Archive for the ‘Linguistics’ Category
Entry 1740 — Of Meaning & Meaningfulness
Monday, March 2nd, 2015
I think a lot of gush and counter-gush in philosophical discussions has been caused by the use of the word, “meaning,” to mean two different things: (1) a description of a named entity in material reality that relates it to one or more named and defined entities in material reality in such a way that a person knowing the language its name is part of will, upon hearing or reading that name, be able to distinguish it from what it is not—by pointing to it on a table or the equivalent; and (2) a description of some real or alleged function of a real or unreal named entity that allows the entity to carry out or contribute to the carrying out of some mission important to whoever defines it as having this kind of meaning.
I’m satisfied with my definition of the first meaning of “meaning,” but consider my definition of the second meaning rough. The following examples should help clarify it:
Keats’s bust of Shakespeare had a great deal of meaning for him for reminding him of the possibilities of poetry. That is, the function of the bust was its help in encouraging him to follow Shakespeare’s lead as a poet.
The New Testament has a great deal of meaning for a sincere Christian for reminding him that Jesus died to allow him a chance for Heaven–i.e., its function (or one of its many functions) is to remind a Christian that immortality is possible.
Winning the first world series game has special meaning for a baseball manager because winning the first game in the other team’s ballpark gives a team an advantage, and winning it in one’s own ballpark prevents the other team from having an advantage–i.e. winning the first game regardless of where played has the function of increasing a team’s chance of winning the series (in addition to the advantage an victory will have.
Each time I list one of these “meanings,” it is plain to me that the word I should be using is not “meaning,” but “meaningfulness.” So my simple insight concerning the meaning of “meaning,” is that the second meaning should be junked. The main place it crops up is in the phrase “life’s meaning.” I maintain that “life’s meaning” should be, simply, “a state of being certain entities in material reality possess which allows the entity to move of its own volition, and in other ways act as living organisms in accordance with the latest scientific understanding of the state,” not “life’s purpose.” If you want to discuss the latter, the correct term should only be “life’s meaningfulness.”
And the question central to much of philosophy should be, “What gives life meaningfulness? not what gives life meaning? Linguistics with the aid of biology gives the word, “life,” its only proper meaning, a meaning that it is important to point out is objectively-arrived at, because based solely (for the rational) on the material attributes of the state of being the word, “life,” represents. (I’m ignoring the inexpressible intangibles those who believe in the existence of immaterial entities or substances consider part of life’s state of being as irrelevant because either non-existent or existent but not material, so incapable of having any effect on anything.)
There, another attempt to form a minor understanding of an over-rated question without great success. But if I’ve only gotten a few people to use “meaning” only in its linguistic sense, never in its philogushistic sense, I’ll be happy.
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Entry 1657 — Back to Witheo
Wednesday, December 10th, 2014
I consider myself a subauthority, third-class, concerning linguistics, but (as long-time readers of this blog will know) that hasn’t kept me from working on a theory of linguistics of my own, and frequently sounding off on the subject, as I’ve now been doing for two or three days at a thread at Aeon about an article claiming Chomsky’s theory of an innate grammar is invalid that has drawn a bunch of excellent comments, as well as many silly ones–and the usual yes or noes that airheads seem to think it worth posting to threads like this.
Hmmm, I see this is the fourth day I’ve been in and out of the thread I’m speaking of, and have already used some of what I’ve said here. I’m afraid I’m committed nonetheless to bringing you my latest comments–’cause I think parts of one or two are brilliant! Included is a post by one of the two my comments are replies to, a person using the name “Witheo.” (He’s the one I was last dealing with here.)
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ME: “Just a note to indicate that I read your long reply to what I said about your linguistic nihilism, Witheo, and see that you have some goofy concept of “meaning” that I can’t deal with. Mine is simple: it is what is obviously conveyed when I show someone who speaks English a picture of an animal and ask him what it is: if it is of what I call a “cat,” then he will just about always answer, “a cat.” He and I will then have converged on the meaning of “cat” by my simple standards.
“As for Dr. Johnson, if he did not demonstrate that the rock was real, he demonstrated that it was an unreal object that had the ability to make people think it was real, and there is no difference between a real rock and a non-existent rock that human beings perceive in every possible way as a real rock.” (Note: Dr. Johnson famously kicked a rock to refute the philosopher Berkeley’s contention that nothing was real–or whatever Berkeley’s contention was–as I know most of you will have known, but perhaps not all the kids who are no doubt reading this as a fourth-grade davincianation assignment.) (Note #2: Isn’t that hilariously funny note alone worth reading this blog for a year? [Yes, I have a hydrocodone in me, with a caffeine pill. Just couldn’t get going otherwise. {Ooops–kids, don’t tell your teachers I said that! /Dang, I’m getting so inexhaustibly funny, I’ve run out of parenthetical brackets. Gotta go back to the Serious Stuff./}])
WITHEO: “How nice. That you decided to deal anyway, with my “goofy concept of meaning that you can’t deal with”. I just wish it wasn’t necessary for you to resort to ridicule everything that, by your own admission, you don’t understand. What moral advantage can you possibly hope to gain?
