Date: Tue, 7 Aug 2001 06:53:33 -0700
Subject: PKF: RE: Pluralism and Language





Quinn,

i am replying just for starting a discussion, not because i really know Feyerabend (I don't, it was not required in the bibliography so far). So i actually say nothing.
Of course Feyerabend says something about language, insofar as he wrote about the language of science. His opposition towards the logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle. In particular, Feyerabend rejects the distinction between theoretical and observational terms (any observation is theory-loaded; in order to report even the most trivial observation, such as "i see a red patch over there", i have to rely on the background of my beliefs: the light that travels from the red patch to my eye is not disturbed, etc). Does it follow from here that prima facie theoreticl terms, such as "proton" or "gene" can be part of observation reports ?

second. you wrote:
" Language is a product of
>many independent evolutionary tracks. It seems like a waste of time to look
>for a unifying principle for independent evotionary tracks. If the couple
>times in our life our babble is effective, saving our life once, and helping
>us reproduce once, and if the genetic development requires babbling ones
>entire life in order to be effective a couple times, then most of language
>isn't effective. " Can ypou make your point clearer ? Do you perhaps mean that meaningless sentences are sentences that were/would be "useful" (what does "useful" precisely mean ?) in a particular situation in life, but they are used in situations for which they were not meant ? What do you mean by "most of the language is not effective" ? (Compare with "most of what we see is not effective", "most of what has a particular taste is not healthy to eat"). Language is, at least potentially, infinite (Chomsky blah-blah-blah); if it weren't then we could not understand/utter sentences we have never heard/understood. what is wrong with this ?


about the idea of "pluralism about language and wittgenstein" , i think there are thousands of paper and dissertations. so it is difficult to discuss without starting from s specific problem. (not that i am able to find a good one).

i think a good idea would be that we all read a book of feyerabend, say "against method", and after each chapter discuss by email the points that need to be clarified.

laurian



>My main area of interest is language. I think that language lacks a proper
>science more than medicine does. The reason, I think, is that scientists are
>still looking for unified theories (a traditional grammatical theory is
>comparible to the sort of unification we find in non-quantum physics). The
>internal reason for unification theorists amounts to the belief that the set
>of everything is a consistent set. Why think that? Language is a product of
>many independent evolutionary tracks. It seems like a waste of time to look
>for a unifying principle for independent evotionary tracks. If the couple
>times in our life our babble is effective, saving our life once, and helping
>us reproduce once, and if the genetic development requires babbling ones
>entire life in order to be effective a couple times, then most of language
>isn't effective. Historically, I find similar views of language in
>Wittgenstein and John Austin.
>    Does anyone know if Feyerabend tried to say anything about language? I
>would be interested to see other people apply pluralism to language.
>
>Quinn
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