[MD] Iain McGilchrist

[Ian Glendinning]

Hi Arlo,
Dictionary definition - just two word short-hand for your 10 line
paragraph ... but yes OK.

So ... that evolution involves people using the language beyond
existing understood explicit meanings - implying, glimpsing, evoking
alternative possibilities.

Obviously anyone (me included)  "starts" from existing understood
definitions - but they're enabling tools as you said - we don't "end"
with that, only a pedant involved in some tight logical construction
is constrained by those.

Ian

On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 2:57 PM, ARLO JAMES BENSINGER JR <ajb102 at psu.edu> wrote:
> [Ian]
> Constraining - not necessarily - not constraining "within" any boundaries. A pedant can choose to work within dictionary definitions of the words used and the formal syntax of the sentences composed - but any good writer / communicator - like Pirsig does NOT do this.
>
> [Arlo]
> Really? How did you understand a single word in his books? Seems to me that he "relied" a great deal on shared definitions and syntax (can you point out ONE sentence in his books that did not follow a culturally-shared syntax?). "Dictionary definitions", by the way, is a ridiculous straw man (and I'm a little surprised you use this). Of course the "meanings" of individual "words" (and the shared use syntax) evolve over time, who has ever suggested otherwise? The point is not that such-and-such a word is forever etched in iron, but that we can never "think" outside "language", any more than we can "breathe" in a "vacuum" (aka, "our intellectual description of nature is ALWAYS culturally defined" [emphasis added]). (By the way, if you respond to this by implying I deny a pre-intellectual experience or pre-language awareness, I will reach through the nether and slap you. ;-))
>
> Sidenote: for those "struggling" with the idea that "language" is a prison to be escaped from, I suggest reading the works of Helen Keller. As she describes it, having-no-language was the prison, and acquiring language is when she was "born".
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