[lit-ideas] Re: Hands Across The Bay
- From: "Donal McEvoy" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> (Redacted sender "donalmcevoyuk" for DMARC)
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 14 Dec 2017 17:19:58 +0000 (UTC)
Does Etruscan language exist (as language, not just as a name) in W3 and why
or why not ?>
I think the answer is yes - at least the encoded/written part:- because it was
in W3 when encoded, and it remains encoded, so it remains in W3.
Even if all humans were wiped out in a global war or pandemic, the libraries
would be full of W3 material that would remain W3 material.
An opposed argument would be that W3 content loses its status as such when
there is no potential subject that could decode, access, grasp or understand
that content - but there are two problems with this counterargument (1) it need
not be accepted that W3.1 objects become merely W1 objects when there are no W2
'subjects' capable of grasping their W3 aspects (2) if we accept this
counterargument, what is the measure of "potential subject" - e.g. even if all
humans were wiped out, and even if there were no intelligent life as yet in any
other part of the universe that could decipher any of that W3 content, there
would remain the possibility that such intelligent life might evolve (perhaps
from life extant on earth), and this would mean the content was potentially
accessible.
So my view is that once W3 content is encoded so that it is a W3.1 object, it
remains a W3.1 object while it remains encoded - the disappearance of any
'knowing subject' from the universe would not change this, although it would
render the W3 content about as much use as works of art in a lifeless universe.
Moreover, without any 'knowing subject' to access the W3 content, the W3
content becomes completely inert in its causal efficacy - in other words, W3
content can only exert causal effects, say on W1, via the W2 of 'knowing
subjects'.
In the case of Etruscan language, the reason scholars will work on it is
precisely because they know there must a right way of decoding it - in other
words, there is the potential of it being decoded. I think it remains in W3
before this potential is fulfilled and even if is not fulfilled.
Of course, there is the question whether an oral language, that has disappeared
from human history leaving no physical or mental traces, leaves any trace in W3
from the time it was spoken - or whether we say whatever traces it left in W3
have disappeared with the extinction of any physical or mental record of the
language. But my Popper-Genie only answers one question a day.
DL
From: Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Thursday, 14 December 2017, 12:59
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Hands Across The Bay
Okay, I am not sure that I find this completely satisfactory, but here is
another question for Donal. We will take Etruscan language. There are written
texts preserved in Etruscan, which I suppose belong to W1 in D's
classification. However, we cannot read them - it will be great if Etruscan
gets deciphered one day, but for now even the scholars can make sense only of a
couple dozen words at best. Thus Etruscan, or thoughts expressed in it, are not
really part of anyone's W2 today. Does Etruscan language exist (as language,
not just as a name) in W3 and why or why not ?
On Thu, Dec 14, 2017 at 7:52 AM, Donal McEvoy <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Omar's post may be related to W3 somehow, but my remarks here are to clarify
that the problems raised by Omar are not problems that directly throw doubt on
W3 or W3 content. This, essentially, is because W3 includes false propositions,
and so can include fictional propositions. So we might ask Omar's questions of
specific W3 content but they are not questions relating to the general
character of that content qua W3 content.
What makes 'content' belong to W3, rather than W2 or W1, is that it is not
'content' that can be explained, or accounted for, in W2 or W1 terms.
In a separate post I drafted yesterday, but did not send, I tried to answer
some of Omar's questions or points in some of his other posts, particularly by
focusing on 'reading': the argument is that, when we read, the content we
extract is not physical content or mental content but another kind of content,
W3 content. It is plain that we learn to read without learning any physics, and
it is plain that physics offers no theories that explain how we learn to read
(except to the extent we read by sight and optics explains the physical aspect
of this; but then we can also, and importantly, read by touch; the visual
aspects of reading are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for having
any of the understanding that is central to reading). For these reasons,
reading cannot be a merely W1 process.
Is the content we read 'mental content'? Here is a more complex issue. Clearly
W3 content is potentially 'mental content' where it is potentially graspable by
W2, and that indicates we might treat what Popper calls 'W3 content' as if it
were just 'mental content' - say out of deference to the great tradition of
W1-W2 dualism in Western philosophy, or the great tradition that "knowledge =
JTB", or the great tradition of Occam's Razor which might oppose W3 as
"unnecessary".
One of the central arguments here is that W3 content may have a 'life of its
own' (even if it only comes alive when in the spotlight of W2 activity): when
Einstein arrived at "e = mc2", he did not do so by examining or accumulating
his sense-data or other sense experience, and he did not do so by having a
peculiar human psychology, he did so by manipulating different kinds of W3
content in order to solve certain problems. When he arrived at "e = mc2" that
equation had many deep consequences that were beyond his own present W2
understanding - some became apparent to Einstein only when other physicists
worked these consequences out. When those other physicists worked on the
equation, they worked directly on the equation itself as W3 content - they did
not need (and it would have been ludicrous for them to request) that Einstein
spell out what sense experiences he had that he thought relevant to his
equation or what peculiar human psychology underpinned his workings. They took
his equations in objective terms, as a form of "objective W3 conjectural
knowledge", and worked out consequences - including whether there were testable
consequences. These consequences followed from the 'content' in its W3 sense
not from content in a W2 sense.
The case of Roberts was to bring out something similar in a legal context.
