Heidegger

Cologne 28-Sep-2006

GEVANS613 at aol.com schrieb Tue, 26 Sep 2006 13:12:59 EDT:

> In a message dated 26/09/2006 11:20:12 GMT Standard Time,
> artefact at t-online.de writes: Cologne 27-Sep-2006

> JUD EVANS:[on Socrates] As usual he doesn’t know what he is talking
> about. EVERYTHING in the cosmos is itself one in itself.

> DR. ELDRED:But how can that be, according to the materialist
> eliminativist? One is an abstract idea, not to mention “one in
> itself”.

> JUD EVANS:ALL human words are abstractions in that they are not
> objects but communicatory significations issued as features of the
> existentially expressive modalities of human causal objects. Some
> signifying humans indicate other causal objects, and some such codes
> issued by humans do not have such a nominatum and remain
> indicationally orphanic. Any object in the cosmos can be meaningfully
> indicated with the significatum *the thing in itself* because all
> objects in the cosmos exist in that manner.

> DR. ELDRED:So neither one nor one in itself can exist, just as little
> as something (also an abstract category) can exist according to
> eliminativism.

> JUD EVANS:It depends in what sense and in what circumstances the
> significations are employed. Sometimes the word *one* is used as an
> alternative first person pronoun in such constructions as:
> *One has to take more care of oneself as one gets older* meaning*I*
> have to take care of myself, and others of a similar age group to me
> need to do the same. It can also be used to indicate a causal object
> whose name is unknown: *The one with the red hair and yellow dress.*
> *Nothing, something and anything do not exist per se, though if your
> hostess says: Will you have *something* to drink?* she will actually
> be employing the abstraction *something* in order to avoid saying:
> *Would you like a whisky, a gin, a rum, a coke, a lemonade, a cup of
> tea, a cup of coffee, a glass of water to drink?*

ME: This commonsensical empiricist account of language as an assemblage
of convenient abstractions seems plausible enough, but, examined more
closely, is entirely untenable. Our human understanding does not and
cannot work that way. To understand the various things in this list, “a
whisky, a gin”, etc. as belonging together in the class of “something to
drink”, they must already be understood as “something” and “something
drinkable”. These latter categories are _prior_ and _constitutive_ for
our understanding, and the concrete specifications as whisky, etc. are
derivative.

In other words, what exists first and foremost for human understanding
(but not in the mode of singular real things) are the abstract
universals such as “something”. Only by being able to understand
something _as_ something can you ever see and understand that cup of tea
before you on the table as “something to drink”. Human understanding
moves from the most abstract universals through to more concrete
particularizations (or specifications) to grasp the singular in its
singularity, and never in the other direction, from the singular thing
up to merely nominal, conventional abstractions. (Our understanding
would simply not know where to head upward.)

Furthermore, your pugnacious eliminativism would seem to have put its
nitty-gritty mits on things in themselves by naming concretely “a
whisky, a gin”, etc., but these specifications or particularularizations
of the more abstract universals, “something” and “something to drink”,
do not and cannot ever reach the singular thing in its singularity. Why
not? Because our human understanding works in no other way than to
identify the singular with the universal (or the particularized
universal). E.g. we do not merely understand that “whisky is something
to drink” (an identity of a particular with a universal), but also that
“this here is something to drink” (the identity of a singularity with a
particular), and even the expression “this here” is a universalization
of the intended singular thing. Even doing without the “convention” of
language with its “convenient abstractions”, and pointing and grunting
instead of speaking, eliminativism would not attain its postulated
rock-bottom reality of tangible things in themselves.

As it is, your materialist eliminativism operates with a postulated,
unfounded basic unit called “causal object” which is no less an
abstraction than the category of “something to drink”. So denying the
existence of the latter (as a conventional abstraction) implies also the
non-existence of the former.

> Jud: The useful fictional abstraction *anything* is another useful
> fiction that can be used in a similar way. *Are you going to eat
> anything?*

> DR. ELDRED:If something existed in the eliminativist universe, then it
> could perhaps also be one, but as it is, nothing at all can be said
> about what’s in the eliminativist universe.

