deperplex linguistics

  Originally published on Language and Philosophy, January 5, 2012 Following up on the last post — If English were incapable of expressing ternary logic, then Aymara could not be described in English. It does not seem too contentious, then, to conclude that any natural language, like English, Spanish (Rojas’ original) or Aymara, can express any known logic. The means will no doubt differ: analytic languages would express notions of uncertainty with word-morphemes (like “might”); agglutinative and inflectional languages should express them with affixal morphemes. The notions seem to drive the languages, not the other way around. For example, German has a past tense conjugation for the equivalent of English “must.” English doesn’t. Instead, English uses “had to.” No one would conclude that English speakers are at a loss for the notion. Rather, the pervasive usefulness of the notion has compelled English speakers to formulate an analytical combination that has every mark of a modal ex...

  Originally published on Language and Philosophy, January 4, 2012 I see that Wikipedia’s article on ternary logic references Aymara “a Bolivian language famous for using ternary rather than binary logic.” Aside from the vaunted adjective “famous,” I am skeptical of the claim that Aymara uses a ternary logic rather than binary, skeptical also of the presupposition that natural languages use a particular logic rather than another logic, and skeptical as well of the implicature that other languages use only binary logic, infamously or otherwise. Much of the excitement over Aymara derives from a monograph written  in the 1980’s by an engineer and machine translation pioneer, Ivan Guzman de Rojas, who observed that Aymara indicated in its inflections the degree of certitude of its respective assertions. He takes these as logical operators, just as “not” can be taken in English as a negation operator: in English, “not” takes a true statement into a false one, and a false one into a...

  Originally published on Language and Philosophy, October 29, 2011 Geach and Horwich both criticise Strawson’s performative analysis of the truth predicate in English on grounds that seem to me not only mistaken, but a common mistake, really a category error, conflating the speech situation with logic uncontextualized — the logic you study in college. Not just a common mistake, it’s just about everywhere. Here’s their argument: If Strawson is right that the truth predicate is some kind of gesture of agreement, then accepted deductive arguments will fail, e.g., 1. Phil’s claim is true 2. Phil’s claim is that snow is white 3. conclusion: snow is white. If (1) means that the speaker is agreeing with Phil’s claim, then there’s no deduction from the speaker’s agreement to the fact in the conlcusion. At best, the argument concludes that the speaker agrees that snow is white. But even that wouldn’t hold, since agreement, like belief, is probably an opaque context — imagine a speaker who ...

  Originally published on Language and Philosophy, August 27, 2010 While commenting on David B. Hart’s “ Believe it or not ” at First Things , I learned that many outside the field of linguistics and philosophy (at least, outside analytic philosophy) seem to view linguistics as just a ‘soft’ social science. I’m moved to correct: Current syntax began with computer theory, a form of math — pure math, strictly speaking. It originated in cryptology, but as developed in computer theory, it’s all abstract elements and abstract structures replete with proofs, either by logical deduction or mathematical induction on those elements. When I studied CT, it was presented exactly as that: pure math, including proofs for every single result. The prof — this was a while ago — had no idea Chomsky was a linguist, but knew him as a mathematician, because Chomsky had proved several important mathematical results: Chomsky Normal Form (that any multiple expansion can be reduced to equivalent set of bin...

  Originally published on Language and Philosophy, August 27, 2010 While commenting on David B. Hart’s “ Believe it or not ” at First Things , I learned that many outside the field of linguistics and philosophy (at least, outside analytic philosophy) seem to view linguistics as just a ‘soft’ social science. I’m moved to correct: Current syntax began with computer theory, a form of math — pure math, strictly speaking. It originated in cryptology, but as developed in computer theory, it’s all abstract elements and abstract structures replete with proofs, either by logical deduction or mathematical induction on those elements. When I studied CT, it was presented exactly as that: pure math, including proofs for every single result. The prof — this was a while ago — had no idea Chomsky was a linguist, but knew him as a mathematician, because Chomsky had proved several important mathematical results: Chomsky Normal Form (that any multiple expansion can be reduced to equivalent set of bin...

 Originally published on Language and Philosophy, June 28, 2007  A student asks why “she and I” sounds so much better than “I and she.” A simple, but resonant question — the bias for the former has the strength of a grammatical intuition, the stuff syntactic theories are made of. So it’s not a trivial question. Evidently the schemata that we learn, especially, I imagine, those we learn at an early age, embed themselves deeply — and inflexibly — alongside our original and much more flexible, productive grammar. Corrections, including hypercorrections like just for you and I, fall into the category of memorized forms along with formulaic and schematic utterances. Their relation to the grammar of the language is incidental, but they are strongly imprinted on memory, in some ways more inflexibly than grammatically generated forms. They show up in places where the standard forms no longer carry any grammatical function. Along with formulae and schemata, they are a part of language...

  Originally published on Language and Philosophy, June 11, 2007 I’ve always considered Grice’s theory of conversational implicature to be one of the most beautiful theories around. But nowhere is beauty so tightly yoked to truth as in the sciences, where beauty, in the form of simplicity, will decide the truth of two otherwise equally powerful theories. (It’s kind of remarkable when you think about it — truth and simplicity seem not only distinct, but unrelated, unlike say, truth and accuracy or consistency. A complex theory will cause more complexity in its relation to other theories, but if it’s still true, why should complexity ever matter? Is preference for simplicity just a bias?) Truth seems to be a necessary condition for the beauty of a theory in science, so if Grice’s theory isn’t true, its beauty all is lost. The application of conversational co-operation gets messy at and, impugning its truth. I’ve got an idea on how to clean up the mess and restore the symmetry of the ...