(Editor’s Note: When I first read the last sentence above, I thought to myself that trying for some “moral advantage” was what my opponents too-often seemed to be doing but that I almost never did; just now, though, I wondered whether or not I perhaps do try not for a moral advantage, but a sort of moral disadvantage. Why would I do that? One possibility I refuse to accept is that by coming across as a nasty fellow, I can believe opposition to my thinking is due to my opponent’s hostility to me rather than my ideas: i.e., I’m giving myself up to protect my ideas. I think a better answer, however unusual, is that I want to get my opponent to do his very best against me, fueled by RAGE. But I may be trying unconsciously to get him off-balance due to rage. Actually, my best explanation, which I’ve had for a long time, is that I truly want fully to express myself, which means expressing not only my ideas, but my feeling about those ideas, and about my opponent’s opposition–but not my opponent, because I expect an emotionally mature debater to treat the debate he’s in the same way I expect a tennis opponent to treat a match he’s in–as a fight to the death against Absolute Evil, which has nothing to do with what I think of my opponent when the debate or match is over.)
“As it happens, I would like to sincerely pretend that I can empathise, perhaps just a little, with your evident frustration. Do you feel better, when you habitually denigrate those you don’t agree with?
“You seem proud to claim that your concept of meaning is ‘simple’. I prefer to avoid that word. What may seem ‘simple’ to you (always within a certain context, specific to time and place) is not necessarily, I would venture to suggest almost certainly never, so easy to accept for another.
“You conclude, on the basis of a “simple” scenario (showing someone a picture of a cat and coming to an agreement that it is in fact a picture of a cat), that “he and I will have converged on the meaning of cat”.
“I beg to differ. What you have agreed on is that the picture is of a cat. You have not agreed, as, typically, the question did not even arise, on “the meaning of cat”. To your self-evident satisfaction, which, I hasten to acknowledge, is all that matters to us most of the time, “the meaning of cat was obviously conveyed”.
“As if ‘the meaning of cat’ could be meaningfully encapsulated in a single image. It’s not a cold silent picture that destroys our furniture and is a fussy eater and wants to be let out and then refuses to budge …
“Of course, the word ‘cat’ can be invested with numerous, often surprising, widely divergent meanings. ‘Wild cat’, ‘cool cat’, ‘alley cat’, ‘pussycat’, even an iconic brand of heavy agricultural machinery is commonly evoked as ‘a Cat’. In a court of law, the question will seem simple enough. ‘Please tell the court whether, in your expert opinion, this is a picture of the cat in question.’ (Please just say, yes or no.) Note the essential qualification. Not just any cat, but ‘the cat in question’.
“Many people like to talk about their pets. The ‘simple’ remark that ‘I have a cat’, inevitably begs the next questions, ‘what breed, male or female, how old etc.’ Suddenly, it isn’t enough that I have ‘“just a cat’.
“I guess the point I’m trying to make is that what we habitually treat as obvious ‘statements of fact’ are never the whole story. It’s the story – the narrative, if you will – that is intuitively attached to every experiential observation, that we then adopt as ‘the meaning for me’. It behooves us to keep in mind, I think, that, like it or not, each of us sees ‘the world’ differently. It’s those moccasins again, I’m afraid.”
ME: “How do you know I was replying to you with ridicule, Witheo? Haven’t you established that language can’t convey meaning. However, I agree with you that I do enjoy injecting my personal feelings into my arguments on the grounds that it will make what I’m saying more entertaining, and–I confess–because it will make me feel better by annoying someone who has annoyed me (for I have in my opinion a revenge instinct). I’m not out for moral advantage, just intellectual advantage, which I feel I always get when someone I mock makes such a big deal of it. Particularly when the mocker himself, as seems nearly always the case, has been using various kinds of mockery, such as sarcasm and superciliousness.
“To get to the meat of what I’m saying, and you would be missing if my words had meaning, is that you are saying that language has no meaning when you merely mean something very trivial: that language cannot communicate any meaning with absolute accuracy. So what? It can in all but a very few cases communicate meanings sufficiently. It really reduces to the problem of absolute truth. So far as human beings are concerned, there is no such thing–BUT there are many truths that are so far beyond reasonable doubt as to act as absolute truths, or be maximally objectively true. “Maxobjective Truths,” I call them.
