Hi Bruce
BN: Rick, would it kill you to encourage people and tell them how you think they could do better rather than discouraging them and telling them everything you think they’re doing wrong?
RM: Would it kill you to take my advice when I tell you how you could do better rather than continuing to do things that way you do them? And I presume that you have stopped beating your wife;-) See, I can do it too;-)
BN: Considering mortality and the importance of PCT, you should be working as hard as you can not to be the top expert in PCT when people brighter than either of us are carrying it forward into the future.
RM: I’m not trying to be the top PCT expert; I’m not trying to be the top anything, really. I’m just trying to inject my understanding of PCT into this discussion group which, from my perspective, has drifted (and continues to drift) father and farther away from the heart of PCT.
RM: And I am, indeed, aware of mortality (though I admit that I don’t like to think about it all that much), I do believe PCT is important and I would like younger and brighter people to carry it forward. But I would like whatever they carry forward to by a correct understanding of what PCT is and how to study it, which is why I wrote The Study of Living Control Systems.
BN: I request that you, Ishmael, call me.
BN: I request that you call me Ishmael.
BN: These are homonymous but different verbs. In one, you can substitute telephone; in the other, you can substitute name. What’s going on here is more fundamental than commas and intonation. Also see A grammar of English on mathematical principles, p. 351, for starters, and sections 3.5 and 3.6 of the same work.
RM: My point is that these different meaning of “call” perceived by the person reading the sentences. I know that “call” evokes different meanings in the two sentences; but why? My guess is that it results from the way we perceive the programmatic structure of the two sentences.
BN: The actual structure of language—its grammar in fact—is more or less different from the various descriptions of that structure which have been called grammar, sometimes extremely so, and that includes operator grammar.
RM: I think that is surely true. But all languages have some structure that contributes to the meaning evoked by different sentences. In the sentences above the different meaning of “call” seems to depend on how one perceives that structure. Indeed, the meaning of “call” can be perceived both ways in both sentences depending on how one perceives the structure of the sentence.
RM: And it’s not just the sequence that is responsible for the difference: I can hear “Call me Ishmael” as a request to call him by the name “Ishmael” or as a request for Ishmael to give me a call. I can do this with no change of rhythm or intonation in the three words. It’s like the young/old woman reversible figure illusion; same physical input perceived in two different ways presumably because the different perceptions are constructed in different ways.
BN: Suffice to say, it doesn’t support the notion that grammar is control of program perceptions.
RM: I don’t think grammar is the control of program perceptions; I believe the meaning of sentences involves the control program perceptions. I think grammar itself is an “emergent” phenomenon (as you say) which is based on people noticing consistencies in the programs that are used to convey different meanings.
Best
Rick