The Civilization of Illiteracy Part 50

"History remains a strict discipline only when it stops short, in its description, of the nonverbal past." (Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders, The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind, p. 3).

Derrick de Kerkhove, Charles J. Lumsden, Editors. The Alphabet and the Brain. The Lateralization of Writing.

Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer Verlag, 1988.

In this book, Edward Jones and Chizato Aoki report on the different cognitive processing of phonetic (Kana) and logographic (Kanji) characters in j.a.panese (p. 301).

Andr Martinet. Le Langage. Paris: Encyclopdie de la Pliade, 1939.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phnomnologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothque des Ides, 1945.

Andr Leroi-Gourhan. Moyens d'expression graphique, in Bulletin du Centre de Formation aux Recherches Ethnologiques, Paris, No.

4, 1956, pp. 1-3.

-. Le geste et la parole, Vol. I and II. Paris: Albin Michel, 1964-1965. -. Les racines du monde, in Entretiens avec Claude-Henri Rocquet. Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1982.

Gordon V. Childe. The Bronze Age. New York: Biblio and Tannen, 1969.

John DeFrances. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. 1983.

Marshall McLuhan. Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw Hill 1964.

In many of his writings, Roland Barthes suggested characteristics of the oral and visual culture. The distinction between the two preoccupied him.

Klingon is a language crafted by Marc Okrand, a linguist, for use by fictional characters. The popularity of Star Trek explains how Klingon spread around the world.

By eliminating sources of ambiguity and prescribing stylistic rules, controlled languages aim for improved readability. They are easier to maintain and they support computational processing, such as machine translation (cf. Willem-Olaf Huijsen, Introduction to Controlled Languages, a Webtext of 1996).

An example of an artificial language of controlled functions and logic is Logics Workbench (LWB), developed at the University of Berne, in Switzerland. The language is available through the WWW.

Drawing: The trace left by a tool drawn along a surface particularly for the purpose of preparing a representation or pattern. Drawing forms the basis of all the arts.

Edward Laning, The Act of Drawing, New York: McGraw Hill, 1971.

Design: Balducinni defined design as "a visible demonstration by means of those things which man has first conceived in his mind and pictured in the imagination and which the practised hand can make appear."

"Before Balducinni, its primary sense was drawing." (cf. Oxford Companion to Art). More information is given in the references for the chapter devoted to design.

Alan Pipes, Drawing for 3-Dimensional Design: Concepts, Ill.u.s.tration, Presentation, London: Thames and Hudson, 1990.

Thomas Crump. The Anthropology of Numbers, Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Referring to Yos.h.i.+o Yano's article of 1973, in j.a.panese, ent.i.tled Communication Life of the Family, Crump writes: "...age, in the absence of other overreaching criteria, determines hierarchy: this rule applies, for instance, in j.a.pan, and is based on the ant.i.thesis of semmai-kohai, whose actual meaning is simply senior-junior. The moral basis of the precedence of the elder over the younger (cho-yo-no-jo) originated in China, and is reflected in the first instance in the precedence of siblings of the same s.e.x, which is an important structural principle within the family" (p. 69).

On the issue of context affecting language functions, see George Carpenter Barker, Social Functions of Language in a Mexican-American Community. Phoenix: The University of Arizona Press, 1972.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. The Disuniting of America. Reflections on a Multicultural Society. New York: W.W. Norton, 1992.

Sneja Gunew and Jan Mahyuddin, Editors. Beyond the Echo.

Multicultural Women's Writing . St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1988.

Stephen J. Rimmer. The Cost of Multiculturalism. Belconnen, ACT: S.J.Rimmer, 1991.

Language and Logic

A.E. Van Vogt. The World of Null-A. 1945. The novel was inspired by a work of Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity. An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (1933).

Walter J. Ong seems convinced that "...formal logic is the invention of Greek culture after it had interiorized the technology of alphabetic writing, and so made a permanent part of its noetic resources the kind of thinking that alphabetic writing made possible" (Op. cit., p. 52). He reports on A.R.

Luria's book, Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations (1976). After experiments designed to define how illiterate subjects react to formal logical procedures (in particular, deductive reasoning), Luria seems to conclude that no one actually operates in formally stated syllogisms.

Lucien Lvy-Bruhl. Les fonctions mentales dans les socits infrieures. Paris: Alcan, 1910. (Translated as How Natives Think by Lilian A. Clave, London: Allen & Unwin, 1926.)

Lvy-Bruhl reconnects to the notion of partic.i.p.ation that originates in Plato's philosophy and applies it to fit the so-called pre-logic mentality.

