[lit-ideas] The Natural and the Artifactual

 
 
In a message dated 8/30/2004 6:23:19 PM Eastern Standard Time,  
atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
Is there  an essential something to naturalness (ah, I hear JL
grumbling awake at the  sound: "essential") to distinguish those things
brought about through  "natural" bodily processes -- such as honey
production -- and those things  produced external to bodies  but through the
natural bodily processes  of intellect, such as plastics?

 
---- Good question.
 
One of Grice's claims to fame was, indeed, the drawing of the boundary  
between the 'natural' and, er, what, for lack of a better epithet, he called 
the  
'non-natural'. There must be a lot online about this. (He set the distinction 
in  an essay written in 1948, 'Meaning'. Of course, he was concerned with 
natural  and non-natural meaning, but the distinction (he attempted to draw) is 
more  general.
 
In his later 'Meaning Revisited', he concluded that there is _no_  
distinction between 'natural' and 'non-natural' (essential, anyways --  sic).
 
In an attempt at bad humour, an online list that mentions the causes of  
deaths of some famous philosophers, Grice is mentioned as having died of  
"non-natural causes". 
 
It is good to distinguish between the 'artifact' and the 'natural'.  
Intellect would be, like a burp, a natural process. But making a plastic (an  
artifact) would be artifactual (or 'artificial', as M. Chase prefers). 
 
Cheers,
 
JL

 


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