5 ideas
3916 | Hopi consistently prefers verbs and events to nouns and things [Whorf] |
Full Idea: Hopi, with its preference for verbs, as contrasted to our own liking for nouns, perpetually turns our propositions about things into propositions about events. | |
From: Benjamin Lee Whorf (An American Indian model of the Universe [1936], p.63) | |
A reaction: This should provoke careful thought about ontology - without concluding that it is entirely relative to language. |
3917 | Scientific thought is essentially a specialised part of Indo-European languages [Whorf] |
Full Idea: What we call "scientific thought" is a specialisation of the western Indo-European type of language. | |
From: Benjamin Lee Whorf (An American Indian model of the Universe [1936], p.246) | |
A reaction: This is the beginnings of an absurd extreme relativist view of science, based on a confusion about meaning and thought. |
3460 | Superactors and superspartans count against behaviourism [Putnam, by Searle] |
Full Idea: Putnam proposed the superactor/superspartan objection to behaviourism. | |
From: report of Hilary Putnam (Brains and Behaviour [1963]) by John Searle - The Rediscovery of the Mind Ch. 2.II | |
A reaction: This is a beautiful compression of the obvious counterexamples, which are behaviour-wth-no-experience, and experience-with-no-behaviour. Presumably, though, Spartans are disposed to go 'aagh!' when they get home, and there are no 'super' actors. |
7903 | The six perfections are giving, morality, patience, vigour, meditation, and wisdom [Nagarjuna] |
Full Idea: The six perfections are of giving, morality, patience, vigour, meditation, and wisdom. | |
From: Nagarjuna (Mahaprajnaparamitashastra [c.120], 88) | |
A reaction: What is 'morality', if giving is not part of it? I like patience and vigour being two of the virtues, which immediately implies an Aristotelian mean (which is always what is 'appropriate'). |
3915 | The Hopi have no concept of time as something flowing from past to future [Whorf] |
Full Idea: A Hopi has no general notion or intuition of time as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at an equal rate, out of a future, through a present, into a past. | |
From: Benjamin Lee Whorf (An American Indian model of the Universe [1936], p.57) | |
A reaction: If true, this would not so much support relativism of language as the view that that conception of time is actually false. |