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DavidOdden

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  1. It is analogous to the fees imposed on vendors who accept credit cards. Credit card companies charge vendors some amount for their service, which the market has set at about 3% but some companies charge more (hence “we don’t accept Discover or American Express”). In this case, the business can either eat the cost, or refuse to accept credit cards, or charge mor for using a credit card (if legal, otherwise they offer a discount for cash). NAR has the power to enforce terms on members using their services, and 3% per party is fairly standard (was so when we bought our first house in 1987). An agent has the greatest incentive to sell a house that they are the seller’s agent, so as a buyer you can assume that you will probably get shown many houses being sold by your agent: but not exclusively. MLS is the useful tool by which agents gain access to many more houses and buyers. Originally, there was little alternative to paying the “standard rate”, when all agents agree to abide by a certain fee standard. The rates have never been fully-enforceable so the NYT is just lying, no surprise. An agent can elect to forego some of their commission, if they want, but Agent A cannot force Agent B to accept a lower commission. I’ve heard of agents accepting a lower commission but it seems to be rare. Of course there was always “for sale by owner”, where there is a chance that you will sell your house for a good price. The interwebs provided some competition, and there are services which aim to match buyers and sellers for a lower commission. The FTC approach is to force multiple listing services to become public utilities, preventing them from not including discount sales in their listing. Outside of real estate, 3% is a ludicrously low sales commission given the agent's labor, so whiners who object to paying for the service provided by a real estate agent are free to arrange cheaper alternatives. Doing without an agent is an obvious albeit hard-to-implement choice. Shopping for a discount listing service is another choice, depending of course on the nature of the market you are in (i.e. do you need a shark, to make sure that you make the winning bid?). But real estate commissions are not "so high". Government excise taxes on the other hand...
  2. The next step in the analysis is to determine in what way children should be protected from harm (removing the question of the role of government), which therefore means identifying what is harmful to children. Many things are harmful to children, in my opinion. Causing a child to hold false beliefs is harmful, for example, causing them to believe that they are sacrificial animals meant to serve the greater good is harmful, believing in God or other supernatural entities or mystical supposedly axiomatic forces like “climate change” is harmful, causing a child to believe that good is arbitrary and subjective or that it is what is mandated by God (according to whomever) is also harmful. Raising a child so that they will believe that others will take care of them is harmful, similarly not raising a child so that they become independent self-propelling beings is harmful. It is harmful to cause a child to believe that heroin, meth, amphetamines and so on are harmless aids to spiritual development, it is also harmful to enable a child to inflict self harm (supplying them with dangerous materials such as tobacco, drugs or alcohol, also firearms or power tools when not paired with appropriate training). This is just a sample of harmful things, by no means an exhaustive list. Man is not born with a hard-wired moral code, such a code must be learned, and it is primarily the responsibility of the parent to provide a moral code to their child. Of course the child must choose to accept the code which is offered, or to develop their own moral code (ultimately though the choice of higher-level moral codes which rely on more perceptual principle such as “don’t kill yourself!”, “don’t steal!”, “don’t lie!”). The responsibility of the parent is to make an earnest effort to import a proper moral code to the child, and irresponsibility is defined on the basis of a lack of effort, not a lack of success. This is a very thin and under-specified framework for defining the idea of “protecting a child”. Still casting aside the question of proper or constitutional law and the role of government as a means of protecting rights, if a society cannot say what end it is trying to reach and only relies on meaningless slogans like “protect the children!”, I see no hope for bridging the logical gap between that desired end and the proper means of reaching the end. There is an underlying historical / documentary challenge coming from this specific law. Social media has abundant unsupported assertions as to why this law was passed, but those analyses lack concrete evidence. Can anyone locate floor debates or committee reports, or even notes from legislative aids, surrounding the enactment of this law which provides evidence as to the state of mind of the legislators who voted for (or against) this bill? I have searched for any such evidence on the Utah legislature website, to no avail. This is not entirely surprising, since overt discussion of real issues is typically lacking in the official legislative process (discussion of content needs to be via unofficial channels, in order to circumvent the Utah Government Records Access and Management Act – if there’s no record of discussion, there’s no hope of revealing the underlying truth about a particular law). It is not insane to think that most legislators hate social media platforms for being so blatantly leftist in their policies, that is both a standard right-wing meme and an observable fact. However, there isn’t a shred of concrete evidence that this fact caused the majority to vote yes on the bill.
