ONT Re: Limited Mark Universes
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LMU. Note 6
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| By their fruit flies ye shall know them.
|
| ~~ Pragmatic definition of a geneticist.
To be a language, formally speaking, L c A*, is to embody
a distinction between the strings or sequences of A* that
are in L and those that aren't. There are two exceptions,
or degenerate cases, if one prefers to view them that way,
two languages that draw no distinction in the space of A*.
These are the "empty language" L_0 = {}, so empty that it
fails to contain even so much as the empty string <>, and
the "total language" L_1 = A*.
Some would say that we are only doing syntax as this point,
but others say that the semantic and pragmatic dimensions
cannot be reduced to zero magnitudes, even in this frame.
For example it is possible to see in the present setting --
others would say "read into the present scene" -- a bit,
yes, exactly one bit, of semantic meaning and pragmatic
motive, namely the Peircean arrow from the nonsense of
non-L to the sense of L, except for the non-orientable
cases, of course.
Jon Awbrey
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