Re: biting the hand that feeds us?

[eric (Eric S. Raymond)]

> I respond, hopefully apolitically, to the first of his two repostings, which
> argued the definition of 'society' that allows 'society' to have needs.

Argued *against* it, actually.  I presume that's what you mean.

> This linguistic situation, contrary to what I believe eric was saying, is the
> result of natural language, especially western indo-european (since I can make
> no claim about others) tendency to personify any and every concept that is
> personifiable.

Not contrary to what I was saying at all. It's natural-language prejudices
like this that make semantic manipulation possible (and General Semantics
necessary).

>                This leads to the corporate individual, which he argues as a
> linguistic ~e(fallacy (I think).  But I suspect it is a fallacy only if it 
> goes unrecognized - and much in language goes unrecognized at the time we say
> it.  He is thus practicing wishful thinking.

Eh?  If I assert that I drew a square circle yesterday, then I have uttered
a false statement, whether or not I am consciously aware of its formal
impossibility (it is "wishful thinking" to believe otherwise).  The kind of
category error I discussed is of precisely similar kind.  One can deduce
anything from it, because it embeds nonsense in one's premises.

> In any event, the corporate indivdual arises linguistically in a totally
> different way than he suggests OR that European languages actually do.  This
> is in the 'mass' concept that shows up in Lojban's 'loi' and 'lei' and 'lai'.
> The concept derives from the Trobriand Islanders, among others, who view
> evry rabbit as an instance of Mr. Rabbit - the mass concept of rabbit. 

This is a paraphrase of an observation from Brown's Loglan 4 book, one I've
devoted quite a bit of think time to.  I agree with Brown that the `Mr. Rabbit'
view of mass terms is probably prior (historically and psychologically) to
the `collection-of' view.

The implications of this are interesting for neurologists and linguists,
certainly.  But to regard that priority as an *argument* for incoherent
reasoning (which you seem to have done) is to commit precisely the map-
territory identification GS is designed to correct.  The universe doesn't
care about our linguistic prejudices; "A rose by any other name..." etc.

>                                                                     By the
> same world-view, evry person is an instance of Mr. Person (loi prenu) and
> 
> Statements that are true of any rabbit are true of Mr. Rabbit.  Staements true
> of any one person are true of Mr. Person.  I would contend that the 'society'
> definition that people use(misuse?) in the manner eric describes is
> 'Mr. Person', and hence, if indeed any one person is hungry, than 'society
> is hungry'.

Thus providing us with a perfect example of how structural mismatch between
one's language and reality leads to the utterance of seductive but harmful
nonsense.  The fact that you've identified another cause of false
identifications doesn't make their consequences any less nasty.  Reread the
bit about the Final Solution, please, and consider what happened when Hitler
made speeches about "Mr. Jew".
 
> Now this kind of world-view is not supportive of indivuality, personal freedoms,
> etc. - it is strong on interdependency.  The various doctrines of the 'Gaia'
> hypothesis might therefore see all of us, and all creatures plants and natural
> resources as instances of Mr. Earth (Ms. Gaia?).

Am I seeing what I *think* I'm seeing?  Are you *really* trying to support a
fundamental category error with a feel-good argument from fashionable
speculation?

Look, Bob, I'm a *fan* of the Gaia hypothesis --- I'm a nature-worshiping
neopagan with a scientific bent.  It would thrill me to pieces to be able to
identify my Goddess (which I now think of as a human projection, a sort of
noetic power tool) with some aware homeostatic complex in the biosphere.
But the evidence just isn't there yet, and there are some serious problems
of principle with the stronger forms of the Gaia concept (as Lovelock
himself has acknowledged).

Even if we made contact with a strong Gaia tomorrow it *still* wouldn't
constitute any kind of argument for wholesale mass-term/individual-term
identification, and deductions made from such an identification would still
be both formally and (in general) operationally false.  "Is-a-part-of" is not
"is"!

This is a disappointingly poor argument.  
 
> If all of this seems unlikely or unaccesptable, look within yourself.  You
> are thinking about what I write (I hope).  But is it you who is thinking, or
> merely some portion of the neurons in your brain.  It is legitimate to say
> that you are thinking only if you can generalize from the individual who is a
> portion of the mass to the entire mass.  Thus to call it wrong that 'society'
> can be hungry also calls it wrong that 'you' can think.

There are two problems with this:

Empirically, your premise is incorrect.  There's no such thing as a
subcollection of neurons "thinking" because local neural activity has
measurable field-effect consequences which may extend over the entire brain
(this has been experimentally verified with magnetotactic SQUID devices).
Thus, although the components of thought may be tokened in particular
specialized areas of the brain, *thought* is in principle an emergent
of the whole system.

Formally, your conclusion would not follow even if your premise were correct.
The simplest counterargument is to observe that human beings can dissolve
their societies and form new ones, unlike brain cells.  The brain's behavioral
repertoire is hugely more complicated than any individual cell's; by contrast,
the repertoire of the emergent we call "society" is not very much more
complicated than any individual human's (this has to be the case, otherwise
humans could not maintain the mental model of their society that permits
them to function in it).  There are many other arguments, but these should
be sufficient.
 
> (Note that there are some theories that in effect each of our cells is really
> not one but two independent life forms - the cell proper and the mitochondria
> living in symbiosis.  Then we are merely symbiotic results of many independent
> cells that have evolved through natural selection to respond to signals from
> neighboring cells.  So we are a 'society' of cells, and 'we' cannot be hungryy
> only our indivdual cells can.)

Yes, I've read Lynn Margulies's work, too.  And I've been a fan of the
hereditary-symbiosis theory of organelles theory for a long time.  BUT....

Same fallacies as above.  The degree of interdependence really does make a
difference.  When your cells can melt into a lojbab-sized puddle of goo and
reconstitute themselves as someone else, *then* I'll accept that the analogy
with `society' is valid and my argument against the mass term applies.
 
> This of course takes the argumnent to the extreme. The point is that language,
> especially Lojban, must be open to many world-views, and Lojban by its goals
> must be designed to avoid prohibiting any more than minimally necessary,
> except in the places where intentional constraints exisst (the logic part).

It's that `exception' I'm concerned with.  If you take it seriously, you
cannot justify sponsoring a habit of thought that demonstrably leads to
analytically incorrect conclusions without *marking* it as something
that leads to logical errors.  The mass-term view of the universe is not
just "another world view", it is a provable cause of illogic and unsanity
(what GS calls "inappropriate semantic reaction").

> While typical English speakers do not understand the Lojban mass concept, I
> think it is one of the neater things in the language, and it has probably
> changed my own world-view in a direction opposite from eric's.

In that case, lojban has done you a serious disservice by encouraging you
to muddy your thinking -- as evidence for which I offer the rather flabby
nature of the arguments in your reply.  "World-view" is not at issue here;
fuzzy reasoning from the mass term *simply* *doesn't* *work*, for
reasons which are formally demonstrable.

>                                                               Luckily eric
> need not use mass description in Lojban, but he may find that others doing so
> will make for even more of what he considers 'erroneous thinking' than occurs
> in English.

You speak of `erroneous thinking' and the consequences of mass-termism as
though the whole dispute were a sort of value-free intellectual bagatelle.
But it is not.  Consider Hitler and "Mr. Jew" again --- carefully.  Unsanity
kills.  Sometimes it kills millions.
-- 
							>>eric>>