> Hi,
>
> Lena Rotenberg <lrr@netkonnect.net> wrote:
> > Is it _your_ obligation to try to understand my Portuguese
> > verbiage, or is it _my_ obligation to use language that is
> > conducive to getting my meaning across to this group?
>
> The latter, of course.
>
> As you guys might remember, I've taken up a project to read the Virus
> archives. My current status is "Mon Dec 16 10:59:57 1996", or what I
> figure must be 3000 or so messages in. The reason I'm posting here is that
> this is reminding me of a discussion I just read through where Eva-Lise
> talked about communication.
>
> She pointed out, although with a different analogy than I will use here,
> that *meaning* per-see is not "encoded" into our communications. Having
> just read Dawkin's "The Blind Watchmaker" and Dennett's "Darwin's Dangerous
> Idea", I'm currently awash in biological metaphors, so here goes... meaning
> can be likened to phenotypes, but communication is always in the form of
> genotypes, and so what happens is that individuals, in attempting to
> communicate, reduce their "meanings" (i.e. the effects they wish to have)
> into the code of language (the genotype), and send it out. Then, the
> receiver picks it up, and puts it into their decoder, and attempts to
> *rebuild* the phenotype from the genotype that was communicated.
> Unfortunately, because everybody has different readers, it frequently
> happens that the *new* phenotype is a "monster", or is simply dead...
> (i.e. there are many more ways of rebuilding the communication which do not
> make sense (dead), or are incorrect (monsters), than there are to come away
> with what was intended (specific living creature)).
>
> I would maintain that although Brett obviously is attempting to
> communicate, his own encoders and decoders are so different from ours that
> not only can we not make a specific living species out of the instructions,
> we can't even make monsters most of the time!
>
> Towards the synthesis of knowledge into wisdom...
> ERiC
> ... and if I'd made a monster of your long forgotten post, Eva, be sure to
> point it out!
>
> ... oh, one last thing. In about two days, I'll be compiling my list of
> best posts to Virus through '96, and I'll forward a web address to Virus at
> that time. Then I guess we can debate over which actually go to the "top
> 100" or whatever... I have included quite a number of posts which I think
> we could cull, and I'm interested to see if you all agree.
>
My version was straight out of George Lakoff's piece in _Metaphor and
Thought_. Eric's seems not only highly viable, but even capable of
breeding with the original to produce attractive and viable offspring,
which is really all that can be asked of any system of reproduction.
:)
Eva