Margaret Masterman

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Margaret Masterman (born May 4, 1910 in London , † April 1, 1986 in Cambridge ) was a British philosopher and linguist .

Live and act

Margaret Masterman was the daughter of the politician Charles Masterman and his wife Lucy Blanche Lyttelton , who was also politically active and a poet . She studied modern and medieval languages and Ethics (Moral Science) at Newnham College of the University of Cambridge . Later she also learned Chinese .

In 1932 she married the philosopher Richard Bevan Braithwaite , with whom she had a son and a daughter. Masterman was one of the selected students in 1933/34 who were allowed to write Ludwig Wittgenstein's lecture ( Blue Book ) in Cambridge (the others were the close colleague and friend of Wittgenstein Francis Skinner , the mathematician Reuben Goodstein , the philosopher Alice Ambrose and the mathematician HSM Coxeter ).

She was also a pioneer in computational linguistics and founded the Cambridge Language Research Unit (CLRU) in 1956 . Although not officially part of the university, important research in computational linguistics and machine translation has been done in the UK. Funding came from research grants from the USA, Great Britain and the EU. At that time, however, the center suffered from a lack of computer capacity. Masterman therefore made a new attempt to revive the institute with the advent of PCs in 1980, but this was abandoned after her death.

Their understanding of language was very different from Noam Chomsky's syntax - oriented grammar school . Rather, she emphasized the importance of breath groups , redundancy in language, and rhythm for language; their starting point was semantic analysis. The Chinese served as a model.

Margaret Masterman was one of the founders of Lucy Cavendish College for Women in Cambridge and was its vice-president from 1965 to 1975. She herself was related to Lucy Cavendish (1841-1925, nee Lyttelton), a pioneer in women's education.

As a philosopher, she played an important role in the development of the paradigm concept by Thomas S. Kuhn , whom she criticized in an essay in 1965.

She also dealt with writing; she wrote plays and novels and had a wide range of other interests (such as Gregorian chant ).

literature

  • William Williams, Frank Knowles Margaret Masterman. In Memoriam , Computers and Translation, 2, 1987, Jstor
  • Masterman Language, Cohesion and Form , Editor Yorick Wilks, Cambridge University Press 2010 (Collected Articles)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Masterman: "The Nature of a Paradigm", in: Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave: Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge , Proceedings of the 1965 International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science 4, 3rd edition, Cambridge University Press, 1970, p 59-90
personal data
SURNAME Masterman, Margaret
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British philosopher and linguist
DATE OF BIRTH May 4, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH April 1, 1986
Place of death Cambridge