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Interesting article, from my pov anyway. The argument put forward is a little like those between "descriptivists" and "prescriptivists" in the realm of grammar
by LeonB 3y ago
Interesting article, from my pov anyway. The argument put forward is a little like those between "descriptivists" and "prescriptivists" in the realm of grammar arguments.
I was expecting to see this Alfred North Whitehead Quote pop up --
"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them."
Whitehead making the point that not knowing how it works is part of the magic of the whole thing! If every layer of abstraction "needed" to be understood by everybody: the layers would not be serving any purpose.
Whitehead said other things too that were clever and pithy.
- defrost 3y agoeg: "From this proposition it will follow, when arithmetical addition has been defined, that 1 + 1 = 2." ~ Alfred North Whitehead (& Bertie R.) Volume I, Principia Mathematica https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=umhistmath&cc=umhistmath&idno=aat3201.0001.001&frm=frameset&view=image&seq=401 https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=umhis...
- LeonB 3y agoYeh - it’s a bit of a slow boiler that one. Takes, what, 379 pages to establish that 1 + 1 = 2. Still, Orwell took longer to arrive at 2 + 2 = 5. (Edited to include actual page number since you linked directly to it above, thank you!!)
- defrost 3y agoTo be fair there's a lot of preamble to lift by the bootstraps from the concept of object, not object, set of objects. Recdep nowdate: 2 + 2 = 3
- TRiG_Ireland 3y ago> "descriptivists" and "prescriptivists" in the realm of grammar arguments In terms of working academic linguists, this is not a debate. "Prescriptivism" belongs in style guides, not in linguistic texts. All linguists are "descriptivists".