humanities.philosophy.objectivism

On Apr 5, 9:33 pm, Mark N wrote:

> Your point seems to be that it's possible for people to build false
> assumptions into a concept, to such an extent that the concept fails to
> have any referent, or at least, fails to have an unambiguous referent.

Precisely. And that this is very easy and common to do, and that there
is nothing wrong with doing it. In fact, both language and reason are
typically massively ambiguous because it takes effort to remove
ambiguity, so generally we are as ambiguous as we can get away with
being.

> I don't deny that that's possible. But surely that's not the case with
> all of our concepts? I'm not sure what you think follows from the fact
> that that kind of thing happens *sometimes*.

I think it's the case with the vast majority of our concept and
communications, possibly all of them. Again, it takes effort to remove
ambiguity and generally we are either incapable or unwilling to
bother. (Which is perfectly valid. We don't need to, so why should we?
Literal correctness is not important.)

> > Well, if by "atoms" they referred to whatever was indivisible (which
> > is a perfectly reasonable claim) then they always were indivisible.

> > The point is, this is all crap. The Greek's concept of an "atom" was
> > part of an incorrect model, period.

> Well, it's not just that the model was "incorrect." You are claiming
> that the model was so badly flawed that the concept can't properly be
> said to have had any referent. But that's not true of all concepts that
> are associated with "incorrect" models, is it? I mean, you wouldn't deny
> that it's possible for a person to refer to a thing, while having some
> mistaken beliefs about that thing, would you?

Well, when a person talks about the size of the Sun, how far out do
you go? Until I just mentioned it, did you even think about exactly
where the Sun ends and open space begins? Certainly the term "Sun" (as
you are using it) unambiguously includes some things, but it is
ambiguous about others.

And where does the size of a physical object that is mostly empty
space end? How much of the empty space does it include?

And that's just the obvious reference problems off the top of my head.
And that's fine, we don't care. It doesn't matter. I can say "the UN
headquarters are in New York" without having to being able to refer to
New York with any significant level of precision. We do this *all* the
time.

Even when we talk about where something is, we typically use a notion
of position that we know is totally invalid. Positions of the type we
normally mean them simply do not actually exist. And that's okay too.

> > The same is likely true for many of our cognitive models. That doesn't
> > make them invalid, but it means they are what they are -- imperfect
> > cognitive models with predictive validity.

> OK. So, *if* it is true that there is some fatal flaw in our concept of
> the Sun, or in our concept of the Earth, or in our concept of size,
> *then* "The Sun is bigger than the Earth" may not refer to anything
> except our flawed models of reality. But if there is no such flaw, then...

Right, and there almost certainly are dozens of such flaws, and that's
perfectly okay. We manipulate the information that is most useful to
us, and how it "really is" doesn't matter, except to the extent it
really does.

DS