ONT Presti-Digital Re-Imaging -- Hyper-Descartes

[Jon Awbrey <jawbrey@oakland.edu>]

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BM = Bernard Morand
JA = Jon Awbrey
MA = Murray Altheim
MK = Mary Keeler
MT = Minamoto no Tsunenobu

JA: In order to reconstruct ontology along pragmatic principles
    one would have to reconstruct the whole of metaphysics,
    propadeutically or coevally in time, along pragmatic
    principles.  After 30 years of preparation, a mere
    couple of years in the SUO-Slash-Ontology Forum --
    I told him, "Julie, don't go!" -- have impressed
    on me the brutoid fact that this is not as easy
    as it sounds.

JA: Not as easy as it sounds -- ha! --
    I thought you would like that.

MA: Hahaha!  [maniacal laughter in the wings]

MA: But I'm not concerned with reconstructing the universe, ...

I said "to reconstruct ontology" (la carte),
not "to reconstruct the universe" (la terre).
This is precisely one of those confusions
that so recalcitrates my pragmatic heels
in the SUO/Ontology Forum.

By "ontologies" I mean "stories of what are" (SOWA's?),
and these narratives, like politics, are always loco,
spoken from points of departure that spin on the rim,
not the hub of that eternally self-reinventing wheel.

And so I've been asking recurssedly:

What are the possible geometries of
those spaces whose points are views?

One of the things that "reconstructing ontology along pragmatic principles"
would mean, and against this there is nigh unto an infinite resistance,
is putting the interpreter back into the story of being, and we all
know where that leads, but please don't tell too many people yet --
it scares their cartesian egos to ergo-death.

In my next note to SUO, I am already proposing that
we change the name to "logontos" or "logontology"
as a way of stressing the prag.maxim.attic turn.

MA: ... nor do I imagine my audience (ie., authors) are either,
    we're interested in models of the universe of very limited
    scope, sometimes not even matching the real, known universe
    (imagine that).

And how would that be different?
From the story that we tell now?

MA: In fact, we (and I speak for the King and/or Queen now that I'm in merry England) ...

The People Are We, Too.
Try not to forget that.

MA: ... are really more interested in constructing our models in order to support our
    writing projects.  Our readers are interested in the way our models play with the
    reality in their heads, not in how accurate some bit of text matches with what
    really might have happened, witness the mythologization process that happened
    with the world's religions over the past few millennia.  My point here is that
    I think it's perfectly fine for myself or any author to create an ontology
    that *doesn't* mesh with reality, insofar as that ontology is useful in
    organizing my research, keeping track of my copious notes, et cetera.

I see that you are unfamiliar with my character.
But I hope that you will not soon try to impress
me with some kind of super-Rorty complex, for I
know you know that "In a story where anything
can happen, who the hell cares what does!?".
And a "story where anything can happen" is
just a name for an inconsistent theory --
its names like its theorems are legion.

JA: Nostalgic Deja Vu.  Thirty odd years ago I read this very note of Peirce's
    and promptly starting writing incidental pieces of my Journal on the backs
    of unused computer cards, of which I had access to an ample and utterly
    free supply in my student job as "prep room supervisor".  Still have
    boxes of 'em.  Murray be advised, or warned ...

Sheesh, and I thought I was the only one with a shrink-wrapped pallet
of computer cards under my bed ....

BM: While it is not directly related to Digital imaging in itself, but to the
    purpose of note's gathering, I thought that the following quote from Peirce
    could be useful.  As a matter of fact, it further gives a pragmatic argument
    in favor of local, individual "ontologies". It shows that the imaging
    process would have to take care of the problem of "classification,
    arrangement and rearrangement" of the postcards (see § III).

MA: Jon, what Bernard mentions here (ie., local,
    individual "ontologies") is what I imagine is
    created within the head of an author creating a
    work say, of historical fiction.  Does Umberto Eco
    use a computer database, note cards, or the backs of
    unused computer cards?  No matter the means, the method
    seems to be some sort of in-the-head ontology made
    explicit in-the-notecards (hmmm, I accidentally
    typed the word "nodecards" which I think I'll
    now trademark and use as a term in my Ceryle
    application).  You heard it here first.

Okay, but I got dibs on "paranode".

The problem that I am constantly up against up late is that
the very word "ontology" appears to have a very intoxicating
and even toxic effect on people's brains -- toxonomy? -- for
no sooner does someone start us frame his or her vision with
the all-purpose ever-contentless operator "Ontology Of" (OO),
than he or she, and soon to be it, develops a kind of tunnel
vision against all the diversity that does not fit within it.

I have only recently succeeded in being able to gnomenclate the syndrome:

| The illusion that one begins with some unmediated intuition of objects
| is one of the most insidious of all the systematic errors in ontology,
| tantamount to the "ontological worker's occupational disease" (OWOD).
|
| http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg08069.html

But I think that OWOD is just another variant strain of the condition
that Mary Keeler diagnosed a couple of years ago, epidemic to nomimal
thinkers, under the toxon of the "veil of transparent election" (VOTE).

Shades or Welt-Weit-Weber!

Jon Awbrey

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