Quetz has a certain style in how he titles OPs. If you take the title and read it as “Is what we think wrong?” l believe you’ll have a clearer picture of what he’s saying. He might be going a bit far when he asks if our thinking is ‘wrong,’ but other posters understood and answered him.
None of us think descriptions are incorrect–they’re just incomplete. You’re being rather trollish here, James.
Liz, I am the one who said that the descriptions are merely incomplete, not necessarily wrong.
quetz and I had a detailed discussion about it,
“box doesn’t mean a perfect cube”
“what is real about an actual dog?”
“There is no such thing as objects in and of themselves”
“It is not a matter of describing things properly”
You are mis-assigning credit and blame.
…and still not ever answering questions.
That will get you ignored by ppl in the long run because it forbids you from ever learning what they are trying to say.
Just answering other replies…
Incorrect is not determined.
The map describes itself as a map ~ just as well as territory describes itself as the territory [is what I meant].
The territory is transient and so information about it is never exact. If we did make a perfect map it would soon be wrong because the territory would change. Perhaps its clearer if we thought of this as a map of the weather, clouds.
Its debatable if it can be any other way, but I am talking about God’s reality here. Indeed if we went on to say that God and ‘reality’ are the same, then there is nothing about existence, or any describable thing, or anything other than reality, that is equivalent to reality itself.
reality is non- definable. You would say your reality is alone your arm or leg, or any part of and the whole of the brain etc. everything you attempt to describe your reality by is only ever a partial description.
Well that’s a rather massive topic. There are many kinds of description and I tend to define how I am using them as I go ~ so as to be more fluid. Here’s just a few;
Linguistic description
Eidos
Data [as a computer uses]
Informational background [holographic theory]
Conceptual
Holisms/shapes/geometry
Math
A cube can ‘exist’ but not be physical just as info and forms. I wouldn’t say any are less/more real because everything is equally not real as compared to what is real [I.e. reality]. The comparatives are all equivalent. _
You sound lovely 
but as you say that’s just a description, we say a given actress or model is beautiful, yet they haven’t done anything to produce that, its purely genetic. What is beautiful about a person is who they are and all the ladies here are that ~ and even some of the gents. So it’s the reality beyond the description that truly tells us about who someone is.
Yes descriptions are only partial, what I am getting at is that our processes tend to break everything up into pieces, then put them back together as a whole ~ like parts of a machine perhaps. The very act of partitioning, of ‘breaking’ up, is a distortion of the whole reality which is far more fluid.
In doing so we don’t see e.g. love, we may break that up into evolutionary chemical emotions and whathaveyou, and that breaks what love is. It infers that our experience is purely internal, when in fact there is a reality to love, not to mention information exchanges which themselves transcend our individual realities. May I add that I think such realities are as real as who we are, so love-ness is equivalent to you-ness, is equivalent to object-ness.
‘Incomplete is wrong, complete is right, but we cannot describe what is complete because descriptions themselves are incomplete’ - quetz.
_
I was saying that “God” is the condition that forces that it cannot be any other way (“the lack of alternatives”).
That is your unsupportable assertion. Your example doesn’t support your assertion.
James, “The map is not the territory” is a foundational concept in Alfred Korzybski’s General Semantics introduced in 1933. I studied General Semantics in grad school. (Read Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-aristotelian Systems and General Semantics.) The map isn’t the territory because the map is an abstraction, something I tried to demonstrate in my self-description. Strictly speaking, then, Korzybski was the first to say descriptions are incomplete.
I don’t really understand you when you say I don’t answer questions. I tried to answer quetz’s op question, didn’t I? I may have used General Semantics in my answer, without calling it that, but if you didn’t understand my answer, I at least made the attempt.
That is the issue.
Incomplete is NOT wrong unless it is taken to be or meant as being complete.
Hmm so for descriptive purposes its ok to have something that is vaguely true. I think my answer on the other thread sums up my position best…
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=178118&p=2286065#p2286065
Perhaps this is better; [here I am saying more than the description but the info contained or pertaining to an object itself is only ever partial and transient!!!
‘Incomplete is wrong, complete is right, but we cannot describe what is complete because descriptions themselves and the informations they pertain to are incomplete’ - quetz.
_
No.
A description is never proposed to be an entire infinitely detailed explanation. Every description is merely identifying an abstract/general category. As such, it is not “vague”. It is exact. But fitting into an exact category, “dog”, does not mean that every one of the infinite number of details of the dog has been spelled out. Thus it is not “wrong”. There is no error. The object either fits into the general category or doesn’t.
Yet it is proposed to be an entirety when there are none bar reality itself ~ or a given entirety by any description e.g. if we supplanted ‘reality’ with something else to suit the purpose [the absolute could an example of that perhaps].
An abstract or general category is vague. Is a dog a wolf, are there then any dogs if they are wolves, or is a wolf a dog so there is no longer the category of wolf; now exchange all identities, rinse and repeat!