Loyal to the Group of Seventeen: Star Trek's Darmok, Shaka, and the Tamarians revisited

Gwern Branwen · 21 Jun 2014, 14:37 · from 2014-June.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: gwern at gwern.net (Gwern Branwen)
Date: Sat, 21 Jun 2014 10:37:56 -0400
Subject: (urth) Loyal to the Group of Seventeen: Star Trek's Darmok,
 Shaka, and the Tamarians revisited
In-Reply-To: <CA+Z2yj1BU1UQJmXoP42TVnkOpQPJCCZJ612vicFCN4NDo71w0w at mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAMwO0gxy-Jtv6jscKiYZExUCb1okWaK5bsSR-Sz67pgX97paAQ at mail.gmail.com>
	<CA+Z2yj1BU1UQJmXoP42TVnkOpQPJCCZJ612vicFCN4NDo71w0w at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <CAMwO0gz8+H6KLShJ4Qq4J92oe20Dm4nEO3y-2Dw3nD+MpG68=A at mail.gmail.com>

On Sat, Jun 21, 2014 at 10:18 AM, Thomas Bitterman <tom at bitterman.net> wrote:
> Like grue-bleen it sounds good until one inquires how somebody, who did not
> already know what was going on, could figure it out.

Doesn't that same objection of the logical indeterminacy of language,
pace Wittgenstein & Quine, also apply to natural language?

-- 
gwern
http://www.gwern.net

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net