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From: ladkin@kestrel.UUCP
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Subject: Re: The meaning of language (information content)
Message-ID: <13429@kestrel.ARPA>
Date: Mon, 13-Oct-86 18:17:21 EDT
Article-I.D.: kestrel.13429
Posted: Mon Oct 13 18:17:21 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 16-Oct-86 08:01:53 EDT
References: <16090@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Organization: Kestrel Institute, Palo Alto, CA
Lines: 19

In article <16090@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>, tedrick@ernie.Berkeley.EDU (Tom Tedrick) writes:
> There is bound to be some "information" (in the information-
> theoretic sense) in the samples of the language that remain.
> Cryptographers have frequently managed to break what were
> thought to be impossibly difficult encoding schemes.

This is not, nor can this ever be made into, an argument against
the private language argument (which is that there can be no such
thing as a private language).

Neither can it be an answer to Quine's radical translation argument.

To provide an analogy, I think it's a little like answering a proof
of the undecidability of predicate calculus by saying that there
are some pretty ingenious mathematicians out there who could
probably prove or disprove any predicate calculus formula you needed.

Peter Ladkin
ladkin@kestrel.arpa