Re: Information and Natural Languages

   Rafael's concern

>trying to get
>more deeply in the understanding of your concern about the present
>tenseand the present progressive tense etc.

has actually straightened me up. Let me try to say what I want to
say in a plain language, though I don't know whether I could
succeed.

   My starting point is this: Any dynamic behavior in progress
is descriptively in the mode of the present progressive tense.
Dynamics starts from the present progressive, no matter how
awkward it may look.

   The second point is that the present progressive tense can
allow behavioral agents other than the author who decribes it.
Imagine, for instance, I am walking through a crowd as avoiding
collisions with other people. Then, I can see that other people
are doing the same. That is, I am walking through the crowd as
collisions with other people being avoided. The statement of
my waliking in the present progressive tense makes others beside
myself active agents, also. Of course, they are active observers.

   The third is that if we still adhere to the practice of
describing any dynamics in the present tense, it will be
required for us to construct a bridge between the present
progressive and the present tense. One candidate for this is
via the present perfect tense. If the presence of globally
perfected movement is guaranteed, global synchronous time as an
attribute of the presence can serve as a reference against which
statements in the present tense are made possible. Such a
global synchronous time can have a static attribute and can be
parameterized accordingly. When I talked about the presence of
perfected movement in the above, a hockey puck sliding on an ice
rink almost frictionlessly was in mind.

   One more candidate approaching the present tense is via the
past progressive tense. Since the past progressive tense can
already be in the record, it has to satisfy the principle of the
excluded middle. What is needed for the transference from the
past progressive to the present tense is the presence of the
activity for fulfilling the principle. When I was walking
through the crowd as avoiding collisions with other people,
the avoiding activity has successfully been conducted up to the
point the record has been registered, though the walking has not
yet been perfected. My walking yet to come is going to avoid
collisions with other people, since walking and colliding exclude
each other. Local time associated with the presence of the local
activity for fulfilling the principle of the excluded middle is
definitely involved in the synchronization with other local time
in the nehborhood because the principle extends towards the entire
discourse. But, no global synchronous time is available. What is
possible instead is a delayed or skewed scynchronization at best,
the latter of which is quite difficult to be decipered in terms of
global synchronous time.

   This has been a rough sketch I have now. What concerns me is
the relationship between the issue of information and local time
as a local activity based upon the grammatology of our ordinary
languages. How about that?

   Regards,
   Koichiro

     Koichiro Matsuno
Received on Fri Dec 12 06:33:22 1997