Re: VL-TRANS: a favorite saying
Rob Zook 
Wed, 22 Oct 1997 08:58:00 -0500

At 08:26 AM 10/22/97 -0500, Saul wrote:
>At 10:12 PM 10/21/97 -0500, Rob wrote:
>>In the case of poetry, it adds a different dimension, but
>>still it seems an emotion or non-rational one. Not that
>>I regard that as bad, but in English we use metaphors so
>>much people get lost in spooks sometimes talking about
>>metaphorical "things" as if they were existential "things".
>
>Efficiency intersects both honor and shame...

Yet, "Cast out all emotion that speeds entropy, whether it be love or 
hate. Cast out these emotions by using reason to accept them, and then 
move past them."

>I guess I'm reminded as much as anything of Zen Koans, which have always
>seemed to me to warn against too much trust in any particular logic, to
>ask the listener how long it has been since she really thought about 
>what she knows and how she knows it, to recognize that there are always 
>unexamined possibilities each of which has its own logic and some of 
>which may be well-suited to the tasks of living. And of course to 
>remember that logic is only the beginning of wisdom...

Certainly, I find I must re-read them often or sometimes the lessons 
they taught fade. Of course, I also enjoy them, they great "shock"
value. Like a blast of cold water on your face in the morning ;-)

>Poetry, even of a less-advanced sort, chases particular alternative
>logics to learn from them, or just to practice. The key is that it
>doesn't privilege what has been known over what has not been known -- 
>or as you might put it, the "existent" over the "metaphorical." The 
>pressure of memory takes care of that.

Well, sort of. Existant does not refer to knowledge except for the
immediate sensory feed back kind. An Existant thing I can sense, 
a metaphorical thing I can only think about or imagine - at least
until someone makes it manifest.

I just want to make sure that some demagoge could not take Vulcan
and use it to say untruths in the context of describing existant
situations. Like the way leaders use mere emotional noise and
rhetoric in place of reasoned arguments - yet they sway millions
with such nonsensical noise.

Keeping a totally rational mode which can act independantly from a 
metaphorical mode seems very wise to me.

>>Hmmm..,Saul somewhere after "That", I lost you.
>
>Sorry. I just meant that grammatical ambiguity usually refers to
>sentences constructed so that there is no way to tell exactly what role 
>some of the participants play. Having the well-defined case and deixis 
>systems that it has will go a long way towards protecting Vulcan from 
>that.

Ahh, I think I see what you mean now. To take an example, in Lojban
one cannot form untrue sentances in a gramatical sense, because the
structures of logic have been formalized in the language. If we 
formalize some logical terms in the language then on could tell by
their absense that the speaker uses metaphor.

For an example of what I mean check out:
http://xiron,pc,helsinki,fi/lojftp/reference-grammar/chap16,html

Now I don't propose that we directly adopt a bunch of Lojban
grammer indiscriminately, there are at least three logically based
languages I have heard of, and for this mode it would serve us
well to review all of them and select the most appropriate grammer
structure, or invent a more appropriate one.

>>I agree all natural languages suffer from ambiguity. I think 
>>that after the Reformation that Vulcans would have reformed 
>>their language, at least a bit.
>
>Yes. My imagination of history gives pre-Reformation language an
>inambiguous voice designed for special purposes which, post-Reformation, 
>attained much greater importance and was extended for broader use. There 
>was probably a time when among the sages only K'dvarin taught without 
>it.

K'dvarin?

>And, since I think I suggested that first, I obviously see no reason why
>we can't have two such modes either. I will simply find it interesting 
>to discover if we really can separate them that way. But I am not at all
>opposed to trying, nor will I obstruct such efforts. Let's get the thing
>built, and THEN we can argue about what the end result can or cannot 
>express.

Agreed. :-)

--------------------------------------------------------
Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that
he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny 
the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.
-- Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoyevsky