Re: Number/Specificality/Archetypes in Language

--- Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:

>   - maleness is certainly _an_ archetype for all men
> & boys (that is 'male
> humans'). Plato talks about the objects we see
> around us as "partaking"
> (metekhein) in the Archetype or Form. Thus in the
> Platonic sense, all men
> partake in the Archetypes of Maleness as well as of
> Human-ness. Woman also
> partake in the Archetype of Human-ness but not, of
> course, Maleness. They
> partake in the Archetype of Femaleness.
>
> >> Animals and
> >> plants can be male or female too.
>
> Indeed, these partake in the Archetypes or Forms of
> Maleness & Femaleness
> (according to Plato - not me  :)
>
> So a male elephant partakes in the Archetypes of
> Maleness & Elephanthood
> (among other things).
Ah, but that's quite interesting, since I had the same
idea ! (only I didn't know it was an archetype). My
idea is that we have to get rid of the arborescent
representation (scientific taxonomy, etc), and the
example of the male elephant is very close to what I
fancied. I'm reading about the DOM (Document Object
Model) just now: could we imagine a DOM that wouldn't
be strictly arborescent (tree-like) ? That would be
fantastic !

> >> - there is a difference between "the set of all
> men"
> >> and "the characteristics common to all men".
>
> In modern programming terms, the first is the set of
> all instances or
> _objects_; the second is presumasbly the _class_
> definition.
Yes, looks like that; yet I was very pleased to
discover that in JavaScript, the properties of an
object belonging to a class can be in contradiction
with the general class properties (the prototype ones,
if I got it right). As I understood it, if you refer
to an object's property, Javascript will first look
for an explicit property at the very object level; if
it doesn't find it there, it will look for it at the
prototype level; if it still doesn't find there, it
will look at the global level (maybe I mix it up a
little). So it should be easy to say: a property of
the birds' class is that they can fly, but a property
of the ostrich is that it can't fly, even being a
bird.

 In the
> Platonic sense, nothing _belongs_ to an Archetype.
> The things of this
> world (which to Plato were less than real - shadows
> of shadows)
> 'participate' in or share in an Archetype and,
> indeed, will share in more
> than one Archetype.
So they inherit properties from different archetypes ?

 Again I suppose
> it depends on how one defines _entity_. The set of
> all conlangers is a
> different sort of entity from the enitity that is
> Philippe Caquant or the
> one that is Chris Bates or Ray Brown etc.
>
Yes, because in the set of all conlangers you can find
different instances, while Philippe Caquant is a final
leaf: you can divide him into arms, legs, head and
some more parts, but you cannot find different
instances in him, except if considering severe
schizophrenia.
>
>
 The set of
> Americans that walked
> on the moon has two members only.
I'm afraid there are some more. Actually, they went
back to Moon after Apollo 11. They probably had
forgotten something there.

(snip)

=====
Philippe Caquant


Barbarus hic ego sum, quia non intellegor illis (Ovidius).

Populus me sibilat, at mihi plaudo (Horatius).

Interdum stultus opportune loquitur (Henry Fielding).

Scire leges non hoc est verba earum tenere, sed vim ac potestatem (Somebody).

Melius est ut scandalum oriatur, quam ut veritas relinquatur (Somebody else).

Ceterum censeo *vi* esse oblitterandum (Me).

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