Greetings Economists,
I characterized Tom's thoughts as a wiseacre, and the truth in that is
that Tom has a light heartedness, and wit, not wiseacre about him. I enjoy
Tom's comments.
Secondly I acknowledge the seriousness of his comment,
Tom,
[1585-95; MD wijssager prophet, trans. of MHG
wissage, late OHG wissago, earlier wizzago wise
person, c. OE witega; akin to WIT 2]
Verily my tongue hath worn a hole in my cheek. But I am also dead serious. I
would just add that the emptiness of the God term is potentially a
productive emptiness, although it is also potentially deadening. How can
there be different kinds of emptiness? Think of aporia and hollowed out.
Aporia carries thought forward with an expectation, hollowness arrests
action with disappointment. Fortunately, hollowness can be transformed to
aporia, which is the method of Negative Dialectic.
Doyle
My response would parallel the remarks that John Searle makes about
Chomsky's UG (Universal Grammar) in the New York Review of Books, February
28, 2002, to Tom's comments about God in a grammatical sense.
in particular Searle writes on page 34,
Searle characterizing Chomsky's theory,
The overall conception of language that emerges is this: a language consists
of a lexicon (a list of elements such as words) and a set of computational
procedures. The computational procedures map strings of lexical elements
onto a sound system at one end and a meaning system at the other. But the
procedures themselves don't represent anything; they are purely formal and
syntactical. As Chomsky says,
The computational procedure maps an array of lexical choices into a pair of
symbolic objects...The elements of these symbolic objects can be called
phonetic and semantic features, respectively, but we should bear in mind
that all of this is pure syntax and completely internalist.
Doyle
Which characterize grammar in a computational sense. And that is what Tom
is saying about the word, God, that it is a place holder in a grammar, that
has a null meaning, or to quote Tom from the thread origin,
Tom 22 February 2002 14:29 UTC,
Sabri has framed the issue correctly. Both are beliefs. For the same reason
as Sabri, I believe in God but not in a God or gods. The distinction is
crucial. There IS a difference between believing in God and believing in a
God or the God. God is a unique part of speech that cannot be a noun. The
article makes God into a noun, which is grammatically absurd. It is like
saying, in English, I the go to store or She a eat apple. It is clearly,
obviously ungrammatical. God is also not a verb, an adjective, an adverb, a
preposition or any other common part of speech. In fact, one might say that
the linguistic function of God is precisely to stand as other to all the
common parts of speech and thus to remind us of the incompleteness, the
inadequacy of any conceivable utterance. God is the unique grammatical term
for the ultimate unutterableness of being.
Doyle,
To which in the above cited article Searle remarks about Chomsky's theories
in parallel to Tom's assertion,
Searle page 34,
...Of course, Chomsky is right to insist that English is not a
well-defined notion, that the word has all sorts of looseness both now and
historically. I am a native English speaker, yet I cannot understand some
currently spoken dialects of English. All the same, the point remains: a
group of letters or sounds is a sentence, or a word, or other element of a
language only relative to some set of users of the language.
The point has to be stated precisely. There is indeed an object of study
for natural science, the human brain with its specific language components.
but the actual languages that humans learn and speak are not in that way
natural objects. They are creations of human beings. Analogously humans
have a natural capacity to socialize and form social groups with other
humans. But the actual social organizations they create, such as
governments and corporations, are not natural, observer-independent
phenomena, they are human creations and have an observer-dependent
existence. As their speakers develop or disappear, languages change or die
out.
Doyle
God is a social construct hence my assertion about god being an explanation.
One cannot expect that god has a grammatical role. Grammar being the
division of speech into apparent parts related to human experience and
habitual routines of expression. The meaning of god may fit what Tom says,
but the grammatical structure does not call for a hole or null place as Tom
would like to assert. Inventing such a null place grammatical structure
akin to constructing a new mathematical theorem might have value if it can
be shown to have practical utility. So I would ask what is the utility?
thanks,
Doyle Saylor
Tom's remaining remarks are pasted below for easy reference.
Tom
A 17th century German dramatist wrote:
Whosoever would grace this frail cottage, in which poverty
