From pycyn@aol.com Mon Jul 31 18:34:54 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 16509 invoked from network); 1 Aug 2000 01:34:53 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by m2.onelist.org with QMQP; 1 Aug 2000 01:34:53 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO imo-r04.mx.aol.com) (152.163.225.4) by mta1 with SMTP; 1 Aug 2000 01:34:53 -0000 Received: from Pycyn@aol.com by imo-r04.mx.aol.com (mail_out_v27.12.) id 1.bf.5980db2 (4553) for ; Mon, 31 Jul 2000 21:34:50 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2000 21:34:49 EDT Subject: SW again at last To: lojban@egroups.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: AOL 3.0 16-bit for Windows sub 41 From: pycyn@aol.com X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 3777 pc: Ah, it's nice to see S-W turning up again; it's been a while! But to make the discussion work, we have to be very careful of how we speak about the various things involved: words, external reality, our perceptions, and so on, for it is the interplay of these that is the topic of the hypothesis. Thus, to call words that refer to sensory properties, for examples, "adjectives" if they are not gramatically different from words that refer to physical activities is to undercut the kinds of distinctions that are essential in the formulations of the hypothesis. For the hypothesis claims that a person in a language in which a color is treated in the same grammatical way as an activity will have a different sense of color from one in a language in which these two are treated differently (and a different sense of activity, too). Words like "color" and "activity" are here taken loosely for the moment -- they too need to be examined closely in the same way. Mr. Park does try with this latter move, while falling occasionally into the earlier trap a bit. But the attempts to deal with the object/activity/property distinction sees set to fail, since he claims that every language has something like this at some level or other. This raises the question of what level is the relevant one (or -s are -s). To be sure, every langauge deals with the world and so deal with what we see in the worldand thus with objects, activities and properties. But the interesting question is whether they deal with these AS objects, activities and properties -- and, if they do, whether they deal with the same things in the same way or divide the world differently in this respect (dealing with many of our objects as activities say, but maybe some of our properties as objects). Clearly, many languages do not have these distinctions in their grammars -- and other have many more distinctions -- but does this lack (or surplus) carry over to the semantics or the metaphysics of the speakers? The other question with these categories is how to formulate them in a relatively neutral way (or how to adapt them to the diverse biases of different languages). To talk of a persistent or recurring bundle of properties is already to adopt a certain attitude about these entities, a different one from that of a substantialist or of a particularly careful Buddhist, to wander off in two opposite directions. The justification for this formulation seems to be radically empiricist, but when that is put into language it inevitably collapses, since langauge presupposes an external referential world in its origins (it is a SOCIAL activity after all, there must be at least two things) and, in particular, the objects (a term of convenience) cannot be constructed from properties (ditto) because the properties can only be known by analysis from the objects (Mad Ludwig's "Describe the smell of coffee" -- the end of phenomenalism and "bracketting"). The fractionalist psychology does not work for speaking creatures -- nor, for practical reasons, which Park cites, for non-linguistic creatues either. And so espitemological metaphysics, as opposed to linguistic metaphysics, seems a dead end, so far as the S-W hypothesis goes. And linguistic metaphysics makes S-W a tautology. So some more neutral form is needed.