  3. Do you think that parents (or other legal guardians) should be held legally responsible for harm that befalls a child because of lack of parental supervision, including foreseeably bad choices? Or should parents be free from the consequences of their inaction, when action (restriction) is warranted?
  4. So do you argue that the age of legal adulthood should be 8, including e.g. the obligation to fulfill contract, provide for your own survival, have sex etc?
  5. There is a recurring problem – here and elsewhere – of asserting an underlying reasoning behind government actions. Whether those supposed reasons are offered by the right or the left, there is never any concrete proof that those are the reasons. Indeed, there is never any discussion of the actual mental state of the legislators or regulators, much less evidence of that mental state. Instead, the analysts will pick up some phrase uttered by some person and say “That is why we have this law”. Poppycock! The real reason why such laws come into existence (and this should be so self-evident that no proof is needed, I admit that this is a lazy argument) is that each law-maker creates a mental image of the political consequences of supporting or opposing any law. This particular law is “about protecting children”, no sane politician would oppose protecting children, end of story. But the real issue is very complicated, and Gus fails to give the issue the scrutiny that it deserves – who has what right? Let’s start with the question of what rights children have: do they have the same rights as adults? For example, can a 10 year old rightfully have sex with an adult, consent to surgery, or form contracts and be sued for breach? If not, why not? Under current law, the answer is no they cannot, because children only exercise rights under adult supervision. In the case of surgery, surgery is possible with the consent of the adult (and despite child opposition), but sex and contracts are strictly impossible for children. It is never legally permissible for a parent to rent out their 10 year old under the guise of “parental approval of prostitution”. The spectrum of “social media sites” out there ranges from various altruistic do-good social-support safe spaces to criminal and sexual Angie’s lists. We might then distinguish unsafe websites from safe indeed good websites, and only restrict access to unsafe websites. But who is the subject of such restrictions? The broadest restriction bans all unsafe websites from existing, as determined by an official government censor. First Amendment strongly says no to that. The narrowest restrictions start by limiting the class of individuals allowed to exercise their adult choices, to, dare I say it, adults. There is a line that can be drawn between engaging in sex and reading about sex, which underlies this law (though we have no idea what the members of the Utah legislature were thinking when they voted for the law). The most-accessible distinction is between the actual sex act (the adult cannot deem that the child reasonably consents) and gaining expressive knowledge of sex acts (or criminal acts, etc) where the adult may reasonably make the consent judgment for the child. Of course a hyper-libertarian can always insist that the choice should be left up to the child for all of their acts, and if you want to seriously argue that children should be treated as adults from birth, I suggest starting a separate thread to advance that argument. How then should the government protect the rights of children, if this ID-requirement is seemed to be morally offensive? The answer comes from that initial question about child rights and the role of the adult rights-custodian. Very simply, the child will do whatever it does, and the adult custodian bears responsibility for the consequences of those actions. The adult is responsible for supervising the child, and should be made to bear the consequences of their actions. What is wrong with this law is not that it restricts children from accessing harmful websites and as collateral damage in protecting rights, some adults are inconvenienced. The problem is that the law sees the platform as being solely responsible for the harm, and not the adult who enabled access in the first place. The Utah law is a pragmatic solution, in that there are way fewer platforms than supervising adults, so enforcement against platforms is much easier than enforcement against supervising adults. This law draws a bright line which distinguishes legal from illegal action, the alternative of post hoc lawsuits by children who were harmed by poor parental judgment is unmanageably vague. There is a third alternative, which is to hold social media platforms (not parents) liable for damage to minors (violations of their rights) that they contributed to. Such a law would be limited to responsibility for damage to those not legally capable of consent. The platform can then decide to take the legal risk and not attempt to vet users, or they can protect themselves by id-checking. Their risk, their choice. Adult users who don’t want to be inconvenienced by providing ID can then take their business to a platform without an ID requirement. In short, this is an extremely complex moral issue, which is not resolved by simply declaring “there should be no restrictions on expression”. The question that should be asked by the libertarians is, what is the nature of the crisis that demands a further infantalization of our society where everyone is coddled in a safe space?
