It can be said that a philosopher is in conflict with reality. The philosopher goes to great pains to show us how the world really is—in distinction with what it appears to be. It isn't just the philosopher of course, and it isn't just correcting our view. We all do it, and various roles we take—philosopher, scientist, artist, teacher, individual making his way—all share this character. And we don't just correct mistaken views but clarify confused ones, create new ones, and validate existing ones, seeing them in a new light. The principal philosophical problem addressed in this series is conflict with, up to now, a focus on contradiction as distinction. Contradiction is an issue of truth and falsity. Paradox is a contradiction showing the limitation, or mere boundary as we would have it here, of the logical, rational point of view. As rational investigators it would seem we have one guiding principle that should hold true in our search for new views. Whatever new description of reality we find, as different as it may be from our common conception, we really cannot expect it to be rational—correct—unless it describes exactly our common conception. That is, whatever new truths we conclude, a full description of reality should describe exactly what we see now, including the error-prone, confusing common conception we started with. It is exactly this feature—that we should express a new view that is nothing other than the old view—that leads the rational investigator to face contradiction. In this entry we will see where our view that explains our reality with contradiction can describe a view not requiring truth and falsity. We continue to accept distinction as the source of our reality, but recognize in distinction not just contradiction, but naming.
As we stated, all our existing phenomena should remain in our new view, so truth and falsity will remain. We alluded to this resolution in To The Extent, where we recognized truth and falsity as just two categories in a model of distinction as a function over yet other distinctions, a category just being another thing, a thing just being another distinction. In Being Free we pointed out that our rational, non-contradictory view is a division of our world into two categories, true and false. From this perspective any distinction, or function, over so many things can be modeled with another distinction that rewrites our function as a collection of true and false statements—as a function is seen as a relation in mathematics.
We will focus here on the coupling of distinct things, which we may call laying against or taking together. In the rational view of language, statements, or sentences, denote truth. Other components of sentences just denote other things—nouns, adjectives, etc. We can remove truth and falsity easily from many of our sentences. So if we say “I am happy”, or “I am happy” = “truth” in a rational view, we can also say “My feeling” = “happiness”. Choosing the form of equation may lead us to view even this latter phrase as a statement of truth. When we do, the relation to contradiction is clear, particularly if we transcribe our first phrase more directly and say, “I” = “happy”. The ideas “I” and “happy” cearly are not the same, so the statement is a contradiction. But in fact what it denotes is not what is under consideration. The thing under consideration is the taking of the two together. The denotation, even as a rational view would have it, can be many things—truth, as in a statement, falsity, as in sarcasm, hogwash, as in “what do you really mean and who are you really referring to in the indexical ‘I’?” The point is, that all these denotations are part of separate further distinctions. In all of them the sense is the same, and that is that clearly “I” and “happy” aren't the same thing, but there is a “feeling” to resolve this taking together of distinct things, and that that feeling is elaborated by the distinctive nature of the name “happy”. The fact that we are discussing language shows that the experience of this statement takes place within a larger distinction where the graphical forms, the words “happy” and “I”, are given meaning. We can say, to the extent “I” and “happy” are the same thing, other of my distinctions then convey yet more sense.
We've discussed sense in Contradiction as Distinction where we observed, it is only when we identify two different things that sense exists. The sense discussed by Frege is revealed by the identification of two things that clearly are not identical—they denote the same thing but aren't the same thing because identification of two identical expressions communicates nothing. So reexamining sense, we can see it as the very parameterizations of a thing that allow us to resolve contradiction in any identification of it with another thing.
Naming is then seen as just another identification of expressions such as “the object in the middle of the table” = “the crunchy red piece of fruit in this room”. One doesn't consider it desirable, let alone feasible, to bring the actual object into our thought, so we name it. We take something distinct from it and call that the thing's representation. That representation has the appearance of approximating the object named. We can picture a partial order of sense where taking the actual object conveys the most sense—all of it. Then expressions or images we take to refer to the object contain successively less of that sense in that they convey less information about the object. So “the sweet, red, crunchy piece of fruit in the center of our table” is a closer approximation of the actual apple than “the red object before us”. The least informative reference, and least approximate description, is the proper name. So if we've named the apple Plato we are explicitly recognizing “Plato” is completely independent of the nature of the thing, as is evident from the fact that the same name can be used as easily to refer to an ancient philosopher as to a piece of fruit. In a reality as distinction light, each of these representations is as much a name as the last as they are all expressions and as expressions they are distinct from the thing and require parameterization to be seen as identical with the thing.
We took simultaneous truth equivalences and generalized them to simultaneous thing equivalences. This principle in generality is just the single identification. Taking this form of equation, A = B, and the natural language form, A is B, as distinction itself redraws our operation of naming as just as another of these identification of things. The question of what is sense of names has a specific answer from this perspective. A name is not outside the domain of discussion, but is just another thing within the domain of discussion having just another sense like any other thing. Essentially we are saying there is no atomic senseless name.
We have now a new view of life. To look at all as naming—something recommended to us by the text quoted in our first entry. To some extent we have united views as distant in time as those of Frege and Laozi. This view has much to offer in the way of further clarification of various of the phenomena we experience. The connection between negation, or A is not B, and how it can be simple, as it is in the rational view, or difficult, as it is in resolution of intuitionism with classical logic, or a subtle creative principle, as it is in a world born from distinction, is a topic for another entry. But many topics for discussion arising from this view can only be carried out as we live our lives and pay closer attention to the power of naming over the very real exigencies and spectacles of our lives.