This blog is essentially about the nature of language. I am calling it the nature of value calculi because I began by treating money as a value calculus and then noticed the universality of the concept in terms of any medium of exchange; money, language, the number system itself.
What I mean by value calculus is a paradigm by which the relative value, of items separated by either space and/or time in a market, of perception, of two given numbers, can be computed. Money, where I started, is extremely amenable to this form of analysis.
If an apple sells for a $1.00 and an orange sells for $2.00 then, apples and oranges be damned, an orange is worth two apples. The relative worth of these classically disparate items in a given market have been computed.
If rock A appears twice the size of rock B and I have reliably communicated that in a language system, then these two disjunct systems are now commensurate on specific criteria.
If 2, a counting number, is compared to 4, another counting number, it will be found to be half the size in the relation 2+2=4, a value calculus operation. Although, as Dashiell Hammett noted, when one puts 2 and 2 together, sometimes one gets 4, sometimes 22.
The nature of a value calculus is to order raw data in a more than or less than relation of various degrees of rigor in order to resolve the chaos of naive perceptions of reality into models of some explanatory power. Value calculi are instrumental entities.
Language, then, exists in order to talk reasonably about perception. Any other employment is gratuitous and unnecessary, however enjoyable.
Do Well and Be Well
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