List:
In reply to reference (2) of his message, Kerry builds upon several
examples of names in day-to-day usage, Internet DNS, commerce and
trademarks. He contrasts intersubjective and objective uses of names as
well as their relative usefulness and eventual intersubjective precedence,
in the connections we may feel justified to make between a name and
what it denotes (two entirely different things, see (1)). At the end -- with
no connection with his server's name ;-) -- Kerry sympathizes with the
writer's mistype ;-)
BTW, I corrected the line break in reference (2) of his message,
possibly due to e-mail agent formatting, which kept the name but
changed the denotation.
Ed Gerck
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: kmm043: NSF, semantics, a dash of control theory
Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1999 23:54:54 -0004
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Kerry Miller)
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED],"raft"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Following some of the notes to Ed Gerck's FirstMonday paper {1},
I found this exchange:
> > ps - Unfortunately, your 'footnote' referred to by [3] was omitted;
> > I've always preferred inline references myself.
>
> Me too, but they tend to clutter the text (see B, below). Howeverm My
> reference [3] was just [2] -- I mistyped. {2}
I found this interesting first, because I took the missing footnote to
be #20 in the Arguments for Recall (the target is missing); second,
because replacing the 'clutter' of real things is the fundamental
reason for -- you guessed it -- names.
Rather than drag in the cow when yarning with a neighbor, we talk
*about* Bessie. Rather than pace out every meter of one's front
yard, one *refers* to the area; indeed, we *nominate certain units of
distance and area as 'standards' in order to compare that area with
others. The greatest benefit of this technique, of course, is in
being able to talk about things which do not exist: ideas and
concepts (although the adequacy of naming in this respect is
somewhat problematic, or 'intersubjective').
Now all these 'convenient' purposes are only of value to human
beings, and in particular to the subset of human beings who have
*already*, a priori, experience with the names used. (It's no help to
say my front yard is 1.2 bighas if you dont 'know' what a bigha is,
or to say I 'multiplied' the length by the width if you havent 'learned'
or 'remember' what multiplication is.) But, just as technological
contraptions have replaced more and more human physical
activities, computers now are taking over the need for human
memory. It doesnt matter a jot or tittle (remember what those are?
:-)) to a machine whether a URL is inline or 'referenced' in a
footnote; the entire resource at the given address could as well be
included within the square brackets, as long as the 'convention' of
paired brackets was in its instruction set.
To apply this line of thought to domain names. One could argue
that the DNS might as well be given over entirely to those -- call
them 'trademark holders' -- who have something they'd like to point
to which is inconvenient to provide 'really'; the rest of us will surely
be content to reference references to references as we've always
done. If there is confusion caused by the Internet impinging on
*human activities, its only by the illusion it offered that because
one could 'name' it, there must be something there to be named.
(One can imagine Word 2001 not even using keyboard input; it will
rely on eyeball tracking as one selects topics, and phrases, and
related words, and alternative spellings from picklists it
progressively generates by web searches... Every term paper, after
all, has already been written; only the words are distributed.)
But take it a step further. Instead of supposing that every thing
worth having warrants a TM, let's look at the counter argument.
As it happens, what this argument is, exactly, was not 'known' to
me *until I looked back over what I had written above*. The counter
argument consists in precisely that I am now not merely 'talking
about' something which doesnt exist, but am *creating it.
I extract from the above 'resource' two points: a) 'human' as it has
thus far been constructed refers to a very skinny creature indeed,
_Homo mercantalis_ with an eyeball and (presumably) a credit
card to 'license' the use the words and phrases and concepts other
H. merc. 'produced'; and b) 'things that dont exist' includes just
what the TM holders are up in arms against: GOODS.COM that
arent the *real* GOODS, Inc.
(A book on astrology introduced the subject by saying "To those
who understand, everything that follows herein is perfectly obvious.
For those who have not reached that point, however, I provide a few
words of explanation." Thus will I, too, now flesh out the 'point.')
Being human is *already* an intersubjective idea or concept,
*despite* the fact that one carries the evidence around everywhere
one goes. It follows that everything one does beyond that
references only references, because the 'everything' that is worth
talking about involves other humans. Reducing human only to the
objective being who is one's self is therefore a travesty -- and in
fact, the concept of so doing has a name: solipsism. Reducing
names, even domain names, to trademarks is no different: its a
crime against humanity that can have no place within any other
'code' of human behaviour -- the corpus of human law in particular --
and that humans regularly and consistently talk about things which
don't exist is the acid (not to say the Turing) test.
If, in the context of addressing machine resources, certain
pointers do not point where some other pointer might suggest it
'should'; if (to give this concept a name) *lies* are told, the solution
is not to reduce being human to being a machine, but to elevate
the domain-name language from machinic to *human status. It
exists exclusively for our convenience, and it is not for the
international business machine to dictate what does or does not
meet that standard.
Names are Earth's Hallmark; Veronica and Pokey are its saints,
and you, kind (kins) men and ladies who have read this far, must
defend them as lying in the *public* domain as I defend Ed's
*common* sense in using footnotes -- and his entirely *human*
right to mis-type!
kerry
{1} http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue4_4/gerck
{2} http://mcg.org.br/cgi-bin/lwg-mcg/TRUST-REF/archives/ref/date/article-193.html
{3} While no neologisms were used in its production, this
assemblage of words may be referenced as a piece:
http://www3.ns.sympatico.ca/kerryo/kmm043.htm
