DJP
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Seems a bit offtopic here but..
if any comrades are interested in such a project let me know as I have some broadcasting experience and these days we can all broadcast from home.
It’s easy to do, and the relevant PRS licence starts from a few hundred. But it’s much harder to get any listeners. The digital media space is way past over-saturation.
Instead of trying for a live station why not do a podcast like MHI? I can advise on microphones and the technicalities of uploading them etc
Karl Marx wrote that industrial capitalism had to spread across the world before socialism was possible.
Any citations for that? In his later work about the Russian Mir, it actually looks like he thought otherwise.
Either way, is this not an academic question for us now?
Photovoltaic and hot-water solar panels are not the same thing, nor installed by the same type of engineers as far as I understand.
Obviouslly his politics are bad, but I don’t think liking solar panels is the thing we should criticise him for.
For the record, the Revered Mark Coleman got 455 votes or 1.5 percent of those who voted.
How does this compare to the average percentage when the SPGB stands?
BJ, Sorry to do a ‘logic bro’ on you, but dictionary definitions are just general descriptions of how words are used. They are not prescriptive in any way and certainly can’t be used to settle conceptual or moral debates.
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Appeal-to-Definition
In the definition I gave, it’s the ‘manipulation of a series of symbols’ part that is important. I think the prairie dogs example you gave the link to is a good contender. An octopus changing colour according to its mood isn’t – it’s communicating something but not logically manipulating a series of symbols to do so.
I’m no expert, but roughly speaking, you could say that a language is a set of logical rules that can be used to convey meanings through the manipulation of a series of symbols. Any being that uses something like that is a language user.
I’ll leave it to you to come up with examples from the non-human animal kingdom. I guess you won’t like it if I use some extinct archaic human species as an example either.
But the thing is, even if we say that most (or even all) non-human animals are not language users that doesn’t mean we are saying they are just objects to be used as we please. That’s an entirely different argument.
TM the good news for you is that the idea of “language” and “communication” as not wholly the same thing is entirely compatible with the possibility of their being non-human language users.
The claims that only human beings could possess language, that language is only verbal, or that animals are no different from machines in no way logically follows from the claim that “language” is conceptually distinct from “communication”.
So you too, BJ, define language as solely verbal in the sense of human spoken language.
Nobody defines language in that way. If BJ does I promise I will eat my hat.
I can’t see how you are getting “language can only be verbal” from anything I’ve said.
I’d guess that the person that said “words are just sounds” didn’t mean that either. They where probably trying to claim that words are not acts. But that is not always the case. As in “I pronounce you husband and wife”, “I promise I’ll pay you back next week” etc – what they call “speach acts”
The above examples are very good and interesting.
But there’s still a herculean leap from “some” to “all”.
language is communication
Depends how technical you want to get. But strictly speaking I would have thought “language” and “communication” are separate categories. A language is something that has a certain logical structure. (In theory you could invent a language on your own without communicating it to anyone). And there are types of communication which are not language – a fire alarm going off communicates something, but it would be a bit of a push to describe that as a language.
