Re: CHAT reality (was: Number/Specificality/Archetypes in Language)

 --- Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> skrev:
> On Saturday, September 25, 2004, at 07:35 , Philippe
> Caquant wrote:
>
> >  --- Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> skrev:
> >
> >>
> >> To be quite frank, _ordinary people_ consider
> things
> >> differently even now!
> >>   Most people, for example, would say that a
> horse
> >> is real and a unicorn is
> >> not.
> >
> > Hmmm again... Consider how many people believe in
> > astrology, horoscopes, homeopathy, religions...
>
> Well? So what?
>
> The fact that some people consider astrology to be
> true and others
> consider it to be false has no bearing upon
> _objective_ truth or reality.
That's what I meant. What is the difference between
believing in a green unicorn with pink dots on it and
believing that 77 virgins (is it 77, or just 70 ?) are
waiting for you in Paradise ?

> Also, of course, the mere fact that i can say I
> consider astrology to be
> false and another person can say it is true means
> that both I and that
> other person do give meaning to the concepts "real"
> and "unreal".
>
> It is no so very long ago that you berated people
> like me and Keith as
> some sort of freekish 'geeks' and pointed out that
> you were an ordinary
> human being. Well, I maintain that 'reality' does
> have a meaning for most
> 'ordinary human beings' (whether an individual human
> being's concept of
> 'reality' is true, only partly true or, indeed,
> downright false is quite
> beside the point).
>
> If 'reality' means nothing to you, so be it.
Well, indeed, it does not mean much to me. But that's
every single person's problem.

> I understood that a
> solipsists held his/her self, even if everything
> else is a mere figment of
> his/her imagination. But if reality means nothing to
> you, I suppose the
> corollary is that unreality means nothing which, I
> guess, means you cannot
> be certain whether anything including yourself
> exists or be certain that
> anything including yourself does not exist.
It's not exactly that. I don't mean that we cannot be
certain of the answer to some questions, I just mean
that the question might be absurd.

This is something I was thinking about for some time,
starting from the famous ternary distinction Yes / No
/ Null. Usually, this is the best you can expect when
you have to fill a public opinion enquiry. Questions
look like: "Do you think that (blablabla) ?". Possible
answers are often: Yes or No, or, at best: Yes / No /
Doesn't know (or: won't answer). But I want to have
the possibility to give such answers as:
- 7,5 on a scale from 0 to 10
- I don't know
- in some cases, yes, in other cases, no
- I refuse to answer this question (it's no matter of
yours, for ex)
- This question I find absurd, so any answer would be
absurd too
- This question is not decidable at the moment (but it
might be some day)
- This question will never be decidable
- etc.

The only reason why the proposed answers are : Yes/No,
or Yes/No/Doesn't know, is that it is easier to
process, especially on computers. But are the
collected answers worth anything ?

What has this to do with conlangs ? Well, such
distinctions could be implemented in conlangs too. For
ex, one could have special words for them, or even
grammatical marks.
>
> So be it. But I do have a notion that some things
> are real and others not
> (and some may or may not be - I simply do not have
> sufficient information)
> ; and I can assure you that in the 65+ years I have
> existed (I think) on
> this planet, my experience has been that practically
> everyone else I have
> met also has a notion of what is real and what is
> unreal.
Yes, that's what I mean: that reality is what your own
brain considers as reasonably real, at the moment.
Actually, it's only a hypothesis. If you accept the
hypothesis, than you can make some deductions. If the
hypothesis, for any reason, doesn't hold any more,
than everything collapses. If two parallel lines
suddenly decide to meet somewhere, try to imagine the
consequences.

> [snip]
> >> Plato's conceptions might be more apt. It will be
> >> found that no single
> >> coherent system can be constructed from his
> >> writings.
> >
> > What strikes me when reading Ancient Greeks, and
> even
> > philosophical literature up to, say, XVIIIth
> century,
> > is the terrible lack for methodology.
>
> Oh - in what way did Plato lack methodology?
Not especially Plato. But here we're getting to far
and leaving conlang territories :-)

> [snip]
>
> "metalanguage /'meEt@%l&ngwIdZ/ _n_ A language which
> is used to talk about
> another language, the _object language_. A
> metalanguage may be either a
> natural language or a formal language; the same is
> true of an object
> language. it is very common in linguistics to use a
> natural language, such
> as English, as a metalanguage to talk about the same
> language as an object
> language; when this is done, it is essential to
> distinguish the two
> clearly to avoid confusion. This is conventionally
> done by typographical
> means, such as by citing object language forms in
> italics or in inverted
> commas: compare _Men are beasts_ with _'Men' is an
> irregular plural_."
> [Trask]
Right, although it is not always the case. But such
conventions are only efficient in case everybody
agrees about the concepts we're talking about, for ex
in the case you mention. But in a philosopher's work,
or even in some linguists' work, there are words used
by the author carrying a personal meaning, which is
not always clearly explained (or sometimes explained
somewhere, but you cannot find where, so the result is
the same).

> > and the real meaning the words used by the author
> are
> > suppose to carry.
>
> But how can you talk about 'the real meaning the
> words...are supposed to
> carry' is, as you say, 'reality' has no meaning for
> you?
>
Nono, that's a sophism. I meant the exact concept the
author had in mind. Whether it actually matches some
reality or not has nothing to do here.

To take a trivial and caricatural example, if some
French author talks me about "dames", I want to know
very precisely at any time: is he talking about
ladies, or about checkers ? So I propose to write
*dames when talking about checkers, the symbol "*"
referring to some URL where the definition of
"dames=checkers" would be clearly explained. Of
course, if the whole book is about checkers, then we
could use the opposite convention: *dames = ladies.
It's just a convention to be mentioned at the head of
the book.


> [snip]
>
> > meaning would not be prefixed. Imagine how much
> time
> > we would spare instead of arguing about what the
> > author really meant !
>
> No, I cannot imagine it. The simple fact of life is
> that language changes,
>   whether we like it or not, and so also do people's
> perceptions of the
> world change as knowledge advances. That's life in
> this changing world!
Precisely. That's why it is so difficult for us to
understand what the Greek philosophers, for ex, had
really in mind. If they had given accurate definitions
on URLs, or even on carved stones, and had referred to
them, everything would be much easier for us. We could
agree with them or not, or we could think that their
conceptions are outdated, but at least we would not
get them wrong and lose our time discussing what they
never meant.


=====
Philippe Caquant


Ceterum censeo *vi* esse oblitterandum (Me).

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