Or, that types only makes sense through tokens? — Πετροκότσυφας
The reason why I ask is that animals can count. And if it's not mathematics, a counting system of "none, one, two, three, many..." it still counting and counting is part of mathematics. Now the vast majority of species don't use these terms in their language (which typically limits to "Danger!" and "This is my territory!"). I wouldn't be surprised if some advanced hunters like Orcas would have terms for counting prey in their communication system (at least "many" and "few") or even something more advanced. Perhaps the other extreme from gesture could be some postmodern meta-analysis of language itself and not mathematics. Or basically philosophical study of language. That would feel very remote from the languages that animals use or even can comprehend. — ssu
This might be irrelevant to the overall discussion, but what comes to my mind while reading this, is Wittgenstein. The act of writing "1+1=2" does not affect the fact that 1+1, in fact, equals 2, but the act of calculating it, does. 1+1 does not equal 2 unless someone invents a calculus in which in fact it does. Wouldn't it be fair to say that any calculation would be meaningless to us if it didn't involve the world in one way or another? Or, that types only makes sense through tokens? — Πετροκότσυφας
Some of the reading I've been doing that somewhat inspired my thread has been precisely on the link between gesture and math, and the fact that math is unthinkable without gesture. — StreetlightX
Insofar as all language is normative, so too is math: it does not reflect some other-worldly eternal reality. — StreetlightX
Going back to the way we learn math, it strikes me that while the general way we are introduced to this type of cognition depends on gestures, as means of spatial designation and delimitation, as well as on language to slide us toward abstraction, neither of those domains recovers the essence of mathematical reasoning. The understanding of 1+1=2 depends on an initial suspension of actuality on the operational side, followed by a recovery of this actuality through a projection of this operation on an abstracted world which we pretend is a proper translation of ours.
I would suggest that if gesture is primordial here, in this context, its because it is a form of informational mapping. The educational gestures behind 1+1=2 serves the purpose of establishing boundaries and then lifting them, putting emphasis on the sequential aspect of the event so as to give the impression of operationality, while the language serves the purpose of obfuscating the fact that none of this is actually happening in reality. — Akanthinos
No, but it does reflect the countability of the world, and possibly more. — Marchesk
I'm not convinced that poetry attempts to be gestural. There are many formal techniques in poetry -- and those formal techniques are even language-specific, in some cases; Especially as we go back to ancient poetry which were more formalized than a lot of modern poetry is. — Moliere
Basically the idea is that if you really want to understand the nature of language, two seemingly marginal areas need to be investigated: math and gesture. My intuition is that all three terms - gesture, language, and math - all stand on a continuum of increasing abstraction, and that to understand each, we need to understand the other(s). Or to put it differently, gesture and math stand at opposite ends of a line on which language occupies the centre: they are the limit-points though which language must be understood. — StreetlightX
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