  6. An essential feature of the Objectivist ethics is that man is not a sacrificial animal, hence the rejection of self-sacrifice. Objectivism does indeed require the integration of all facts, but not all statements represent facts. The only “fact” involved in an irrational statement is that so-and-so uttered a statement, and a rational man has no obligation to consider such statements. Case in point, a rational man on OO has no obligation to assimilate, address and refute some arbitrary communist racist woke screed – an arbitrary string of words is not ipso facto an “argument”. There is a point at which “argument”- and viewpoint-rejection are valid responses (I would say after a half dozen attempts to elicit signs of rationality from the author, another more-hopeful person might set the threshold at a dozen tries). A person who advocates self-sacrifice isn’t acting like an Objectivist anymore. A person who refuses to engage in moral evaluation isn’t acting like an Objectivist anymore. A person who sanctions evasion isn’t acting like an Objectivist anymore. I do agree with your call for the forum to practice Objectivism (all of it, not just epistemology). Evasion is the antithesis of Objectivism, and I am glad that you now accept that point. Indeed, I would hope that people would be more scrupulous in calling out evasion when it happens
  7. At the outset, I should say that Rand’s theory of concepts is inadequate in only addressing “concept formation” but also inaccurately describing cases of actual formation. Children do not form concepts (her postulations notwithstanding), they acquire them: the concepts already exist in the society, the child has to learn what the extant concepts are in that society. Adults may on occasion actually form concepts, for example “quark”, or “clade”, scientific concepts which refer to novel integrations. Then there is “concept redefinition”, where a person decides to reassign the accepted word–referent relation. This certainly does happen, but it frequently leads to breakdown in communication when one person posits a new word–referent relation, declaring for example “There’s glory for you!” rather than “There’s a nice knock-down argument for you”. Openness is not a characteristic of a forum, but it is a tautologically a defining property of an open forum, a type of forum. I will add that “forum” is like “emergent” and “information”, words that have exploded in popularity over the past 30 years where there is little agreement as to what they mean. I do not fundamentally object to exploring new ideas, but I do object to any implication that new ideas are intrinsically good. A new idea may merit consideration if the idea is swaddled in a rational supporting argument. I suppose Wordpress blogging is one way in which anyone can set forth whatever new ideas they want, or, Google pages. I contend that the intended purpose of OO is not “exploring new ideas”, it is exchange of information about Objectivism and discussion of its applications. Notions of “good” and “bad” are not absolute, they are defined in terms of a specific purpose. If in fact the majority of content on OO ends up having no relationship to Objectivism and is indistinguishable from Twitter with no banning mechanism, then why would an Objectivist want to continue an association with this or some similar forum? In the real scientific world, nobody of any repute uncritically publishes anything and everything submitted just because it is a “new idea”. There are places to deposit one’s uncritical unvetted new ideas, I just spam-can those emails. I would not say that OO is in any sense a scholarly publishing venue, but it does and should strive to be higher-quality than most social media. Quality-control standards are not defined in terms of the viewpoint expressed, they are defined in terms of the logic of the presentation. Sometimes the presentation is logically deficient, and there is a point where the abandonment of reason becomes especially deleterious to a forum dedicated to a philosophy that places reason, not emotion, in a central position. You correctly identified the wording flaw in the guideline. The ukaze Do not post complaints about the behavior of any member on the forum is simply wrong, it is a mis-identification. I don’t propose a specific re-writing, I just offer a criticism of that rule to point out reason can be applied to laws and guidelines alike, so that we might identify a principle that better fits with the purpose of this forum. Which returns us to the question of the purpose of this forum – anything by way of guidelines that you think is clearly in error. For example, the central purpose of this forum (which I take to be an axiom, yet open for discussion)?
