EDIT: My mistake. I was just excited to have found this article and so wanted to share it, but this is really not a good follow-up to "On What There Is", but is obviously better suited to "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" — Moliere
A wallpaper group (or plane symmetry group or plane crystallographic group) is a mathematical classification of a two-dimensional repetitive pattern, based on the symmetries in the pattern. Such patterns occur frequently in architecture and decorative art. There are 17 possible distinct groups. — Wiki
So, whenever something is part of an ontology, because it can be seen as a P (where 'P' is a sortal concept that defines what specific sort of pattern any P is seen as), then P must be discloseable within some broader context of activity (i.e. an empirical domain being governed by constitutive rules, such as the laws of physics, for instance). It may or may not be the case that for some P to exist as such (i.e. as the P that it is, where 'P' is a sortal concept) consists in its being internally arranged thus and so. — Pierre-Normand
Which is to say that though we must see a bean as a bean in order to count it as a bean, there is no 'seeing as' about how many beans make five. — unenlightened
How am I to understand this 'exist as such', except as 'exist as stuff', as distinct from 'exist as a sortal concept': is this not the dualism of stuff and arrangement sneaked into the analysis without acknowledgement? — unenlightened
Consider, for instance, the concept of a planet (such that Saturn is one, but Plato isn't, because it didn't clear up its path, on one possible account of what it is for something to be a planet). — Pierre-Normand
In fact it might be a useful definition of being - that which does not change just because we change how we talk and think about it. Or is that horribly naive?
Intimate relationships can - and often do - change as a result of how we think and talk about them. Do relationships exist? — csalisbury
In fact it might be a useful definition of being - that which does not change just because we change how we talk and think about it. Or is that horribly naive? — unenlightened
Naive realists believe that there is a fact/value dichotomy, where values are placed on the side of our contingent sensibilities and understandings. They thus believe science ought to be tasked with peeling off (or explaining away) the appearances that our use of secondary quality concepts yield. What would remain of reality after mere appearances (to us) have been thus peeled of is the objective world as it is in itself. But if the dichotomy is illusory, as I believe it is, then the peeling off leaves nothing. — Pierre-Normand
A relationship is not any state of the world. It's a logical expression expressed across many. An intimate relationship isn't formed by any one state, a hundred states of a person, or even ten billion states of a person. — TheWillowOfDarkness
This realism undercuts both scientism and the fact/value dichotomy (also attacked by Putnam). Secondary qualities, such a color and smell, that we perceive, and ascribe to objects, also don't change when we change the way that we talk about them. Not always, in any case. Talking about them can induce changes in the brute shape of our sensibility and aesthetic appreciation. That can lead to a change in the reference of the words that we use to refer to secondary qualities. — Pierre-Normand
I'd be interested to hear a bit more about this undercutting of the fact/value dichotomy. — unenlightened
Lots of critical comments to make, but this'll do for now. — StreetlightX
I also want to say that the above is in some way a response to Ciceronianus the White's question about why questions about being can matter so much. If the above is correct, and being cannot be delimited to the field of language alone, it might will be the case that our "ontological commitments" are normative through and through, not at the level of what we say, but at the level of what do. One rather disastrous effect of 'deflationary ontologies' like Quine's might in fact be to disavow the fact that ontology operates in a manner that goes beyond mere intellectual debate, and flows right into the way in which power is both sustained and exercised across various domains of life, in which what one 'says' is not at all the issue. It's a nice, 'respectable' exercise of course, to confine questions of being to the parlor where we debate about Pegasus and so on, but some debates take place on the streets, conducted in a key other than language - perhaps sometimes violence. — StreetlightX
It appears that "ontology" may be defined rather more broadly than the study of what there is, but I question whether a city can be said to commit itself to a particular ontology when it makes land use decisions; or whether it's at all useful to characterize such a commitment as ontological in nature. In what sense is the city committing itself to an ontology by doing so, instead of or distinct from something else? It would seem it would be making a value judgment, or acting out of a desire for revenue through property taxes, for example, or due to prejudice of some kind. Do such things depend upon a particular ontology beyond an acceptance of, e.g., the existence of people, dwellings, money? — Ciceronianus the White
I think modern 'liberal' politics has taken this on as an explicit belief, that representations of things somehow precede their existence: thus we need to raise awareness, and grant representation. There seems to be a genuine fear that if you do not see yourself in a movie, you will cease to exist (where 'yourself' means someone of your color or whatever it might be: sublimation of the individual's suffering into an abstraction). And there is also the notion of self-identity: there is some quasi-magical means by which committing oneself to being a certain thing, ~*identifying*~ as it, means that you are that thing: ontological commitments in the form of desires or choices to represent those things in public or in the media make the things we talk about real, and so we are all collections of acts of ~*identification*~ and not whatever we were supposed to be before. — The Great Whatever
And you have white actors nominated across the board for two years running for best actor/actress, you do have to wonder what the actual fuck is up (Stallone over Idirs Elba? Please...). But of course these are only gestures, and they ought to feed back into material conditions, which themselves ought to be the subject of political action just as much as representation and and so on. — StreetlightX
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