A problem arises with abstract representational thought where we imbue more significance to the symbol… the word… than to what that word is a symbol of.
This is the major failing of most established memes throughout recorded history.
This principle can be traced historically to Plato who has infected all thinking since. Christianity picked it up when St Augustine merged Christianity and Platonism. Plato sub-consciously ascribed more significance in the subjective than the objective when he asked “what is chair”.
He answered the question by looking for the ideal chair, not in the physical realm but in the subjective realm. He suggested that all chairs in the physical realm are imperfect variations of the ideal chair that exists in the subjective realm completely.
In short he gave more significance to the linguistic representation than the gradient of objects that fit categorically into the description of chair.
Comments
What's lacking in all of these instances is knowledge of the laws that govern the materials you're working with. Call it natural principle/law, "eternal form", imaginary abstraction, or intellectual masturbation, but you can't deny that without this knowledge you'd have a difficult time. Building materials, objects of gravitation, & apples change, but principles of architecture, the law of gravitation, & the role of prices within a free market don't.
kerrjac (not verified) | 03/16/09 | 18:04 PM
I have no objection to convenient classification, if it were not for this it would be impossible to finnish a sentence. The problem with this concept of Plato is that he claimed there was literally an ideal chair, orange, whatever someplace beyond our reach that was perfect, unatainable by all other (place object here) on earth.
What this has led to is that the concepts of perfect ideal has interwoven itself into culture. This may have occured without Plato but there is a direct chain of evolution of this throughout history. What it led to after the enlightenment was that humans thought that they should strive for their own ideals of perfection. This led to Naziism and Soviet Communism and millions of deaths in the name of a perfect society.
Delian Valeriani | 03/19/09 | 17:26 PM
In considering the chair, we could list all the different styles and variety of types of chairs everytime we spoke about chairs. But in practice we draw all of these together under the word "chair", and so we have a greater comprehension of what we are looking at and what we are talking about. So, we are moving from particulars to the universals.
Science is done the same way. Science looks at all the particulars and tries to make laws which cover a sufficient number of particulars for us to see the association and understand properly. "Super" Laws, (for example; electromagnetism and gravity) are laws which go further than that and reduce all the particulars in the material universe to as few universals as possible.
Plato was saying that in learning we are all constantly moving from particulars to the universals. Plato's concept of the "ideal" chair was that; let's say there is somewhere an "ideal" chair and this chair covers all the particulars of all chairs that ever were. Thus a chair had meaning in reference to this ideal chair and not a particular one. This means that when we use the word "chair", there is a meaning that is beyond our mere gathering up of the particulars about chairs. This is Plato's solution: an "ideal" that would cover all the possible particulars that anybody could ever possibly find out about chairs. There would be no chairs outside this universal or beyond the concept which was covered by this "ideal" chair. Anything outside of it was not a chair.
If Plato and his chair was responsible for Hitler, then he is just as responsible for Mother Theresa.
JDK (not verified) | 03/20/09 | 08:27 AM
kerrjac (not verified) | 03/19/09 | 17:34 PM
In essence, 'ideal' may have meant 'ideational' to the original translator - words change in their use over the centuries. For example the terms 'subjective' and 'objective' are now each used in the exact opposite of their former sense.
Plato, long before modern cognitive theories, had the brilliant insight that everything we think we know is just the end product of our sensory pathways. We now know that those sensory pathways act as filters - censors if you like. Our take on reality is censored by the very mechanisms which we rely on to tell us about the 'real world'. No wonder we get confused!
This censorship mechanism, as I would call it, keeps us sane by forcing us to be entirely indifferent to micro-information - we do not see a trunk, branches, twigs, leaves and blossom against a background of so many blades of grass and clods of earth. We see it as, and normally describe it as, a tree in a field. That is why we may watch a 'swords and sandals' movie a hundred times before we notice the actor with a wristwatch - the film is being censored by our own neurons even as we watch it.
We think that our web connection is slow if we get less than one million bits per second, but -
Human beings are not simply information storage systems resembling tape recorders. Information digestion rate is severely limited to 1 bit per second or less over the long term. This should be taking into account when deciding on the content of learning exercises.
Source: Robert W Brown
Patrick Lockerby | 03/19/09 | 18:17 PM
This is easily seen in the area or morals. We need universals (absolutes) if we are to determine what is right and what is wrong. Not having universals the concept is only sociological: assessing the statistics of public opinion and the majority determines moral questions. Or an elite can emerge to tell us. The Greeks understood we need to have a universal which would cover all the particulars. Plato's chair for example. All philosophies; social, scientific or religious, seek the absolutes. That is where the answers lie for existence, morality, and epistemology.