Hallo!

On Thu, 7 Apr 2011 22:49:17 +0100, And Rosta wrote:

> Jörg Rhiemeier, On 07/04/2011 22:12:
> > Hallo!
> [...]
> > We indeed live in very different universes.  You live in a world
> > of Platonic ideal forms, but how could such forms exist in a world
> > which is constantly *changing*?  The notion that every language
> > that was ever spoken or will ever be spoken, every lifeform that
> > has ever lived or will ever live, every invention that has ever
> > been made or will ever be made, every piece of art that has ever
> > been created or will ever be created, has been pre-formed since
> > before the "Big Bang" is ridiculous, isn't it?
> 
> It is mistaken, though perhaps not ridiculous, to describe eternals
> in temporal terms like  "since before the Big Bang", and it is
> ridiculous to conceive of eternals (platnoic forms) as existing in 
> spacetime.

Point taken; I chose my words badly.  Of course I know that Platonic
forms are not meant to exist in spacetime, but beyond it.  Yet, it
seems to me that the existence of such eternal forms leads to a
universe where nothing ever changes, or at least everything is
preordained, and any appearance of evolution or creativity was an
illusion, as well as any appearance of free will.

> But the notion that every language, every lifeform, every invention 
> qua platonic form exists eternally independently of any manifestation
> of it in spacetime is not at all ridiculous; it is ontologically 
> necessary; an altenative is inconceivable (to me, at least).

To you it may be.  To me the existence of eternal Platonic forms
is inconceivable.

> > Yet, that is the
> > consequence of Platonic idealism thought to the end.
> >
> > I live in a world of constantly changing individual entities,
> > which may be in some sort of "morphic resonance" with each other,
> > but those "morphic fields" are not immutable but themselves undergo
> > change through time.  Fact is and remains that only the _parole_
> > can be observed directly, and that any _langue_ is an abstraction
> > drawn from observations of _parole_.
> 
> Nevertheless, the majority of grammatical descriptions have been,
> and have professed to be, descriptions of langue.

Sure.  I do not say that langue does not exist, but it must be
deduced from the study of parole.  At least, any speaker of a
language has a langue in that he has a set of words he considers
meaningful and a set of rules of grammar determining which sentences
he considers well-formed, etc.  However, there are probably no two
human beings in this world who share exactly the same langue; there
will always be subtle differences, at least in vocabulary and
stilistics.

>       But perhaps when you said "grammars of natural languages are 
> based on observations of the actual usage of the language" you meant
> merely that our knowledge of langue is epistemologically dependent
> on our knowledge of parole (-- which, while not obviously true, is
> not obviously false either).

Exactly.  We agree on this point, more or less.  But I still reject
the notion of the langue being an eternal Platonic form.  (There
*may* be, though, a morphic field corresponding to the langue, but
that is still not a Platonic form because morphic fields exist in
spacetime and undergo change.)

On Thu, 7 Apr 2011 18:37:58 -0500, Patrick Dunn wrote:

> In no possible definition of the word "fallacy" can Platonism be described
> as a fallacy.  You can disagree with it, certainly, and not ascribe to it,
> but to call it a "fallacy" is -- well, a bit baiting.

OK, I perhaps went too far in naming this thread "The Platonic
fallacy", but I see so many problems with the notions of eternal
Platonic forms that in my eyes, it at least borders on being
fallacious.  But perhaps I simply haven't understood it well enough.

--
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