I have recently been reading Eco's 'Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language'. It is a book very well worth reading and should be a choice for the book of the month here. The ontology of language (that should be plural) that Quine wrote about is supported well by Eco's description of language semiotics.
Language is of course represented by signs. Signs have meaning. Meaning tends to derive from referral to objects, yet not necessarily. In fact the more abstract removal from direct experience life becomes the more it is regarded as reflecting intelligence. Today news brought the story of alleged Neanderthal Art and opposition to the idea that Neanderthals had that level of abstract reasoning. The conceit of humans is that art is an exclusive human activity-one doesn't expect that from chimps for example though listening to the news media I might take exception to that.
Metaphor is an abstract art as is metaphysics. Eco helpfully recounts the history from Aristotle through the Middle Ages to at least the 1980s of language theory. One finds the classification of ideas, words, objects and so forth by Aristotle and later Porphyry into genus, species and etc as a hierarchialization of descriptions, meanings and relationships that was important to philosophers over the ages. Yet we find that the hierarchialization of signs and meanings breaks down. Eco describes the failure of dictionary definitions to have a valid hierarchical structure of words and meanings as a result of the need to explain each word used in a term with other words that again need to be explained by other words. Eventually an encyclopediazation of descriptions supplants the validity of dictionaries.
W.V.O. Quine wrote a book named 'Ontological Relativity', and at least so far as I have read in Eco's book, that is the consequence of language and signs that are fundamentally no more than descriptions and descriptive fields. The vast non-linear web of word-meanings allows formation of local lexicons or ontology that are valid only so far as they go-as they are used. That is a reason why logical formulations can be contradictory and yet valid potentially-the meanings of the terms in propositional usage may differ making formulations such as if P then Q true sometimes and false in other given the same values for P and Q.
If language and semiotics is a network of differentia, describing God with differentia is an implicitly difficult effort unless it is a real individual such as Jesus Christ; that is simply the nature of language. One wants to place God on a Prophyrian tree chart as a substance or quality, mortal or not mortal yet the nature of language is such that even with Kripke's rigid designators temporality would tend to erase the meaning with the drift of time from the Baptismal bestowing of meaning to on word.
It is notable that Adam appeared after the creation of the world to name every animal rather than before. Mankind needed to develop abstract reason a little before naming the things it encountered with more than grrs and yikes.
It isn't likely that any human logic has the linear rigid designators needed to describe God in order to refute the concept of the existence of God logically. One can appeal to ignorance and say that that which cannot be expressed cannot exist-it works well implicitly for the worm and even the chimp yet of course that thought never occurs to either perhaps.
The neo-Platonists gave quite a bit of thought to the ideas about hierarchical classification of material things and immaterial ideas arising from the One. The One is the inexpressible, immaterial creator or emanator of all things-what Christians such as myself like to call 'God'. The nature of words in the modern context makes refers to metaphysical or trans-physical ideas problematic yet also more possible because of the appearance of cosmological theories that support such logical speculations. The One is logically possible for individuals to consider even if inaccurately.
I have given some thought in recent time to the question of how monism can transform into pluralism logically, regarding cosmology. The question of The One (God) issuing a Universe of plural forms is ponderous regarding logical method for differentiation.
One knows that Leibniz inferred that the quantum world is constructed from one-dimensional section called monads-with some being two dimensional, and that these sections of Spirit comprise the 'matter' of which everything else arises, yet we might one where the monads came from-at least I did.
If one imagines a circle as 'The One' existing in the beginning, as an example of monism, it is easy to regard the 'nothingness' inside and outside the circle as important. The circle might have been a dot to start with-yet of course its only a visualizable paradigm for comprehending a little of the character of monism creating pluralism.
With the existence of the circle of any relative size it is possible to imagine the omniscient One emanating a sinusoidal wave around the circle of a select size, and from that a succession of smaller waves perhaps graduating toward the center of the circle with the important nothingness or spacing allowing the formation of structure.
Of course these structures might be compared with quantum structures of strings, membranes, quarks or larger particle-waves. Yet it is the geometry of the generation of the continuous yet distinct structures within the circle that is of most interest, for one can visualize that the monism continues concurrently with the creation of pluralism.
One can imagine that the order of appearance of the structures might be construed as time, with the spacing or intervals in order of appearance and distance, relative scale and form of the structures comprising space and the scale of space.
The structures instead of being in just two dimensions can occur in three, four or N dimensions as then purpose of The One finds it useful. In a four dimensional hyper spherical Universe with structures arising within and without it is easy to imagine that even more complex dimensional regions could travel in different directions of space and time toward the one circle of origin or 'outward' toward the center of the circle while the original line might itself not be absolutely stationary and may even transition into being part of the structure-for-itself.
The philosophical problem of how one substance or one Spirit might generate pluralism along with nothingness and the variety of different forms may be approached from another slightly different way. The initial Spirit might be able to thin out or decrease its substance somewhat and create a comparative being and nothingness even though nothingness does not actually exist. Then the variety of structures of pluralism created with quantum relationships of scale of energy or mass could proceed.
There is obviously no definite limit to the number of structural 'universes' that the pluralism could issue as the scalar field characteristics are contingent upon the will of The Spirit.
Eco’s ‘Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language’ gave an illustration of the classification of words and meanings with a hierarchical branch structure with hyponyms and greater hyponyms arising unto the top wherein one might find general, universal concepts. That obviously suggested to me the idea that the universal One might in a comparable way issue a variety of forms through structures of pluralism.
Within the pluralistic structure not only might forms arise with definite complex structures generated by the one that yet remain within monism, it might be possible for the One to design the emergence of forms or intelligence from the context of the structures-perhaps intelligence of sentient beings arising from matter might be an example. Photons too are I believe emergent quanta of an electro-magnetic field.