  8. I have a general question about Objectivism, of the type “how does one use Objectivism as a tool for living?”. As I understand Objectivism, it is a central premise that man’s proper means of survival is reason, which is reducing knowledge to observation, forming concepts from measurable relationships among concretes then integrating this knowledge by logical rules into propositions. I observed that numerous Objectivist fora have died, subsequently it turns out that there is an apparently-significant distinction between “forum” and “magazine”, a crucial differentiating property being “control”, where exercising editorial control makes a venue not be a forum, instead it is a magazine /journal. So my question is, how should one determine the proper meaning of “magazine” and “forum”? Obvious it would be based on observation, but what are we to observe, and what are we to measure in distinguishing these concepts? My own use of the term was based on a specific type of technology distinguishing a “forum” from a blog, a chat channel, a mailing list, a WhatsApp group, and other means of propagation, distinguished by hierarchical structure and permanence, however, that is not the ancient etymological meaning (a forum was simply an outdoor meeting place). I don’t assume that ancient etymologies dictate contemporary word meaning in English. Magazines and journals do not typically have multi-level recursive topical structure and they do have quantal structure (an “issue” with fixed content). If it is true that by nature there cannot be content-control in a forum, then there are no fora of any type anywhere (this is a factual claim, which can be refuted by pointing to a venue that purports to be a forum and has the essential characteristic of permanence but which does not impose any controls on content), and OO is also not a journal or magazine, so what is it? This is a basic issue in epistemology: people make claims, how can we ever evaluate the truth of those claims (that was the core flaw of the covid thread: objective judgment of truth is impossible if one cannot objectively identify concepts and propositions, and distinguish what is true from what is false). I pointed to the OO guidelines above, the question at hand now is whether the guidelines are dysfunctional and should be revised, or are they correct; and then, have they been followed or violated? A property-rights response would be pointless, in that it does not violate David’s property rights to discuss this issue. If you find the guidelines to be in error and can point to a good reason for changing A into B, then I expect that David would be open to such reasoning. To the extent that some may think that the underlying issue is content, I disagree, I hold that it is about methods. Frankly, the emoji-response option is a terrible feature of the software, especially the lulz-icon which is just plain rude. If you disagree with something that someone posts, you should explain the rational basis of that disagreement and not just dismiss the statement as being laughable. I do think that there is a flaw in the guidelines, that an important section is given low prominence: The forum (acting through its owner, admins, or moderators) reserves the right to modify or delete any material that violates any of these forum rules, or for any other reason that they deem appropriate. For example, the moderators may split, merge, close, or delete questions or threads. Posts with frequent misspellings or grammatical errors may be deleted at the moderator's discretion. They also reserve the right to ban any user if they are in violation of the board's rules, although warnings will generally be given first (especially concerning the more innocent mistakes). Egregious violations of rules may result in a banning without warning. Also, this bit probably needs some re-wording: Do not post complaints about the behavior of any member on the forum - report them to the moderators. Public complaints about other members will be treated as a personal attack and may be deleted! If you think someone deserves a warning, please use the "Report!" link found on every post. The offender will not know who reported him. I do not think that this thread is in violation of that guideline, yet I do think that we are skirting around the edges of a personal attack (on more than one party). Should personal attacks be prohibited, and if so, what constitutes a personal attack? How should we effectively communicate the distinction between disagreement and a personal attack?
