White horses and orphan colts

[robinturner]

On the recent discussion of radial categories (see replies to Oops, I did it again), what do the linguists/philosophers out there make of these statements attributed to Huizi (a leading member of the "School of Names"):

"A white horse is not a horse."
"An orphan colt has never had a mother."

Correction (28/6/01)

Oops, that wasn't Huizi, it was Gong-sun Long (the other main person in that particular school). Huizi (also known as Hui Shi) was the guy who said things like "The heavens are as low as the earth; mountains are on the same level as marshes."

Comments

Re: oh my god. it's cog sci 101 all over again.

[solri.livejournal.com]

Even the idea of thinking in a language is dependent on the way language structures thought. The idea that thoughts casn somehow be "in" something is a metaphor based on the CONTAINER image schema. In other words, language is seen like a box that we can place ideas in, but there are other kinds of thoughts which are outside the box.

OK, let's imagine we use a different language, in which language does not take the equivalent of the preopsition "in". In this language, we don't say

Person(x) expresses idea(y) IN language(z)

we say

Person(x) expresses language(z) TYPE-OF idea(y)

Wouldn't that affect the way we thought about the relationship between language and thought?

Personally, I don't think that there are thoughts that are expressed in language and thoughts that aren't (though Kristian is certainly correct in saying that some thought is non-verbal). I just think that language is a particular kind of thinking. In other words, the medium is the message, though not quite in the sense that McLuhan intended.

What's the problem with Newspeak, by the way?

newspeak

[ex-fauxpas266.livejournal.com]

It is double-plus ungood. Eh? Eh?

Re: oh my god. it's cog sci 101 all over again.

[kristian.livejournal.com]

My problem with Newspeak is that its purpose was to eradicate the possibility of any Anti-Party sentiment by the eradication of linguistic structures that would allow a subject to even THINK anti-party thoughts.

i.e by not having a language that could express "The Party is Bad" then the people would be unable to -think- "The Party is bad".

Which is pretty much at the crux of my argument here. I would say that even IF newspeak were perfected people would still be able (even though it would be difficult, though not because of linguistic restrictions, but from cultural ones) to have such revolutionary thoughts. How would they express them? well, the way we express new/revolutionary thoughts now - by creating new symbols for them.

(In a rush-Will reply to your imaginary example later, I think I know what is going on, but haven't the time to try and articulate it into the clunkiness of words!)

Newspeak

[solri.livejournal.com]

Orwell's problem was that he knew a lot about language, but not that much about linguistics. The idea of the Party manipulating language so as to enforce ideological conformity is interesting, but the actual examples he gives are largely flawed, as far as I can remember (last read 1984 twenty years ago). I don't see why, to give one of his examples, the sentence "Big Brother is ungood" should be any less meaningful to a speaker of Newspeak than "Big Bro's a mofo" would be to a speaker of US English. To us, "ungood" signifies an absence of positive good rather than its scalar opposite (hey, we don't have these problems in Lojban - they based the grammar on Moore's Natural History of Negation). However, in a language which lacks a word for "bad", I'm pretty sure that "ungood" would come to mean "bad".

A totalitarian govenrment could maybe restrict people's ability to criticise by restricting vocabulary in other ways - the overall effect would be not to make them agree with the official ideology as such, but to lessen the effectiveness of criticism. Functional illiteracy does the same trick.

Actually, I quite like some of the changes to English found in Newspeak, such as getting rid of adverbs and irregular verbs.

Actually,

get rid of irregular verbs?

[ex-fauxpas266.livejournal.com]

But then it would be okay to say "the signs costed $400," and I'd be out of a job!

Re: get rid of irregular verbs?

[solri.livejournal.com]

Well, there was a time when "costed" was the correct past tense and past participle of "cost" (which was frequently spelt "coste" anyway).

Incidentally, I read somewhere that there are moves - how serious, I don't know - to establish a "European English" analogous to "British English", "American English" etc. This would be based on English as spoken in an EC context, and would include -ed as the universal past tense marker, and "isn't it" as the universal question tag (replacing "wasn't it", "aren't you" etc.).

functional illiteracy

[ex-fauxpas266.livejournal.com]

Can you help me settle this once and for all? What is "functional literacy" and what is "functional illiteracy"? What you seem to be calling "functional illiteracy" I thought was called "functional literacy." I am so confused, and HAVE been confused about this for the past four years or so.

Re: functional illiteracy

[solri.livejournal.com]

Functional literacy is having sufficient vocabulary and reading/writing skills to cope with the demands of everyday life; you may not be able to read Chaucer or write a sonnet, but you can read a newspaper and write a job application. Functional illiteracy is when you can't even do that.

Re: functional illiteracy

[ex-fauxpas266.livejournal.com]

So what's the difference between illiteracy and functional illiteracy?

Re: functional illiteracy

[solri.livejournal.com]

My guess is that if you can just about get through Spot the Dog but can't fill in a job application form you're functionally illiterate without being totally illiterate.

There again ILLITERATE is one of those weird categories that change according to context and communicative intent, so I may describe a student as "illiterate" because they hadn't read Plato. Then you've got all the radial categories like COMPUTER ILLITERATE. In the context of the discussion of my last post, I could be described as "phenomenologically illiterate", perhaps!

mofos

[ex-fauxpas266.livejournal.com]

Also, mofo is passe among speakers of U.S. English. A more up-to-date equivalent would be something like, "Check it -- Big Bro's WACK y'all."

Re: mofos

[solri.livejournal.com]

"Wack"?? Since I don't listen to rap, my main source on American slang is South Park, but I suspect that there they frequently make up argot just to see if it will catch on. I mean, does anyone really say "That's absolutely tits" to mean that it's really good? (There again, in Britain, "It's the dog's bollocks" is actually a compliment!)

Actually, I have a couple of questions arising from Seinfeld.

1. Is "step off" the same as "back off"?
2. Does "I'm down" mean "I'm in"? And what kind of kooky image schema does that come from?

Re: mofos

[ex-fauxpas266.livejournal.com]

Wack, I think, originated in AAVE but is now understood as a slang term by pretty much all young Americans.

I've never heard "That's absolutely tits"; nor would that make much sense to me if I heard it! I don't watch "South Park," though!

Yeah, "step off" is the same as "back off." Incidentally, if you "step to" someone, you're challenging him, like, trying to instigate a fight.

"I'm down" means something like "I'm in" or "I'm hip to that." Like, "I'm down with cognitive linguistics" means that you know something about it, that you're interested in it. Or as a friend of mine jokingly said to me, "I'm down with the 65 too!" meaning that she took the same bus I did. I would imagine "I'm down" is related to "get down."