2004:07:22
976 - A Language by any Other Differentia
Page 40, Harris quoting Chomsky's "Syntactic Structures,"
- language
- a set (finite or infinite) of sentences
- grammar
- a device that generates all of the grammatical sequences of [that language] and none of the ungrammatical ones
Harris goes on to contrast strings of words that are grammatical with strings of words that aren't. But doesn't this all put the cart before the horse, metaphysically and epistemologically speaking? We are presupposing the existence of these word thingies and sentence thingies without any direct evidence of their existence, based solely on the depth of penetration these ideas have acquired in our language and culture (so deep that it is hard to speak sensibly without recourse to these terms.) Still, like the flat earth (and how often do you think of your floor as "an arc of a circle with infinite radius?) the ubiquity of these terms does not justify blind acceptance of them, not if you want to use the word science.
If science is empircal, treating of empirically accessible and assessable entities (and even these, we know, are more a matter of psycho-physiology than of any hard-nosed reality) then how can we take the science of words and sentences seriously. No, I find I am inclined to throw in with the radical behaviorists; better to study the relationship between noise and response. That's a scientific pursuit. Or admit that language isn't scientific and accept the lunatic fringe, admit that unless the work is tied to a productive application anything goes.
Linguists, by and large, treat of words and sentences and assume their set of metaphysical and epistemological assumptions without disclosure. The assumption isn't intellectually dishonest. The failure to disclose is.
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2004:07:11
986 - Sassing Saussure
If one lived 200 years their language would not change? I dig that. Totally Boss idea. It's veritable dot-commage.
Seriously, by the age of ten I recognized idiom shift...even if I lacked the formal vocabulary to call it such. And how does langauge evolve except through accretions of this kind of thing, the novel usage or construction becoming less novel with each repeated success by some speaker satisfied with the results garnered thereby?
All of which is more or less aproppos of the thought experiment attributed to Saussure in page 17.
Of course the text emphasizes Saussure's use of the word "isolated," in reference to above mentioned 200 year old. I missed that part. Probably end up scrapping this whole note.
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2004:07:08
989 - New York Cheesecake for the Mind
Harris' book is dense, in the good way, in the sense that there is hardly a paragraph that doesn't call for pondering; it's what Pirsig would call a slow reader. The Linguistics Wars would fare well on a cross-country cycle trip.
Here's a melange of ideas I pegged yesterday morning, paraphrased from pages 12-14:
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Geologists study rocks, linguists study words.
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The Stoics get credit for the initial taxonomy of phonetics, morphology and syntax.
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The business of science is to find uniformities -- Russel
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The brain is a pattern sensing device
Wow. Talk about a lot of argument packed in a little space. Let's take the first one, the one about rocks and words. When I talk about a rock I not only have concrete (pardon the pun) sensory evidence of, and experience with, the thing I'm talking about, I can *share* that experience by bringing it in range of the sensory apparata of the person I want to share with. I'm not limited to talking about the rock, I can show it, take turns performing various non-destructive tests, etc. And I can do it all in total silence, word free. Is there any such thing that can be done with a word? Hardly, unless the physical aspect of ink on paper or sound waves in the air is what words are. We can indeed count and even measure these physical aspects of words; but, but, but...
This entire notion of word rests on another notion, a notion going back to the ancient Greeks, of "spirit" or "soul", which in turn is a universal concept springing from the universal difficulty of describing then insensible (not to be confused with the non-sensical.) Sound is a word's body, meaning it's soul. The entire discussion of words, and therefore language, which is taken to be comprised of the use of words, is based on this idea...an idea that has lost some currency with regards to humans, at least in the "scientific" arena, but which still controls the debates and discourse about words. With regards to humans we've had those who were concerned only with the soul, priests and ministers and the like. We've had the Behaviorists and the Radical Behaviorists, concerned only with the observable and measurable. And we have the psychologists, too many of whom don't have the intellectual capacity to recognize their pursuit is little more than an update of the Dark Age conception of soul (what, for instance, is the meaning of the Greek root 'psyche') while trying to claim the charismatic cloak of science. Into the mix, then, conceptually speaking, we toss words, their bodies, their souls. No such problem with rocks, and on this rests much of the cause for the seeming superiority of the hard sciences.
This idea of body and soul of word is so old, so deeply set in the sub-conscious of all modern discourse on the subject, that even if it's completely wrong it's too late to get away from it. At least if you're going to call what you do "Linguistics."
Harris gives the ancient Greeks, particularly the Stoics, credit for dividing language into phonology, morphology and syntax. Which means again that no matter how valid, or not valid, such concepts may be, we are stuck with them. But considering the wide-spread over-application of Aristotle's law of the excluded middle, I am instantly suspicious. Phonology, morphology and syntax are about the body of words, and indeed this is a fertile field of study for would-be linguists who prefer the imprimatur the 20th Century's infatuation with science. So, these terms, and all the discourse over long centuries treating these terms, are still bound to the basic view that words have a body and they have a divine, immortal soul, meaning, and any heretical thoughts of throwing out this body/soul, this sound/meaning bifurcation will want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But haven't morphology, phonology, syntax made wondeful advances? Aren't they real sciences, safe from conceptual reconfigurations? Aren't there solid answers to "What have they done for me lately"?
I can ask; that's all I'm good for at this point, trying to ask questions that will be valuable and seem to have gone un-asked. This is a learning process for me. Harris' book surveys the field of linguistics more or less as it stands. I suspect before long I'll be introduced to folks carrying similar ideas.
