Thanks for that.

Read Berkeley's "The Analyst" and it may not seem so strange. If we are convinced a value is being reached that is necessary to our principles, but that value never is reached, then the character of our conviction in the effort is the real story, and not some objective reality at all. And if recognition of this is the final term of a rigorous analysis, then the [emotional?] character of that recognition cannot be impertinent to whatever truth there is in it.

How can there be an asymptotic convergence between quantum and "classical" physics if the whole thrust of quanta is to hide some portion of its phenomena from mathematical formulation? "Classical physics" is mechanics. What mechanism emphatically and explicitly hides its mechanism from science? And what kind of logic "passes over in silence" where its terms fail its anticipated conclusion? And doesn't the task of understanding the silence and the hidden start its talking there? And, once again, if the best rigor we can bring to this is that point of departure, how can it be untruth? Isn't emotion the beginning of reason, not the end of it? If rigor is humanizing, then maybe reality is too. If science is failing, it is its commitment to dehumanizing reason.

"Indeed Léon Rosenfeld recounts Bohr's frustration at the continued misunderstanding of his principle. When Rosenfeld off-handedly suggested to Bohr that the correspondence principle was about the asymptotic agreement of quantum and classical predictions, Bohr emphatically protested and replied, "It is not the correspondence argument." from: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bohr-correspondence/

Is this what this thread is about? What if the asymptote doss not tend toward a numerical value, or even a mathematical principle, but to a re-characterization of all values? Calculus is a reduction to infinitesimal of values not definable mathematically. But it requires regarding those values (deviating from law) as "negligible". It also requires using them as a positive value for part of the rationalization of that neglect, but then as zero to complete it. (see "The Analyst", by George Berkeley) - The final term of the reduction, then, alters the meaning of the premise. Bohr, by the quote above, rejected this consequence, as a convicted analyst would. But his thesis about electron orbits raises the question, What becomes of the material properties of the electron when phase shifting erases it from the otherwise expected presence of those properties? Is ignorance bliss [before] after all? Isn't science premised by an assumed right to ignore?

I thought we were talking about science deniers, not the limits of science.

Probably can't help. You see, when faced with ideologues progress is alienating. The ideology, that is, that answers must be mechanistic and dehumanizing. However, the logic of contrariety, up to a point, is exactly the same as the logic of the "law" of contradiction. but if that "law" is only effective to a point, then the final term of the reductive process begun from a premise we have become convicted of and the extension, always reductive, in accordance with that "law" is a contrariety. That is, a term contrary to the premise. But if that "law" has its limits, then that contrariety is not a contradiction of which each pole is opposite to the other, one of which must be, even if indeterminate for some reason, contradicting the premise, but two contrary terms as contrary to each other as, together, to the premise. Forming a community in contrariety to the premise and to the "law". This polar pair complement each other in finding the limit of the "law" and the lexical coherence of the term premised to it.

Help?... Or "Help!"

Well, we yammer at each other, grudgingly holding off threats to our convictions and possibilities of bewilderment (which we should welcome, if well posed to us), but the community in contrariety looms. And though we may never recognize it, the drama of that alienating moment engages us in an enriching of our terms. And since we each bring as much to that community as the other, the result is a lexical body more naturalized to us than the supposed laws of reason ever could be, and even though our contribution to it is always contrary to the law and to our convictions. And, because contrary, what we owe to each other can never become an entanglement, as our convictions and the commitments to convention always are. Which is to say, if I read your concern correctly, neither individualism nor communism can detract from it, because our part is contrary and yet complementary. Individualism and communism is an artificial polarity with an extension between as void and empty as each pole is. That is, no complement to each other. Looking for answers there is futile.

The limit is the idea. But time is explicitly unreal within that limit.

How fast is the banana ripening at any one time? At any one time a drop of rain is a deluge. At any one time any occurrence is not even a phenomenon, it is merely "anecdote". There is simply no time that is "one time". There is simply no sense in which time is "one". There is no quantity "one" that time ever is. How many "any one time" is time "one"? Neither one nor many, time is the qualifier, not the quantifier space is. The calculus of change is the reduction to the infinitesimal of that difference (between space and time). The result we call "ideas".

