Brian:
>In all the time that I've been reading your comments here
>and elsewhere, you've never recognized that what theory/
>explanation is simplest depends very much on what evidence one considers
>relevant and on how one weights it.
So you're saying to embrace chaos? Because what other
choice do we have if we ignore logic principles?
I never said that the optimal solution of the solutions
evaluated by Occam's Razor is necessarily straightforward.
However, the principle itself is, unless we're questioning
the nature of existence itself... and that's a boundary that
should only be crossed on a philosophy forum, not a
linguistic one.
So a theory should conform to the Razor in some way.
I've mentioned how there is simply _no_ evidence to support
palatals in IE itself... But nobody has addressed this important
fact because their faulty logic seems to confuse "evidence
for palatals in SATEM dialects" with "evidence in IE itself".
People like you then come along to derail the topic in
the confusion and question logic itself. It's so absurd. This
isn't a proper debate of the issues in question. Can we
please talk about palatal velars in IE?
So when you say that it "depends very much on what
evidence one considers relevant and on how one weighs
it", how can we weigh evidence that DOESN'T EXIST?!
I mean, does anyone honestly think that there is any
_evidence_ (some logic snippet of some kind) that shows
that palatal velars are anything other than a satem phoneme?
In Proto-IE, there is no evidence, period. If you say otherwise,
show me wrong and stop questioning my applications of
Occam's Razor!
Logic cannot be redefined according to your chaotic rules.
Facts are facts. Major fact #1: no support for palatals in
IE itself.
>Logic is almost never the issue in these arguments; the
>argument is almost always over the relative importance of
>different types of evidence.
Erh, that _is_ logic. I think you're looking at logic as a matter of
true and false only. True and false are absolutes but they
cannot be applied to theories. I look at "logic" as true, false and
probabilities in-between (particularly the latter for evaluating
theories properly). I don't know what you call the matter
of "relative importance" but it's still called "logic" in my vocab.
I think you assume that my thinking is drastically different from
yours. It's like this obsessive us-versus-them mentality. I'm on
the same side, man!
= gLeN
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