Use and Reference Theories of Meaning

Well, I have a couple of minutes to write something about the topic.

Wittgenstein of course was an early linguistic philosopher, son of the richest man in Europe, who served admirably in the First World War as a soldier in Europe. He actually worked on the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus while stationed in Italy. That was a little like Descartes in some respects who was stationed in Bavaria as a mercenary and wrote his Discourse on a Method after thinking contemplatively in a sauna. Descartes was never in love with a British fighter pilot though, and Wittgenstein was.

I was rather shocked to learn of that eccentricity of the philosopher whom was also a competent engineer. I believe his wealthy background and wierd life brought him to examine language for-itself as some sort of solid ground, though of course shfting and difficult to define linguistically speaking. His fighter jock was killed in the war.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sellars/

Wittgenstein’s work after he moved to Cambridge as a PhD with Russell's help included writing the Blue and Brown books-those express his ideas about language rather well. He has a rabbit reffered to by natives as a 'gavagai'. By association a language translator learns what the meanings of gavagai might be and then forms a lexicon. Wittgenstein also uses the example of meanings such as 'bring a brick' in brick laying parlance. I reallize this is not a very technical discussion. Good reading.

Word meaning origins as explained within a philosophical context however may be found described a little more completely with W.V.O. Quine's 'Philosophy of Logic'-read the first few chapters, then try his 'Ontological Relativity'.

Quine placed all word structures within ontologies that may be regarded as sets. Sets of course have the elements of the set as potential referents and meanings. Wittgenstein associated word use with situation that conveyed a particular meaning to a given word use. Quine can acknowledge that implicitly however as a logician he has taken a look at the construction of language from phonemes and morphemes and built up from that an explanation of elements of interest to a logician rather than a grammarian the points of interest in discussing truth.

Intentional theories of meaning versus the extensional in some ways have a psychological component that was elaborated by empiricism working along Immanuel Kant's epistemological distinction of categories and meaning. Philosophically the location of meaning-in the mind or in the world, and the location of qualities such as objects seen, is a perennial topic perhaps resolved by quantum mechanics a little. Ideas that are of the mind such as 'I don't like strawberry pudding' differ from ideas with external referents such as scientists like. Extensional ideas refer to the material world while intentional ideas have a psychological and subjective component.

W.V.O. Quine of course abolished the analytic-synthetic distinction in his ’Two Dogmas of Empiricism'. Empiricism was given a real punch on the jaw from which it hasn't recovered. Quine helpfully provided his 'Ontological Relativity' to explain how language has a use and simultaneous reference basis. I enjoy reading Quine now and then and recommend his work.

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Senate Should Vote to Defend Rights of Americans from Arrest and Exfiltration by U.S. Military

The U.S. Senate voted 99 to 1 not to clarify or defend the right of U.S. citizens to have due process of law when accused by the government of criminal or terrorist activity. Instead, because the laws are made by the rich and the rich were attacked by Al Qa'eda on 9-11, the Bush II provision allowing possible arrest of U.S. citizen sympathizers, associates or facilitators of Al Qa'eda and/or possible other activities deemed terrorist by the authorities greased the skids of the commoner Americans for rightless ransacking by black-bagging military exfiltration squads, anonymous foreign detention, stateless torture and military tribunals in-camera (secret). Seems like a rotten development.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/us/senate-declines-to-resolve-issue-of-american-qaeda-suspects-arrested-in-us.html

I understand well that overpaid politicians with bad bills ought to be given extraordinary rendition and water boarded at Guantanamo Bay until they come to their senses. Newt Gingrich perhaps might give back the Freddie Mac 1.6 million dollar payment for working up a history profile or whatever for the CEO as 14 billion dollars was pilfered and lost as bad investments (how do you get it done Newt?), yet ordinary citizens should be free from such perfidy even if they plan to revolt against the government and need to develop a plan of attack.

It should not be illegal to plan to revolt against the government especially if it is fiction used for gaming purposes. War gaming in the present should be as acceptable socially as re-enacting civil war battles. How otherwise could new Commandants of West Point make the difficult decision to field a coup and restore a good government?

The idea that the 58,000 millionaires of Boston and the U.S. military are in some way good enough citizens to have the right to arrest and exfiltrate U.S. citizens from Harvard U. for waterboarding interrogations because they have knowledge of networks of Palestinian and Somali terrorist life ways is silly. President Bush II's incompetent post-war reconstruction plans for Iraq did more harm to the U.S. economy than a dozen flights crashing into the Pentagon and other sinks of U.S. taxpayer funding ever could. Maybe a President should be exfiltrated to Gitmo for waterboarding to reveal if he intentionally planned to run up such a military debt that social spending could be cut-such wickedness lurks in the halls of the rich and of defense contractors!

The right to plan revolts even if they aren't used is as fundamental for American liberty as the right to own guns. Without plans it would be impossible to have a civil war to remove an aristocracy today-and the founders believed that Americans implicitly have the right to revolt against corrupt, unjust, capital concentrating, deficit spending, oppressive rotten government as they did themselves.

In times past actual revolutions against the rich and the feudal over-vampires have required actual violence to get on. Though the United States has entered the age of moral and economic perfection with perfected interpretation of the scripture of Adam Smith with impeccable exegesis by economist-monks of the Chicago School, and hence peace and domestic tranquility shall forever ensue, one day some substantial element of the population may want to roll the heads of the rich again. Americans must protect that right-of-revolt for future generations since it a foundational element of liberty, equality and social justice as well as of full employment and good pay for all citizens.

Economics take note of the comparative thriftiness of revolutions. In the Al Qa'eda incident the assymetric economic warfare was entirely in favor of the cost-conscious Al Qa'eda, while in the Libyan revolution the expenses of the revolutionaries was far less than the historical defense spending budget of the Khaddafi administration.

Al Qa'eda may be a foreign terrorist organization-in translation it simply means 'the base'. So if a domestic terrorist militia does not affiliate with a foreign terrorist militia or lashkar then they are free from arrest by covert operators with HK's, night vision optics, niitrogen grenades for flash-freezing and so on?

Reason does allow U.S. military forces to help bag really tough clumps of terrorists in the U.S.A. if need be, as they could be called in to fight a Godzilla after the monster slaughtered L.A. Sheriff Department warriors. In regard to military arrests of American citizens thought to comprise a threat to the class interests of the rich through whatever means really threaten the rich (raising their taxes to 90%?), that should just never happen. If they are American citizens it just has to be good enough to give them a regular trial and then let them go to plan their next nativist uprising against the occupation forces of evil repressing the masses.

The Senate should pass a defense of civil rights act that clarifies the point that none of the rights in the constitution can be abridged and transmogrified into neat little pieces of paper airplanes like meaningless zen koans that float through space without leaving taxable footprints. American citizens should never be removed from the United States involuntarily for any reason unless to help former congressmen plan how to create more funding for defense contractors while cutting taxes for defense contractors.

The magic world of military torturers that Senator Graham seems to believe is supervised by a more dependable kind of citizen or foreign guest soldier/proxy (though none dare call it torture) is an inappropriate location for American citizens to have their legal questions examined. It is easy to understand that empowered government apes of righteousness beleive they can do no wrong and should not be summarily executed for abrogating the rights of U.S. citizens, and I would probably feel the same way too if I used steroids or was all juiced up to have no respect for the U.S. legal system. Recursion of righteousness inquisitors and degrees of torture appropriate for those thought to be threatening to the rich are tough questions for the government to secretly answer and to leave vague.

I might suggest that if the incompetent border security against illegal immigrants was corrected, and if more stringent standards were used for awarding citizenship to a constellation of five passport holding Americans such that they could have just one if naturalized, it would reduce the number of technical citizens lusting to drop a nuclear bomb on Washington D.C. more than regular politicians of a few foreign countries.

The U.S. legal system should leave no ambiguity about the rights of U.S. citizens to have due process of law in a public court by a jury of their peers. The needless and corrupting drift into the dark side of the force is an infarction to justice and a corruption of the spirit of freedom that was the purpose of the American experiment in democracy. It is quite reasonable and desirable that military powers to arrest and exfiltrate U.S. citizens beyond the jurisdiction of the state and federal laws within the territorial boundaries of the United States be defended against rather than supported. Supporters of such insidious evils are more of a 'them' caliber that raised the rebel flag at Ft. Sumpter than defenders of the American way.

Much Anticpated Higgs Particle Announcement Mañana

The CERN announcement tomorrow that people speculate will announce better evidence of the existence of a Higgs Boson particle of between 90 and 40 GeV yet possibly as much as 140 GeV will not herald the discovery of a 'god' particle embedded in solid state physics as a concatenated probability association of quantum uncertatinty. It would indicate that particle accelerators and theoretical physicists have taken one more step to fill in the sketch of the ways and forms that quantum energy takes in the Universe.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-does-the-higgs-boson

The Higgs field and its particle the Higgs boson are described by some as a new kind of mass, yet it has existed since the inception of the Universe within a given cosmological paradigm. Those cosmological theories change from time to time providing deeper knowledge yet not necessarily evolving in some linear, hierarchical order of consistency.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_particle

A Higgs field is in some ways comparable to an electromagnetic field. The standard model of physics differs from string theory, which offers a deeper explanation for the values of quantum particles. The Higgs boson should have certain values in order to fit logically into the paradigm of values of other quantum particles. The Higgs field is believed to be more fundamental than the other particles, masses and fields and in fact to give them their mass. In other words the particles of the standard model are regarded as localized expressions of the Higgs Field. The Higgs boson too get's its mass from the field.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson#Theoretical_overview

I have no idea how physicists extrapolate the existence of uncertainty within a primordial Higgs field. Perhaps uncertainty is local within the universal non-locality of the field.

The Higgs field was early in cosmological inflation theory regarded as a possible source of the energy in Guth's theory. Now the Higgs field isn't now considered a cause of the initial or present expansion of space-time. Knowledge of dark energy-the lamda force- and its relation to a Higgs field (if either exist) are full of uncertainty.

Dante, Milton, Christians, Missiology etc.

Milton or Dante were great poets, and I have read and admired their skill along with Shakespeare in ages past. I write free verse of a philosophic nature in order to jot down ideas. Writing in formal style is something I have put little time in learning.

One might read about Homeric poetic style that kept the dactylic hexameter of earlier ages and be aware of the continuity of method that exists in contemporary rap music construction in that rhythm is an important mnemonic element. Milton was blinded and wrote in his 50s and so one might guess he was influenced by the rhythmic cadences of verse as a calming ocean wave of ideas overtook his thought.

I believe I read somewhere of Milton's experience after leaving Oxford of a friend poet who was drowned offshore of the S.W. coast of England, and that the experience affected Milton's style. Unlike Pilgrim's Progress composed in prison by Bunyan, Milton was a 17th century academically brilliant individual writing in an area where the method of construction was all-important. He wrote during the glory days of English ascendancy over the world of letters and world of sailing.

Today however Christians have a vast realm of ideas to experience as well as compete with. One finds the Evangelist Billy Graham's enduring personal appeal marvelous for the simplicity of his message-it rarely changed its form and was to the point. I have enjoyed listening to Vernon McGee's 'Through the Bible' recordings of Biblical exegesis-they are quite good.

The broadcast media in much of the world essentially puts out trash-have you experienced the U.S. broadcast media? It is a dumbing down experience generally and underutilized for scientific, humanities as well as historical and even Christian education. The media is a tool for the control of the masses and as Sartre said 'the fundamental relation of the listener to the broadcaster is impotence'.

It is possible to have web book computers and telecommunications apps that are readers of content such as the classics of Milton and of Dante, yet people must earn a living too. Christians need to reform their ecclesiastical and liturgical form as it is-the most unlikely thing is that they would embark far into the historical readings of reformation era poets, or even of late renaissance poets like Dante.

I have found as I have surveyed world literature, history and philosophy that I enjoy reading in new areas unknown to my prior experience reading. That is why I ranged abroad from standard U.S. and Western European history and philosophy readings into those of Russia and of the far east, and of course why I read with interest of the first world civilization at Sumer and of Abraham's role in leaving it's decadent phase as it became taken over by foreign control.

World civilization and its history set with the pre-historical researches of anthropology and archeology from the inception of mankind perhaps 200,000 y.b.p. comprise a continuum in which philosophical thought and Christian religious experience cohere. God has a secular history of interaction in human cultures as well as transcendent aspects that are translated in various forms unto the faithful. One becomes interested in the history of the University of Paris as well as of Arabic, Omar Kyham and the history of algebra. There are innumerable theories against God and Christianity today developed by incomplete learning and inadequate reading in history, the sciences and philosophy. Protestants too are interested in Augustine, Aquinas and Pope Gregory the First as well as Constantine the First and the last.

Christianity has obviously for most of its history been a light to the illiterate, however literacy in the modern post-Darwinian era does require that the faithful become aware of the complete database of knowledge that provide extracts for opposition to belief in God. Inadequate readings in Biblical history and scripture form a large part in stimulating wrong-headedness of secularist opposition to belief in God.

The reason for that has a foundation in the historical relationship of the Church to the state. Too often land owning clerics were regarded as oppressors, and of course Marx too made is statement about religion, opiates and the masses. In France clerics had tended to support conservatives. The problems of church and state associations oppressing the masses, or at least being in opposition to random 'liberal' movements is a reason why so many contemporary liberals including the U.S. Government seem to be in opposition to conservativism internationally except as it helps concentrate wealth.