Clearly the text of the judgments in Roberts is invariant in W1 terms, and we
can also say it is invariant in the W3.1 content expressed by that text. Yet
understanding that text, in W2 terms, is not 'invariant' - either between
individuals or even with a given individual. So, in my own case, I assimilated
Roberts by a gradual process that involved several readings - the W3 content of
Roberts was not changing but my W2 grasp of Roberts was. This indicates why it
is very problematic to consider 'the content of Roberts' as 'mental content',
especially as that content may give rise to valid discussion of its character
that was beyond the W2 horizons of the judges who produced that content.
As to the questions about fictional texts: clearly we can say that it is true
in the text that Lear had three daughters, Holmes lived at Baker Street etc.
but that it is not true that outside the text there was a 'real' Lear or a
'real' Holmes. This approach surely allows us to clear up most issues here, and
without getting in a knot on the concept of 'existence'.
DL
From: Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Wednesday, 13 December 2017, 20:12
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Hands Across The Bay
I will make a few comments perhaps not directly related to what was said
previously, or perhaps related. In literary studies, it has long been a
convention to speak of literary texts as if having a world of their own. Thus
in this mode of discourse it is perfectly acceptable to say things like "King
Lear has three daughters" or "Sherlock Holmes lives in Baker Street" even
though we are perfectly aware that neither of these persons ever existed in the
physical world, let alone exists now. (The things are somewhat more complicated
with something like Homer's the Iliad which is thought to be a mixture of fact
and fiction, but we will leave that aside for the moment.) If someone claimed
that King Lear had three sons, or that Sherlock Holmes lives in Buenos Aires,
that would be considered... laughable ? Inappropriate ? Incorrect perhaps, with
reference to the text. But I don't think that we would say that such statements
are false, because that would imply that "Sherlock Holmes lives in Baker
Street" is true, and we know that strictly speaking it is not. If something is
real it should be possible to make true or false statements about it, while in
this context to speak of truth or falsity seems rather beside the point. Is
there a plausible sense in which we can make true or false statements about
King Lear, or Sherlock Holmes ? Or perhaps such statements are neither true or
false because, well, those persons never really existed, and Frege's view that
"of non-existing entities we cannot predicate" seems more intuitively plausible
than some other view like perhaps Russell's.
Well, I will submit this for consideration, although I am not optimistic that I
will receive much in the way of illuminating comment.
On Wed, Dec 13, 2017 at 5:04 PM, Redacted sender jlsperanza for DMARC
<dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
A point or two onemergence and ‘actualitas/potentia,’ with thanks to McEvoy for
theclarification.McEvoy: “Popper isexplicitly in the emergentist camp: he
would, however, regard the sense inwhich W2 is "potential" within W1 as trivial
or misleading or both (Imean, wasn't World War Two "potential" in the Big
Bang?).”Well, I guess thedistinction is Aristotelian: ‘dunamis’ vs. ‘energeia’.
Admittedly, it may bemisleading, or trivial.Aristotle would
possibly(potentially) say, misleadingly (or trivially) that indeed World War
Two waspotential in the Big Bang.I guess the idea of‘potentiality’ here is that
there is a ‘potentiality’ in W1 to allow for W2 to‘emerge’ from it. Similarly,
there is the ‘potentiality’ in W2 to allow for W3to ‘emerge’ from it.Trivial
and misleading, termsderived from Aristotle’s “dunamis”and “energeia” have,
forthe record, become parts of modern scientific vocabulary with a very
differentmeaning from Aristotle's! Physicist Werner Heisenberg, for the
record,looks to the notions of “potentiality” and “actuality” in order to
understand betterthe relationship of quantum theory (later fully formalized by
John von Neumann) to the world.Is this relevant? It mayhave to do with Popper’s
W1. Why did Heisenberg looked for the notion of‘potentiality’ and ‘actuality’
to understand the relationship between quantumtheory (an item in Popper’s W3,
if you wish) and the physical world (W1)itself? We should ask
Heisenberg!Regarding the“statistical expectation” quantum theory associates
with the behaviour of anatom, Heisenberg says:“One might perhaps call it an
objective tendency or possibility, a“potentia” in the sense of Aristotelian
philosophy. In fact, I believe that thelanguage actually used by physicists
when they speak about atomic eventsproduces in their minds similar notions as
the concept “potentia.” So thephysicists have gradually become accustomed to
considering the electronicorbits, etc., not as reality but rather as a kind of
“potentia.””And again:“The probability wave of Bohr, Kramers, Slater… was a
quantitativeversion of the old concept of “potentia” in Aristotelian
philosophy. Itintroduced something standing in the middle between the idea of
an event andthe actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the
middle betweenpossibility and reality.”And yet again:“The probability function
combines objective and subjective elements.It contains statements about
possibilities or better tendencies (“potentia” inAristotelian philosophy), and
these statements are completely objective, theydo not depend on any observer;
and it contains statements about our knowledgeof the system, which of course
are subjective in so far as they may bedifferent for different observers.”
Discussing, moregenerally, the relationship between matter and energy in modern
physics,Heisenberg says:“If we compare this situation with the Aristotelian
concepts of matter andform, we can say that the matter of Aristotle, which is
mere “potentia,” shouldbe compared to our concept of energy, which gets into
“actuality” by means ofthe form, when the elementary particle is created.”But
this is quite a leapfrom _my_ usage of ‘potentiality,’ and so I take McEvoy’s
point.It may be interesting torelate ‘emergence’ with some alleged forms of
‘reductionism’ and‘supervenience’, as they relate to W123. Thanks for the point
about Popper on‘emergence.’Cheers,Speranza
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