Ray Evans Harrell wrote:
>
> I may be dumb about this but to me all of your descriptions are connotative.
> How about a good denotative definition or two?
[snip]
I would argue that there is no such thing as a denotative definition
simpliciter.
I will certainly also agree that some definitions are more blantantly
connotative than others, but that does not make the more modest ones
members of a different genus. One man's "tyrannic dictator" is another
man's "beloved leader" (if not "savior"...).
"A cat is a four-legged small feline mammal" is not simply
denotative.
In a society of Lilliputians who suffered daily predation by
hoards of what we call "cats" in that sense, if these people used the
phonetic string "cat" to refer to same, the definition they
offered might be more like: "Four-legged devils with
fur coats and fangs and evil eyes that glow in the dark."
These people would *see something
different* than we see, although, if they have scientists and
semiotics professors among them, these latter might agree with ours
that their "cat" and our "cat" "refer to the same thing" -- where,
of course, "thing" (generalized abstraction of a semiotic target)
is a concept that persons in any society acquire only through
a certain kind of long schooling in certain scriptorially based
praxes (AKA "sciences" and "humanities").
I have come through long years of study to believe that
"value" and "fact" are not different things, but rather
the two poles of a continuum in which all things find their
palces as "value-facts". No person entertains any fact without
haveing some interest in it. And every emotion is about
something, i.e., makes factual claims.
I had a professor who spoke of the scholarly ideal of
"passionate competence": to be both passionate *and* rigorous.
The alternative is our society of massive "splitting", in which
values float off into de gustibus and fact descend below
"meaning". Susanne Langer had things to say about this, in
the 1940s already, in her _Philosophy in a New Key_.
"Yours in discourse...."
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Visit my website ==> http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
