On Sep 14, 6:06 am, Christopher Culver <crcul...@christopherculver.com> wrote: > Robin Becker <ro...@reportlab.com> writes: > > well allegedly, "the medium is the message" so we also need to take > > account of language in addition to the meaning of communications. I > > don't believe all languages are equivalent in the meanings that they > > can encode or convey. Our mathematics is heavily biassed towards > > continuous differential systems and as a result we end up with many > > physical theories that have smooth equilibrium descriptions, we may > > literally be unable to get at other theories of the physical world > > because our languages fall short. > > This is the old Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which fell out of favour among > linguists half a century ago already. 1) Language does not constrain > human thought, and 2) any two human languages are both capable of > expressing the same things, though one may already have a convenient > lexeme for the topic at hand while the other uses circumlocution.
Fashion changes in science as well as clothes. :-) I wouldn't count Sapir-Whorf out yet... http://edge.org/3rd_culture/boroditsky09/boroditsky09_index.html -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list