ONT Re: Extension x Comprehension = Information

[Jean-Luc Delatre <jld@club-internet.fr>]

Jon,
 
Let's get off SUO to argue about philosophy.

> It is prohibitively difficult for me to try and clear up
> whole hosts of misunderstandings at once, so I am trying

It is not so much "misunderstandings" than not having the 
same goals, I already said that:

JD: Tue, 05 Mar 2002 10:15:00 +0100
    May be I shall not keep contradicting you on Peirce because
    neither of us will get much profit out of it, given that we
    don't have the same goals.

> 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".

I am *not* arguing about the *nature* of "what is" and I don't think 
the SUO people do that either.
Rather, taking it for granted that when we talk, we talk about objects 
and attributes we already deem "existing", we (me and the SUO's) are 
looking for ways to organize the discourse in an usefull manner.

NO questioning about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin!

> JA: Yes, but it is the level of discourse in which we swim,

You choose to "swim" wherever you like, others will choose differently.

> 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.
  [snip]
> 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.

I am *strongly* anti-Platonician!

> 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).

Long standing topic, upon which there is not the slightest hint of agreement.

Nevertheless, there must be *some* level of "unmediated intuition" below 
which it is impossible and useless (Wittgenstein) to go.
This could be at the attribute level rather than at the object level.
Try to explain to me what 'red' means, really try. 
Though I am not blind, you are gonna have a hard time doing that.

Cheers.

-- Jean-Luc Delatre
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An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage,
concludes that it will also make better soup.    - H.L. Mencken. 
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