sophiaserpentia | (no subject)

I said winter said it is the season of Death. Autumn is very close, as things are dying, but far too colourful.

So you would say it is more depressing to look around and see that everything is dead, as opposed to looking around to see that everything is dying? An argument can be made either way. So i suppose this one is just a matter of taste.

Doing the Goth Thing takes effort - gotta put on makeup, gotta have my nails done in black or maroon, gotta find my boots, gotta see if last year's velveteen pants still fit...

Winter is just too damned cold for anything that requires effort. Winter is for hibernating.

Has to be Autumn. I'm still awake then.

The statement "Unicorns have horns on their heads" makes no reference as to the existence or non-existence of unicorns, therefore its validity is not dependent on whether unicorns exist.

But she didn't say "Unicorns have horns on their heads", she said "A unicorn has a horn on its head". That's ambiguous; it could either mean "Unicorns have horns on their heads" or "There is a unicorn that has a horn on its head". If the former, then it's true, like you said. If the latter, then it's false (assuming unicorns don't exist).

Good point.

*makes tally mark #8 for times when her logic major actually proved useful* (;

The question is a classic case study from the philosophy of language, and deals with the way words hold meaning. From the positivist perspective, a word's meaning is tied to the objective accuracy of what it points to -- and therefore (again from the positivist view) the truth value of any statement has to take into account whether the words point to things that really exist.

Ugh! Logical positivism drives me up the wall! (:

Me too. Proof that asinine over-literalism and myopic statement-parsing are not confined to fundamentalism!

But unicorns *do* exist! :)

I'd say Winter, but given the ice and snow, walking outside in your gothick footwear could be precarious...

To me a major part of some 'goth-ness' seems to be the inevitability of death, even as they are surrounded by life. So I chose autumn, since it's beautiful and it's a settling down for the hibernation of winter... and yet for many it's simply the precursor to deadly winter.

Also, I have to ask: the question "A unicorn has a horn on its head" keeps you up at night? Why not just admire narwhal whales instead? Yes, I know, that's yet another question... ;)

I agree. To me the goth aesthetic is about finding beauty in decay, so autumn seems more appropriate than winter.

Unicorns may have never been animals, but they have surely existed in literature.

The statement "Anakin lost his right hand in a duel with Count Dooku." evaluates to true because that's how the movie played out.

To make your statement a falsehood you'd have to quantify that the questions presumed unicorn's existence outside of fiction and art.

Yeah, what you said. :)

I think that's one of the points that helped debunk the logical positivists. After all, anyone who reads this poll knows what a unicorn is, and can call to mind a representation of one in his or her mind. This is because we've read descriptions and seen depictions thereof.

Pascal Boyer brought this up in his book Religion Explained: that most myths involve cases of people or animals who have one or two distinguishing characteristics. A ghost is a person without a body. A unicorn is a horse with a horn. A zombie is a dead person who moves. And so on. It's not hard at all to conceptualize such things.

From there, our brain can more easily treat a ghost, unicorn or zombie as a real thing, than it could do so with some odd idea (like a flying spaghetti monster). We don't just believe anything, but rather, the class of things we find believable is small.

All that said, the purpose of language is not to talk about concrete things, but to communicate thoughts and feelings.

I said autumn, but now I'm not so sure. Ours are surprisingly tranquil affairs... the calm before the storm.
Perhaps it all depends on what kind of Goth you are. The Romantic Goth would probably enjoy Autumn or Spring - the Autumn to appreciate the transience of things and the Spring to provide a nice contrast to their fashionable black clothing. But a plain old depressed, heavy-metal-listening Goth might not be so subtle, and go for winter. At midnight. In a graveyard.
Personally, if you've ever wandered round in midsummer in a long black dress with your white-face melting, you too will know that Summer is, in its own special way, an ironic means to bring out the angst in any young and overdressed Goth kid. :)

i think of "summer" when i think of goths for a totally personal reason... reason being that when i was younger and hung out with folks i would call "goth", it was while living in NJ and haunting the shore with them til sun-up...

we always seemed to have more fun (and get into more trouble) on summer nights ;-)

winter/autumn nights, we were more apt to stay *inside* the cars/diners/houses/etc... and not "venture out" to run around the neighborhoods like little maniacs hahaha

so bad me, i guess my experience biases my answer to "what is more goth"...

Jules & Co.

other: the month of november.
it's not really autumn, in my mind, because autumn involves beautiful foliage.
it's not really winter, either, because it doesn't snow much.
it's just bare, grey, and melancholy.

i chose autumn because it seems like the weather then is most friendly to goth clothes. or at least MY goth clothes. or maybe that just shows that i'm a shallow goth because i think it's all about the fashion or something... ;)

Typical Goth as you see it in the Western World? Autumn .. for the simple reason that it is more eye-catching and melodramatic. ;)

great poll!

i dithered over the first answer because it depends on the sense in which you're asking and how precisely you intended the wording to be taken. i went with the most precise interpretation, which is as a logical assertion that "there exists some entity which is both a unicorn and has a single horn on its head."

if you look at it colloquially, though, it can easily be read as the assertion that "for every entity x, if x is a unicorn then x has a single horn on its head."

note that the answers provided correspond to these two interpretations of the statement. the choice between answers is based on the choice of how to translate the question into a formal assertion. it seems that there is a further distinction to be made within the first interpretation based on the ways in which one is willing to say that something "exists." pegasus is an entity which exists as a literary figure, and inasmuch as he exists, he can be said to have one horn.

Is "the dark night of the soul" a season or a time of day?

Winter, it is so bleak, yet nothing is as beautiful as a snowflake.

Well even if they have never existed, unicorns still have horns on their heads....

And although Winter IS the season of Death, Fall is PRETTY!

But unicorns do exist. Their cline appears to center around "gift stores," where they can be found in abundance. However, subsidiary habitats in jewelry, posters, and book illustrations have been recorded.

(Waits for the inevitable discussion about the difference between a thing and the representation-of-the-thing.)

Of course, unicorns have also been created-- out of cows, actually. There are also the goat-unicorns, although I believe that their breeders say that it was a spontaneous mutation, and not surgery, that created them.

In both cases, it was the single horn that was the defining characteristic of the unicorn.

Personally, I do not think that it takes away from the reality of an object if that object were first conceived of in a human mind before being created.

My name is Autumn, and I've always termed myself a "semi-goth" - so I choose winter.

false; since unicorns have never existed, the statement cannot be true

Take that back.

Wha?? Unicorns don't exist?
*Vanishes in a puff of logic*

True, irrespective of the existence of the creature.

We assign certain meanings/values to specific words. For instance, if I say, "birthday cake," pretty much everyone within my culture knows what I'm talking about. Without a general agreement as to the meaning of at least nouns, if not all words, language becomes inefficient as a means of communicating information.

Everyone in my culture, and probably some others outside of it, knows that when you say "unicorn" you are talking about an animal, mythical or not, which has one ("uni") horn. That's what that word means.

Now, if you said, "Unicorns have wings," or "Unicorns are purple," those statements couldn't really be evaluated as to truth or falsity. Some people may think of unicorns as having those attributes, some may not, Because those attributes are not alluded to in the actual word "unicorn."