“That many people–all of us at times–inappropriately perceive a text’s meaning as what we take it to be does not mean language can’t convey meaning, only that human beings can’t always use it effectively. Another dictum: any text’s meaning can require additional context to determine, as the meaning of a picture of a cat as simply “a cat” does not.
“I note you didn’t deal with what I said about Johnson.
(Editor’s Note: I’ve been defending Johnson for years, but I think my defense of him in my previous response the Witheo is as good a one as I can make.: )
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ME, this time to someone named Steve Hudson, who had earlier revealed how, when he first read the article under discussion in this thread, found Chomsky’s theory be “unfounded and spurious, stupid really: “You’re sounding more sensible to me now, Steve (in merely saying the article convincingly refuted Chomsky’s but not mentioning its stupidity), but I still can’t see the article as convincingly against Chomsky rather than perhaps interestingly opposed to him. I haven’t read Chomsky myself, but what the idea of our having some sort of innate neurophysiological mechanism or set of mechanisms that greatly facilitate early language acquisition makes too much sense to me to drop on the basis of what you and others on this thread and the author of the article itself have said. Considering how important language is for us, how could we not have an innate ability very quickly to recognize a noun or a verb, tag them as such, and use them as the basis of some sort of grammar that helps us pick up language?
“Common sense also tells me that we instinctively can tell human speech from other sounds, including (most) sounds animals make, except cats, although they mostly keep their supra-human intelligence to themselves.”
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My theory, I think, is a clumsy mess so far, with gaps I have no idea yet how to remove, but it’s fun for me to work on it, and I think I’ve said one or two interesting things in it. So I’m afraid I’ll keep talking about linguistics here as long as I continue blogging.
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Entry 1382 — The Prescriptive Approach to Language
Tuesday, February 25th, 2014
I stealed a whole entry to Mark Newbrook’s excellent blog for this entry–in order to publicize the writings of a highly intelligent, entertaining linguist I agree with 93.7% of the time, but more to argue a bit with him (politically-incorrectly).
New post on Skeptical Humanities |
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As those of you who have come here more than a few times before know, I wholly believe in the responsibility of linguists to do their best to counter imbecilic misuse of the language, usually for propagan- distically political, and/or purely sentimental, but always for anti-verosophical reasons, by the leaders of the masses and their air-headed serfs. Yes, most language changes are unconscious. Most are innocuous, some make sense. But more than a few do not, and should be consciously, loudly resisted by the linguistically responsible. However unlikely of success. No one that I know of has ever agreed with my general definition of “marriage” as the union of two opposites and therefore inapplicable to a union of two men or two women. I specifically define it in the traditional manner, so what if fundamentalist Christians agree with me.
Note: one of my opponents who did argue with me on the subject claims that two males are not opposites–because both are human beings. Right. And up and down are not opposites because both are directions.
I have given up doing more than lashing out at the use of “marriage” once in a while nowadays. Smilingly imagining the beauty of a marriage of H2O and water. And coining “mirrorge” for kind of marriage homosexuals are being joined in. When they mirry (meery) each other. I haven’t yet come up with a coinage for “marriage of a man and a woman.” One will definitely be needed.
To repeat, I’m no more homophobic than I’m Anglophobic (as–mostly–a descendent of English settlers whom I–mostly–very much admire). Their lifelong unions should be equal in law to marriages. Only the unmarried should be discriminated against. That’s a joke.
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Entry 1176 — Natural and Learned Concepts
Thursday, August 8th, 2013
A few days ago while discussing conceptual poetry, which seems to be attracting a lot of attention amongst poetry people, I got mired in confusion: I realized I didn’t know what I was taking about. This morning (no, yesterday morning since I’m writing this a day in advance) I suddenly felt I did, so wrote the following to New-Poetry:
I think I’ve solved my question about what Grumman was trying to put into words. It is that there are two kinds of concepts, those we perceive “naturally” the way we perceive the color red, and those we learn, which are more complex and ordinarily the only mental objects considered to be concepts (so far as I know). I realized this while thinking about numbers. The number one is a natural concept, I claim, because–I claim–one perceives a thing’s “oneness” the same way one perceives a thing’s redness. Thinking about it further, I decided that what we experience (due to a simple innate brain counting mechanism) is “absence of duplication.” The mechanism consists of a storage chamber holding everything a person has seen (I’m considering the visual only for simplicity’s sake) over the past minute or so; and matching chamber with a slot for the object being tested for “oneness” and a slot into which each of the things in the storage chamber are inserted. The matching chamber has a second compartment where one image overlaps the other and differences and samenesses are counted and a percentage arrived at that indicates match or non-match.
