"In general, one might define a complex of semantic components connected by logical constants as a concept. The dictionary of a language is then a system of concepts in which a phonological form and certain syntactic and morphological characteristics are assigned to each concept. This system of concepts is structured by several types of relations. It is supplemented, furthermore, by redundancy or implicational rules […] representing general properties of the whole system of concepts. […] At least a relevant part of these general rules is not bound to particular languages, but represents presumably universal structures of natural languages. They are not learned, but are rather a part of the human ability to acquire an arbitrary natural language." (Manfred Bierwisch, "Semantics", 1970)
"The syntax and the grammar of the language of music are not capricious; they are dictated by the texture and organization of the deep levels of the mind, so with mathematics."( H E Huntley,"The Divine Proportion", 1970)
"Because the subject matter of cybernetics is the propositional or informational aspect of the events and objects in the natural world, this science is forced to procedures rather different from those of the other sciences. The differentiation, for example, between map and territory, which the semanticists insist that scientists shall respect in their writings must, in cybernetics, be watched for in the very phenomena about which the scientist writes. Expectably, communicating organisms and badly programmed computers will mistake map for territory; and the language of the scientist must be able to cope with such anomalies." (Gregory Bateson, "Steps to an Ecology of Mind", 1972)
"Because the subject matter of cybernetics is the propositional or informational aspect of the events and objects in the natural world, this science is forced to procedures rather different from those of the other sciences. The differentiation, for example, between map and territory, which the semanticists insist that scientists shall respect in their writings must, in cybernetics, be watched for in the very phenomena about which the scientist writes. Expectably, communicating organisms and badly programmed computers will mistake map for territory; and the language of the scientist must be able to cope with such anomalies." (Gregory Bateson, "Steps to an Ecology of Mind", 1972)
"Everything we think we know about the world is a model. Every word and every language is a model. All maps and statistics, books and databases, equations and computer programs are models. So are the ways I picture the world in my head - my mental models. None of these is or ever will be the real world. […] Our models usually have a strong congruence with the world. That is why we are such a successful species in the biosphere. Especially complex and sophisticated are the mental models we develop from direct, intimate experience of nature, people, and organizations immediately around us." (Donella H Meadows, "Limits to Growth", 1972)
"Images apparently occupy a curious position somewhere between the statements of language, which are intended to convey a meaning, and the things of nature, to which we only can give a meaning." (Ernst Gombrich, "Symbolic Images", 1972)
"Mathematics is much more than a language for dealing with the physical world. It is a source of models and abstractions which will enable us to obtain amazing new insights into the way in which nature operates. Indeed, the beauty and elegance of the physical laws themselves are only apparent when expressed in the appropriate mathematical framework." (Melvin Schwartz, "Principles of Electrodynamics", 1972)
"By taking the word as an absolute, never investigating its personal significance, the word acquires a life of its own. Reifying the word in this way removes it from its practical function as a more or less efficient way of referring to a process which remains alive and has continually changing referents. Enactment is one way of keeping alive the words a person uses to characterize himself or someone else. Keeping his language connected to action permits feelings of change and growth." (Erving Polster & Miriam Polster, "Gestalt Therapy Integrated", 1973)
"The catastrophe model is at the same time much less and much more than a scientific theory; one should consider it as a language, a method, which permits classification and systematization of given empirical data [...] In fact, any phenomenon at all can be explained by a suitable model from catastrophe theory." (René F Thom, 1973)
"The field of probability and statistics is then transformed into a Tower of Babel, in which only the most naive amateur claims to understand what he says and hears, and this because, in a language devoid of convention, the fundamental distinctions between what is certain and what is not, and between what is impossible and what is not, are abolished. Certainty and impossibility then become confused with high or low degrees of a subjective probability, which is itself denied precisely by this falsification of the language. On the contrary, the preservation of a clear, terse distinction between certainty and uncertainty, impossibility and possibility, is the unique and essential precondition for making meaningful statements (which could be either right or wrong), whereas the alternative transforms every sentence into a nonsense." (Bruno de Finetti, "Theory of Probability", 1974)
"The unconscious reveals its meaning imaginatively, through symbols and images, and it speaks [...] a basically mythological language." (Morton Kelsey, "Myth, History & Faith", 1974)
