Hello everyone.

I have just completed a very complicated audio and slide show that attempts to lay out a new theory of language and apply it to supreme court decision making. The theory is only preliminary. It's the audio and slide version of a paper I posted here about a month or so ago. Feel free to have a look if you like.

Here is the link:

http://ludwig.squarespace.com/storage/language.rig.ppt (powerpoint audio and slide show).

http://ludwig.squarespace.com/storage/Rigidity.show.web.mht (same show, only for Microsoft Explorer. Only use if the PowerPoint show fails. Slides sometimes don't play right in browsers for some reason)

By the way, the audio on the title slide is getting knocked out when I download it. So the first slide may not play properly. Everything else seems to work fine.

Regards and thanks.

(P.S. I'll jump in on this "what is philosophy" thing as soon as I have some time; this stupid slide show took my weekend away from me).

Dr. Sean Wilson, Esq.
Penn State University
Website: http://ludwig.squarespace.com/home/
Email discussion group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TheLudwigGroup
SSRN papers: http://ssrn.com/author=596860
Conference papers: http://ludwig.squarespace.com/research-agenda/

____________________________________________________________________________________
Finding fabulous fares is fun.
Let Yahoo! FareChase search your favorite travel sites to find flight and hotel bargains.
http://farechase.yahoo.com/promo-generic-14795097

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Hi Sean. Thanks for posting your stuff. I had a look through your
interesting slide show. Than I stumbled upon your article (which I think
you provided us with some time ago) which seems to be about the same
thing. I thought I might give you a critical review of what seems to be
the most significant theoretical section in your research - the part that
helps constitute your construct of an 'archetype'. Hopefully the following
can at least start us off on a good debate which may help us both...

Part I: The Theoretical Basis:
The Concept of Language Rigidity in Legal Sentences

There is much happening lately in the field of cognitive linguistics.
Although my work draws upon some of this scholarship and as well upon
works in philosophy of language, it is possible that the approach I am
about to present is somewhat novel. I leave others to decide whether or
not my offering constitutes a breakthrough of some kind for language
philosophy.

Whether novel or not, my primary influences are two analytic philosophers,
Ludwig Wittgenstein and Saul Kripke, and one linguist, Steven Pinker.
Drawing upon their works, I now construct criteria of rigidity