The stupidity of the law is that police, lawyers, and judges are required to apply a meaning of the law that belies its origin. When we stop at a stop sign we chafe a bit, from a rolling stop to an annoyingly full stop. The cop has his own standards, but each of us expresses our own in subtle ways and that subtlety, even if it doesn't come to explicit declarations or even political activism, effects the writing of the law, but not necessarily its enforcement, which may be entirely numb to the human controversy generating law. When the difference becomes intolerably confused the result is road rage. The legislator can't stand being judged. How stupid do you have to be to live under such a system?

Somebody in mind?

Merely suggesting that the most prevalent mode of stupidity in the world is obtusely misconstruing the stranger for fear of one's own alienation. It's the variations that come upon us even as we try to achieve consistency or continuity that create the terms by which intelligence grows. Stupidity is resistance against the stranger in us all.

Maybe add the h?

It's hard to know what ignorance is these days, when even the most expert source is largely ignorant of the broader details of his own field. Anyone with a cell-phone knows it all! But what can smarts do that AI can't? I was on hold the other day, and every so often a machine-voice would run through the same delay info, in the same voice. A living voice would make every repetition nuanced. Kierkegaard said repetition was impossible, and that this meant we are incapable of imitating Christ. But the variations we bring to life, even when repetition seems to be required, the avoidance of mechanical repetition, is one way we show what intelligence is, and what we know is so much more worthy of us than repeating the same.

I'm with Baker on this point. Platitudes are not opinions. They are lines in the sand. Or, as Gump would say, Stupid is....

The world we are born into tries to expropriate our identity. But that expropriation serves us as foil to who we rally are. It is only in distinction from that expropriation that we become and know who we are. But all too many of us fail to avail ourselves of this foil to convention and convince ourselves that we are who the world, community, neighborhood, family, etc., made us. And others of a different ilk threaten thaat facile self-knowledge. Stupidity is that failure to let ourselves be discerned from our upbringing. And he and she are smart indeed who use our cultural differences to ratify our distinction from our cultural similarities.

It takes a certain low cunning to realize greed, but not intelligence.

Well, this is going too fast for me.

Well, even if we have a right to say pretty much whatever is on our mind, that doesn't mean we have a right to be understood as we believe we mean it. But it does seem a little lopsided to me to establish in legal and social norms a right to speak freely, more or less unregulated, and yet to regulate what we listen to in response. I suspect some balance should be struck there.

I think you've answered my question. If so, there's no point.

However...

Every word we utter is inflected, every gesture or expression we share characterizes what is said such that the lexical sense and syntactic structure of the entire language is revised in that character. When we get lost we look for a map and for some landmark to reference it. Without that reference all signs are inscrutable. But the map doesn't tell you where you are, it tells you how to leave. You are more present where you are lost than navigating that departure. Any sign convinced you you know where you are actually leads away. So with language. When you think you know where you are in it you are lost, and as a matter of deliberation. If you cannot recognize how inscrutable we are to each other you can never know where you are in the drama of life. But note the sudden transformation of all signs once you become convinced that you do. The completed loss death is is an inscrutable absence we cannot navigate ourselves away from. But we only learn what language really is and means in that loss. There is no final term to the departure from being real. Only loss is presence. For, in loss, all that remains is responsibility that the worth of the lost be recognized. Deny this and we really are lost, and the drama of language is, in reality, not even begun. Finality is not loss, it is the beginning and the act of being undeparted. But conviction in the terms of navigating our departure from the inscrutable realness of life assures only that what we think we mean is never really even a beginnig. Time is neither beginning nor end, and certainly not a duration between such "ends". It is the moment of our participation in the recognizableness of the worth of the lost, and of being lost.

That's the wrong way to look at it. We can't really get each other right in life, but we can interact and respond to each other, and the real measure we share is the character of honesty and discipline we bring to the drama of it. That drama is never complete in the sense that we achieve synchrony in our terms, but every measure of the quality of our participation in it is more complete than the quantity of synchrony to our terms. But even this is never a matter of established meaning or appropriated terms. What death brings to this is the completest possible recognition of how incomplete our participation is in that drama. But if that recognition is always more complete than all the terms we deem we share in life, then what we do share in, subterranean to the explicitly perceived meaning of our terms, is more real than that perception. The dead can no longer respond to our misperception of them. We can either arrogate that misperception or recognize how incomplete our participation with them is. But insofar as that participation is real, more real than our perceptions of it, then the dead are always as with us as they were in life anyway. You cannot remembrance the dead, for any perception of what they meant to us is distortion without the living response correcting, or modifying it. But you cannot eliminate the meaning our part in the drama, or dialectic, of always uncompleted terms is to our continued capacity for that drama among the yet living. Language does not emerge unilaterally, and death proves just how unalone we are in it, even, maybe even most, when we are at a loss for words.

