[lit-ideas] The Natural and the Artifactual
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2004 10:35:09 EDT
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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