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Re: What do you think is necessary in order to have an excellentcomposition?
>I would start by reading A.J. Ayer's "Language, Truth and Logic", or Hans
>Reichenbach's "The Rise of ScientificPhilosophy",
I don't want to belabor this too much, but I forgot to mention Bertrand
Russell's "Logical Atomism"....a fantastic and most intriguing read that
illustrates the idea of literally meaninful statements. Russell actually
breaks language down into logical atoms and molecules. An atom is
something
like "x is red", where red is an unanalyzable term the denotes an
empirical
sense datum that is also unanalyzable....really fasimating stuff!
Utlimately, sentences that can legitimatly be considered meaningful
propositions are broken down into logical atoms of this sort. So, complex
sentences or logical molecules like "This billard ball is red" are
anaylzed
into an extremly complicated array of atoms, like "There is an x, such
that
x is round, x is of such and such a size, x is at this specific
location,.....etc..and x is red". This is an oversimplication, but similar
to what we do in symbolic logic to concert a normal English speaking
statement into symbols, so that we can focus on its logical structure and
not the content.
Hence, we can analyze statements like "Rick Walker looped the sound of a
sex
toy at the Boise Experimental Music Festival" into an array of logical
atoms. However, we cannot analyze "Mozart is good", "Avant-garde is better
than pop", etc into logical atoms, because the term "good" fails to denote
any real property that render the atom "X is good" meanful. "X is red" and
"X is Good" are entirely different. One we can verify, the other is empty.
Kris