Re: Intro/AI/compound-nouns/concept-systems

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@access.digex.net>]

James Cooke Brown wrote:

> >There are many criteria of 'primitiveness and this is
> >one of them, the logician's.  Another, perhaps more appropriate to an
> >empirical science, is 'whatever carves reality at the joints' ...

Doug Merrit writes:

> And in *this* sense there will never be a universal set of primitives,
> because in addition to whatever is hardwired by biology, there is a further
> set that is based on both culture and experience, and those things are
> primitives only in a subset of the human race.

Ironically, I think this phrase is Whorf's, and if so, JCB is using it in a
non-Whorfian and perhaps anti-Whorfian sense.  The "joints" of which Whorf
spoke were culturally based, but JCB talks of them as if they were hardwired
by The Nature Of Things; i.e. physics and such, not hominoid biology, still less
hominoid culture!

Sidenote:  I will no longer talk of "human rights", but of "hominoid rights".
Hominoid are they born to Hominoidal Mitochondrial Eve.

-- 
John Cowan		sharing account <lojbab@access.digex.net> for now
		e'osai ko sarji la lojban.