"Act Promptly, Make Your God Happy": Representation And Rhetorical Relations In Natural Language Generation

Tile Sumerian proverb in the title is invoked by Julian Jaynes (1976) as he documents the laborious process of coming to consciousness. This activity is the cognitive labor that enables us to arrive at a question about the precise relationship between two types of knowledge, or ask if "rhetorical relations [are] the realizations of intentions, or should . . . be discarded as simply a misconstrual of intentions proper?" It is the legacy of that arrival we are discussing when we raise issues around intentionality, and I do not think it is coincidental that the proverb quoted in Jaynes' investigation ca.n be read in its English translation as being among the earliest evidence for a clMm of a mental state of intentionality: not only does the proverb denmnstrate that we possess a state of awareness about "how to live", it also presents that consciousness as the instilling of action coincident with the having of the mental state. The "god" whispers to the other half of the bicameral brain; the ability to act lodged there responds as to a direct physiological stinmlus. What is not quite so obvious is that, as the presence of intention makes itself known, so do the effects of a necessary rhetorical relationship. This paper takes the position that rhetorical knowledge is embedded in intentional knowledge, and that the two can be said not merely to have a close relationship but to interact demonstrably in a reflexive one.