Michael Brady quotes me as I display my usual degree of stupidity:
> Saul, suppose you and I look at a painting. You say, "Now, that's a work
of art." And I say, "No, that's a work of foopgoom."
>
> You say to me, "What the hell is 'foopgoom'?"
>
> I say to you, "What the hell is 'art'?"
>
> How would either of us go about showing the other was "wrong"?
It was stupid of me because, among other things, I should have said, "And a
second guy says, 'No, that's a work of foopgoom.'" I figured that by now you'd
know I myself would never in fact write that line except in parody. My point
was to show two listers mired in a hopeless squabble -- "hopeless" because
their suppressed ontic assumptions and their language are fatally muddled.
The muddled assumption I was parodying is the belief that the word 'art'
"refers to" some non-notional entity. Alas, Michael left off the last sentence
from the posting he was quoting:
"Even more interesting, how would you go about proving to me (assuming this
would be your position) that there is no such thing as "foopgoom", it's just
muddled notion in my mind?"
Michael himself is totally in the grip of that muddlement:
"You know, this stuff wasn't invented yesterday. "Art," has been around for a
long time, much longer than any of us has been looking at and discussing
"it". By now, we have a pretty good idea of what we're talking about."
No, Michael, you don't have a "pretty good idea" -- not for a philosophical
discussion.
Despite the hall-monitor image it entails, I'll continue trying to badger
listers into maintaining a firm grasp on the distinction between entities that
are solely notional and those that are non-notional, mind-independent. Listers
may say, "Well of course it's silliness to believe there are
external-to-the-mind "things" called good luck, holiness, curses, sins,
miracles, goodness, or
even evil. Whether we think we're talking about objects or "qualities", they're
only in our minds!"
But when it comes to that beguiling word, 'art', most listers can't even
entertain the idea that its alleged quasi-Platonic referent is just as
chimerical
as tree-spirits and the seven muses.
The badgering is difficult because, to achieve a degree of serviceable
understanding while staying on point, I regularly have to ignore fundamental
befuddlements. For example, Michael writes the seemingly innocent line:
"The squabbling doesn't arise over the term 'art' itself, but over how it's
applied and where its coverage ends."
But consider the phrase 'its coverage'. This assumes that words/terms do
something called 'cover' -- or they don't; that they 'apply' -- or don't. That
notion is folly. Words are inert; they DO nothing. They are the OCCASION for
action -- within a mind.
For that matter even the utterance "word" entails immense confusion. William
thinks he has used a reduction ad absurdum when he writes:
"If we don't know when an object is art, then we certainly don't know if an
utterance is a word."
But exactly one of my unaccustomed and hard-to-swallow points is that it's a
fundamental mistake to believe any utterance or scription either IS or IS NOT
a word. You may say you saw words printed on paper today. No. You saw ink on
paper; you've never seen a "word" in your life. Or heard one. "Foopgoom!" Did
you just hear a word? How would you tell? Run to your little dictionary? The
latest ones have lots of "new words". But they're only sounds they've at last
decided to call "words". What was their "is-ness" before?
But, again, to reach a degree of serviceable communication I have to use
'word' in these postings. Just as I have to use 'is'.
Michael writes:
"If Saul says. "Now, that's a work of art," I doubt you "completely
misunderstand" him."
But I've repeatedly asserted that "understanding" is always a matter of
degree -- and, though Michael put 'completely misunderstand' in quotes, it's
nothing I ever wrote (except, very possibly, in another moment of the degree of
stupidity I'm quite capable of).
When I just wrote, "Words are inert; they DO nothing. They are the OCCASION
for action -- within a mind," I was trying to convey that when we contemplate a
"word" the lump of links in our head summons up countless accumulated
associations in our mind, so what does come to mind is never exactly like the
notion of the writer/speaker. Still, it's very often serviceably close.
But when I write, "Words don't "HAVE MEANINGS"," it's a fairly sure bet that
most of the stirring notions in the minds of readers are NOT even serviceably
close to my notion -- just as they wouldn't be if I wrote: "Words do not
'refer', 'signify', 'name', or 'mean'. Words are inert. They don't "act", or
"do", or "cause". Kripke is wrong to think "names" 'pick out'."
For all this hall-monitoring, I'm sure there are listers who are saying to
themselves, "Old Cheerskep -- he's always faking stuff like this for the sake
of
argument. I'm sure he knows damn well what 'art' means."
**************
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