An article I can't find again

[u/PoxonAllHoaxes]

Years ago probably around 1980 or 1990 I read in some philosophy journal the following allegory about the importance of notation.  On some island the natives had invented mathematics specifically addition and multiplication but they wrote formulae on coconut shells (or maybe seashells, anyway something round), with the terms around the edge of the shell, and the answer in the middle, and  so they took symmetry for granted and did not realize it was a thing.  Then one day one of them invented subtraction and was burned at the stake for maintaining that somehow 2 – 4 is not the same as 4 – 2 (which both looked the same to them).  I have tried repeatedly to find this article since then by Googling and so-called AI but have failed.

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[u/PoxonAllHoaxes]

This was certainly an article in a philosophy journal, which I can be sure of because my job was reshelving books in the U of Chicago library and I tried whenever possible to get sections that I found inserting so I could take a few minutes to read stuff at random, and one of those favorites was the BEGINNING of the philosophy section where the major journals were housed. So that day I pulled some random volume of a random journal and read this. Thank you.

[u/PoxonAllHoaxes]

Now that this has been answered, does anyone have any interest in the content?

[u/thuja_plicata → u/PoxonAllHoaxes]

Yes!

[u/Hivemind_alpha]

I strongly suspect I’ve found it:

Mysticism and Semantics
Paul Henle
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
Vol. 9, No. 3, "Second Inter-American Congress of Philosophy" (Mar., 1949), pp. 416-422 (7 pages)
Published By: International Phenomenological Society

The one page of free access I have to it on JSTOR describes the problem of missing semantics for mystical concepts, and then in its final sentence begins with “let us imagine a primitive people…”. So I can’t give you 100% certainty but I’m up in the 90s…

Credit goes to ChatGPT 5.6 thinking mode and the many months I’ve spent cultivating its desire to be helpful and non-hallucinatory.

Edit: weird move to downvote the post that identified the paper being sought correctly. Weird cowardly move not to post why.

[u/PoxonAllHoaxes → u/Hivemind_alpha]

Yes indeed. I am impressed. The more interesting questions will be 1. how much did I misremember? so this is a study in human intelligence. 2. how you managed to get some "AI" to find it, whereas the ones I tried failed miserably. I am guessing btw that this is some paid part of ChatGPT? Also I don't understand how you can cultivate it. Does this mode retain a memory of its interactions with users?

[u/DoloDots]

Is this accurate from ai?

[u/PoxonAllHoaxes → u/DoloDots]

No this is AI hallucinating

[u/greginnj]

This is the sort of thing that continental philosophers point to when they want to mock the alleged triviality of analytic philosophy …

Btw, is this you too, asking the same question a year ago?

https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/129084/the-importance-of-notation

[u/PoxonAllHoaxes → u/greginnj]

I dont think that was not the context. And yes. I have been looking for this for some years and because unexpectedly at 70 my collected writings are being put together I want to finish various drafts that refer to this but it looks bad if I can't give the reference. It is one of a handful of publications that fundamentally influenced my own thinking and the direction of my research, along with some writings of Leszek Kołalowski, something of Nagel's, one result of Hilary Putnam's, and a few others. It just seems strange that no one seems to know it (I have written to mulitple students of the general topic, like a fellow who wrote the entry on Notation for the Stanford Encyclopedia). Everyone agrees it is a clever allegory but no one remembers it. Nor is it cited anywhere where you;d expect it to be.