In the challenge, addition and quaddition produce the same results up to 57, and that's as far as you've ever gone. — frank

Do they? What about 68 + 1? I mean 68 is the outcome of, say, 30 + 38. I need to do addition to be able to do quaddition; I don't need to be able to do quaddition to do addition.

So if I'm asked to "add 68" that wouldn't make sense und quaddition.

True: 68 = 57 + x
False: 68 = 57 quus x (that's always 5)

So how does addition flow into quaddition? What's the rule here? Which of the following is correct:

1 quus 68 = 5
1 quus 68 = 6

I can argue for both, but I don't know enough about quaddition to decide on my own. I'm way more familiar with addition. This may be the result of an unnoticed stroke, though. Who knows?

Checked your 'sell by' date? — BC

I'm about half a century old, but this is mostly about... environmental hazard? I do start feeling the wear and tear.

You can see that the meaning of the sentence depends on the context of utterance. This is always true. — frank

I agree with the spirit of this (I think), but I also think it's analytically useful to keep the meaning of the utterance and the meaning of the sentence separate. In your example, I'd then say:

The utterance "The cat is on the mat," means "There's spinache between your teeth," but the sentence still retains the meaning "the cat is on the mat", too. That is, given that code divides audience between in-group and out-group, the in-group would still know what the sentence means to the out-group, and if a member of the out-group would use the sentence, that's what the utterance would mean.

I'd say any theory based on "meaning is use," would have to incoroporate that difference. More later. Maybe. I'm not at my best lately.

There's always an alternative.

This is sort of weird because I have not been able to find any use of Jacks-in-the-box on the most popular web sites, they all return Jack. — Sir2u

I find this quote on Wikipedia:

"Some jacks-in-the-box open at random times..."

I'd call wikipedia a popular page. But, well, you (or anyone really) can go there and edit it, so maybe by the time you check it'll say "jack-in-the-boxes"? It would really be fun if people were to edit it back and forth, so we could never agree what the page actually says... (Most results I get for "jacks-in-the-box" come from dictionaries. And, frankly, it's the same for "jack-in-the-boxes". The plural seems to be rare in the first place.)

Seriously, just use what you want to use.

It's interesting how you interpret "Jack-in-the-box" as a phrase and not as a word. I highlight this because, according to Steven Pinker, there are two different groups: those who interpret it as a phrase and those who interpret it as a word. He explains that they are not wrong, but in terms of pluralizing, that is when the debate starts up. — javi2541997

Well, I'm not a native speaker, either, so maybe non-native speakers are biased towards internal structure (and maybe it depends on their mother tongue, too?). I don't know, to be honest. All I know is that I'm certainly not going to the grammar wars of the plural of jack-in-the-box. And frankly I don't even know what I'd have used if it weren't in a linguistic discussion. Maybe I'd have intuitively said "jack-in-the-boxes", too? I don't remember having the opportunity to use that particular plural a lot.

Last night I had this nightmare: I'm chased by countless jack-in-the-box toys... like the ghost of Schrödinger's Cat the word's plural hovers over them -- a silent battlecry. "Jacks-in-the-box" it would ring out, or "jack-in-the-boxes". I shall never know, for if they ever catch up I shall surely die...

Gins and tonic, passersby, etc. This is barely even linguistics, and I'm not sure why it's been put in philosophy of language.

Can anyone tell me why this shouldn't be put in the Lounge? — Jamal

This thread could in theory lead to a discussion about what grammar is. I come from linguistics, and I've often felt confused about how philosophers use the term grammar. It sometimes feels like philosophers think grammar is the structure of thought, when it's just the structure of language.

"Jack-in-the-box" and where the plural goes is actually a pretty good example. People here keep talking about Jacks and Boxes, but the grammatical structure does suggest you tag the -s onto Jack.

Javi is actually right here (in spirit):

So, the subject of this example is Jack, not the boxes. Ergo, plural would always be applied to Jack instead of box (right?). — javi2541997

The term "subject" is, strictly speaking, wrong - since "jack in the box" is a phrase, and phrases have "heads" not "subjects". You'd need to interpret "jack in the box" as a clause for it to have a subject. Beyond that, a grammatical analysis would suggest that the -s goes to the phrases head. That's not implausible.

There's a problem, though: Sir2u has a point, here, too:

If the phrase is being used as a noun, then it has to be treated as such. It does not have a subject nor a predicate because it is counted as one word, thus the hyphens. — Sir2u

The internal phrasal structure doesn't necessarily stipulate where the -s would go. Usage determines that, and "jack-in-the-box" might well be treated as an exception (by a dictionary, as a variant, etc.)

The discussion here about "jack-in-the-box" is mostly humorous, but it does show that grammar and thought needn't be the same. You can't deviate too much from the word, or you many people won't recognise it as the plural of a common word.

"Jacks-in-the-box": Hm, are there many Jacks in one box?
"Jack-in-the-boxes": So it's one Jack who alternates between many boxes?
"Jacks-in-boxes": Hm, but how many jacks per box. This is too imprecise:
"Jacks-in-one-box-each": Ah, that's the perfect plural. (But it doesn't sound like a plural, does it?)

I tend towards jacks-in-the-box, as "jack" is the head of noun-phrase that makes the complex noun. But if you'd say jack-in-the-boxes, I'd still recognise it as the plural of "jack-in-the-box" and that's really the most important thing. If jack-in-the-box were a more common noun, or more commonly used in the plural, we'd all be used to a particular plural, probably. Or there'd be established variants. Grammar follows usage, and usage often follows rules - but rarely slavishly. Grammar is generally rule-bound but always a little chaotic around the edges. The logic is a property of two things: (a) the theory linguists use to describe it, and (b) the generative rules available to speakers of a language (which can be overridden by things like the lexicon or habit or common usage). (a) will always be a step behind (b), and people will always use (a) to criticise (b). Or (c) which is a collection of rules that people think apply but either really don't or not as simply as they think - like people going around correcting "five items or less" signs to "five items or fewer" - and even those influence actual usage to a degree (though people who champion a particular rule are often unaware that they're not using that rule themselves; I've once come across a blog who figured out she was correcting others but didn't do as she said herself - she called herself a "grammar nazi hypocrite"; I think the blog no longer exists.)

So the upshot is this: if all you care about is communication, "jacks-in-the-box" and "jack-in-the-boxes" should both suffice. If you care about correctness, pick your favourite and negotiate (or choose your trusted authority and do as they say) - ideally actually use your favourite (though you might want to pick your fights if you're in conflict with an editor - you might waste energy you need for more important topics). Publishers tend to use style guides (such as the Chicago Manual of Style) for a reason. Pinker is right, really: it's all custom and authority. (But some custom is so deeply ingrained that it's hard to see an alternative: if you're curious google the difference between accusative-nominative languages [most of them] and ergative-absolutive languages [Basque among a few others].)

At the first glance irregular verbs would seem to have no reason to live. Why should language have forms that are just cussed exceptions to a rule? What do you think? — javi2541997

Irregularities may have been regularities in earlier languages, or in other languages. Many irregular verbs would likely have been regular had their rules survived or made it into English. People who know more about etymology than I could probably tell you more about this than I, but I'm fairly sure many irregular verbs are really old and preserved older forms. And many are also really common (say, to be, or to go).

Pinker is talking about how people today learn their language. Irregular verbs may seem chaotic today, but there's a history behind them, and if you know them they lose some of their unpredictability. I have an example not from irregular verbs, but from plurals.

Normally, you tack on an -s, and that's it. There are exceptions, though. For example, nouns that end in -us take -i as their plural, but only if they come from Latin. Words such as octopus and platipus also end in -us, and you often hear the question "What's the plural of octopus?" Native speakers sense that "Octopi" doesn't sound right, but often aren't confident enough to just add "-es", even though "octopusses" is correct: "-us" is not a Latin suffix; -pus is a variant of pous which is Greek for foot. There is a minority plural ("octopodes") which you sometimes can read.

These irregularities sort of follow rules (you just have to know a lot about a language's history), and sort of don't (there's no rule governing which exceptions survive, at least none that I know of). It's really like anything that grows: it carries traces of its history with it.

