From: Cold Mountain Date: 2001-01-27T01:10:01+09:00 Subject: [ruby-talk:9937] [totally OT]Re: First quines in ruby? In article , "Conrad Schneiker" wrote: > on Quine: According to the Jan 13, 2001 Economist, Prof. Quine died last > Dec. 25. The term 'quine' was also reportedly used to denote the rejection > of a distinction. Quine was semi-famous for rejecting the fact- meaning > distinction (aka analytic-synthetic dichotomy), regarding such things as > matters of degree rather than kind. Quine also held that (real) philosophy > was a (developing) science. Sorry to be totally off topic but I was bummed to read this morning--in c.l.r of all places--that Quine had recently died. I had an amusing exchange of letters with Quine a few years back. While reading his "Word & Object" (Object!;) I decided to crudely "investigate" his indeterminacy of translation by bouncing some aphorisms I had written back and forth between English and Spanish, via a highly touted translation program. Needless to say the final product was mangled beyond all recognition with respect to its original "meaning." So I sent these to Quine and amazingly he wrote back. (After all he is described in one of the major dictionaries of philosophy (Cambridge/Oxford?) as the most important American philosopher in the second half of the 20th century. ) He had had a good laugh and indicated that such exercises could be quite instructive on the accumulation of mutations in translation. And I had good laugh that he apologized for "taking over a year to respond," even though it had been less than a month. Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/