PUZZLED ELEPHANT TO CHRIS RE VERY PRECISE WEBSITE:
Chris, I'm hoping we can both get something useful out of this. However,
all that I've managed to get from you so far, in return for my puzzlement
about your association of what I have always taken to be distinguishable
subject matters ("continuous/general/unknown/unnamed"), is a collection of
words in capital letters and a reference to a website where you promised
that all would be explained "VERY detailed and so PRECISE. Read more
please". Well Chris, I'm rather annoyed about this because I've taken the
trouble and time to go and check out the web address you sent me to and read
through your discussion of dichotomy, and at the end of it all I am really
none the wiser. Not one jot. The page was indeed very precise and
detailed, but what it was precise and detailed about was nothing whatsoever
to do with the question I was puzzled about. I am left with the impression
that you didn't actually understand my point, and making quick assumptions
about the likely origin of any criticism of your veiws, sent me packing with
a standard reply. This is rather annoying. It's the sort of treatment I
expect from bureaucrats and petty officials, not from seekers after truth.
So, this time, please take the trouble to understand where I am coming from
and what I want to know.
First, all my protestations about agreeing with you about where the
interesting issues lie are entirely candid. I'm not trying to butter you
up, I'm just trying to get you to take me seriously as someone who it might
(if you would care to) be worth talking to honestly about these things. The
suggestive remarks about mixing dichotomies when we "zoom in" have an
interesting Platonic flavour that make me think you might be worth talking
to. Second, you directed me to a page which says more or less exactly what
I had just said to you on discreteness being a function of the exercising of
our dichotomy weilding inteligence upon the continuum, or in my terms
'flux'. Third, what I was puzzled about was not your general project of
appreciating how dichotomies belong to the map and not the territory. Quite
the reverse. I was puzzled about what I though might be a small local
failure to carry forward the implications of this insight as far as they
ought to take you. That local failure, I suggested, lay in instituting, on
your own part, a new mapping dichotomy which associates on one side of the
dichotomy (without any particular agument that I've been able to find)
"continuous/general/unknown/unnamed", and then clinging so unquestioningly
to this new mapping dichotomy (now even acknowledging my question about it,
it seems) as to completely mistake it for the territory - precisely the
fault you so eloquently discern in others.
So, I ask again, what have the continuous and the general got to do with
each other?
Can you please try and help me on this one. Communication helps one to
clarify one's own ideas I feel, so please try and answer me directly. I
don't feel that I have a right to expect everyone to have read my entire
on-line research thesis on Plato before they respond to me in a discussion
group. I will not, of course, request this of you. So please just answer
the question.
E.
Sample of previous exchanges:
CHRIS WROTE:
> Overall the emphasis is on discrete/particular/known/NAMED vs
> continuous/general/unknown/unnamed. The former takes on the label of
> "objects" and the latter of "relationships" this because there is a
> transformation process going on where "relationships" can be summed to
> create an "object" but CONTEXT will identify the 'hardness' of that object.
> (there is also the reverse process)
ELEPHANT:
>> I am really on your side here, in thinking that this is where all the
>> interesting issues lie. But i just don't think we can associate
>> them neatly
>> the way you do, writing down all the left sides of some disperate
>> dichotomies in one block, and the right sides in another.
CHRIS:
> It is obvious from these remarks that you have not bothered to make any
> attempt to go through my website material...
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