humanities.philosophy.objectivism

On Apr 12, 2:58 pm, Mark N wrote:

> Well, you were the one who brought up ambiguity. I assumed that you were
> talking about ambiguity due to difficulties with our concepts, which
> makes the determination of the referents of those concepts problematic.
> Is that not what you had in mind? If not, what kind of ambiguity did you
> have in mind, and how does it relate to the topic at hand?

I'm sorry, I lost track of the flow of the conversation. I was
discussing ambiguous *statements* on another thread. You are quite
correct that in the the context of this thread, I was talking about
ambiguous concepts.

Going back to your original point:

"Why don't we need to remove the ambiguity? Is it because our
concepts,
and statements that we make that involve those concepts, can actually
refer to aspects of reality that are independent of our thoughts,
despite the ambiguity?"

My response would be, no, that's not the reason we don't need to
remove the ambiguity. We do in fact remove the ambiguity that we need
to remove. At one time, it didn't matter whether "atom" referred to
indivisibility or the smallest bit of an element since that ambiguity
had no cognitive consequences at that time.

We don't need to remove the ambiguity because there are no adverse
cognitive consequences and the ambiguity has utility.

I do agree, however, that our concepts can refer to aspects of reality
that are independent of our thoughts despite the ambiguity. Certainly
our notion of "Sun" refers to some aspects of reality that are
independent of our thoughts just as the Greek notion of "atom"
referred to real things -- just not atoms, since there did not exist
any actual atoms as the Greeks conceived them.

Oddly, a concept can correspond to things that are not in fact
instances of that concept. The Greek concept of "smallest indivisible
bit of an element that maintains the properties of that element"
actually corresponded to things in the real world, even though they
were not indivisible bits of elements.

Precision has cost, so we avoid unnecessary precision. But the net
result is that it is frequently impossible to figure out what
*precisely* we are talking about. We aren't talking about anything
precisely, we are talking about things imprecisely.

We make cognitive models that help us to understand the world. We
model a car as a unit, even though it is only a unit because it is
convenient for us to model it that way. We model objects as having
precise positions at precise times even though we know they don't.
Why? Because most of the time, it simply doesn't matter that they
don't.

But these are epistemological models, and the properties that come out
of them are epistemological properties. They map to metaphysical
properties, but that mapping is often imprecise and approximate. In
fact, efficient cognition is as imprecise and approximate as it can
get away with being.

You wouldn't give someone directions to the mall based on quantum
physics.

DS