May 11th, 2007
Tags: philosophy, radical interpretation, red sox
This entry was posted on Friday, May 11th, 2007 at 12:38 am and is filed under comics.
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May 11th, 2007 at 10:23 am
Pablo’s brain will unfortunately melt when Mark starts to talk about how the “Red Sox” were trampled by Texas yesterday.
May 11th, 2007 at 11:08 am
Oh. Well, presumably, he’s using “Texas” to mean “Toronto”, and “were trampled” to mean “kicked the asses of”.
May 12th, 2007 at 7:46 pm
OK. I knew this was like Kafkaesque political thinking: “black is white” and “war is peace”.
May 13th, 2007 at 6:02 am
This seems like sort of a broken theory; what prevents me from taking the interpretation where, for example, every noun means CAT, every verb (and its negation — since we should be free to interpret “not” as some extraneous adverb) means IS, every adjective means CAT-LIKE, etc., etc. Either we are making the assumption that some words have some intrinsic meaning (e.g. “not” has its usual Boolean meaning), or else the optimal interpretation of language under this theory is likely the trivial interpretation.
I take it by your comics that you also think this theory is silly? I think any theory of language interpretation that relies on Boolean truth-valuation is silly.
May 16th, 2007 at 3:42 pm
Charley, yeah, that’s a good question. The answer isn’t funny, which is why it’s not in the strip. The idea is, there are other desiderata on interpretations, too — we want to respect the compositionality of language, for instance. A question of some controversy is whether this is a way of refuting Davidson’s view, or of developing it.
Also, I would caution anyone against trying to read my own views off of any discussions in my comic strips.
May 17th, 2007 at 11:26 am
Except of course your love for the Red Sox.