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Article 1533 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Natural languages are formal systems?
Message-ID: <1991Nov23.215005.5830@husc3.harvard.edu>
Date: 24 Nov 91 02:50:03 GMT
References: <9myTBB1w164w@depsych.Gwinnett.COM>
Organization: Dept. of Math, Harvard Univ.
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In article <9myTBB1w164w@depsych.Gwinnett.COM> 
rc@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richard Carlson) writes:

>Mikhail Zeleny writes:

MZ:
>>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.  So on the assumption that the semantical
>>relation M described above is captured in a sufficiently rich language,
>>containing at least the elementary arithmetic, the G\"odel trick certainly
>>goes through.  For a reasoned presentation of the thesis that English is a
>>formal language, see Montague's classic paper.

RC:
>Why is it a mistake to treat concepts as mental entities?  That's
>what they seem to be.

Mental entities, at least until and unless telepathy emerges as the
dominant mode of communication, are inherently private, and hence
eminently unsuitable for the part of public meaning vehicles.

RC:
>The pride and joy of structuralist linguistics is Jacobson's
>structuralist phonology.  It is as precise and testable as a
>theory in physics and perhaps the only really universal,
>cross-culturally valid phenomenon, describing the phonemes that
>may exist in any language the way the periodic table describes
>elements, in the "human sciences."  It is based on Saussure's
>basic notions of the bipolarity of human language.  It reveals the
>individual "phonemes" of a language to be not primitive building
>blocks or units, but themselves comprised of "features" which are
>"distinctive."  The human phonetic system is about as well
>understood as any aspect of reality and seems to be a good
>candidate to serve as a model for other, as yet not fully grasped,
>aspects of language.  And it is not a "formal"-looking system but
>a dynamic _structure_ built on the kind of bipolar oppositions
>Saussure said we would find in every aspect of natural language.

Once the link between the sound and the sense is understood as contingent,
if not arbitrary, which is something de Saussure himself has been known to
claim, phonology has to be seen as largely independent from semantics.


'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`
`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'
: Qu'est-ce qui est bien?  Qu'est-ce qui est laid?         Harvard   :
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: Connais pas! Connais pas!                                 think    :
:                                                             so     :
: Mikhail Zeleny                                                     :
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`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'


