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SUMMARY:'Put on my tomb: this is what she was trying for': the extraordina
 ry life of Margaret Masterman - Peter da Bolla (University of Cambridge)
DTSTART:20221026T120000Z
DTEND:20221026T133000Z
UID:TALK184991@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Jacob Stegenga
DESCRIPTION:Between 1931 when a twenty-one year old student at Newnham Col
 lege\, Cambridge changed her degree subject from Modern Languages to Moral
  Sciences\, and 1979 when the Alternative Natural Philosophy Association w
 as founded a formidable presence at the edges of Cambridge collegiate and 
 academic life ran riot\, creatively embracing the ordinary language philos
 ophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein\, the rituals of Christian worship\, the philo
 sophy of science and its connection to religious belief\, the very beginni
 ng of computational linguistics which she pioneered (at a time when access
  to the machines that could run computer programs was extremely limited)\,
  the very earliest attempts to develop functional machine translation and 
 a powerfully imaginative and potentially summative theory of language and 
 meaning that to this day has yet to be properly engaged with by researcher
 s in fields that are now unavoidable for contemporary life: Artificial Int
 elligence\, neuroscience\, information science and computational linguisti
 cs. Unknown to almost all these researchers\, and completely unacknowledge
 d within widely disseminated and accessible accounts of the origins of the
 se fields\, her work was decades ahead of that of her contemporaries. Unkn
 own perhaps to these researchers\, but not unknown to members of HPS. She 
 was Margaret Masterman\, the author of a paper that has become canonical o
 n the work of Thomas Kuhn\, entitled 'The Nature of a Paradigm' which was 
 published in the volume edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave\, _Critic
 ism and the Growth of Knowledge_. She was also the wife of Richard Braithw
 aite\, the Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy who\, as is widely k
 nown to HPSers\, had given his help in the early introduction of HPS into 
 the natural sciences tripos in 1951 by providing lectures on the history o
 f science.\n\nThis paper will provide an overview of Masterman's extraordi
 nary achievements\, taking in not only the two projects she founded\, the 
 Cambridge Language Research Unit and the Epiphany Philosophers\, but also 
 a brief account of some of her collaborators\, almost all of them\, like h
 er\, on the margins of 'official' Cambridge and in their own ways just as 
 extraordinary. In this 50th anniversary year for HPS it seems appropriate 
 to bring Masterman into the limelight as her interests in the philosophy o
 f science and contemplative religious practice\, coupled to her incredibly
  original approach to the philosophy of language and machine translation w
 ere deeply grounded in her intellectual formation during the 1930s in Camb
 ridge\, precisely the era of where Cambridge HPS finds its origins.
LOCATION:Seminar Room 2\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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