{"id":20150,"date":"2016-07-29T09:21:07","date_gmt":"2016-07-29T08:21:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=20150"},"modified":"2016-07-29T09:24:23","modified_gmt":"2016-07-29T08:24:23","slug":"word-of-the-day-indexical","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=20150","title":{"rendered":"Word of the day: indexical"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been reading a short, but fascinating, book titled <em>&#8220;Seven Brief Lessons On Physics&#8221;<\/em>. In the process, I came across a word which was new to me: indexical.<\/p>\n<p>I have learned that, in linguistics and in philosophy of language, an indexical behaviour or utterance points to (or indicates) some state of affairs. For example, &#8216;I&#8217; refers to whoever is speaking; &#8216;now&#8217; refers to the time at which that word is uttered; and &#8216;here&#8217; refers to the place of utterance.<\/p>\n<p>However, in modern science, a term like &#8216;now&#8217; is highly problematic. Carlo Rovelli, the author of\u00a0<em>&#8220;Seven Brief Lessons On Physics&#8221;<\/em>, writes: &#8220;Physicists and philosophers have come to the conclusion that that the idea of a present that is common to the whole universe is an illusion and that the universal &#8216;flow&#8217; of time is a generalisation that doesn&#8217;t work&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>He adds: &#8220;Time sits at the centre of the tangle of problems raised by the intersection of gravity, quantum mechanics and thermodynamics&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Something for you to think about this weekend &#8211; if you have the time &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been reading a short, but fascinating, book titled &#8220;Seven Brief Lessons On Physics&#8221;. In the process, I came across a word which was new to me: indexical. I have learned that, in linguistics and in philosophy of language, an indexical behaviour or utterance points to (or indicates) some state of affairs. For example, &#8216;I&#8217; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cultural-issues","category-science-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20150"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20152,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20150\/revisions\/20152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}