The deep structure of language. Actions, volition; identity, unification. Not realities, but means of understanding the world. Nonsense of the truth of a statement from a determinist perspective. Agent action: volition. Agent action because: post-justification. This is that: the identity fallacy. Two different words; why not this is this or that is that?
A series of images related only implicitly. Richness of language, constraints of mathematics. No verbs, no propositional meaning. Unpresentable relationships for human meaning-makers. An intermittent failure of inserting verbs above. A question of the meaning of verbless sentences. VP-less sentences, to be precise (but still without propositional meaning).
Future eschewing of translations into propositions. A case for the mind to let go of the propositional obsession. The blurring associations between thoughts: associations, judgements, perception blocks. An underappreciated reverence of thoughts in their own right. An abstract picture, not a fact. A thought flying free in the mind. A thought bound to realism with a fact. Meditation and spaciousness in the mind. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
Nouns supplanting verbs as the foundational structure. NPs, to be precise. Potentially mismatching impedance between thoughts and nouns. The question of a freer correspondence between language and thought. Some thoughts have verbs. Mindful restriction, experimentation, like E-prime, to open new pathways in the mind. Now, thoughts of neither noun-ness nor verb-ness:
Vacuous.
Apparently not.
Graspingly anxious at the limits of an author’s imagination. Quotelike, fragmentlike. Descriptive, but without referent. As colors are to a blind man. Thought-Fourier-transform of. Just above decent into syntactic nonsense. Or just before thoughts of pure relationship.
of a normal verb-like sentence with
to the order of
beyond
∅
That brings us back to nouns. A verbal thought.
More poetry than prose. :)
I thought of git and its object model, with blobs for nouns and diffs for verbs. With so much UI focus on diffs, one might naively assume that git stores them somewhere. But the nouns are git’s “foundational structure”, the verbs are just the usual way of relating nouns via some imposed notion of history or causality.
Math is nouns: equations, formulas, definitions, even the proofs. Math is poetry. :-)
Programs are not treated like nouns even though math says they are.
Time to learn Lojban?
Hi Luke! I’m the Community Manager at DZone.com and I’d like to discuss our Most Valuable Bloggers program with you. It is a free program that promotes quality developer blogs such as this one. E-mail me at lgordon {at} dzone{dot}com if you are interested! I hope to hear from you.
We need to go deeper.