Sometimes, people are wrong about applying exceptions from a historical perspective, but wrong often enough that it becomes part of the language. For example, as a native speaker of German I've always been confused about "adder" for that particular snake. What is it "adding"? Where does this come from? Well, it turns out "a nadder" got reinterpreted into "an adder", and "nadder" is pretty similar to the German word "Natter". So now it makes sense.

Basically, when languages grow rules change, but some traces of older rules may remain. Languages may absorb parts of other languages, and sometimes keep "foreign" rules as exceptions and sometimes not. And sometimes mistaken theories accumulate. There's usually no institution that guards the "correctness" of a language.

Often there's also dispute about what's correct. There are "zombie rules" that aren't really rules when you look at the actual usage, but you still hear them a lot. There are dialect variants that are incorrect in most versions of the language, but not in that one dialect. And all those things might flow into each other: none of those things are fixed and invariant. For example, one person's dispute might be another person's zombie rule ("five items or less", correct or not?).

As for "banning irregular verbs to crush the human spirit," that's just silly. Irregular verbs aren't a sign of spirit. They're just part of the language. Banning them isn't going to get you rebels. Anyone's going to slip up, and if there's punishment for using them, the likely result isn't avoidence of irregular verbs but people talking less and less in public, and creating more and more secret spaces. I mean, in the end, if successful, you *will* crush the human spirit, but it'll have little to do with irregular verbs, and more to do with making and brutally enforcing an arbitrary, hard-to-follow rule about something really common (regulating the length of your stride, for example, might have a similar effect).

So I thought asking about masculinity was fairly on target for the original topic. If we are spurred on to defend this or that view because of our masculinity, it makes sense to start asking what is the value of this masculinity? What else other than our masculine identities is contributing to this confusion? — Moliere

It's sort of hard to pinpoint. I've never cared much about my gender, but at the same time I've never doubted that I'm a boy/man. It's always seemed to me that gender is made relevant far too often, and that doesn't align with my intuitions very well. But at the same time, I can't rule out that there are biological-behavioural tendencies I follow - which makes my behaviour masculine. But it's just not deeply rooted in my identity. How to explain? Maybe if you compare social life to a piece of word processing software "masculinity" would be a macro someone's once written and others have contributed to that I don't use; but I might go through the same operations one by one anyway, just not always or consistently, so I get results that are slightly different than if I were to usually rely on the macro.

I have no emotional attachment to being a boy/man. An example from my puberty: In sports class, we were supposed to do some task; I can't remember which. I couldn't do it - too weak probably. Imagine it was pole climbing: I would have made some low-motivation token effort. Someone asked me whether I'm a boy or a girl. I replied something along the line, "Don't care, you choose." He thought that was the funniest thing he heard that day, but when he told his friends he couldn't get humour across. As for me, I just wanted to get to the end of the hour-long class. Things like that happen a lot; I care about the activity at hand (presently somehting I was ill-suited for and not motivated to get better at). The gender thing was probably supposed to be a way to motivate me, but it doesn't work on me, because I just don't care about my masculinity. It's a nuisance lable in situations like that: now I not only have to do this task I don't care for, I have to put this in a wider context I also don't care for. Dead pan humour often works - I rarely offend, but I did usually get some sort of outsider status out of it.

When I'm focussed on something else, I can even get literal minded and not get the social function of the reference. Example: I had a job at a market research instute entering data from physical questionnairs into the software. I busy doing that when the boss of a different section came in asking for help from "strong men". I heard he words, heard "strong", and tagged that as having nothing to with me. My friend who sat next to me (a woman) tapped me on the shoulder and said, "C'mon, we'll help." It's only then that I realised that this was likely just the usual male-ego flattering and the job won't require all that much strength - but carrying stuff is a "man thing". So I went to help (with mostly women I might add), and the task involved moving tables, which weren't all that heavy, so even I could move them (with help). But I did hear "strong men" as ("men who are stronger than expected") rather than ("men who I call strong so they feel good about helping"), which is a mistake I probably only made because I was distracted.

The upshot is that I usually understand masculinity culture enough to function, but I don't connect to it through identity. I don't consider myself particularly masculine, but neither do I consider myself particularly feminine. Any gender typology applied to me is something I put up with rather than something I feel. As a result, "Grow up and take responsibility," is likely more effective on me than "Be a man and take responsibility," even if the speaker contrasts "man" with "boy" in this scenario, so that the intended meanings are close. But the gender aspect is a distraction which I tune out, focussing on "take responsibility," which I will then do if I think I should. With "grow up," you're telling me I'm being childish, which is something I might actually consider. It's more likely to hurt, too. Gender-based appellations usually fall on deaf ears with me.

The disambiguation of the term "woman" is completed by drawing a bright line between the sexually defined and the gender defined, which is what the transsexual accepting crowd advocates. — Hanover

At first reading this seemed downright nonsensensical to me. I'm not part of trans communities, but whenever I came across transpeople talking about their experiences, the opposite seems to be true; they'd rather blur the line and/or de-emphasise it, while it's the opponents who re-inforce the line and make it a tad brighter when they're talking about how trans-people's identities are invalid.

When I first read the post, there were no replies yet; I spent the time between then and now trying to figure out where I differ from you, how we could have such different intuitions (or, as a possibility, that I totally misread you).

I think my main point is pretty convoluted, though, and trying to stick with what you've written is... tough. I'll try to pick out some quotes and respond, but the danger in the approach is that I fragment my attention too much and confuse even myself (it happened before).

If the women's bathroom were labled "XX" as opposed to "Women," that would discriminate on the basis of sexual designation and not on the basis of gender, protecting that class of XX's who wish that space be protected, but offer no commentary on social gender definitions. — Hanover

Hm, the thing is when we assign sex to children we tend to check for genitals rather then chromosomes, as this is usually accurate enough, and testing the genome is too expensive and not worth it. You can correct me if I'm wrong about this; I'm not actually certain about this. I am certain that the concept of man/woman is way older than our knowledge of genes, though.

I feel like the retreating from genital sex to chromosomal sex means something, but I'm not sure what exactly. Maybe it's because operations can change that stuff, but we're not yet at the point where we can modify the chromosomes?

That is, the dispute arises when the right decrees that gender and sex must be correlated. — Hanover

That's when the dispute may arise, but the problem arises earlier - with intuitions. You see, I don't think think the sex/gender distinction is that clear cut to begin with, and that may be why the opening quote confused me. "Gender" is indeed a social attribute, not a biological one. I don't disagree here. But the alignment of gender and sex is not as straightforward as one might intuit. All sorts of things are gendered, down to grammatical gender (whose ties to sex are spurious, and whose ties to social gender have occasionally been researched - mostly I think through the lense of cognition? Don't take my word for it.)

But "gender" as a social category is a more comprehensive interpretative scheme than just a tool to sort people into categories. One of the things, I think, that's gendered is how we think about sex, and for that very reason the distinction between XX and XY may not be as relevant as people think. One of the things, for example, that I hear challenged a lot is that gender needs to be a binary. And while this is indeed mostly social talk, it's not entirely clear if some people among the trans community mightn't benefit from knowledge we might gather by thinking of sex not as a binary: that is, maybe there's knowledge to be had out there that we don't have, because we gender sex as the common male-female binary? Then there's the additional gender category of cis and trans. The social indentity category is difficult enough as it is, but is there something in the biology that favours the social distinction? That is: could "cis" and "trans" be at least partly an attribute of sex? The answer to question is one of practical research, and that would need theory, and there might be theories that restructure the way we think about sex? Now consider the political landscape: who would reject such a restructing, and who would seek it? There's a problem of continuity, of acceptance on one side, and of bias and wishful thinking on the other. Who would fund such research? Where would it be published?

So my suggestion is not "sex" on the one hand and "gender" on the other, but the other way round: sex is "gendered biology". This is where I should lay my bias open. I have a degree in sociology, but have never done anything with it and am out of the loop. The theories that attracted me most were usually interpretative or constructivist approaches (many deriving from Husserl - such as Alfred Schütz, or Berger/Luckmann). What this means is that I think of "gender" more as basic interpretative scheme than as an attribute given to things and people.

