Blog Marcos L. Mucheroni Filosofia, Noosfera e cibercultura

The functions of language have returned to the discussion due to the structural changes caused by the new media, and it is necessary to separate them didactically to avoid incorrect appropriation of their use in communication, so we have the functions: conative, metalinguistic, phatic, poetic and referential, this classification is due to “Roman Jakobson”, but it is necessary to update it now with the use of A.I. (Artificial Intelligence).

Only the referential function can be understood as the direct function of information, which is present in scientific and didactic texts, with a predominance of direct speech and a focus on the third person with the use of objectivity.

Only in metalinguistics are codes present, so it is only in this function that you can have a sender and receiver, because it essentially depends on a message being coded, that is, as the author of the classification says: “it is the one in which the code explains the code itself, that is, the language explains the language itself” (Jakobson, 2008), but the sender, who is the one who codes, and the receiver, who is the one who decodes, should only be here and not in the other linguistic functions.

So the language of language can be traffic codes, the most diverse legislation, but dictionaries and other tables of synonyms for everyday language shouldn’t be included in these lists, while Morse code and digital codes (ASCII and digital transmission itself, for example) are today the most obvious characteristics of metalanguage, but the transmitter and receiver are still human, except in the case of robots (softbots) and A.I.

So the linguistic framework proposed by Jakobson must be updated and revised, and A.I. has an ethical and civilizational problem in that for the first time in history a code (which is confused with the sender when sending a message) can be non-human.

A.I. corrections have the ethical issue that they can be mistaken for a human sender, and it is necessary to differentiate between them, and the civilizational issue of cooperating with the creation of narratives, but it must be stressed that they predate the use of new media.

Transmitting civilizing messages, whether cultural, religious or social (political in a broader sense), has become a problem due to the impoverishment of language, the abusive use of rhetorical simplifications of truths that must be analyzed in context and without ideological manipulations.

JAKOBSON, R. (2008) Linguística e comunicação. 23.ed. Brazil, São Paulo: Cultrix.