There is not an excess of issues, but an excess of faultiness in your thesis, in my view and as I explained it in clear language. My critique is that you are equating normal and perfect by your own logic. If normal is what ought to be, then it is not yet present and real but is instead an imagined ideal; if the perfect is also ideal, then it, too, is only imagined and not real. Thus according to your view, the normal and the perfect are the same ideal.
As far as I know the normal is simply what works according to plan, a pragmatic condition. Depending on the item being measured for its normal condition of working there are different ways to find the norm. It is not the optimal good working or bad working, just somewhere in-between. WC ________________________________ From: Frances Kelly <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, June 2, 2009 9:58:25 AM Subject: RE: Architecture and Philosophy: Review Frances to William... You may be grabbing at too much here, and trying to pull an excess of issues into the web, although there is indeed a lot that could be dealt with here, especially in regard to framing a theory of architecture. Some of your statements below however are unclear to me, therefore you may wish to edit or restate them for my benefit. Your use of "normal" may differ from mine, which for me is what stuff ought to be, whether the norm is of a perfect ideal or a perfect fact or a perfect idea. Allow me to reduce the issues as understood down to a few dealing with how humans likely grasp ideal stuff, like infinity and continuity, as real phenomena but indirectly via existent representative signs that stand for the stuff. The range here is in the tern of stuff and sign and sense, so that between objective stuff and subjective sense there is the relative sign. What is given to sense is the sign of the stuff. The pure essences of stuff remains constant, but will be manifested differently in various substances depending on the contextual situation or location of the signer and their sense. The essences of all stuff will seem to sense as substances, because stuff can only be sensed indirectly, as moderated by signs that exist in between stuff and sense, and what is sensed of stuff only seems to be as the stuff normally ought to be. If some aspect of stuff is given to sense, as a result of this sentient process it will be given as a fact and as an object, where that object also instantly becomes a moderating representative sign of the stuff as another phenomenal object. The stuff is made real by the sense of the sign. The factuality of stuff as a phenomenal object may exist aside from sense as an objective material construct, and even be phenomena that are not signs, but the stuff will not be real until it is sensed and as a sign. The reality of factuality is a mental construct, so that stuff is only as real as sense. The ideal of stuff is sensed as the real sign of stuff, and mind is the law that controls the conformity of sign to stuff, thus assuring a degree of normality. The truth of the matter is that mind can only sense any stuff indirectly as seeming phenomena via moderating signs that represent stuff. The limit of mind is therefore in the interpretation and inference of the sign. On consciousness, it is pure feeling without any reason to be so, and it is also a sign that is accessed indirectly as a representative phenomenon, because the self can only guess at and infer its own inner states, and can be wrong about them. On experience, it is the effect and result of sense, to include knowing the experience of the experience. We sense the ideal infinity of continuing time, indirectly by way of representative phenomena acting as signs, and we experience it because it is a normal norm whose continuity makes common sense, and we know it because we sense an occurring substantive sign of it. The signer can also pretend that signs stand for a belief, and a belief that is furthermore false. On normality, the normal and abnormal can be of the perfect or the imperfect, and of the corporeal and material or the ethereal and mental. The norm of an ideal continuant thing or of a real existent object is what ought to be of those represented phenomena. The eventual test of assurance about the normal is in the collective community of normal persons who agree on it, because the individual alone can be deluded. The normal of an objective ideal or of a subjective idea is experienced or given to sense in the sign, and it is a sense of the sign that makes the difference between the ideal and the real or between the perfect and the imperfect or even between the normal and the abnormal. The key here to all this is likely semiotics. William wrote... Frances says: The normal is what the perfect ought to be in mind, and not what it actually is, because the perfect ideal is only as real as the norm of sense. William responds: If that is so, how do we experience the normal, or know it when it occurs? You have set up a tautology by which neither state, perfect or normal, can be known and neither therefore is different from the other, except in non-normal idealization. You proclaim a belief system, and that's fine with me because I want to claim that all consciousness is embedded in belief. But to get past that subjectivity we need to pretend that signs stand for an objectifying of belief (we make-believe). Since you seem to deny that requirement, we are left with a permanent gap between belief (idealization) and real, objective normal (not pretended via make-believe). And that means that both states remain equally subjective, or idealized, taking us full circle back to my assertion that your normal is equivalent to anyone's perfect.
