Cheerskep wrote: > Occasionally on the forum my aim is specifically to argue that a word, a > sentence, a "work" of any kind does not DO anything, cannot CAUSE anything, > does not HAVE anything. At other times that 's not my main point, but still I > don't want to be inconsistent with the earlier point, so I smuggle in stuff > that perhaps won't call attention to itself but is there to keep the faith > with the earlier argument. Thus I use a word like 'occasion'; I'll say a work > by Mozart or Dickinson "occasions" an a.e., my position being that it no > more "causes" the a.e. than a stable rock "causes" the breaking of a toe at > the end of my swinging foot.
Well, now, that's interesting. "Occassionally," Cheerskep writes, "I say a work by Mozart or Dickinson 'occasions' an a.e., etc." Ain't vocabulary grand! It seems to me that Cheerskep is fighting a rearguard action, picking off all those stragglers who reify an ontic phantasm, but he's just shooting the corpses of the same stragglers he previously picked off. [That's an extended metaphor, btw.] I don't think any of the regular commentators here badly misuse "is," wrongly infer conclusions from an ontic mistake, or regale us with an ontic antic. And rarely does the inexact use of "meaning" or "is" actually impair the argument being made. Why don't we just all agree to an entente: every time one of us on this list refers to "the meaning" of a term or image or other construct, we concede that it has been licitly used unless something in the very expression, sentence, or paragraph explicitly reveals a misapplication of "the" or "meaning" that defeats impeded the argument. In other words, no harm, no foul. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
