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kkissinger@kevinkissinger.com schrieb: > Quoting Krispen Hartung <khartung@cableone.net>: > >> Imagine if everything time I said something was >> beautiful, I had to qualify exactly what I meant down the specific >> logical atoms that denoted my owen sensory data or memories of sensory >> data. It would take hours and we'd never be able to communicate. It's >> easier to just use the word and assume we have a common understand in >> absence of there being an actual "Thing" out there called beauty. > > This point is well-taken: that a word such as "beauty" is a shorthand > that we can use to communicate with the presumption that you and I have > enough in common that our respective approaches to "beauty" are similar. I don't think its a shorthand for something else... If I talk about beauty, I talk about beauty! To come back to Wittgenstein, he claimed the meaning and function of a word is defined by its usage. We learn how to use the word beauty, and have a feeling when its used correctly. But a term like "beauty" is much less defined than a term like "red". Sooner or later we will find somebody who uses it in a context which seems contradictory to the way we used to use it. There are two ways to react. Recontextualise the word, learn that its only valid in a subjective context - or fight for the correct use we have learned so far. How many flamewars are based on simple missunderstandings?... All this depends a lot on our social context. A father would always teach his children his way of usage, correctly assuming the kids have not enough experience to judge yet, and for the child it's the other way around. We can't learn our language without teachers... In on-line communities the ability to judge the experience of a member is much more difficult, that's why flame wars are quite common... And the meaning of words like "beauty" we usually learn from stories. Music can be a purely emotional told story without words. I remember exactly how my father was excited about the string quartets from Schubert, played by the Melos Quartet. This opened me certainly for the beauty of that music... (If I tell a story like that, I probably do not need to explain the word beauty any further, its short, clear and obvious, and any further explanation would destroy the beauty of the story... ;-) Stefan -- Stefan Tiedje------------x------- --_____-----------|-------------- --(_|_ ----|\-----|-----()------- -- _|_)----|-----()-------------- ----------()--------www.ccmix.com