> JUD EVANS:Absolutely correct. As no *nothing* - no *something* and no
> *anything* exist in the cosmos, all that can be correctly and
> veritably indicated for the eliminativist are actual causal objects -
> things in themselves - which are the true nominata of the
> significations employed, as antecedally, mutually agreed upon signs as
> to their meaning by members of the given language family. Adjunctive,
> ancillary, appurtenant, anthropocentric descriptive abstractions are
> additionally useful fictions in describing the way that causal objects
> exist as perceived by the circumscribed and limited sensorial
> equipment of the human observer.

> JUD EVANS: [earlier]Does that make the invisible exist? I’ll you
> who/what informs us that sundry entities that are invisible to the
> naked eye actually exist - it is the scientists and their optical and
> other sensory equipment that signal the concreticity of tiny objects -
> it is as simple as that.

> DR. ELDRED:So the first, and perhaps only, theorem of eliminativism
> is: For all x, if x cannot be perceived with the unaided or
> technically aided eye, it does not exist. Does this theorem have a
> proof, or is it to be taken as axiomatic dogma?

> JUD EVANS:No, that is not the case. No such theorem, proof, or or
> axiomatic dogma operates. Firstly there are many instances of the
> detection and acceptance of existing of causal objects without the
> unaided or aided eye actually seeing them. Scientists can establish
> the existence of a some white dwarfs and black holes by observing the
> perturbationary effects or secondary gravitational influences on a
> nearby binary system that causes it to deviate slightly etc.

ME: There’s no problem for science to convert these measured
perturbations into a picture and put it on a computer screen or a photo,
just as computer tomographs can produce 3-D pictures of our insides and
electron microscopes can generate images of the very small. But in all
these cases, the images produced are theoretical constructions depending
upon the postulates of physics, and precisely these postulates have to
be subjected to phenomenological ontological scrutiny and cannot be
admitted unquestioned as allegedly ‘hard’ evidence for empiricist
eliminativism. To do so is merely scientistic naivety.

Moreover, if visibility is to be the criterion for whether something
really, really exists, then compare the theoretically constructed image
taken by an electron microscope (which can only be seen and understood
through a highly theoretical interpretation) with the Angst we can see
in a painting by Francis Bacon, which does not require any theoretical
prerequisites to be seen and understood, but only that we are human
beings who are familiar and experienced in taking in who we humanly are.
I know, I know, the eliminativist will say that Angst does not exist but
is only a neurophysiological arrangement of atoms, and Francis Bacon’s
paintings are merely arrangements of certain chemically describable
pigment atoms and molecules on a stretched piece of canvas employed as
subjectile whose really real reality can be described in terms of atomic
physics and chemistry.

Unfortunately, your nuts-and-bolts materialist eliminativism eliminates
– and above all _overlooks_ — almost everything decisive and
interesting that arises from the identity between human being and being,
attempting to blow it out of the water with crude, down-to-earth,
commonsensical tales of how our brain processes the data it takes on
board through neurophysiological sensors such as eyes, ears and nose. I
have yet to see anything remotely resembling even an attempt at
grounding — as opposed to a dogmatic postulation — of your
eliminativist reduction of existents to physical, tangible things. It’s
not very persuasive to keep reading “X does not exist.” asserted without
any argument at all.

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

> For all I know [and I don’t know] it may well be that the same sort of
> perturbation detection method could be used in the realm of quantum
> physics. The eliminativist [and I did tell you this in an earlier
> message] is quite willing to accept that there are trees in Sumatra
> without actually seeing them. I am also prepared to believe that the
> office next door to my personal tutor at UCLAN [into which I have
> never ventured] has a window and is kitted out with electrical points
> and a floor to walk upon. If, as I often do with the children, I visit
> our nearby beautiful Lake District and observe a speedboat suddenly
> come to a dead halt in the water and parts of its hull and
> superstructure go hurtling into the air, I feel pretty certain [though
> I cannot see it either with my naked eye or with my excellent Russian
> field glasses] that some submerged X exists at that spot. And no, I
> speak of Lake Windermere not Lock Ness, so the object is unlikely to
> be a saurian survivor from the Mesozoic Era, which is a descendent of
> some aquatic beast that got trapped in the Scottish hinterland 245
> million years ago. regards,Jud Evans. Personal Website:
> http://evans-experientialism.freewebspac…

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Posted on Thursday, September 28th, 2006 at 10:30 am
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