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From: mmt@dciem.UUCP (Martin Taylor)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: Re: Time and Free Will
Message-ID: <1037@dciem.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 8-Aug-84 17:11:07 EDT
Article-I.D.: dciem.1037
Posted: Wed Aug  8 17:11:07 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 9-Aug-84 13:47:31 EDT
References: <727@hou3c.UUCP>
Organization: D.C.I.E.M., Toronto, Canada
Lines: 33

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The general concensus seems to be that natural languages are "univer-
sal" in the sense of being able to express any concept.  A given
language may make it easier or harder to express a given concept, but
I don't believe that a natural language like English can make any
concept impossible to express.  For example, English is pretty clearly
****************
How, in English or any other language, can I express to you the
precise type and degree of discomfort of a slightly queasy stomach,
or the glory that I feel under the right circumstances listening
to the right music?  Language is good only for communicating concepts
that can be tied (perhaps by a looong string) to elements of mutual
experience.  Cause and effect can be thought of as a shared experience,
but when one wants to look deeper into the idea, the very sharability
of the concept gets in the way because the language has trouble
expressing just what the difficulty might be.  The language of
mathematics can go a lot further than can natural language in expressing
non-shared concepts, because the foundations are precisely specified
and so are the rules for making one concept out of previously constructed
(or defined) ones.  Even in mathematics, however, new "paradoxes" or
inconsistencies keep being discovered, and the basic concepts have to
be made yet more precise.  We can't do this with natural language,
because neither the foundational concepts nor the rules for building
new concepts are sufficiently tightly controlled to allow us to go
far in the building.  We pretty soon get into the realm of "you aren't
using the words properly (i.e. my way)," or more probably we get into
that state without noticing that different usage is at the bottom of
a disagreement.
-- 

Martin Taylor
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