debitage
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 1.6.02
http://clark.colgate.edu/sdanielson/blog/blogger.html Clark! It's prophetic or something.
31.5.02An interesting article. I may come back and comment on it later.
29.5.02
28.5.02
One of the side points of this article (which I have chosen to sieze upon) is the author's assessment of how new words are formed in a language. English, as he points out, is more than willing to grab a new word from somewhere, a word that has no obvious relationship to any other words already in the language. His native Finnish has, like many languages (sometimes in a conscious attempt to avoid Anglicization of their vocabularies), taken the other route -- constructing a new word out of old native roots. "Economy" is a good example here. English simply took a French-by-way-of-Greek word and Anglicized it. Finnish could have done the same, resulting in something like "ekonnomii." But instead, it developed the word "talous" from the Finnish base "talo," meaning "house." Of course, the English word has nearly the same basic etymology -- "economy" comes from "oikos," which means "house" in Greek. The difference is that, for the vast majority of English-speakers, the word "economy" does not suggest anything about houses in its structure. Jukka Korpela (the author) sees this as a plus for Finnish. It makes learning the language easier, as you don't have such a large quantity of words to memorize, since so many have obvious derivations (he's a bit bitter in general about how hard it is to learn English). In that sense, he has a point. But I sometimes get frustrated when language doesn't go far enough the other way -- words are too stuck into their etymologies. When you're speaking philosophically, you often run into problems where the language you have to work with doesn't have a set of terms that correspond to the concepts you see as fundamental in the world. I ran into this problem here a while ago, discussing the meaning of evil. I found myself twisting the words good, evil, right, and wrong to fit concepts that aren't clearly designated in English. This leads to confusion, and to people disagreeing with you, because for others the terms cover different semantic territory. The problem only gets worse when the word has an obvious etymological connection to other meanings that you're trying to exclude. In Finnish the economy is something house-related, whereas English has more freedom to take the concept to different places. Having clear etymologies in some ways solidifies the semantic relationships -- the worldview -- underlying the language. Which makes it that much harder to propose ideas that don't fit the language. The ways you have to jerk words around into new patterns becomes that much more obvious, because the old pattern is written there in the structure of the words. Philosophers need a language free of etymology.
27.5.02
It seems to me that the "big project" in physics is a search for some kind of unified theory of everything, a more basic equation that sums up everything we know so far, something that all our current knowledge can be derived from. The assumption seems to be that there's some simple, elegant idea underlying how the universe works. But I see the world as being infinitely complex. Any proposition we make about the world -- any law of physics, for example -- is a simplification, codifying a pattern we think we see in the jumble of stuff that's going on. Like when a cartoonist draws a person's nose as a triangle or an oval -- the shape of the nose is a lot more complex than that, but the shape that he draws captures what he sees to be the simplest pattern to it. So by this logic, more complete explanations of things would necessarily be more complex. The only thing I can think of to reconcile these two opposite directions is chance. As I understand it, there's room for truly random events in advanced physics. These random events become concrete as they occur, and shape the conditions for future events. So maybe what's infintely complex is the result of these few simple laws operating in a universe subject to a lot of chance. Or maybe not.
'Anybody who purports to represent Aboriginal people, can't really do that if you don't really run the show. Let's be honest about it, we're just a black rubber stamp ... the truth of the matter is we are absolutely pissweak.'" And this is why Australian politics is cooler than American politics. I'd love to see Tom Daschle get up and say that John Ashcroft's policies are "a heap of shit."
26.5.02
So I lay there, letting my mind wander over inconsequential things, for 20 minutes. |
I don't know how exactly the system works, but all the webpages on Colgate's site that are people.colgate.edu and groups.colgate.edu have a sort of alternate address on some other server (I think the names are all from the founders) -- osgood.colgate.edu, or kendrick.colgate.edu, or something. Today I was looking at my sitemeter, and saw this referral from my old index page: