🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <LkKh0gB3vET3EwfS@jmwa.demon.co.uk>,
John Woodgate  <jmw@jmwa.demon.co.uk> wrote:
><7igr2v$u5v$1@quine.mathcs.duq.edu>, Patrick Juola
><juola@mathcs.duq.edu> inimitably wrote:
>>.... and you claim this on the basis of what evidence?
>
>A sequence of pictures without words  - a story-board - can tell a
>story. Used all the time in developing TV commercials, for example.
>>
>>One of the "advantages" of any natural language, pictographic
>>or alphabetic, is that new words can be coined and hence any
>>language can be arbitrarily precise -- look at the degree of
>>precision chemists use in discussing novel compounds,
>
>Well, they have moved on a bit from 'liver of sulfur', but you can't
>properly describe a protein in words - the structure in three dimensions
>is of the essence.
>
>> and then
>>the degree of precision that their marketing departments use in
>>coining new names for marketing purposes (Claritin, Xantac, Viagra, &c).
>
>This is 'precision'? In what way? 
>>
>>What I thought you were arguing a few posts back was that the
>>advantage of a pictographic representation is that it gives a more
>>natural mapping to the underlying world -- the relationship between
>>sign and symbolized isn't arbitrary.  Unfortunately, this fails for
>>several reasons -- one, there's no way that you can't make non-arbitary
>>relationships to abstract concepts,
>
>Pardon? That's a triple negative: I'm not objecting on purist grounds,
>just confused by it.

Sorry -- for "can't" read "can" -- "There is no way you can make non-arbitrary
relationships to abstract concepts.

>> and two, that different languages
>>will divide the universe-space into different categories, so you'll
>>need to put in all the bad-old-arbitrariness in a new guise.
>>
>Well, you may be right: we don't know yet. I'm just a bit more
>optimistic.

Well, if you have a suggestion about how to treat the differential
universe-space problem, I'd be happy.  Just as an example -- are the
fingers, or aren't the fingers, part of the hand?   And what is the
part of the hand that *isn't* the fingers called?  (Similarly with
s/fingers/wrist/)

And how do you express this symbolically?

	-kitten