2018-09-12-why.md 2.2 KB
layout: post
title: "On two modes of question why"
date: 2018-09-12 15:45:05
categories: language
Natural languages are ambiguous in many ways, including lexical. We're all used to one word having different meanings (or multiple different words having the same spelling and pronunciation, depending on meaning of word "word"). But some of these differences are more elusive than other.
For example, if you know enough english (and, preferably, another language with different kind of why-words), you might've noticed that word "why" may mean "for what reason" or "for what purpose". But the point of this post is a more subtle difference. Even the for-what-reason meaning is still ambiguous.
Consider question like "why Earth is spherical?". Aside from ironical or pedantic responses, we may legitimately answer "because gravity shaped it so" or "because if you travel, it loops with spherical topology and it also looks mostly spherical from space...".
Both of this responses are about causality (rather than purpose). But first one gives cause of predicate's referent, while second one explains why did we conclude that predicate is true. Depending on question, either of this meanings may make little sense. For example, question "why is this apple green?" about concrete observable apple is most likely about apple's story and not our perception. On the contrary, "why 2+2 = 4?" is a question about our cognition because mathematical objects do not live in time and can't have any causal story (though something like "concepts of math objects in people's minds" may very well have a whole history).
By the way, remember i ranted about natural languages at the beginning? Well, constructed languages can be much less ambiguous and for example lojban does distinguish between different types of reasons. I don't remember precise words, though. Look it up.
...
If you still have little idea of what this is all about, or disagree on some points, you may wonder "why is this post so bad?". And to that i can name any amount of reasons ranging from lack of author's sleep to imperfect perfectionism, or i can just say "because you've read it and concluded that it is so bad".