In philosophy forums issues up for consideration inevitably include metaphysics, that gray domain of all possible speculation. What appears to make such issues debatable is that adherents of specific points of view seem to see only two methods of critical anaysis; and, they see these methods as polar opposites, resolvable only by the anaysis of dialectical materialism.
The two methods are that of seeing phenomena as dynamic and that of seeing them as static. This amounts to verbs vs nouns. The "reducto ad absurdum"of each method is found when the dynamic approach can be reduced to relativism and the static approach embraces absolutes and finalities.
Is anyone here willing to consider complementations of these approaches? Or is it more fun to move the debates to stalemate, dead ends, relative or absolute diehard opinions?
diehard gerunds render dialectical materialism moot
-Imp
=D> I was also thinking of the gerund! In O.E. words such as “milk” or “fuck” meant the thing and what the thing does. I really think the first words in languages are noun/verbs. The verbal split into what a noun is and what a noun does may be the culprit behind our dynamic/static points of view.
that and making the leap that claims that named things cannot by (imposed) definition be other than they are named…
-Imp
I cannot agree more, sir. Let’s see if anyone esle will weigh in on this. I’m sure there must be some semanticists, mathematicians and metaphysicians who will object to what we have said.
Absolutism and relativism have mass appeal!
I agree with you both - the only question is: what’s the third way of conceiving of things after dynamic and static? relational? that would seem to lean towards dynamism. what else do we use?
This is my current thinking on this topic,
There is no “third sex”.
you clearly don’t spend enough time on internet porn sites 
Neat! When it comes to pronoun substitutes for nouns, we get he, she and it. Where would an atom be without its neutron?
Well, there’s always the postmodern “s/he” or “hir” - and then there’s the more pragmatic approach, emerging lately in common parlance, of simply using “they” or “their” in the 2nd person singular
B.F.,
in physics and biology nouns have triune meanings. My experience is of and in physics and biology. Post modernism, in this sense, is irrelevant.
gosh, science really DOES have no soul then, huh?
i jest - all i was talking about were “third sex” pronouns, i realize it has no broader implications for the topic upon which this thread was started . . .
but that brings me back to my previous question - from what do we hope to derive this astatic, adynamic conception of things, neither relativist nor absolute (and, in that sense, kinda postmodern, or maybe post-postmodern)? and what would it consist of?
I’m quite interested in this question and have been puzzling over it for some time. So, to keep the thread dynamic…
Old English is not the promised land. O.E. was less ridged than modern English with respect to word-order typology . But this is neither here nor there however as every language spoken or constructed on Earth is and must be either SOV, SVO, VSO, VOS, OSV or OVS in all of its major sentences.
Of course O.E. had gerunds. And this is not especially remarkable as there are also gerundives and many numerous ways of converting a word from one lexical category to another by agglutination. (Milk may have had a verb and noun meaning in O.E. This however I am not finding to be the case; what I am finding is that the verb and noun forms of milk in O.E. are different and have different origins. I’m not finding anything at all about fuck existing in O.E… But this matters not as English is rich with examples of conversion.)
Whether or not “noun/verbs” existed in the Proto-World language is not exactly the right question. Instead, what are the natures of the S-slot and the V-slot? The noun is the easiest to attack, for instance see Geach’s, or also The Iconicity of the Universal Categories ‘Noun’ and ‘Verbs’. But thought is syntactic. Animals think grammatically. Human language did not evolve, but burst onto the scene; over the pre-existing order of cognition. The origional question is a bit like asking about how pitch, rhythm and dynamics evolved since 1976 with the invention of digital audio.
B.F.,
Yes , science does not exclude concepts of a soul. I’m into the dynamic perspective. Just wondering how to prevent its deterioration into relativism, which appears to be the main trump card in these discussions. Suggestions much appreciated.
etaoin,
Thanks for the good scholarship. Perhaps I was wrong about the primacy of the gerund. Still the Chomsky notion of an innate disposition towards the type of grammar we and animals express meets opposition from many who believe grammer is not only restricted to human thought, but that it is also limited to subjective domains.
What kind of relativism is it that you want to prevent? Can you give me an example of the sort of thing you have in mind?
It does seem that a certain degree of relativism is probably inevitable, because, as you pointed out, nouns and verbs only make actual sense as they stand in relation to one another . . . meaning only exists relative to other meanings, otherwise it’s arbitrary, like absolutism. Self-evidence and self-identification are about as fundamental to understanding as it gets - but ‘self’ only exists in relation to ‘other’. So at certain levels, where things aren’t discernable as strict unities (for instance, at the quantum level) there’s no longer any self-evident thing to anchor a perspective in, and so there’s no self-identification possible (if matter is all recycled energy, then where does the stuff that i’m made of end and where do i begin? the answer is wherever we decide to make the cutoff), so there simply ceases to be any single truth of the matter . . .
I think without things which exhibit self-evidence, there can’t really be any facts, only processes and patterns relative to one another.
I gotta reflect some on what you say here. But gerunds are not trivial; they may even be quite wicked; the mark of the sin of the ages.
B.F.,
Agreed. I object to any sort of relatisim that is considered the final or absolute take on anything. In that sense, it conradicts itself, being no longer relativistic. Example, I often offer the possibilty of constants, which are not absolutes, as satisfying human needs for meaning and value. Constants are what we see in predictable recurrences of phenomena. We humans seem to need that sort of stability. Relativism, “ad absurdum”, cannot even recognize the value of constants. Thus it becomes the trump card of many who only want to win debates, not contribute to resolutions of problematic issues.
etaoin,
Really good post, mon ami. I’m probably a wicked gerund. 
The lack of posts to this thread suggest–1. It is not understood. 2. It is understood but considered unworthy of consideration. 3. It is much more fun to state as antithetical ideas that do not even oppose and argue relativism as an absolute. Which is it?
- it is old hat for a few of us…
-Imp
so it’s absolutes in relation to one another - or relations in relation with one another. it’s a process which isn’t done, and might never be - relativism is part of the truth, it’s just not the whole thing.