Re: *ka/unt- etc, new conquests

From: Torsten
Message: 65368
Date: 2009-11-05

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, johnvertical@... wrote:
>
> > > Gravity-as-caused-by-demons has not been disproven, but that's
> > > because it is not disprovable to begin with, not because it
> > > would be a theory.
> >
> > You don't know how close you are to a real problem here. Actually
> > the classical theory of gravity does introduce demons, namely
> > independent agents doing the pulling, as soon as you begin to
> > formulate it in some kind of representational language.
>
> That says more about the suitability of the formulation than of the
> suitability of the theory.

It is not possible to make an object-based description of a scenario of the movement of physical bodies (including object representations of statements of events (collisions etc) and permanent facts) without a statement like that (I majored in computer science and worked for a time on representational languages).

Causation is a fundamental category of reasoning,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_%28Kant%29
The buck of causation has to stop somewhere, regardless of whether that endpoint makes sense as being animate and capable acting independently or not.


> Note how your anecdote needs to talk of "naive" mecanics.

It is not an anecdote, it is as humorous footnote in the original paper describing the project. As for 'naive', that harks back to Patrick J. Hayes' 'Naive Physics Manifesto'. Searching for that in Wikipedia, I came across this guy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicola_Guarino
who seems to know what he's talking about.
Most of what I learned then came from Lenat
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Lenat
cf.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_engineering


> (Now yes, there WAS a period where they tried to come up with all
> sorts of "naive" explanations for gravity, AFAIK usually of the
> pushing rather than the pulling sort however; eg. macroscopic
> material is porous proportional to mass, and two objects close by
> will shado a "cosmic background ether bombardment" in their midst.
> Getting much too off topic here however…)

You miss the point. We still have such a theory, because there's no other way we can represent it (actually there is another, totally different way to represent gravity, namely as curved space, but that fact should tell us something about the limitations of our perceptional categories).

> > But apart from that, I want "disprovable, but not yet disproven".
> > Simplicity. My second criterion is Occam.
>
> So in theory, we should get along just fine.
>
> How would you propose disproving a word's belonging into one of
> your substrate loan complexes?


Words which have cognates in relatives of the successor languages should be assigned to the successor languages. Those which fulfill one of the defining characteristics of the proposed substrate languages should be assigned to them. Those who fulfill neither I can't assign anywhere by purely linguistic means.


> > > Predictiv power really should come into that too (tho it is
> > > quite link'd with falsifiability).
> >
> > Forget predictive power in a historical science. Any prediction a
> > theory makes we already know, unless we discover new material
> > like Hittite, and that's very rare.
>
> Maybe with Indo-European. There are still plenty of understudied
> languages in the world which may or may not provide us with data
> that fits our reconstruction of, say, Proto-Uralic.

True, but it's pseudo-prediction in principle. We have to come up with some criterion for the historic sciences which doesn't involve prediction.


> > > > > Why do you post your thoughts here anyway if you are not
> > > > > interested in disseminating them?
> > > >
> > > > If I post my thoughts here, then I *am* disseminating them.
> > > > Doh!
> > >
> > > Certainly. But you simultaneously have no *interest* in getting
> > > others to care?
> >
> > I know they will, after I'm dead. But then it will be too late
> > (*sob*)
>
> Am I staring into a sarchasm again?

I'm sorry. I'm Danish; we can't help it. Some tourist books warn us against using it abroad. My own experience hitchhiking in America tells me you can take the piss out of them for about ten minutes before they find out and try to kill you. Of course some people take much longer.


> > > > > The support is simply the base of a tree. Yes, I'm arguing
> > > > > that there is no need to loan a specific word for that,
> > > > > given that the meaning "base of tree" is confirm'd the
> > > > > original one by the other Uralic languages.
> > > >
> > > > The other possibility is that the "tree stump" word spread
> > > > with the storage hut technology and was later generalized
> > > > (those people were not botanists or zoologists; they had
> > > > words for what was necessary to stay alive).
>
> > > "tree stump" is the kind of concept even stone-age hunter
> > > gatherers can be expected to have in their vocabulary.
> >
> > But they can't be expected not to replace by a new word from some
> > prestigious new technology.
>
>
> OK… sure not, but I'd then expect those who kept the technology
> (such as the Sami) to keep their word for it too, not just some
> generalization of it.

I didn't get that?


> And the newness of this prestigious technology remains assumed.


What do you mean? Everything was new once.



Torsten