ERISLOVER:
Always glad to see ya. By the way, who’s this “Eris” anyway?
TUSCULAN:
“…In Hegelian parlance, reality is the actualization of the potentional lying dormant within naked, raw existence. Hence reality is higher than existence…”
Though I think I understand the sense in which you’re using “higher,” this is an example of how ambiguity lurks within even simple and common terms. Reality is “higher” than existance, if “higher” means something like “more palpable, more significant, closer to its ultimate perfection”. But in another sense, an entity might be considered to be “higher” if it is more fundamental, more original, that upon which the other depends. In that sense, the potentia are “higher” than the actualia, as there can be potentials without corresponding actuals, but not actuals without corresponding potentials (so it is said…).
MILUM:
“…Words have no absolute meaning. Words only have function…
Now for all of you who have forgotten, this means that in this deterministic universe all descriptions of that which is, have meaning only in terms of an evolutionary aspect of species continuance, nothing more, nothing less…”
A good summary of a reasonable doctrine with which I completely disagree. In Dickersonism (pop. 1 and 1/2), a word does indeed have an absolute meaning: namely the meaning the utterer intends to express in hirs use of the word. The fact that a given UTTERANCE may, in consequence, stand for different words on different occasions …makes the universe more interesting, dunnit?
That utterances have a social (and evolutionary-biological) “function” is quite true. But this may be regarded as derivative of, and parasitic upon, their situations of use: such situational usage being in turn derivative of, and parasitic upon, their (“mentally”) intended meanings.
A “functional” account of language seems to me to have as its subject not words but signs. (Admittedly, careless usage has blurred the distinction.) SIGNS “function;” WORDS “mean.” The first is a matter of effect upon behavior, the second a matter of a certain entity (a “meaning”) being present to the consciousness of the utterer. I realize that the reality of such entities, as well as that which I term “consciousness,” is controversial.
ANYONE:
I tried, in my OP definition of “actual,” to come up with a clear rule of how to explain the property(s) that distinguish the KIND of reality/existence enjoyed by Conan Doyle, from that applicable to Sherlock Holmes and his pipe. As we all seem to recognize that there IS a distinction (whatever term we use to name it), I’d be grateful for a few other stabs at describing that property. By what test can one infallibly determine that an entity is of the one kind and not the other?