If nothing matches, the object being tested gets a one. One match gives it a two. Beyond that, who knows, but I’m sure four or five matches give the object a many. Words labeling each of these, like “one,” “alone,” “unique,” “twin,” etc. Larger numbers are learned. Five dots gets a many from the counting mechanism–but eventually is learned as a hand of fingers or the like, which is reduced to the word, “five.”
I believe more complex mathematical mechanisms may have evolved, but haven’t thought any out. I can’t believe I’m saying anything very wrong or new. But I work from introversion almost entirely–being too lazy for research and related work.
So, to get to POETRY, I suppose it doesn’t matter whether a conceptual poem’s concept/s is/are natural or learned. But I think all concepts are natural at the core.
Boy, I wish I were 25–and able to focus on ONE area of investigation the way Darwin did! This would be a good such area to spend a life on.
Note: in knowlecular psychology, natural concepts are termed “urceptual concepts.”
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Entry 1077 — Thoughts about “Me & Chomsky”
Thursday, April 18th, 2013
I’ve gone through 6 of the 16 pages of my “essay” about innate grammar, and disappointed but not at all surprised at how disjointedly uncogent it is. So far, I’ve had little trouble picking out incoherences, contradictions and plain bad writing, but I’ve not been able to fix, or start even to see how to fix, anything of significance. I remain convinced that grammar is innate, though. I don’t see how I could change my mind about that. Am I dogmatic? I prefer to say I’m loyal to my premises, and do not choose them readily. The healthy-minded person must form premises to which he clings dogmatically till he croaks–certainly in the case of premises there is insufficient data now available to falsify.
Note: I see that I began this clump of text in 1987 but added to it in 1989.
A page or two later I’m now reading myself regarding the “imagination center” in the brain. This is something I completely forgot. It’s like reading someone else. I hope I soon understand what the guy is talking about.
Later. I have much less confidence in the existence of the imagination center than I do in everything else I’ve been speculating about, but will try to work out an idea of it, in spite of its vagueness, even to me. I’ve already invented a new term for it! Fantacept, or knowlecept based on fantasy only–i.e., with no genuine perceptual basis. The Fantaceptual Zone is where they are gathered, if they exist. (Ho ho: fantacepts are fantacepts.) What I have to do is figure out what fantacepts are. Basically, pure words. To define them exactly, I believe I’ll need to define all the other knowlecepts to show what they are not.
* * * later. One thing a fantaceptual word is, is a word read or with no connections to a percept either then perceived (because its stimulus is in the environment at that time) or remembered. I don’t know if fantacepts are a useful concept but will try to improve my definition of what they would be if existent. Perhaps by example. When a child hears the spoken word, “cow,” for the first time while looking at an actual cow, his brain will record the word as a percept. If he later reads it, he will activate a retrocept of it–as a percept; i.e., as something he knows. Whether it really is or not–in spite of the cow he saw when he first heard the word was really a kangarooo, for instance. If a child is told an invisible sprite is standing before him, his brain will record the word, “sprite,” as a fantacept. Also as a noun.
I feel certain there are many other factors involved in fantaceptuality, but will leave it at that until the subject clarifies for me, if it does.
I will say that abstract nouns–“beauty,” for instance–may seem fantacepts but, in my psychology, are not, because they represent actual attributes the same way colors do. Demonstration: a child sees a red ball; certain light rays strike his eyes that result eventually in his perceiving the color red. Beauty is more complicated, but in my psychology the brain of a child seeing a sunset most people would consider beautiful, will compare the spectacle to similar things stored in the child’s brain and evaluate it as “beautiful”–materially, objectively beautiful (for the child). A better comparison to compare it to than red would be to “high”: when the brain carries out a comparison of the height of one tree, which is physically perceived, to the height of another, and evaluates it as “high,” it is again dealing with something perceived, however indirectly, and contextually.
I think hallucinacepts may well exist, and are different from fantacepts. Fantacepts are words for matter without a material stimulus in reality OR bad wiring inventing a stimulus, which is what causes hallucinacepts.
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Entry 1058 — Poetry Appreciation Accommodance
Saturday, March 30th, 2013
(Note: I suddenly realized that I’ve been treating my texts like they are world class poems, or excerpts of world-class poems. What I’m doing, if it isn’t clear, is showing how a very simple example of a use of metaphor in an attempt at poetry will work for someone who appreciates it–someone, in other words, who is at its level, as we all were once at the level of nursery rhymes.)
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What’s going on in the illustration above is accommodance at work. It could just as well be called “dipping into the subconscious.” I got the idea for it from Aldous Huxley when he was discussing his experiences with drugs—hallucinogenic drugs, I believe. All he said was that they opened a door that admitted data we normally blocked out. I was considering the possible effect of variable cerebral energy levels at the time—being sure, as I still am, that everything we do mentally depends on energy-requiring mechanisms. Not being well-read in formal psychology I’m not sure those in the field with the proper credentials believe that, but I think most of them do. It’s the mystics who don’t.
