>Surely things have to be imagined first, before they can be built?
Yes, but the imagination doesn't just fuel itself or have no fuel at all, like a perpetual motion machine. Humans, and I presume other animals, take in sensory information from the environment first, then it gets processed, and can be used for firing the imagination. There's a great pop-science show called "Connections" which demonstrates this concept by examining how inventions come about: previous observation of inventions or the "inventionless environment" fire the imagination of the inventor.
> As I sit
>here in my house and look around the room I don't see anything that hasn't
>been built, and even the simplest objects have had to exist in someone's
>mind before they could exist in reality. My lamp, my telephone, my iron
>frying pan, all were imagined before they were built. Some of these objects
>were too complex to be built by one person, therefore several people needed
>to work together, and to work together they needed to use language. The
>limits of their language limited the extent they could work together, even
>as the strengths of their language allowed them to accomplish what they
>accomplished. All languages have limits, and those limits, in every era,
>operate as a limit on what can be built in that era. It seems clear to me
>that all the technical progress of the last 10,00 years has been, very
>largely, the progress of language. And when researchers examine the
universe
>and discover new things, for every new concept they invent they must find a
>new word to represent that concept. Thus research constantly expands the
>number of words we have at our disposal; the importance of this being that
>language thus constantly expands the number of concept we have at our
>disposal.
Well, yes, but I would privilege over language the ability to discover new things about the environment, period. Language allows one to create for another person an environment or to add to an existing environment so that the recipient of the language can process what her senses take in and so fuel the imagination more. Note that the recipient only processes what the giver adds to the environment via language, making mistakes likely, but also making "drift" possible in a fractal way so as to create difference and fuel the imagination that way too.
I suspect that what Carrol is pointing out is that studying language is all very well and good, but language itself is not the prime motivator for people's actions (although I would think it is the motivator at times, nonetheless). One should put more work into studying what is going on in the environment around us, especially vis-à-vis capital and communicating this to others. CA is important in that it is supposed to be a tool for clarifying communication between people, in much the same way Korbyzci (is that his name; Count Korbyzci?) does; check out the Institute for General Semantics (couldn't get the link right now).
Todd