SUO: Re: Colorless Green Events Process Furiously
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Pierre,
Let me take a few guesses at what might be the source
of our current mismatch in perceptions, in the hopes
of moving on from that point.
Maybe in using the word "linguistic" I have led you to make
a stricter construction of my meaning than I actually intend.
It was a commonplace of my education -- I am sure that just
about every physics professor I ever had in that first couple
of years invoked it as a cliche observation -- that one of the
reasons we spent so much time fixated on the idea that particles
were particles and waves were waves and never the twain shall meet,
not to mention thinking that only one basis of description could be
"God's Own Ontology", so to speak, was all to be blamed, not exactly
on the fact that Indo-European languages have long maintained a form
that distinguishes nouns and verbs the way that they do -- for the
language itself is blameless -- but that people had somewhere got
into the habit of drawing illegitimate conclusions about Nature
from the structure of mere Language, and on this particular
spit my teachers usually roasted the Ancient Philosophers.
So the point about "reifying syntax", or looking for substantive subjects
and priviledged predicates in Nature, for no better reason than the role
that these categories play in Language, and with no critical reflection
on the implicit hypothesis of isomorphism that is thereby taken for
granted in doing so, is really just a special case of a much more
general point, having to do with the difference between systems
of representation and the realities that form our objectives.
You appear to agree with me that the discipline we call "Ontology" --
even though it is bound to use the resources of language and even
though anything is fair game as a source of hypotheses, that is,
so long as the abductions are subsequently tested -- ought not
to be bound by the artifacts of a particular "language", under
the broader reading of which term I include coordinate bases,
representational systems, syntactic preferences, and so on.
Jon Awbrey
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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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