[MD] Keep on ...

[MarshaV]

dmb,

I've submitted dozens of posts, primarily in the 'Reifying Carrots' thread that offer such explanations from many different perspectives.   Do you understand 'many different perspectives"? 


Marsha  





On May 15, 2011, at 1:36 PM, david buchanan wrote:

> 
> 
> Marsha said to Mark:
> I see reification as a tool too.  But as dmb says that James says, "Intellectualism becomes vicious, he said, when concepts are reified, deified and the empirical reality from which they were abstracted in the first place is denigrated as less than real."
> 
> dmb says:
> Reification is not a tool. It is a certain kind of mistake, a conceptual error. It is a particular way to misuse a concept or abuse an idea. Nobody needs to take my word for it. Look it up. When generalizations and abstractions are mistakenly given concrete, existential status, when a concept is taken as something more than a concept. Around here, subjects and objects would be the prime example. They are fine AS concepts. When they are treated as different kinds of substances or mistaken for metaphysical categories, you've committed the error known as reification. The term is used to oppose various kinds of essentialism and Platonism, as well as SOM
> 
> I think it was Marsha who said:
> And in this reification process, it is that cage wall that creates separation between the phenomenon/concept and the self when an image, construct or definition is erected and assigned.  imho
> 
> dmb says:
> I can't make much sense of this word salad but it's pretty clear that you're confused about the definition of "definition". A definition is like a line or a wall that surrounds a word or a concept. But that line does not separate the word from experience or from the phenomenal reality. The wall around each word or concept separates it from OTHER WORDS and OTHER IDEAS. Words mean what they mean in relation to all the other words in the language. The definition of every word is never anything except more words. It's a system of relations. It's a system of distinctions and relations, similarities and opposites, of subtle connotations and stark contrasts. That's root basis of all conceptual thought. All these analogies, comparisons, oppositions and distinctions are verbal and intellectual. They're explainable and knowable and useful and good. There no rule that says this must be spoiled by "reification".
> 
> I think it would make sense to use that term to push back against the error whenever it appears someone is committing it. If you or Mark actually understood the problem and could recognize it when you saw it, you'd be on the war path against Ham's essentialism. You can see here what James meant by "reifying" the concept of a circle and "denigrating" the actual experiential reality of circles.
> 
> An essence characterizes a substance or a form, in the sense of the Forms or Ideas in Platonic idealism. It is permanent, unalterable, and eternal; and present in every possible world....Socrates was one of the first essentialists, believing in the concept of ideal forms, an abstract entity of which individual objects are mere facsimilies. To give an example; the ideal form of a circle is a perfect circle, something that is physically impossible to make manifest, yet the circles that we draw and observe clearly have some idea in common — this idea is the ideal form. Plato believed that these ideas are eternal and vastly superior to their manifestations in the world, and that we understand these manifestations in the material world by comparing and relating them to their respective ideal form. Plato's forms are regarded as patriarchs to essentialist dogma simply because they are a case of what is intrinsic and a-contextual of objects — the abstract properties that makes them what they are. For more on forms, read Plato's parable of the cave.
> 
> 
> The sun will come up tomorrow and the point of this post will be even further over Marsha's head.
> 
> 
> Bet on it.
> 
> 
> 
> 
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