Two thoughts for today:

(1) This one pretty much straight from Wittgenstein. Adjectives like “this,” “that,” and “other” have obvious practical utility and one can easily imagine their arising in the natural circumstances surrounding linguistic evolution. When the nouns they describe are commonplace — this rock, that apple — we have few problems. So far, so good. I just saw on tv a couple talking about “welcoming [their child] into this world” (my emphasis). From a syntactical point of view, this is a perfectly reasonable construction. But from a semantic point of view, use of the phrase “this world” almost automatically leads to an inference that there are other worlds. It was unstated in the tv show, but I got the impression that the couple was religious, and if so I can guess that they might have the usual sort of belief in “another” world. The word “world” as it is used here ought to have a little rule attached to it: this is not one of those nouns that can be modified by the seemingly harmless adjective “this.” But there’s no such rule, at least in English. If there were, I wonder if the speaker of this sentence would have had to have been more explicit about the claim she was making so subtly and perhaps unconsciously.

In short, I worry that the mere exercise of our syntactic machinery — the creation of syntactically valid expressions — leads us to legitimize the external reality of the states of affairs entailed by those expressions.

(2) Aphorism in progress: “Critical thinking is immunization to nonsense.”

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[ This entry was posted on 23-September-2009 6:03 pm, filed under Aphorisms, Philosophy. You can follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can also leave a response, or trackback from your own site. ]