tetranomos

tetranomos OP , 7 months ago

"the www is fundamentally a distributed hypermedia application."
— taylor, medividovic, dashofy. 2010.

"[i]t is far easier to standardize representation formats and relation type names (i.e., naming controls) than it is to standardize objects and object-specific interfaces."
— roy fielding. 2008.

#restisatheoryoflanguage #nobodycitesthegiants #shouldersofgiants #philosophersstarveincavesonlylaughing @philosophy

This and other examples of semantic and perceptual motivations suggest that language is not in fact autonomous from the rest of human cognition. Unfortunately, the autonomy claims that justify the formalist school’s approach have been elevated to the status of doctrine. Rather than being seen as a set of simplifying assumptions that are intended to help tame a complex system, they are now taken as truths about the nature of language. Linguists routinely argue (e.g., Bickerton 1981, 1984) that language is a completely self-contained system, with genetically preprogrammed modules that interact with each other and other cognitive processes only through well-defined interfaces. The years of work based on assuming the autonomy of language and its components have not been wasted; our understanding of many complicated linguistic structures has advanced a great deal. But it is time to take the evidence seriously and to build theories that treat the complex interconnections of language, perception, and cognition.

tetranomos OP , 7 months ago

@philosophy anthropologists read wittgenstein. black people read anthropologists.

Throughout Western intellectual history, there has been a conviction that it is possible to find the necessary and sufficient conditions for any category. A square is a two-dimensional object with four sides of equal length and four right angles. Nothing lacking these properties can be a square and anything having those properties is defi- nitely a square. Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his Philosophical
Investigations, brought the whole necessity-and-sufficiency enterprise crashing to earth in the West. Wittgenstein argued to the satisfaction (or rather, dismay) of even the most analytic of Western philosophers that establishing necessary and sufficient conditions for any complex or interesting category, such as a "game" or a "government" or an "illness," was never going to be possible. A thing can be a game even if it is not fun, even if played alone, even if its chief goal is to make money. A thing is not necessarily a game even if it is fun or is a nonproductive activity engag- ing several people in pleasurable interaction. Wittgen- stein's sermon would never have been needed in the East. The pronouncement that complex categories cannot always be defined by necessary and sufficient conditions would scarcely have been met with surprise.