Why worry, nobody wants to prove the two classes of entities would be
indistinguishable. The point was only to ask for not defining them each
by themself on the basis of how their exemplars haven effects upon us
the observers. But rather to have them interact according to their
potential when dealing with each other and to influence, change,
regulate, often constitute in some way each other. The idea is to learn
about them in their own settings and developments with each other.
You also wrote yesterday:
>So it goes with definitions, at least as a means to develop a common
>understanding of some thing or other. Not to argue on general grounds
>about definitions, which would insist that people use them on a daily basis
>without dichotomy or despair, and even post-modernistically without any
>fixed sense. But to promote a process through which two or more people
>can use language *consistently* about a common OBJECT, the 'commonality' of
>such object being a condition yet to be defined! Provisionally one can
>offer a definition as a statement of the shared meaning of a word, the act
>of defining as a process of describing, explaining, or making definite and
>clear.
Since you have written in an earlier piece about referents of names
such as electrons or protons you cannot mean by this that the
coordination of names for purposes of communication is all that
interests you. But isn't there a risk in losing sight of the referent
when coordinating names? With electrons or atoms the problem might be
nil because you need rules how to get them to do certain tasks and when
they do perform in a certain way they are electrons or atoms of a
certain kind or state etc. But in this field all electrons are
electrons are electrons.
In the field of people doing tasks with things, both people and things
are not exchangable because they exist and have effects as singulars. A
class of things does not do anything with a class of people; or only so
in your head, if you wish.
It's the singular and different and changing tokens that interact. So
you must be careful to define them terms of class membership beyond a
simple provisional mark. A rose is a rose is a rose ... perhaps not.
Alfred
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Alfred Lang, Psychology, Univ. Bern, Switzerland --- alfred.lang who-is-at psy.unibe.ch
Website: http://www.cx.unibe.ch/psy/ukp/langpapers/
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