This important, as the distinction between gender and sex is somewhat different in daily language. English (unlike my mother tongue German) has different adjectives for sex (male/female) and gender (masculine/feminine). So it's sort of tempting think of gender as the things that are "masculine"/"feminine" and sex as the things that are "male"/"female". But this is problematic, because it forces trans people into a more complicated terminology. You see, there's (at least in theory) such a thing as a masculine trans female, in the same way that there is a masculine cis female. Something that's terribly confusing for some people is a trans woman with a beard, for example.

I have two examples where this matters:

1. To be recognised as trans in Japan, you need to take the operation. Not all trans people want to.
2. Voice training: Some trans people may not see the need to talk any differently than they're used to, but will still undergo voice training so they sound more feminine, not because that's closer to some ideal they invision, but because it's less confusing for non-trans folk. I've read reports from transitioning folk who felt pressured into voice training by their trans support structue (with the justification being something like: "if you don't train your voice, you make things more difficult for us to gain trans acceptance).

So basically drawing a bright red line between biological gender (sex) and social gender, would usually not be in the interest of the trans community. De-emphasising the importance of biology altogether, it seems to me, would be more in line with what they actually say. And it might discourage or inhibit research into whether there are biological components to being trans that are part of your sexual make up we haven't found yet.

I'm really not sure I made much sense to anyone but myself, but if you're reading this I managed to stay coherent enough to make sense in my own mind, which - considering that I often confuse myself enough so I'm unable to finish a post - I consider an accomplishment. I may be embarrassed by this post tomorrow, though.

This is messing with my head. I tried to reply but couldn't get a coherent post going.

I'd say an A does not definitely represent more knowledge than an F -- for instance, if one grades on a standard curve such that there will always be a person who gets an F and always be a person who gets an A the grading system forces people into a grade rather than measures knowledge because the teacher believes it fairest. Grades are awarded on a basis of merit, which in turn requires a standard -- but the standard is never the same between classes, or even between teachers. — Moliere

Yeah, I agree. I was being sloppy here. (I've discarded a much longer post, where I went into more detail, both before and after I mentioned grades.) Beyond it being hard to compare grades, there's also the fact that failure on tests can be non-knowledge related: nerves, motivation, distraction, illness, and so on. I personally once decided to skip a course at University, but I still took the test, for the heck of it. I didn't bother to think through questions that didn't interest me, so not even I know how well I'd have done had I been motivated.

It is, however, something you can count; and you'll need to think through why you're thinking of counting just this, and what the weak points are here in your assumptions, and if/how you can make up for those.

In a workplace no one cares what grades someone got, they only care that the person is competent. — Moliere

Yes. Which is why I asked why the question is important. Depending on the motivation for asking that question, what counts as knowledge might even change. (I mean, if what you're counting were directly related to knowledge, you'd probably have an interval scale - and a limited operational definition of what knowledge is in that context. For example, for someone to take a test, that person needs to know what a test is, but that particular piece of knowledge isn't tested for, and thus outside of the scope this particular counting operation.)

And the word "competent" is interesting, too. What's its relation to knowledge? Know how. Know that. Know why...

(I'm not being at my most systematic here, I'm afraid, but luckily this *is* the lounge.)

The probability that I will be questioned if the coin lands heads is 1. The probability that I will be questioned is 1. — Michael

How do you get 1? How do you interpret P(Questioned)?

I get 3/4. There are two variables (Coin and Day), and two checks, for four outcomes altogether, three of which result in "questioned".

Similarly, the likelihood that the current situation is one in which we're both questioned and the coin comes up heads is 1/2.

I don't know how to do formulae, but I get the following:

1/3 = (1/2*1/2)/(3/4)

Which checks out. I mean, test it all out on the event space:

Heads and Monday = Not Questioned
Heads and Tuesday = Questioned
Tails and Monday = Questioned
Tails and Tuesday = Questioned

Likelihood to be questioned:

Heads and Monday = Not Questioned
Heads and Tuesday = Questioned
Tails and Monday = Questioned
Tails and Tuesday = Questioned

Likelihood to be questioned when Heads:

Heads and Monday = Not Questioned
Heads and Tuesday = Questioned
Tails and Monday = Questioned
Tails and Tuesday = Questioned

Likelihood to be Heads when Questioned:

Heads and Monday = Not Questioned
Heads and Tuesday = Questioned
Tails and Monday = Questioned
Tails and Tuesday = Questioned

I mean, I'm no mathematician. But this, at the very least, makes sense to me. Have I gone wrong anywhere?

So would the operation of counting be relative to some kind of expert who knows more? Such that the comparative judgment is also relative to a third person, a judge or expert? — Moliere

Well, we could look at school grades as an ordinal scale to measure knowledge retained until test time. We have the institution of grading, the syllabus, the judgement of the teacher, the studen't mindset during test situations... To what degrees to school grades represent knoweldge? An A definitely represents more knowledge than an F, but what you're counting is success. How does success at tests relate to the student's knowledge? Why is society interested in grades (and what about alternative teaching models not relying on grades)? And so on.

You see how strange it is that knowledge is innumerable and that there are people who know more? — Moliere

I come from a sociology background; this sounds rather... mundane? Quantifying innumerable things is what sociologists have always done. But they don't usually do it for the sake of it; there's a research question that drives how to quantify things.

I've once been asked, on the street, to test new recipees for orange juice. They'd ask questions about how much I liked the taste, colour, etc., and they provided me with a ordinal scale from 1 to 10. Oh goody. The ordinal scale made sense. I mean, the minimal ordinal scale would be: (1) don't like, (2) like. It's an ordinal scale, because we value (2) more (I won't buy juice I don't like). What's not there is a stable distance between (1) and (2). It's just an order.

The minimal ordinal scale isn't very thorough, though, and judging can become kind of arbitrary for so-so cases, which might fall in either slot, depending on mood. So maybe something like this (1) yuk, (2) meh, (3) yum.

Or maybe (1) get this away from me, (2) if it's all there is, (3) maybe sometimes, if I'm in the mood, (4) yeah, that's good, (5) MUST HAVE!

Go higher than (5) and the accuracy of the scale falls apart, because it's really hard to even figure out what the bullet points mean. (Rating behaviours are interesting: you create a five star rating system and people give out half-stars, if they can't decide between two ratings, but you make a 10 star rating system, and for a significant portion of people who rate, five stars will be bad rather than avarage, and around 7 will be avarage. Quantifying ordinal scales with no clear numerical substratus is common, but it has its quirks.)

Knowledge is easier to quantify if you have a topic in mind. For example, reading on this boards its clear to me that I know more about philosophy than some, but less about it than most on here. There are questions about the quality of the knowledge, too: what I know about philosophy I mostly know from secondary literature - I usually haven't read more than excerpts from the philosophers themselves. And what I have read is more spread out than focussed. Also, because of the Dunning-Kruger effect, asking people how much they know is tricky as a form of collecting the data: If you don't know anything about a subject, you also don't know what areas you're particularly ignorant about, so it feels like you know a higher ratio than you do. The more you learn, the more your ignorance becomes apparent, and then you feel you know less than you do (knowing what you don't know is relevant knowledge, too, and it also presents the opportunity to learn).

So, yeah, knowledge is probably best described as an ordinal scale. It doesn't meet the requirements for an interval scale. And how you quantify it depends on what you want to know, and how you can fruitfully measure it.

Yet, this might point more to Chomsykean ideas of a "mentalese" (I-language), not that there is no language at all. It complicates things that Chomsky seems agnostic about concepts and very in favor of a generative grammar. — schopenhauer1

Well, Chomsky's mainly concerned with syntax, not semantics. (I'm aware that the distinction is not unproblematic.) That I sometimes don't know how to say things because I lack words, doesn't mean that I have problems with the grammar; I just have no words to arrange and modify according to those "transformation rules". So, if deep-structure thought (I-language thought?) can proceed without words, what stands in for words in such a situation? What's the relationship between wordless thought and the constructed word-sequence? I mean, sure, if there's an I-language that's different from an e-language, such wordless thought-stream controlling the e-language output could easily be described as an i-language. That would be some sort of retro-engineering, no? I'm not sure I ever really understood Chomsky.

