignorance per se. It is the trouble we get by not recognizing it.
Criticism of our conjectures is of decisive importance: by bringing out our mistakes it makes us understand the difficulties of the problem (and/or opportunity) which we are trying to solve. This is how we become better acquainted with our problem (and/or opportunity), and able to propose more mature solutions; steps forward that take us nearer to the truth.
Truth is not manifest, as a rule. We may raise questions, albeit, give no answers. The simple truth is that truth is often hard to come by, and that once found it may easily be lost again. Erroneous beliefs may have an astonishing power to survive, in defiance of experience.
I am mainly dealing with the structure of business, industrial and marketing organizations in a comparative and systematic manner, at the risk of falling under the anathema “Dilettantes compare”. I do so in order to remind us all that thinking, writing and judging – being creative overall - if it is to be of any value, must always be and remain comparative, open and in the context of time, historical events and business / social development. Striking the right balance between “thinking and doing” is important, and I would henceforth like to “bend the arc towards doing”. Eilt sehr. Sofort am Schirm. Zugreifen! Time is of essence; Tempus fugit.
The human mind is both brilliant and pathetic. We have mastered fire, created democratic institutions, stood on the moon, and sequenced our genome. And yet each of us is error prone, sometimes irrational, and often ignorant. How we think is helpful to understand why we think. Thought could have evolved to serve several functions.
The function of thought could be to represent the world – to construct a model in our heads that corresponds in critical ways to the way the world is. Or thought could be there to make language possible so we can communicate with others. Or thought could be there for problem-solving or decision-making.
Or maybe it evolved for a specific purpose such as building tools or showing off to potential mates (evolution dictates that there is no more important action than mating; some say that if life has any purpose, surely it is to propagate). All of these ideas may have something to them, but thought surely evolved to serve a larger purpose, a purpose common to all three proposals: Thought is for action!
Thinking evolved as an extension of the ability to act effectively; it evolved to make us better at doing what is necessary to achieve our goals. Thought allows us to select from among a set of possible actions by predicting the effects of each action and by imagining how the world would be if we had taken different actions in the past.
One reason to believe that this is why we think is that action came before thought. Even the earliest organisms were capable of action. Single-celled organisms that arose early in the evolutionary cycle ate and moved and reproduced. They did things; they acted on the world and changed it. Evolution selected those organisms whose actions best supported their survival. And the organisms whose actions were most effective were the ones best tuned to the changing conditions of a complex world.
The best tools for identifying the appropriate action in a given circumstance are mental faculties that can process information. Visual systems must be able to do a fair amount of sophisticated processing to distinguish a rat from a leaf. Other mental processes are also critical for selecting the appropriate action. Memory can help indicate which actions have been most effective under similar conditions in the past, and reasoning can help predict what will happen under new conditions.
Some - or many, even most – business and marketing institutions are trapped in financial constructs that makes it hard to pursue missions intelligently, albeit, it is not flesh and blood that make us fathers. Being [critical] of everyone enable us – as a Search Engine Optimization and Digital Marketing Group – to be impartial, utilizing oratio obliqua; explicit and implicit, verbal and non-verbal.
You need to own – or create – great content to differentiate yourself in the market, and it is like anything else; perseverance seems to pay off. The market gives no quarter - you need technological and/or linguistic advantages - and be reminded that while the amateur may feel like your friend, there is joy in developing expertise and craftmanship. Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end. Peel that onion of reality!
Science shows us regularly that our intuitions are mistaken. Science is constantly learning something new, and more often than not such learning means jettisoning wrong ideas. That is why science often clashes with common sense – our intuition, for example, wants Earth to be flat and still, and time to be the same everywhere. None of this is true.
Perhaps our difficulty in dealing with impermanence (or the passing of time) is at the root of our anxiety and suffering. It might have been in order to escape from this anxiety that the Greek philosopher Parmenides denied time’s existence, Plato imagined a world of ideas outside it and Hegel spoke of the moment in which the spirit transcends temporality.
In our emotional fog – with a temporal structure far removed from our intuition – perhaps, ultimately, we end up losing our own sense of time; and the emotional dimension of time is not the film of mist that prevents us from apprehending its nature objectively.
“Here-and-now” is a well-defined notion in science, but “now” on its own is not. If we call reality that which exists now, what is reality after we have realized that there is not a well-defined “now” everywhere.
The very grammar we use to talk about things, in which verbs have only a past, future and present tense, is inadequate to describe the ways of nature. Is our perception of time illusory? No, not necessarily, however it indicates that what we perceive as time may not be a simple and elementary aspect of nature, but rather a complex phenomenon with many layers, each needing to be addressed by a different chapter of science.
The full complexity of what we perceive as the flow of time has to be understood by studying the structure of our brain: evolution has shaped our brain into a machine that feeds off memory in order to anticipate the future. Time remains – also for explorers of Digital Marketing Intelligence and Search Engine Optimization – a mystery; a mystery that relates to issues of our individual identity and natural consciousness.
How do we reach a perfect symmetry between search engine optimization, artificial intelligence, machine learning, overall digital marketing and management control? To combine purpose and means is to create. Art is the capacity to create. Theory is the representation of art by way of concepts. This constitutes the whole of art, with two exceptions: talent, which is fundamental to everything, and practice – neither of which can be the product of theory. In short, even the most realistic theory can never match reality. (We will look into established rules with prescriptive powers of business management / digital linguistics research at a later section of study.)
We are not exploring the difficulties – the friction – of having decisions implemented due to uncertainty, ignorance, confusion, fatigue, error and countless other imponderables inferring with the effective application of business and digital marketing development. We are not [yet] investigating one important element in business / digital development – chance – subject to theoretical analysis. What depends upon a few persons is, in great measure, to be ascribed to chance, or secret and unknown causes; what arises from a great number may often be accounted for by determinate and known causes.
