SUO: *Date 10 Mar 2002 -- Extension x Comprehension = Information
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JA = Jon Awbrey
JD = Jean-Luc Delatre
It is prohibitively difficult for me to try and clear up
whole hosts of misunderstandings at once, so I am trying
to scan through JD's comments and to pick off the easier
pickings as I come to them. Here is one misapprehension
that I think I can clarify a little.
I have repeatedly tried to explain the following point.
I am still hopeful that one day I will find a way that
actually gets through. The basic insight is really as
old as Aristotle, and its development marks one of the
initial instances of a "linguistic turn" in philosophy.
The suggestion is this: If you find that you and your
colleagues having been arguing for an excessively long
time and without success about the nature of "what is",
then maybe it is time to back off from the fixation on
being, just a step or two, and start to look, with new
deliberation and due reflection, at the many different
categories of things that people say about "what is".
That is what I was trying to say when I said these words:
JA: Yes, but it is the level of discourse in which we swim,
the one of which we have some immediate grasp, the one
that is "closer to us", as Aristotle said, and the one
in which we cannot help but to begin. So let us begin.
That is what I was trying to say when I said these words:
JA: If you consider semiotics to be straying, then that is your entitled opinion,
but I have reasons to think, reasons with which even Plato and Aristotle were
thoroughly familiar, that our sorts of beings cannot get at ontos+logos except
through the door of logos first. So that will be my approach to the subject.
That is what I was trying to say when I drew this picture:
o-----------------------------o-----------------------------o
| Objective Framework | Interpretive Framework |
o-----------------------------o-----------------------------o
| | |
| | "man" |
| | "horse" |
| | "kangaroo" |
| | "whale" |
| | "mammal" |
| | |
| | "spherical" |
| | "bright" |
| | "fragrant" |
| | "juicy" |
| | "tropical" |
| | "fruit" |
| | "orange" |
| | |
o-----------------------------o-----------------------------o
That is what I was trying to say when I said these words:
JA: That is to say, in the beginning there is nothing but words,
and the objective side of the universe is all form and void.
JA: Still nothing happening on the objective side of the world.
Our first inkling of a connection to the "world of matter"
comes with the notions of denotation and Peirce's "sphere".
To which you replied, respectively:
JD: Ha, ha, pure bollocks (sorry, cannot resist that one ...)
No one could build any kind of concepts if it were not for
some examples of objects out of which he will painstakingly
try to make some sense by ordering them along concepts.
JD: Same remark, you will meet with "actual" men, horses, kangaroos,
and whales before you figure out how they relate to each other.
In response to this I might just point out that the "semiotic turn" is
wider than both the linguistic and the logical turns, because among the
so-called "signs" that semiotics studies are all the data of the senses,
which is all that greets us when we first meet with "examples of objects"
and all of the "actual men, horses, kangaroos, and whales" that there are.
The illusion that one begins with some unmediated intuition of objects
is one of the most insidious of all the systematic errors in ontology,
tantamount to the "ontological worker's occupational disease" (OWOD).
Watch out for that ...
Jon Awbrey
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