Hard News: A Full Sense of Nationhood
509 Responses
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why can't you offer evidence from the future?
don't you watch Star Trek?oh, i forgot, everyone got bored with this conversation and left.
next problem for you to solve: can you do something about this 4-hour time difference i'm up against?
(woops, we've already had that thread too?)
fkit, better do some work, i suppose... -
You just need to get up earlier, Stephen
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(NOTE: Posting without having fully caught up: ... )
English is a creolised bastard language, though. That is its history. And that's always been its strength.
Yes, and that is one reason I partly agreed with Islander earlier about language complexity.
Also, I think there's been a fair amount of straw man arguments on both sides in this argument, and it ain't helping. To wit,
Nothing to do with the armies and the economic might, then?
You’ve missed his point.
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Anyway, BenWilson, I've got a way to settle this argument once and for all, you jus...
Anyhoo, it's been fun, folks. Over and out.
...aw crap.
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You didn't get the general gist of what superpower Tutta Patata possesses?
Well, I kind of worked it out via the glowing rings, but I was trying to relate it back to the hairdressing salon and coming up blank.
Damn you, logical consistency! Damn you to hell!!
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You’ve missed his point.
I do that sometimes.
next problem for you to solve: can you do something about this 4-hour time difference i'm up against?
Didn't somebody recently suggest on PAS that we stop differentiating time, so that at 3am in London it's 3am everywhere in the world, even if it happens to be in the middle of the day?
We might be developing a strange universalist streak.
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You just need to get up earlier
yes. but it just never seems to happen, for various reasons.
let's see...
universal language tick
universal time zone tick
universal government (copyright law, etc.) tick
universal cuisine tick
universal left-hand break just like Raglan crossdamn, can we get someone onto that last one? seems pretty inconvenient to leave that one out when everything else has been covered
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next problem for you to solve: can you do something about this 4-hour time difference i'm up against?
I'm so with you stephen. My marginal stake in this conversation couldn't withstand the two hour time difference. Imagine my surprise when an innocent discussion on grammar turned into this:
Not that I want to stop this thread from crawling into a corner to quietly bleed to death, but
where we some time fulfill the roles of 'pron gal' and 'Italian gastronomy guy'.
I totally reckon Giovanni and I should get costumes.
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Oddly, as Paul's is the first post on page 24, I see at the top of the screen
the Prime Minister gamely dancing with a couple of drag queens.
Have we come full circle?
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Ha! I can live with being known as a Drag fanboy.
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Actually, I was thinking of Gio and Emma, but if that's how you roll, patrinfikulo....
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Gosh, that was fun. Wasn't it?
I'm still giggling about Waitaki day from our Maori corespondent. (damn it, where's the macron when you need it?) -
Actually, I was thinking of Gio and Emma, but if that's how you roll, patrinfikulo....
I knew my Speaker piece was a little less popular than other threads...
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Linger, I just noticed your follow up comment to my earlier question. Sorry I missed it because I still wanted to get an answer to your 'referential multiplication' claim. It piqued my interest. I'm not sure if you were actually making a mathematical claim about social signals having a multiplying effect, or if that's more of a rhetorical device.
If you were actually quantifying, I'd like to hear what actual numbers correspond to what in your example on page 20 (I don't know how to do the linky thing). It's clear enough that more is conveyed in the examples than just the words. So saying "Thank you" after a compliment in Japanese carries some kind of negative connotation about oneself or one's opinion of the other people? What I don't get is how that 'multiplies' the meaning. It seems to simply have added a constant amount of data to the conversation. I can't say what constant, because it depends how you assign numbers to the content, but how it can be multiplicative is something I really can't grasp.
In fact, I can't grasp how any signal at all could do that, verbal or non-verbal. If you can store the meaning in x bits, and then add another signal, which takes y bits to store, how is the information contained anything more than bits(x)+bits(y)? It could certainly be less, if the concatenation of the bit patterns could be compressed, by some kind of algorithm, but it's not more.
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Paul
Actually, I did read that the other day. But surely you weren't trying to compete with copyright threads?!? -
That is one theory. It is not a fact. The existence of this theory does not make my reasoning specious.
To me it sounds like a bullshit theory, too. As I see it, the meaning of what an author writes is what they intended it to mean. They may have expressed it poorly for some particular audience, but that doesn't mean the audience get to claim the work and say it meant something other than what the author intended. That is like saying that Nietzsche was advocating Nazism, just because the Nazis willfully interpreted it that way.
No, it is not like saying that at all. If you'd understood what you'd read, you'd've realised that an appropriate reader is not justified in attributing Nazism to Nietzsche.
However, you were right on one score! It's not the existence of a theory that makes your reasoning specious.
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Paul
Actually, I did read that the other day. But surely you weren't trying to compete with copyright threads?!?Not even the vain delusions I do have would make me that foolish.
