Edwina, Gary R, List, I've spent many years working with linguists, lexicographers, and computer scientists in developing tools for analyzing languages.and relating them to and from logic and computer notations. Following are the slides for a talk about the problems: http://jfsowa.com/talks/natlog.pdf The first 20 slides present examples from a variety of sources. You can skip the rest. But I want to emphasize slide 17 on microsenses. That's a term coined by the linguist Allen Cruse, who observed that there is an open-ended, potentially infinite, range of variations for nearly every word in every language.
---------------------------------------- ET: Thank you for the link to the last chapter of your book, where you outline the basic ambiguity of language.This is a well-known fact and simply supports my view that, for example, a reading of Peirce can only be an interpretation and is not a direct mechanical transfer of meaning from Site A to Site B. It's an interpretation and subject to further discussion. Yes. Please read the examples in those slides. It's never safe to assume that the same word in two different contexts has the same meaning. The technical terms of science are more likely to have fairly fixed meanings, but note the examples for the word number. ET: This means that I reject JAS's statement that my interpretation of Peirce's Mind/Body relationship is merely an 'assertion' whereas his interpretation is an accurate demonstration because he provides 'exact quotations' Yes. Peirce's thought was dynamically developing over the years. It's never safe to assume that words in two different MSS have exactly the same miicrosense. Nobody on planet earth is qualified to say that he or she knows exactly what Peirce meant. His statements about mathematics and logic are fairly reliable. But it's not possible to assume that any two people have the same interpretation of the following words: mind, thought, feeling, God, imagination and many others ,... John
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