Date: Sun, 19 Jan 1997 09:39:43 -0800 (PST) From: Aaron Fox Subject: Re: Logic, etc Sender: owner-linganth@cc.rochester.edu To: Ronald Kephart Cc: linganthro list MIME-version: 1.0 Precedence: bulk On Sun, 19 Jan 1997, Ronald Kephart wrote:

>In message <199701191328.WAA12575@kayoko.niji.or.jp> writes:
>>Dear Linganthers,

>>Who says language is based on logic anyway?

>Exactly (and nice post, by the way). People who have been misled by centuries of
>Western thought which demands a strict separation between biology and culture, nature and nurture. People who mistakenly assume that because language is
>patterned, structured, it must also be "logical."

Respectfully, I disagree with both (intriguing) formulations. "Logic" in the philosophical sense is not an *invention* of "Western" thought, but a scientific *discovery* (or set of discoveries) about causality, correlation, and the representation thereof. Most of our formal codes for manipulating "Logical" expressions in this sense have been drawn either unconsciously (what bothered the good Bishop and Mr. Hayakawa and Mr. Russell) or consciously (a la Peirce/Boole and modern symbolic Logic/computer programming) from the *discovered* structure of natural language grammar. If Human Language didn't have an underlying conceptual grammar -- a "Logic" in the technical sense -- it would lack not only the formal similarities which appear to connect all human languages (including mathematics and formal symbolic logic and computer languages) to the same underlying *capacity* for Language, but it would also lack the functional indexical extensions to reality which enable humans to process information and act accordingly in order to survive in hostile environments. That humans everywhere have pursued analagous adaptive conceptual/pragmatic/social responses to various kinds of natural environments strongly suggests a Universal Logic.

The nature of that Logic is *undoubtedly* elusive and often counterintuitive. As Bickerton points out in *Language and Species,* 91991, cite below) from one perspective (obviously not Sapir-Whorfian!) it is remarkable how FEW aspects of perceptual/conceptual prelinguistic experience are gammaticized in human Languages. But the *particular* categories are even more mysterious. Why, for example, do humans not have an innate conceptual distinction between "edible" and nonedible" which finds its expression in SOME grammar the way, say, our innate visual cognition determines the sequence through which color terms will be added to a Lexicon in (hypothetically) any known language. To me, the debate here is really about the value of the *colloquial* senses of "rationality" and "logic" (and "empirical" and "scientific" &c.) Or, differently, we could be arguing about an issue of "semantics" in (once again) both colloquial and scientific senses of the term (cf. Damasio, et al., 1996, cite below).

I am concerned that the assertion of an infinite array of human "rationalities" ungrounded in what seems to me to be the apparently universal "logic" of human Language risks shading over into the position that differences are are somehow constitutive of relative approximation to culturally specific ideals of "humanness" (as we see all the time in racist characterizations of AAVE, for example). Additonally, the emphasis on incommensurability of culturally, historically, gender, class, or linguistic-specific forms of reason can lead to assertions of the futility of translation and thence loop back into a methodological resistance to raising questions of mind at all, a creeping behaviorism which I think haunts sociolinguistics especially (as I have argued here before). This are, ironically, precisely the opposite effects from those which are usually *intended* in a relativist argument, (though not always, as we found out several posts back in this discussion). And there is always the problem of "Western" (to me a meaningless term) Euro-American white men (like me) pronouncing on the nature of "logic" and "reason" which will only be resolved through the (political) process of opening the institutions of science to full human (multi-cultural, multi-lingual, etc.) participation. Despite its flaws, however, I think the holy grail remains an acceptably universal (and acceptably creative and "leaky") conception of "Reason" (or "Logic") itself. (And as I said before, I am especially open to the effects of modality of transmission -- speech/writing; SIgn vs. Speech, etc. on cognitive/cultural differences, within species-specific parameters.)

af

PS -- cf. Damasio, et al., 1996, "The Brain's Dictionary," *Nature* 380: 499-505. Bickerton, 1991, *Language and Species* (Chicago UP)

______________________________________________________________________ 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?"

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