In a message dated 6/27/10 11:40:33 AM, [email protected] writes:
> We all accept the working premise that the remains of ancient art are > representatively distributed across the range of quality. The best of the > ancient Greek or Sumerian or Chinese art are in fact the best. > When I examine what comes to my mind when I read those two sentences, I say to myself: I have to disagree; I DON'T accept. What I'm not accepting is the somewhat suppressed assumption that there is in some mind-independent ontic realm, abtracts entities that are "standards", "qualities", "art". Conveying my notion here is not easy. Nor will I here try to "prove it". I'll only try to convey my idea, and my suspicion about an idea I sense Michael has. I'm ready to call myself a dualist. I believe that there is a "material realm" comprising what I think of as "physical objects" -- including other human bodies. This is merely to say I'm not a solipsist; I can't "disprove" the possibility of solipsism, "prove" that you are out there, but I believe it, and I'm not interested -- in philosophy -- in maintaining moot positions that are non-credible to me. In addition to material things, I feel that notions, consciousness, are entities generically different from material entities. Mental entities are genericallyh different from phuysical entities. I'm aware that many thinkers would deny this; they'd point at a squirming neuron in my brain and say, "That's your pain." What acutely interests me is how many people -- whether they'd call themselves dualists or physicalists, also tacitly accept that there is a third (or second) kind of entity that exists out there in a mind-independent, material-independent, realm: abstractions. It's the realm of alleged "categories", "qualities", "sets", Platonic "forms", "absolute standards", "THE meanings of", "relations", "language", "referents", "beauty", "sin", or even "art". My position is that though we have notions that we might apply any of these labels to, there is no non-notional entity that you might assume the notion or word is "referring to". For example, I claim that mind-independent "meanings" and "names" and "referents" are imaginary abstract entities invented by thinkers struggling to "account for" "communication". I maintain I can "account for" everything many people would want to call "communication" without ever summoning up the non-existent abstract entity those people call "THE meaning of" the word. Again: I am not attempting to "prove" my position in this posting. But I maintain that in merely describing the position, I'm doing something more interesting that simply asserting, for example, "I don't believe in God." That's a position everyone has heard about. I'm not aware of anyone's having made explicit this fundamentally "trinary" view of "what there is" -- a view that countless philosophers have tacitly -- in effect unthinkingly -- entertained through the millenia but that I myself would argue is hard to defend. That argument is for another posting.
