Posted by
glen e. p. ropella-2 on
Mar 22, 2010; 4:42pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/advice-needed-tp4777984p4778872.html
Vladimyr Ivan Burachynsky wrote circa 03/22/2010 08:53 AM:
> Once people from different disciplines start collaborating we will see
> much anxiety over the usage of simple words. A little philosophy might
> help create a willingness to cooperate. Academic territorialism will
> raise its head at some point and different groups will align to attempt
> control of language. It would be very easy to see people begin arguments
> about wording as Wittgenstein called “Word Games”.
>
> My intention is to learn the established language by working through the
> existing body of work with help, at some later time I hope to strike off
> in new directions. My father spoke ten languages and told me the only
> way to learn was to immerse oneself and cut off the connections with old
> languages until the new one was well established. I hope the members of
> the Group will forgive us when we use the wrong words or appear to
> jabber nonsense upon occasion. Reminds me of trying to buy cigarettes
> along the French German border and pausing to consider which language I
> was supposed to use. Lucky for me the clerk spoke 4 languages.
You may want to look back at the friam archives for our recurring
discussions of language and emergence. There is a robust contingent of
people, some of whom are on this list, who (seem to) believe that much
of "complexity theory" is nothing but word games. Now, that contingent
breaks into 2 (overlapping) sub-groups. Some of them (seem to) feel
that the word games occlude reality and get in the way of understanding.
But others (seem to) feel that it is this very mismatch of languages
that give rise to interesting phenomena in the world, not just between
humans trying to understand the world.
As such, your father's advice is both good and bad. It's good because
even when studying the interaction of incommensurate languages, it's
effective to gain a concrete understanding of all of them by immersion,
first. Then abstract away and consider them all. But it's bad in the
sense that people, whose pattern matching powers come by way of
historical dependence (experience and intuition), can become very
trapped by constraints set and reinforced in them through past
experiences. Hence, your approach upon the subject matters just as much
as (if not more than) your final arrival to the subject. And although
we don't yet know if some paths of approach are somehow "better" than
others, we can hypothesize that serial immersion may not be the best (or
only) way to do it because there may be some languages that are
canalizing "attractors", suck your mind in, and never let you go...
resulting in stubborn curmudgeons (like me) who always percolate back to
the same rhetoric, even if expressing that rhetoric in other languages
makes the rhetoric look like a Rube Goldberg machine. [grin]
Anyway, you will find a certain impatience with words and how they're
used on this list, as with any other. But deep down, it seems like
everyone here appreciates the journey as much or more than the
destination. And word games are always a part of that journey.
--
glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095,
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