Knowing the Words
October 5th, 2008, search relatedRelated posts :: What Does the Knowing Brain Know? :: Knowing the Words :: Knowing the Words :: *The Evidence for the Physical Universe is the Physical Universe.*
[Jud]: I [am] interested in receiving the vital message from you which
deals with my recent demolition of the *I think therefore I am.*
absurdity.
[Joe]: and which demolition would that be? is it the one Heidegger
promised but never delivered? perhaps someday you could state your case
without the florid rhetoric that obscures the argument (if it is an
argument) that you are trying to make. no matter, let’s review …
>Joe: consider a statement such as ‘I experience; therefore, I am’ or
>the simpler ‘I am’.
>Jud: Such … verbalisms are meaningless UNLESS the addressor is
>already in possession … of biographic, experiential, existential
>modes which map to the statement *I experience.*
[Joe (new)]:
for ease of reference, I use ‘Experiento’ as the proper name of the
sentence, ‘I experience; therefore, I am’.
you seem to assume that I can not assert the Experiento without
understanding the words of which it is composed.
I agree (to some extent) and disagree (to some extent), as follows:
as to ‘I’ - in order to assert the Experiento, I must understand the
word ‘I’ as the word (the linguistic tool) by which I self-reference.
however, it does not follow from the fact of self-referencing that I
(the referent of ‘I’) know what I am. all that follows is that I am
self-referencing.
as to ‘experience’ - there must be some recognition that the word
‘experience’ applies to all these ‘events’ of which I am aware.
as to ‘therefore’ - it seems that I must intend *some* meaning when I
use ‘therefore’ in the Experiento; but, judging from the weight of
philosophical speculation as to the meaning of the ‘ergo’ in the Cogito,
alternate but equally correct interpretations (of ‘therefore’) are
therefore possible.
as to ‘am’ - one may understand or accept ‘I am’ as a true statement
without knowing what is asserted of I when I say ‘I am’. bizarre as it
may seem, I did not begin to understand the meaning of ‘am’ until I
realized that ‘I am’ is a true statement.
Joe
–
Philosophy is, after all, done ultimately in the first person for the
first person. — H-N Castaneda
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http://what-am-i.net
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