Anesthesis: Inhibition, Negation, Numbing, Projection, Quotation, Reflection, Reification, ...

Dan Brickley wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 18 Jan 2001, McBride, Brian wrote:
> 
> > [snip]
> >
> > > However,
> > > in the RDF syntax there is a known problem there.
> > > You can't quote something without asserting it.

<...>

> IMHO RDF as-is lacks precision in this area;
> but I stick by my story that this is a problem
> for the Web at large.  One that it would be nice
> to see folk on this list have a crack at ...
> 
> Dan

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Dan,

In the fond-mess of my youthful Lisp daze,
all of my friends and I used to call this
the problem of "evaluation inhibition" --
excuse me while I wax nostalgic for a bit.

Okay, back to work.

In my observation this a problem for the World At Large,
especially as I diagnose it to be just the prototypical
case of "propositional and intentional attitudes" (PAIA),
to which I made some obscure allusion in a previous note,
and I would love to have a crack at chipping out the code
that could someday provide fast, if temporary, relief from
the whole miserable syndrome of its most annoying symptoms!

In deference to the present "community of inquiry" (COI),
I have started trying to russell up a generous number of
new -- or freshly used, but still apt to be judged fit! --
names, with which to brand or to gloss, depending on the
ambient temperature of their new application environment,
for what it is that some other COI's, at least, the ones
that I would like to have keep talking to me, have been
used to using the handy string "reification" to wrap up,
as in its APA (American Pedantical Association) meaning
that comes straight out of the chutes of the dictionary
and hog-ties it to the bedeviled notion of "hypostasis".

To cover the common use of the charge of "reification",
as it is used in whole de-genres of critical j'accuses
about "other people's usage" (OPU), the best surrogate
that I can come up with -- "off the top of my head" as
Data might say -- is "projection", since that may well
be the most flagrant, notorious, and openly observable,
in a sense, aspectre of this whole affair that accuses
the world of its own syntax.  Nevertheless, I must ask
you all for your indulgence and your patience in these
trials, if not for your mercy, as this suggestion, and
the ones that may follow if it this essay should prove
unsuitable, are intended to be regarded as little more
than tentative associations between sounds and strings,
on the one hand, and senses, and the other.

Still, my suggestion of "projection", no matter how
e-mediately tenative or how ultimately e-stablished,
as the case may be, it is now or may become thought
to be apt in time -- it does not properly cover the
more positive and the frequently beneficial aspects
of the conceptual processes to which those monikers
in "hypostatic abstraction, hypostasis, reification"
were once so fondly attached.  And so I find myself
in a state of being forced to persist in my efforts
to get a more algorithmic, a more effective, a more
recursive way to resolve the hermeneutic remainders,
in general, that currently and typically affect the
processes of generating -- "finding" or "making" as
the case may be -- the potential resolutions of our
possibly not vain textual attempts to coin, to find,
or to make a "common sense" among various or sundry
COI's.  As I e-vision it, and as not just one of us
may well-come to view it in time, this effort takes
us to the edge of asking a certain form of question,
as to what the sign-theoretic analogues of a common
denominator might be, as well as bringing up in its
train the associated questions of GCD and LCM -- or
of INF and SUP, if you prefer that fashion of lingo,
though multiplicatively speaking.

Just as a way of giving you an inkling of the chief way
that I personally have to address these sordid problems,
to wit, by way of the "pragmatic theory of signs" (PTOS) --
just beware of Geeks boring GIF's when you decrypt that! --
let me introduce our dis-assembled company to the person
and the work of C.S. Peirce, following up on an allusion
that I made to his DIOVIT, otherwise dubbed as "RATLOT":

...

But I have, for the moment, exhausted myself --
and probably not just me! -- with my overlong
preambling bit, and besides which I could most
likely use another cup of coffee before trying
to go on, so I will break here, and start again
later in the day.

Many Regards,

Jon Awbrey

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Received on Thursday, 18 January 2001 10:59:03 UTC