After the End of the Analytic-Synthetic Distinction; Part Two

I believe that Quine in renormalizing the Kantian dichotomy from the analytic-synthetic distinction left a default criterion for philosophical epistemology rather adrift without a rudder. Plainly it was fairly difficult to maintain that naive realism presents the comprehensively true facts regarding theory of knowledge.

The implication of ending the separation between intellectual constructions and statements about 'real' objects and the 'real world' so useful to scientists of a certain persuasion brought more credence to the Dewian kind of linguistic relativism preferable in the Midwest and possibly amongst certain Bostonian academics. Pervasive skepticism about meaning in language regarding its ability to make statements about what true knowledge is also slipped a fog of Brahmanist-like temporal relativism over the ultimate value of science. I care about that because I enjoy cosmology.

So given that knowledge expressed in language may be a subjective ontological selection of terms and concepts such as W.V.O. Quine described in 'Ontological Relativity', ideas are not limited simply to selecting from ideas and concepts already made--they are synthesized for use in new emergent temporal circumstances as required to provide meaning. Meaning is found in the use of words to accomplish functions as desired in communication.

There is an unknown element to human knowledge, and that was what I mentioned above-rather than being convoluted it is expressly simple and plain. My opinion is that the unknown comes in two flavors; the first can be known and the second cannot.

Kant used the word 'noumenon' to describe the unknowable realm of things-in-themselves that cannot be known. What can be known is the phenomenal. Both analytic and synthetic statements are valid as far as the phenomenal goes, yet not for the noumenal. Perhaps some analytic statements cannot be used in the phenomenal either, because they are false, yet Quine believed that all analytic statements of mind occur in the wholistic Universe. My opinion is that the wholistic universe presents, for human beings, a noumenal-phenomenal distinction.--that is , I agree with Kant. The unknown within phenomenal parameters has the potential to become known, the unknown within noumenal parameters does not.

Since I am on this topic of linguistic relativism, I should like to mention an opinion that Shannon entropy conserves information not only of mass, but of 'the spirit'. The spirit in this present context means the sentient mind,its experience and personality. Because Darwinian insights about material causality referring to biological life processes may seem to differ from 1930's era common opinions, naive interpretations of, and additions to the Bible; it became popular and even dogmatic to assert that spirit does not exist, and could not outlast physical death.

A license authorized by meaninglessness regarding moral accountability logically followed a theory of non-spiritual existence.It became dogmatism amidst select unenlightened minstrels to a certain extent without conveyance of intellectual merit upon the point of view. It is a somewhat anachronistic ontology before modern science brought many more insights into the nature of language from both the analytic and synthetic sides, along with mathematics, genetic research and so forth. Spirit viewed as a sentient gift of a human mind, albeit with a substantial foundation in the wholistic universe, along with all information--is not necessarily destined to disappear through a process of annihilation by death of the body.

Matter is never created or destroyed (generally). The information of where or what everything is inclusive of the spiritual will be equally conserved. Life is not just a meaningless relativism--there are consequences for all things sentient beings choose to do.

Returning then to the nature of language; ontologolgies may be larger meaning-lexicons in through which one may describe world-view elements and relations. Describing a theory of knowledge within a given lexicon may in some way be analogous to the human experience of reality; downloading or collapsing a world-view reduces the potential from an all-possible worldlines of the uncertainty realm of quantum superpositions toward a more specific realm. There is an opportunity cost to collapsing any realm of potential world-views to that of the selection of a particular world-view.

William James wrote about 'forced options' in his pragmatist work. In several respects the selection of a world view is a forced option with the default world-views being less effective generally. That which human beings create or construct in knowledge is not all the knowledge that is, it is not all that could have been, and is limited to a phenomenal nature though it has pragmatic applications. Knowledge is a beans and bacon item. We are luck to such as we have yet might have had halibut cheeks if we were good at fishing and filleting.