And we can imagine the same wood
specialist coming in a year later with slightly different measurements but
with some reservations about one or more meters and their accuracy under
certain conditions. Now imagine that a baby thinks the chair is the
best place to hide a doll or that a house dog prefers to sleep under the
chair. There also might be a household story in which the chair
plays an important part. And there is the history of the chair that
could include a manufacturer's certificate of origin. And on top of
all these connections and attempts to fix the identity of the chair the
matter of the chair is changing--a crack is wider than the way we
remembered it, stains show where new materials have mixed with the wood
and paint. And then there are the studies on wood and the type of
wood used in the chair that are scattered around the libraries of the
world and that have a bearing on what "is" this chair.
This fictional list for a fictional green, German chair can be used for
any actual chair with virtually unlimited factors adding, subtracting or
coloring what the chair actually "is." The point is that the "chair"
is a batch of properties of indefinable limits and that these are ever
changing.
Quotes
"What is wrong with the notion of objects existing 'independently' of
conceptual schemes is that there are no standards for the use of even the
logical notions apart from conceptual choices." Putnam, Hilary.
Representation and Reality. Bradford, 198?, p.114.
"Dynamic objectivity aims at a form of knowledge that grants to the world
around us its independent integrity but does so in a way that remains
cognizant of, indeed relies on, our connectivity with that world. In this,
dynamic objectivity is not unlike empathy, a form of knowledge of other
persons that draws explicitly on the commonality of feelings and
experience in order to enrich one's understanding of another in his or her
own right. ... Dynamic objectivity is thus a pursuit of knowledge that
makes use of subjective experience (Piaget calls it consciousness of self)
in the interests of a more effective objectivity." Reflections on Gender
and Science, Evelyn Fox Keller, Yale, 1985, p. 117.
"What is an elephant's trunk? What is it phylogenetically? What did
genetics tell it to be?
"As you know, the answer is that the elephant's trunk is his 'nose.' (Even
Kipling knew!) And I put the word 'nose' in quotation marks because the
trunk is being defined by an internal process of communication in growth.
The trunk is a 'nose' by a process of communication: it is the context of
the trunk that identifies it as a nose. That which stands between two eyes
and north of a mouth is a 'nose,' and that is that. It is the context that
fixes the meaning, and it must surely be the receiving context that
provides meaning for the genetic instructions. When I call that a 'nose
and this a 'hand' I am quoting--or misquoting--the developmental
instructions in the growing organism, and quoting what the tissues which
received the message thought the message intended.
"There are people who would prefer to define noses by their
'function'--that of smelling. But if you spell out those definitions, you
arrive at the same place using a temporal instead of a spatial context.
You attach meaning to the organ by seeing it as playing a given part in
sequences of interaction between creature and environment. I call that a
temporal context. The temporal classification cross-cuts the spatial
classification of contexts. But in embryology, the first definition must
always be in terms of formal relations. The fetal trunk cannot, in
general, smell anything. Embryology is formal.
"Let me illustrate this species of connection, this connecting pattern, a
little further by citing a discovery of Goethe's. He was a considerable
botanist who had great ability in recognizing the nontrivial (i.e., in
recognizing the patterns that connect). He straightened out the vocabulary
of the gross comparative anatomy of flowering plants. He discovered that a
'leaf' is not satisfactorily defined as 'a flat green thing' or a 'stem'
as 'a cylindrical thing.' The way to go about the definition--and
undoubtedly somewhere deep in the growth processes of the plant, this is
how the matter is handled--is to note that buds (i.e. baby stems) form in
the angles of leaves. From that, the botanist constructs the definitions
on the basis of the relations between stem, leaf, bud, angle, and so on.
"'A stem is that which bears leaves.'
'A leaf is that which has a bud in its angle.'
'A stem is what was once a bud in that position,'"
Bateson, Gregory. Mind and Nature. Bantam. 1980. pp. 16-18.
“Alternative worlds are, in
Aristotle’s eyes, strictly disjunctive; and since ours exists, they do
not. Our universe is unique, and nothing in it could profitably be taken
out of its context and examined under ideal, non-existence conditions.
These are the deeper reasons why Aristotle was not willing, as Clauberg
rightly observed, to see things ‘as they are in themselves’ but always
insisted that we should see them ‘as they are in respect to each other.’”
Funkenstein, Amos. Theology and the Scientific Imagination From the Middle
Ages to the Seventeenth Century. Princeton University Press. 1986. p.
163-4.
SEE ALSO QUOTES UNDER POINT 1
Examples
See above at "General Elaboration."
Statement of Point
The “society” of what has been
called object and subject is the most salient society from which to view
the compact of mind and matter. Every object exists as object by being
embedded in a subject’s patterns of relevance. An object is an adaptation
into our relations, a domesticated partner, an agreement. “It” is a
society by its multiplicity of relatability.
Bibliography
Further
Considerations