"is the same as"
Larry Trask
larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk
Tue Jan 25 15:26:12 UTC 2000
Stanley Friesen writes:
[snip account of ring species among salamanders]
> It seems absurd to say that just because the end-points are clearly
> distinct that each of the intermediate steps must *also* be held to be
> distinct! Ergo, I must use "same" to refer to a purely "local" state of
> affairs - any two *specific* populations are either the same or not,
> irregardless of the situation with other pairs of populations in the same
> series.
Why "absurd"?
At least in biology, such relations as "can interbreed with" or "cannot readily
be distinguished by eye from" need not be transitive -- I agree. But by what
right can we identify the relation "is the same as" with one of these? And
what would be the point of doing this?
> The same sort of situation can, and *does* hold for languages. The West
> Romance area is a dialect continuum, with chains of locally similar
> dialects connecting all of the separate "languages" in West Romance. So,
> does one treat all of West Romance as one language? It seems silly to call
> French and Portugese the same language, does it not. Yet they are connected
> by a series of pairwise similar dialects.
Indeed, and this is a common state of affairs. But how does this constitute an
argument for treating "is the same as" as a non-transitive relation? Better, I
suggest, to forget about this last relation altogether, and to speak instead of
some more appropriate relation, such as "is readily mutually comprehensible
with" -- which again I agree is not going to be transitive.
[LT, earlier]
>> But, if we agree to a fuzzy interpretation of 'is the same as', and hence to
>> its negation 'is not the same as', then we can no longer manipulate these
>> relations as though they had non-fuzzy interpretations, and draw non-fuzzy
>> conclusions -- which I think is the practice I was objecting to in the first
>> place.
> I am a little confused here. I do not remember ever actually applying
> "sameness" in a non-fuzzy manner in this discussion. (Of course, given the
> time lags, my memory is a little fuzzy itself).
As far as I can recall now, the objections of which I speak were not to Stanley
Friesen's postings, but rather to somebody else's. But it's been a while.
Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK
larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk
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