We have a word for tingo, don't we? Its "to "borrow"".
Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith Sent: Friday, June 23, 2017 3:36 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] the role of metaphor in scientific thought Marcus - The _From Other Tongues_ sketch is good. Both what is heard and what is said could be modeled as a closure over some subjective representation. ... The squiggles suggest that the types are not yet shared amongst the agents. I agree with this, but the theme of the "From Other Tongues" collection is that one culture (and in this case associated language) has atomic concepts built into it (as a single common word) which do not have an atomic word in the other language and in fact may not lend themselves to a succinct description. In fact, I believe entire books, multivolume sets, maybe even libraries have been written on and dedicated to a concept native to one culture but not to another? My favorite: "Tingo" from Pascucense (Easter Islanders) is succinctly described as "to gradually steal all of one's neighbor's possessions by borrowing them one at a time and not returning them". The fact of a single word for this suggests that in that culture it is a much more common occurrence than in our own, or that the number of possessions involved is a tiny fraction of what we are familiar with, or the attachment to them by the original owner is so minimal that it is *possible* for Alice to borrow all of Bob's possessions before he might notice "what she did there". Sobremesa is Spanish (and Frank and a few others may have their own input) for "the sociable time after a meal when you have food-induced conversations with the people you have had a meal with. WedTech has an element of Sobremesa, but also has some of the overtones that Stephen once observed at the Complex: "When you get together with a group of autistics, they might all appear to be listening intently to your every word, when in fact they are just waiting intently for you to pause so THEY can talk about what THEY are interested in!" I'm not sure I agree in the value of the interpolations and extrapolations of ontologies. It sounds too much like "agree to disagree". I think that it does begin as "agree to disagree", my main formal experience with Ontologies is the Gene Ontology and that is perhaps 10 years stale now, but at the time, it was apparently considered to be the most elaborated single technical ontology with a huge amount of work put forth to bring it to it's current state. I think the number of concepts was roughly 5,000 at the time. Progress I think requires aggressively creating and destroying types and constant by negotiation and empirical validation. I do believe a great deal of this was done in order to come to the level of "agreement" in place, but it was anecdotally understood that this was more of a "Rosetta Stone" linking the more accurate and apt Ontologies from the many subfields... it was more useful for translation than for understanding, and that real understanding required learning the language/ontology of the subfields. I don't think these are "disagreements" but rather an awareness that there is a fuller richness behind the formalisms agreed upon for convenience of discussion. Many "interpretations" just put off getting to the bottom of things. Keep the interpretations around long enough to get parallax on a better interpretation, then press Delete. I do agree with this in a mild form. Many of us here are very interested in Etymology because often there is some deeper understanding residing in a word's original use, just as the calling up of deprecated terms can turn out to be useful for many reasons. John Zingale referenced something in last Monday's Salon about how idioms frm early string theory investigations was almost deprecated when it found new utility in quantum loop gravity? I am winging this if John wants to correct me. I think that a great deal of the "Ontology" developed by Alchemists before the Age of Enlightenment was still useful long after the Enlightenment brought a new way of thinking about Natural Sciences and in fact remains useful in the form of the Periodic Table. Similarly Newtonian vs Relativistic Mechanics, not to mention Quantum Theory? Each has a domain of utility which may last past a formal resolution of the differences and an agreement on a shared view (e.g. GUT)? Closer to shared/reserved lexicons, I don't know if Newton's and Leibnitz' differing notations for Calculus also differences in how facile one using one or the other might be with the same concepts? - Steve
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