"Perplexed in Peoria"  wrote in
news:cc205j$2so3$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org: 

> 
> "John Wilkins"  wrote in message
> news:cc1bkj$2lkn$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org... 
>> Perplexed in Peoria  wrote:
>> > Funny, I thought I understood what "mind" meant.  ...
>>
>> Jim - do you really understand what "mind" is? Then rush
into print
> immediately and settle the last 500 years of debate.
> 
> Of course not.  No more than you understand what design is.
> What I said is that I know what the word means - how it is used.
> And, frankly, your persistent misrepresentations have become
> tiresome.


Perhaps the problem here is that words don't have a one to one 
correspondences with "meanings" - if they did language wouldn't work. To 
use Pierce via Deacon, icons and indexes may have a one to one 
correspondence, but symbols (words are an example) don't. This poses a 
problem for Dr. John, because he is a philosopher. While it should follow 
that he loves knowledge (and in fact I think both he and you qualify as 
philosophers under that definition), in practice it implies that he needs 
to make language less meaningful (quite literally), so that he can use it 
for logical argument. You do understand what "mind" means in the symbolic 
sense - but Dr. John needs to reduce it to the indexical sense. To allow 
it to "mean" the whole panoply that is associated with a symbol will make 
an attempt at logical argument equivalent, in Dennett's phrase, to 
"playing tennis without a net". Now it also happens that Dr. John is 
singularly pigheaded, as witness our discussion elsewhere on this thread  
:-), but I do not think he is misrepresenting so much as simplifying.


Yours,

Bill Morse
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