Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Pyrotex
"Math is a language" is True.
"French is a language" is True.
But the word "language" in the first sentence does NOT have the same meaning or usage as the word "language" in the second sentence.
|
This difficulty is one of the key observations of the early 20th century discipline of
General Semantics. Although GS is a complicated discipline, it’s easy to summarize how it addresses the problem of the same word used for 2 different things: it “subscripts” them. Thus, in GS, we’d write:
"Math is a language
1";
"French is a language
2",
and keep adding to our table of precise definitions of the words usage as new and distinct ones are used.
That few people outside of academic Sociology have ever heard of GS suggest the influence it has had on 20th century Western society.
