[MD] Doug Renselle & Language

[Ian Glendinning]

Interesting Matt, not a surprise that you subscribe to the more
descriptive, looser use of language that allows us to work with
attractive potted phrases and slogans .... so much easier to spread
messages that way (obviously, as I said to Krim; memes are a subject
of mine).

But this is making my point that we really have two different domains
of discourse.

If in a smaller community that cares about how those slogans are
understood and used, we find ourselves debating their meanings and
applications (in a lot more than 700 pages of words so far) and we
find ourselves relating these words to other 700 page tomes of
technical philosophy, then we do (appear to) need agreement on
technical meaning of the language.

Communicating in natural language beyond the technical environment
.... we basically have to "trust" the communications and
communicators, and not pick nits.

Actually, I'm playing devils advocate a little. I'd prefer the looser
trusting discursive debate anyway (as I think you do), but that means
that there has to be trust between that process and those that want to
plough more definitive furrows or even just score technical points.

On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 3:18 AM, Matt Kundert
<pirsigaffliction at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> I was going to teach Freshmen composition students about a
> "uniform critical vocabulary."  Then I thought again, after surmising
> that it might be more sophisticated than can usefully be approached.
>
> So the idea behind "MoQish" isn't bad, just probably limited in utility.
> Just think of all the sophisticated, tightly-bound philosophical systems
> with their very specific vocabularies--Whitehead's a good example.
> Nobody does philosophy with them, except for rare acolytes that
> nobody reads.  Whitehead's metaphysical system is wonderful, and
> quite advanced in terms of the spirit of 20th Century philosophy, but
> nobody wants to learn a sophisticated language that no one else
> understands.
>
> What works much better, I think, are systems that can be potted in a
> few very simple concepts and slogans.  These are more easily
> disseminated as tools because of they can be picked up without
> worrying about everything else going on.  Robert Brandom's
> philosophy of language, for instance: once you learn the basics
> behinds implicit/explicit, committment/entitlement/incompatability and
> a few others, everything just locks into place, but you don't need to
> wield his 700+ page book, you just need those easy ideas.
>
> And Pirsig's system already has the simple concepts and slogans in
> place.  So I've never thought much of Doug's neologisms.  New
> words are maybe even worse than old ones used in specific, odd
> ways.  In terms of dissemination, of course.
>
> Matt
>
>> Date: Wed, 18 Aug 2010 13:00:21 +0100
>> From: ian.glendinning at gmail.com
>> To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
>> Subject: [MD] Doug Renselle & Language
>>
>> I often get caught making smart-ass comments that much of our
>> "problem" expecting to reach definitive conclusions on any aspect of
>> MoQ .... is basically linguistic. Some of you don't find this helpful
>> ;-)
>>
>> In my real day-job life, I spend a lot of time on (effectively)
>> linguistics .... standardizing terminologies shared between businesses
>> .... and often find myself preaching to people not to expect to find
>> one language to suit (literally) all situations unambiguously. Those
>> with high expectations don't always find that helpful either. Hey ho.
>>
>> One thought that often springs to mind, is Doug Renselle's
>> idiosyncratic quest to develop and promote MoQ ... where he has his
>> own invented language, to distinguish specific MoQish uses of terms
>> from everyday use. I hear myself saying "it'll never work Doug" ...
>> and invoke Wittgenstein's "private language" argument, but .... an
>> open question ...
>>
>> Does anyone see value in working towards a MOQish language ?
>>
>> Ian
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