On Russell and uniformity, I'm reminded of the Einstein quote, "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." Pure tautology, of course, but an interesting rebuttal to Russell. Whence comes this idea that all can be expressed as one? Well, of course, there is an easy answer. "Is." This simple word, Korzybski's bane, suffices to take care of all unified field theory. "Is." "The universe is." "Eternity is." "Existence is." There you are; easy as pi. The problem is Russell wants to at one time encompass every distinction and difference and also show there are none. Only slightly self-opposing.
As for the brain being a pattern sensing device, again we are positing that there is something called pattern, it exists in the world, and our brains (presumbably after receiving similarly postulated "data" from the senses) detects these patterns. I refer the reader to Watzlawick's (sorry, no links I'm willing to pimp for) wonderful discussion of Randomness in, "How Real is Real," and Bateson's meta-logue on muddles in "Steps to an Ecology of Mind" (Bateson link courtesy of Harris' incomparable Incommensurability links.)
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2004:07:06
990 - Fiefdom
Psychology or Anthropology? From page 12:
...in general, linguists regard their discipline now as a branch of psychology. For most of this century, though, linguists had quite different allegiances, seeing their discipline as a branch of cultural anthropology.
As a youth I had a hard time understanding that biology was not a subset of chemistry, itself a subset of physics. Sure, that would be a nice neat way to view the world, but the reality is there is no such linear inclusive relationship nor would all contenders feel such would be a worthy goal. Likewise I had a hard time at the beginning of '04, back in school for the first time in ages, and taking Sociology classes. To my eye it ought to be Ethology > Anthropology > Sociology & Psych. No such view obtains anywhere outside my muddled head, and anyway, where would such a system leave Political Science or Zoology?
And yet a discipline needs some kind of differentia, some organizing principle, not so much to distinguish itself from other disciplines as to structure it's pursuits. So, if the topic is linguistics perhaps existential questions are less relevant.
Except that linguistic considerations so strongly influence and even pre-figure so many other considerations, from our conceptual reliance on bifurcation (which I personally blame on Aristotle by way of Alexander) to the ubiquity of negation.
So, what is the proper domain of the subject that deals with the way we relate and responde to sensation clusters? What started this note was my reaction that anyone fool enough to think psychology isn't beholden to cultural anthropology deserves all the wrong answers they get. But what school of psychology would that be true of?
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991 - Campfire Linguistics
HTML isn't a language because it lacks iteration, for one thing. And according to Harris another thing it would need is self-reference.
Fred and Barney must have had some way of talking about talking or, what they were using wouldn't have been language.
I've read in the occasional programming text the bit about HTML; it lacks iteration, it lacks iteration in particular and control structures in general. But a quick google did me no good in terms of learning the full list of what a language can't do without if it still wants to be a language.
Now, just winging it, I'd say the bit about self-reference is close, but reference in general, and more, the capacity for combining, willy-nilly, one-to-one references with one-to-many references and many-to-many references...within a single modality. Which is to say vision is a representational system but is not a language because it needs recourse to other sensory systems to establish...
Nope, not right. I'm thinking it's more to do with the interrelation of different reporting systems. And, maybe the first step is some kind of extra-somatic information storage (I like the idea that rythm might have been the trigger; drumming and coordinated movement before actual words.)
Well, I hope I get more about what it takes to be a language in the first place.
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2004:07:01
997 - plug and pray
First, shout out to Andreas Reigber for his wonderful Tex2im script, which worked seamlessly out of the box on my debian install.
And this is what I wanted it for (any ugliness is the result of my negligble command of LaTeX):
(note)
The example is from Randy Harris' wonderful book, "The Linguistics Wars", and is I think, a good place to start this blog. The formula is an attempt to formalize the meaning shared by a series of examples in the opening pages of the book. One thing that strikes me about this is the idea of abstraction, not really aproppos of Harris' writing but more of general conversations I've had, this idea of abstraction, or formalization, is often identified as "finding a core." There seems to be the idea that there is one true meaning that the various examples share, and yet nothing could be further from the truth if the meaning of meaning includes reference to the sesory world. Ms. Piggy's "Never eat more than you can lift" and the Scottish maxim, "If ye canna see the bottom, dinna wade" share nothing along the lines of sensory referents except for "you." So why should we seek their common meaning?
Because we recognize a parallel between them. Disparate as the sensory experiences are, each includes a relationship, and the relationship in both is not poorly represented with the nice little formula above, which might be paraphrased in English as:
"For all x and all y, if you don't have ability x, and ability x is neccessary for task y, then don't you do task y."
Isn't that tautological? If you really *need* need ability x to do task y and you don't have ability x then you don't need to be told not to do task y; you simply won't be able to do it. Whereas the examples refer to situations where one may or may not succeed, with varying measures of grace.The examples caution a knowledge of ability related to attempted task, calling attention to a possibility of failure, but not actually referring to situations where folks try to do the impossible.
Footnote:
The formula shown is corrected from the version
appearing in the Oxford University Press 1995 printing of Harris' book.
The correct formula appears courtesy of correspondence with the author.
The version from the text omits the third closing parentheses in both
places where the correct form has three successive closing parentheses.
Many thanks to Professor Harris.
(return to formula)
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2004:06:30
998 - Character encoding
I've spent longer looking for "amp+hash+one+seven+two+semicolong" than I would have spent on the whole darned entry! Oh well.
I'm trying to get the first bit of Harris' "The Linguistic Wars" on the page; just one line of formal notation. Been a challenge, and I think the answer's a-gonna be to include little gifs of such equations...but shouldn't there be a better way?
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999 - Reading notes
If you have been reading the oblios-cap blog you'll understand why I think it's time to get to Randy Allen Harris's "The Linguistic Wars", especially after my last blip on the cogling radar. And so this new blog and category. Welcome.
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