  9. I disagree at the level of fact here. A prelude to an agency writing a regulation is that the agency must first be created by Congress, and be given a location under the executive branch. Without specific empowering legislation, the agency has no power to interpret laws and find someone to be in violation of that law. Everything that the Environmental Protection Agency or the Department of State does is an interpretation of a law passed by Congress, and in fact the laws upon which the EPA calls on in a regulation are cited in the Federal Register when the rule is proposed, modified and finalized. It is a question of fact whether laws passed by Congress are more often prohibitions or allowances / commands: individuals are prohibited from…, the government is allowed / commanded to… Here is what has been passed this year. No new agencies have been created, lots of spending has been authorized, parts of the government have been commanded to do or refrain from doing. There is a bottom line in Chevron Deference that Congress has to have actually commanded specific action or inaction, it is insufficient that an agency be created “to protect the environment”. Chevron Deference arose because Congress passed a law (42 USC Ch. 85) that purports to prohibited pollution by burdening the “source” of pollution, but failed to define what constitutes being a “source” (radically simplified, read the ruling here). Congress acted and prohibited, and commanded the EPA, and the EPA was only following orders (at the end of the Carter administration, probably not causally related to his subsequent electoral defeat). I think I will go out on a limb a bit here and claim that no federal agency has ever been created without there also being specific commanded actions, perhaps the Dept. of Foreign Affairs and the Sec'y of State position, created before the Constitution and Congress existed, was sufficiently unspecific. I invite you to identify an Congressional act creating an agency without a specific empowerment. Pretty much by definition, an "agency" can only do what a superior commands them to do. Sure, "State" has been around forever, likewise "Defense" (name changes don't count). We can easily identify agencies that can be wholesale eliminated. State, Treasury, Defense and Justice are the only legitimate executive branches, Homeland Security is redundant, and the rest simply should not exist at all.
  10. Okay, so your metric of government size is in terms of absolute dollars spent. I submit, then, that your use of the word “now” is less accurate than the alternative expression “for a very long time”, though the Wiki data only goes back 10 years. Let’s take a simpler case: who is in charge of enforcing laws against murder or theft? There is not a single answer (even setting aside the jurisdiction matter). The police may actually implement force to arrest and detain a suspect, but the individual officer does so by following objective procedural rules spelled out by their superior (the chief of police). The chief of police is (usually) appointed by the elected mayor, though a sheriff may be elected. Apart from arrest power, there is prosecution power, which is held by a different government employee, perhaps a hired city attorney (subordinate to the mayor) or an elected prosecuting attorney. Actual enforcement is the product of a further step, a trial which involves a cabal of civilians who decide certain facts, lawyers who make arguments, and judges who procedurally oversee the interaction between lawyers + witnesses and jurors. The judge may be appointed or elected, depending on level. At the state level, higher level judges (justices) tend to be elected and trial judges tend to be appointed by a cabal of superiors). Ultimately a judge gets to decide what the law says regarding the force to be used in a case, and other judges above him get to decide whether he has correctly applied the law. If upheld, the judge orders another agency to use force (for example haul his ass to prison and keep him there for 10 years). In short, what is enforcement. In no system of government is there a guaranteed mechanism for compliance with the law. In the US system, any person who has been wronged can appeal to the judicial system, and you can have your day (week, month) in court. The courts fail not because the courts are corrupt and unsupervised dispensers of justice, but because the elected creators of law are on average unprincipled evil bastards, which is because they are elected by a popularity contest that has no discernible relationship to a real political issue. The media will be happy to declare some spurious cause-effect relation so that if the Republicans lose a few seats and the Democrats win a majority in the three elected federal sub-parts, where will be plenty of post hoc analysis lacking any rational basis in reality. At most it will amount to the emotional reaction “I hate Trump”. Or, “I hate Biden”. (Admittedly, Trump stepped out in a surprising way last time with his “Build the wall” promise, I don’t expect to see any concrete issues in House and Senate races, recalling that it is the House and Senate that write the laws and POTUS that enforces them). At the federal level, the “watcher” is POTUS, who is empowered to command enforcement of the law. The voters are the watchers of the watcher, and generally speaking I don’t think that those higher-order watchers are doing a very good job (they have no idea what the watcher- and commander-in-chief is actually ordering to be done). POTUS commands a secretary to enforce a particular law in a specific way, you get to comment on the announced plan for enforcement, if you’d like. The real problem with law enforcement at the federal level is the interpretive deference rule known as “Chevron deference” which holds that the governments interpretation of the law is presumed to be correct, unless it is plainly incorrect. It remains to be seen, and not soon enough, what if anything will remain of that doctrine. I still don’t understand that this notion of a “permanent government” refers to. Dollars spent? Number of employees? Subjective law?
