"Everything that comes to be comes to
be (1) by something and (2) from something
and it comes to be (3) something (1032a -
13-14 Aristotle. Metaphysics.")
BACKGROUND. The human development of object
recognition and the repetitive reification
of abstraction, also called ontological priming,
is a form of ontological and moral readying
to which we are all exposed from a very young
age. The conflicts which emerge from male-female
parental priming are well known and are dealt
with in great depth by child psychologists
including Antonio Rossin, a medical man who
is well known to many of us on the various
lists which we frequent. In order to instill
the same semantic category and share features
we begin to be told and start to learn about
the closed system in which we find ourselves
during our earliest childhood years. We observe
for ourselves and our parents point out to
us the objects that exist and repeat sounds
which describe our interaction with those
objects. We pick up what behaviour towards
those objects is considered right and wrong
as early as when we are old enough to sit
up in our baby carriage.
SYMBOL – OBJECT INDENTITY When our parents
or older siblings point to and name an object
we associate the linguistic relation of that
object with that sound. Later when we learn
to read and spell (A is for Apple, B is for Bear, etc.) we add a lexical dimension to the
existing audible relationship between object
and sound. Eventually when a name of something
we know of is mentioned, (Mummy) even if
as an object it is physically absent, our
brain searches for an antecedal identity-match,
which when found and "a hit" is confirmed initiates a predicative
link with the object concerned.
Neurologically we construct a conceptual
exemplification for each name which maps
to an object. In the case of multiple objects
of a similar sort which become associated
with a single name (dogs, tables, etc.) we envisage a prototype and our core-predication
specifies the average morphological and behavioural
values of the members of that object-category.
The brain supplies a simple, brief, private,
covert core-descriptive predicative tag which
is fused with the noun in the form of:
| Ice-cream – nice |
| "Rover – doggy |
| Mummy – warm/food |
Such is the manner by which our neurological
data-base is established and our nomino-predicative
stimulus is experienced. Though the core-predicative
content we associate with names in our youth
changes and becomes more sophisticated as
we grow older and we become more familiar
with objects (and what is said of objects)
and our later encounters with the noun-core-predicate
stimulus function become routine and are
processed more quickly by the brain, this
basic, instinctual supply of core-predication
to noun-stimulus as an instantiative process/mental
imaging system remains with us to our dying
day.
I am convinced that to a large extent noun-predication
in children and adults is a form of inductive
ontological generalisation in the form of
sentence prompted predication induced on
the personal judgement of word significance
for individuals. In the sinister words of
the Jesuits: "Give me the child and I will give you the
man." This was said by Ignatius Loyola,
founder of the Jesuits, who died in 1556
and was later beatified to sainthood.
Some people are so heavily imprinted with
early forms of agenderised imprintation that
they never recover from the experience and
some manage to recover and work out a free-thinking
reality-connectedness model of their own.
But the latter are very few and far between.
The former are confined to either utter dependency
on the imprinted paradigms of their formative
years or spend the rest of their lives tailoring
the induced version more to their own tastes
and fancies.
I originally qualified the fact that the
auto-neurological self instantiation response
is the same for ANY noun we hear or read,
other than those we have not heard before,
or those we have never resolved into a designatum or nominatum, and posited that if an unrecognised noun
which refers to a designatum or nominatum
which is unknown to the recipient of such
a signal is mentioned - no such correlative
connection is made and the utterance is considered
meaningless. I have since modified this view
thanks to Larry Tapper who wrote:
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"…it seems to me that in conversational
practice, unrecognized nouns are hardly ever
classified by the addressee as meaningless.
When a doctor tells you there's something
wrong with your infundibulum, or an auto
mechanic tells you that your tertiary manifold
is on the fritz, you'll assume they have
some idea what they're talking about until
you see evidence to the contrary… what happens
in such cases is that the puzzled addressee
will assign a vague and generic reference
to the mystery noun until he learns more
--- thus given the sketchy contextual information
at hand, an infundibulum is conjectured to
be some body part, etc." [1.]
(Tapper. 2010)
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I accept this apposite criticism as a completely
justified one and with a well deserved reference
and thanks to Larry Tapper I promise that
in any future publications of my theory due
recognition of this aspect of the Predicate Response Mechanisms will be made. I have now incorporated it
into my schemata as being true of our internal
responses to novel nouns/nominata in the
following modified sense.
