vol 2: Synopsis
part I: Motivations and possibilities
page 3: Naming
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Naming
At the root of language is naming. '... from the soil Yahweh God fashioned all the wild beasts and all the birds of heaven. ... The man gave names to all the cattle, all the birds of heaven and all the wild beasts.' Genesis 2.19-20. Genesis Naming yields immense power, since for many purposes we no longer have to move things, which may be heavy and dangerous, to express ourselves, merely their names.
Naming establishes a correspondence between a two entities. Often these entities are a word and a thing or action, but in the most general view, we may name anything with anything. This is possible in our world because every observable event is unique. Behind the events, the quantum no-cloning theorem tells, us every quantum state in the universe is also unique.
All that naming requires is a fixed correspondence which enables one thing to stand for another. So my name means me and I mean my name, in the sense that when I walk into a room, someone prompted by my presence may say my name.
Usually we think of the name as the simpler of the two corresponding things. So while I am an unbelievably complex biological entity, my name is embodied in a few micrograms of ink or a tiny quantity of sound energy.
Naming creates new world or spaces. Whereas once there was just the world of plants, now we have created a 'plant name space' which serves as a foundation for all our talk about plants. In the abstract way we understand it here, naming is the root of imagination.
We save a considerable amount of time and energy (and thereby gain fitness) by using names rather than things in our imaginative manipulations of the world. Truly, talk is cheap, thought even cheaper.
In English grammar, we call the names of things nouns, and the names of actions verbs, and these two classes of words, together with all sorts of modifiers, go to make up our language. So 'the boy killed the cat' gives us a clear representation of a certain class of event. More specifically, 'John killed Tigger' narrows the field down to the interaction of a particular boy with a particular cat.
We call the correspondence between name and named meaning. Mathematics has a more general concept, mapping, to cover the same idea. The idea is intuitive. Each point in a geographic map corresponds to some point on the surface of the earth, and vice versa. We create a mapping between two mathematical structures when we establish correspondences between named points in the structures.
A natural language is sufficient to describe everything that happens in a natural world. So we can say a mapping exists between the language and the world. Our minds embody this mapping, so that we can observe a situation and describe it in our language. We also embody the inverse mapping, whereby we observe a piece of natural language and act it out or imagine it acted out in the natural world.
The true complexity of the world very quickly exhausts natural language. To name the millions of species, chemical compounds, stars, minerals and all the other things that scientists encounter, special technical names must be introduced. To deal with the task of naming everything, we turn to mathematics.
Mathematical language feeds upon itself, so that it may grow large enough to describe everything that happens in any possible world. One version of this language is the Cantor universe. We use this sum of all possible worlds to approach the immensity of god.
The namings in the universe are a space, a space of functions, correspondences or meanings. Naming is the foundation of language, to which we turn next.
Books
| Allen, Richard Hinckley, Star Names: Their Lore and their Meaning, Dover 1963 Jacket: 'From his studies of the writings of scores of ancient astronomers, the author has come up with a fascinating history of the names various cultures have given the constellations, the literary and folkloristic uses that have been made of the stars through the centuries, and the often incredible associations that ancient people established with the stars. ... The book is the only complete coverage of its kind in English. It is completely non-technical, hence accessible to etymologists, anthropologists and amateur star-gazers. But it contains so much unique reading material on early astronomical theory, so many delightful accounts drawn from the pages of books almost impossible to find today, that even the practicing astronomer will finds its pages refreshingly new and instructive.' Amazon back |
| Bierce, Ambrose Gwinnett, and David E Schults, S T Joshi (Editors), The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary, University of Georgia Press 2001 Amazon customer review: 'Ambrose Bierce, in this hilarious book, satirizes all aspects of human behavior. This lexicon that he has created provides often true insight in to the tacit meanings of otherwise benign words. For example, PRAY, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy. This book is a must-get.' Doshi Amazon back |
| Borowski, Ephraim J, and Jonathan M Borwein, HarperCollins Dictionary of Mathematics, Harper Collins 1991 'It is the immodest hope of the authors that this dictionary will not only prove valuable as a reference book for students of mathematics at all levels from secondary schools to a master's degree, but also offer much to interest a more general readership.' Amazon back |
| Bronowski, Jacob, The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination (Silliman Lectures), Yale University Press 1978 The Silliman Foundation Lectures: 'On the foundation established in memory of Mrs. Hepsa Ely Silliman, the President and Fellows of Yale University present an annual course of lectures designed to illustrate the presence and providence of God as manifested in the natural and moral world.' Jacket: '[Bronowski] examines the mechanisms of our perception; the origin and nature of natural language; formal systems and scientific discourse; and how science, as a systematic attempt to establish closed systems one after another, progresses by exploring its own errors and new but unforseen connections.' Library Journal Amazon back |
| Eco, Umberto, and William Weaver (translator), The Name of the Rose, Harcourt Brace 1983 Jacket review: 'No mere detective story, we are given absorbing insights into [the] age - its history, its predicaments, its intricate politics and religious wars, its philosophy, mythology, science, handcrafts, cuisine, medicine and sorcery.' The London Times Literary Supplement. Amazon back |
| Genesis, and Alexander Jones (editor), in The Jerusalem Bible, Darton Longman and Todd 1966 'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was a formless void, there was darkness over the deep, and God's spirit hovered over the water.' (I, 1-2) Amazon back |
| Man, John, Alpha Beta: How 26 Letters Shaped the Western World, John Wiley and Sons 2001 Jacket: ' The idea behind the alphabet - that language with all its wealth of meaning can be recorded with a few meaningless signs - is an extraordinary one. So extraordinary, in fact, that it occurrred only once in human history: in Egypt about 4000 years ago, newly discovered origins that this book is the first to detail. Apha Betas then follows the emergence of the western alphabet as it evolved into its present form, contributing vital elelemtns to our sense of identity along the way. The Israelites used it to define their God, the Greeks to capture their myths, the Romans to display their power. And today it seems on the verge of yet further expansion through the internet.' Amazon back |
| Winchester, Simon, The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Oxford English Dictionary, Penguin Books 1998 Review; 'Absolutely riveting ... a portrait of the emergence of the modern tongue; an insight into Victorian mental health policies; and an evocation of a remarkable intellectual friendship between two men who were radically divided ... a tour de force' Will Self, The Times Amazon back |
Click on an "Amazon" link in the booklist at the foot of the page to buy the book, see more details or search for similar items
Related sites:
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Revealing Vatican attempts to propagate its religion by international treaty
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