Just here to let y’all know there’s a new person around to discuss stuff with you.
What wishest thou to discuss? Pick a topic, any topic, and fling it up for all to see. You’ll be radically affirmed, viciously shot down, or somewhere in between, but you will not be bored.
Let’s pick something. (note: vicious topic-hijacking alert - my apologies)
Anyone have an opinion as to whether “ontology” is possible or impossible? I’ve been reading a bit of Quine recently, and Carnap’s article where he introduces “linguistic frameworks” whereby when we say “x exists” we are not actually postulating “there is some x in the world,” about which we can predicate properties and such, but rather that “x and its associated terminology provides a useful model of the world and can help us predict future experience,” making no ontological claims about the world. I really like this idea. Anyone disagree (with the idea, not with the statement that I, Z.S., like the idea 
)?
Yes, all of our scientific knowledge is a model of the world. It’s not like that detracts from it’s validity, however. In either case, the knowledge provides a way to predict the worlds behavior. It may be that the world is just the way we see it, or it may only act like what see. Does it matter?
To most people, the answer would be no…but people pushing the frontiers of science and technology encounter this barrier all the time.
or you could go the extra mile and say that the meaning of x and all the associated terminology is the result of differantial comparison of other pre-existent symbols, that they themselves are the result of comparison of other symbols, and that there is in fact no “real x” and more importantly, that there is no x outside the text.
Saussure’s infinite deferral aside, (another wonderful paradox of language) you could keep trying to find the perfect text, the perfect most exact name for x, searching for the proper signifier for the signified and never finding the perfect term… perpetually creating new language never finding the one perfect term… endless…
then again, that could lead one to take Derrida’s position…
“philosophical discourse suffers from the same vicissitudes as every other form of speech and writing, and every attempt even to say what one means by “meaning” and “reality” must necessarily self-destruct…”
-Imp
I can’t really remember my Quine at all, apart from that it often gave me a headache, but if that’s a central idea, don’t you think it’s in stark contrast of the common sense view? When I ask a barman for a beer, perhaps I’m not saying that it exists, but when I ask for my beer to be passed to me, I definitely am; I’m referring to a specific instantiation of the beer class, namely mine.
But perhaps I’m misinterpreting what’s meant.
Take a specific beer b. You demand b forthwith, and expect that it will be provided to you. Take a step outside of the bar for a moment (not literally) - b and those things related to it are specifically-defined components of a linguistic framework (this is mostly Carnap, actually). You use those components, and thus accept the framework as useful to you, because doing so is a convenient way to think about the world, that has been proven in your experience to be productive for thinking about the world and for predicting the experiences you will have. The bar-framework, then, consists of a vocabulary of terms that, when mastered, allows you to cause yourself to have the experience of drinking beer.
This is not really a necessary way to think of ordinary experience, since there’s essentially no difference between whether b exists or you just think it does, but it is quite useful for thinking about science, particularly physics - what the hell is a quark, a string, a muon, etc? We say of these things that postulating them in the framework of a theory is hella useful for predicting the data we receive when we push certain buttons on very specialized apparati; but who the hell can authoritatively say much else about them?
Now for personal reasons I think the framework view is a neat one to hold about everyday life; it makes things slightly more interesting for me in all kinds of dealings. But it’s certainly not obligatory.
“Common sense is what tells you the earth is flat.”
'Scuse me, I need a b.