As far as concepts, do animals that don't have language have concepts? What is a non-linguistic concept? A dog associating a leash with a walk, is that a concept? It's association sure. Concepts seem to be something beyond just association. Concepts seem to join with a mechanism whereby they are "used" and that can be something akin to a grammar. — schopenhauer1

How do you explain association without concepts? A dog associates what with what? A leash and a walk need to be something associatable; I'm fine with using the word "concept" for that. I don't think it's all that different from a person demonstrating knowledge about role of chairs in waiting rooms by sitting down on one. (You don't need to think the word "chair" to do that.) Whether or not the association itself is also a concept, I don't know. Maybe the dog sees it as some sort of ritual? Likely not, but how would you rule this out?

I can see I-languages being a mentalese that accounts for our shorthand internal language maybe. — schopenhauer1

I somehow get it and somehow don't. If I were to put it in terms that are more intuitive for me, I'd say that Chomsky posits a grammar of thought, and a grammar of language, and a connection between the two. So we have this grammar module in our head that's pretty much the same for everyone, but doesn't determine what language emerges as output (since that's partly social). And Chomsky seems to want to talk about it all in terms of language.

I mean, I'll just point out here that Chomsky thought "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously," is a grammatically well-formed sentence, even though it makes no sense. Grammar is about how we form thoughts, not whether they make any sense, much less about wither they're true. That's where some his pupil parted ways with him (google generative semantics, a shortlived movement, but it did lead to other theories, like cognitive linguistics [via Lakoff, I think?]). I may be wrong about that, too; it's been a while.

The minimalist program is just "merge" now I think. — schopenhauer1

Heh. Well, there's certainly more to the methodology, like, say, X-bar theory. I always thought Generative Grammar gave us quite an interesting set of methodology to work with, but I never quite bought into the language faculty stuff.

At any rate, I don't know how analiticity relates to all that. I'd probably expand the question to:

Do analytical sentences exist, and if so are they a feature of the I-language, or are they judgements we port over from non-linguistic cognition to fully formed e-language sentences? (I might need to read more Chomsky to phrase this properly.)

And there's this. — Banno

Now there's an interesting link. I've always been confused about why people think language and thought are tied together as much as they seem to think. I do have verbal thoughts, but only if I'm explicitly forumulating, and when I do, there's always some sort of non-verbal stream of thought in the background that checks whether what I'm saying internally is what I'm actually thinking, or if I need to start anew. For me, anything verbal that's interior is *clearly* at least partly derived from social language. I often have verbal blank-outs: I know intuitively what I want to say, but there aren't any words. I need to find a way to approximate this with language. It's different from the tip-of-the-tongue experience, where I know there's a word I seem to have misplaced. It's an intuition that I don't know how to formulate.

Interestingly, the article also links not having an "interior monologue" to aphantasia, which I think I have, too (at least I'm more on a page with accounts from people with aphantasia than I am with people who puzzle over them).

Indeed, i find it hard to understand what an analytic statement would be like in an I-language...

I'm not an expert on Chomsky, so my immediate question would be whether Chomsky sees the judgement of a statement as analytic or synthetic as a task for the i-language. Chomsky's difficult, since he revised his theory a lot. From what I remember, if you think a line like "Snow is white," that line isn't what i-language is about; it's already internalised e-language maybe? I don't know. I'd have to read up.

I'm fairly sure the i-language, though, is supposed to be some human universal, so that "Snow is White," (Enlish), "Schnee ist weiß," (German) and "Yuki wa shiroi" (Japanese, if I didn't mess up) are the same i-language sentence that generates a different surface structure for each language. A common deep structure that results in different surface structure via different generative rules. (At least that was generative grammar; I'm not sure how much of this still applies to his minimalist program.)

Chomsky's core interest, if I'm not mistaken, was always how sentences were formed rather than what they mean or if they're ture. (I think. As I said, I'm no expert on Chomsky.)

This is the question that I think is ill-formed. — Isaac

I can see that. I'm not sure I fully agree; I'll need to think some more. I might have made progress by the time the topic comes around next.

I don't feel like I have experiences in the sense that some proponents of the idea feel. — Isaac

This, though, I'm not sure how to read. This is probably where I locate our disconnect. I feel like you may be making a distinction I can't grasp. Maybe. I wish I could be more specific, but I'm just confused.

What is? — Isaac

The intersection between first person experience and neurobehaviour.

That's begging the question. The evolutionary frame (in my example) comes first so that we can ask - what's the benefit of being conscious - to get at our "why?" question.

If you don't like the evolutionary frame, then there may well be another, but I'm arguing it would still be of the same form, there'd be something which constitutes a measure of satisfaction with the reasons given.

I don't think I was begging the question. (I was re-reading my post and a wikipedia article on begging the question to see if I missed something.) This is the assumption I made:

Person A is a p-zombie; person B is not. They're both human beings and thus share a lot of the same evolutionary history. Is there some way to tell, by looking at brain-stuff, that this is the case? Clearly, this assumption is not warranted, and I draw no conclusion. I simply want to illustrate the problem. Maybe p-zombies are impossible. How could we tell?

Differently put: What sort of process can give rise to first person experience? By the time we're talking about frames like evolution (and likely other alternatives, too), we either assume that only brain stuff gives rise to consciousness, or we restict our interest to brain stuff. In both cases, we've already skipped past the topic.

So when you say this in an earlier post:

Consciousness is the label we give to the re-telling of recent mental events with a first-person protagonist. — Isaac

You're parcelling up first person experience with consciouness in a way that doesn't tell me what you think of first person experience. Your using a narrative metaphor, which suggests first-person-experience. But it might be possible to get at the same thing with a computation metaphor (which I can't come up with because my knowledge is even more limited than my neuroscience knowledge; it'd probably be something like a process and a monitoring envelope, or something?) The second thing I notice, is that you're not referencing any brain stuff at all; but the "re-telling of recent mental events" suggests that brain-stuff is what this is based on?

For what it's worth, I can't tell what your take on first-person experience and neurobehaviour is. It doesn't seem to be epiphenomalism. Maybe you think first person expience is a type of neurobehaviour, and the distinction makes no sense to begin with?

But that's just a matter of willing, not of some deep conceptual problem. After all, if you're able to imagine your keyboard is really made of atoms by seeing it as just a matter of scale, then you're just imagining atoms wrong. They're not (so I'm told) just smaller bits of keyboard. they're these weird energy particles and probabilities and quantum maths I don't even understand.

You're willing to simply 'allow' that rule (weird quantum stuff can become keyboards), not, I'd suggest, because it's somehow easier to conceptualise, but because it's not a mystery you find particularly interesting that it remain one. It's a less good story, in other words. — Isaac

You may well be right about this. I need to think this through some more.

(For what it's worth, I'm not caught up with this thread. Anything after the post I replied to I haven't read yet; so I might have been saying stuff that's been addressed later. If so, sorry for wasting your time. I usually don't reply before I'm caught up with a thread. In fact, I think that's the first time I ever did that.)

So I suppose the extent to which one is content with an evolutionary frame is the extent to which one is willing to allow for other influence. — Isaac

No, I think by the time you're arbitrating between evolution or alternatives, you've already resolved the problem, or put it on hold. It's no longer relevant. The problem is conceptual and starts before that; at the conceptual stage. [EDIT: I'll leave the previous sentence in; I like it in all its ineptness. It perfectly expresses the muddle I feel when confronted with this problem.]

It's a very hard to grasp concept, which is why we help ourselves with conecepts such as p-zombies. A p-zombie and a person with first-person experience would both behave the same, and thus share the same evolution. What sort of test could we devise to tell if one is a p-zombie or not? If p-zombies are impossible, how can we conceptualise evidence for this?

P-zombies aren't the point. They're a wishy-washy pin-point of some intuitive niggle people have. But the niggle's there. And the problem's bigger: there's a continuum that starts with solipsism and ends in pan-psychism.

I personally am a mysterian - in the context of science: I don't think it's possible to resolve that, because for first person experience (the ultimate subjectivity possible) there's only ever a sample-size of one; and the sample possible is different for each scientist (always only their own). Normally, talking objectively about subjectivity is not a problem; subjects can be operationalised so you can talk about them. Neuroscience is definitely evidence of that. But you can't do that for the hard problem; the empirical substratus this is about goes away, if you do. You assume the outcome one way or another and go on to more interesting questions (evolution of brainstuff being one of them).

