From: sasafw@dobo.unx.sas.com (Fred Welden)
Subject: Re: Semantics of "to be"
Originator: sasafw@dobo.unx.sas.com
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 1992 14:17:22 GMT
Organization: Dobonia


In article <1992Sep29.051350.6608@sandbox.kenn.wa.us>, wstatler@sandbox.kenn.wa.us (William Statler) writes:
|
|...article <BusA8E.6G2@unx.sas.com>, in which sasafw@dobo.unx.sas.com
|(Fred Welden) wrote:
|>...each sentence carves out an area of meaning-space.  A simple vague
|>sentence (e.g. "I feel bad.") carves out a very large area of meaning-
|>space, and conveys correspondingly little information.
|
|It would appear at first glance that the two descriptions of Mary carve
|out very similar areas of meaning space.  Both describe a characteristic
|of Mary.  But it seems to me that "Mary is a cripple" also carries an
|_unstated_ secondary message: "This is Mary's most significant defining
|characteristic.  You may pigeonhole her with other cripples."
|
|Fred Welden:
|>All communication rests on a statistical foundation.  That is, if you
|>think you understand what I'm saying, you have in mind a group of
|>possible meanings with likelihoods assigned to them that range from "He
|>almost certainly doesn't mean THAT." to "He almost certainly does mean
|>THIS." The more different sentences I use to tell you the same thing,
|>the tighter the distribution of likely meanings becomes, until at some
|>point you are willing to say I mean one thing only.
|
|I like this idea, and I think it models "real" communication pretty well
|_if_ the listener takes the time to analyze what is being said.  But I
|think most communication also contains an element of "conditioned
|response."  For example, tell a randomly-chosen American that "Joe is a
|Communist," and he will most likely develop an instant mental image of
|Joe as a scowling, deceitful sort who works for scowling, deceitful
|foreigners, to the detriment of good Americans -- sort of a "Platonic
|ideal" Communist.  (And it doesn't really matter whether the local
|dialect or language leaves out the verb; "Joe a Communist" still contains
|the "is of identity" concept.)

My point exactly, when I stated that someone hearing the isolated
sentence "Joe is a Communist" feels free to interpret it as "meaning"
any small portion of its meaning-space that he likes.  It is context
that determines whether the sentence "Mary is a cripple" is an attempt
to pigeonhole Mary so that she may safely be ignored or to demand that
she be given the attention and support that she deserves.  It is
the determined taking of statements out of context that has given both
political correctness and deconstructivism their ill-deserved strength. 

|Let me present a different example, this time out of physics:
|"A photon is a particle."
|"A photon is a wave."

This is an example of a pair of sentences whose meaning-spaces do not
seem to overlap.  A reader, told (and believing) that both are true,
would have to seek further information to resolve that apparent
conflict.  I think this represents a fair model of what happened in
physics with regard to the nature of the photon.
|
|Twentieth century physics has shown that photons may act like particles
|or like waves depending on how they are observed.  In fact, many
|experiments have demonstrated photons acting like waves and particles at
|the sime time.  (Recently, similar results have been obtained with whole
|atoms.)  Many physicists believe that one can make no valid statement
|about what a photon (or an atom) "is", but only about what it _does_.  As
|a result, many have (unconsciously?) dropped "is" from their scientific
|papers.
|
|Should we care?  I used to think that this issue only mattered to
|particle physicists, but "non-isness" is starting to look like a
|fundamental feature of the universe.
|
|We can't blame the verb "to be" for all this.  We can't blame a Mercator
|projection for failing to show a spherical Earth either, but I'd hate to
|be stuck with one if I were plotting an intercontinental airline flight.
|I think Wilson was making a similar point: as a tool for dealing with the
|modern world, "English-with-isness" fares poorly.
|
|I've also got a more down-to-earth reason for wanting to write without
|"is": I use it too much.  I got most of my early writing practice from
|generating political diatribes in college.  And I found you can really
|generate some impressive-sounding logical arguments if you use "is" a
|lot:
|
|"Look, property is theft, right?  Therefore theft is property.  Therefore
|this ship is mine, Okay?"
|   - Zaphod Beeblebrox

Yet another good reason to show the readers rather than telling them.
I usually find novels that say things like "Mary was beautiful" to be
unsatisfying, while ones that say "Mary had short-cropped blonde hair
that revealed the classic shape of her skull and complemented the
upward sweep of her cheekbones" are usually more interesting.
-- 
--Fred, or another blind 8th-century BC  |  sasafw@dobo.unx.sas.com
        Hellenic poet of the same name.  |
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