[FRIAM] All Of Feynman’s Lectures Now Available Online Completely Free

[Roger Critchlow]

Here's a new free book at MIT Press which I'm finding readable.  Suggested
by hackernews.

https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5329/The-Art-of-Abduction

>From the Introduction:

If you are a linguist, I encourage you to read on because abduction has
> been said to be fundamental to determining what a speaker means by an
> utterance.  Specifically, it has been argued that decoding utterances is a
> matter of figuring out the best explanation of why someone said what she
> said when she said it.  Even more specifically, authors working in the
> field of pragmatics have suggested that hearers invoke the Gricean maxims
> of conversation (Grice, 1989) [
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle] to help them work
> out the best explanation of a speaker's utterance whenever the semantic
> content of the utterance is insufficiently informative  for the purposes of
> the conversation, or is *too* informative, or is off topic, or is
> implausible, or is otherwise  odd or inappropriate.  As Yan Huang (1994, p.
> 2) puts it, "What pragmatics does is to provide a set of ... *explanatory* principles
> which constrains the interpretation or production of an utterance whose
> linguistic representation has already been antecedently cognized" (emphasis
> mine).
>

-- rec --


On Sat, Jul 23, 2022 at 7:42 PM David Eric Smith <desmith at santafe.edu>
wrote:

>
>
> > On Jul 24, 2022, at 7:43 AM, Edward Angel <angel at cs.unm.edu> wrote:
> >
> > Feynman once claimed he started Feynman Physics because he couldn’t do
> those problems.
>
> “Couldn’t” here is an interesting word.
>
> One of the few books I couldn’t read (back when I did seem able to read
> book-length material), was the Dao of Physics.  Several people had,
> believing it was an act of friendship, given me copies when I went away to
> college.  After getting a little way in, any time I dutifully opened it to
> try to get through a little more, I would be seized in a narcoleptic fit
> before getting through a half-page.  Like having one’s head pushed
> underwater by god; no resisting it.  I think it was the first book I
> accepted permanent defeat before.
>
> Nowadays there seem to be many mindless, tedious, and world-destroyingly
> stupid (mandatory) things that, when I chain myself to the desk to do them,
> I never advance on because I can’t or won’t restrain a superhuman pressure
> to daydream.
>
> These cases have increased my tolerance for the ambiguity between “can’t”
> and “won’t”, when I see it in others who, for whatever their reasons,
> “won’t” do something needful that seems to me like it shouldn’t be that
> hard to do.
>
> Eric
>
>
>
>
>
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