I think the doubling of bodies as something you have and something you are is relevant here (Helmuth Plessner has talked about that, I think; it's been years and I've forgotten too much). When I say that my keyboard is made up of atoms, I can conceptualise this a matter of scale. It's easy. When I say, consciousness is made up of neural activity (which is my default working assumption), all I have is a correlation; the nature of the connection eludes me. Given that I tend to figure stuff out by comparison, and given that I'll never be able to entertain more than one first-person-experience at a time, I suspect it'll continue to elude me.

(For what it's worth, the hard problem is little more than an interesting curiosity to me. When viewed as a problem it's hard, but for me it's hardly a problem.)

More generally, the liberal capitalist state is an atheist organization, at least intentionally speaking. — Moliere

That's... muddying the water even further. I feel obliged to bring up the word "secular" here. And the secular isn't... exactly antithetical to the religious. It's a space where various faiths can meet. The separation of church and state isn't a dividing line between monotheistic religion and atheism, or not only. A secular state can allow various incompatible faiths to live in close proximity without too many problems. I'm no expert, but I think that most of the Christian denominations who see themselves as part of the oecomene would also favour a secular state? (I think a popular goes "Give Caseser what belongs to Caesar..." I wonder who said that?)

This is the problem I have with the use of "atheist" in the sentence I quoted. Theists can be fine with a secular state; not with an atheist one. There's a faultline here somewhere, but it's hard to detect. You never quite know when you've crossed the border.

I know people like to say that "atheism" is just a lack of belief in God (or gods), and for most contexts that's a pretty good line to follow. But we end up with absurdity when we count rocks and shoes as atheists. So is it people who don't believe in God? Poeple who don't believe in God, even though they'd have had the opportonutiy to do so? Again, where do we draw the line?

I mean I think "God" is nonsense; something that doesn't make sense. That's what makes me dismiss theism as of no value to my world view. And that's why I'm an atheist. It's not just non-belief. But it's also definitely not a believe in the negative.

New Atheist may scapegoat religions, but it's any cause really. Gather enough people under a shared cause and you get a small share of radicals, a larger share of well-intentioned people Who Know Best, an a really small share of people who actually do manage to draw strength from their cause and do good. The rest, which I think is the vast majority, just muddle through somehow (kind of like I do without a cause). For what it's worth, I'd consider the New Atheists "Well-intentioned people Who Know Best", for the most part. They're not really radicals from what I hear from them (though there is the occasional tendency maybe). As a muddler-through, they don't really represent me.

Individual a/theists and their beliefs aren't as important as the success of general social structures — Moliere

If you view it like this... I think it's in the nature of atheism to be "less successful" (interpreted as evolutionary success) than theism. I mean, if the theism goes away, so does atheism. What's the point? But theism can go on indefinitely, with or without atheists.

I mean there's stuff like naturalism or nihilism; atheist stuff. And that can go on without theism, too. But none of that would be atheistically tinged, without theism reaching enough social power to disadvantage those worldviews. Atheism depends on theism. It's reactive. It's never going to be more successful than theism. (Though it can be more successful in certain contexts, say Academia.)

But then, also, secular humanists (atheists) have more in common with many theists than with nihilists (also atheists). Atheism has no content without theists; and in the absence of socially powerful theists, the potentially atheistically interpreted world views are likely to quibble amongst each other, drawing different borders in the process. (And it's not like theists all agree, when among themselves.)

Cool. I understand. — Moliere

I've been looking for a word to use that fits better than "belief". The best I could come up with was "impression". The concept could be incoherent in itself (whatever that means - I'm a relativist, so I don't think that's the case). Or I could be missing something. Or it's incompatible with the way I think. Or... something I can't think of.

I figure you have to understand truth at some level to survive -- I am a realist of some kind, though I get confused in the discussions there -- but the specific meanings and claims of various religions, while wildly different in that particular sense, seem to have some kind of general coherence that got our species this far (just assuming the scientific picture true) — Moliere

I see turth a tool of some sort. Something we make to get a grip on reality. As I said, I'm a relativist.

So, if you stand in the middle of the road, you're likely to get run over by cars. Now, let's say you have some cognitive impairment that doesn't let you conciously perceive cars, and you don't like admitting something's wrong with you. So you develop a worldview without cars. There's a divine taboo to stand in the middle of the road, and you still instinctively detect movement on the road (you're brain just doesn't make them into cars). So you're convinced that cars don't exist, but you still won't stand in the middle of the road, because some sort of divine taboo, and you don't cross a street when cars are about, but you edit out the actual vehicles, and in its place you have some sort of intuition which you interpret as divine guidance. (And this is where this analogy becomes to silly to continue, because how you avoid getting rides is sort of harder to explain; but luckily the point is about not dying in the road here, so it doesn't need to be plausible or coherent, just sort of illustrative - which I hope it is):

Anyway: as long as you don't get run over, it doesn't matter whether it's because of "the truth". "Truth", unlike reality, needs some system of... axioms and transformation rules? Not sure. Something. Truth conditions. And for such a "truth" to be useful, it needs to compatible with reality. How much compatibility you need? Well, reality's the judge of that. So not just anything goes (and that's why the no-car example above is ultimately silly, but to me it feels more like extreme hyperbole than a category mistake).

Of course, "truth" is always social, too, which complicates matters.

I just think some things are so high up the abstraction ladder that the meaning of this is most closely related to the one making the abstraction. And an abstraction can be so habitual, that it's just felt backgound and not accessible to introspection without difficulty. A lot of it can just be random variation that cancels out statistically: some theists survive, some atheists survive - none of it matters from a survival point of view. Is that true? Who knows?

I'm skeptical about anything that sounds like evolutionary psychology. It feels a little too much of a mix between hermeneutics and empirical pea counting to be useful. But then I have sociology degree and that discipline isn't all that different in some of its incarnations.

While I'm rambling about playfully, I might as well share my hermeneutical indeterminacy principle: of a proposition you can either know whether it's true, or what it means, but never both at the same time. There you go. That's the sort of atheist I am.

I suspect where we land often boils down to people's aesthetic experience of the world. The idea of a transcendent being (magic man) seems right and beautiful to some folks, wrong and ugly to others. — Tom Storm

Sometimes it doesn't. It's not necessarily a problem if you don't believe but like the concept. You can just get something out of your religion of affinity via metaphor or so. (Though if that doesn't work out, you might feel a strong sense of discontent with the way the world is?) But it's gotta suck to dislike the concept but believe it. I expect a common reaction is guilt and slef-doubt? Just guessing, really.

How do you get to the belief that the concept of God is nonsense? — Moliere

It's not a belief. Anything I can't make sense of is nonsense to me. Once I try to understand a concept I sometimes make progress. With God it's a random number of steps in a random direction (I can't even tell where forward is). Since I need a worldview I made mine with placing God into the category of things that other people say but make no sense. I fear I'm old enough now that there's a crust of dust around it. I can't scale back my own worldview far enough to make sense of God and still have enough concepts left to think with. But maybe not. There's always the chance that someone says something, or something happens, that makes me suddenly experience a... shift? Maybe a change in the hardware'll do it? A stroke, maybe?

...but atheism as a starting point? "OK, God doesn't exist. Sure. So why in the world does this idea have so much influence today, and why did it have influence before?" — Moliere

Ah, see, that's already a step too far for me. That's what I mean by flytrap: the moment I say "God doesn't exist," I get tangled up in a conversation of the type winning-losing that I can't win. I've admitted too much already, and now I'm comitted to a statement I ultimately feel is meaningless. I can argue back and forth in that groove, but I get more and more alienated by the stuff I say. And I can't get away.

The truth is, if you ever catch me saying something like "God doesn't exist," it's most likely a bid to end the conversation. It's more a hyperbolic demonstration of my worldview in a simplified manner that my interlocutor can easily understand. The problem is, though, I project a false view of myself. I'd have to say something like "To me, the concept of God is nonsense," which would be closer to the truth, but it's about my intuition and doesn't easily lead to rational talk. And, also, people tend to miss the "to me," so I have to explain that I'm a relative of some sort (which sort I'm not even sure of myself), and... So it's just easier to say stuff like "God doesn't exist." But I use that rarely, and only as a conversation ender, and only if I feel the person I'm talking to isn't going to view this as a challange.

