Elements of Style in English
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From: Raffael Cavallaro on 14 May 2010 08:25 On 2010-05-14 05:37:22 -0400, Pascal J. Bourguignon said: > Not an underlying language, but an underlying model, in the sense of > formal semantics. This part seems to be true - i.e., all human languages, as near as I've been able to determine, makes some sort of separation between what in english we would call nouns and verbs - there seems to be an underlying human cognitive model that there is a class of more temporally stable things (nouns) and a class of more temporally transient things (verbs). > Yes I assume that the languages denote some > underlying reality. It is this next step that is demonstrably false (see the wikipedia article on the neuroscience of free will for example). Human beings have a number of cognitive illusions that are adaptive in that they make it easier to navigate the world, but the convenience of a cognitive illusion does not make it congruent with underlying reality. warmest regards, Ralph -- Raffael Cavallaro
From: Bob Felts on 14 May 2010 09:56 Raffael Cavallaro <raffaelcavallaro(a)pas.espam.s.il.vous.plait.mac.com> wrote: > On 2010-05-14 05:37:22 -0400, Pascal J. Bourguignon said: > [...] > > > Yes I assume that the languages denote some underlying reality. > > It is this next step that is demonstrably false (see the wikipedia > article on the neuroscience of free will for example). Human beings > have a number of cognitive illusions that are adaptive in that they > make it easier to navigate the world, but the convenience of a > cognitive illusion does not make it congruent with underlying reality. > First, unless you know what the underlying reality is, how do you know which are illusions and which are real? Second, Pascal said "some underlying reality" -- he did not say that he knew what it really is.
From: Peter Moylan on 14 May 2010 09:59 Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote: > Peter Moylan <gro.nalyomp(a)retep> writes: > >> Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote: >> >>> Water droplets are falling. In the action described by "it rains", there >>> is clearly a 'ontological' subject: the water droplets. >> Consider expressions like "it is raining cats and dogs" or "it was >> raining soup". It's clear that the things that are falling from the sky >> are the objects of the verb, not the subjects. > > Yes, that's my point. There is a thing that falls. There is no action > without something that does this action, AFAIK. > That sounds like something Isaac Newton might have said. On second thoughts, it sounds like something Bishop Berkeley might have said. Water is falling down. There is no action without something that does this action. That is, water cannot fall down unless something makes it fall down. Therefore there must be a god to throw down the water. QED. Perhaps I'm being too subtle here. My point is that we need to distinguish between the subject and the object of the verb. Or, in ontological terms, the doer and the doee. The raindrops do not throw themselves down. They are the things acted upon. The actor is the rain god, or gravity, or whatever other thing you think to be the cause. But, in any case, the things falling out of the sky are not the subject of the "is raining" verb. Certainly you can say "rain is falling". That's a different verb, though; one that usually does have a subject. -- Peter Moylan, Newcastle, NSW, Australia. http://www.pmoylan.org For an e-mail address, see my web page.
From: Jerry Friedman on 14 May 2010 10:06 On May 13, 10:46 pm, Raffael Cavallaro <raffaelcavall...(a)pas.espam.s.il.vous.plait.mac.com> wrote: > On 2010-05-13 22:00:21 -0400, Pascal J. Bourguignon said: > > > That is, ontologically, is it possible to have an action without a subject? I'm going to leave that to the ontologists. > Ontologically, a buddhist would say that it is not possible to have an > action *with* a subject. i.e., the supposed subject is an arbitrary > delineation within a completely interconnected continuum of phenomena: > <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indra's_net> > > "It is raining," without any real subject, is, in this view, one of the > few ontologically correct utterances one can make in english. It is the > other "normal" sentences with their putative subjects which are > ontological fictions. Everything that happens, just happens, just as > rain just falls, and the wind just blows, without any single causal > agent, other than the universe as a whole, that makes it happen. The > need for a supposed subject to be the author of an action is just a > linguistic fiction arising from the perceptual fiction of free will: > <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will> .... I don't think we see the subject as the /author/ of an action. When we say "the rain falls" or "the wind blows", I don't see that we're imputing any free will to the rain or the wind or anything else, or implying a single causal agent, even though those sentences have subjects. -- Jerry Friedman
From: Raffael Cavallaro on 14 May 2010 10:53
On 2010-05-14 10:06:12 -0400, Jerry Friedman said: > I don't think we see the subject as the /author/ of an action. When > we say "the rain falls" or "the wind blows", I don't see that we're > imputing any free will to the rain or the wind or anything else, or > implying a single causal agent, even though those sentences have > subjects. My point was not about these types of degenerate sentences considered separately. My point was that the pervasive agency seen in human languages - the near universal grammatical division of the world into agents, actions, and the objects of those actions - flows from the cognitive illusion of our own agency or subjecthood. Our languages have a grammatical notion of "subject" "verb" and "object" because of the perceptual illusion of free will, the illusion of our own agency. Once this became the linguistic norm, it is only logical that expressions would arise that appear to follow this norm grammatically (e.g., "it is raining") but obviously don't conform to this grammatical norm semantically (i.e., there is no "it" that "does" the raining when it rains). Because the grammatical norm is based on a perceptual falsehood, it is, in fact the exeptions to the grammatical norm that are more scientifically accurate. Everything that you think you choose to do, in fact merely happens, without your illusory agency, much as it just rains without there being a "rainer."[1] warmest regards, Ralph [1] for those reading on c.l.l., I'm not talking about Rainer Joswig here! ;^) -- Raffael Cavallaro |