Posted on 03/17/2015 7:37:26 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Its a perpetual lament: The purity of the English language is under assault. These days we are told that our ever-texting teenagers cant express themselves in grammatical sentences. The media delight in publicizing ostensibly incorrect usage. A few weeks ago, pundits and columnists lauded a Wikipedia editor in San Jose, Calif., who had rooted out and changed no fewer than 47,000 instances where contributors to the online encyclopedia had written comprised of rather than composed of. Does anyone doubt that our mother tongue is in deep decline?
Well, for one, I do. It is well past time to consign grammar pedantry to the history books.
As children, we all have the instinct to acquire a set of rules and to apply them. Any toddler is already a grammatical genius. Without conscious effort, we combine words into sentences according to a particular structure, with subjects, objects, verbs, adjectives and so on. We know that a certain practice is a rule of grammar because its how we see and hear people use the language.
Thats how scholarly linguists work. Instead of having some rule book of what is correct usage, they examine the evidence of how native and fluent nonnative speakers do in fact use the language. Whatever is in general use in a language (not any use, but general use) is for that reason grammatically correct.
The grammatical rules invoked by pedants arent real rules of grammar at all. They are, at best, just stylistic conventions: An example would be the use of a double negative (I cant get no satisfaction). It makes complete grammatical sense, as an intensifier. Its just a convention that we dont use double negatives of that form in Standard English.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
So it is OK to speak in Ebonics, then?
Of course it’s OK to speak in Ebonics!
Don’t you just wish you could?
And it largely was in Newton's time as well. Your claim that Newton's understanding was simply tweaked by later mathematicians is preposterous. George Berkeley's critique of the conceptual underpinnings of calculus was devastating. It took more than a hundred and fifty years to satisfactorily answer his charges in The Analyst.
But Newton explains the whole thing. “Passing to the limit” is my characterization of his explanation. Anyway, the proof of his method is in the Newtonian pudding. Are you saying Newtonian physics is null and void since it’s not founded on Weierstrass? To me, your arguments are all rhetorical. I don’t see any substance to them.
Like all physicists, he was mostly concerned with answers to practical questions, and believed in "justification by works" [of experimenters] rather than "justification by faith" [in his own arguments.]
Absolutely not. Based on my own studies, I can see that Archimedes did not arrive at a general method, such as calculus is. In particular, his formula for the surface of a sphere is not an integration.
He made two constructions: Of a figure inscribed in the unit sphere consisting of conic figures whose surface ( given exactly ) is less than 4 pi squared, and of a circumscribed figure whose surface ( also given exactly ) is greater than 4 pi squared. Hence, by the obvious logic, the surface of the sphere is 4 pi squared. This is not calculus and it is not infinitesimal reasoning. It IS brilliant.
Oops. For “4 pi squared” read “4 pi”. I was trying to get rid of “r”, you see.
It's not infinitesimal "reasoning" because infinitesimal "reasoning" is not reasoning. And it's EXACTLY why I say Archimedes understood calculus better [in a sense] than Newton did. He is not waving his arms frantically in the air about "reaching a point where the small quantity o is zero." He is actually showing you how to do integration, and in the course of doing the construction, he is asserting that
The intersection of an infinite number of nested non-empty closed subsets of a compact space is not empty.
That is the fundamental basis of Calculus, and does not involve the "reasoning" of "infinitesimals."
Archimedes constructions depend on finding exact expressions for the limiting values. This makes them idiosyncratic, because, supposing you can't?
The calculus derivation for the surface of a unit sphere is most definitely based on infinitesimal reasoning. The notation, d theta, in the integral is an expression of this. We have Int (d theta 2 pi sin theta) from 0 to pi, where d theta is the infinitesimal width of each strip of the surface in the integration, and 2 pi sin theta is the length of each circular strip. Of course this evaluates to 4 pi.
You have to use infinitesimal reasoning just to write this down!
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