  11. First: do you have a factual basis for that claim (I assume you're not just intuiting what you think reality is) – gimme a number, and what nation has the second largest government? Second, are you claiming that the fact of having many government employees establishes that we have a "permanent government"? As far as I can see, this is just a right-wing meme, the counterpart of the left-wing meme "The Man". Every nation has some substantial set of employees which doesn't get traded out every two of four years. I'm just trying to understand what this invention "permanent government" even means. Law provides checks on the power of government employees. The problem is not with employee tenure or the fact that federal janitors are un-elected, it is the scope of government in the first place. It is the minimally-fettered power of a few hundred federal lawmakers to actually make those laws (and the also minimally-fettered of the various tens or hundreds of of thousands or state and municipal lawmakers to make lower-level laws), that is the source of "the problem". Evidence is strong that Mayorkas is not part of some permanent government: he was first appointed 3 years ago, and at most could serve another 5 years. It seems to me that the word "permanent" in this meme "permanent government" is redundant, people just mean "the government", though specifically "the government that I disagree with".
  12. OO is supposed to serve a particular purpose, which is not the same as the purpose of Twit-Face or alt.philosophy.objectivism and its spawn HPO, if you remember them. When content deviates from that purpose, it is right for management to take corrective action. My judgment is that adherence to that purpose here is not strict, and it has gotten much looser since I first joined about 20 years ago. Every person who contributes here should be able to articulate their justification for contributing, to say what value you receive in exchange for your posts. If you can’t do that, you should re-evaluate your self-sacrifice. In fact, very many former contributors have done so (by which I mean, the vast majority). There are loose guidelines which state what the purpose of OO is and what contributors should and should not do. Intellectual honesty is one of those requirements, the problem is that intellectual dishonesty comes in many flavors, one being evasion and the other being unreasoned reliance on authoritative statements. The covid thread reeks of evasion and was worthy of closing on those grounds. I concluded that there was no rational value to be had in the thread, and that put paid to my participation there. I might, in another incarnation, contemplate whether just leaving the thread open does any harm. There have been many fora for Objectivism, most of which have fallen into complete inactivity. When you peruse the content of other Objectivist fora, ask yourself if you would want to be associated with that group and if not, why not? My judgment is, “No: crappy content” (NB this explicitly does not refer to HBL). The potential harm of crappy content to Objectivism should be obvious, so now we know the basis for closing crappy threads, what remains is a specific evaluation of one or more threads, to decide if they are overall above that crappiness threshold (I will not engage in a specific autopsy here). I would like to avoid reaching the “crappy content” conclusion w.r.t. OO.
  13. I am curious about this notion of a “permanent government” in the US. Now we know that Lukashenko has been the absolute ruler of Belarus ever since it separated from the Soviet Union, Putin been has ruler of Russia de jure or de facto since 1999. Many African nations have been ruled by single absolute rulers for decades, e.g. Equatorial Guinea, China is controlled by a de facto permanent ruler. Iran and Burma are essentially run by permanent councils / juntas with an irrelevant figurehead. In the US, OTOH, we change president relatively often, and Congressmen individually last about 4 terms in the House and 2 terms in the Senate though there are individuals who last for decades. Of course, the federal appellate judicature is composed of life appointees. Clearly, this permanent government of which you speak isn’t composed of the executive, legislative or, realistically the judiciary. What I’d like to know is, what or who is this permanent government in the US? I suppose you might be talking of career military and civil service employees. In what sense to the various park rangers, TSA agents, clerks in the bureaucracy, embassy grunts and so on constitute a government? And if you aren’t speaking of the clerks and cops, who are you speaking of? In what was was this supposed government “disrupted” by Trump (and how was that disruption not exactly the same as the “disruption” created by the Carter-Reagan, Bush-Clinton, Clinton, Bush, Bush-Obama or Trump-Biden transitions)? Is this government distinct from the shadow world government run by the Illuminati?
