Current academic establishment displays a stunning propensity to replace thinking with rat hunting. In PREDICATE LOGIC http://findgeorges.com/CORE/C_NOUMENAL_VIEW/c2_predicate_logic.html and SET THEORY http://findgeorges.com/CORE/C_NOUMENAL_VIEW/c3_set_theory.html
I have shown that academic logic and alleged set-theoretical foundation of mathematics boil down to rat hunting for "reflexive fallacies" and "antinomies". Rat hunting is clearly a negative sport. Having exterminated all rats, we stay in a desert with ill-founded, meaningless pseudo-logic and 100+ set theories unable, after 100 years of hunting, to define their principal concepts of "set" and "number". Let me now talk a bit about rat hunting for reifications gaining vast popularity in philosophical academies. I tackled briefly the reifications in http://findgeorges.com/CORE/C_NOUMENAL_VIEW/c1_reification.html without, however, considering them as rats to be hunted. Now, like Georgia's "melodies bring memories", so do reifications bring to my mind the old Kotarbinski. We know well his views of reifications, but much less those of the hunting sport. Having frequented him in resistance hideouts of occupied Warsaw I have the dope from the horse's mouth and would like to expose it here. Let me start by saying that I mean Kotarbinski's first, war time period and not his post-war Gulag opportunism where, to please his capos, he tainted his linguistic reism with "materialist" ontology directly copied from small handbooks of young red pioneers of the Konsomol. We can do without these handbooks, can't we? In the first period K. tackled the senseless speech muddled with fictitious terms, particularly in philosophy and ideology. He saw it as principal cause of historic disasters such as Nazi genocide. Trying to unmuddle the speech he restricted meaningful terms to concrete, empirically adequate objects and banned unobservable phantasms and generalizations. Thus he considered as fictitious such terms as German, Jew, patriotism, honor, fidelity, love, corruption, gods or angels. He made himself unpopular in his own quarters by banning the cliche of noble heroic Polish resistance, substituting for it oppressed people trying to defend themselves. At this time he based acceptance of terms on empiric adequacy and concreteness and did not talk about "real", or "existing" "material objects". That came later, imported from handbooks of red pioneers. Now, let's return to the hunting sport. I remember K. saying - I'm not a maniac and don't want to change the language, nor its common expression forms. Most of usual statements about apparently fictitious terms may be converted to a concrete form and as such are reasonable. - Let's take the example "departure of the train was belated". "Departure", not being a concrete object but a fictitious term, the statement appears illusory. However, it's readily convertible to the reasonable "the train departed later than scheduled". Thus, it's acceptable and we may keep the useful and properly understood headings "departures", "arrivals" in railway stations and airports. It would be rather silly to embark on quixotic wars against them, while we were facing the illusory statements about fictitious German superiority commanding concrete extermination of other people, fictitiously inferior. It was certainly impossible to turn back the tide of Nazism with the feather of linguistic purification, but it will not be said, that it had not been properly judged. Less impossible were the trials to demystify the "noble heroic Polish resistance", but even those succeeded only to made K. unpopular and did not prevent the demential children crusade, aka the second Warsaw Insurrection which, in the name of Noble Heroism made a quarter million dead and left Warsaw in ruins. So, by K's standards reifications are mostly benign, tolerable and should not be confused with rats to be hunted. With exception of really serious cases, which should not be rejected as reifications , but examined in their entirety. Thus, when I hear "The critical question is how to prevent Iran from getting nukes", I would be ill advised to say "It's no question at all, because questions don't exist, only questioning people". More rational would be to forget the rat hunting, to disregard the reificative formulation of the pointer and to consider the pointed at issue - the ways of preventing Iran from getting nukes. All that was a trial to look at the reifications rat hunting through the glasses of Kotarbinski, which are not mine. My view reduces reality to experiential events coordinated by abstract concepts. "Departure" appears to me as an event encompassing the physical body "train" as explained in NATURAL MODEL http://findgeorges.com/CORE/B_NATURAL_VIEW/b1_natural_model.html As for reifications, my view sees them as exposed in http://findgeorges.com/CORE/C_NOUMENAL_VIEW/c1_reification.html which lacks the sporting, rat hunting spirit. Good hunting Georges. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Epistemology" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/epistemology?hl=en.