Utterances of unfamiliar names which draw
both a nominative and predicative search-blank
on the part of the addressee and generate
no meaningful category entries made by persons
for whom we have respect and/or we suspect
of possessing interesting, valuable or essential
valid information regarding denotata and
predicative adjuncts currently unknown to
us is treated by a separate auto-predicative
response category. With regard to Larry’s
examples of "infundibulum" and "tertiary
manifold" such new forms will often (but not
always) generate verbal responses from the
addressee requesting predicate examples from
the addressor in the form of statements which
themselves include antecedal references to
a discoursal subject with the interrogatives:
"What? or "What exactly. etc." acting as predicative bookmarks or
providing spaces awaiting sentential occupation:
"What exactly... (insert missing
predicate form here)... is my infundibulum
doctor?
Here the predicative data describing or providing
information about the sentential subject
is being requested from the doctor’s own
neurological compendium of ready-made predication
that usually goes with the noun infundibulum.
Larry Tapper is correct to mention (in another
form of words) that when we encounter a new
noun we can often arrive at some form of
covert predication from the state of affairs
and what certain discoursal content implies.
All this is not to say that we NEVER reject
unfamiliar nouns as being meaningless, for
in certain discoursal contexts it becomes
obvious that either the addressee is joking
and patently has no wish for the name and
the predication that accompanies it (if such
is the case) to be taken as being serious
or meaningful at all – or in the case of
a word we judge to be so bizarre both in
its spelling, syntactic position and morphology
that we reject it immediately as being of
no semantic consequence other than it amused
the addressor to say or write it and we waste
no further time in attempting to award it
a core-predicate.
The empirical evidence for this system of
noun-predicate stimulus is not only apodictic
from our own experience, but can be studied
and its effects to some extent predicted
in lexical decision (word-response) experiments of the type conducted in educational
research and psychiatric therapy treatments.
Where this all leaves the primitive concepts
of the the so-called: "is
of existence" the incomplete,
orphanic or hanging copula of the biblical:
"God is." type, or the ancient
Greek forms of the verb "einai" and the "estin of identity" in Parmenidean poetry, or the Cartesian "I am" of the Cogito – and Popeye’s "I yam whad I yam" or for linguistics in general and
philosophy in particular will I hope be made
clearer in what follows.
(Compare Plato's (428/427 BC - 348/347 BC),
comment that true speech tells *the things
(ta onta) that are [or *as they are*] (hos
estin) about you refers to ONTIC physical
features of a person (a wooden leg or a flat
face [the meaning of Plato].)
For Kant to say that a thing exists as in:
*Obama exists* - or (for the modern throw-back to the days
of the medieval inquisition) - *Obama is.* is not to attribute existence (or *isness*) to that object, but to say that the concept
of that thing is exemplified (we would say
*instantiated*) in the world.
My researches and analysis of the copuletic
*is* and the intransitive verb *exist* shows that the orphanic copular or predicateless *exists* is NEVER EVER involved in mapping to entitic (property-vacuous) pure or propertyless entities,
in spite of the utterer’s belief that such
is the case. In my view it is humanly impossible
(psychologically and ontologically infeasible)
to neurologically map to an existential propertyless
nullity – whether it be a spirituous nihility
or otherwise. Some form predicative description
is ALWAYS encapsulated in the subject name
either as a proper name or in the form of
a prenominal adjective and name: *Black swans exist* or is forms the content of a private, covert,
mentalised predicative implicature. In other
words humans would/could never attribute
meaningful names to entities either factual
of fictional that are property-bereft, otherwise
they would have no meaning, direction or
identicative purpose.
As Kahn points out in his: *Some Philosophical Uses of be in Plato*
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In cases where no predicate is expressed
there has been a tendency of late to describe
the use of the verb as *incomplete* and to
construe it as *an elliptical copula (*orphanic, hanging, incomplete, etc. Jud
Evans) i.e. to interpret an expression of the
form: *X is,* as elliptical for *X is Y,* where the value
of Y is either specified, or left quite general. [2]
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When Kahn says *either specified or left general,* he means of course antecedently specified
dialogically or characterized by extreme
economy of expression or omission of superfluous
obvious writer/reader elements.
The mention of ANY NOUN automatically initialises
a neurological search for an archived mental
hit. Such a referential retrieval routine
throws up associated semantic associations.
Whichever colligate data is accessed first
is a property-based allusion attributed to
the subject noun involved. The neuro-linguistic
reflexive cross-referential search-response
to any visual or auditive nominal stimulant
can be individuated as privately covert,
opinionatively predicative internalised implicature.
If an unrecognised noun which refers to a
designatum or nominatum which is unknown
to the recipient of such a signal is mentioned
- no such correlative connection is made
and the utterance is considered meaningless.
[1] Tapper. Larry. The Analytic List, yahoo. 06.07.2010.
[2] Kahn. Charles H. Some Philosophical
Uses of "To Be" in Plato
Phronesis, Vol. 26, No. 2 (1981), pp. 105-134
Published by: BRILL
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