Stephen P. King (stephenk1@home.com)
Tue, 02 Nov 1999 00:23:02 -0500
attached mail follows:
Thanks for your remarks on my stuff. Also, I appreciated your effort for
calling my attention to Peter Wegner and Hitoshi Kitada.
It seems to me that your folks give serious second thoughts to the
diehard epistemological takeover of ontology. Let me add a footnote here.
The act of experiencing is about irreducible fundamentals making our
empirical world going around, and the act of transforming what has been
experienced is about an outcome from the activities intrinsic to these
fundamentals. These statements are exclusively ontological without having
recourse to any epistemological devices. Representing what has been
transformed to others so as to be experienced by the latter is also
ontological in
stating how the two acts of experiencing and transforming are related. What
we can represent in this scheme of the triad is therefore quite limited.
Both experiencing and transforming cannot be addressed in the present tense
because both of them are being involved in the transactions in the present
progressive and present perfect tenses. Representation referred to in the
act of representing can be addressed in the present tense only locally and
temporarily, just in between its successive updating. Consequently,
epistemological (or the externalist) takeover of the triad of
experiencing-transforming-representing is something we have to avoid by all
means.
When empirical scientists try to refer to the triad, on the other hand,
many or most of them seem to take it merely epistemologically. Nonetheless,
our linguistic institution is quite seductive in forcing us to make almost
everything an epistemological object. One recipe for presenting an
ontological basis of curbing and defending our peculiar urge towards
epistemological domination is to internalize the act of relating one thing
to another like that of measurement also in the ontological domain. That is
internalism. If one takes the externalist stance letting whatever object be
simply out there, it may become vulnerable to epistemological takeover of
ontology even unwittingly. Our sturdy attempt for describing what the
empirical world looks like from within, if practiced properly, should be
upon internalism. This has been just a musing on my part.
All the best,
Koichiro
Koichiro Matsuno
Department of BioEngineering
Nagaoka University of technology
Nagaoka 940-2188, Japan
http://bio.nagaokaut.ac.jp/~matsuno
Voice & Fax: +81 258 47 9420
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