----- Original Message ----- From: "Paul Echeverri" <gomi at pollywog.com> To: <dragaera at dragaera.info> Sent: Thursday, February 03, 2005 12:01 AM Subject: Re: Hello, I'd like to have an argument (was Re: duh!) > Jeff Gibbons wrote: > > >Ah. > > You know, the difficulty of arguing via email is that not only does time > >pass between volleys, but that others interject new points, and the tangents > >change. We started on the nature of the English language, then to the nature > >of an argument, to the definition of a contradiction. If we had reversed the > >last two, we would have followed the same progression as a rather famous > >Monty Python skit. > > > >Jeff > > > > > Indeed -- I was reacting to 'contradiction' in the logical sense, a > paradox or impossibility, as that had seemed to me to be the sense in > which skzb was using it. By that definition, life _cannot_ contradict > itself, as contradictions are logical impossibilities and thus do not > exist in reality. Where there is apparent contradiction (in this sense), > there must be a misunderstanding or misperception of the facts. Thus, I > found his use of 'contradiction' in that specific example to be > thoroughly baffling. There is, to my understanding, no contradiction in > the ongoing transformations of living creatures. Unliving mass is > absorbed, integrated by the organism, and formerly living mass is > detached from the organism and ejected. Just because the life/unlife > pair operates as a continuum rather than as a binary operation is no > reason to call it a contradiction -- at least as I understand the word. > So I guess we're full circle to use of language again. > > pe > If you think about it, the fact that we both misunderstood his use of a simple word helps prove the orignal point of the argument in the first place: that the presence of prescriptivists helps to maintain a standard in language, thus making communication simpler. Oops. Jeff