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Semantics Quotes

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Semantics Quotes

“We live in a highly complex, technological world – and it's not entirely obvious what's right and what's wrong in any given situation, unless you can parse the situation, deconstruct it. People just don't have the insight to be able to do that very effectively.”

ThinkingLifePhilosophyWisdomScienceKnowledgeTechnologyMoralityEthicsIntelligenceInsightStupidityThoughtComplexityWrongRightModern WorldBrillianceAnalyticsSemanticsSad Truth
Author:Christopher Langan
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“Reason, when understood ontologically, takes on an entirely different meaning from the one conventionally assigned to it. It takes on the extra “dimensions” of emotion, perception, intuition, desire and will. All of these are involved in the intricate nexus for providing sufficient reasons for actions. People who don’t understand our work keep reducing reason to one dimension, which means that our central point that reason is ontological and explains everything – including love, human error, insanity, and everything else that, according to the conventional treatment of reason, has nothing to do with reason – has completely escaped them. Reason, in our system, is both syntactic (structural) and semantic (meaningful). Its semantic aspect is what gives it the capacity to generate all the weird and wonderful things that average people do not associate with reason. They regard reason in strictly syntactic, machinelike terms. That is only one aspect of reason. It has many others.”

ReasonPhilosophyEmotionApolloRationalismSyntaxSemanticsDionysusOntological MathematicsIrrationalism
Book:Base Reality: Ultimate Existence
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“To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born -- the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to he accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it be-devils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.”

MindLanguageInformationCommunicationHumanExperienceSymbolsConstraintsSemanticsSemiotics
Book:The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell
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“Nothing complements a fast mind better than a slow tongue. And nothing aggravates a slow mind better than a fast tongue.”

MindWisdomSpeakBrainSilenceWiseFoolIntelligentSilentIntellectTongueFoolishComplimentThinkerSpeakersThinkAggravationTalkComplementTalkersFoolsFastThinkersSemanticsComplimentsPonderConsiderSpeakerContemplateTonguesGeneral SemanticsAggravateTalkerThink AboutComplementsReflect OnRuminate OnAggravatesBrood AboutBrood OnChew OverCogitateDeliberate OverDwell OnMeditate OnMull OverMuse OnTurn Over In One S Mind
Author:Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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“Objections to Christianity... are phrased in words, but that does not mean that they are really a matter of language and analysis and argument. Words are tokens of the will. If something stronger than language were available then we would use it. But by the same token, words in defense of Christianity miss the mark as well: they are a translation into the dispassionate language of argument of something that resides far deeper in the caverns of volition, of commitment. Perhaps this is why Saint Francis, so the story goes, instructed his followers to "preach the Gospel always, using words if necessary." It is not simply and straightforwardly wrong to make arguments in the defense of the Christian faith, but it is a relatively superficial activity: it fails to address the core issues.”

ChristianityArgumentWordsSemanticsChristian ApologeticsSaint FrancisStronger Than Language
Book:The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis
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“Conceptual historians of various stripes asked after the origins of ideas, but they sought them by tracing the changing meanings of words across different socio-historical contexts. My concern, by contrast, is with the practical origins of ideas: with the ways in which the ideas we live by can be shown to be rooted in practical needs and concerns generated by certain facts about us and our situation.”

PragmatismSemanticsSocial HistoryIntellectual HistoryHistory Of IdeasPragmaticsConceptual History
Book:The Practical Origins of Ideas: Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering
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“Why are some words bad? The idea that they could be bothered me as a kid. Words are strings of sounds. How could sounds be bad? But of course: words aren’t just strings of sound. They are strings of sound to which we attach meaning. And yet it’s not the meaning of words that makes them bad either. Just consider this list: poop, crap, manure, dung, feces, stool. It’s all the same s**t. And yet, it’s only “s**t” we shouldn’t say. Why is that? F**k if I know.”

LanguageWordsMeaningShitSemanticsPhilosphyPoo
Book:Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Adventures in Philosophy with My Kids
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“If you understand McCarthy's eval, you understand more than just a stage in the history of languages. These ideas are still the semantic core of Lisp today. So studying McCarthy's original paper shows us, in a sense, what Lisp really is. It's not something that McCarthy designed so much as something he discovered. It's not intrinsically a language for AI or for rapid prototyping, or any other task at that level. It's what you get (or one thing you get) when you try to axiomatize computation.”

LanguageProgrammingArtificial IntelligenceSemanticsComputationLispPrototypingAxiomaticsEvalJohn Mccarthy
Author:Paul Graham
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“Von Neumann languages do not have useful properties for reasoning about programs. Axiomatic and denotational semantics are precise tools for describing and understanding conventional programs, but they only talk about them and cannot alter their ungainly properties. Unlike von Neumann languages, the language of ordinary algebra is suitable both for stating its laws and for transforming an equation into its solution, all within the "language."”

LawLanguageUnderstandingSolutionsOrdinaryProgramToolsPropertyReasoningConventionalPreciseEquationsTransformingDescribingSuitableAlgebraSemanticsVon Neumann
Author:John Backus
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“From semantics to shipbuilding, from dream theory to propositional logic, any specialist ... is invariably astonished to discover that modern knowledge was foreshadowed at the time. ... Should we not replace these foreshadowings by the study of the influences of Hellenistic thought on modern thought?”

ShouldDreamStudyInfluenceModernTheoryLogicSpecialistsSemanticsForeshadowing
Book:The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why it Had to Be Reborn
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