In this entry we return to the view of life as naming. Of the ideas considered in this series, naming is only less general than distinction itself. Our recent investigations on the subject await further tools to their task. Subjects such as present wings and the relation of self to truth having been forthcoming with such tools and characterizing devices, we will now employ them in characterizing naming by showing the relation of naming to these other views.
Face value and the meaning of naming
It is a difficulty for the philosopher who seeks to reduce phenomena to prior principles that the process of so doing never ends. However, in seeking to understand reality, even in reducing it, we may rely on the practical effect in our life of our investigations. Observing that the process of reduction does not end, yet in our practical affairs, things do not regress unendingly, we may choose to take this observation of unending reduction as a first principle—putting an end to the reduction by the same fiat we presume to be in effect in our practical affairs.
In Context as Community we observed that science as a method of authoritatively cataloging absolutely true fact falls short of the philosopher's goal, in that the community determining those facts is not the only community in which we participate. However, scientific method carries a deeper allure. Scientific truths commend themselves. We come for ourselves to the same scientific conclusions presented to us in a scientific account. It is exactly in the method's not being authoritative that it is most compelling. We observe that we are compelled to accept and benefit from scientific investigation because its results are reproducible, not only because its results have been reproduced. This same effect on both the author and audience is sought by an author in the indication of first principles. We as readers make progress when we feel compelled by our own concurrence with what we read. We here endeavor to establish what we mean by the concept of reality as naming, striving such for self-compelled communication.
What is it an author and reader share when in successful communication of such self-evident ideas? In Doing Yet Discovering we observed our skepticism about knowledge comes into action when we attempt to hold what we hold—investigate our very apprehension. When we hold X and look to hold Y, “that we hold X”, Y is now our apprehension, and uncertainty is cast on what we held in X. This thing we do without self-inspection we will here call holding at face value.
When we discuss something, we treat as fixed among participants the meaning of various of our terms. A writer may not know that his reader has the same sense in mind for a term as he does, but his writing is no less useful for it. To the extent the agreement is in, the discussion will be fruitful. However, for that writer to assume as fixed and then cast doubt on a term, is to bring the meaning of the term under discussion, not the substance of the originally fixed meaning. This too can be fruitful, but in it is again an assumption of coordination between writer and reader on the terms of that discussion. This coordination, or concurrence of face value, is always present and holds what effect there is to our first principles.
Face value holds two roles in the present conversation. In one role, it acts as the medium of our first principles. In the second role, it characterizes naming itself in that face value is held, as are names to their meanings. We find ourselves in the same place as our opening paragraph to Underneath Not. Our topic and its explication are found to be one and the same. If this is paradoxical, it may not be dishearteningly so, for it is fitting, even necessary, of any explication of all reality.
Another reductive attempt bearing relation to naming is the theory of descriptions as per Russell. In demonstrating the eliminability of descriptions from pure logic we find their disappearance encourages us that descriptions may in fact be a superb description of reality. In our search for prior principles to all reality we would be most pleased if when we have exhausted our sequence of priors nothing remains at all. All priors as among everything should be eliminated if we wish not to provide circular explanations. If, in an intuitive sense—or if only in what we take at face value in logic—the logical constants and rules of deduction of pure logic are recognized as themselves descriptions, there is no part of pure logic that remains after description has been fully eliminated.
So, by naming we mean that which we hold, or perhaps those descriptions we introduce and eliminate. We can add to these two characterizations also that naming is the process of identification and substitution of expressions, as well as the convention of this identity relation by an individual or community. In taking together, naming is seen almost directly to be distinction, and not just identifications but any laying of things against each other, as one finds in compound expressions, is left as first in principle. We can choose not to take it as first in principle, and derive even this juxtaposition to be an act of identification. The placement of things in such compound entities is then determined by the letting of, say, “left side = ‘f’” simultaneously with “right side = ‘x’” in fx. The simultaneity would then be the letting of the two namings themselves to name each other, recognizing in this that basic principle that one thing can be be multiple things—in this case a thing with a left side and a thing with a right side. In what follows we will compare naming to some views of reality presented previously in this series.
