Re: minds of our own?

Jay Lemke (JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU)
Fri, 11 Jul 97 13:53:10 EDT

Paul's response to my worries about affordances being taken as
intrinsic properties of people, or objects, seems to find the
relationality of the notion of affordance still compatible with
a notion that objects have intrinsic properties, that the 'object'
can be regarded as still meaningful when analytically separated
from its milieu.

This is a basic disagreement I guess. I have come over the years
to be profoundly mistrustful of the notion of intrinsic properties,
and this has also extended more recently to an unwillingness to
rely more than the language nearly forces us to on a notion of
isolable objects. My view is rather than relations do not exist
between pre-existing 'objects', but rather than the notion of
'object' (or person, I'm afraid) is itself a particular, and sometimes
very misleading, abstraction by our culture, from what is often
better seen as systems of interdependent happenings, or dynamical
'flows', which constitute the possibility of artificially isolating
'participants' in these processes, of the sort we call 'objects'.

In a purely logical sense, the justification for the notion of
intrinsic property, is that it remains invariant across all the
interactions or processes in which an 'object' participates. This
is however often not a particularly good approximation. It certainly
does not seem very good as applied to what one might want to
call psychological properties of human individuals in social
interaction. It is even today on rather shaky ground in respect
to basic properties of objects like electrons, though certainly
it has often been a more useful approach there.