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Article 1817 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: egnilges@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Ed Nilges)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Natural languages are formal systems?
Message-ID: <1991Dec2.012056.13228@Princeton.EDU>
Date: 2 Dec 91 01:20:56 GMT
References: <9myTBB1w164w@depsych.Gwinnett.COM>
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In article <9myTBB1w164w@depsych.Gwinnett.COM> rc@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richard Carlson) writes:
>Mikhail Zeleny writes:
>>You are mistaken in assuming that I am referring to some kind of "Personal
>>Semantic Relation"; the relation I have in mind is as public as any
>>arithmetical relation.  Indeed, no personal semantics is of any use in
>>communication; the cardinal sin of de Saussure consists in treating
>>concepts as mental entities...
>
>As I read the material about "formal semantics," which seems to be
>at the heart of "Anglo-American" or "analytic" philosophy, it
>looked to me as if the whole thing was based on a careless error
>so egregious that calling it sophomoric would be understating it,
>namely the notion that natural languages are similar to
>mathematical systems in the important ways that relate to the
>"meanings" these systems convey.  I thought perhaps the
>Anglo-American philosophers just weren't aware of Saussure --
>after all this is an age of specialization and John Stuart Mill
>was the last human being who knew everything that was knowable in
>his time -- but that didn't seem right since philosophers aren't
>exactly specialists, or aren't supposed to be, and structuralist
>linguistics is part of the general intellectual culture which can
>be safely supposed to belong to the average educated person --
>physician, attorney, engineer, humanist or scientist -- even if
>sh/e reads nothing much more general than the New York Review.
>
>The above paragraph by Mr. Zeleny reassures me that there was no
>oversight or carelessness.

My take is quite different from yours.  As I understand it, Mr.
Zeleny (and people of his ilk) are quite capable of flinging
names, from Hegel through de Saussure to Derrida, without having
much understanding of what the thinkers behind those names might
be saying.  When pressed, they typically describe thinkers who they
are unable to understand as "unreadable", which neatly places the
blame on the thinker and obscures what in a less fallen era would
be described as functional illiteracy.  As to the average physician,
engineer, or (God save us) attorney reading anything more challenging
than Time or Soldier of Fortune, well you think more highly of those
tribes than I do.

Not only is Zeleny wrong in believing that concepts of logic and
mathematics are not mental entities, Saint Wittgenstein of the
analytic pantheon went one better (if sociology is in any way
emergent from psychology) in describing all language including
mathematics as anthropological forms of life as he matured from
the Tractatus to the Investigations.  To me, belief that mathematics
is NOT a "form of life", and any sort of Platonism in the philosophy
of mathematics, is almost always indicative of emotional immaturity.

Dividing language into a binary opposition between (good, correct,
pure) mathematics and logic and (not so good, incorrect, impure)
not-mathematics and not-logic is only understandable as the continuing
need of ethnocentric Western males to make binary oppositions.  The
fact that this division is almost always coupled with ferocious denials
that (of course) any value judgements are being made makes the entire
discourse more reminiscent of a therapist's office than of what is
"supposed" to be philosophy.  

This division has caused much mischief, including the overdomination
of departments of philosophy by analytic schools, with the result
that students are undertrained in informal logic, business ethics,
and critical thinking...all examples of skills which analytic
philosophers tend to feel are "beneath them."

As for John Stuart Mill, his empiricism in the philosophy of mathematics
is undergoing a curious post modern revival because of the use of
computers in such ultimately sociological and completely empirical
ventures as the proof of the four-color hypothesis.
 


