Dusko wrote: colin mclarty's cryptic comment is very interesting to me, and it seems to
strike at the heart of some matters of interest.
Colin's comment didn't seem cryptic to me - let me guess what he meant.
On May 9, 2010, at 3:41 PM, Colin McLarty wrote:
Dusko Pavlovic Asks
is there any reason why words should be taken seriously?
That just depends on whether or not you want to be understood by people who do not already know everything you are going to say.
there are at least two ways to interpret this.
1) "you can only say something new if you declare what your words mean. otherwise, people will interpret them in their own way, and understand only what they already know."
2) "you can only say something new if you contribute to the evolution of language. otherwise, everything you say are just words that people already know, mostly in combinations that they already tried."
I thought he meant: 3) If you don't take the prevailing meaning of words seriously, you're likely to talk in ways that people won't understand, unless they happen to already know everything you're trying to say. I worry about this point a lot, because I often want to "fix" standard mathematical terminology that I dislike, and I have to weigh my desire to do that against my desire to be understood by people who are unwilling to learn new ways of talking. For example: do I use "n-category" to mean "weak n-category", which will eventually be the most sensible course of action, but may be premature, or do I use it to mean "strict n-category", as tradition dictates? Best, jb [For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]