Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id AAA18498 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Wed, 1 May 2002 00:36:25 +0100 Message-ID: <20020430233104.15031.qmail@web10106.mail.yahoo.com> Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2002 16:31:04 -0700 (PDT) From: Trupeljak Ozren <ozren_trupeljak@yahoo.com> Subject: Re: teleology and language To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk In-Reply-To: <000f01c1f07e$53967780$856c4518@no.shawcable.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
--- "Douglas P. Wilson" <dp-wilson@shaw.ca> wrote:
>
> Natural languages are, I think we would all agree, something vitally
> important but terribly hard to understand. So I concentrate
> instead on
> various kinds of artifical languages, e.g. the lower predicate
> calculus,
> Fortran, C, Python, the Colon Classification, deontic logic, and so
> on.
This is what I call "optimised languages". They are really really good
at what they do - but their general usefulness in everyday life is
significantly below the one of the language you use when you go
shopping or courting or teaching your children ethics.
>
> I am quite fluent in a few of these language-like things, and writing
> in
> them seems quite a lot like writing ordinary text, as I am doing here
> and
> now, so I do think of them as languages, and in my mind they have
> started to
> replace natural languages as defining paradigms for the word
> language.
So you are aware that the languages you use very often actually change
the way you think, right? :)
If you are mostly working with languages that are good at expressing
discrete logic of some kind or other, no wonder that "natural"
languages seem clutered and non-efficient. Happens to me every time I
try to explain physics to someone without appropriate math skills. :)
> Before long I find myself measuring natural
> languages
> against these new paradigms, and finding they don't measure up very
> well.
Obviously not. You are measuring the difference between the apples and
oranges, while using the apples standard. Oranges make very poor
apples. :)
> Before long I find myself saying that English, Russian, and Walpiri
> are not
> actually languages at all, they are, as Wade Smith said, culture --
> memetic
> content expressed in some underlying mathematical ideal language.
True. But the same thing is true of your artifical languages, including
the worldwide (universal?) language of mathematical symbolism. It is
still a culture-memetic content expressed through some formal system.
>
> At which point even the dullest philosophy undergraduate will surely
> say
> that all of the above points notwithstanding, English, Russian, and
> Walpiri
> must be languages because they are precisely what the word "language"
> denotes.
In their language, yes. :)
>
> Oh, Semantics, Semantics, god of communication, why do you torture me
> thus?
>
> dpw
Personaly, I would blame Godel. He pointed out the first that you can't
have *the one Universal Perfect System*. :)
=====
There are very few men - and they are exceptions - who are able to think and feel beyond the present moment.
Carl von Clausewitz
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