109
by simmo_Archive
No, no, no, not at all. Sorry, i haven't been very clear. Perhaps "instantiated" was a really shitty choice of word. What i meant to say was approximately this: clarity of meaning isn't a very easy thing to achieve. in some modes of expression it is more lucid than others: there's no subjectivity or ambiguity to a statement made in abstract logic, say for example, A= B, B= C, therefore A= C. There's no room for interpretative manoeuvre here. Once you start looking at modes of language which are socially/psychologically/whatever other than logically and symbolically defined i.e. words rather than symbols, the temptation is to fight till you're blue in the face over what the exact meaning of any statement in this language is. For Chomsky, any language is translatable in to any other: the aim is to not trip over localised/temporalised syntactical or grammatical forms, but instead focus on the statement in its purest form - to reduce it to its essence. For Chomsky, syntactical or grammatical variations are to some extent misleading and superfluous details - the meaning of any given phrase in pretty much any given spoken language can be accurately reduced to to a statement that is free of the surface syntactical and grammatical variations or permutations that that language possesses. In English I might say:
a)
1)Fred is bored.
2)Bored people are unhappy.
3)Therefore, Fred is unhappy.
In French I might say:
b)
1)Fred s'ennuie.
1)Les gens qui s'ennuyent sont malheureux.
3)Donc Fred est malheureux.
A linguistic fallacy would be to find something in the fact that the English verb "to be bored" does not take a reflexive form, whereas the French one does (i.e. the French verb necessarily has a referential object, whereas the English one doesn't). A literal translation of b) in to English would be something like this:
b1)
1)Fred bores himself.
2)People who bore themselves are unhappy.
3)Therefore Fred is unhappy.
Linguists have often made something of this. Perhaps, they say, there is a different cultural value amongst French speakers, in some way born of their language, that means that they see boredom as something one actively does to oneself, rather than passively experiences. Chomsky's point here is this: Maybe there is some cultural difference in the approach to boredom between English and French speakers, but this does not affect the ability to truely translate between the two - what you have here is a an extra-logical detail, a detail of grammar and syntax. In the end, both statements are reducible to the original algaebraic statement A = B, B = C, therefore A = C.
All of this isn't for a moment to say that spoken languages are irrational. It is simply to say that the rationality of spoken languages is often obfuscated by many other factors - the social, cultural, etc value of leximes. Rationality in English isn't as lucid as it is in algaebra, but nevertheless through careful attention to the basis of the construction of a phrase, we can find ways to align the two.
This is where Chomsky brings in his idea of a Learning Acquisition Decive in the brain, something in the brain that arranges thoughts through linguistic tokens and does so in a manner which remains fundamentally consistent in all human minds. Rationality is in a sense a biproduct of this innate disposition to arrange tokens of thought in certain ways. The language of mathematical logic is probably the most lucid mirror of this faculty of the brain. Cultural, social and psychological differences might inform the particulars of any given human's expression through the language they have learnt, but fundamentally there rests a system of the arrangment, qualification and investigation of ideas that is born of our innate aways of arranging tokens of ideas. Because of this, we end up with two conclusions: 1) as previously discussed, you can fight your way through the obfuscating jungle of cultural influences upon language to find what is really being said, in a logical rahter than significative sense i.e. what the phrase means structurally rather than culturally. 2) The attempt to study language in such a reductionist fashion seems to lead to the conclusion that that which prevails in the human being's way of arranging thoughts is what we call, roughly, rationality - this is about the most lucid way we can think. In a rational, logical, necessarily true way. Strip away all the cultural values and look for that. There you'll find intellectual progress. Intellecutal progress is found in rationality, in the pre-linguistic, pre-cultural and thus pre-value based method of analysis that is inchoate in all human minds (or that we are all disposed to, might be a better way of phrasing it).
I hope this is a little clearer. For now I'm gonna go to bed and leave generative grammar to one side. It certainly plays a huge part in identifying what logical truth might be, but I'm a little too tired to meander there. Hope this helps and look forward to your criticisms.
Simmo
Rick Reuben wrote:daniel robert chapman wrote:I think he's gone to bed, Rick.
He went to bed about a decade ago, or whenever he sold his soul to the bankers and the elites.
