RE: Re:
there is gold in the refrigerator. there is food in the refriegerator. . , 1. does either the physical gold or food have more intrinsic value.? . depends . is the value the same to both owner and , consumer.? depends, need , time frame ? if so how does one calculate it. what if there is more than two players. 2 exchangability ( first order derivative ) not the thing itself but what one can do with it. - it depends 3. the piece of pape or hunk of useless metal that "states" there is gold in the fridg ? is that money. ?you get the idea does there have to be actual gold in the fridge for it to be accepeted by others of something of "value". ( depends on trust and belief system ). yesterdays question - If the sentence " there is gold in the fridge " is either spoken or written . does that change its value? . buyer, seller, trust ,belief system ?
If I understand what you're saying, I agree. If I want to buy something, the gold is more valuable (thanks to conventions of the social order). If I'm hungry, the food has higher value than the gold (independent of such conventions). But I'm not sure I see what follows.
- the terms - value , money ,and currency- need definition. separate and apart from an intrinsic worth to an individual , the hungry one . or the Indian tooth manufacturer, either can actually be consumed or merely stand as a store of value or medium of exchange. a piece of paper representing either is the familiar form of money, . a dollar bill. . as you know the US version used to say the convertible into something. ( gold silver ) . now it says trust me. its worth one dollar. , the trading of dollars is well known. I wondered whether sentences ( concepts without being necessarily written on paper. could be , looked at the same way. some having intrinsic value and others being used as exchange. I see no reason why not, does that set up an economics of sentences /concepts. .
2 Of course I would love to talk to your friend
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- With nothing more meaningful than sharing a new tasty food with you that I have enjoyed.] think you might enjoy the taste of a new math.
I read your attached paper. I would suggest that the system of analysis suffers from the use of early twentieth century reasoning , ie references to Merge. minimal computation ( the set notation can be misleading ) or modules. I think a system and notation that might, just might, help and add interesting insights is -category theory. fresher, more useful then either the former popular set theory or group theory of the 20th century . where for example mc would be contained in a larger category. ( your Merge would fall into a subcategory of operations that were a combination of associative , transitive operations in a space etc . One then looks at the spaces of probabilities and realizes that some are just much more probable than others . nothing more. these probabilities generate shapes only as a result of their statistical ensembles. - the age old study of soap bubbles suffered from the same handicap. . the shapes were analyzed by attempting to follow the mc rule. ie containing the most volume for the least area. ( a broader category ) now i would propose that the shape merely represents its most probable shape- nothing more. given the statistical space. for ex, things on the membrane , free to move but the shape not changing. I understand that language is not an input output system like vision. Shapes are not input /output devices but have very strong properties, relationships etc. there are mappings onto those spaces. the old version of functions expanded ei using more than only mathematical terms. mappings are not required to be linear. ie grammatical sentences would be represented as coherent shapes. its very beautiful math.
Had dinner with woody and he wanted to know if valeria had gotten the book he suggested as in hindsight thought that he should have sent her a copy and not merely forwarded the title. my side still hurts from laughing for the past 2 hours.
Thinking about it, but I don't see how once can assign a value to a sentence (token or type or looked at even more abstractly, say the proposition expressed) in isolation from contexts, and value will vary all over the map as contexts vary. Take the standard example "the cat is on the mat," typically valueless, but not if the information conveyed is a signal to set off nuclear weapons that will destroy the world. Generalizes.
On 3, there is a place for probabilities in the study of use of language (e.g., Charles Yang's integration of UG and learning theory in study of acquisition), but there is no indication of how they might enter into I-language. The concepts don't seem relevant.
As for category theory, it makes sense to appeal to it if the results obtained at this level of abstraction have implications for the particular system under investigation. I don't see how it would be true in this case. Would we, say, learn more about the roots and implications of the copy theory of displacement if we abstracted to category theory? I don't see how.
I'll ask Valeria if she's gotten the book yet. Sounds like a great evening.
Noam