Re: ANNOUNCE: First longer sentence in S7

I always heard "Cogito, ergo sum", but "Cogito, sum"
would be even nicer. I'm not a Descartes fan, first of
all because he said animals were nothing else but
machines (typical anthropocentrism and egotism), and I
don't believe that saying "Cogito ergo sum" of "Cogito
sum" does prove anything. He also decided that
everything should be based on evidence (maybe I make
it a little caricatural, but it's something like
that), which is very dubious; it is not evident at all
that it's the Earth that's going around the Sun, and
yet I was told it is so.

But that's philosophy, and our purpose is linguistics.

Equality belongs to logic, and even to mathematics. If
you understand "I think = I am" (which is quite
possible), then you can infer that "I am = I think".
Well, in philosophy that might be synonyms, but surely
it's not so in linguistics. Anyway, if there is no
causative neither ablative there, so there should be
something like an "equative":
- Thinking-EQU being.
Looks a little strange. Let's better figure it:
- Thinking is-equivalent being.

'To be equivalent' is one of the very deepest semantic
concepts, with 'to exist' and 'to be identical' (and
'to be different', of course). It implies a very
primitive subroutine: COMPARE.

To be equivalent = there are two different things
existing, but there are completely alike (all their
properties are equal, except identity)
To be identical = there seemed to be two different
concepts, but one can reduce them to a single one.

--- Christophe Grandsire
<christophe.grandsire@...> wrote:
> Actually, if you read Descartes (in the original
> Latin) you'll discover
> that the sentence he wrote doesn't contain a
> "therefore", nor any other
> connector for that matter. It is "I think, I am",
> *not* "I think, therefore
> I am" (a common mistranslation that was already
> common in his time, and
> that he fought against all his life). The sentence
> is *not* a law of logic.
> It is *not* an implication, it is *not* a
> cause-and-effect description. The
> sentence is a declaration of *EQUALITY*: I think = I
> am.
[snip]
> But for EGO itself, thinking
> and being are synonymous. That's what the "cogito,
> sum" (the correct quote)
> means.
>
> Christophe Grandsire.
>

=====
Philippe Caquant

"High thoughts must have high language." (Aristophanes, Frogs)

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