Looking at the Wall...


Excursus -- Did I just switch from a correspondence theory of truth to a coherence theory of truth?

  1. As I wrote the section about how the finest primitives of language 'lose their referents' as we push on them, and instead start deflecting us 'sideways', I found myself wondering about this issue.

  2. But as I look more closely at the question, I don't think so...or at least I defined the problem away?

  3. I still seem to have a notion of correspondence--the 'words' still 'point' to something (and tests of truth are ostensive and intersubjective--with interaction with externally constructed 'norms'). But these 'pointers' now do NOT point atomistically--rather they point at gestalten in reality, which cannot be reduced to the atoms per se. (And the relationship between the dots and image of Mona show that this relationship cannot be described simply as 'epiphenomena'--there is some 'semantic agglutinator' that 'sees' the dot-pattern 'into' a higher-level semantic/meaning context.)

  4. The reason the coherence question came up, is that when I push on a word for its 'correspondence' referent, sometimes all I get back is a set of alternate words...in hope that THAT combination of primitives would be epistemically more 'vivid', and that I would say "got it--so THAT's what 'weight' is..." So it is not that the words point to other words, but that the words have to try 'alternate' words, in order to 'show' me the reality.

  5. And finally, at some level, both perspectives merge in my 'system'. IF the universe is ultimately linguistic/semantic AT ITS METAPHYSICALLY LOWEST GESTALTEN LEVEL, then the equation of things=words effectively EQUATES correspondence with coherence. (In a Judeo-Christian worldview, this is simply that God 'spoke the universe into being'--not fashioned it out of something. The universe can-- fuzzily, but appropriately--be called semantic events...words + will (but this we will need to get to later.)

  6. [One interesting corollary of this view is that objects have 'meaning fields' from which relationships 'select meanings'. For example, a rock has a different 'meaning' in an electromagnetic field than it does in a shower of UV rays.]


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