[topicmapmail] Identities and names (WAS - A somewhat new topic maps format)

[Murray Altheim]

Daniel and Bernard,

Just to let you know, I've not been ignoring your very well written
messages in this thread, I've just been extremely busy and also trying
to think through my response in some detail. Daniel, your mention of
Wittgenstein ping'ed very strongly with my reading of Robert Brandom;
I was poring over his book "Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to
Inferentialism" again during lunch today. I'm still waiting on Amazon
to deliver his larger book, as well as a book by Donald Davidson,
"Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Philosophical Essays)",
which I hope will provide some more of the background I seek.

There are so many echoes back and forth across these canyons, say,
between Brandom and Peirce, Sellars and Wittgenstein, etc. that I
find myself saying "yes!" from a mostly intuitive standpoint -- the
parts all make so much sense to me but I'm having difficulty pulling
a holism from them. But Brandom's ideas about rationalistic
expressivism providing a normative vocabulary for logic are extremely
interesting, and is increasing becoming part of the philosophical
basis of my own work. *Implementation* is of course more difficult
than talking about it...

Perhaps it might be my training as a Taoist, but I was at first confused
when confronted by the idea of intensionality, as it just didn't make
sense. There's a recursive associativism involved in the formation of
signs (which I've alluded to recently with the idea of contextualizing
names and identifiers), and intensionality relies on something I simply
don't believe in: truth. So, I welcome the move away from platonism and
other notions of axiomatic truth to notions like pragmatism,
inferentialism, expression rather than representation, etc. as discussed
by Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Dewey, and further amplified by Sellars,
Davidson, Rorty, Brandom and others. It kind of reminds me of how
enthusiastic I was about Hume until I actually read him.

I still feel very much the neophyte in this realm of philosophy and
epistemology, but I have always devoured this stuff, so my real challenge
is to figure out how to fit it into my Ph.D. studies without being
accused by my advisors of getting off track (!). But I think we're onto
really something here, and I hope we continue to pursue it productively.

Thanks,

Murray

...........................................................................
Murray Altheim                         http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK                    .

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