[lit-ideas] Re: "The Cat Was On The Mat; And What He Did There."



--- On Mon, 27/4/09, Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx <Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> Donal takes as a simple ('simplex' in  Latin):
> 
> catus matus
> 
> -- the cat is on the  mat.

Actually, Donal had written:
"The difficulty I see is that such a search for ultimate simples is potentially 
infinite:- we take, say, "The cat is on the mat" and start breaking down "cat" 
into "four-legged creature etc" and then breaking down "leg" into "bone and 
muscle" say, and then breaking down bone and muscle into smaller and smaller 
units."

It is the smallest of these smaller units, and not "The cat is on the mat", 
that I took "as a simple".
 
> As he notes:
> 
> "That's ambiguous. Surely it's the bones and the  skin
> that are on the 
> French suede mat. It's never as simple as  that".

Donal didn't note this, afai/hecanrecall.

Hence the following is really not a corrective to anything Donal said.

> Indeed, and it's best to talk of _complex_. "The cat is on
> the  mat" is a 
> _complex_. One test for complexity I use is:

For those interested there is/was an article on Wittgenstein's Logical Atomism 
in the Stanford Encyclopedia.

Donal
Simple and complex
Ldn





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