Egmont said:
I hope I can explain what I meant and why I don't see it as a contradiction.
You example illustrates your point well. I don't quite agree with your conclusions, of course as that is the reason for this post in the first place, but I do understand your reasoning.
OK, I can handle the Japanese thing. If my memory serves me, you have to say something like "kono hito wa onisan desu" or "kono hito wa otosan desu", depending on whether your brother is older or younger than you. Point taken, the word "brother" does not exist in traditional Japanese, but still there is no loss of information when you translate the English sentence into Japanese.
You say that there is no loss of information. Doesn't that fact that the translation is not possible count for something? Furthermore, Japanese is extremely noun heavy, compared with English. Doesn't the extreme reliance on nouns possibly reflect a difference in understanding?
What you mentioned about the bible losing information, happens because translators have to worry about aesthetics as much as correctness. If someone translates a Japanese book and replaces every instance of "otosan" with "my older brother", it would be ugly and boring. But it is the translator who introduces information loss, not the translation process itself.
This is a major source of difference between us. I believe that most words in Japanese cannot be translated into a single equivalent in English and vice versa. How would you, or your friends, translate the word animal into Japanese? I will bet you that if you ask Japanese, 100% will tell you that animal in Japanese is doubutsu. This is fairly close, but is also very wrong in most cases.
That is because you think the proper translation of a word such as "onisan" is "brother", when it in fact is "a person's older brother". The Japanese word does contain more information, but that information can be just as well expressed in English, or any other language for that matter. Depending on how primitive the language is it may be tedious, but you can always do it.
But, this is missing the point, in my opinion. Such translations cannot always be done. In this extremely simple example, it is simply the fact that Japanese has more nouns, and English requires adjectives to perform some of the Japanese noun distinctions. This is a simple example, and in this case, the loss of information is not great. However, this is an extremely trivial example. When deeper cases are examined, the differences become extremely significant, in my opinion.
Did I say "every way"? I don't recall, but if I did please apologize. I'm not particularly enthusiastic about science, and I'm quite fond of the various alternative philosophies. I'm not too familiar with Chinese culture, but I do like the little I know. However, I'm trying not to allow my somewhat disdainful attitude towards materialistic science get in the way of an objective assessment, and what I do observe is that what you call the Indo-European way of thinking is, regretably I might add, quite popular around the world. I take it that when most Chinese doctors reject traditional Chinese medicine in favor of European approaches, that they know what they are doing. Personally, I'm not enthusiastic about our medicine, in fact I'm quite skeptical of it to the point of cynicism.
Western medicine is quite popular in China, but your statement that most Chinese doctors reject it in favor of European approaches is without foundation. I wonder where you got it. Doctors who go to western medical school become steeped in western techiques, and tend to reject Chinese medicine, which they neither understand or are qualified to judge in a profession manner. Doctors who study Chinese medicine, as I have done, do not consider western medicine to be superior. Doctors in China recognize that in some cases western medicine is far superior and in some cases Chinese medicine is far superior. Western medicine is very popular in China, but so is Chinese medicine. Western medicine is based on western science, whereas Chinese medicine is based on the Dao.
I do not at all mean to disagree with the idea that western science is quite popular. It is also quite successful, which contributes to why it is so popular. However, it is very different from the model of the Dao. Not all of these differences are superior, in my opinion, only different.
You know, due to the popularity of western science, a number of Chinese intellectuals have, over the past decades, developed an inferiority complex. Fortunately, this is dissipating, I believe. There are valid reasons for the popularity of western science. This should not be construed as superior in all important ways, in my opinion. The Dao is an extremely profound model of nature.
I suspect the Chinese people are open to things they cannot understand, while the modern Western-European mind is quite closed to anything it can't properly understand. But I may be wrong about the Chinese.
Although this is a reasonable interpreation to make, I think that you are jumping to interpreatations that are not fully justified. The Chinese have been open to adopt what the west has developed. They have been able to recognize the value in doing so, and they have been able to do so. The west has not been able to see the value in the Chinese model of nature. This should not be construed to be equivalent to the notion that the Chinese model is therefore inferior in most respects.
Well, my reasoning comes from the fact that physical reality doesn't change depending on how you describe it. What does change is the metaphysics, the interpretation of what is implied by our observations of the world.
And yet, our descriptions are all that we have. In English, and in western science, we have a concept known as time and another known as space. Modern physics teaches that we should think in terms of space-time, but our language grammar does not enable us to recognize this unity. It does allow us to pretend, which is what most people who use the word space-time do. The Chinese grammar makes the unity of concepts easier to grasp, because Chinese is a unified language at the most fundamental level, unlike English and the Indo-European languages.
I would agree with you that other languages can tremendously help in the development of a more solid, more consistent metaphysics. For instance, it seems to me the Chinese concepts of ying and yang seem far more sophisticated than the primitive Western notions of duality, so there's definitely something to be learned.
Excellent perception. The Chinese concepts exist at a much deeper level than the western concepts. In other words, the subdivision of the Dao into Yin and Yang occurred much earlier in the Chinese model than in the western models.
I'm just not sure what you mean by "models of nature", whether you think they should incorporate metaphysics or not.
At the most fundamental level, speakers of Indo-European languages recognize two differenct, and seemingly incompatible, models of the world, religion and science. Each of these have large numbers of adjerents who believe passionately that these models of nature can truly and accurately describe nature. Of these 2, religion is a unified model, as it has a single force, a singel god. Science is a subdivided model, as it has 4 subdivided forces of nature. Both of these models of nature are natural outgrowths of the understanding of the world of their speakers, based on the possibilties inherent in nature as reflected through the grammar of language.
Chinese is a unified language. It supports a single model of nature, which is unified, the Dao. The Dao is extremely profound, just as science and religion are profound. The Dao is very different from science and religion. The Dao is as close as the Chinese languauge gets to natively supporting a science, and it is as close as it gets to a native religion.