"The theory of the nature of mathematics is extremely reactionary. We do not subscribe to the fairly recent notion that mathematics is an abstract language based, say, on set theory. In many ways, it is unfortunate that philosophers and mathematicians like Russell and Hilbert were able to tell such a convincing story about the meaning-free formalism of mathematics. [...] Mathematics is a way of preparing for decisions through thinking. Sets and classes provide one way to subdivide a problem for decision preparation; a set derives its meaning from decision making, and not vice versa." (C West Churchman et al, "Thinking for Decisions Deduction Quantitative Methods", 1975)
"Without a constant misuse of language, there cannot be any discovery, any progress." (Paul K Feyerabend, "Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge", 1975)
"A higher-level formal language is an abstract machine." (Joseph Weizenbaum, "Computer power and human reason: From judgment to calculation", 1976)
"[…] semantic nets [are defined] as graphical analogues of data structures representing 'facts' in a computer system for understanding natural language." (Lenhart K Schubert," "Extending the Expressive Power of Semantic Networks", Artificial Intelligence 7, 1976)
"Computers make possible an entirely new relationship between theories and models. I have already said that theories are texts. Texts are written in a language. Computer languages are languages too, and theories may be written in them. Indeed, for the present purpose we need not restrict our attention to machine languages or even to the kinds of 'higher-level' languages we have discussed. We may include all languages, specifically also natural languages, that computers may be able to interpret. The point is precisely that computers do interpret texts given to them, in other words, that texts determine computers' behavior. Theories written in the form of computer programs are ordinary theories as seen from one point of view." (Joseph Weizenbaum, "Computer power and human reason: From judgment to calculation" , 1976)
"Being a language, mathematics may be used not only to inform but also, among other things, to seduce." (Benoît B Mandelbrot, "Fractals : Form, chance and dimension", 1977)
"A theory is a category with certain operations (defined up to isomorphism) [...] The notion of theory is thus 'intrinsic', i.e., independent of a particular presentation via formal languages and axiomatic systems. In this sense, categorical logic may be viewed as 'synthetic' or 'intrinsic' logic by opposition to the usual 'analytic', 'formal' logic." (André Joyal & Gonyalo E Reyes, "Forcing and generic models in categorical logic", 1977)
"[...] much of the information on which human decisions are based is possibilistic rather than probabilistic in nature, and the intrinsic fuzziness of natural languages - which is a logical consequence of the necessity to express information in a summarized form - is, in the main, possibilistic in origin." (Lotfi A Zadeh, "Fuzzy Sets as the Basis for a Theory of Possibility", Fuzzy Sets and Systems, 1978)
"[Human consciousness] depends wholly on our seeing the outside world in such categories. And the problems of consciousness arise from putting reconstitution beside internalization, from our also being able to see ourselves as if we were objects in the outside world. That is in the very nature of language; it is impossible to have a symbolic system without it." (Jacob Bronowski, "The origins of knowledge and imagination", 1978)
"But there is another kind of change, too, change that is less suited to mathematical analysis: the abrupt bursting of a bubble, the discontinuous transition from ice at its melting point to water at its freezing point, the qualitative shift in our minds when we 'get' a pun or a play on words. Catastrophe theory is a mathematical language created to describe and classify this second type of change. It challenges scientists to change the way they think about processes and events in many fields." (Alexander Woodcock & Monte Davis, "Catastrophe Theory", 1978)
"Common to both logical positivism and transformational linguistics is their view of language-as-mathematics. Both focus on language as a system of primitive or elementary units which can be combined according to fixed rules. However useful this analogy may be in certain limited ways, it creates problems in understanding how the purely formal system of elements and rules relates to something other than itself. Both create dualistic systems which oppose formal linguistic competence to empirical components." (Stephen A Tyler, "The said and the unsaid: Mind, meaning, and culture", 1978)
"Information is carried by physical entities, such as books or sound waves or brains, but it is not itself material. Information in a living system is a feature of the order and arrangement of its parts, which arrangement provides the signs that constitute a ‘code’ or ‘language’." (John Z Young, "Programs of the Brain", 1978)
"Clever metaphors die hard. Their tenacity of life approaches that of the hardiest micro-organisms. Living relics litter our language, their raisons d’etre forever past, ignored if not forgotten, and their present fascination seldom impaired by the confusions they may create." (James R Moore, "The Post-Darwinian Controversies", 1979)
"The conceptual framework of quantum mechanics, supported by massive volumes of experimental data, forces contemporary physicists to express themselves in a manner that sounds, even to the uninitiated, like the language of mystics." (Gary Zukav, "The Dancing Wu Li Masters", 1979)
"The use of metaphor is one of many devices available to the scientific community to accomplish the task of accommodation of language to the causal structure of the world." (Richard Boyd, "Metaphor and theory change: what is ‘metaphor’ a metaphor for?", 1979)
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