Elements of Style in English
in [Lisp]
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From: Tim Bradshaw on 14 May 2010 04:44 On 2010-05-14 03:00:21 +0100, Pascal J. Bourguignon said: > My question really is whether this is a bug or a feature? > > That is, ontologically, is it possible to have an action without a subject? > Or is it merely quirks in the languages, because of some laziness in > finding the subjects? You seem to be working from a theory that there is some underlying language provided by nature or something, to which human languages approximate.
From: Pascal J. Bourguignon on 14 May 2010 05:34 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. -- __Pascal Bourguignon__
From: Pascal J. Bourguignon on 14 May 2010 05:36 Raffael Cavallaro <raffaelcavallaro(a)pas.espam.s.il.vous.plait.mac.com> writes: > 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? > > 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> > > Presumably this perceptual fiction arose in support of the theory of mind: > <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind> > which has obvious adaptive advantages for social primates, as it > allows partial prediction of the actions of others. > > People who think that subjects actually exist often believe that the > past and the future exist as well; that the present is an > infinitesimally small, effectively non-existent junction between > them. In fact, it's the other way round - there is only the present; > the past is just a fragmentary and distorted recollection, not even > universally agreed upon, and the future is just an imaginal creation > of even less consensus. > > warmest regards, Indeed, an ontology opposite to mine. -- __Pascal Bourguignon__
From: Pascal J. Bourguignon on 14 May 2010 05:37 Tim Bradshaw <tfb(a)tfeb.org> writes: > On 2010-05-14 03:00:21 +0100, Pascal J. Bourguignon said: > >> My question really is whether this is a bug or a feature? >> >> That is, ontologically, is it possible to have an action without a subject? >> Or is it merely quirks in the languages, because of some laziness in >> finding the subjects? > > You seem to be working from a theory that there is some underlying > language provided by nature or something, to which human languages > approximate. Not an underlying language, but an underlying model, in the sense of formal semantics. Yes I assume that the languages denote some underlying reality. -- __Pascal Bourguignon__
From: Ilpo on 14 May 2010 06:05
On May 13, 6:09 pm, Peter Moylan <gro.nalyomp(a)retep> wrote: > Stan Brown wrote: > > > Granted, I oversimplified. Out of curiosity, though, which languages > > are you thinking of? > > To be honest, I made the comment without thinking very hard. It's > possible that I was thinking of Esperanto, with Russian as a close second.. Finnish belongs to this group, too. In Finnish you could say "Sataa.", which literally is "Rains." (there's no progressive tense in Finnish). Normally it's used with some kind of a qualifier (outside; water, snow; again; etc.), but a bare "Sataa." is also possible in some situations. Omitting the subject makes sense at least to me - what is this "it" that's raining anyway? |