Heidegger

Cologne 05-Jan-2006

GEVANS613 at aol.com schrieb Wed, 3 Jan 2007 13:48:11 EST:

> In a message dated 03/01/2007 12:59:21 GMT Standard Time,
> artefact at t-online.de writes:
>
> SNIPJud {last time]It simply means that the animal indicated
> is a member of a group of entities which physically conforms
> to a humanly created, and universally accepted
> classification subgroup of animals known as frogs {i. e.
> batrachians - any of various tailless stout-bodied
> amphibians with long hind limbs for leaping; semiaquatic and
> terrestrial species. It is of course the frogs and the human
> classifiers that actually exist - not the classifications,
> generalisations or universal that exist. ME:So now “A frog
> is an animal.” This is an example of identifying a
> particular (”frog”) with a universal (”animal”). That is,
> “frog” _is_ what it is _not_, to wit, “animal”. Jud:No. It
> simply means that the frog in shunted-up one humanly-created
> usefully fictional designatory species-slot from Litoria
> Caerulea — Batrachian — Animal. It has nothing at all to
> do with some pot-bellied Greek pedophiliac and his
> envisioned emporium of *Universal Forms* cruising the sky
> like Heideggerian hang-gliding Tilers awaiting the moment to
> swoop down and invest some lucky singularity with his right
> trouser-leg rolled up and a knife at his left breast with
> membership of some universal *Grand Lodge of
> Simulacrumania.* in the sky. Universals are just imaginary
> shoeboxes into which similar things are sorted and thrown to
> keep language shipshape and to tidy up the way we think
> about the entities that surround us.Surely you don’t think
> that these let’s-pretend linguistic encyclopaedic sorting
> stacks ACTUALLY EXIST like some postal sorting-room
> pigeon-holes ) [open-mouthed in amazement smiley]
>
ME: So you’re saying that there _are_ “let’s-pretend linguistic
encyclopaedic sorting stacks”, but they do not exist?

> Dr. Eldred:In the first statement, “This is a frog.”, “this”
> is a singularity and “frog” a universal.
>
> Jud:BEDONG! Wrong again! *Frog* is the singular form of the
> noun
>
ME: So now you’re saying that the statement, “This is a frog”, is really
saying, “This is a singular form of a noun”? You don’t seem to realize
that language is always identifying what is different and is therefore
always saying contradictions. If you want to avoid contradiction, say
tautologies such as “This is this.”, “Frog is frog.”, “Lily-pad is
lily-pad.”, and so on. This keeps things nicely separate, as common
sense is wont to do.

> and the demonstrative pronoun *this* is in agreement with
> its singular form.
>
ME: So now you’re asserting that “frog” is a singularity?

>
> *FROGS* is the plural form. If the sentence was referring to
> more than one frog [in the way that your useful-fiction
> *EVERYFROG* *universal* refers]
>
ME: So you still do not understand the difference between universal and
generalization. The triad of categories, singularity, particularity and
universality, is not my invention. Furthermore, if words, being mere
parts of speech with grammatical functions (mere “signs” pulled from a
“mental toolbox”) are non-existent fictions, how could they ACTUALLY
“refer” to anything? How can a sentence ACTUALLY “refer” if it does not
exist? And yet you claim that there _is_ such a thing as a sentence with
the power of ACTUALLY “referring”, albeit that you claim that a sentence
is ‘only’ a “fiction”. Your typing “ACTUALLY EXIST” in caps, on the one
hand, and your blithely talking about “fictions” such as names, nouns,
pronouns, signs, mental pigeon-holes, etc., on the other, indicates only
that you seem to imagine a hierarchy of existents, i.e. beings that are
more or less ‘there’, sinece your attempt to make a clear-cut
distinction and separation between existents and non-existents patently
entangles you constantly in self-contradiction — of which you are
totally unaware. That is the fate of common sense — to blithely
entangle itself in self-contradiction whilst claiming that what it says
is plainly self-evident to any right-thinking British subject who is
wont to keep all things tidied up in separate drawers so that they do
not get mixed up.

Your silly polemical caricatures of Socrates and Plato amount to a
self-exclusion from philosophy. Only an insular British empiricist
mind-set could parody Plato’s so-called ‘theory of ideas’ in such a
risible way that misses the mark. (Remember, Plato’s parables to try to
get the thought of ‘idea’ across were, from the start, invariably
misunderstood and taken for the thing itself.) But, even today, there
are philosophy professors at Oxford and Cambridge who, more sedately,
paraphrase Plato’s so-called ‘theory of ideas’ in a similarly ridiculous
way that reveals only a total lack of understanding. And yet, even
British common-sense empiricism would not exist if understanding did not
grasp first of all the simplest ideas such as ’something’. When you
identify a frog on a lily-pad, you have always already presupposed the
category of ’something’. Otherwise, you would see neither the frog as
something nor the lily-pad as something. What your smug common-sense
does is unthinkingly invert the order, thus making a nonsense. Here we
have another little entrance door to philosophy.

