C-142. Sense and tense

That we need to reinvent language is obvious. If we cannot Grasp well that which is being talked about -- or needs talking about (C-110: what is called for), but isn’t being talked about (C-55), then we cannot expect to have a firm enough Grasp of materiality to make and take the collision-relevant steps (avoiding and/or arranging) we need.

How we got to this juncture also seems obvious (C-138) … and contrasting the tense of verbs with the sense – the R-sense (C-128) – of verbs is indicative. Tense tells us about behavioral entity (BE) behavior in B-time (the familiar body particulars of “past, present and future”). But we need to know and to be able to talk about behavior more historically than that, to be able to Grasp the R-sense of materiality (e.g., G-change: C-138).

Language is a technology. Languages are invented technologies, responsive to needed functionality but far from fully comprehensive of and productive of our needed functionality … and these technologies are severely biased by conditions obtaining at the time in CEM-history of their invention (C-39: the BPO bias). And also biased by the absence of an R-sense of the past, present (C-96) and future -- i.e., no Grasp of CEM-history (App. XI), of what is general and not just particular (III) about steps taken, and of steps yet to be composed and then taken, of what it is like to be a Pioneer AT and IN the Frontier (C-118-9).

We can conjugate verbs, adopting conventional linguistic practice (Skinner) and/or conforming to the compositional logic of the BPO-biased grammar (Chomsky) … but what still remains are the unmet demands of messaging (App. XX) for what is and/or needs to be talked about. There we saw that the Realization progression required for problem solving and the mapping of that process (App. XIX) specifies that many words (R-words: C-107) need (but rarely have had explicitly) two noun and two verb applications … to make the path of needed functionalities evident.

(R-words take some of the deleterious effects of concepts out of play [C-124], such as the limited sense of generality as no more than universality among particulars … the latter to the distress of needed functionality responsive to the Nature of Things’ general persisting conditions [III].)

Language needs to hew closer to an R-sense if it is to make an optimum contribution to behavioral architecture (C-90) … to the solutions needed for the many problems yet unsolved (0: Quality of life) – and those solved poorly and/or too expensively (0: Sp,S-P,Ps,P).

When it comes to needed functionality, there are steps we take and those we don’t appear to take but which are actually a special kind of step. Principal among these are cognition and communication-aided steps (App. III) whose outcome is (“just”!) an observation, an idea (C-143): the materiality (“stuff”) of messages. We cannot afford to speak meagerly of all this, as we do with the (merely) conceptually related “language and thought” (C-85).

(See R-blocks, for R-sense, in App. XXIII, as a potential introductory technology.)

(c) 2015 R. F. Carter
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