Hey Krimel, Krimel said: An expansive definition of ideas would include sensation, emotion, memory and context or anything else we think up later. Or we could narrowly define words as parts of languages which are subsets of communicative acts.
Under such a narrow definition words and ideas still come out as ontologically distinct as within languages word order carries meaning. Syllables carry meaning as prefixes and suffixes. If we are talking about words and ideas we should adopt either strict or loose definitions to both at once; not a loose definition on one side and a tight one on the other. Matt: Yeah, I think the looseness of caring about definitions is a trait that comes from not caring about creating a systematic metaphysics. I'm definitely a culprit. The way I perceive philosophy is as a therapist, seeing problems and wanting to solve/dissolve them. Some problems are created from differing contexts, and though having family resemblances, they require one to stand differently (use different definitions) to see them. I'm a problem-oriented philosopher, not a system-oriented one, partly because I've come to think it is the best way to move the conversation forward. Everyone (every philosopher, at least) has their own particular terminology for solving this or doing that, and one of the few ways to tell whether something works, as far as I can tell, is seeing what it avoids and what possibilities it opens up. Pirsig was problem-oriented in ZMM and shifted to system in Lila, which is probably why I favor ZMM. I'll give you this--if we are going to talk about ontological distinctness, then I would say that every word picks out something ontologically distinct. This has, of course, the same disastrous effects on "ontology" as a distinct area of discourse as Pirsig's claims about Quality have for aesthetics. By the way, when Descartes was creating what we moderns know of as the mind (which was not what the Greeks knew of as the mind), one of his key moves was in putting sensations together with concepts in an "inner space." For the Greeks, sensations were bodily. But in Descartes' concept so often taught to Philosophy 101 students, "clear and distinct ideas," the "ideas" is just as often translated as "perceptions." Part of the problem some philosophers have with the idea of a "mind" as an inner space is what kind of criteria we would use to determine what was "in" it. Take two paradigmatic examples of things we consider in the mind: beliefs and pain. Beliefs are in the mind because they are intentional, and we take physical objects to be devoid of intention. A rock is a rock, whether or not I believe it to be a baseball. And pain, what is pain but an example of the sheer phenomenal experience of something? Showing you which neurons are firing does nothing to tell you what pain _feels_ like. But what do beliefs and pains have in common except that aren't physical? For instance, my beliefs are located in my mind, but why isn't my beauty? Both are functional states, things that have physical components (certain neuron makeup, bodily makeup) but cannot be reduced to those components, but why isn't a person's beauty in their mind? Sure, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but does that mean that _my_ beauty exists in _your_ mind? That's a possible answer, but it is strange, don't you think, that something of mine is not something in my possession? At any rate, the substance of the problem is that the only thing beliefs and pain seem to have in common is that they are immaterial, yet so are adjectives like "beauty". What happened that this came about? Is there another criteria that is making this disjunct happen? All of this is hackneyed Rorty from his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, and he has proposals for all these things (for instance, the criteria we are looking for is "privileged access"), but my point is that I can only really go at the words/ideas thing if we rehearse the problems, because otherwise we just get a proliferation of definitions and constellations of ideas that all have prima facie plausibility on their own merits if worked out consistently. Remember when Pirsig says in Lila that these "great philosophers" are pretty convincing if you read them with an open (read: blank) mind, and you'll end up moving from philosopher to philosopher, being a convinced Platonist, then Aristotelian, then Humean, Kantian, Schopenhauerian, Heideggerian, etc., etc. This is what will happen unless you start collaging questions and answers together with your own instincts to see what all the fuss is about. The fuss comes to us in problems. Where do the problems come from and are they problems? This is a process that takes us far from short (or long) definitions, into things like writing ZMM and describing boogeymen like "SOM." But there you go. One thing I'd think about in your proposal that "within languages word order carries meaning. Syllables carry meaning as prefixes and suffixes" is the verb "carry". It's a metaphor. People carrying something makes literal sense, but a word? Granted, it's a dead metaphor that makes obvious sense, like the "mouth of a river," but if we become atomistic in assigning bits of meaning to be carried by parts, like syllables, where do we stop? Why not go to individual letters and phonemes? But what continued sense is carried from the letter "I" between "I," as in "_I_ am Matt," to the "I" in "My _i_nstincts tell me to run from the t_i_ger"? (And that's not even going into the problem of converting visual letters to auditory phonemes: the I-as-in-ego and I-in-the-word-tiger are more or less the same visually, but not when you hear them.) This kind of atomism is, I think, what is standing behind your desire to say "that the word idea applies to less complex things as well." I would warn away from atomism because, to repeat Ron, "meaning always requires context." This is holism, a kind that denies the "carry" metaphor, and the required "context" in holism stretches from words to hand motions to spatial location. If I say, "I see a tiger!" and point over your shoulder, you're likely to take me for making a joke if we are in an Italian bistro. But if we are in a jungle, the meaning might be quite different. Whether or not ideas _are_ words in any exciting sense (as I seemed so excited to say earlier), I am a holist and not an atomist, and the fact that words are so obviously contextual (to understand one word is to also understand an entire, whole web of words) is probably why I'm so quick to assimilate an "idea," which sounds like a discrete chunk of mind-stuff, to them. Hence, "words are ideas" _plural_, not "a word is an idea." But either way--holism over atomism, wherever the chips fall on the other questions. And that's why SOM is relevant: traditionally, atomists have been SOMic. I'm not even sure how an atomist wouldn't be one. Matt _________________________________________________________________ Pack up or back up–use SkyDrive to transfer files or keep extra copies. 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