SUO: Re: Colorless Green Events Process Furiously
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JA: Jon Awbrey
PG: Pierre Grenon
JA: You must have noticed the tendency here and elsewhere to try
and wring ontologies whole cloth from linguistic analysis?
That's all that I meant by that. There was a time, long
time passing, when this was rather soundly drubbed as
"syntactic reification", that is, the quest to find
subjects and predicates in nature because they are
found in language, unessentially more generally,
to project our conceptual categories onto the
world with no critique of the resulting fit.
JA: The more I think about it, the more I think that this may be the very
answer that I've been looking for lately, namely, the principal feature
that distinguishes "scientific and technical ontologies" (SATO's) from
"popular and naive ontologies" (PANO's).
JA: The notion that we can tell what sorts of things there are in the world
by interrogating under sufficient torture the categories of linguistics
is the very thing that we used to ridicule the Greeks for -- it seems
that the recent reprisal of this turn of mind is what Freud would have
called the "return of the repressed", or what Jung called enantiodromia.
JA: At any rate, I can now begin use this characteristic
as a tentative criterion for telling these two broad
types of ontologies apart.
PG: It is plain to me that you have discovered the truth, the meaning of life,
and the purpose of the universe. It is sad to realize that now that you have
accomplished this great discovery and fullfilled your cosmological purpose,
you will stop posting on this list.
PG: Sorry but I cannot see what to "tell what sorts of things there
are in the world by interrogating under sufficient torture the
categories of linguistics" could mean or under any sensical
reading whose methodlogical maxim this could reflect. OTOH,
that some people may have trust in natural language may be,
but where in the first place did you get the idea that
ontology was a linguistic endeavour?
Pierre,
Sadly, I cannot claim any great originality for this perspective that
I am struggling to recapitulate here, as it is largely but the voices
of all those teachers that I had over the years droning on with what I
used to regard as utterly stock notions that everybody knew already, and,
of course, I hardly paid them much mind on the first, or the second, or
the third cycle through. But now I am, slow learner that I am, somewhat
dimly just beginning to see the signifcance of their point.
It does, however, slightly shock me that you recognize no object examples
of the portrait that I have -- no doubt clumsily in my tardy waking from
dogmatic slumbers -- attempted to paint here. I have other work I have to
do right now, but I promise to give this question some additional thought
throughout the day, and I will, of course, persist in trying to clarify.
Jon Awbrey
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