Latin, the Enlightenment, and science
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From: Robert Bannister on 26 Dec 2009 19:41 chazwin wrote: > > All thinking is language dependant. I have serious doubts about that unless you think that thinking you're hungry isn't thinking. -- Rob Bannister
From: DKleinecke on 26 Dec 2009 20:47 On Dec 26, 4:41 pm, Robert Bannister <robb...(a)bigpond.com> wrote: > chazwin wrote: > > > All thinking is language dependant. > There is a lot of that going around. People who think verbally tend to think people who think in other modes aren't thinking. In mathematics there have always been algebraists who think verbally and geometers who think in pictures. This has been understood now, by mathematicians, for a long time and both sides make adjustments. It appears that about 75% of mathematicians think verbally and 25% visually. Outside of mathematics this puts visually minded people in a minority like left-handed people. A lot of educators think they must be taught do things the right way. But visually-minded people are in a worse fix than left-handed people because their thinking is considered as not thinking at all. But they learn to cope. It is possible that many linguists are visually-minded people who had to focus much more intensely on language in order to get along and learned how fascinating the whole thing is.
From: Peter Moylan on 26 Dec 2009 21:15 On 27/12/09 12:47, DKleinecke wrote: > On Dec 26, 4:41 pm, Robert Bannister <robb...(a)bigpond.com> wrote: >> chazwin wrote: >> >>> All thinking is language dependant. >> > > There is a lot of that going around. People who think verbally tend to > think people who think in other modes aren't thinking. > > In mathematics there have always been algebraists who think verbally > and geometers who think in pictures. This has been understood now, by > mathematicians, for a long time and both sides make adjustments. It > appears that about 75% of mathematicians think verbally and 25% > visually. > > Outside of mathematics this puts visually minded people in a minority > like left-handed people. A lot of educators think they must be taught > do things the right way. If visually minded people are in a minority, there must be two different meanings of "visually minded". I've found that I belong to that minority of people who have trouble imagining a picture in their mind. I can't, for example, mentally form a picture of the face of somebody I know well. My visual memory is terrible. My auditory memory, on the other hand, is pretty good. As far as I know, most people do have the ability to imagine a scene in a photographic way. Whenever I mention it, everyone is surprised that I don't see in pictures. It seems that the vast majority of people are visually minded in the sense I'm thinking of. My lack doesn't hinder my ability to think geometrically. I can easily picture a diagram. Perhaps "picture" is the wrong word, though, because I'm probably seeing that diagram as an interlinked set of symbols rather than as a projection onto a three-dimensional or two-dimensional image space. I'm curious to know whether there is any connection between "visually minded" in the sense used above in reference to mathematics, and "visually minded" in the sense that makes one a good artist. -- Peter Moylan, Newcastle, NSW, Australia. http://www.pmoylan.org For an e-mail address, see my web page.
From: Yusuf B Gursey on 26 Dec 2009 21:53 On Dec 25, 7:31 pm, Robert Bannister <robb...(a)bigpond.com> wrote: > Andrew Usher wrote: > > bert wrote: > > >> I think that this adoption of national languages had > >> more to do with rising national pride than with any > >> consensus about the shortcomings of Latin. > > > This is kind of my point. My question was why this happened when one > > would think that the Enlightenment would lead to more internationalism > > among scholars - yet all the major Enlightenment figures wrote in > > their vernacular. > > Moreover, particularly in Germany, many of them translated their names > into Latin or Greek. > but the German Romantics were for the vernacular (German) and were very anti-Latin, and eventually a language reform movement started in Germany removing many Latin or Romance based words, and Germanizing scientific terminology. > -- > > Rob Bannister
From: PaulJK on 26 Dec 2009 22:28
Robert Bannister wrote: > chazwin wrote: > >> All thinking is language dependant. > > I have serious doubts about that unless you think that thinking you're > hungry isn't thinking. I guess it turns tricky, if you make frequent spelling mistakes in your thinking. :-) pjk |