On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 3:40 AM, Ivo Doko
<ivo.doko@gmail.com> wrote:
On 27 April 2011 08:26, Jonathan Jones <
eyeonus@gmail.com> wrote:
> We don't fly because we evolved the ability. We fly because of technological
> innovation.
because of natural evolution.
> Bats have the ability to manipulate tools...
There have been no reported sightings of bats manipulating tools.
> That's not a reason.
The sentence by itself is circular and not an explanation of the
reason, but the sentence is not by itself (it is followed by an
explanation) so there's no point in singling it out and pointing out
that it is not a reason. Of course it's not. Now that I've singled out
your sentence as well I can say that it is a pointless tautology,
because the word "that" is clearly not a reason. Those sorts of
arguments don't give much fruit, though.
>> No natural language
There are a lot of languages, and some of them are pretty weird. Have you checked them all?
stevo
features even
>> remotely similar mechanism for handling pronouns, which can only mean
>> that our "hardware" is not a priori "wired" in a way in which such
>> handling of pronouns comes naturally to it. (Which doesn't mean that
>> I'm saying that it can't be learned - it is an extremely flexible
>> piece of hardware we are talking about here.) As opposed to that,
>> inductive reasoning (which I demonstrated in understanding the example
>> with Mabel) *does* come naturally to the hardware, which is why no
>> natural language features specific mechanisms for minimising the
>> requirement of inductive reasoning in understanding of the language.
>
>
> None of that has anything to do with whether or not Lojban's system is messy
> or confusing. Red Herring fallacies are not logical arguments.
I don't see how what I had said was a red herring argument. My point
was that lojban's way of dealing with pronouns does not in any similar
form occur in any natural language, thus it is not a linguistic
mechanism which comes naturally to humans, thus it is confusing (not
messy, I agree - that was a hyperbole).
--
mu'o mi'e .ivan.
--