Anyway, for some reason, I jumped into the idea that “blocking” the entrance of data might require energy pushing the involved door shut. Hence, a weakening of energy might be what allows those doors to swing open. Other simple ideas of mine in development lead me to conclude that a sense of wrongness can cause a lowering of cerebral energy which causes something to happen somewhat like what Huxley described, except much less dramatic.
To put it most simply, what happens (according to knowlecular psychology) is that a person’s normal tendency to find his way from his ongoing experiences into habitual knowleculations is weakened by a lowering of the energy needed for it. The person’s ability to remember is weakened which, oddly, increases his memories (although it may take a few moments before it does). One of the things that must be understood is that normally one goes from one strongly-remembered understanding of what is going on in one’s life to another—because they have become familiar, something that will not usually happen if they are defective. Hence, if it rains, we remember previous times when it rained and how we avoided getting wet, and open our umbrellas, or run for shelter. That’s all there is to it.
If a person starts to open an umbrella and it explodes (harmlessly), the experience will be unexpected because unfamiliar—radically unfamiliar. One will become appropriately stupid, in effect, due to a decrease in cerebral energy due to his accommodance. He will have no remembered understandings to draw on. He will still try weakly to find memories that pertain to his circumstance, but activate very few. At the same time, much of his cerebral energy will be transmitted to varied memories that will not become active but will become primed to become active. Bits and pieces of memories primed before the explosion may be randomly activated by the environment, which will be able to activate more percepts than it had because of lack of competition from retroceptual activation. Eventually, he will remember recent events, but not necessarily in order (which will enhance their ability to re-order themselves effectively, although they will most often re-order themselves counter-productively—which won’t matter much, usually, due to the brain’s ability to recognize their flawedness and ignore them.)
Finally, sometimes during one’s first reflection on a poetic passage with a metaphor like the one under discussion here, enough of the . . . accommoflow? will clump into a resolution or partial resolution. That will cause one’s accelerance to come into play, strongly activating the new understanding (or, too many times, the potential new understanding that isn’t). And one will have resolved his frustration—or realized he hadn’t, which will turn on his accommodance again.
The process could take a week or more in the case of a poem. Ergo: some poems need to be read many times, and reflected on before they make sense. One can’t expect to enjoy a dramatically new technique like a mathephor as easily and quickly as one can enjoy a rhyme.
Now we know that the above, shown again, depicts something I’m tentatively calling an accommoflow. A very simplified one. With a focus on the part of it in the mathelexical zone although much will be going on importantly at the same time in the lexical zone, and probably in both the visiolexical and audilexical zones. In the best cases, important mental activity will be occurring in non-lexical zones, too—where we feel a moment of some long ago spring just after a shower, say.
Crucial to the effectiveness of the mathephor here, is the colored x, which is my symbol for everything multiplication is, everything that makes it much more for those sensitive to it than a mechanical switch (which it certainly also is).
Ooops, I see I left out the importance of the multiplication algorithm, which is really the primary agent in the creation of the mathephor because (I claim) it will have been strongly activated before the “explosion” occurred by both the multiplication sign (“x”) and the line under the second term. Moreover, it will be a very strong habitual knowleculation, so able to do more even when the cerebral energy available is low than most other data. It will cause a person to find a multiplier and a multiplicand and then use the logic of multiplication he should have learned to determine why it makes sense for the product of the two to be “flowers.” Eventually, understandings like the three shown in darker ink must occur if the mathephor has any chance of being a success.
The above depicts a successful resolution of the knowlexplosion. A multiplication serves as a metaphor for the transformation of a meadow/ the coming of spring/ the birth of flowers, all of these with vivid connotations that will be activated by the energizing effects of the resolution. I would add that there are “under-metaphors” present to the sensitive aesthcipient—for me, one is the metaphor of spring as some kind of machine like a long division “machine” churning out beauty from ordinary constituents.
It is important to note–or am I re-noting it?—that the resolution of this particular knowlexplosion will occur in different parts of the mathelexical zone while at the same time many of the knowlecules involved with be activated in the lexical zone—[flowers], for instance. I fall goes as well as it sometimes can, remembered images of flowers, flower-smells, pleasant dampness and other sensual knowlecules will enter the final experience.
Apologies my not articulating all this very well. It’s not a first draft, either—more like a fiftieth draft. Each one is saying more, but remaining less coherent than I’d like.
