Heidegger

Cologne 07-Jan-2007

GEVANS613 at aol.com schrieb Sat, 6 Jan 2007 08:54:11 EST:

> In a message dated 03/01/2007, artefact at t-online.de writes:
> SNIPJud; [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.

ME: The sentence *This is a frog,* is of the same type as “The Morning
Star is the Evening Star.”? That is patent nonsense. Moreover, you now
claim, “*This* is the same as *a frog*”, although ‘This’ and ‘a frog’
are obviously different. You don’t seem to realize that statements of
identity are necessarily simultaneously statements of difference, that
is, unless they are mere tautologies. And even British empiricist common
sense wants to avoid mouthing mere tautologies. So much for imagining
language is a convenient “mental toolbox” containing a collection of
conventional “signs” that can be pulled without contradiction from the
box at will by a “human ideator”.

> Jud: 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.

ME: They are “created/developed” and yet they do not exist?!!

> Jud: 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.

ME: So, you now contradict your own statement that a “sentence” was
“referring” to something. Now you say that a sentence cannot refer. You
claim that “words antecedally agreed by their language community […]
map to certain entities or to the neurological modes of some human”. If
that isn’t a mad, baseless phantasy of British common sense… That’s
the kind of project likely to be awarded a million pounds Sterling
research grant at Cambridge University. Socrates and Plato are
representatives of “PSEUDO PHILOSOPHY” (see below) only for that
common-sense, British, insular mind-set that also created so-called
“Continental philosophy”, thus excluding itself from philosophy.

> 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.*

ME: Precisely. Which only goes to show that the category of “something”
is ontologically PRIOR to “frog” and “lily-pad”, and NOT merely derived
(for convenience and by convention) from summing together all the
singular entities (which are ontologically invisible without the
category, “something”) into a convenient pop-up sign called “pronoun”.
British empiricist common sense is always skipping over the most simple
and obvious, racing to show off its natural scientific knowledge, still
fighting the brave fight against medieval scholasticism.

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

>
> 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 Monday, January 8th, 2007 at 6:45 am
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