Heidegger

In a message dated 21/11/2008 11:06:28 GMT Standard Time,
_jPolanik at nc.rr.com_ (mailto:jPolanik@nc.rr.com) writes: _GEVANS613 at aol.com_
(mailto:GEVANS613@aol.com) wrote:

20/11/2008 jPolanik

writes:

[Joe]: Jud, your recent posts concerning the natural language quantifiers
‘is’ and ‘exists’ display a fundamental confusion insofar as they suggest that
there is a relationship between natural language quantifiers and logical
quantifiers.

[Jud]:
Let me attempt to *de-confuse* you Joe. First of all there is no right which
reserves the term *quantifier* exclusively for use by predicational
logicians. The term was only introduced in the early nineteenth century as a term in
logic. It has been in use in NL for centuries and comes from the Medieval
Latin quantificre : Latin quantus, how great; see quantity + Latin -ficre, -fy.
Literally in the sense of “determine the quantity of, the measure of* etc.

[Joe (new)]:
hold onto that thought about quantity.

there are two uses of ‘is’ involved in this discussion: the is of
predication and the is of isness.

Jud:
Correction - there are two uses of ‘is’ involved in YOUR discussion: the is
of predication and the is of isness.

That is precisely the point that you fail to grasp. There is no *isness,*
there is only *that which exists.* You are confusing the aware human’s sensing
of *what exists* as some will o’ the wisp *property* of the object. We are
discussing whether the subjects of sentences actually exist as objects
(nominata) not the reification of human mentalisations. The *isness* or essence
(haecceity) of a concrete object does not exist. It is merely a term describing
the physical features of an object which humans distinguish in order to place
objects into reificatively convenient categories. It is the camel’s
quantifiable hump of hydrated fat that exists - not it *humpness.* The hump can be
measured, weighed, its moisture content assessed. If there is no camel body to
quantify - then the camel does not exist - it is as simple as that. The term
*camel* would be absent from the list of authentic nominata and join the ranks
of unicorns, *Being* and *isness.* Haecceity refers to the human perceptions
of a object which enable it to be categorised as particular thing, quiddity
is the old-fashioned term which points to the universal qualities of a thing
as sensed by a human object.

The quiddity of a camel, its “whatness” and its *isness* is purely relative.
A dromedary may categorise a camel as a fellow creature with one hump, a
mosquito may see/smell it as a blood/food supply, the human quantifies it by
seeing its hump and splayed toes which help him to recognise it as a camel and
not as a horse or a cow - it is not the *isness* of the camel that the Arab
traveller measures, assesses, evaluates, calculates its usefulness as a mode of
transport.

It is not THE FACT that the camel is a camel that exists - it is the CAMEL,
and THE CAMEL-TRADER judges is physical strength as mass in relation to how
far it can travel or the aspects of a thing which it may share with other
things and by which it may form part of a genus of things. The *isness* of a
camel and of every other object in the cosmos is a complete myth.

The concept of *isness* is no more than a classificatory conception of the
classifying human - the *isness* cannot be found in the camel or the leaf as
even the bumkin Heidegger publicly confessed (after examining a leaf and
looking for the non-existent *isness.* We wish to know and be able to quantify,
which designata exist from amongst the countless significa that act as
sentential subjects.

We need to be able to communicate which sentential subjects exist and
consist of quantifiable mass and extension, or whether they are reifications like
movement, energy, causality, beauty, *Being* and all the rest of the reificata
that haunts western thinking.

THAT IS WHY the Latins developed the word *EXIST to differentiate, quantify,
specify and confidently communicate what they meant to be taken as an object
in a sentence and what was no more than a human perception. The Greeks
lacked such an ontological significand - and it is that clearing up of that
metaphysical mess of definitional doo-doo that my project is all about.

Joe:
there are two logical quantifiers, the universal and the existential. each
of these specifies a quantity — the quantity of cases (within the
designated universe of discourse) for which a statement of predication must hold
before the statement in question can be considered true. thus,
*both* quantifiers assert/use the is of predication.

Jud:
Quite frankly Joe you are being gratuitously patronising, I ALREADY KNOW
what the logical quantifiers of logic are and the purpose for which they were
designed. The difference is that philosophy (particularly ontology) is more
concerned with the IS or IS NOT (see Parmenides) of the *unlimited universe of
discourse* in philosophy - ontology. I am researching, analysing and writing
about NL Quantifiers which are not restricted by the trammelled, and
curtailed and for the purposes of ontological investigation *inferior* existentially
confused and inadequate language of logic. The NL quantifiers of BE and
EXIST are concerned with a different discourse - the discourse of 1. What exists
and 2. What is said about what exists. As philosophers we seek truth STARTING
with the ontological nature of what in logic can be substituted for the
symbols. A good example of the total inadequacy of predicational logic is the
example you supply below

where C = is a crow and B = is black

[1] (x)(Cx - Bx) = for any x that is, if x is a crow then x is black
(or, colloquially, all crows are black).

as a universally quantified statement, [1] is false if and only if there is
at least one non-black crow; meaning; that [1] is true if either
(a) there are crows in the universe of discourse AND all such crows are
black; or, (b) there are no crows at all in the universe of discourse.
(in case ‘b’, the assertion may be vacuous; but, it is not false; so, as
long as we use a binary logic, it has to be true).