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Entry 1055–Manywhere-at-Once, the Rhyme, 2
Wednesday, March 27th, 2013
Okay, here goes my attempt to give my knowlecular explanation of rhyme-appreciation. In the upper illustration the auditory knowlecule [ght] is carefully differentiated from the audiolexical knowlecule [ght] (a ‘knowlecule” being a “molecule” of knowledge in my theory, as you should all know by now!), and shown highlighted in gray to indicate that it is “primed,” which means that it is partially on the way to being activated because it contains stored . . . neuro-transmission chemicals of the kind that provide cell-activating energy when available in sufficient quantity. The illustration is intended to depict the knowleculation–in this case, an audiolexical one ending in [x]–just created in a given subject’s brain. [x] is whatever connotations knowlicles (final units of knowlecules) [“a lovely sight”] activated along with random “noise”–i.e., random knowlicles that will come alive in every instacon (or moment of consciousness) almost entirely out of context. I include it for completeness, but it is of no importance for my story here.
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The lower illustration shows the subject having just heard “these swans in fli–” in the process of experiencing [ght] audiolexically. Of pivotal importance, though, is that he is shown also experiencing [ght] as a retrocept in his auditory zone. This results because the audiolexical knowlecule (or partial knowlecule) [fl] must send a small amount of neuro-transmitter to the primed [ght] in the subject’s auditory zone. Now, this may not be enough for the latter’s activation, but in most cases ought to be, for the auditory [ght] will probably have gotten a bit of activation-causing neuro-transmitter from the expectation of rhyme-occurence he, like most people, would have learned that poems of the kind he is hearing cause. Be that as it may, I’m assuming the second shot of neuro-transmitter causes the activation of the subject’s auditory [ght]. This puts him in a Manywhere-at-Once because he will experience a [ght] in each of two separate places.
It’s all ridiculously simple. According to my theory of pain and pleasure, pleasure is a matter (for the most part) of the number of neuro-transmitters an instacon’s releases that succeed in causing cellular activation compared to number that fail to do this. Ordinarily, the neuro-transmitters [fli]’s sent to the auditory zone would not activate anything, so would keep the audiolexical [fl] from causing much, if any, pleasure. Not so, this time.
There are many other complexities involved that I won’t get into here to avoid confusion. It should be remembered that what I’ve said is a simplification. I stand by its being close enough to what will happen if my theory is not too wrong. I further contend that even if my theory is 90% hooey (no, my good friends, it is nowhere near 100% hooey), my account of rhyme-appreciation is better than any other one out there. And it applies, too, to all the varieties (nearly) of what I call “melodation”–to wit, alliteration, consonance, etc. “Nearly,” because it does not account for the pleasure of euphony. That, and perhaps others, is due to our innate predisposition to derive pleasure from certain sounds like “ah.” We may also have such a predisposition to enjoy any repeated verbal sound. Only when neurophysiological lab technicians have the means to test my ideas, and they eventually will (if they don’t already), will we know how valid they are.
Yes, they are readily falsifiable. They also break no long-accepted laws of science. Hence, they are scientific.
Note, what I’m calling the auditory zone could probably more aptly be called the lexical-auditory association area.
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Entry 1050 — FromandTos, Fromandnottos and Fromandnulltos
Friday, March 22nd, 2013
For about a week I was having trouble with different parts of my knowlecular psychology theory. It seemed to come down to how my theory of the way I think the brain deals with cause and effect. I think the brain has mechanisms that recognize various stimuli as causes and tags its records (our memories) of those stimuli with “cause-tags” of some sort. These greatly facilitate scientific reasoning.
I was trying to pin down how rigidniks carry out scientific reasoning so poorly for my book on the Shakespeare authorship controversy. There I describe those whose situational psychosis makes them incapable of accepting Shakespeare as the poet he was as suffering from rigidnikry, a condition which causes, among other defects, an inability to perform scientific reasoning effectively. But I was floundering in my attempts to show exactly why this was so.
I almost gave up trying but kept coming up with slants at a solution and last night everything came together. The solution may be my most important knowlecular insight, even though it only took me a minute or two this morning to scribble the diagram of it above. I think it tells its story pretty well, albeit very superficially. Now to try to explain it.
1. First of all I need to tell you my concern changed from cause and effect to from and to after I realized it would apply to many related kinds of reasonings besides cause and effect ones.
2. The basic idea is that cerebral mechanisms (and there are a similar ones in the cerebellum and–probably–elsewhere in the nervous system) monitor active memory-cells (as I will call them here although it’s actually various organs I call menmoducts but don’t want to get into here) and become active themselves when sensing the development of a potential fromandto knowleculation, a knowleculation being a series of remembered matter. (I think I have some other name for such a series which I can’t now recall but don’t want to spend time looking for, since it’s irrelevant so far as what I’m writing here is concerned.) Such a knowleculation will go form records of moments whose contents change only very slightly each step of the development until it reaches an endpoint, which I call its “to-point.” It must have a certain minimal number of such steps to qualify as a one. Throwing a ball would be an example. It would consist of one moment for each movement the throwing arm makes until it releases the ball, its to-point.