Context and choice
Naming is not self-centric. Naming as convention has a clear tie to context as community in that communities convene on standards, such as names. And while external truth may be determined for ourselves by the communities to which we as individual self belong, naming, in and of itself, does not require the individual-centric perspective. Any community can form a convention. We are free to consider names with or without the involvement of we the person doing the considering. In this can be found some freedom from disproportionate conflict, for comprehension of any exigency from this view allows, but doesn't commit, us to examining our own involvement in it.
We observed in Choice, Self and the External World that naming shares with the view of reality in choice and contradiction, internal creation and external observation. Having now at hand an index between pure self and pure externality in context as community, we can tie also the partial order we imagined in Taking Together to this spectrum of truth. Under this correspondence, the varying expressions we have for an externally found object act as the conventions of communities determining the truth of that object. The least explicit expression for an object leaves open the most choice in resolution of its denotation—this corresponding to the self as pure choice. The most explicit expression for an object is the most determinate, leaving no choice in resolution, corresponding to fully externally discoverable fact.
Incompleteness
There are counterintuitive conclusions one can draw from this identification of reality with naming. We can expect, as we found in Doing Yet Discovering, present wings to resolve some of these perplexities. For example, expressions being incomplete depictions of our objects, taking our expressions to be the entirety of our objects leads us to conclude that what is not known about an object from its expression alone is not determined independently of our knowledge of it. We may ask, is the object going to change to meet whatever expression we provide in elaboration of it? The answer is no. On the one, seemingly self-defeating, hand, whatever it might change to can be seen to be whatever it “really” was prior to changing, simply by the presence of all alternates to that thing as discoverable in found reality. On the other, that original fact of the object truly does contain variability. And this is not a philosophical problem, but a demand we have on reality.
This demand is that of possibility. By example, the very determinate piece of paper and very determine inscriptions on it, made very determinately by we ourselves, is held by ourselves not in complete determinate detail. That is, we don't even know exactly what we have written, but carry an incomplete image or expression for that seemingly determinate fact as and after we write. If we knew exactly what was written on the paper, the paper would be no useful tool at all, but merely a superfluous copy of what we already know.
We demand incompleteness of our things in universals. Universals are contrasted exactly with the fully specified, or particular. When we inspect a universal, specifying it to greater and greater degree, it loses its generality. If the universal “green” were as determinate as a list of things green, “green” would be specific, not universal.
In one sense, there should be found very little conflict in that which is unknown about a thing being as integral to that thing's essence as what is known about it, for the known and unknown are opposites—in perfect correspondence to each other. Either, and both, are completely characteristic of the thing. In relation to context and the separation of self from the external world in choice, we might say, the incompleteness of our fixedness at the varying points of context shy of the completely external is the imperfection of our knowledge of the true nature of things, or the incompleteness and imperfection of the names that demarcate those things.
Metaphor
In present wings we take the possible worlds, w1 and w2, to be found within each other. We say, the particulars of w1 are the particulars of w2 under change of perspective. We can ask, what is this change of perspective? If we compare our present wing worlds to logical expressions, we will see in their strange particularity something like the particularity of possible predicates—i.e., satisfiable but not valid, or not necessary but not contradictory propositions. Such predicates carry extensions of interpretations that satisfy them. We will here imagine an idealized logic for which sense and this extension coincide. When discussing the entire world we would expect the full context of that world to be present in our predicates. We take the features of observer perspective implicit in the Earth-bound morning/evening observation of Venus as a star, and the historical particulars of Greece in the names Hesperus and Phosphorus as constants or free variables explicitly visible and admitting interpretation, thereby capturing the sense of the various names for Venus in extension. The distinction implicit in taking two predicates, P and Q, to be the same is the extension of the larger predicate, P ≡ Q. And in the same way that sense is most visible in the identification of distinct names, Hesperus = Phosphorus, the identification of two worlds, w1 = w2, will capture a sense and the sense will capture the distinction of this alteration of perspective.
