Philosophical Ramblings Thread

[a completely inoffensive name]

Get Monty his PhD in post-modernism immediately.

[HoreTore]

Kids, stay away from linguistic studies. Do drugs instead.

But yeah, I do agree with your conclusion that the study of formal semantics is only a study of the effects of formal semantics on formal semantics. I can't see it having much of a connection to reality(unlike maths). That's the main reason I dropped out of my masters last fall, I need real-world application in what I'm studying.

[Montmorency]

Yeah, it does smack somewhat of sophistry, maybe in a post-modernistic way, so I wanted to know if anyone could unravel any fallacies, omissions, or conflations in my reasoning. I mean, my exposure to semantics as a field is limited to a couple of old papers I happen to have read, so it could be that my cogitations have an insubstantial basis, in addition to being too many parts roughage than otherwise.

Horetore, my impression was that you were doing a degree like Theory and Criticism, something under the heading of Philosophy at any rate. Or am I off-base? What was your exposure to linguistics?

Disclosure: I'm at somewhere related to "clinical" linguistics at the moment. I'll get back to you all within the next few years if I can make it through to some sort of practice.

If not, there's always contracting I suppose...

[HoreTore]

Yeah, it does smack somewhat of sophistry, maybe in a post-modernistic way, so I wanted to know if anyone could unravel any fallacies, omissions, or conflations in my reasoning. I mean, my exposure to semantics as a field is limited to a couple of old papers I happen to have read, so it could be that my cogitations have an insubstantial basis, in addition to being too many parts roughage than otherwise.

Horetore, my impression was that you were doing a degree like Theory and Criticism, something under the heading of Philosophy at any rate. Or am I off-base? What was your exposure to linguistics?

Disclosure: I'm at somewhere related to "clinical" linguistics at the moment. I'll get back to you all within the next few years if I can make it through to some sort of practice.

If not, there's always contracting I suppose...

My degree was called "International education", so I assumed it would be concerned with different educational systems, pedagogical philosophies and such challenges in different parts of the world. What it turned out to be, however, was constant nonsense about language trivialities, like why the human rights declaration is wrong because it isn't worded like a, say, african would want it(because, somehow, that's "oppression"). It was about form, not substance, which I see as a major feature of post-modernist and linguistic studies, particularly those where they try to influence reality. It was also so blatantly leftist it made me sick.

Anyway, I don't see much of a problem with your OP. It's a logical conclusion to me. I'm sure a proper post-modernist will burn you at the stake for using gender-based oppressive discourse.


God, how I hate the term 'discourse'