A to-point is the first moment whose content ceases to be similar to the knowleculation’s previous moment’s. It can be of three kinds, positive, negative and null. Which it is depends on how the brain’s evaluceptual mechanisms evaluate it. If they find it gives a certain amount or more of pleasure, the fromandto monitor involved will label it positive; if the evaluceptual mechanisms determine it to give a certain amount or more of pain, it will be labeled negative. If found to be neither pleasurable or painful, it will label it null.
Note to Posterity: I just saved the above for the second time, a record for me.
Okay, once the monitor has ascertained a knowleculation to be a fromandto knowleculation, it puts a “to-tag” (which it had kept stored from the beginning of the process) in the first unit of it, the knowleculation’s “from-point,” and a “from-tag” in the to-point. The monitor will also add a link forward to the to-point to the from-point, and a link back from the to-point to the from-point. It will make these links strong to the degree that the pain or pleasure of the to-point involved is great. The strength of a link will also depend on the importance of the from-point at the moment it is active, which will depend on several things. One important one is how focused on the stimulus a person is when it is active; the more focused he is, the more energy he will have to use the short-cut. An to-point will also tend to be strong is leading anywhere to which it leads to the degree that is important to the person, which will be evident by how many memories it leads to, and how important they are.
The bottom line is that the existence of fromandto monitors and knowleculations will will give a person a short-cut from his experiencing a stimulus to his memory of what it will cause, including nothing. Exactly why this is so would take many words to elucidate, which I ain’t got time to go into right now. Nor, I confess, am I sure I I’m clear enough about it to do a good job of elucidation.
One problem with my thinking that I see is that it requires just about any knowleculation to be some sort of fromandto knowleculation. Can that be so? Perhaps. It’s not clear to me. Ergo, I must think about it more. I think what I’ve said is otherwise valid.
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Entry 1046 — Mathematical Semantics
Monday, March 18th, 2013
I’m fairly sure “real” linguists have gone where I’ll be going in this entry, and farther–but I’m not sure they have, and wouldn’t be surprised if they haven’t, such is my opinion of most academics. Anyway, I’m going on this little exploration self-indulgently, hoping to self-teach myself a few new understandings. As always, I don’t expect many to enjoy following me but do hope that some linguistical layfolk will enjoy companioning me. My exploration begins with a few notes I made a week or so ago after thinking to what I said in them in one of my philosophical sessions abed before sleeping one night.
The front door OF my house is red.
The positive square root OF four is two.
I came up with these sentences after suddenly wondering if there was truly such a thing as mathematical reasoning. Perhaps, thought I, I have been all wrong about there being a mathematical section of the brain; perhaps we do math in the same place we do our work with words. Perhaps when asked what the positive square root of four is, a person finds “two,” a word, the same way he finds “red,” when asked what color the front door of his house is (assuming–as I my being in my super-exactness zone compels me to say) that is the door’s color. The process, according to knowlecular psychology (and–really–common sense), is simple (although much more complex than my description of it will indicate). Being asked about one’s door, the verbal sequence, [what] [color] [is] [front] [door] [of] [my] (automatically changing “your” to “my”) [house] will form in the verbal portion of his brain. The “[what]” will cause that “knowleculation” to produce [color] [of] [front] [door] [of] [my] [house] [is] . . . [red] OR [image of the front door] [the red of the door] [“red”–i.e., the word for its color].
Give me a few more decades of mentally healthy life and I will write a full book about that one knowleculation. And consider it fun! Here is how it might start: [wuht] [what]{pronoun}<interrogative>, meaning the heard sound of the word “what”/the symbol for “what”/its general grammatical class/its grammatical subclass. (Note: I like the way an interrogatory pronoun is described at the Grammar Untied website, which I visited to check my understanding of it: “Interrogative pronouns are aptly named. They basically stand in for the answer to the question being asked.”) Actually, that would have to be preceded by something about the individual sounds involved, the w-sound, “uh” and “tuh.” And other things? Like what would share the instacon (smallest temporal unit of consciousness) [wuht] is in. But here my only concern is to show how, in my view, the verbal section of the brain comes up with the color of the front door by simply plucking it out of one’s memory, each step of the knowleculation getting closer to it until it reaches it the way a mailing address gets closer to a house until it reaches it. The answer to what the positive square root of four is could be grabbed the same way. In the verbal section of the brain. I think it may be–or in effect, it may be.