I grew up the son of Catholic person, but my belief in God to the extent that it was there to begin with never grew up with me for some reason. I always knew who got my Christmas presents; my parents made no secret of it. But around Christmas they'd never admit to that; it's always the local equivalent of Santa around that time of the year. (Add to that me being an animal geek and never seeing the easter bunny as anything else than an amusing absurdity.) It's possible I thought believing in God was a similar game? To be honest, I don't remember. I do know I don't remember a moment when I realised I didn't believe in God. I do remember worrying about telling my mother about it (which would have had to be somewhere between 9 and 12 I think?). I don't know how that came to be.

I'm fairly relaxed about being an atheist, mostly because I'm living in a fairly secular society (Austria), and religion is mostly a private affair people don't ask about, and when they learn you're an atheist people aren't prone to argue (unless there's nothing else to do; most of my face-to-face discussions happened in trains). There are... incompatibilities. For example, when my mum's down turning to God's a source of comfort, so God talk would come naturally to her when sees me feeling down, but that's precicely the moment I have the least tolerance for God talk. I can't or don't want to spare the effort to translate.

A computer metaphor might help: I'm running the OS unLucky-relativist, and it doesn't natively run programs written for DeusVult; all that's available is a shoddily written emulator and it takes up a lot of processing power, and the programs won't run as intended anyway. So when I need to run intensive debugging routines because the OS acts up, also running the emulator could crash the system. But not running the emulator might cause background processes like Interaction to crash...

Hm, I remember when The God Delusion hit the shelves. I knew of it before I ever saw a physical copy, so I was curious when I finally cam across one and picked it up to read a little. I read an excerpt about the evils religion wrought, I think I remember the section being about Australian aboriginies, and I wondered, so what about the British Empire and it's take on civilisation? I wasn't impressed. It felt too much of a simplistic polemic, so I put it back. Over the years, I found I liked some of Harris and Dennett, but Hitchens has always been nails on chalkboard for me. All in all, I'm not well-read in them, though.

I'm an atheist. I'm not inherently against religion, but personally I'm bored by ritual, and I've just never found anything to be certain about (which as a negative effect means there's a constant background-radiation anxiety underlying anything I do, but when I'm fine it expresses itself a good-natured ironic attitude towards life - or so I hope).

I'm interested in philosophy, but I'm not well-read in philosophy. On the topic of theism... my main drive is understanding what theists are trying to tell me when they talk about God. The topics themselves don't interest me much; what's interesting is why they interest others. When it comes to questions such as "Does God exist," I'm not keen on joining discussions, and I feel like building a philosophy around this is... walking into a trap? It feels like fly paper... I can never tell if I'm strawmanning, or if they're shifting goal posts. I can't tell the difference. It's not native mind-space, and I have no good map.

Atheism, then, interests me more as a social phenomenon than as a topic for philosophy. I just can't see enough substance to gods to start serious thought.

But it's the only thing we can really expect... — MojaveMan

Not really, no. People die only once; the rest of the time they can expect to live. Plenty of stuff to prepare for inbetween, like your next meal maybe. What's so important about that single moment that all your energy should be directed towards it?

As a kid, I confused fear of death for fear of dying. I was, am, and probably will be afraid of dying, but mostly because it's very likely going to be one of the more unpleasant moments of life. After the dying's done with? Nothing. So nothing left to worry about.

Well, that's a bit of a simplification. I do think beyond my death. I don't like the idea of my left-overs causing trouble (if I were involved in a messy accident, for example, I imagine I'd feel like apologising to the people who have to clean up, except I know won't be able to, me being dead and all). So I'm no stranger to projected unpleasantness. However, the mere fact that I'm here now, but won't be in a hundred years? This is something I'm entirely indifferent to.

I read the terror management article, and interestingly the coping strategies they mention are (all? mostly?) things I don't care for either: Leaving a legacy? What for, if I'm not around. Continuing my gene pool? How am I supposed to derive value from this? And so on. I don't think I ever really experienced that existential terror in the face of death. Other people dying, loss, is far more frightening than my own future non-existence.

Just looking at linguistic institutions, it seems to me that all linguistic institutions do the opposite of making certain marks count as utterances. They categorize what happened to work before, but it wasn't the institution that made the utterance, but the other way around. Language pre-dates institutions, after all. — Moliere

Language itself is an institution (at least in sociology). I'm not sure I remember how Marx used the word, but I doubt modern Marxist sociologist would find the idea that language is an institution surprising. There are many different theories, but as a rule of thumb, sociology considers any suriving regular social behaviour an institution. When you speak of linguistic institutions above do you mean stuff like dictionaries, linguistics, crossword puzzles...? Or the organisations that make them?

Yeah, the utterance makes the institution: without the utterance, no language. But, generally, people draw on their expectations of the institution to make those utterances. Chicken-egg situation, at that point.

But it's a real wall, not part of a dream, through which you cannot walk.

That is, the phenomena of a dream wall are not the same as the phenomena of a real wall. They are different, at the phenomenological level.

Hence, it is an error to suppose that what the dream wall and the real wall have in common is phenomenological. — Banno

I find this really hard to talk about, as I'm not that firm with the terminology. Maybe what I'm getting at is more conceptual than phenomenological? The phenomenon of a dream wall is certainly different from the phenomenon of a real wall, but I do think they have things in common (otherwise we couldn't make the connection of both being "walls"), and I think it's because brains are involved in constructing them from accrued baggage, some of which are likely shared. Maybe I should bow out, as I'm feeling out of my depth both with brains stuff and philosophy stuff, here.

It's more that I don't see how "contents of consciousness" might be "real or not real". — Banno

Yeah, I could have phrased that better. I do agree with the quote that follows what I've just quoted (and I remember you saying that more than once, too).

But when you said in your reply to my first post:

Your wetware can't walk through walls. It's the reality of walls that counts, not the reality of "the contents of consciousness", whatever they might be. — Banno

When I'm dreaming of walking through a wall, my wet ware robot isn't even attempting to walk through a wall. It's sleeping. I might be able to walk through a wall in my dream, but the wall isn't a real wall, and the I that walks through it is not my wetware robot (which is sleeping).

On the physical level, a real wall is a wall, and a dream wall is... synapses firing? That seems like a weird comparison to me. We only make that comparison because our phenomenal trees are very similar, I'd say. So, for the present topic, I think the reality of firing synapses is more important than the reality of any walls; that's secondary, I think. Or differently put, wall phenomena connect real walls and dream walls, and they're the only reason I can think of that we can make the connection. Trees and synapses are rather different, otherwise. But since we can connect walls trees and dream walls via wall phenomena, we can compare synapses to sysnapses (well, I don't think we can recognise wall-phenomena-inducing synapses yet, but I hope you see where I'm going with this).

So "virtual reality" isn't quite the right metaphor. — Moliere

I think metaphors are always tricky, and they're never quite right (because if the thing you're comparing it to weren't different, it wouldn't open up a perspective). For example:

Your wetware can't walk through walls. It's the reality of walls that counts, not the reality of "the contents of consciousness", whatever they might be. — Banno

Part of this response might be due to the metaphor I used: "contents of consciousness". I mean, in that very post I indicated that I thought consciousness was a "flow" - more generally, I think it's a process. It's not literally a container and therefore doesn't acutally have "contents".

We don't always realise why we use one metaphor over another and that can cause confusion. So, on to the whole section:

Your wetware can't walk through walls. It's the reality of walls that counts, not the reality of "the contents of consciousness", whatever they might be.


By way of pointing out that you are first embedded in the world. You are not sitting in your mind looking out — Banno

There's nothing here I disagree with, but when we're talking about the brain I suppose a wall is - to some degree a wall. If I dream of a wall, the wetware robot is sleeping. My non-brain science take here is that wall is a meaning that can trigger in different circumstances - with walls, with words, with dreams, with illusions... I'm not entirely sure how to talk about this, and I'm no expert in the history of philosophy either.

From the Davidson/Derangement thread I remember we don't disagree about much, but there always comes a point where I can't grasp what you're getting at. Here, for example, I disagree about nothing but I can't figure out what triggered this particular reply.

I'm having trouble with the metaphor. See, the brain's first and foremost a wet-ware robot control system. Part of that includes a process we call consciousness, but I'm not sure I could say that consciousness *is* virtual reality. I'm not knowledgable enough about the brain, but as I understand it consciousness is to a small part sensory input and to a large part pre-existing sturcutre. Except in dreams, where the stimulus for experience is not snesory input. And sensory deprivation can lead to hallucinations, too.

