Have you played any, or are you a fan of, interactive fiction? If so, and you haven't played this particular game before, I recommend you look at The Gostak. It's an entire story written using standard IF principles and conventions, only every noun, verb, adjective, and adverb has been changed to be semantically unrecognizable but syntactically familiar to an English speaker. It is based on a thought experiment from The Meaning of Meaning; in short, the meaningless sentence "The gostak distims the doshes" allows you to generate three interconnected floating beliefs, one about the gostak, one about distimming, and one about doshes.
The core of language and communication is common... (read more)
Have you played any, or are you a fan of, interactive fiction? If so, and you haven't played this particular game before, I recommend you look at The Gostak. It's an entire story written using standard IF principles and conventions, only every noun, verb, adjective, and adverb has been changed to be semantically unrecognizable but syntactically familiar to an English speaker. It is based on a thought experiment from The Meaning of Meaning; in short, the meaningless sentence "The gostak distims the doshes" allows you to generate three interconnected floating beliefs, one about the gostak, one about distimming, and one about doshes.
The core of language and communication is common... (read more)