Is perception finality?

What about the chance to know what the dead really meant? (in the case of others' deaths) Or what they really think of you. (in the case of your own)

Is it possible to recognize when consciousness is lost?

Careful! It's a trick question. but there is an answer.

Whose? When is this if only recognition of the difference lost life, or new life, is is knowledge of what time most really is? Surely not consciousness only your own? Even dead matter experiments with altering conditions that ultimately, if very rarely, generates the potential for life. And even wholly instinctive life experiments, however many fits and starts and dead ends, with the conditions from which consciousness might emerge. And even our much touted awareness is within the context of a mostly autonomic biology that is only in the least terms autonomy. What we have to recognize is that the expansive terms of duration and enduring is not what time is, and that it is through the least term of not enduring and not attenuating duration that time is what it is and most real. The most infinitesimal deviation from the causal nexus is the most complete term of time. But it is never to be found in the continuity of that nexus. That is, the least term of time is all the differing it is. There is no "because..." to it. And recognition of this is never in your possession, but is always only known as something lost to you. Something worthy, and more what worth is, than all that endures your possession of it.

Think of Damocles before you get all Humean! Is it metaphysics to change position on that? What does "Get real!" mean?

Death is the completest term of time. It is proof, complete proof, that time is change, not duration. The difference life is to the metaphysics of duration, proving duration is not what time is and metaphysics not what realness is, is the meaning and realness of time. We are biologically committed to enduring, and metaphysically committed to conceive realness enduring or duration. The devil is in the details of that commitment, because if we can't see past it to the completing term of time lost life is we can never know, or be, the angel only that loss can intimate and all we know and are is the devil of duration both experience and metaphysics is.

In the same dialogue, Socrates shows Gorgias how an idea is a differentiation made recognizable as a similarity with another differentiation. Medicine:cookery::gym training:tailoring. The pain of change articulates the worth of your character otherwise undisclosed even to yourself. The articulation of worth, value, good, is the only pleasure or satisfaction not a fraud or hidden vice. The personal dynamic character in this articulation is the genesis of our knowing ourselves and each other. It is by exploring, and celebrating, our differences, and the changes that exploration engenders in us, that we evolve the terms by which we can even hope to be who we are. To defraud yourself of that celebration of articulated worth may bring a sense of victory over others, but at the cost of losing the terms necessary to know and be who you really are.

So why bring him up? I don't waste a lot of time on fiction, not even Sartre's. I've tried to write some, but I'm not at all happy with the results. It feels like pulling a fast one on the reader, and a thinker should speak for himself. I assumed there must be something in Nabokov you thought resembled my views, and maybe that he was an influence. The only influence I feel comfortable with is Plato, but, unfortunately, the literature is dead against me. Lofty? Maybe, but only if I don't have the goods to back it up. But these discussions preclude prolixity. We look at each other's mind through a keyhole and expect to grasp the horizon.

Some things really do just have to be left to personal discretion. How I spend my study time is one of them. Just answering your inquiry. No, Nabokov was no influence. Sorry if that troubles you, but there it is...

Which is the more completed moment? When you suddenly realize what you thought to be a friend, even a lover, is a betrayer, or when the stranger you meet in a land strange to you suddenly shows himself to be a welcoming friend?

When a child is born i is a unique presence in the universe untested of its boundless capacity to intimate the worth of it. It's parents, however, are bound to a life of putting boundaries upon it. That is, upon the intimation of the worth of time. The infant struggles to reconcile that boundlessness with that boundedness. That reconciliation, initially, can only be wholesale. Once boundless, but become forever bounded. That transformation is the intimation. I do not mean "closeness". And I do not mean change that we can anticipate or pursue. I mean change as complete as the awakening of language in childhood, always completest at its inception, and always tempered differences we discipline each other in.

So what? it's an argument that serves as long as all are in agreement, I suppose, but it aint much of a response to a different view. Maybe my views are flawed, but "So what?" doesn't add or detract.