Most men / women are neither capable of achieving intellectual mastery over complex areas of human activity, nor much interested in it. People are happy just to carry on carrying on. To help them through the confusion of business / digital marketing development and application, initiative and required means demand relatively firm guides.
How are these to be provided? Experience goes a long way, as does a comprehensive and scientific analysis of Homo sapiens, and of human nature as it is. Understanding [reality] as such is what matters most to us. Any logical and intellectual symmetry achieved at the expence of reality will not do.
The realm of business and computer linguistic science – of Digital Marketing Intelligence – extends wherever in psychology our intellect discovers a resource that can serve our battle. What [motivational] resource? Your initial guess is – I would say hesitantly – decidedly not as good as mine... The future lies not just in predicting our outermost behaviours, but understanding our innermost ones.
I am obsessed by this type of Digital Marketing Intelligence. It has taken years – or decades – to understand what is at stake. The great Digital Marketing Intelligence of the world must demonstrate that it / we will “serve” and not “dominate” in the scheme of things. I have seen and noticed among journalists and a few pundits the sentence that, “international search engine optimization is complex to a degree, however, it is not rocket science.”
I think this judgement, by these people, is wrong and misguided. Already the competition, which will increase, demands future natural, organic algorithms and linguistic capabilities so complicated that no one person completely understands them. Rather, different people understands different aspects of them. The complexity of human invention – and writing; think Tolstoy, Dostoyevski, et al – pales in comparison to the complexity of the natural world.
We, as a communications partner, are helping clients transform their marketing model to face digital disruption and the threat of new entrants. At present the mystified theme du jour of a new technology priesthood is “artificial intelligence”, however, we would opt instead for the more limited “machine intelligence”.
When people hear the term AI, they often think about a robot taking over the world, albeit it is about increasing the efficiency of what we do across the board. Every part of our business is always being augmented by these new capabilities. Strategic distraction over denominations are not needed when content is paramount.
We must bear in mind that “artificial intelligence” is a misnomer, albeit instead perhaps call it “collective intelligence”. All AI algorithms need to be trained using reams of human-generated examples – i e, machine learning. Unless they know what the right answers (provided by humans) are meant to be, algorithms cannot translate languages, understand speech or recognize objects in images. Data provided by humans can thus be seen as a form of labour which powers AI.
We might compare AI giving Michelangelo modern sculpturing tools like laser measurement tools and X-rays to detect flaws in the marble; a more hybrid approach with substance and depth over surface.
Initially – in the 1950s – academic researchers were looking for a way to imbue machines with human-like “general” intelligence, including complex reasoning. But that remains a distant aspiration. AI/ML is about to make humans more efficient, not to take them out of the process entirely.
Buying AI/ML takes time, can feel like hard work, and the results are often imperfect, however, artificial intelligence / machine learning is likely to have a bigger impact than anything since the advent of computers, and its consequences could be far more disruptive. Being both powerful and relatively cheap, it will spread faster than computers did and touch every industry.
We used wrongly to believe that “situational understanding could be delivered on a computer screen”, albeit, we have learnt the hard way it can not. Sometimes you have to be there to understand. We advocate the merits of understanding the world both through the data and through personal experience. Numbers will never tell the full story of what internet and life on Earth is all about. Hard logic and personal impressions work best when they reinforce and correct each other.
Representing the semantics of linguistic items in a machine-interpretable form has been a major goal of Natural Language Processing since its earliest days. Among the range of different linguistic items, words have attracted the most research attention. However, word representations have an important limitation: they conflate different meanings of a word into a single vector. Representations of word senses have the potential to overcome this inherent limitation.
Indeed, the representation of individual word senses and concepts has recently gained in popularity with several experimental results showing that a considerable performance improvement can be achieved across different NLP applications upon moving from word level to the deeper sense and concept levels. Another interesting point regarding the representation of concepts and word senses is that these models can be seamlessly applied to other linguistic items, such as words, phrases and sentences.
Personally, I chiefly write for ourselves and a few global multinationals – less than ten in numbers: from USA, Japan, China, England, France, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden and Russia – being as linguistically stringent and creative as possible. Each project is seldom a “quicky”, but rather comprises long periods of “writing slowly”, following the template of marketing success by “the well-told story erasing scepticism by wrapping [its] meaning inside an emotion”.
Speed in itself will never be taken as an index of progress or success with ourselves! Commencement, on the other hand, of a creative writing assignment could - and perhaps should - be both rapid and immediate.
Our corporate authors and digital art directors cover most sectors on this planet in a timely fashion. However - one wonders - can any one person be an expert on all the writing and linguistic systems in the contemporary digital world? Let us explore humanity’s greatest invention, putting it in context of today’s convoluted internet verbosity.
WRITING
Writing is perhaps humanity's greatest invention. Without it there would be no history and no civilization as we know it. How, when, where and why did writing evolve? Do alphabets function better than hieroglyphs? Are we today, in the computer age, moving towards a "universal language" of signs and symbols?
The details will make the whole full, and thence you will be able to reach your ultimate telos - with an intact kudos - soon; very soon. "N'en parlez jamais; pensez y toujour" ("Speak of it never; think of it always") as the famous philosopher Michel Gambetta wrote it down a long time ago.
See you at the top!
CG Ekman
CG Ekman negotiating global SEO with a huge UK retailer client.
Our SEO / Search Engine Optimization efforts and models are not per se scalable - rather extremely bespoke, nimble and agile - hence we concentrate on a limited number of large and long-term clients. Please be as prepared as possible when you contact us. Take some time beforehand to evaluate and think through your objectives and goals. Thanx!
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