Date: Mon, 20 Jan 1997 11:32:23 -0800 (PST) From: Aaron Fox Subject: Re: Logic, etc Sender: owner-linganth@cc.rochester.edu To: "Harold F. Schiffman" Cc: linganthro list MIME-version: 1.0 Precedence: bulk On Mon, 20 Jan 1997, Harold F. Schiffman wrote:

>I'd have to disagree with Aaron, then; otherwise how did ancient Indian philosophers "discover" a logic that was not consistent with the western type? I think they're both constructed/invented, rather than discovered. Or am I missing something?

>Hal Schiffman
I am perfectly open to the inclusion of non-Western systems of Logic among our many valuable perspectives into the Logic of nature. If Indian epistemology and Western epistemology differ, the grounds for that difference must be principled and intertranslatable in natural Language, or we (you) wouldn't know the difference! It is that intertranslatability that intrigues me. I also give plenty of room in my view to the creation of new (read also: "different" or "other) contexts for logical thought (e.g., new social forms, new environments, new technologies, new instruments of perception, and new means of accessing the unconscious in particular, an extension to received notions of "logic" which has occurred at different times in many non-Wstern spiritual disciplines and sciences, as well as in recent cognitive science and phenomenology. An etics, after all, is a comparative emics. "I don't want nothin'" is after all a different surface form from "I don't want nothing," and could mediate rather distinct cognitive/perceptual/behavioral/affective sets toward "reality" in some dialects of English where the contrast would be referentially marked (as well as indexical of formality of situation and dialect/register commanded by the speaker).

Incidentally, I too have a native speaker grammtical intuition about "I don't want nothing/nothin'" and it is close to yours. However, In my intuition, the form which is *marked* is the form which may be *unmarked* for AAVE speakers, that is, the use of a double negative construction to emphasize the degree of lack of desire. In my dialect, "I don't want nothing" ="I don't want *'nothing'*" (it is the "nothing" you are offering that I don't want.) I might even be tempted to make the point clear by saying "I don't want YOUR 'nothing'!" Or "I do not WANT 'nothing." If I were to say "I don't want nothin'" I would shift the prosodic shape considerably (moving stress from WANT to NOthin') and be using a form which was *marked* in my dialect as a metapragmatic index to AAVE (or maybe Southern white English -- my transcripts are *full* of "rednecks" using expressive double negatives). In the case of "I don't want nothin'" (which is probably more likely to sound like "I don' wan' nothin' in any case) it is *No* thing (absolutely NO thing) that I (don't) want. The lexical entry for "NOTHING" in our brains must contain at least these two variants, in which the unmarked form in AE (Morgan's curious label for "American English," contrasting with AAE for "African-American English") maps onto the representation of the lexical item itself (nearly a form of reported speech), before accessing the word's full semantic range. Now, Hal, you may be a native speaker of some "vernacular" code in which expressive double negatives are unmarked, but either way I argue that we are dealing with two *logically* contrastive underlying semantic and syntactic representations here (at least). That we can discuss and debate our intutions about such things suggests that we hold to a "logical" standard for the adjudication of such differences, a logic which is some respects *a priori* to competence in a particular dialect or language. I presume that dealing with a native speaker of any other language we could still arrive at this kind of adjudication and comparison, and in the process expand our understanding of the pre- and inter-linguistic "logic" of human cognition.

Aaron


PS -- By popular request I will forward the LINGUIST-L posts shortly.

______________________________________________________________________ Aaron A. Fox
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Adjunct Assistant Professor of Music
The University of Washington Box 353100, Seattle WA 98195-3100 FAX: 206-543-3285, TEL: 206-685-1811
EMAIL: aaf@u.washington.edu WWW: http://weber.u.washington.edu/~aaf/ ________________________________________________________________________

"We're not here for glamor or FAshion
but here's the question I'm askin
Why isn't young black kids taught BLACK? They're only taught to read, write, and act It's like teaching a dog to be a cat
you don't teach a DOG to be a cat
you don't teach WHITE kids to be BLACK
why IS that?
Is it because we're the miNOrity?"

KRS-1/BoogieDownProductions "Why Is That?" From *Ghetto Music: THe Blueprint of Hip Hop.* Copyright 1989 Jive Records (BMG)
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