🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov20.163832.28976@ils.nwu.edu>, David Pautler (dp) writes:

dp> I agree with the sentiment as a statement of extremes, but argument by
dp> analogy is not usually considered valid.

That isn't an analogy, it's an equivalence. A linguistic phrase is, or
for any platonists present is embodied in, a physical configuration.
An act of interpretation is an event.

But, you're right, I was putting an extreme argument as a way of
pointing out that just airily talking about a `contextual theory of
meaning' is begging the question. Saying that if we had one we could
talk about synonymy is like a computer scientist claiming his new
alogorithm can be proved tractable assuming that P=NP.

Trimming down the relavent context from the whole of 4-space to
something usable in a definition of synonymy is, well, not something
for net.handwaving. And I see no reason to believe that it must be
possible. Nice if it was, but so would P=NP and a way of squaring the
circle.

--
rjc@cogsci.ed.ac.uk				_O_
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