_-_-_-_-_-_-_- artefact text and translation _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_- made by art _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ http://www.webcom.com/artefact/ _-_-_-_- artefact at t-online.de _-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ Dr Michael Eldred -_-_-
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_

> then the form of the pronoun would be THESE and the copula
> ARE as in: *These are frogs.* The indefinite article *a*
> simple means that *a* single frog is being indicated which
> is unspecified. In natural language such a sentence would
> not appear utterly out of context in this way anyway, and
> when the monologue or dialogue continued the indefinite
> article would be abandoned and replaced by the definite
> article *the.* Example?*This is a frog. It is sitting on a
> lily-pad. The frog is green and has a tiny golden crown upon
> its head. The frog is actually a handsome prince over which
> the Wicked Wizard of the West Heidegger has cast a national
> socialist spell.Now why do think the indefinite article
> suddenly changes to a definite one? Why doesn’t the text
> keep to the indefinite article and contiue:*This is a frog.
> It is sitting on a lily-pad. A frog is green and has a tiny
> golden crown upon its head.* Have you worked it out?Let me
> know in your next post. Dr. Eldred: But now “frog” is a
> particular, specified under the universal, “animal”. This
> gives the well-worn syllogism: “This is a frog.” “A frog is
> an animal.” Jud: You appear not to have grasped that the
> eliminativist has no argument with the employment of useful
> fictions. All world languages are literally slewing with
> them - and a good job too, for they are vital in human
> intercourse and talking without them would be a
> communicational pain in the arse.The discussion concerns my
> rejection of the insinuation that these useful fictional
> categories or *universals as you insist on calling them
> ACTUALLY EXIST. [REMINDER: CAPS FOR EMPHASIS - NOT
> DISCOURTESY.] Not one eliminativist on earth would disagree
> with the statement: “This is a frog.” “A frog is an animal.
> Therefore “This is an animal.”Dr. Eldred: The particular,
> “frog”, serves as the mediating hinge that ‘closes together’
> (con-cludes) the singularity, “this”, with the universal,
> “animal”. (This is the sense of the German term, “Schluß”,
> meaning “conclusion”.) Once again “this” is identified with
> what it is not, viz. a universal, “animal”. Jud: You are
> trying to teach your grandmother to suck eggs as we say in
> the north. I am more than familiar with the syntactical and
> semantic mechanisms of language. I repeat this discussion
> concerns the ontological status of your universals - not
> there communicational efficacy.Dr. Eldred: So now you have
> to start again with an eliminativist materialist account,
> and explain to us how humans, in times long, long ago before
> King Ethelred, created the universal, “animal”, by voting on
> a universally acceptable classification in a referendum. It
> was then, presumably, decreed by the people that this “sign”
> was to be placed carefully in the “mental toolbox” (known to
> non-eliminativists as language) donated to every newly born
> English citizen for later employment in designating all the
> beings around it. For instance, on seeing something, every
> adult, gum-boot-wearing English citizen searches in his
> mental toolbox under the universal classification
> “something”
> (set up merely by convention of course in a preceding
> referendum) for the appropriate sign to be waved for
> purposes of designation. Going down the list, he finds the
> appropriate sub-classification “something with a bodily
> quality”, and then, under the list of the universal, “bodily
> quality” he finds the sign “green legs”. This provides the
> clue that the “something with green legs” must be a “frog”
> (what else could it be? A bird?), so the citizen then pulls
> out the sign saying “frog” and puts it together with the
> sign saying “something”, thus forming the statement, “This
> something is a frog.” And so on. Of course, all this
> searching and classifying and taking of signs from the
> mental toolbox called language happens in a split second,
> the container for this mental toolbox (called “brain”) being
> equipped with first-rate, multi-processor-core, neuronal
> networks. So we don’t even notice it’s going on.
> Nevertheless, it remains unclear when the sign “animal” is
> to be pulled from the mental toolbox and when not. How is
> the average, language-using English citizen to decide? And
> how is he to know when the sign “something” is to be
> appropriately waved? Jud:I like your eminently readable
> style, but the development of language is not at all as
> colourful a process as you depict it. It would be great if
> it was such a democratic procedure - sadly it isn’t. Our
> language and that of your partner’s are members of the Great
> Indo-European language family and many if not most of the
> words in any of the branches can be traced back to an
> original UR language which predated Sanskrit. [you know all
> this I know and you can no doubt suck eggs] Humans needed
> useful words to describe faunae in general for obvious
> reasons. A farmer in one of the hillside pastures on the
> outskirts of Mohenjo Daro, or “Mound of the Dead” the
> ancient Indus Valley Civilisation city that flourished
> between 2600 and 1900 BCE would NOT want to shout to his
> peasants: *Bring the oxen and the cows and the goats and
> the water-buffaloes and the camels and the horses and the
> sheep and the geese and the hens and the cockerals and the
> dogs and the pigs and the cats and the pigeons to the
> compound right away - there is a war-party of Harappans been
> reported approaching the north-east of the city!.*He would
> simply say: *Bring the animals to the compound right away
> — there is a war-party of Harappans been reported
> approaching the east of the city!.I trust that the above
> example will help you in understanding the sort of scenario
> when we would use the generalisation *animals* rather than
> employ a detailed list and pedantically ensuring that each
> entity was complete with an actual nominatum? You can
> extrapolate the above and create many other fanciful
> scenarios where lesser or greater categorial specificity
> would have been required for the easier and more rapid
> communication of information.The Mohenjo Daroien farmer’s
> property would no doubt have been overrun by the marauding
> Harappans if he had to stand there for half the morning
> enumerating each and every bit of livestock which needed to
> be hurried to protective custody. My conclusion?
> Generalisations were created/developed spontaneously in line
> with other aspects of the basic necessities of survival,
> including suitable clothing, food, weaponry and warfare,
> agricultural implements and semantic and numerical accuracy
> etc.They were and remain no more than the usefully
> fictitious signs created to avoid paraphrasis, ambage and
> longwindedness. regards,Jud Evans. Personal Website:
>  http://evans-experientialism.freewebspac…
>

Posted on Friday, January 5th, 2007 at 5:15 pm
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