Muse: Shelf Life: The Dying Elephant in The Book Room?
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DCBCauchi, in reply to
Yes.
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"korua" "pair" "a couple"...
two-ness as words with explicit meaning =2
-just for the fun of dropping small pebbles into the murky pomo pool- -
BenWilson, in reply to
Bertrand Russell had to do quite a bit of work in Principia Mathematica to demonstrate that one plus one equals to, as I recall.
Yes, it was the work of about 2 months in a class I did in Stage 3. Having done that, it actually led to history's first sane discussion of infinite numbers. Turns out that there's a whole lot of things that follow from being able to actually describe numbers rigorously. The biggest mind flip was that not all infinite sets are the same size.
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Nothing is real! Nothing is true! Nothing exists!
Nah, Nuffink doesn't exist...
I was having a discussion last night with a friend regarding the intangibility of value.
Take a bottle of wine, for instance, It is a liquid, it comes in a bottle, you can drink, you can get drunk but its value relies purely on its taste which is intangible. You could have a similar argument with regard to land, what you actually own is a location, which is, again, an intangible. -
DCBCauchi, in reply to
There are plenty of words that are without real world (or, as I prefer to call it, 'world of appearances') signifieds – symbols that exist solely to manipulate other symbols, much like how + and = functions in an equation.
You can't point to 'which' for example.
However, grammar is dependent on humans in a way that numbers aren't. If people had never existed, grammar wouldn't exist. Numbers, though, would.
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DCBCauchi, in reply to
Go on then. I have to know. Who's got the biggest infinity of them all?
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Bertrand Russell had to do quite a bit of work in Principia Mathematica to demonstrate that one plus one equals to, as I recall.
One and one equal TWO and it was Newton not Russell. You'll be telling me that Wealth of Nations was written by Ayn Rand next.
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I think my pebbles (words=numbers=qualities=words) are stirring mud rather than enlightenment...there are languages that get by without which,and other animals that know numbers (your average dog knows 1/2/more, and a lot of birds have an appreciably better grasp of numbers than that-)
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giovanni tiso, in reply to
One and one equal TWO and it was Newton not Russell.
You're right about the first statement, wrong about the second.
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Greg Dawson, in reply to
Take a bottle of wine, for instance, It is a liquid, it comes in a bottle, you can drink, you can get drunk but its value relies purely on its taste which is intangible.
Wait a minute, I thought in NZ the value of a particular bottle of wine was required to be printed on the front before the % symbol.
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Our dog, Stella, can tell the time. Exactly 13 minutes ago she demanded rawhide munchies, her appetiser before the jellymeat. And before you poo poo this I have to point out that she adjusts for daylight saving and only gets it wrong when the clock on the stove is out.
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Anonymous Author, in reply to
It was Foucault who scathingly interpreted Derrida's theory as 'a pedagogy which teaches the student that there is nothing outside the text'. Which is why Derrida was only partially correct when he was said to have suggested it, not completely incorrect when he wasn't quoted verbatim.
However, that's a semantic straw herring. Ironically it is a reading of Derrida's meaning that existed outside the text (in the appendix to a whole other text) and even more ironically they didn't speak to each other for years after Foucault wrote that. Two prolific thinkers, so few words to share. Perhaps they conducted an aphonic discourse. -
DCBCauchi, in reply to
'Which' was but one example of many. All languages have grammar. You could say that language = words + rules for combining and modifying those words.
The important point is that, regardless of what they are in any individual case, all words and all rules have been made up by people.
If no life had ever evolved anywhere in the universe, there would be no words and no sentences in any language, nor anything like them. But 2 + 2 would still = 4.
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You’re right about the first statement, wrong about the second.
Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. was written by Isaac Newton and I hold that Messrs. Whitehead and Russell are sailing close to the wind on the plagiarism front when it comes to coining a striking title for ones book. Propositional logic? pah..
"Mr Brown is a farmer, farmers keep cows therefore Mrs Brown is a kept woman" -
Islander, in reply to
I think you are, somewhat unwisely, limiting language only to our species (and only, since we dont have much evidence aside from FoxP2 and the hydoid (? -my anatomy stuff is upstairs and it's very wet here)bone for the possibility that earlier extinct humans could use language...
Sooo, we cruise up to something that has intrigued and perturbed me for over 50 years - what is language?Communication with species-specific rules? -
linger, in reply to
However, one of the most pervasive concepts making up rules for constructing and interpreting human language is … identity
(necessary for pronoun systems, deixis, definiteness, existential constructions, and possibly, though less directly, even for tense/ aspect systems).
It isn’t clear to me how postmodernism copes with that.Islander: close, it’s hyoid (for other readers, it’s the one above the larynx).
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"This piece of intellectual property cannot be copyrighted or trademarked because it has been plagiarised. © TM"
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Islander, in reply to
Thank you linger-
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recordari, in reply to
Sooo, we cruise up to something that has intrigued and perturbed me for over 50 years – what is language? Communication with species-specific rules?
Recently finished Sarah Gruen's Ape House. While it is a human form of sign language the Bonobos have 'acquired', they communicate, which does raise some interesting questions, and while fiction, reflects the work of Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh.
ETA: Hmm, this has happened to me a couple of times now. Selected Islander's text and pushed 'reply' to quote it, but my reply was recorded as Anonymous Author. Maybe I bumped something?
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Islander, in reply to
recordari- that is one of my ace-in-hands! Kanzi has not only passed on a symbolic language to other generations of bonobo, understands a lot of human words (+800, and can use them appropriately) but has also invented a bonobo-spoken form (which has also been picked up by other bonobos, and is understood – not perfectly, because he keeps on adapting it- by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and her team.) Koko has done something similar in that, over time, she has trained her humans to understand her kind of language.
Watch out for orangutans – bloody philosophers (as well tool-users deluxe) those ones…
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recordari, in reply to
Amazing stuff, eh? Dr Dolittle.
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Islander, in reply to
And from the other animals speaking to us!
(Ok, it's mainly, "Marshmallows, gis us matches & a stick" but it does appear to be interspecies communication (which has always happened - dogs, horses (less so), cats know but refuse to actually talk other than manipulate, and most especially, some cetaceans, and a lot of birds...)
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BenWilson, in reply to
Go on then. I have to know. Who's got the biggest infinity of them all?
That did come up. The answer? No one. There is no biggest infinite set. This is because you can always form a bigger set when you take the set of all subsets of a set. So the "set of all sets" is a logically contradictory notion.
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From The Onion:
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However, grammar is dependent on humans in a way that numbers aren't. If people had never existed, grammar wouldn't exist. Numbers, though, would.
Depending what you mean by grammar, I'm not sure there's much difference. Formal grammars, which are used to define computer programming languages, and other languages too, are highly abstract concepts in just the same way numbers are. Mathematics has grammars galore, and grammars are studied mathematically. Logic seems to me much like numbers in abstract existence. eg
If A then B.
A.
Therefore BWould be valid whether or not anyone could ever appreciate that.
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