  14. Separately, let me address the rational thought / rights question. “Rights” derive from man’s nature: our proper means of survival is reason, not e.g. superior force as in the case of lions. More specifically, man’s actions are chosen, not automatic / metaphysically given, and man uses reason to devise a moral code guiding his choices. “Rights” are a part of that moral code specifically devised for existence in a society, that is, when we live together through voluntary trade (the natural outgrowth of living cooperatively in a society). An alien species might well have aspects of the faculty of reason yet be compelled to survive by superior force, hence the fictitious Kzinti. In the Man-Kzin Wars novels the cats seem to be in an evolutionary middle stage, that they have language and space ships but cannot freely resist the compulsion to kill and eat. The human concept of rights and surrender of the use of force for survival to government monopoly is simply not applicable to a Kzin. The connection between language, the faculty of reason, and the concept of rights as applied to humans does not come from the ability to group individuals together under concepts, or to form communicative propositions, and it does not come from the fact that we can perform logical computations like “If A then B; A is true; Then it follows that B is true”. Rather, it follows from the fact that we can freely chose our actions, and that we can survive using our wits rather than our claws.
  15. Professionally speaking, (*sigh*). This animal language nonsense apparently will never go away. The first relevant division in cognition that has to be made is between “symbol” and “concept”. Very simple organisms with nervous systems can at least respond to physical stimuli. We don’t know anything significant about bug-cognition, but we do know that honeybees have the ability to communicate information about good (via an iconic dance, where the signal is directly related to the message (direction and distance). When we get to birds and mammals, people increase their metaphorical talk about “language” (though they say the same thing about bees and in fact in extremely metaphorical cases, about inanimate objects). There is a fair amount of evidence that some birds and mammals have something along the lines of “self-awareness”, thus they utter the message “Me. Me. Me”. There is a lot of variation in the form of the message, so that the signal may be stored and repeated for a short while (i.e. “today” or “this season”), or maybe longer terms. This is simple a label a name. Humans have a unique ability, which is to for concepts, which is (first) the mental grouping together of existents defined on some perceptible basis and (second) a label attached to that grouping. Thus we have in English the words “dog”, “cat”, “rat”, “mammal”, and “animal”, each of which refers to a different thing. We use these discrete labels to communicate to others. Concepts can be formed by grouping other concepts together, to form a new concept (mammal, animal, pet, etc). The various labels can be combined into sentences which communicate propositions. Sequences of propositions can be organized into “reasoning”, as exemplified by Atlas Shrugged and ITOE. The ability to self-identify is not the same as having a rational faculty. Even the ability to learn to group immediately-evident classes of existents under a communicable label is not the same as having a rational faculty, and there is no evidence that dolphins or apes have even that rudimentary capacity. The “signal complexity” claim is a red herring. What is lacking is evidence for discrete generalizability and combinability. Words of human language are made of cognitively-discrete combinable sound units, like “k”, “s”, “i”, “m” and so on, but the physical reality is continuous modulation of an acoustic waveform. (That cognitive fact is why we can write with distinct letters to represent the infinitude of physical symbols). The whale/dolphin language-advocates have yet to establish that the emited waveforms of those animals have an analogous cognitive status: construction of complex structures built on concatenation of cognitively discrete units which are realised as physical continua. We have known for a century that bee dance superficially looks complex because there are very many possible signals, but they don’t reduce to complex and structured combinations of atomic units. Us linguists object to misusing the word “language” to refer to things that aren’t language, like “the language of music”, or talking of DNA as being a kind of “language”. You can call the laws of physics the “language of reality”, but it ain’t a language. Abstraction and recursive structure build on lower-level abstractions is the essential feature of human language, and no animals on Earth have it, other than the rational animal.
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