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From: jc@mit-athena.UUCP (John Chambers)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy,net.ai,net.nlang,net.books
Subject: Re: WITTGENSTEIN Discussion #002  (Reposted)
Message-ID: <123@mit-athena.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 18-Mar-85 13:03:50 EST
Article-I.D.: mit-athe.123
Posted: Mon Mar 18 13:03:50 1985
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> In the third article, Jay first considers the proposition:  "If a 
> lion could speak, we could not understand him."    It is found to 
> be a little incorrect,  in that we could deduce and confirm  what 
> the  lion is saying from his reports of external  events.     

There was a clever illustration of why this is fallacious, published 
some years ago in the form of a science fiction short story.  Sorry, 
but I don't remember either the title or author; maybe there are some
SF fans around who do.

The scenario was the discovery of ruins of a recently-dead civilization
on Mars, complete with extensive libraries.  The only trouble was, there
wasn't any Rosetta stone.  The libraries had been written by members
of a species with no contact whatsoever with humans, not even common
ancestors that might have produced minimally similar outlooks on life.
But the scientists broke the "code" anyway.

The breakthrough came when one of the scientists recognized the layout
of a large chart on a wall in a room.  It was a periodic table.  This
is not a function of an individual's outlook on the universe.  Hydrogen
has the same properties everywhere, regardless of who is observing it.
So does helium, lithium, ..., uranium.  The electron orbitals are the
same everywhere, and they are what determine the observable properties
of the elements inside chemical compounds.  Any scientists on any planet
will come up with a periodical table, and a chart will look the same
(except for rotations and reflections).  The basic properties (atomic
number, atomic weight, filled/unfilled outer orbitals) will be the same
numbers (in some representation, to about 10 bits precision).  

Once such an artifact is encountered, decoding the numbering system 
would be straightforward; any cryptanalyst could do it.  (No, I don't 
believe there could be a usable numbering system that humans couldn't 
decode.  That's silly.)  Most of the names for the elements would be
complex symbols with visible inter-relationships, which gives you some
good hooks on the low-level syntax of the language (or at least of the
writing system).

If a lion were intelligent enough to "speak" (i.e., produce noises that
communicate information), and were willing to speak to us, there would
be relatively little trouble establishing understanding on a wide range
of topics.  Of course, we might never come to terms on value-judgements.
But that's a change-of-subject.
-- 

			John Chambers [...!decvax!mit-athena]

If you're not part of the solution, then you're part of the precipitate.