Heidegger

In a message dated 27/08/2007 03:40:52 GMT Standard Time,
_chaney525 at yahoo.com_ (mailto:chaney525@yahoo.com) writes:

Fred writes:

Jud said,
“My own theory is that the reification of abstraction has a biological basis
in which cognitive and communicative word meanings and sentential structures
are grounded in a pragmatic physical dynamics which is associated with and
is an aspect of the human, species-specific process of natural selection.”

So all of this grounding is merely by chance or natural selection.

Fred

Jud: (earlier)
My model of cognition is the connectionist one, in which activity patterns
are generated holistically [the neuronal net] and not disparately as with the
curious notions of folk psychology. Because connectionism gels so well with
eliminativism - if the connectionist paradigms are found to faithfully reflect
the processes of our cognition, that the abstract guff about
Nietzschean-type *will* and * beliefs, desires,

* snip

Fred:
So, given your ‘dissertation’ (opp of brevity) what will take the place of
second degree notions, er, entities? A capricious ’selectional system’ -
unlike natural selection which is no different than the human directed artificial
selection system - a kind of jumbling of units at every level of analysis
imaginable? Are these connections ever more than analogies of +/- judgments.

Jud:
Linguistically nothing will take their place. Communicationally second
degree notions, i. e., abstract nouns/gerunds etc., will still be used in natural
and philosophical language much as they are now. It is simply that there will
be an awareness, that whilst the terms are extremely useful in order to
avoid circuitous ambage - they are in the end no more than useful fictions.
(example: Love does not exist - only loving lovers exist etc.)

So there would not be any *capricious selectional replacement procedures.*
If it became common knowledge that abstract nouns are merely reificational
or instantiational signs bereft of denotata, then any academics, politicians
and second-hand car salesmen naive enough to believe that such denotational
phantoms exist would be held in contempt.

If on the other hand such people DID become aware of the fantasy-factor
embodied in abstraction, but in spite of that intentionally continued to employ
such signs to con people, then they would be deservedly booted out of the
White House, the universities and the local Ford Dealership. They would be
viewed rather like we the idiots who handle real, rather than reificational
reptiles. That is the hilly-billies of the southern states who believe that if
they *take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt
them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover. I refer of
course to the religious nut-cases that infest the hills of Tennessee and their
*Church of God with Signs* who for me are not much different from any other
transcendentalist reifier of significations, except that they handle real
wriggly-things rather than semantic serpents.

Fred:
Of course you aren’t in favor of reificational tendencies even when the
speed of your categorical thought is faster than your meditative skill of
combining the “real” sensed elements with past ideas.

Jud:
Lacking a divining rod or a hazel-twig switch, I take it you are referring
to the primitive frog-worshippers of the higher reaches of the Amazon or
Platonists? There isn’t much difference as far as their reification of
abstraction is concerned. Both run around naked and wipe themselves with leaves. Both
believed in utter transcendentalist nonsense - although the more intelligent
Greeks left humankind a rich bounty of technological and scientific know-how
and a philosophical feast of ideas before the rot set in and the
pre-Socratics were elbowed off the stage by the spoilers and European ideas took a
gnosiological nose-dive - that is ‘knowledge’ and logos (logos being the ‘word’ or
‘discourse’ about the real - rather than the reificational.)

Of course there were a tremendous number of exceptions, even amongst some of
what the proto-fascist writer of the Republic, Plato had to say when he
wasn’t busy with little boys. There is no need to board any philosophical
time-machine in order to combine the “real” sensed elements* with *past ideas.* The
*past ideas* are alive and well and are being peddled along with crack, the
weed and the opportunities to gun people down in most of our universities
thank you very much.

Fred:
The true reasons for historical periods of totalitarianism may not be
related to objects or perceptions at all. Unless this is by accident, why does it
happen or not happen as the “case” may be?

Jud:
Well Fred if you can come up will any other instances of what the *case may
be* let us hear them. Don’t be coy - you’re amongst friends.

Jud
Personal Website:
 http://evans-experientialism.freewebspac…

“In nuclear war all men are cremated equal.”
Dexter Gordon

Posted on Monday, August 27th, 2007 at 11:05 am
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