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Quote of the Day: What Does This Mean?
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781119072256.ch24
Sociolinguistic theory provides a dynamic view in which change is apprehended in progress, so that leaders and laggards can be identified and both the course of its diffusion and its rate can be delineated. The philosopher William James distinguished concepts, the idealization of reality, from percepts, the apprehension of reality. In order to demonstrate how the analysis of variable linguistic data proceeds and what its correlations with independent variables reveal, the chapter discusses a well-studied variable of English often symbolized (CC) but sometimes called (more descriptively) final stop deletion or morpheme-final consonant cluster simplification. The core social attributes affecting language use are social class, social networks, sex and gender, ethnicity, and age. Sociolinguistics is the science of parole or ergon or performance. Like grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence is neither taught nor consciously learned. It is simply acquired by virtue of human nature, and deeply embedded in it.
The fruits of wondering what my student meant when referring to social-linguistic theory.
I’d prefer we don’t blame this on William James. I like James. He makes sense.
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I haven’t used the concepts and language of set theory in my thinking. Not directly anyway. Perhaps that would give me a better understanding. I’d like to hear more about this idea.
I basically listed above, by implication, the requirements for a minimally satisfactory language, but I don’t know how to map it to set theory. It’s about the first time I’ve tried to write my idea down for someone else to read, and I’ve not criticized it. Just wrote it, stream of consciousness-style.
I see some lumpiness. “No contradictions allowed by the language” needs critical examination, eg.
And here we are right back to Goedel. So embrace the ambiguity. Love it! Sloppily. It’s all we will ever have. (Probably)
Loving it would be a difficult switch for me!
I hate unnecessary miscommunication caused by correctable language deficiencies. The existence of programming languages, which are perfectly free of ambiguity, has already proved that the poverty, ignorance, strife, and warfare caused by ambiguous language is unnecessary. In theory.
Didn’t Latin have much less of a problem in those areas, since it seemed to have a lot of different specific words for anything you might think of?
You should see the steaming piles of dreck I get to compile.
OK. Just send me a message,
Ricocheteer.see(dreck Dreck_pile);
Nope, nope, nope. I’ll submit that ambiguous language is a feature not a bug, and at any rate is consistent with Conway’s Law: “Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.” In all the history of the species, no langauge has ever emerged (that we know of) which has been free of ambiguity. The ambiguity is in us. That which can be expressed unambiguously is probably trivial.
This is not to denigrate efforts to reduce ambiguity, which can be laudable. But Diversity is not our strength, and Ambiguity is not our downfall.
Simple processors can unambiguously execute unambiguous instructions. Scale it up and quantity becomes a quality all its own. Your statement is correct in parts, but I think that you unjustifiedly scale the solution up to fit an unenumerable plethora of problems, El Guapo.
Excuse me, but do you have any documented evidence that perfectly understandable, correctly communicated put-downs or insults (as opposed to sarcasm, veiled, passive-aggressive, or back-handed compliments) would ever reduce poverty, ignorance, strife, and warfare?
Is the steaminess implied here?
Steaminess is implied in everything I write.
I gave thought to that. One who is expressing himself in such a language is primarily communicating with machines, but not exclusively so. Someone may come along one day and try to determine the meaning of what the writer intended.
Is reading code more social than writing it?
That sounds dreadful to me.
I’m not surprised. I submit that the discipline of philosophy requires the ability to smoothly elide between concepts in ways that mathematics would not allow. Philosophy is the art of substituting the map for the territory.
Thank you for the translation. Are you fluent in lots of other obscure/abstruse languages?
No, it’s not.
But some terribly unclear philosophers do do that.
Most of them are hardcore analytic philosophers. I.e., the kind who try to replace clear English with an artificial clearer philosophical language.
Who are the clearest writers in philosophy? It’s not the ones who aimed to surpass Vulcan-level precision. It’s the ones who used clear ordinary language to convey insights normal human beings can understand. Not Leibniz, Spinoza, and the contemporary analytics so much as Aristotle, Epicurus, Seneca, Boethius, William James, and C. S. Lewis.
+10 points for you. I like to say that “All software development is a social activity.” Managers and HR types like it, and it happens to be true.
I also tell people that the first trait of quality code is readability.
Well this is a deep subject (;-) , and one that you’ve obviously thought a lot about. It’s probably too interesting for me right now…everything you and Flicker write just now makes be think of 2.5 more things. I will probably write when I’m not tired.
Gödel did something amazing. He didn’t just prove that a proposed system for describing natural numbers was incomplete. He showed that no such system could be complete. Briefly stated, there are true propositions about natural numbers that are true, but cannot be proven to be true. This made mathematicians drink, and theologians giggle.
It made my head spin when I first learned it. Now it just makes me think, wow. How cool it would have been to be a logician/philosopher/mathematician/theoretical scientist and spend my time learning, thinking, writing, arguing about those things. I started out on that path and ended up far from it. (But I am happy, no regrets).
Exactly what Godel proved is probably beyond me, but I think your brief statement leaves out the important part: some true statements about any formal number theory cannot be proved within that theory. I have always speculated about a handshaking pair of complementary number theories, in which anything can be proved about either but not necessarily both, using the combined mechanism of both. I’ll probably never investigate that. I barely know enough to read Godel’s Proof by Nagel and Newmann.
The method Ricocheteer.see() would return a positive integer (steaminess), based on the steaminess of Dreck_pile. Hank would discard this value, since he already knew how bad it was when he sent a reference to it.
And philosophers were like, “We were wondering if you guys were ever gonna catch up.”
Being on Ricochet is better than being formally a scholar in most academic settings.
See what I mean? That’s JUST the kind of brainstorm I would have spent a year thinking about, and then giving a paper on at a conference in a hotel on Lake Geneva. Not the one on the Northwest Line from Chicago. I mean the lake in Switzerland.
If either one has something unproven, then this strategy is helpful, but it still leaves us trusting in some First Principle.
We always end up there, which is always back where we started. Which is fine.
Just like He planned it.
You are free to use the idea. I’d at least like to have someone tell me whether it’s already covered by Godel. May I have a copy of your paper?
Dunning. Kruger.
So you’re saying Hank’s communication included a value that was known by you and discarded by him? I think that this goes against the idea of a precluding “references to undeclared and undefined classes and variables.” Or else your approved system of unambiguous communication includes mental … what’s the word? … tele … tele … heliographic, isomeric teletetroscopy or something. It’s not coming in clearly.
Fold your hands in front of you and stare at a spot on the wall again. I’ll resend.