William writes: > "What I mean by commonsense logic is akin to what linguists say about the > innate parameters of language -- an a-priori constraint for word order: either > subject-verb-object or subject-object-verb....all require a subject, a verb, > an object to make sense. > "Nah. Balderdash. What nonsense."
Even William doesn't believe it. How could he when just two days ago he wrote that a simple elbow in the ribs is sufficient to convey a notion? This quasi-Chomskian deluded notion about the "deep structure" of language has breathed its last, I hope. Good riddance. One of the things that began to undermine my faith in mathematical/symbolic/existential logic was my noticing how often its practitioners would take someone else's statement and tell us, "Here's what he's really saying," and they'd put it into math-logic format -- introducing all sorts of text-elements that weren't in the original guy's utterance. "We're just filling in the elisions. They are assumed by the speaker." Linguists tend to do the same. Look up "zero copula" languages. They regularly lack 'is', 'am', and 'are'. Don't expect they'll all be "primitive" languages. Chinese, Indonesian, Russian, Arabic, Irish, Aztec, and many more -- even ASL: American sign language. "Oh, well, the verb is assumed." Remember the early-movie parodies of English spoken by the Indians and the Chinese immigrants? "You good man. Him crook." Since over half the people on this globe were born and brought up with no 'is', 'am', or 'are', it's hard to believe they are "assuming" they never herd about. "But they MUST be assuming it, or their utterance wouldn't make sense!" Not to you, maybe. William refers us to Hauser's "Moral Minds", and says, "He makes a claim for an intuitive moral sense by which we instantly know what is morally, ethically right or wrong through unconscious innate logic that is genetically determined." I don't know Hauser, but I think he'd have a tough time convincing me that every marauding tribe in history believed it was morally wrong to live the way they did -- the Vikings, the Mongols, etc. Would he say, oh, well, those tribes were missing a gene -- the moral gene. The Catholics of the inquisition felt there was nothing wrong with torturing unbelievers. It's hard to believe they lacked a "moral gene", given their preoccupation with sin. But perhaps William and I digress... ************** Get fantasy football with free live scoring. Sign up for FanHouse Fantasy Football today. (http://www.fanhouse.com/fantasyaffair?ncid=aolspr00050000000020)