Jud:
Whereas the predicational logician is so concerned to ensure that the
conclusion does or does not follow from the given premises in order that the
argument can be declared *sound* or *unsound* the philosopher concentrates not so
much on the argument which follows the subject of the posited premisses - but
on the truth value of the components of the premise, which if wrongly
instantiated, or just being plain wrong will automatically render the argument
totally worthless in the manner of the one concerning the obvious falsity that
all crows are black.

Practically everybody KNOWS that all crows are not black - at least they
certainly do in the part of the country where I live. Have you never heard of
the Corvus albus? In Kenya (when I was in the army ) white crows were flying
all over the camp, pinching the food from our very plates as we carried it
from the Naafi to the dining area, while the birds were shitting white crow shit
all over the tents.

Predicate Logic is grossly inferior to philosophy and even to natural
language for the reason that it gets so pompous and excited about matching false
premises with (so-called) *sound* arguments that it neglects to check out such
things that even a poor uneducated Kikuyu tribesman knows - THAT ALL CROWS
ARE NOT BLACK. So you can use *binary logic* until you are blue in the face
- it will not make all crows black, nor will it make your conclusions true -
in spite of your insistence that it makes the *sound* - it just makes them
plain daft.

Nonsense can never be *sound* even *on the strength of the premises,* such
as when the argumentive elements are unchecked, wrongly specified, and clumsily
or inadequately chosen and described.

It is no use quoting:

where HR = is a hemp rope and BS200 = is a breaking strength sufficient to
bear the weight of the average adult male. in the United States (which is
189.8 pounds)

…. when one of your countrymen is hurtling down the cliff face of Mont
Blanc to his certain death, because you forgot to add the adjective *DRY* and to
the premisses and make it *DHR* rather than the potentially dangerous HR.
(dry ropes remain stronger - wet ropes are dangerous.)

Joe:
[2] (Ex)(Cx & Bx) = there is an x such that x is a crow and x is black
(or, colloquially, some crows are black).

Jud:
Utterly useless information. Everybody KNOWS, not only that SOME crows are
black - but that MOST crows are black. Like the illogicalities: like *I am*
that is doled out by this nonsense - no human being would ever make such a
statement. What is the POINT of it all - you are not providing anything people
don’t already know? Philosophy is interested in increasing the understanding
of humanity - not producing statements which no human being (except nutters
like Descartes perhaps) would ever say, or even think.

What interests me here is the nominalist-like choice of the existential
quantifier here in this *some* nonsense, rather than the universal. Does this
suggest that the originators of the symbolisation of this occult world were
aware that *universals* do not exist?

Joe:
as an existentially quantified statement, [2] is true if and only if
*there is* at least one black crow in the universe of discourse. hence, [2]
asserts the is of isness — its truth conditions require that there is an instance
of a black crow; whereas, [1] can be true even if there are no black crows
(as long as there are no crows at all).

Jud:
It does NOT follow that just because one black crow exists that there is
also some transcendental hobgoblin called its *isness* fluttering around and
pecking at worms or hiding in leaves too. You must be out of your mind! It is
the crow that exists - NOT the fact that it exists that exists. Heidegger
looked for *is* in a leaf - could not locate it and gave up looking with the
words:

Heidegger:
The question remains strange enough. It seems to lead to an empty
hair-splitting, a hair-splitting about something that does not and need not trouble us.
The cultivation of fruit trees takes its course without thinking about the
“is, ” and botany acquires information about the leaves of plants without
otherwise knowing anything else about the “is. ” It is enough that beings are.
Let’s stay with beings; wanting to think about the “IS” “is” mere quibbling. Or
instead if I intentionally steer clear of a simple answer to the question as
to where the “is” can be found.

If even the dolt Heidegger gave up on the is or isness of a leaf why are the
more educated predicational logicians still bothering their arses with such
crap?

Jud (earlier)
What I am claiming is that *is* and *exist* are (God forbid!) not the SAME
as the *isness-bound* predicate logic (all and some) version of the UQ and
the EQ, but act as the *some or none* NL VERSION or VARIANT manifested
linguistically as sentential tools in the quantification of the presence or
non-presence of matter, material, matergy, (call it what you will.)

Joe:
as you well know, mathematicians consider ‘an even prime number exists’ a
true statement; and, thus, the logical quantifiers are not limited to situations
where the subject of the predication is a material object.

Jud:
I am not talking about *true statements,* nor what reifying mathematicians
think - nor am I *particularly* interested in your *logical* [?] rather
boring and specious version, informationally and analytically crippled version of
the NLUQ and the NLEQ. I am interested in what exists and what does not
exist and the way that natural language has developed over the centuries from
the inadequacy of the Greek einai, through to the intelligence of the Latin
*exist* and forward to the present day, where the differences have become
blurred and the lack of focus that has ensued and the result has become a
parlous situation where reification has metastasised throughout the world as a
communicative cancer.

Jud.

Reminder - Caps for emphasis - not shouting.

Posted on Sunday, November 23rd, 2008 at 7:00 am
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