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Re: OT: Tinkering versus creativity

From:Sai Emrys <sai@...>
Date:Tuesday, June 27, 2006, 18:09
On 6/26/06, Sally Caves <scaves@...> wrote:
> I'm also slightly annoyed by his demand that we ask "what evidence it would > take to prove our beliefs wrong." I come from a school of thought that > prefers the dialectic to the binary--thesis, antithesis, synthesis, rather > than off, on, zero one, right, wrong. I guess I run on analog.
Just as a short note - I don't see that he necessarily is binary at all - nor for that matter that his challenge is. (It's clearly directed, imo, at religious folk with tautological / closed-loop belief systems...) He is making a distinction between tinkering and creativity, or tinkering and neogenesis perhaps. One could call them both 'creative' in some sense, but I feel that the distinction is a worthwhile one, and reflected in how most folk do conlanging - by hearing about how some language does X, and incoprorating it or a small variation thereof. This, rather than thinking of entirely new ways of doing X, or choosing not to do X at all (viz. Kelen), or otherwise going outside of the usual scope of language. Which, as I said, is of course a plenty wide scope to start with. But I'm never one to be content with it just 'cause of that. :-p - Sai

Replies

Mark Reed <markjreed@...>
Sally Caves <scaves@...>