Young Writers Society

The Linguist Says . . .

I really don't mean
to interrupt, no, please
go on talking.
There are paper bats
in your breath,
and I'm just recording the way
they flutter.
The sound is fast
and difficult to capture.

-- The Linguist

Please don't feel
like this is
a lesson
in how to use words.
Simply observe
a paper bat
flap its wings
upon exhale.

-- The Linguist


_______

Just some poems with the vibes of a Linguistics textbook.

On Existential Threats to Humanity and Acting Before the Script Says So

cw: discussions of death

Nice work! Did y'all discuss too?

(Spoiler warning: don't click if you take Redditors seriously)

Thanks!

Grue - a list poem

t = 0 : dinosaur times, layers of mineral rock like skin growing from the Earth's core -- sleepy detox routine
t = 1 : once upon a time, there was a girl named Grue --
t = 2 : her mother told her, get a grue emerald ring for my birthday, will you? There must be something you can do with that six-figure salary
t = 3: all grue things are ___ before the time and something else after
t = 4: Grue met a girl called Green at the town square - and she said "I like gemstones because they're stable characters."
t = the time: Grue and Green blinked at once
t = 6 : and Grue just knew the emeralds had changed colour
t =
what if the past is just
a flitting wing? one second it might
go extinct, cosmological bombing.



Nelson Goodman introduced the 'grue' problem to illustrate his New Riddle of Induction. What was the Old Riddle, you ask? If you've ever heard of Hume's Problem of Induction . . . Yeah, it's that. Basically, Hume argued all our inductive inferences (where we infer generalities of unobserved instances based on specific instances we have observed) assume the Principle of Uniformity of Nature -- that the unobserved will resemble the observed, but we have no rational reason to believe this principle.

Meanwhile, Goodman's riddle is about how when doing induction, we seem to allow certain inductive inferences to be made but others are 'obviously' invalid. He gives a few examples, but grue is the most famous one. In 'our language' 'grue' would mean 'is observed before time t and is green OR is observed after t and is blue'. Up until time t, it seems that every green object X observed would support the hypotheses both that 'all Xs are green' and 'all Xs are grue' - but these hypotheses yield contradictory predictions -- one that X to us will change colour and the other where it will stay the same.

Something interesting about this to me is how Goodman argues from this apparent symmetry that which inductive inferences are allowed might be language-relative -- as in, if you spoke a language with the basic colour terms grue and bleen (blue before t and green after), then the grue hypothesis would be allowed and green disallowed.

This is a poem from the perspective of someone who speaks the language of grue. At the moment, I'm starting to suspect that Goodman's problem is better illustrated with a different example than the grue-green one, and that's what I'm looking into right now - but the grue problem certainly captures the imagination and that's why I wrote this poem about it.

Between Paradigms: Somonka

Oh but she was an
icon among the rabble,
a lily amidst
rough, dry weeds, the reek of soil,
mud immeasurably wet.
-- X.