[lit-ideas] Re: The Natural and the Artifactual
- From: Andy Amago <aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2004 10:50:25 -0400 (GMT-04:00)
-----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
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
Other related posts:
