Re: [ontolog-forum] Universal Basic Semantic Structures

[William Frank <williamf.frank@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, September 27, 2012 09:41, John F Sowa wrote:
> Doug, William, and Leo,
>
> Rom Harré
>> the brain is not a part of a person in the way that a grain of sand
>> is part of a beach. It is part of a person’s body and a person’s body
>> is not a part of that person in the relevant sense.
>

>
>
> WF
>> If a body is a *part* of an animal, what is the other part???
>
> The other part is the *process*.  The body of an animal or a car
> is mereologically the same as its body immediately after its death
> (or you turn off the engine).  But a running car and a living animal
> can do things that the static body cannot.

Of course, only I hesitate to say "part" here. Rather, another whole perspective, on the whole, not on a part.   how many parts does that cow have?  Well, it has a body, a personality, and a milk giving capability???? I would not expect such an answer. 

John, my question was Rhetorical.  I imagined that people would relate it to your Rom Harre quote, and realize: no, a body is not a ***part*** of an animal.  From one single perspective, it IS the WHOLE animal But this is only one dimension, one facet, one viewpoint, perspective, take your pick. maybe the perspective of a butcher, for example. BUT, when you put on the glasses of thinking about people or dogs or cows  as social beings, then you find they have personalities, character, friends, enemies, etc..  And the parts of THESE are of a very different nature than the parts of their bodies.  

There are **correspondences** between the things that can be observed from these different viewpoints.  Doctors, for example, might use personality change as a phenominon to predict a disease, or knowledge of the presence of the disease to predict a personailty change. So too with mechanics diagnosing the behavior of a car, or the reverse, predicting car behavior from car mechanical state.

I agree that the functions you cite are emergent properties of the whole, that can only emerge under certain conditiions.

 

>
> _____________________________________________________________________
>
> Why Brains Can’t Think: Exposing the Mereological Fallacy
> Rom Harré, Emeritus Fellow of Linacre College
> Monday 16th July, 7pm: Rewley House
>
> As the 21st Century opened, the discipline of 'academic psychology'
> seemed to be separating into two radically distinct and perhaps
> irreconcilable domains. Cultural/Discursive psychology focused on the
> discursive means for the management of meaning in a world of norms,
> while Neuropsychology focused on the investigation of brain processes
> loosely correlated with intuitively identified cognitive processes.
> These two domains can be reconciled in a hybrid science that brings them
> together into a synthesis more powerful than anything psychologists have
> achieved before.
>
> The marriage of Neuroscience and Cultural/Discursive psychology is based
> on the insights of many critics of the causal framework for psychology,
> but the most insightful has been one philosopher in particular, Ludwig
> Wittgenstein. Hybrid psychology depends on the intuition that while
> brains can be assimilated into the world of persons, as among the
> instruments people use for carrying out many of their projects, people
> cannot be assimilated into the world of cell structures and molecular
> processes. To suppose that they can be has been called the 'mereological
> fallacy' – ascribing attributes of wholes to some of their parts. People
> think. Brains, parts of people’s bodies, do not.

>
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William Frank

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