"William Morse"  wrote in message
news:cc47d8$gcc$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org...
> "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.

"Misrepresentation" was probably the wrong word.  "Deliberate
misinterpretation for rhetorical effect" comes closer to what I meant.

John's inability to get what people are talking about regarding "analog"
vs "digital" is perhaps inexplicable, but I think that your
"indicial"
vs "symbolic" point has some merit as to why we are having trouble
communicating on other issues.  But it leaves the question as to why
John insists on "indicial".  I suspect it is because he sees the role
of science and philosophy differently than I do, and perhaps differently
than you, as well.  John appears to believe, on some level, that the
goal of science and philosophy is to develop certain knowlege.
Furthermore, he seems to think that real progress in this direction
has taken place over the years.

I, on the other hand, think that the goal of science and philosophy
is to create better models - better ways of looking at things.  The
criteria for a "good" model are always somewhat subjective, and
include both aesthetic and pragmatic aspects.  Progress has been
made, certainly, but, as with progress in technology, the old models
were not exactly wrong and the new models are never exactly right.

John seems to see intellectual history as a record of famous battles
and glorious victories on the path to right thinking.  He sees
his own role, in part, as a defender of the gains already won.  To
warp Santayana, because he knows so much history, he has condemned
himself to repeat it.
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