Helmut Raulien: I have not understood, what could label a subjective observer "all-knowing". Is not any theoretician always putting himself in the place of some subject other than himself? -x- GCM: Physiological perception as personally experienced, the primary basis for any single person’s “knowing” anything, is not theoretical. It only becomes theoretical in a purely secondary derived manner. ¶ -x- HR: An ontologist is putting himself into the place of an all-knowing observer, and others are putting themselves reciprocally in the places of each communicating subject, and Luhmann sees a social system too as a subject with an intention. These role-takings may all be suppositions, but I cannot see that it is bad, because one can learn from it how communication works. -x- GCM: That I, Gary C. Moore, am typing these letters onto this page is not at all a matter of theory. Theory is based on hypothesis which is based on a singular physical experience that is compared to memories of similar singular physical experiences. The chain of knowledge could not even begin without the singular physical event first physiologically observed – and then analyzed. Do you have your theories first based on no facts whatsoever and then go find evidences to fit the theory which forms the pattern for the evidence – or do you take the fact of experience as it is experienced (time, place, conditions, etc.) and examine it in situ, then formulate a hypothesis? An “ontologist” has to start from the first fact – that he exists. That is one of the few good uses of “Cogito ergo sum”. ¶ HR: But I would agree, that one should always be aware of the fact, that he is supposing all the time (if that is what you criticize: That this often is forgotten). I think (maybe wrong) that most rules of reasoning and logic are not (just) learned, but (also) apriori, and the same on other planets, and that language is a mixture of (apriori) universal language (I think, that is from Chomsky), and cultural specifications. Best, Helmut
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