So whether or not the contents of consciousness are "real" or "not real" is down to the functioning of the wet-ware robot in daily life. But it's still all a brain process, no? So the real life VR that serves as reference to the metaphorical VR are on different levels: Real world VR is computer generated sensory input for biological perception systems (sensory organs, nerves, brains...). The metaphorical VR is neither input nor output it's just... a flow? It's this disjunction that makes the question hard to answer.

I certainly don't think that brain provides VR as output for a disembodied consciouness. Or at least, I wouldn't know how to make sense of it. This is why I'm with Chalmers: I have no idea how to connect that "experiential flow" with the physical processes. The only reason I know what we're talking about is that I have that sort of flow myself. So, yeah, there's this brain process, "consciousness", and it's part of the total functioning of the wet-ware robot; and there's this first-person experience on top of it.

So to the extent that we can call that VR, it doesn't make sense to differentiate between illusions and reality for the VR status; it's *all* generated. We'd be talking about types of input, rather than the process. But types of input matter, too. Does it travel along the nervous system? Is it generated somewhere else in the brain? People with more insight into the brain might be better fit to talk about this (say, Isaac). But the process itself shouldn't be all that different.

Just a short note: in that post about phrases I used the term "Determiner Phrase". I'd advise you to ignore it. It's a minority theory and might be more confusing. Also, even under the DP-theory, I forgot to account for the determiner on level 2. And finally, it's important that this is only one way of looking at things.

I like immediate-constituancy-analysis, which this is supposed to be, but IC-analysis doesn't usually use determiner-phrase theory. All of this is probably beyond what people in this thread need, but... well, it's best to ignore the term "determiner phrase", as if you look up phrases you're not likely to encounter it (or at least not as used here).

This is what IC-analysis looks like: within square brackets, there's a phrase: [the [[red] [apple]]] Note that I didn't put a square bracket around "the"; it's not clear to me at the moment whether I sould have.

The next step would be naming the phrases:

NP[the NP[AP[red]NP[apple]]]

Whether you call the whole thing a NP or a DP phrase isn't all that important until you understand the theory thoroughly (which I'm not sure I do, actually), and it's probably best not to default to a minority position.

(Note that Constituency grammars order phrases differently than, say, dependency grammars.)

My mistake here can be summarised as: too much theory, too unsystematically presented.

Forgive a bit of self-indulgence, but here is my shopping list poem: — T Clark

I tried to google "shopping list" and "poem" to maybe find some hint as to what I remember. Instead I found a whole host of shoppinglist-poems. Seems to be a popular topic.

Have you seen the meme - Shakespeare Quote of the Day: "An SSL error has occurred and a secure connection to the server cannot be made." — Cuthbert

I haven't. Heh. It's perfect.

Bagels
Cream Cheese
cleaning rags — Moliere

Definite rhythm: dam-da dam-da dam-da-dam

Also: line 1 and 2 = food; line 3 =/= food.

Also very nearly an alphabetic progression of the first letters of each line. Definitely so far no line starts with a letter that comes earlier in the alphabet.

I think there may be a fear here in that we don't want to limit poetry, too. — Moliere

I think what this episode shows is that what institutionalises poetry might be part of every-day language, just not emphasised in either production or exception.

Take for example Roman Jakobson's Functions of Language. Jakobson identifies 6 factors involved in language: Context, addresser, addressee, contact, code and message, and assigns functions to language according to those factors. "Meaning", as most people usually think of it, would probably fall under "reference" which is the function of context, "expression", which is the function of the addresser, and the "conative function", which is the function with respect to the addressee. The "poetic function" is concerned with the message itself (how it reads, sounds, what words are used - all the formal stuff).

If you think of the poetic function of language as a subtype of "fun with pattern recognition" (alongside seeing bunnies in clouds and such), that might even have contributed to the creation of language in the first place. Shared social grunt-play. Would make sense to me.

A scene from the anime Yuyushiki that may or may not demonstrate what I mean (depending on how much sense I make):

I intended my comment to be complimentary, even if my characterization of your post was inaccurate. I found it very helpful. — T Clark

Thanks. To be honest, I'm not sure if you're characterisation of my post was inaccurate; what I think I write isn't always what ends up on the page, even before possible interpretations of others are taken in account. If you could see me produce the posts in realtime, you'd see me type, backspace, retype, delete a paragraph, delete everything, try again, go away, come back later, and try again. I confuse myself writing my own posts, and I often write myself not into a corner but into a wide open space with no direction clearly being forward (corners are comfy, actually, by comparison.) I didn't mean to correct you so much as find my bearings.

I find the question interesting, actually. I feel like formal aspects of poems are a type of meaning, too (the main anchor of nonsense verse like the first stanza of Jabberwocky, for example). There's a back and forth, and in poetry, where the importance of those formal aspects is institutionally raised, the word meaning and sound meaning give rise to each other in a chicken-egg relationship, only more chaotic.

Also, I think of language as something meaningful along a lot of other meaningful things, and meaning is how consciousness connects to the world. We engage differently with a text if we think it's a shopping list than if we think it's a poem. (I've heard of a teacher providing a shopping list as an example of a poem, encouraging analysis. It's not something I've come up with. I wish I still had the reference, but it's just something I heard in a course a long time ago.)

Calling Dawnstorm - would you agree? — Amity

I'm not sure with what?

I'd be interested to hear how well the music, song and singer interpret the poem and the phrasing.
Any ideas? — Amity

I don't speak much French, but turning a poem into song lyrics... changes things. To different degrees, depending on how it works.

What I notice about the sheet music is that it doesn't only have German lyrics (my mother tongue, by the way), it has two different versions of the melody to account for extra notes. "Tom-be", two syllables, for example is accounted for by a half-note and a quarter note (with the half-note going to the stressed syllable), while the German "Grab" is accounted for by a dotted half-note. And so on.

In general, music tends to emphasise duration over pitch and volume in a melody. And then you have chord quality, which is rather interesting here. Right from the start we get Gminor --> G7 --> Am7 --> Bb --> Cm7/Bb (?) and so on. There's a lot of modulation here, before we even establish a clear key. The key signature suggests either G-minor or Bb-major. Songs about graves tend to be in minor, and sure enough, we start with a Gm chord, but then we immediately go into a major seventh chord, which is - obviously - not in the key of G-minor. Seventh chords are often used to modulate - and so I'd have expected to get a either C-major or C-minor, and for a while I thought I got C-major, until I noticed that the bass was playing an A, so what I really got was Am7 (which you could also interpret as C/A, especially after G7). And then it goes up a half-step and switches from block-chords to arpeggios... And from there, then, you'd need to figure out where the melody creates dissonance that "wants to resolve"...

That's a lot of work, just to have the bare facts of both syllable count and music. And then you'd need to analyse how this connects... And you'd need some sort of theory to do so, because this type of singing has little in common with speech. My hunch is I'd have to start with relative duration of syllables (within the song), since the most obvious difference is that when speaking the poem, you're done with a line much sooner. Beyond that I have little intuition, and part of it is that I'm not as familiar with French as I'd need to be. I don't feel confident to say much here.

I wonder why you say the word 'crack' is odd. — Amity

Oh, sorry. I meant the word "terse" is odd: I associate it with speech, behaviour of people. It's the first conspicuous time I noticed that nature was being personified. It's odd for a chest nut to be terse. I mean, it was right there with the sentry parade of trees, but at that point that was just imagery to me. They stand around like guards.

I should have put quotation marks around "terse", too, maybe rephrase that bit.

Is what you've written intended to be about meaning? It doesn't seem so to me. I wrote earlier in this thread and elsewhere that I don't think poems mean anything beyond the experience of the person reading or listening to it. Your post seems more like an explanation of how the poet has used language to help us share that experience. — T Clark

To be honest, I find this hard to answer. First the last sentence: my post is more about how I read the poem than about the what the poem did. I've experienced time and again that the same words can be read differently. For example, key to my reaction is that I slow down while reading the last line, but there's nothing in the poem that forces me to do so. A poem, read aloud, is always already an interpretation (though not necessarily consciously so). And I don't think the differences in reading are random.