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If you'd understood what you'd read, you'd've realised that an appropriate reader is not justified in attributing Nazism to Nietzsche.
This it true. I did not really understand what I read. The separation of the work's meaning from the author's is I guess the point where I find the theory wanting. It's the author's intention I want to understand. If what they say strictly makes no sense, on a perfectly valid and justifiable parse of the text, but another less justifiable parse does make sense, and furthermore the author says that the less-justifiable one is the one they meant, they just didn't fully get how it could be misinterpreted until later, then I'm prepared to go with the author on that one.
I can fully see that other people might not care what the author's intent was at all. They may insist on the text, and how it would be interpreted by an appropriate reader. I don't really see why they would do this, though, unless they were trying to school the author, rather than understand them. Perhaps a lawyer might do this, to take advantage of poor wording in a contract or law. But I feel it likely that the judge or jury is going to look beyond the poor wording to the intentions of the author of the document, and the signatories.
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Gudday Ben,
"Multiplicative" was intended as more rhetorical than strictly mathematical. But as the compliment examples should make clear, the social meaning is not "a constant added to referential meaning" -- because it changes depending on the sociocultural context: e.g. the "same" responses result in completely opposite inferences in those two cultural settings, because they are surrounded by different frequencies of potential alternative responses in each setting. (Rinse and repeat for a wide range of different potential environments of use, and perhaps you can see where I'm coming from with "multiplicative".)Putting it more generally: a sequence with a particular referential meaning can, when placed in different contexts, be interpreted in several different ways, even if the referential meaning remains clear. This is different in nature from what you seem to be assuming about elements of referential meaning.
Even the behaviours and values associated with exchanging referential meaning are culturally dependent. For example, it is, in general, much less acceptable to eliminate small talk and go straight into detailed discussion among Maori than among Pakeha -- and because of the negative inferences that may be made about your character if you try that, the discussion will often be less productive as a result.
---[A final footnote: Culture-based behaviours, and attitudes to such behaviours, as with those compliment responses are almost impossible to "unlearn" even if you are consciously aware of the cultural difference. The resulting miscommunications are especially dangerous because there is no linguistic signal that there has been a miscommunication, and they can colour the participants' opinions of one another forever after.]
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Damn, linger, I thought you knew something I didn't which sounded very interesting indeed. But alas, it was rhetoric! Never mind.
I don't really see too much distinction between signals that are verbal and those that are not. The non-verbal ones are fewer and therefore less expressive, but they are also most likely the ones about the things that are the most important to us. But they could safely be treated as 'more words' in a translation. They're not a special class of signals grammatically, they just have a different delivery method.
That's why I don't see the existence of other signals as a problem for universal language. They're not a problem in a good translation currently, so really all you can say for sure is that a good elegant translation into universal language might sometimes be difficult. Yup, it will be. It is also difficult between other languages, and that is no reason not to use those translations.
The conclusions that can be drawn from the context of a communication are not in themselves that relevant to the 'meaning' of the communication, unless they are intended to be. You could conclude if I ask for another helping after a big meal that I am a greedy pig, but I did not actually say that, nor did I probably mean that. Knowing that some people will think that is useful cultural information, but I don't think it actually projects meaning backwards into the utterance, unless that was intended, and can be seen to have been intended.
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I do rather get the feeling we are arguing from within different contexts... :-/
Please note I am contrasting social with referential meanings of the same verbal signals, not contrasting verbal with non-verbal signals. There are no "extra words" or equivalents of same to consider here.
And I am not describing "conclusions from the context of a communication" per se, but rather conclusions from the fact that *that particular communication* -- and not some other -- occurs in that particular context. That difference is important, because my central point is that it is not possible to remove an utterance from its context and preserve its full meaning as perceived by the audience who are also in that context; that meaning derives at least in part from the conditional probability of occurrence.
(In trying to remove the message from any social context you would, in effect, remove the audience and everything they know about their culture. It is not clear to me what would be left to allow any evaluation of the effectiveness of the communication.) -
I hereby confer linger power of attorney to represent me in the rest of this conversation. Beautifully put.
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3410,
The separation of the work's meaning from the author's is I guess the point where I find the theory wanting. It's the author's intention I want to understand.
Think of it this way, Ben. If your best friend bakes you a birthday cake, but when you eat it you discover that it tastes absolutely terrible, will you decide that they intended it to taste terrible, or that they merely failed in their effort to make it delicious?
The former would be a foolish concusion. If it is the latter, you'll understand that the intention of the creator may be very different from the resulting creation.
It's the same with text. An author may try to have the text accurately capture their intent, but there's no guarantee that that will happen. Therefore the meaning of the text is different from the intention of the author of the text.
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3410,
... conclusion...
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I for one welcome our new overlords.
You're such a slut Brockman.
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