Heidegger

In a message dated 03/01/2007, _artefact at t-online.de_
(mailto:artefact@t-online.de) writes:

SNIP

Jud; [originally]
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?

Jud:
A very interesting and *telling* comment. You appear to believe [with
Meinong] that the very utterance of a linguistic expression existentialises that
which the idea describes?

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”?

Jud:
I am merely analysing the sentence as a grammarian - parsing it by analysing
it syntactically and assigning a constituent structure to the sentence. I am
merely elaborating upon what you have done above when you syntactically
identified *this* as a singularity, but wrongly identified *frog* as a universal.

I am using the same syntactical methodology that you used in order to point
out your mistake, hoisting you by your own petard if you like.

Any linguist will tell you that in the sentence: *This is a frog.* The
demonstrative pronoun
*this* is an identifier which indicates and is in grammatical
number-agreement with the unspecified noun *frog.*

The unspecificity is marked by the use of the indefinite article
*a.* The sentence: *This is a frog.* is NOT saying:

(A) “This” is a singularity and “frog” a universal. or
(B) “This is a singular form of a noun.” or
(C) This is not a jet airliner or the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The sentence merely says and means: *This is a frog.* You are confusing the
message and the meaning of the sentence with its implicature - implications
that can be extrapolated from the sentence - something that is inferred
(deduced or entailed or implied)

Dr. Eldred:
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.

Jud:
The ‘is’ of identity, which is what the sentence *This is a frog,* is all
about, refers to sentences of the type “The Morning Star is the Evening Star, “
“Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens, ” or “Carl XVI Gustaf is the King of Sweden.
” This is usually interpreted as meaning that, the *is* is taken as stating
*is the same as, * (*This* is the same as *a frog*) in way that wouldn’t be
possible for predication, the *is* here provides an entirely different
syntactical function. At the same time, this aspect of identity statements means
it also has a *substitution property* which, again, distinguishes it from
normal predication. Logically the sentence actually COULD have a tautologous
element if the utterer is correct in his statement that *this* is indeed *a
frog* in the sense that *this* = *frog* is a statement that [to the utterer] is
necessarily true.

However it does not provide the second important criterion for
tautology-hood in the sense that for the addressee the information may indeed be new. [see
my penultimate paragraph] He or she may not have realised that the entity
was a frog until informed by the addressor, in which case the element of
*useless repetition* necessary in order for the sentence to be declared a
tautology would be absent.

ME:
So now you’re asserting that “frog” is a singularity? Jud: No the use of the
singular form of the pronoun and the singular form of the article does this
- there is no need for me to assert anything. A child reading the sentence
would see immediately that *This is a frog* refers to a single frog and not to
all the frogs in the universe.

Jud; [earlier]
*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.

Jud:
Of course I understand the differences between these words. I have just
spent time analysing the singularity mapped by *this* and *a* in the sentence:
*This is a frog.* If the sentence were: *This is THE frog,* then the definite
article would be introducing the particularity, of a singular specific frog..

As far as the term *universal* is concerned I understand its categorial
function and usefulness - what nominalists and eliminativists claim is NOT that
the idea of universality should be in some way be eliminated from language, but
that which it indicates does not exist in the world and, if you like,
universality cannot be found in the universe.

Dr. Eldred:
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?

Jud:
The explanation is a very simple one. Words, grammatical functions, just
like number, categories, phylums, sets, groups, crowds and universals are
non-existent USEFUL fictions created/developed by the humans who employ them.
It is the HUMANS which exist and language, number and language itself are
modalities of the WAY [the mode or manner] in which the embrained human
linguists, mathematicians, grammarians etc. exist.
When the human brain stops functioning [coma for example] the patient still
exists but his/her the modalities of language, number and communication
cease, in a similar way that the modality of smoking ceases when a man gives up
tobacco. Why? Because *smoking* never existed in the first place – only the
smoker, the cigarettes and the nauseous smoke particles ever existed.

Dr. Eldred:
How can a sentence ACTUALLY “refer” if it does not exist?

Jud:
It is the two HUMANS involved in the referral who do the referring, using a
sentence (with words antecedally agreed by their language community to map
to certain entities or to the neurological modes of some human in the case of
abstraction) as a means of communicating the existential modalities of one
human to another.

Dr. Eldred:
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”.

