When
Plato described the realm of forms he created a field of philosophy
that would occupy the thought of those concerned with such arcane
interests for millennia. The realm of forms had a perfect form or
model for each and every real, existing item finding itself to have
an appearance in the spatio-temporal empirical world. That of course
included words themselves. The realm of forms thus had some
similarities to Kurt Gödel
’s incompleteness theorems generated 2500 years later. Not only
were words required to explain and account for everything that might
exist including themselves, the realm of forms required an item to
represent every object that could ever exist including all sets and
forms inclusive of the realm of forms. Plotinus limited certain kinds
of objective substances to particular ways of being in a Universe or
field there-through sidestepping the conundrum.
W.V.O.
Quine and Saul Kripke along with numerous linguistic philosophers
considered the meanings and nature of words. Did words have any
actual nature of Platonic realism about them such that their meanings
existed forever (though of course it was always possible to generate
another new version of a word 1.1, 1.2,1.n etc.).
Quine
believed that meanings were entirely nominal and cohered within a
linguistic lexicon that might evolve. Kripke seemed to think that
word meanings had a mildly lasting form though, even if not within a
realm of forms. He believed that some words were rigid designators
and that their meanings could not really change although they might
be lost.
I
would think that his idea would be that a word meaning at a given
time, such as Mona Lisa, might like the painting always be the same
even if viewed or understood correctly 4000 years after construction.
When considering the nature of reality itself however, as might
metaphysicians, can there be said to be rigid designators that are
beset by the same problems as Einsteins General Relativity regarding
time; that it is local everywhere?
Physicists
today have numerous terms for sub-atomic particles, waves and other
theoretical objects. Physiologists also have numerous ways of
explaining how it is that humans interpret and experience sense data
with inherent cognitive faculties. So philosophers reached a point of
understanding that what is seen is an appearance of reflected light
wavelengths interpreted by others in ways the cognitive faculties
allow. A black object is not for instance, actually black; it just
appears so because it won’t reflect light in any other way. What
about invisible to the human eye theoretical objects comprising the
sub-atomic world; can they be said to have characteristics comparable
to those of neo-Platonic rigid designators?
In
a sense the complete sub-atomic world that comprises the physical
cosmology of the apparent Universe is forever unknowable as a
thing-in-itself, or what it is really like for-itself. Human beings
experience it in a particular way, or at least select features of it
and perhaps at best learn about certain aspects of its workings or
functions instead of how they actually are. Physicists might be
regarded as developing rigid designators for apparent cause-effect
relations though they do not regard cause and effect as valid ideas
themselves.
What
if there are no actual rigid designators possible for sub-atomic
entities that theoretically exist such as quarks and strings? Quarks
and strings may be physical locations for force events understood
perhaps as locations along wave segments that exist as emergent
though not independent entities. Perhaps the entire sub-atomic world
is a monistic whole with variable constituent parts. Human beings
encounter and explain the behavior and shape of such elements of the
universal object-for-sentient-others as they may and endeavor to
observe and learn more.
Forming
rigid designators that correspond to subatomic forces such as the
nuclear force or the theoretical gravitational force that has no
immediate explanation or object to associate a cause with seems
challenging. Yet rigid designators for the effects of forces may be
the better practice for contemporary scientists or philosophers.
In
that sense science investigating the subatomic realm and quantum
cosmology maps the observable and inferential behavior of mass and
energy, even unto larger structures such as a Higgs field, that
cohere as greater non-rigid designators for the Universe. There is a relativity of forms.