Not him. Am I wrong? It's just something I've noticed over the years, and maybe why there are so few good translators. Don't recall ever finding anything pertinent in Nabokov. I suppose learning two or more languages as an infant is almost the same, but not thereafter. The introduction to the world, and to a facile ease of speaking one's native tongue, is a one-time deal. And no, it aint "wired-in" either.

Can't difference be shared? If the paradigms of reason just don't quite cut it, isn't difference more "primordial"? And if so, contrariety is more foundational than contradiction. That is, we are more potently contrary to the inadequacies of reason if we discover that contrariety in contrariety to each other. In doing so we become a community in contrariety. But, naturally, that community only extends in dissipation of the moment of it, its worth is lost, and we are set upon a new dialectic of reduction and intimation. That is, we may never agree, but the terms of our discourse fully emerge.

We know we do not teach children to speak. Trying to only makes a hash of it. And when the child does speak he or she is already made him or herself native to that language. Language is only born fully grown. It is intimated, not taught or learned. A second language is never the same, and multilingual people are notoriously inarticulate.

"unity" "concordance"! Listen to yourself! These are quantifiers! Worth is qualifying. Meaning is qualification. Language is its intimation. We resort to quantifiers because because reason is reductive. The only way to reach the synthetic term is the exhaustion of analysis. But so exhausted, all terms alter. though, again, if only in the dynamic nuances of our sustaining our convictions. It is precisely through our effort to be consistent that all terms change. Because time is the intimation of the moment of its worth.

Bit of crib, aint it? I mean, this simply elides the dependence between reason and experience. Pretending it all happens by some ineffable means, so long as we make no effort to understand it, doesn't make it invulnerable to inquiry. The worst bet to make is when you're on a roll. Or, the sword aint fallen yet, but that doesn't mean it wont. I suppose you're referencing Hume. His history of England is great fun, best jokes in the notes. But patterns of experience are a dangerous standard to the user. Like the soldier (Baldric, in Blackadder iv) who put his name on a bullet thinking he would be safe in the trenches with that in his pocket. But it's not what you think you are, but what you know you do not deserve to be that determines the worth of your ideas. Theatetus concludes that knowledge is true perception plus a coherent explanation, Socrates, however, says that knowing that you do not know, knowing what it means that yo do not know, is the essence of knowledge, and truth.

..., and the first great art form was spitting at our hands...

From where does logic receive its terms? Once it has them it can only manipulate them reductively. That is, by dividing what is said in them between 'is' and 'is not' into ever more finely drawn categories. But the rules applied in this have no ultimate truth or "self-evidence" other than our ability to recognize in each other the honesty and discipline of judgement and respect for each other in that judgement. That is, there is no synthetic reason. This opens the way for some to just make stuff up, as logicians do routinely, and call it truth. But they have to rig the conditions in order to get away with this. Existence cannot be rigged. For instance, the law of contradiction is only true a priori under the auspices of pertinent quantifiers. Some are - none are, all are, one is not, and so forth. But this is truth by definition, a circular argument, and the subject and predicate are irrelevant. What "A is B" might really mean, logically, is a complete and total mystery. Unless, that is, the ultimate product of the reductive function logic always is is the complete transformation, even if only in the minutest nuance to our ability to sustain our commitment to it, of all terms. That revision of the terms of reason is a drama subterranean to the conventional laws of reason. But if it comes as product of keeping faith with that law it cannot be untruth. And if it is the only real source of terms, if it is the only valid synthesis, it is hardly illogical to put in the effort to understand it, even though that effort is fraught with error and misdirection. But nothing can be more conducive to error and misdirection than to apply a patently invalid standard as the measure of being reasonable. The fact of the matter is there is no validity in experience and there is no truth in logic. We cannot validly derive anything from experience without appealing to the rational, and logical extensions are only valid or invalid, there is no truth in logic. We need both, and we need each other, to do either. We need existentialism to be logical.

Not enduring is unendurable. Extension without change is a myth we create to make being bearable. To forfend loss. After all, or before after all, death is the completest term of the articulation of the worth of time. The trick is to reduce that completeness to the infinitesimal. But what if the infinitesimal is the most extensive term of time? Yup, Husserl spent a lifetime trying to eliminate it. He failed.