My tentative fraction of a hypothesis is that there is a mathematical section of the brain, but that it is part of the verbal section. I think it evolved from that. (Note, my thoughts now a first-time so may well be incoherent or absurd or both–but interesting, too, I hope.) As is obvious, I go along with the idea of an innate grammar, although I don’t know how close my model of it is to Chomsky’s or to any other linguist’s since I’ve read almost nothing about it, only that Chomsky came up with the hypothesis that it exists. I believe the brain tags words with their grammatical function, and that eventually it came to label identify words–such as + and the numbers, which I regard as words–as mathematical parts of speech. Hence, “=” came to be considered a mathematical (intransitive) (linking) verb, and take a knowleculation it is in (unless the context strongly prevents it) into the mathematical section of the brain. There, it would be able to focus on pure math.
It probably was first devoted to counting, “one” and “two” being originally normal adjectives, albeit describing something slightly more complex than a color. My guess is that we developed a mechanism for recognizing the similarity of two objects: a locus holding a short-term memory of various stimuli and comparing each to every other stimulus the person perceives, and tagging, for example, both the stored memory of a cow, and a second cow seen with “[same as]” and putting the first in the memory recorded when the person saw the second, with some kind of tag indicating the first was a remembered part of the new memory–a memory within a memory.
Or the first would be tagged [remembered same][cow], the second [second same cow], or symbols meaning remembered, same and second. I think I worked out something along these lines that worked. No matter, what I saying should give a reasonable gist. As pairs and groups of many became important, it would have evolutionary sense for the verbal section to provide a separate “room” for them. Numbers would develop as a pair became known as “two,” and solitary things become known as “one.” At that point, “more” and “less,” then “plus” and “minus.” The truest beginning of mathematics would occur when an algorithm (procedure for solving a problem, which I present up because for a long time I didn’t know what this word meant, and still sometimes forget) for addition evolved in the proto-mathematical section of the brain (the matheceptual sub-awareness of the brain, to give it its knowlecular name). More and more algorithms of ever-increasing complexity would come to be stored in the math section, and making use of that section would require greater and greater ability at what I call reducticeptual thinking, for analytical or conceptual or symbolic reasoning. It may be that simply having one’s thoughts enter the math section automatically increases one’s attention–i.e. reduces the ability of data not tagged as mathematical to enter.
Could all the algorithms in the math section ultimately be translations of math procedures into grammatical knowleculations like the one used to find the square root of four? So that particular algorithm might be just one of many similar steps in solving some very difficult problem in calculus, or something further beyond me in the discipline? I don’t see why not but am too ignorant of higher math to know.
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Entry 970 — “Lingueffect,” “Existuent” and “Mattribute”
Tuesday, January 1st, 2013
I’m into the fourth day a Serious Work on Getting a New Book done. This one is to be specifically about Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18,” and generally about poetry and poetics. I’m sure I’ve mentioned my Sonnet 18 project here before. I forget when I started work on it–two or three years ago? Anyway, I should be able to make a book of it, and I must make a book of something this coming year or admit that the significant portion of my life is over. (If any portion of my life has been significant.)
As part of what I’m calling my current Major Project, I spent yesterday going through entries in my Comprepoetica blog, looking for material to use in the book. I have nearly two thouasnd entries to go through. I got through 600 yesterday, and 200 so far today, by eleven in the morning. Along the way, I came across a few entries concerned with the old form/content poetics question–is form separate from content or just part of it. I say it’s separate. Thinking about that yesterday, I came to the tentative conclusion that actually a poem is form and content–and–what meaning an engagent of the poem gets from both of those. What I feel has confused people about form and content is that both express something, although each does something entirely different from the other. Content is simply the concrete verbal (or other expressive) matter in the poem: its words, phrases, and other locutions–as well, in some cases, letter, punctuation marks and the like–and their syntactic organization; form is the abstract, general arrangement of that verbal matter–i.e., not, for example, a specific rhyme at the end of line 3, but some rhyme there. I have dubbed the third constituent of a poem its “lingueffect,” short for “linguistic effect.”
Coming up with that term, made me think about what different kinds of words do–adjective and nouns, for instance. What do nouns name I wondered for a minute or so, then answered my wonder with another coinage, “existuent.” At first I had, “existent,” but that seemed too close to “existent,” the adjective; hence, “existuent.” Every material entity in existence. Attributes of existuents I named, “mattributes.” What adjectives describe. Not material. Color, motion, shape, but not essence. Or so it seems to me. A mattrimattribute is what adverbs describe. Verbs describe a change in how an eistuent is perceived. Prepositions describe relationships.
I have to leave the subject however much it interests me, and it does interest me enough to be tempted to spend the rest of my life expanding on the little I’ve just said. There’s really nothing in life but what we perceive and how we use words to communicate our perceptions to others. I need to stay with my Sonnet 18 book, though!
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