Posted: Nov 25, 2010 5:41 am
katja z wrote:Again, good points. I feel the bolded bit is the crucial one. I was thinking about cases of consensus (as there usually is a broad consensus in a community about how the world functions, I'd say probably in a majority of communities over human history), but you're right that these can't be taken as the ultimate norm and situations where opinion is divided written off as a quirk.
Given the pervasive disensus along human history (e.g. religious conflicts), I think that those different stances towards the existence of referents are usually a relevant issue.
katja z wrote:Still (and sorry for being a bore), historically, when these concepts - for gods, say, or the soul, or whatever - appeared, their referents were thought of as existent by those who used them. At least, that must have been wthe case for a lot of those words
It´s interesting to see how some "words for the nonexistent" have evolved from initial words that were used to name very concrete referents, and then became less concrete after a process of generalization and recombination with other concepts. For example, I´ve readen that the greeks first used the word “psyche” to name breath, then to name "the last breath before death", then to name “life”, then it was related with “intellectual faculties”, and then it was imagined as “something that can be separated from the body”. Plato (in Phaedo: 65, 68, 106) said that the psyche brings life to the body, that it rejects its opposite (death), and that it is therefore inmortal. Also, he said that the philosopher trains himself to move away from his bodily needs by focusing on his intellect, and that this is a preparation for death, when his psyche will remain alive without a body. Here we can see how this word came from an initial concrete name, but then it was recombined with other relational frames until it became a “word for the nonexistent”, as one of the effects of this relational recombination. Skinner wrote an interesting article about the concrete beginnings of some mentalistic words:
The origins of cognitive thought.
http://www1.appstate.edu/~kms/classes/psy5150/Documents/Skinner1989.pdf