[lit-ideas] Re: The Natural and the Artifactual

-----Original Message-----
From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
Sent: Aug 31, 2004 10:35 AM
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [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). 



A.A. We can make the further distinction between artificial and synthetic.  
Synthetic is using chemical reactions to create a substance that is identical 
to the original substance, e.g. laboratory synthesized vitamin C is identical  
to nature-made vitamin C.  That was, I think, the point of synfuel from 
Carter's days.  Or Mary Shelly's Frankenstein.  Artificial is creating an 
entirely new substance that mimics certain properties, such as artificial 
sweetener.  Artificial sweetener has sugar's sweetness, but occurs nowhere in 
nature.

Enough horsing around.   To work.


Andy Amago


 
Cheers,
 
JL

 


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