On 12/14/15 8:00 PM, Jerry LR Chandler wrote:
List,
The argument given in Matt's email below is problematic. I will raise
a question and make a brief and casual effort to place a Peircian
interpretation on symbolic communication in terms of current
scientific terminology.
While human language is a very powerful source of human communication,
is it complete with regard to expressibility of information?
I give two examples of what I consider to be the incompleteness of
utterances as the sole source of the meaning of information.
One idea is that music, science, and mathematics were only able to be
born because language enabled them. For this reason Joseph Margolis
calls these non-language sign systems /lingual/. That is, lingual
systems are natural extensions of language by encultured people.
Matt
1. Mathematical equations can be read as sentences, but when the
number of terms is large, the reader must evaluate the individual
symbols as units of the whole and as the unity (wholeness of the
equation) for the message to be communicated. This is NOT the usual
linear process extracting meaning of a written or spoken sentence.
2. A chemical icon (rheme) is even more difficult to interpret. The
message emerges from a perception of its components, its arrangement
of components and often, it role in the chemistry of life such as
"DNA". It can requires a huge number of words (the name of each
symbol) and ALL of the individual relations among them (bonding
pattern) but also A QUANTITATIVE EXACT NAME for the specific entity.
These two examples go to the very root of understanding the unity of
human communication among two academic units - mathematics and
chemistry. Musical symbols, as units, are less exact as the artist
must interpret them, thereby adding information during a performance.
Human communication CAN requires icons (in the traditional sense) with
a countable number of terms (indices) that are visualizable and
interpretable within the logical rules (legisigns) that can be formed
from multiple premises (rhemata) and multiple possible arrangements
(dicisigns) such that arguments can be made that are consistent with
the individual members of a category (sinsigns), their proper
attributes (qualisigns), and their common symbols in a symbol system
designed for that purpose.
(The preceding sentence strives to integrate the nine rather
arbitrary terms of CSP into a meaningful thought.)
The two examples above are both examples of the perplexity of
artificial symbol systems that put exact and extreme requirements on
the meaning of expressibility and completeness, the consistency of
arguments and the logical soundness for the meaning of signs and symbols.
Cheers
Jerry
On Dec 14, 2015, at 4:08 AM, Matt Faunce wrote:
On 12/13/15 6:24 PM, Franklin Ransom wrote:
Human languages differ with respect to the rules of construction and
the things that can be said, and they also develop and evolve over
time; the development of a language to the point where it can
articulate scientific terminology is not a development shared by
every human language.
Can you give your source for this? I remember reading the opposite
from two different linguists. Michael Shapiro is one. (I'd have to
search for the exact statements, but the keyword I'd use is
'passkey'.) Edward Vajda writes
" Human language is unlimited in its expressive capacity."
"Today, it is quite obvious that people living with Stone Age
technology speak languages as complex and versatile as those spoken
in the most highly industrialized society. _There are no primitive
languages_. Virtually no linguist today would disagree with this
statement."
--
Matt
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