Dante is certainly one of the world's great poets, however the inferno is more Jonathan Edwards-ish than many will accept as reasonable. I believe there may be a translation issue between various problems on the concept of hell today that is beyond Europe and America. The Shinto with volcanism and Kami, the Buddhist with the nihilation of nirvana, the Brahman recreation of a Universe every 50 billion years etc make the Inferno paradigm a little local and in a vernacular not appreciated by English as a second language speakers I would guess.

On the Question; Does the Universe have an Appearance For-Itself?

Reality has many definitions by many different conscious beings. Conscious beings describing experience tend to refer to their experience as being real. Reality as opposed to non-real aspects of reality is part of the larger meta-set of the given universe of that which does exist.

One gets to Sartre's 'Being and Nothingess' as a method of describing being and contingent non-being associated with the absence of previously existing things, or of hypothetical real things that are not presently observed (such as a Higgs boson). An observer has a capacity to observe his or her own experience as a part of reality perhaps rather than potentially all of it as if it were a universe the size of a marble made of lime green jello that if one were outside the Universe could be seen to roll downhill.

If reality is complete in any portion of it, as if it were a Mandlebrot fractal representative sample, an unlike the U.S. Congress made of contented millionaires, if it has a given appearance in a particular area, viewing itself without benefit of human observers or intelligent insects, ameoba with contempletive natures or such, would it's pantheistic self-awareness be aware of it's own location in reference to any potential contingent alternate location or appearance that could exist only as a product of its own imagination? Or would a self-aware universe without any human observers tor e't's o describe it that is still have an objective appearance subject unto itsself.

I suppose the concept of a self-aware universe that is a little neurotic wondering if it seems fat unto itself when it is really comparatively thin isn't really a question here. We will assume that unlike Einstein's relativistic yardstick that changes it length in a given iinertial reference frame that the Universe is like the Federal Debt that always looks the same although its really increases and the same for the nation's unemployment rate.

The Universe as it really is in a non-temporal state when it has finished 'growing up' may be transcendental and wonderful and be a bloc of oragne or green ecotplasm with marshmellow. Funny as that may be it is representative of the problem with describing a solid state object. Maybe it is simply a probability of The One that appears in many forms as it Wills now and then, from time to time.

Probably, outside of some theotransitional preferred point of view given by God, the potential for observing the entire universe as it appears objectively to a non-conscious being is limited. One might take something like the Keplar Space telescope or the Hubble or some other and give it instructions to survey the entire universe in given wavelengths to discover what the objective universe looks like, and in fact a WMAP portrait of the distribution of mass-energy about 300,000 years after the inflation of the universe from either the hypothetical size of a grapefruit or a collision as a membrane has been made. That portrait is not what the Universe looks like now though. Any space-time slice of the Universe made in a temporal order will differ a second later as it expands, contracts or changes its thermodynamic powers and configurations.

Perspective in consciousness is given with experience and conscious knowledge and learning allowing the cognoscenti to see deeper into the nature of things. Yet the solid state of matter-energy in this universe quadrant of human experience is the tip of a probability association wave from the quantum mechanical wave realm of all possible world lines. It is very difficult to even understand how any one-quantum wave has no particular existence apart from the virtually infinite number of places it might have been otherwise. Such locations have an infinite range. One particle that could have been sampled at point A might equally exist several light years away from its other locations at point A', A'' etc...

The nature of reality, the learning of cosmology and of perception and so forth are fascinating subjects. Like Bishop Berkley and the pure idealists we may wonder about where sense qualities cohere, or if all experience is holographic and how pain and hypothermia emerge in personal experience as impressively real and simultaneously subjective and objective.

Philosophers may use logic as well as physics to form their own ideas about reality, about the future, and how spirit or consciousness might be mapped by God for remixing in some future Universal or heavenly epic of kindness for human existence. Reality may be experienced by human beings yet probably not encompassed comprehensively within reason. Cosmologists can dry hypothetical space-time areas of mass-energy transitions and many are better than others, however the all inclusive set of definitions of reality that some scientists may seek after seem improbable to determine if for Godel's incompleteness theorem paradigm or numerous others.

Space-time mass and energy that appears against a backdrop of nothingness, and a nothingness without real distance from any other point of non-being. These are excellent things to consider, and wonder about as the many mansions said by Jesus Christ to exist in space if not in competent federal or Wall Street building plans for the homeless of the U.S.A. offers some hope for those that do not complete the course of discovering what the Universe looks like objectively, for-itself, perhaps as God views it and all of the creatures living in it simultaneously from their own points of view as well as his own.

