Biology A new philosophy and biology journal 11 Dec 2009 Massimo Pigliucci has just announced Philosophy & Theory in Biology, a new online open access journal. Its stated mission is to bring “together philosophers of science and theoretically inclined biologists to interact across disciplinary boundaries. This interaction fosters a broad conception of what it means to do “theory” in science… Read More
Epistemology Math as language 31 Aug 201122 Jun 2018 I recommend this webcomic, “Freefall” – it’s thoughtful and fun. Read More
Humor For every philosopher 8 Sep 2010 It’s an old joke: the one rigid and true law of economics is “For every economist, there is an equal and opposite economist”. But the joke was anticipated by Cicero back in the Roman times: “”There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it.”[1] I would like to… Read More
Language is a tool? (If the words weren’t there, there wouldn’t be a right one that wasn’t being recollected.)
Check out this recent blog post from the same site http://www.calamitiesofnature.com/blog/?b=321 Awesome!
@enigMan, that language is a tool for manipulating interest systems, others’ and one’s own, is the idea that got me my PhD, back when
Long before I had even heard of a Worf (the Klingon one without the ‘h’) I remember reading that there was no direct English equivalent for the French word epanouissement and being struck by the possibility that it might be possible to talk and think about things in one language but not in another and wonder how that might affect a culture. Would it be true, as Chancellor Gorkon comments in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, that “You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.” Is there any support for at least the weak version of the hypothesis?
Personally, I think that any alien language which resembles the gutteral utterances of odd-toed ungulates will tend to make a culture a bit beastly. I call it the Worf-Tapir Hypothesis