Anton Dumitru. History of Logic. 4 vols. Turnbridge Wells, Kent: Abacus Press, 1977.

In exemplifying the law of partic.i.p.ation, Dumitru gives the following example: "In Central Brazil there lives an Indian tribe called Boror. In the same region we also find a species of parrots called Arara. The explorers were surprised to find that the Indians claimed to be Arara themselves. [...] Put differently, a member of the Boror tribe claims to be what he actually is and also something else just as real, namely an Arara parrot" (vol. 1, pp. 5-6).

Ren Descartes (1596-1650), under his Latinized name Renatus Cartesius, sees logic as "teaching us to conduct well our reason in order to discover the truths we ignore" ("qui apprend bien conduire sa raison pour dcouvrir les vrits qu'on ignore").

For Descartes, mathematics is the general method of science.

Oeuvres de Descartes. Publies par Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, Eds. 11 vols. Nouvelle prsentation en co-dition avec le Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Paris: Vrin. 1965-1973 (reprint of the 1897-1909 edition). In English, the rendition by Elizabeth S. Haldane and George R.T. Ross was published in London, Cambridge University Press, 1967.

"Logic is the art of directing reason aright, in obtaining the knowledge of things, for the instruction both of ourselves and of others. It consists of the reflections which have been made on the four princ.i.p.al operations of the mind: conceiving, judging, reasoning, and disposing" (Port Royal Logic, Introduction).

John Locke (1632-1704) was looking for simple logical elements and rules to compound them. Certainty is not the result of syllogistic inference. "Syllogism is at best nothing but the art of bringing to light, in debate, the little knowledge we have, without adding any other to it." An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London, 1690) sets an empirical, psychologically based perspective of logic.

George Boole (1815-1864) conceived of a logical calculus, in An Investigation of the Laws of Thought on which are founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities (London,1854), which eventually became the basis for digital computation.

Fung-Yu-lan. Prcis d'histoire de la philosophie chinoise. Paris: Plon, 1952.

"It is very difficult for somebody to understand fully Chinese philosophical works, if he is not able to read the original text. The language is indeed a barrier. Due to the suggestive character of Chinese philosophical writings, this barrier gets more daunting, these writings being almost untranslatable. In translation, they lose their power of suggestion. In fact, a translation is nothing but an interpretation" (p. 35).

Chang-tzu. cf. Anton Dumitru, Op.cit., p. 13.

Kung-Fu-tzu (551-479, BCE), whose Latinized name is Confucius, expressed the logical requirement to "rectify the names." This translates as the need to put things in agreement with one another by correct designations. "The main thing is the rectification of names (cheng ming) [...] If the names are not rectified, the words cannot fit; if the words do not fit, the affairs [in the world] will not be successful. If these affairs are not successful, neither rites nor music can flourish. If rites and music do not flourish, punishments cannot be just. If they are not just, people do not know how to act." The conclusion is, "The wise man should never show levity in using words;"

(Lun-yu, cf. Wing-Tsit-chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963).

Aristotle (384-322 BCE). Logic in his view is thinking about thinking. The whole logical theory of the syllogism is presented in the a.n.a.lytica Priora. The a.n.a.lytica Posteriora gives the structure of deductive sciences. The notion of political animal is part of the Aristotelian political system (cf.

Politics).

Takeo Doi. Amae no kozo. Tokyo: Kobundo. 1971. (Translated as The Anatomy of Dependence by John Bester, Tokyo/New York: Kodansho International and Harper & Row,1973.)

Vedic texts, the collective name for Veda, defined as the science (the root of the word seems to be similar to the Greek for idea, or the Latin videre, to see) of direct intuition, convey the experience of the Rsis, ancient sages who had a direct perception of things. The writings that make up Veda are: Rig Veda, invocatory science; Yajur Veda, sacrificial; Sama Veda, melody; Atharva Veda, of incantation. In each Veda, there is a section on the origin of the ritual, on the meaning, and on the esoteric aspect.

Mircea Eliade. Yoga. Paris: Gallimard, 1960.

"India has endeavoured...to a.n.a.lyze the various conditioning factors of the human being. ...this was done not in order to reach a precise and coherent explanation of the human being, as did, for instance, Europe of the 19th century,... but in order to know how far the zones of the human being go and see whether there is anything else beyond these conditionings" (p. 10).

The logic of action, as part of logical theory, deals with various aspects of defining what leads to reaching a goal and what are the factors involved in defining the goal and testing the result.