White horses and orphan colts
Thursday, June 21st, 2001 05:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robinturnerOn 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."
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."
"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."
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Re: cog sci is one of the reasons i -left- my first uni course.
Date: 2001-06-27 05:02 pm (UTC)I like that, I really do! Despite being more-or-less part of the cognitive linguistics camp, I feel that cogling has got to the point which generative linguistics reached around 1970 - that moment where you take a theory which explains certain things pretty well, and inflate it into some kind of dogmatic theory of everything. A little humility is called for, I think.
Tibetan Buddhists have identified around five stages between the first germination of a potential thought and its eventual mental expression. It's not surprising that they don't take Western psychology terribly seriously.