Re: OT: In the 'ignorance on parade' file

Herman Miller wrote:

> On Mon, 13 Aug 2001 08:24:30 -0500, "Thomas R. Wier"
> <artabanos@...> wrote:
>
> >There is, for example, no such thing as a 'fish';  there are only individual
> >entities which we to greater or lesser degrees choose to categorize in
> >the slot arbitrarily marked 'fish'.  Where we draw the line between one
> >category and another is entirely up to us, and not something that we can
> >find out through the world around us.  All this means that any word you
> >choose to use will be semantically ambiguous, because you could be more
> >specific in refering to a particular entity, rather than to the type.
>
> Not entirely up to us ... well, in theory someone might put elephants in
> the "fish" category and clams in the "bird" category, but no one would see
> those as "natural" categories. Whether or not to include sharks or whales
> in the "fish" category is a matter of opinion, but there are limits beyond
> which it starts making less and less sense to extend the boundaries of the
> category. Even color categories, which you might expect to be arbitrary,
> seem to have some natural basis in the process of human color vision.
> Still, in most cases there's no obvious place to draw the line between
> categories.
And that's the crux of the matter. I normally do not like the law of the
excluded middle, since it so often results in reductionist absurdities, but
in this case, I can see no alternative to it:  to me, it is either up to us, or
not at all, because "up-to-us"ness is an abstraction that appropriately
captures human freedom of will, even though most abstractions usually
gloss over the complexities of reality to achieve something that makes
people feel they understand it. So, to me, saying that it is not ultimately
up to us to decide where one category should begin and where another
ends sounds tantamount to saying that we do not also have the freedom
to choose what categories are and are not useful for our perception of
reality.  It does not seem to me a question of whether we can perceive
some kind of external reality, as I am no solipsist, but rather how that
reality is encoded in language.  In a certain sense I agree here with the
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in that I think many people are fooled by not
making a distinction between the arbitrary linguistic value something in
the world has, and the semantic notions we associate with it. As Zhuangzi
said, you do not point to the moon and confuse your finger for it; but why
do people do that so often with language?

An aside:  you know what I should do?  Create a conlang where all
discussion of metaphysics is physically impossible, because it will cause
you to have a fatal seizure.  <yuck>  I feel dirty now.

> >(And therein rests my apologia of artlanging.  Here I stand; I can do
> >no other.)
> >
> >It is for these reasons that I gave up on Degaspregos as a profoundly
> >naive attempt to systematize and organize the world through language.
> >I decided though that rather than obliterating the work as a failure, a
> >greater testament to that failure would be to leave it be, unchanged
> >and incomplete, analogous to the way that logical systems must be
> >incomplete.
>
> Organization isn't easy. I've given up on creating vast organized lists of
> vocabulary (as I've tried in Eklektu, Ludireo, Tilya, and Czirehlat, among
> others), but I still find it useful to organize words systematically in
> limited semantic areas.
I dunno.  The problem for me has never been creating the organization, per
se, but rather it was determining what level of organization should be or even
could be encoded.  I mean, could we not encode not just a given object's
relationship to other given objects, but also the given object's entire internal
atomic chemistry, every historical position in at least four dimensions of each
atom since the beginning of the universe, and who it slept with last night?  To
me, there seems to be no nonarbitrary way to say what kinds of information
must be encoded in a language's grammar and what must not.  (Indeed, this
forms the basis of Alexander Carstairs-McCarthy's theory on the origin of
human language, which proceeds from the question of why human language
syntax fundamentally distinguishes NPs and VPs, since there seems no inherent
reason for it to do so outside the course of human evolution that we have actually
taken.)

It is for this reason that I turned to artlanging, since, if the form of language is
an arbitrary artefact of human culture and evolution, this meaninglessness can
at least be combatted by reveling in it, as we do with dance and song and art.

===================================
Thomas Wier | AIM: trwier

"Aspidi men Saiôn tis agalletai, hên para thamnôi
  entos amômêton kallipon ouk ethelôn;
autos d' exephugon thanatou telos: aspis ekeinê
  erretô; exautês ktêsomai ou kakiô" - Arkhilokhos

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