On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 23:51, Colin Wright
<colin.wright@denbridgemarine.com> wrote:
I've lost your point. Yes, you can put a definition in something
other than a "dictionary". I simply pointed out that I didn't
mention dictionaries, you did.
My point is that all definitions are essentially the same as dictionary definitions (which is why I added that word), and that the word's usage comes first and the definition afterwards, and even the most deftailed definition captures only a pale shadow of the word's usage.
Well, as I said, I'm not an expert.
I am hardly an expert either.
The thesis I read seems to
suggest pretty clearly that there are coordinates who got their
ability through what Krashen calls learning. I won't argue with
evidence. I have none to present, and to some extent don't really
care. I'm merely passing on what I found. If you have evidence
that no coordinates ever gain their ability through what Krashen
calls learning, then I find that interesting.
I will have to look at it more closely. That is what I recall from the last time I read Krashen.
Just because it isn't required by the current evidence does not
suggest it isn't true. I believe this to be a common misuse of
Occam's razor. That's a philosophical point, though, almost an
article of faith, rather than science.
In some sense, you're right. But in the absence of evidence that needs a certain hypothesis to be explained, there is not much point in entertaining the hypothesis.
The formal evidence I've
seen is consistent with SWH, and my personal experience in these
things persuades me to believe a form of the SWH, and I haven't
seen any convincing evidence contradicting it, so I will continue
for now to make predictions with it. So far my predictions have
proven to be correct.
I guess that this makes me realize that my basic problem with SWH is that it is essentially impossible to learn a language without also learning the culture that typically uses it (the well known problem of separating the two), and I also strongly suspect that if there do exist such things as SWH effects, it is impossible with our current state of linguistic and cognitive knowledge to deliberately engineer such effects. If there were to develop from the current nascent Lojban community a speech community whose primary spoken language is Lojban, any SWH effects that that community's language would exhibit would be nearly identical to the SWH effects displayed by English.
I suspect that if SWH effects exist, they are related to the typical categories and metaphors, etc, that speakers use (a woefully inadequate half-sentence way of describing it), and not to much that you will find described in a complete grammar, but at that point it's not clear how much these effects are "language" and how much they are "culture". I believe, for example, that almost all "SWH" effects that might exist could be displayed just as well if the culture in question were to dictionaries, but would still use the new language in a subtly different way.