Roger -
I would rework Steve's explanation. Just as infants babble to learn
the correct sounds for their native language by feedback, older
children babble explanations to see what works. Unfortunately,
correctly formed explanations can be uninformed opinions or fallacious
reasonings or imaginary evidence, and flawed as they are they can
still sound true to some social population, so people get positive
feedback for ridiculous explanations and build up self-consistent
systems of explanations. Voila, the party of tea or the birthers or
the church of scientology or sociologists crafting a bespoke
vocabulary for linear algebra.
I do like this model of how language, even knowledge and understanding
are formed. It is about mutation (babbling) an fitness (what works).
In children, it seems (semi) obvious as it does later in all kinds of
clicques and cults of personality. In Science, presumably, this is the
scientific method: Forming a hypothesis (babbling) then seeing if it
works (doing an experiment, taking data, comparing it to the hypothesis).
In this light, I entertain GEPRs (Glen) elaboration. I have come to
resonate with his description of "language as grooming" within reason.
And I use "resonate" deliberately, because I think this is the heuristic
that we, the hairless apes use as we sit about over coffee (or keyboard,
or at the barber/beauty shop). And as Glen indicated, when we have
nothing to talk about, we talk on anyway, testing our current
resonance... call and response... If we fail to get a hearty
"hallelujiah" from the choir, then we check our sermon, tweak it and try
again, this time with more conviction.
It may be this "need to find resonance" that brought us (in part)
scientific study... preaching to nature and waiting for *it's* hallelujia
I really enjoyed reading
http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Cant-the-Sciencesthe/142239/ this
morning. It's all about the evidence and the reasons.
-- rec --
On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 10:57 AM, glen <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Nick's "metaphor" answer is generative (even if vague). Steve's
"selection" answer is constraint-based. So, they're in different
categories. I'll posit another generative answer: finite
capacities. As social animals, we're bred to interact, even if
there's nothing to actually interact _about_. The best
interactors (idealized by gossiping over too much coffee) often
seem to have no subject at all. They wander from subject to
subject, never spending enough time on any one subject to satisfy
anyone, including themselves.
But when they finally tire out, they're satisfied that they
interacted.
The reality of it is that every one of these interactors would
_love_ to have the time, energy, IQ, databases, etc. to do a
complete analysis of every subject that might come up during
gossip time. But, of course, they don't. So, the semantic drift
is purely an artifact of finite capacity ... much to the chagrin
of the privileged, who have plenty of time, energy, IQ, and
database access to do a more complete analysis of any issue of
their choosing.
Of course, one defining feature of the geek is that, when a
subject with which they're familiar comes up during gossip time,
the cork is popped and out comes a gush of data ("info" is too
generous a word for it). But when the subject is not something on
which they've already familiarized themselves, they shush right
up. And that self-imposed shushing is what _prevents_ them from
being a good interactor.
Yes, you heard me right. The unwillingness to yap to no end about
stuff you know nothing about _prevents_ you from being a good,
social, citizen ... grooming your fellow morons, ensuring them
that you're part of their clan. ;-) I, for one, go to great
lengths to ensure my fellow morons that I am a member of the clan!
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> wrote at
10/12/2013 05:29 AM:> If "we have a responsibility to try to find"
anything, I think it
is to try to find *why* some people insist on (1) glomming
onto bits
of jargon with very well-defined in-domain meanings, (2)
ignoring much
or all of those meanings while re-applying the jargon (often
without
ANY definition to speak of) in a new domain, while (3) refusing to
let go of some (or all) of the Impressive Consequences derived in
the original domain by derivations that (4) depend on the
jettisoned
definitions (and the rest of the technical apparatus of the
original
domain).
Nick Thompson wrote at 10/12/2013 09:52 AM:
I [...] know, deep down, that this has something to do with
the crucial role of
metaphor in science. Even Kuhn, right?, had something
positive to say about
having conceptual Genies escape from one scientific bottle and
infect the
next. Perhaps I have to take a kind of pragmatist position
here: If we
don't assume (wrongly) that all uses of a word avert to a
common core, then
we will never have the sort of conversation in which the
different meanings
get articulated and the forementioned frauds (and Freuds) and
hucksters get
exposed.
Steve Smith wrote at 10/12/2013 11:42 AM:
I am left to wonder if this isn't an artifact of the
*evolutionary* nature of ideas. To invoke a genetic
analogy... it is perhaps more efficient in the scheme of
things for a phenotype (scientific discipline?) to appropriate
memes (terms, concepts) from other genotypes (the scientific
literature of another domain) and then (ab)use them (let
semantic drift explore the adjacent likely space of their
meaning) until they fit (well enough) to have significant utility.
--
?? glen e. p. ropella
Who cares to care when they're really scared
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