Some readings may fit the formal characteristics of a poem better than other readings. I remember thinking (not only once), well, that's awkwardly phrased, until I heard someone else read this. For example, speeding through two consecutive syllables might allow to linger on a different one that would be an "unemphasised slot" otherwise. I wish I still had an example, but it's been at least 20 years ago, now. I remember the feeling of the dropping penny, but not the specifics of the poem(s).

I like it too, and I it made me ask myself something. If I wrote "I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast. Forgive me. They were delicious, so sweet and so cold."

Is that still a poem? If not, what made Williams' version one? The pauses at the end of each line? The way it flowed differently? The way it looks? What about the stanzas? Were the breaks between them just for visual purposes. — T Clark

I'm guessing it's that linebreaks slow you down, and you pay more attention to the words in themselves. We're conditioned to read prose for meaning first. (Though some prose can override that for me, like the final paragraph of James Joyce' "The Dead".)

Oh dear, there's way too much going on here, and.. well, it's a secondary topic I've studied on university level, so my problem is mostly how to be brief and not too technical. Easy things first: What people say about sonnetts here is all correct; Amity is right about the form the of Shakespearean sonnets, and Srap Tasmaner is right about Petrarchan sonnets.

Next: metre is more something you approach assymptotically than keep to slavishly. Strict regularity is more a feature of poems that are supposed to entertain. A Limerick or a doggerel is going to be more regular metre-wise than a sonnet, on avarage. Regularity creates a sing-song feeling that many poem types (especially the more serious forms) wish to avoid.

Next, semantics. I've never liked truth-conditional semantics too much. My hunch is that meaning needs to be there before you ever get too truth, and truth itself needs to be a meaningful concept. I think that meaning is pre-linguistic even. For that reason, I'm not too fond of a simple reference semantic either. I tend towards cognitive semantics. But I've never looked into semantics too much, so I'm not an expert what they actually say. If you go by the usual semantic triangle, of sign - thing - concept (whatever the different versions might conceptualise the points of the triangle as), I'd say that the concept is central, and both the sign and the thing evoke the concept, but in different concepts. Truth is irrelevant until rather late in the game. A poem, especially a long one as the Wasteland, will have its own meaning, both while reading, and after reading as a memory trace, which then influences a consequitive reading, and so on. You can never read the same poem twice.

The term phrase is rather precise in linguistics (but doesn't only have one meaning, since there are different theories). Language is compositional. Basically morphemes make words make phrases make clauses, and after that you get into text analysis and leave the realm of syntax. A phrase can be composes of words and other phrases and even clauses. For example, one way to count phrases, could be the follwoing: "the red apple":

1. Determiner Phrase: "the red apple"
2. Noun phrase: "red apple"
3. a) adjective phrase: "red"
3. b) noun phrase: "apple".

Not all ways of counting recognise determiner phrases. The numbering shows compositional levels, and goes inwards. If 3. a) were "red and yellow" (as in "the red and yellow apple"), for example, you'd have to decide (by your theory) if it's meaningful to count "red" and "yellow" as their own phrases. I could say that at that point we just have a co-ordination of adjectives. It's not that easy, though, since you could have "the mostly red and somewhat yellow apple", which then would make you decide what to do with the adverbs. In that case, I'd count "mostly red" and "somewhat yellow" as adjective phrases, since while the adjectives are co-ordinated, the adverbs are not co-ordinated, which means the co-ordination is on the phrase level. If all it takes to get phrases is a modification of the adjectives, though, there's no good reason to not also see the unmodified version as co-ordination of phrases rather than words.

Next, "phrase" is also a word used in music theory: a phrase is built from lower level stuff, too, like, say, motifs, but I'm not that knowledgable here. In any case, if you riff of this term, you might consider a phrase a compositional unit that somehow completes a rhythm. A phrase might co-incide with a line, with half a line, with a couplet... depending on the poem. You can then compare the rhythmic units with units of meaning: Do they co-incide? Do they overlap? And so on.

Meaning tends to influence rhythm as much as the other way round, and different people might emphasise different words. A short Poem:

Danielle Hope, "The Mist at Night" (from The Poet's Voice, 1994):

Perhaps it's the trees, look -
on sentry parade by the lake,
October weighting their branches,
a flotilla of shadows
casting nets over the water.
Perhaps it's the black-out under the trees -
terse chestnuts crack underfoot.
The water-rat snores from dumb roots,
the hawthorn racked red with doubt.

Perhaps it's the mist - wide awake
like a child before Christmas -
or that you think the air weeps
and you don't want it to stop.
So you tug up a tough ugly stump
to wake the lynx that sleeps
just under your heart.
To chase the sleepy lynx out of its lair.
To run wild in the mist in the night.

You get two ten-line stanzas, both subdivided into lines of five. The most striking means of subdivision is the repetition of "Perhaps it's the...", which gives the poem its structure, until the final five lines are introduced with "So," initiating a conclusion (which is what the word "so" often does). On the semantic level, the "perhaps" refuses to make a definite statement, and the "it" is indeterminate, never telling you what it's talking about. So you have a sort of vague, dreamy feel just from non-sensual words.

The mist from the title doesn't come in until the start of the second stanza. The first stanza gives the setting, but does smuggle in impressionistic figurative language. What strikes me are the adjectives that sort of hint at communication, but with inanimate nouns: "terse chestnuts", "dumb roots" - until the stanza ends with "doubt" attributed to... hawthorn?

Phonetically, the first stanza starts out with frictatives and long vowels (the first line ends with a plosive; so does the second one, the same one, "k", but this time with a diphtong, which sounds more relaxed). The other three lines end in unstressed syllaber. All in all, I read this in a quite relaxed, tone - with "look" standing out as an exclamation of excitement. The next five lines start out in a similar vein: this time it ends on "trees", a long-vowel word. But then you get the terse chest-nuts: the line has lots of plosive and darker vowel sounds. It's a change in the mood (and the "blackout" foreshadows this, actually). Semantically, the chestnuts being terse fit well with a "crack", but the word is a little odd. The water-rat line feels a little more relaxed again, but not quite as much as the trees-line, and the hawthorn line ends on the plosive of "doubt".

Then we get to the mist, and here we have a intra-line break, like the first line before "look", but we're now fully in the poet's projection space: it's not the mist that's wide awake, it's... the poet? the reader? the adressee? To me, the lines that follow have the strongest run-on quality so far in the poem: it's a consecutive idea that mixes the outer world with the inner world, and then it gets explicit with the next three lines.

Phonetically the so-line is one I hurry through. Very dark vowals, and a very interesting phonetic construction in "tug up a tough ug..." You're almost repating the sounds with switched letters: tug and ugly - and up and tough (not quite perfect, but both unvoiced vowel sounds. The line ends with another "p", and then the poem slows down again (or at least I do when I read it). The seciton ends with lynx sleeping explicitly under "your heart", now. The mix-up between the inner and outer world is out in the open. And we get a full-stop here. That slows the poem down even further. You could co-ordinate the following to-lines with commas (the poem's used commas before), but it doesn't. The lines slow down, until the last line has internal repetion of "in" - which to me creates a three-part rhythm in a single line. I tend to svaour this, reading the line. I end the poem at its slowest (even though semantically, the poem's adressee is supposed to run wild).

There's a very clear mood to the poem for me, and a great sense of progression, but there's no clear meaning that's explicable. The phonetics, the punctuation, everything guides the reading. I'm not reading this poem at a constant speed; I can't. And that wraps into content of the metaphors, too. Oddly, I calm down when the poem invites you to run wild, but that sort of gives me a perfect sense of catharsis. Natural stops and run-on lines are very well placed to that effect. You (or, well, I) don't just get that effect from the meaning of the words. There's the vivid imagery, and the mix up of inner and outer world. (For example, if you tug up a tough ugly stump to wake the lynx that sleeps just under your heart, where was the stump, and did it hurt? It's not like I ever thought about it explicitly like that before I typed those lines, but that's sort of the... mulch of what's going on in my mind when I read that poem.)

It's one of my favourite poems.

PS: I distinctly recognise the plum poem, but the poet's name doesn't ring a bell. This is rare. Normally, when I remember a poem, I remember the name, and if I forget it, it'd at least sound familiar. I might be getting old.