Jud:
See above. The important thing to grasp is that the power does not lie with
the sentence itself but with the Addressor who *sends* the sentence and the
Addressee who recieves it and understands it.

Dr.Eldred:
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’, since 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.

Jud:
*Self-contradiction?* Examples please. I am quite clear [and always have
been on this list] about what an existing object comprises of. VAN INWAGEN
provides his own definition for physical objects in his Material Beings, he
says:
“A thing is a material object if it occupies space and endures through time
and can move about in space and has a surface and has a mass and is made of
certain stuff or stuffs.”

Dr. Eldred:
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.

Jud:
The desire to identify *what is what* is not peculiar to the British,
although it is true that our small nation does have an instinctive distaste for
bullshit of the continental type.
If the Germans concentrated more on tidying up the transcendentalists crap
that clogs up their thinking processes rather than obsessively tidying up
people and tattooing numbers on their arms they might engender more respect..

Dr. Eldred:
Your silly polemical caricatures of Socrates and Plato amount to a
self-exclusion from philosophy.

Jud:
Correction. My satirical polemical caricatures of Socrates and Plato amount
to a self-exclusion from THAT KIND OF PSEUDO PHILOSOPHY. *Let’s Pretend
Philosophy* holds no exclusive franchise on human thinking, the label simple
identifies a esoteric congregation of fuddy-duddies married to Folk Philosophy
who are either congenitally or psychologically incapable or unwilling to get
up to speed with modern philosophical thinking and seem to enjoy being
regarded as ontological oddballs.

Dr. Eldred:
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.

Jud:
Ideas don’t exist – only the ideator. The only worthwhile theories worth
reading are the theories of ideas that rubbish and expose the whole baloney of
duality and the existence of such lunacies as *mind* and *consciousness* etc.
Plato is interesting to read in a similar way that one examines a Greek
vase. His work provides interesting historical insights in to the development
and methodology of philosophical thought and warns us of the pitfalls and
mistakes of the wrongful thinking of the past which [allied as it was to
religion] has wreaked such havoc on the European experience.

Dr. Eldred:
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’.

Jud:
The *something* behind the most complicated and the most simplest OF HUMAN
ideas is the human ideator him/herself – that is ALL that exists.

On the one hand we have the Addressor who communicates by signs the way
he/she exists in relation to the way he/she is thinking about some problem or
piece of information at that particular moment

(b) One the other hand the addressee who exists in the modality of
receiving an account by means of audible signs which communicate the way that
the Addressor is existing [or existed, if the information is in a written
form or recorded form]
The Addressee modifies the way that he or she exists neurologically in
relation to the new information. It is all as simple AS THAT.

Now tell me [I am really curious] why do you find this so difficult to
grasp? You never challenge this modern neurological interpretation. Why?

Dr. Eldred:
When you identify a frog on a lily-pad, you have always already presupposed
the category of ’something’.

Jud:
The eliminativist has always already presupposed the nature of the
’something’ as *the human identifier.* In other words – himself as he identifies
the given entity as * a frog* or *a lilly-pad.*

The two existents in such an identification process are:

The categorising identifier – i. e., himself.
That which is categorised – the frog – the lily-pad.

Dr. Eldred:
Otherwise, you would see neither the frog as something nor the lily-pad as
something.

Jud:
In the case of a person encountering a frog or a lily-pad for the first
time, being someone [say an Esquimo who had never seen such entities and had not
seen pictures of them on TV or in books etc., the fact that he/she was unable
to categorise the items in terms of their phylum or universal Platonic form
would NOT MEAN that he did not regard the entities as *not being something..*

Dr. Eldred:
What your smug common-sense does is unthinkingly invert the order, thus
making a nonsense. Here we have another little entrance door to philosophy.
to know when the sign “something” is to be appropriately waved?

Jud:
My approach to language is to try to discriminate between signs [for words
are signs] that point to objects that exist and signs which do not. As you
are well aware, technically signs which *indicate* [hence the *indicant* of
analytical INDICANT theory] actual EXISTING objects can be said to be the
*nominatum* (that which is nominated by the human nominator) by the word. Some
words (abstractions) point to only to the human abstractor and have no
nominatum to point to – they are nominationally orphanic. My ontological interest is
to sort the nominational wheat from the designatory transcendentalist chaff..

regards,

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

Posted on Sunday, January 7th, 2007 at 3:05 am
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