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My salary at Lille Skole wasn’t a living wage even during the first year when things looked rosy. The second year, after another, less idealistic, private school took most of my paying parents away, my salary was pretty much nothing. My main source of income was the GI Bill. As long as I continued working on my doctorate at University of Houston, I had a small but steady income stream. Living really cheaply in a communal setting, I could get by.
Graduate students also pick up a few research projects and, if really lucky, they can teach classes. I taught “Introduction to Computer Science,” “Systems Analysis," and "Business Communications” at the University. I think I learned a lot more teaching classes than I ever had when I was taking them.
The text for “Business Communications,” oddly, was a book on semantics by S.I. Hayakawa. We paid very little attention to the text as we went through memos, business letters and ended with picture-perfect job resumes, but I did a lot of thinking about semantics. Semantics explains a lot more than its most obvious use in misleading people through advertising.
Semantics explains some of the great contradictions in our thinking. My old struggle with religion, circa age 13, for example, would have been a lot simpler if Hayakawa had written his book sooner and if I had read it. We worry because we can’t answer certain questions: “What is outside outer space?”and “What’s outside whatever is outside outer space?” The same with “When did time begin” and “What happened before that?”
Those are word tricks, not real questions.
Language is our main way of communicating about reality. But words aren’t reality. They’re nearly always a close approximation and an adequate way to communicate reality. But they aren’t perfect. They are usually rooted in practical past experience. They can’t always communicate ideas for which we have no practical experience. The idea that space may well go on forever, or that whatever is outside our concept of outer space may go on forever, or that there is always something outside of everything we consider a limit, consequently there is no ultimate limit; is way beyond our practical experience.
Mathematics, by the way, is also only a way to approximate reality. It’s not reality and it can’t explain everything. An obvious shortcoming is expressed in the square root of a negative 1. We call the number "imaginary."
Questions that have their roots only in semantic contradictions do not deserve answers. "What is the sound of one hand clapping?"
While we are alive and self-conscious, we try to apply what we think we know to understand the things we don’t.
A good example is a goldfish that travels back in forth, during its entire existence, in the same bowl. To the goldfish, all knowledge is what he/she experiences there in that goldfish bowl. Everything outside that goldfish bowl experience is much harder to explain. We’re the same, except that our bowl is bigger.
The most dangerous word in the newspaper is "we."
Consider something we've read many times that goes something like, "We have to bomb hell out of such and such peoples because we have to protect our interests there." What do they mean by "we?" The joke goes that the Lone Ranger and Tonto were attacked by thousands of angry Native Americans. Lone Ranger says, "We're in trouble," and Tonto responds, "What you mean 'we,' white man?"
Semantics. Really worth investigating and thinking about!
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