"We exist in moments of gentle apocalypse"                       Roland Barthes      

22 April 06: Lame ass blog about me

This began by my pondering whether I simply do not like people, or whether it is my inherent social discomfort which has generated and serves a cognitive bias that I do not like people and social situations.  I decided to look into the nature of the discomfort, accepting the existence of the bias.

Being back in the army has made me realize how little comfort I have with people.  My quietness has been mistaken for condescension, this could not be further from the truth.  Take it for disinterest instead.  I believe I avoid most people because I would prefer to minimize the opportunities I have to say strange things which tend to invite criticism.  Part of this certainly stems from fundamental security issues, which may be long in the running to shake.  More frustrating is the fact that I think of a lot of strange things, and have trouble conveying these ideas should someone be foolish enough to ask.  Finally, there is that I found my best results in un-learning what society has programmed into me, and I still have a long way to go.

Every time you try to communicate an abstract idea to another person, there is little likelihood that conventional language will adequately convey your idea such that you and your subject will be imagining the same thing.  I tend to rely on metaphors or silence.  Thus my affinity to Zen.

This is trouble with language, it is an inherently static medium in which to describe the to abstract concepts/thoughts which run through ones mind. 

It is just the trouble with words.  We can neither perfectly adopt a convention nor easily work with a 'process language' language if you will.  This brings us to semiotics, which provides nothing conclusive, but merely a challenging inquiry into the nature of the subject.  All this to introduce the most interesting thing that I have read all day by the Donald Davidson....

There is no such thing as a language

"I conclude that there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases. And we should try again to say how convention in any important sense is involved in language; or, as I think, we should give up the attempt to illuminate how we communicate by appeal to conventions." ("A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs," Truth and Interpretation, 446)

Maybe this will get me some where eventually, I am still in search of an MBA thesis subject by the way....