Re: Anti-telic?

Yahya, please snip your replies a lot more. Having a page or two of
quoted material followed by "I agree" is excessive and hard to read.
:-(


To get back to the point:
I don't believe that metaphysical questions of whether the universe
can *be* eternal or not are at all relevant. I can claim that it is,
ergo I can say that it is, ergo I can have a way to say it. Viz. what
I and others said before about exaggeration or pragmatics of scope.

The way I'd define it (borrowing from previous again):
* telic: having a necessary bound, i.e. intrinsic to the event (it's
not possibly to keep doing it indefinitely)
e.g. eating a finite thing, killing, etc

* atelic: being POTENTIALLY bound, but not necessarily; i.e. the bound
is extrinsic to the event itself (something has to interrupt or stop
it, or else it'll keep going indefinitely)
e.g. dating someone, writing a journal vs a novel (though arguably a
journal is bound by your death, I'd say this is an instance where I
could extend effective 'forever' to be 'until I die'), going hunting
(though ditto) etc

* antitelic: NOT being able to be bound, i.e. it is not possible to
interrupt or stop the event once started

e.g. the existence of the universe, states-of-the-world-history (viz
Achilles), gods dating (ha), humans dating (exaggeration - eg "they're
sooooo cuuuuute together it's impossible they'll break up"), many
belief-system-dependent things (e.g. Atlas holding up the earth,
assuming he's under some sort of permanent everlasting "Hercules won't
interfere again" spell), expansion of the universe (depending on your
astrophysics), universal tendency towards entropy, WoT world cycling,
etc


Note that this in no way addresses how the event STARTED, only whether
it has a necessary, potential, or impossible ENDpoint.

Difference from gnomic:
1. Gnomic AFAIU would require it to be universally true, i.e. have no
finite start point before which it may not have been true (e.g 2+2=4)
2. Gnomic seems exclusively a state-of-the-world or
truths-about-the-world sort of thing, whereas antitelic would be a
type of (forever-continuing) action, of which existence or state is a
subset
3. Antitelic
4. They're different grammatical categories


The point about mass vs count nouns seems spurious to me; just because
they happen to be analagous in some ways does not mean they are
NECESSARILY linked or that the limitation of one implies the
limitation of the other.

 - Sai

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