Comment by griffzhowl
4 days ago
Yeah, I think that's an interesting feature of linguistic thought: it builds on and exists within our deep evolutionary heritage of percetion and fuzzy classifications, but by the nature of words as being discrete items it also predisposes us to think naively that the phenomena referred to by words are also discretely organized into this box-like either/or structure, but the reality is more complex
That was insightful re words.
Yes a two step.
Spoken words forced/helped us divide up completely fuzzy concepts into discretized hierarchies of less and less fuzzy concepts over time.
And then written symbols, enabled a trend of identifying more and more simple I.e “primitive” abstract concepts (culminating in true, false, 1, 2, 0, infinity, node, edge, …) that let us reformulate and better understand complex fuzzy concepts as compositions of primitive concepts.
Language and then pen/paper.