ONT Re: Extension x Comprehension = Information
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JA = Jon Awbrey
JD = Jean-Luc Delatre
I will continue with the tack of trying
to clear up small points one at a time.
JD: Let's get off SUO to argue about philosophy.
JA: 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: 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.
That statement itself betrays of host of misunderstandings,
most of which I must pass by in hopes of finding something
that can be addressed in a satisfactory way at this time.
Your assumption that you know of my goals at this point
is one for which I can find no evidence in what you say.
There are goals and there are subgoals, long-term and short-term.
This is what I said to you in reply to this question about goals:
My present goal is arriving at good theories of intelligent systems
and building software that will help us do inquiry in the real world.
I started out in math, physics, took a detour through philosophy and
psych, came back to math and statistics, took another detour through
cog and quant psych, back to math, then took up computing because of
needing to build a theorem prover to help with some of the questions
in math that i really just had to know the answer to, and continued
that project into my current systems engineering work. The point is,
I did not start as a classical or 19th century scholar, but only got
forced to return to these old sources by a kind of backtrack algorithm
that I was pursuing, when I had to diagnose why current hypotheses and
methods appeared to be failing to do what they were supposed to do.
That describes my larger goals, and explains the bearing
of the my present focus on Peirce's theory of information.
JA: 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".
JD: I am *not* arguing about the *nature* of "what is"
and I don't think the SUO people do that either.
I will make a note of your intent (old-fashioned meaning of "intent"),
and I will make a note of it when I think I see you departing from it.
The SUO group is too diverse to characterize in a simplistic fashion,
but I have seen enough hue and cry about "straying" into linguistics
or logic or semiotics or any other subject that is held "immaterial"
to the issue of "sheer unfettered ontology" to know that this first
observation or hypothesis of yours shows a lack of acquaintance with
the population in question. And, of course, to adapt the remark of
a noted architect: "Experts do not have to argue -- they just know".
JD: 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.
Alright, this is good, to put one issue on the table at a time.
So I get another chance to say it again. When you take this
much for granted, that there are two kinds of things that
you (plural, you and the SUO's) deem to exist, then you
are already taking a whole lot more for granted than
I (and some other people that I might name) feel
that we can take for granted quite so quickly.
JD: NO questioning about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin!
A common way to dismiss any other point of view.
JA: Yes, but it is the level of discourse in which we swim,
JD: You choose to "swim" wherever you like, others will choose differently.
Yes, but I notice that they continue to swim
with their mouths open, emitting bubbles ...
but is your remark now intended to dismiss
the attention to language? Have you gone
so quickly back to reside in pure being?
http://www.medialab.chalmers.se/fishcam/fish.html
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.
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.
JD: I am *strongly* anti-Platonician!
It is a remark now taken out of context (old-fashioned meaning of "context"),
but I was talking about words. That is commonly taken to be a nominal start.
Not that I would end up as a nomimal thinker.
JD: Same remark, you will meet with "actual" men, horses, kangaroos,
and whales before you figure out how they relate to each other.
JA: 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.
JA: 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).
JD: Long standing topic, upon which there is not the slightest hint of agreement.
My point exactly.
JD: Nevertheless, there must be *some* level of "unmediated intuition"
below which it is impossible and useless (Wittgenstein) to go.
Let's call a spade "a spade".
Calling it "a formal spade" will
not turn in into a runcible spoon,
nor a hawk nor a handsaw for a' that.
You have turned Ludovico's pragmatic trick
into the fulcrum of the soul's absoulution,
and the Master of the Game is hence undone,
or is he contrary wise now so done that we
may so facilely stick a fork in his tongue,
and leave him spinning in his own spit in
the pit for wit you have dug him?
JD: 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.
It's black and white and read all over.
Jon Awbrey
Incidental Musement:
http://philebus.tamu.edu/pipermail/kif/2000-December/000122.html
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