Dear Sami, (first time that I have an exchange with you, so: *greetings!)* I am a bit negative towards ontology, because it postulates an 'existence' to describe and such is hard to identify. A second difficulty arises in a descriptive view of a dynamic (constantly changing) world, most likely a "snapshot" of one stage in the change.
whether X exists? my answer is a "yes", because in your mind (and now in mine as well) it does. Be it virtual, physical(?), mental, or whatever. While still active in my job, I always asked a co-worker to check my texts I wrote (in this 5th language of mine). He pointed to some words maybe formulated by my linguistic freedom - and asked:* Does such a word exist?*My response was: did it make sense to you what it may mean? if yes, it *does* now, be it in your dictionary of yesterday, or not. We face an unlimited (dynamic) complexity of a world and I do not condone 'human' restrictons towards its content did we know about it yesterday, or not. Open semiotics. I consider 'everything' as the unlimited relations (relational changes?) among unlimited content in an unlimited complexity - known only in part by the so far enriched cognitive inventory for us - result of our epistemic additions starting with the first conscious 'molecule' (or even just with a hint) IOW of the evolution (that is the historical dynamics of the world's complexity). I try to speak about it in non-temporal terms. You wrote: "*In the subject of this group"* a sometime hard-to-define term. Thanks to Wei Dai, the group condones a wide variety of topics - domains what makes it interesting and educational. Thanks for your views what I see facing a certain direction. I try to expand it more. John M On 8/31/10, Sami Perttu <[email protected]> wrote: > > I've been suspecting that some problems of ontology can be solved > nicely if we practise a little therapeutic philosophy first. > > I'm claiming that when we talk about existence, for instance "X > exists", then we should always qualify it with base set Y as in "X > exists in Y". And that unqualified use, as done in metaphysics (and in > the subject of this group), is an ontological fallacy - existence "in > the general sense" is meaningless. > > This reduces the nebulous question "does X exist?" to the problem of > finding a suitable base set Y. Thus a seemingly fundamental question > is resolved to a logical/linguistic misstep. > > People often seem to think that to exist, X has to have the quality of > existing, but we can get rid of that in this way, simplify our > thinking and gain some peace of mind. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]<everything-list%[email protected]> > . > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" 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/everything-list?hl=en.
