Re: what is a loglang?

Ray Brown scripsit:

> Yep - I was very skeptical at the statement "Any form of intelligence
> would have exactly the same
> system of logic we do (Boolean)".
Well, let's see what that might mean.  Obviously it doesn't mean that
every intelligent being will have a formal theory corresponding to
Boolean algebra -- after all, lots of people are entirely innocent
of such a formal theory, but we don't exclude them from the category
of intelligent life forms.

So let's consider something else.  We meet a traveler returning from
the jungles of Southeast America, or some such place, who regales
us with tales of his experiences among the Prelogicals.  He has spent
some fifteen years with this tribe, and has learned to speak their
language perfectly.

"Why do you call them the Prelogicals?", we say.  "Oh well", says Mr.
Cod Levi-Strauss, "I find that they are disposed to assent to the
proposition 'This jaguar is hungry and this jaguar is not hungry'.
Furthermore, they are disposed to deny the proposition 'The river
flows quickly or the river flows slowly.'"

Now what are we to do?  Do we accept that there are people who
actually think like that, or do we decide that Mr. C. L.-S. doesn't
know what he's talking about?  Clearly the latter, I think.  He
hasn't grasped the words for "and" and "or", or he has somehow
confused them.

In short, the notion that some people contravene the tenets of plain
reasoning of this sort is untenable: we would far rather decide that
we don't understand someone's (use of) language than that they accept
stark contradictions as true.

> Do we really have such a deep
> understanding of our universe that we can categorically state that? I
> really wonder if in a few centuries time our descendants will look upon
> the logics of early 21st cent. as we view Aristotelian logic today.
Surely we think Aristotelian logic is limited and archaically formulated,
but we don't think it's *wrong*, unlike, say, Aristotelian biology or
physics.

--
Henry S. Thompson said, / "Syntactic, structural,               John Cowan
Value constraints we / Express on the fly."     jcowan@reutershealth.com
Simon St. Laurent: "Your / Incomprehensible     http://www.reutershealth.com
Abracadabralike / schemas must die!"            http://www.ccil.org/~cowan

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