August
25, 2017 Friday
Bedtime
Story
Understanding Natural Languages (and its weaknesses)
Linguistically,
a natural language can be said to be comprising broadly of two primary components:
linguistic objects and semantic terms.
Linguistic
objects include stuff like sentences and terms that are one of the components
of the language.
Furthermore,
even the names of the linguistic objects such as sentences and terms are
included in the language without the requirement of enclosing them either
inside quotation mark or parenthesis.
Same
is the case with semantic terms such as “truth”, “name”, “designation” etc,
that even though they refer to the relationship between linguistic objects,
they form part of the language without any kind of formal treatment.
Though
it all seems harmless and benign, but what it does is that it gives us ordinary
apes an extraordinary power that is highly vulnerable to misuse.
For
every sentence that can be constructed in a natural language, it allows us to
form another sentence in the same language that can declare the first sentence
to be true or false.
In
short, a natural language allows us to generate self-referential sentence.
Hence
a sentence S can assert itself to be either true or false.
In
some cases where S can claim its own falsity, then as we have seen in the case
of Liar Paradox, it can clearly be reasoned out that S is both true and false.
So
how do we get out of the trap that is laid out bare for us in all the natural
universal languages?
Or
how do we avoid them or go around them?
One
way, Tarski says is to avoid the use of universal languages as much as possible
since in many places we can do without them.
I
know you are not going to accept this so easily so let me elaborate on this.
One
place where the natural languages can surely be done away with is the sciences.
Take
for instance chemistry.
The
primary topics of discussion in chemistry are elements, molecules, chemical
reactions and so on but not linguistic objects such as sentences or phrases.
In
such a case the language can be restricted possessing limited vocabulary.
It
will largely contain names of chemical objects such as “elements”, “thermal”,
“equations”, “equilibrium”, “entropy” and so on.
This
language will be largely deprived of the names of linguistic objects thus
depriving it of being semantically universal.
Other
branches of sciences can be given the same analogous treatment.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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