Occasionally I find myself speculating on a language's altering forces, mostly as it relates to changes impacted by writing, and I always come back to the issue of Google, but more generally it's an issue related to an obsession with ubiquitous documentation. In every English class from grade school on, just for my own reference, whenever I deliberated over word choice or stumbled over an unfamiliar word, the answer was always to reach for a dictionary or thesaurus, and further if having grammatical doubts, consult another textbook. Perhaps we don't always think of Google as so authoritative, such as William here, but I doubt many of us seek to verify a definition surfaced at the top of a Google search. But I can see documentational authority arresting the development of language, where if one awkwardly constructs sentences or persistently orders words unusually, editors or just readers either brand it as unorthodox or neutralize it with the label of "rhetoric" or poetry. A community of speakers may condition one another's language, but with extensive and authoritative documentation, it seems more likely that if we continue to treat structures such as grammar as fixed and (universally) rule-bound that the process that would otherwise break through current boundaries of thought and language is resisted and, again, neutralized. My hope is all of this is illusory and that for the most part all of us experience "everyday" language as static considered within a small frame of time and place. But all of the counterexamples I present to myself are technical, where the developments in American English more recently are analogous with the emergence of "Googling".
-Brian -----Original Message----- From: William Conger [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, April 11, 2008 8:49 PM To: [email protected] Subject: google I don't think it's very helpful to go to google every time a complex idea if fuzzied. Anything can be put on google, any definition, any unsupported, fanciful notion is equal to any other. This is a bad turn. For instance Cheerskep says qualia is found on google as such and such. I turn to a marvelous book by William Lyons, Matters of the Mind, Edinburgh Univ. Press 2001. Lyons is Professor at Trinity College, Dublin and editor of Modern Philosophy of Mind. He explains qualia as subjective conscious experience associated with the five senses. pp. 168-172 Because qualia is subjective it must be interpreted as being like something to be objective. Thus the only way to speak of qualia is to make believe it is material, as if something in the world. It leaves unexplained how something material, physical, such as the brain and its functions give rise to something immaterial, such as mind. This is, I think, the biggest philosophical, biological, ontological problem of all and the expert opinion is that no one has a fully satisfactory answer. Super materialists seem to imply that they don't think the aesthetic can exist simply because it can't be found in brain physiology. Nor can Beauty be proven as material. To say that it exists wholly outside of brain physiology would be to declare everything as idea only, and further, as solipsism. In that case there's nothing to discuss since pure subjectivity can't be shared. At any rate, turning to google and its "anything goes" references is no better than turning to any person in the street for an authoritative comment. I think vetted expertise is needed and it is available (if we are readers and not merely scanners of googles). WC
