> On Fri, 14 Nov 1997, Nick Bostrom wrote:
> > > I'd say I'm a verb.
> >
> > You are both making category mistakes here. The sort of things that
>
> I apologize wholeheartedly; I'll ask your permission next time I want to
> make a flip metaphor.
We'll let it pass this time, but please observe that repeated failure
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> > IMHO, if one is afraid of being mentally imprisoned by language
> > patterns, one is better advised to read Carnap and W. V. Quine than
> > to study this e-prime stuff.
>
> Agreed; e-prime and general semantics are wastes of time which perpetuate
> the ludicrous (in its strong form) Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. If you're
> interested in language, try linguistics. Steven Pinker's _The Language
> Instinct_ is a good start; it pretty much sums up everything I learned in
> undergrade linguistics in a highly readable form. Pinker, a
> psycholinguist who is the world's leading child language acquisition
> researcher, is also one of the loud proponents of evolutionary psychology.
> He makes a number of points that readers of this list should find
> interesting.
Thank you for the suggestion! I will take a look at it.
Nick Bostrom
http://www.hedweb.com/nickb