Time is not a dimension. It is the qualification of dimensionality. Not an extension, but a revaluation of the character of extension, or the characterology of that revaluation. Where the existentialists went wrong is that they were caught between individualism and collectivism. The truth of it is that the only individualism is the act of loss, and the only extension of that loss is the response to it in recognition of its worth. The act of loss and the response of love (responsibility that the worth of the lost be recognized) is the engine of mind, not rational structures. No more than, say, our autonomic heart rhythm is anything more than a framework facilitating its autonomous role in slight adjustments to the second-by-second changing needs of the body, every cell in the body. It's a community in which each individual is far more effecting of the whole in contrariety to its autonomic functions than obedient to them. And how much does this have to be the case for agency to have a portal through which to break into the otherwise rigid framework of the causal nexus or systems of rational extension? Is the geometric modulus really axiomatic to the completion of space? That is, does a geometric ratio really extend, in the real world, as a constant without residue? How much residue would undo the axiom, if only enough to let the character of time slip through? What if the least residue is all the differing time ever really is? How much quantifiable extension does it take to give the qualifier a venue to become recognized? If logic can never outstrip its quantifier, time is a personal drama of the recognition of its worth. But neither one alone, nor the full collective count, can ever breach the gap between the act of loss and recognition of the worth of the lost that the personal drama of human discourse does with such apparent facile obliviousness to the strangeness of it. Time is change that occurs even in the face of a complete commitment to the conservation of it terms. Even bored out of our skulls, we are constantly re-characterizing what time is. Even when we are most burdened by time unchanging, we are exhibiting its being change.

I'm saying that Sartre produced rigorous philosophy, not just the impertinent fictions. I'll let you decide whether he agrees with Husserl or critiques him. I just wish people would stop citing what supports and omitting what repudiates their views. Existentialism needs revision, but it may make a lot more sense than the uncritical obeisance people pay to analysis. Language is a dynamic of familiarization, not information or definition. It's opposite is not gaps in knowledge, but a wholesale loss of familiarity, or alienation. Alienation is the bane of the current consensus, and passing it off with a glib or facile "illogical" is just not gonna cut it.

Try Sartre's two tracts on imagination. You cannot distinguish Husserl's intentional object from the intentional act, image from imagining.

https://books.google.com/books?id=b-g_yf7kVeIC

If there are limits to reason it is perfectly rational to acknowledge them. Some will use this as a pretext for abandoning rigor, and even endorsing ideology, and this can motivate vilification of a serious exposition of the rational consequences of those limits. But if we arrive at the recognition of the limits of reason through a process of rigor we can recognize in each other the character of that recognition, however personal it is to each, is every whit as rigorous as the discipline we can recognize in each other there. And though that recognition is not itself a rational term, our recognition of the terms that commit us, each alone, to perform reasoning as if its limits were never operative or real are transformed by that recognition. The structure of reason may not seem to alter, but the terms do, suddenly, wholesale, and in the personal character of our participation in the moment of that change. It is because we can come to recognize, through each other, changes in our terms at least as rigorously rational as the rational functions performed along the way that we can come to think and to share our thoughts at all. It is hardly illogical to recognize this.

The renaissance was a reaction by ancients modes of thought to rebelliousness in the northern reaches of Europe against them. Latin forms embellished extravagantly against the spartan barrenness of Lutherans. This set up a convoluted opposition between Latin symbolism and Protestant introspection, between reading the world as a crude and corrupt array of divine signs of an ineffable hereafter and a here and now embodied divine perfection in the knowable proportions of phenomena. You need a codebook of symbolism to understand the art of the rococo era, while phenomenal examination would extract the smells and pigments of the rose to analyze its components, and to draw conclusions about the nature of reality from this, rather than citing mythic meaning to it. But if the symbolic age ultimately succumbs to phenomenal analysis, and people have to throw away the codebook, phenomenology also succumbs to a strain between the actual entities and events in the world and the intellectual tools derived from the analysis. The rose may not represent blood or loyalty, or whatever, but it does not represent chemical and mathematical formulas either. In an important and highly pertinent sense, we have exchanged mythical superstition for a rationalist one. What occurs in the mind when this dilemma is recognized is a personal dynamic through which the terms of myth and analysis have their origin, and kinship. Superstition is superstition, whether it is a belief that myth and magic rule the world, or that the axioms of reason are self-evident, rather than a mere condition to our conviction in it. And, whether losing the codebook of mythic symbols or the contiguity of that conviction, the personal drama that ensues from that loss is no impertinence to our vital interest in understanding how the language or either that faith or that conviction is pursued.

