If you were to take apart a flower piece by piece in search of the thing that makes it a flower… you will not find it.
If you were to take apart a brain to find where the mind is…
or if you were to take apart a body to deterine where the self is…
you will not find them.
There is no flower… it is just a reference.
There is no self… it is just a reference.
I prefer category to reference.
You have solved nothing, Bane.
“Reference” is a dichotomous meaning. It implies a thing which “refers” and a thing “referred to.”
What is this thing that “refers”?
You can thank Frenchy for this question, and the phenomenologists that followed.
What’s the difference between category and reference?
That they’re different words.
Implies, yes. But not ‘requires’…
More waste of time bourgeois workshy philosophy? Make up your mind…
Yeah, that’s a category error, or something, right? It’s like when you take a family on a tour of a university campus, and at the end they ask “Well, where’s the university?”. The idea of a category error came into play in refuting the Cartesian mind-body thing, didn’t it?
I don’t see how the reference thing follows from the examples.
I wasn’t aiming to. Just posting mundane babble in… Mundane Babble.
A category is a reference of sorts.
I don’t know if a reference is a category though…
I don’t know… damn words… 
Very cool quote by the way, “When midway in our life’s journey, I found myself in a dark forest…” – Dante
In this case the word “flower” is the thing that refers to “the part of a seed plant comprising the reproductive organs and their envelopes if any, esp. when such envelopes are more or less conspicuous in form and color.”
That’s the difference between category and reference. A reference requires something that it refers to, as opposed to a category which is just a section of things that have these qualities or look or feel like this.
Don’t become overly enchanted. If words get in the way of your task then go past them.
A category would be a distinguished set of things aside from other things. Philosophers have ordered and classified concepts and physical features of objects by categories. Call them “attributes”, “characteristics”, “qualities”, whateva.
The difference, sir, is that a “category” is something that is “referenced”. Because it is absurd to say that a reference is categorized, since that would mean that something else besides the referencing was referencing the category of reference, referencing cannot be categorized and must be a an exclusive thing of which has no similiarity to something else. If it did, it would need a category.
So say that we wanted to call “observing” something similiar to “referencing.” We could use either term in a statement and convey the same meaning, more or less. We might then make a category where observing and referencing were itemized.
But I’m saying that the spontaneous “notice” of an “otherness” of anything whatsoever is the basis for immediate referencing and consciousness. The “consciousness of somethingess.”
At this point, it might be too much to suppose that “observation” is similiar to consciousness, since the concept of “observation” is one in which we reference aspects of categorized terms and concepts, rather than being an immediate, spontaneous activity in experience- that of simply being conscious.
Maybe the term referencing denotes a dichotomous ontology where there is some kind of dualistic feature to reality, in the sense that the “idea” and the “object” are not the same, but necessarily there for consciousness to “happen” and “reference”.
To reference the “referencer” is to only be aware that one is holding the idea of “consciousness” in consciousness. But to reference a category or aspect of some object is more than methodologically observing it…it is also a spontaneous “surge”, as Sartre called it, up from the heart of being and into the syrup of existence.
Consider yourself lucky to be conscious, man. It is a rare occasion.
I don’t think so. The flower is not the thing which “refers”, since that would mean it is having a consciousness. It might be conscious, but you can’t ever know it so fagetaboutit.
The things you described as being parts of the flower would occupy a place in a category just like the flower. They do not reference each other. They are all mutually referenced as classified and categorized.
YES! =D>
WTF!? 
The WORD flower is the thing that is the REFFERED to by you and me. Words and ideals are attached to words like ‘flower’. When I said ‘refer’ I would think it was clear that I was not meaning a verb as in a talking flower that says, “I’m refering to the dorks at ILP”.
It is more complicated than that, sir. If the word “flower” is what is referred to when you are talking to me…and you point at the word and say “that is a flower”, I would ask what a flower was, and point at a tulip. You would say “that is a flower too.” I would ask, why does it look so different from the word flower. You would say "because it isn’t a flower…it only means “flower.”
So we are not referring to the word itself, but the thing the word refers to. The word “flower” can be used in a context that has nothing to do with a flower. I could say “those fireworks explosions were flowering outward.”
What would I mean by “flowering”? You would assume that the movement of the explosive parts from the fireworks resembled the direction of petals as they bloom…reaching outward in all directions from the center.
Yet here again, this has nothing to do with a flower, but, instead, a characteristic of a flower. So then I wouldn’t be referring to the flower when I said that…but only a certain characteristic of a flower that happened to be similiar to a characteristic of the fireworks.
Now let’s say you had never seen a flower. Instead of understanding me, you shake your head and ask “what does flowering out mean”. I might explain it like this “the motion of parts outward from a center…like a water-sprinkler.” You would then say “oh, I understand now…I see the similarity of the motion of the parts.”
At each point here, we were using words to refer to something that was not exclusive to the existing word…but what the word would mean contextually at different times. If we strip away all the characteristics of the flower, we would have some objective being that could not be used in any other context but its own reference- one could say, and only say “that is what “flower” means.”
And it gets even more complicated than that, believe it or not.
Speak for yourself. The only reason I am here with you dorks is because you are smarter than the average person, and I get lonely.
I, being athletic and hardened by work and struggle, am also gorgeous. If you saw me, you would never expect I was brilliant (and I’m not really brilliant…I just know how to sound brilliant).
We haven’t gone anywhere. This is part of what I meant by “there is no flower”. You cannot “strip away” everything from a word. The meaning of a word is relative to you. No matter what, “flower” (and indeed every single word) is not going to mean the same exact thing from one person to the next. It is a reference, built on references, built on references, built on a relative viewpoint. Words are not things in the objective world. This is begining philosophy of language to think that words ACTUALLY refer to something objective. They don’t. They are references of references.
My definition of an ILP dork is someone who posts on ILP… so in effect, you are an ILP dork just like me… It’s ok. Don’t deny it. Embrace your dorkdom! We are one, you and me.