[lit-ideas] "Come back to death" (Was: Plato and Austin)
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2004 23:20:09 EDT
Eric quotes from M. Chase,
>>by what rights does *anybody* prescribe to us what reality is?
_____
and writes:
"Prescribed attitudes about reality are often hidden in our language
choices,
even when we are advancing a nondirective position.
For example, as Lakoff points out, we assert that TIME IS SOMETHING MOVING
TOWARD US when we make statements like:
Five O'clock is approaching.
Thursday passed without a bombing.
Or we imply that FORM IS MOTION when we use expression like:
The Tower in Pisa leans.
The road bends.
Our conceptual metaphors lead us to prescribe notions of reality, by right
of
being speakers of a language. Granted, such a prescription is not as
specific
as saying Schroedinger's Cat is or isn't dead--but it is more pervasive."
----- Exactly. This incidentally has a bearing on something else M. Chase
said (in another thread):
>But this implies there is a converse
>path as well, this time from being-dead to being-alive; it's called
>"coming back to life" (*to anabioskesthai*, 72a).
----
I was thinking. Plato's argument is a bit Gricean or Austinian at this
stage. As if: if there is an expression in the lingo (say "anabioskesthai",
that
means "revive") then there _is_ revive.
We might just as well say that if people use 'phlogiston', there is.
The odd thing is that this is a fallacy. And the _interesting_ thing (which
Plato should have noted) is that it's only an artificial expression to speak
of "coming back to death" -- which, if his argument made sense, would be the
expression to expect to prove the 'conceptual dependence' and a forteriori
the immortality of the soul.
Cheers,
JL
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