It is a misunderstanding to read Hegel's phenomenology as rationalist. He was well aware of the shortcomings of Kant's thesis (as was Kant himself!) but his position, so hard fought to achieve and sustain, meant he had to be cagey about it. The undeniable fact of his work is that our humanity is central. Dehumanized reason is antithetical to any real appreciation of the phenomenon. Hegel was the first and founding existentialist.

Existentialism is what happens when systems of grasping reality and ordering our lives succumb to irresolvable aporia. Failing to grasp the crisis of mind and inure ourselves to familiar themes is no rebuttal. Or, as Nietzsche put it, the man of the future will witness the greatest wonders and enigmas of life and the universe, and just..., blink. Responsibility for the truth of it is personal, not mechanistic.

I suppose I shouldn't expect better. Heidegger, as he claims, was not an existentialist. He was a crypto-existentialist. And so his work is not a useful source for understanding existentialism. Authenticity is a mode of anticipation. Anticipation is not a mode of existence. It is a hunger for not "there". If anything, existentialism is an angst over having this hunger, so clearly at odds with being real. The mantra is "existence precedes essence", being real takes precedence over being explained mechanistically or analytically.

Discovering the stranger we more truly are to the means of our enduring life, and to the disciplined engagement of ideas through which we urge each other to reexamine our convictions, is only possible through that disciplined interaction. Yes, Socrates has no patience with those who would obviate it. But amongst these are those who are so convinced of their discipline that the stranger at the beginning and the end of it is completely excluded. That stranger is moment, as Socrates suggests in Parmenides, where the suggestion is dismissed.

There is no valid inductive term. Induction, such as it is, is but the momentary disarray of all ideas before and at the end of our straining to sustain our conviction that logical terms are constants, that motivates us, because the moment of bewilderment or wonder (recognition of the stranger we are to that constancy) is unendurable, to grasp any straw of normativity by which we can imagine enduring life and the terms of rational constancy. But that moment is the differing of all terms, in the character of the discipline that brought us to that change. And insofar as we inspire that discipline in each other that change in that character, the strangest of all because complete character of change each is to it, cannot exclude us from each other, as the conviction in the constancy of rational terms always does. There is no moment reason ever is. Wonder so complete only the stranger is present to it cannot be fodder for rational extension or even epistemic observation. but if we help bring each other to the moment in the personal terms of the discipline we each bring to that moment we recognize each other more intimately and urgently there than we can ever obviate. And if that intimacy grows as we interact in the life of ideas, that intimacy is always becoming more real than our conviction in the constancy of the terms of reason. And this even if we continually differ.

What is it that you think is meant to be excluded here? — Fooloso4

The stranger. And not just the stranger you may think I am to your terms, or terms you take to be common enough to us all to be relied upon as a rough coordination of discourse, but the stranger you are, as we all are, in that reliance. Socrates is succeeded by the stranger. In Laws his effort to normalize normativity fails in the end, and something all too human undoes the whole project. Normativity, familiarity, just isn't as real as the stranger we all are to it. Not that law is corrupting or untruth, but that what becomes known unduly excluded from it through a diligent adherence to it is more real still.

Exactly, but reason only works by division. There is no valid induction. And so, it is only by extending that division toward the moment it becomes impossible to ignore the difference meant to be excluded from it that we recognize the missing participation of that difference. It is how we help each other come to that recognition that is the engine of terms we do share.

if any of your comments were directed specifically at me, I suspect you have not understood me either. — Fooloso4

From this it could be inferred that you do not want me addressing you. Perhaps I shouldn't, but I'm prone to social malapropisms. Thing is, the whole issue, really, is how do we suppose we understand each other at all? It's really bogus to suppose there is some lexical field that supports this. There is always some slippage of meaning between us, and our talking extensively grinds against this difference, subtly altering every term of our exchange and whatever understanding we share. Subterranean to the lexicon true believers in objectivity would insist upon, it is a problematic matter to bring it to light.

In Gorgias, Socrates explains how a predicate is a similarity in difference. Taking a predication to signify a sameness from which we can infer further sameness is missing the foundational difference. Wherever Socrates feels his interlocutor is expressing a view derived from elsewhere or merely a mechanical or formal inference he insists upon a more honestly personal view. He gets impatient when others refer to texts or sources not present and participating. Why, if meaning is fixed outside its personal context?