This idealization entails contradiction, speaking as it does of all things. We addressed this in To The Extent. We there took all things to be all others, to whatever extent they are. The contradiction in the identification of two distinct things there provides the parameterization of extension whereby the identification is resolved. The application to present wings can be seen in the movement from one perspective to another. Taking the figure of two faces to hold in its ground a vase leaves some element of the picture free to interpretation when we take it in its alternate identifications as faces or vase—the free element here well-taken to be figure-ground, or which, black or white, is the figure and which is ground. We have here again face value in that we, upon first view, take one or the other to be figure and experience the surprise of optical illusion when what we took at face value as figure changes.
There is the tie to naming here in the incompleteness implicit in those contradictions, constants and free variables admitting interpretation—or completion. This, taken with the holding of some face value in common to two perspectives provides a close tie to metaphor—another topic in which expressions are identified.
We immediately see alternates to our found facts in those very same facts when substituting likes through their analogies. We directly experience the removal of contradiction in the identification of dissimilars in our full involvement in such analogies. This full involvement can be seen in Freudian slips and the adage, “when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” The analogy becomes our reality when we so completely immerse ourselves in it, we experience surprise when drawn out of if.
In both naming and metaphor we take distinct things to be the same. What is the difference between naming and metaphor? If we remove the distinction between domain of discourse and the language in which we speak of things within that domain, naming is just metaphor. Names then are never without sense. The point at which a name becomes a pure designator is the point at which we no longer distinguish anything in the name. But when discernibly present, names always have some structure, possibly graphical, auditory, imaginative or otherwise. If we truly take the name in a sentence “you are John” at face value, then we distinguish nothing in referent to “John”. But taking the sentence as medium at face value is not to take some meaning of the sentence at face value. We could as easily have used the word “mountain” instead of “John” and would have essentially the same content as we have yet to distinguish any content. If we distinguish further we will take different information from each of the two names. At that point, “John” and “mountain” both carry distinct information in sense.
We can watch the varying sense of a name in the example of “Socrates”. “You are Socrates.” Am I saying you respond when “Socrates” is called out, or am I saying your are a deep source of wisdom by comparing you to an ancient philosopher? In the former what I take at face value has more to do with responses to auditory facts, and what varies from the face value is who responds. The later allows me to review you and refer to other things I distinguish in you by their corresponding distinctions in the ancient philosopher. To the extent you are Socrates you are a conduit for investigation through dialectical investigation. Here I am varying the person and time, and retaining the philosophical activities. If Socrates is just a proper noun, say just another entry on a list of name suggestions, it will carry still some sense—perhaps that its designate is male. If I call you “X”, I am purposely using a name that carries little sense, and so carries exactly that sense: not specific, free as possible of connotation, hence its frequent use in exotic or extensible contexts. We might try to achieve name as pure designator by imagining our sentences to be taken just that degree beyond graphical face value that says, “John”, “Mountain”, “Socrates” and “X” are indistinguishable except in their attachment to “you”. But even here, it is our face value doing the designation, and we have in face value that very boundary that so well characterizes metaphor, that full involvement.
That our very acts are metaphors can be proposed when we look at the meaning we apprehend in our acts, as is well-exemplified by the act of reading. Are we now reading words or inspecting graphic images on a page? When we first sit to a reading, we may find ourselves inspecting the physical object—observing the font and spacing of the text, or the choice of format. When we move on to immerse ourselves in the reading, we never stop our inspection of the page before us, yet we “lose ourselves” in the content. We rarely stop to notice the graphical nature until some imperfection such as a typo or illegible print presents itself to us. We move from a page to an essay. We don't say, the page is like an essay, as in simile, but that it is an essay, as in metaphor.
The relation we've given here of naming to various other concepts is not crisp, concise and definitive. The pervasiveness of naming in our lives—here taking us so far as to the audacious claim that naming forms the makeup of reality itself—recommends to us that it will not be well characterized, but rather is better suited to the role of characterizing. So in proposing these characterizations of naming itself, we hope to gain in their application a crisper, more concise and more definitive understanding of life itself. Where that is not to be had, we again have a ready resource in the recognition that some imperfections of our lives are implicit, and themselves a source of possibility.