School Marm Style of Newt Gingrich Sends Him to Top in Iowa Republican Polls

Republican Presidential primary candidate Newt Gingrich is leading the pack of Republicans lusting after the office of President. With an historian's point of view on world and domestic affairs Newt has no competence on current economic affairs of course, yet talking about the Battles of Bull Run and the Marne, genuflecting upon American greatness of the past and how it can be recovered with cheap imported webbook computers from Taiwan can bring many Iowan voters to believe that cutting capital gains taxes on the rich is actually good for them.

Contemporary history, economic history and so forth are sub-specialties within the overly specialized academic divisions of history. The Wall Street problems of greed and deregulation, the transformation of much of the U.S. labor market to a Latino center driving down wages and creating a reverse economic apartheid in the U.S.A. for strait white male workers, the corporatism ingression into ossifying the national infrastructure in partnership with government-these are items the Georgian historian is only dimly cognizant of if at all. Well, at least he knows who wrote 'Gone With the Wind'.

Farmers with a million in debt and some kind of physical assets making them small business class people are easy pickins for the slick 'I know better than you yet feel your pain' style of the former speaker of the House who was dumped by his constituents after allegations of modest achievements of political corruption.

One must wonder if Mr. Gingrich has any idea of the redistribution of American wealth abroad through a variety of financial instruments brought about by deregulation and federal leadership that resulted during his tenure as speaker, and if he believes that horizontal rainfall will send wealth from abroad to America to trickle down in financially parched regions of the U.S.A.?

The comfortable insiders of the Republican and Democratic establishments fully employed and prospering during these unshared hard times for 20-30% of Americans live in a different nation than many of the rest of the citizens of the United States in effect, and they have the entertainment industry and media on their side as only sycophants are admitted. The rich are very comfortable and can dump buckets of manure on those below complaining of their indifference about high unemployment in the U.S.A, and the military academies are bought and paid for to defend ruling class interests so the confidence of the comfortable insiders is not badly formed.

Newt Gingrich, Sexed Political Changes and Religious Wars

People may get the chance to answer the question 'who do you hate more- Newt Gingrich or Barrack Obama?' Alternatively Hollywood may make a thriller on President Obama as Abe Lincoln making a speech in advocacy of gays at Gettysberg.

Probably there were some homosexuals amidst other cabin vacating soldiers from the north that believed they were fighting to prevent oligarchy from rolling back democracy where it existed just barely.

If the Log Cabin Republicans are representative of Republican globalist designs the new U.S. military may be set to free gays all over the world with as much vigor as Grant attacking the Army of Virginia. Now that Obama has freed the gays the Republicans will have to put away their whips and chains-or perhaps not.

Maybe Mitt Romney can reverse the ill political winds of Washington in 2013.

http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/263571/20111208/lesbian-half-sister-dumps-newt-gringrich-says.htm

The President's record as a champion of queer reichs is unchallengable. Thats the problem with many Americans perhaps. Homos and tepid tax cuts, Obamacare and the prospect of 20 trillion dollars of federal public debt if he is re-elected. If Newt were elected and had a sex change to become Queen Maude the First I that would be about as alien.

Newt's lesbian half sister is reported to have said she supports Barrack Obama. Newt is evidently against activism in support of homosexuality. That position places him outside the Obama global gay rights activism clan.

The new normal seems to be a progressive wave of corrupt federal leadership. Plainly Alaska's Don Young has a reprehensible environmental record, he also spends too much federal money in the state and is happy to cut services to the poor to pay for it.

America as the official planetary advocate for the sin of homosexuality may bring as much political insecurity as to advance it. One might wish a President would have more restraint before through his hat into the queer eye for the world strait guys ring willy nilly.

The new normal as a way to advance weirdness and public debt into American politics seems to be the goal of the broadcast media. I suppose the entertainment industry is a kind of networking leadership of depraved people that have little respect for individual economic rights. Maybe the price of cocaine will drop enough that those in front of television cameras have more creative thought.

One might wish to keep the record straight on who these Republican candidates are-even Sarah Palin doesn't seem so bad these days. Only Mitt Romney seems like an adult candidate running for the Republican nomination. The Iowans seem to prefer religious war sides as an essential element of choice for leadership. St. Bartholomews day all over again I maybe.

http://www.historyguide.org/earlymod/lecture6c.html religious wars of Europe