User:Leucippus/Sandbox3

Some reflections on colour
I shall offer some broad reflections on colour via "Lady in a Green Jacket". Why have I chosen this painting?—its rich-stimulating use of colour; the connections between science, art, and language. Despite these ambitious pretensions, I would like, for reasons of brevity, to produce something more modest. I aspire to create an original piece of work, but also, I must express the chief inspirations for my essay: Nelson Goodman and Wilfrid Sellars.

Most importantly, I hope to produce something accessible to the users of this wiki ... and hopefully not boring—grandiose or obscure ... &#10086;

Sign and Object
What’s in a word? A rose by any other word would smell just as sweet

Just as Juliet doubted the affect of words on things—so too shall I, in a similar vein, criticise naïve presumptions of language’s connection to the world. The main topics that I will address: the importance of identity, and indiscerniblity, for our ability to differentiate between terms; the intension-extension distinction; and use-mention confusions. Use-mention confusions can be illustrated by considering the linguistic development of the child:
 * 1) The child learns to use and respond to sentences like ‘snow is white’ in part because her response to the word ‘snow’ is basically the same as her response to the substance snow. She has confused the qualities and associations stimulated by the substance snow with the sign or phoneme that is signified by the word ‘snow’. This confusion is ubiquitous in human linguistic development; language acquisition proceeds in a haphazard, creative manner; scientifically disreputable?—yes,—but prodigious. Verily, take the Japanese sword-smith: at first he may have an explicit set of instructions for the desired blade, but over time, in response to dynamic local pressures (e.g. the availability of new materials, the pressures arising from Feudal combat, new armour, more horseback combat, the changing aesthetic tastes of soldiers and the military), the recipe will change, it may become more complex, or more simple, it may trail of in directions unforseen directions; and during this process of “wandering” our sword-smith may, in fact, realise that the new directivities he has encountered have led to a far more useful blade—his services may indeed become more lauded—, all of this is to say, to bring the metaphor back to language, is that we shouldn’t set up a priori restrictions and criticisms of the way language de facto develops, even if it contains use-mention confusions and God knows what else, these are not to be eschewed in favour of momentary rigour, for as Heaviside himself is reported to have said “Logic can wait, for it is eternal’. It is precisely this “wandering nature”, if you will, that allows us to respond flexibly to the practical challenges and pressures of our environment; it is only later, in retrospect, that we can begin the process of perfecting our scientific colossus.

Salva veritate
Salva veritate := With unharmed truth. Given a true term, we should be able to substitute it for another true term without altering the truth of the sentence it occurs in. For example:
 * 1) Larry Sanders = Gary Shandling
 * 2) Gary Shandling is the creator of the Larry Sanders Show
 * 3) By Euclid’s Law: substitute ‘Larry Sanders’ for ‘Garry Shandling’ in (2) thus,
 * 4) Larry Sanders is the creator of the Larry Sanders show.
 * 5) Because ‘Larry Sanders’ and ‘Gary Shandling’ are different names for one and the same person. Everything that is true of ‘Larry Sanders’ should also be true for ‘Garry Shandling’. Thus, we should be able to substitute these terms without changing the truth value of the subject-predicate constructions they occur in, that is, salva veritate.

Salva congruitate
Salva congruitate := Without harming syntactic wellformedness or grammaticality. A simple case to consider is the following rule of replacement called “Double negation”:
 * 1) p←→p (p is logically equivalent to not not-p)
 * p
 * 1) Therefore you may replace (2) with p.
 * 2) Next, substitute for the first occurrence of ‘p’ in the schema (1) the statement ‘it is raining’, and due to the rules of substitution introduction it must also be introduced at the second occurrence of ‘p’ (viz. in ‘~(~p)’)  thus we have the following instance of the schema (1):
 * 3) it is raining ←→ (it is raining)
 * 4) thus, because both ‘p’ and ‘p’ are wellformed and logically equivalent, ‘(it is raining)’ may be replaced with ‘it is raining’ whilst preserving the wellformedness of the syntax, or if we take the more idiomatic statements ‘it is false that it isn’t raining’ and ‘it is raining’ we can adjudge that the grammar is also preserved; thus the rule of double-negation allows substitution salva congruitate.