[MD] Definitions.

[david buchanan]

Marsha said to dmb:


You want to fault me for quoting RMP: his language, his concept, his words.  When you present a quote it is evidence of your deep understanding and high intellectual competency, and when I present a quote it is my contradiction, in-coherence and anti-intellectualism.   Right.  I still deny that concepts and language are a "contemptible prison". 


Pirsig said:
 "... The definition is a cage...  You set limits on what a word is.  You set limits on what your experience is.  And those limits, which you set in order that you can manipulate these words, are also a cage for that word.  It can't go beyond it one way or another."



dmb says:

The problem is not quoting Pirsig but MISREADING quotes from Pirsig. The other problem is simply contradicting yourself from one moment to the next and using contradictory terms in your sentences. Given the context of this discussion, wherein the criticism centers on your excessively negative attitude toward words and concepts, I can only conclude that the "cage" quote is being used to push back against this criticism.

It doesn't. Quite the opposite. To say that definitions set limits like a cage is not some deep mystical insight and in fact this meaning can be seen in the Latin root words. from Latin definitio(n-), from the verb definire ‘set bounds to’ (see define ).

Even further, these limits and boundaries are what enable us the have language at all. Those limits are nothing less than the difference between one meaning and another. The use of contradictory terms is a violation of those limits and a destroyer of intelligible meaning. The term "static", for example, cannot rightly be substituted or equated to "ever-changing". Those are two completely different cages and you'd have to break one or the other to make that work, which is why it does NOT work. Neither does "liquid ice" or "clean filth". Contradictory phrases and sentences have no intellectual value. How is this even debatable!? 

"Propositions show what they say: tautologies and contradictions show that they say nothing." Ludwig Wittgenstein