User Friendly, another beloved comic strip I subscribe to, poses the interesting question (generalized): what if someone else discovered X? Ernst Mach deduced and experimentally verified the idea that an object moving faster than the speed of sound would produce a shockwave in the shape of a cone with the object at the apex. The famous Mach number (used for jets travelling faster than the speed of sound) is named after him. User Friendly brings up the point that if someone with a far more complicated name had discovered this phenomenon, perhaps we’d have a much harder word to remember. But I wonder, if the name was more complicated, wouldn’t we have just come up with something else? I suspect there would have been an acronym invented for it.
Ernst Mach also was a heavyweight in the philosophy of science. He recognized early on that scientific laws and theories are approximations of the real world for the purpose of making phenomena comprehensible to the human mind. Mathematics is a human construct (and wouldn’t it be interesting if it weren’t?) and so when you build physical laws like Newton’s F = ma, you are superimposing the activity of the real world onto this construct. Mach saw that the complexity of the world, reduced as it was by science, was an artificial process useful to the human mind. Science then is not so much explaining the world as it actually is, but explaining the world to ourselves in a way we can understand and make use of. This philosophy seems to still influence science, but has been superceded. I’m not very well versed in the philosophy of science, though, and I’m regurgitating this from Wikipedia anyway, so I’ll leave it at that. I just thought it was interesting.
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4 January 2008 at 11:52:11
Jason Adams
Or are you superimposing the construct on the physical world?
4 January 2008 at 12:09:47
Chris
Jason, great post! I think this is one of the key concepts in cognitive science: regardless of what the world IS, we are only capable of understanding it filtered through our cognitive system of representations. The nature of those representations and their correlations to the original input is the great frontier of 21st Century cognitive science.
As for “Dinkelfwat 5″, 2 linguistic points:
1) I think English phonotactics rule out an /fw/ cluster. I’ll give you “Dinkelfat”.
2) There is an interesting sub-field of psycholinguistics going back to the 1960s which looks at how we name things, and how we modify our names in social situations. The work of Robert M. Krauss at Harvard is closely associated with this. He and his colleagues essentially confirmed your intuition that people will modify their reference terms towards more simple ones (usually some sort of leader emerges who sets the simplified form, then others follow).
You can see one of his original articles here
4 January 2008 at 12:47:37
Jason Adams
Thanks for the comments, Chris. Interesting bit about Krauss, but unfortunately I could only read the abstract. Apparently, the CMU contract with JSTOR doesn’t include Child Development. Still good to know my intuition was in the right direction.
4 January 2008 at 14:03:36
Jason Adams
On an amusing note, this post is getting a lot of traffic from people searching on google for ernst dinklefwat!
4 January 2008 at 15:36:09
Chris
Ernst Dinklefwat of the Koblenz Dinkelfwats? I think he owes me money.
26 January 2008 at 11:20:52
To ebay this, to google that « The Mendicant Bug
[...] already taken this to heart, I’m sure. You need an easy name that sounds like English. Just like with scientific terminology, no one wants to Dinklefwat their dishes. RSS [...]