Sure there is. The woman and salt share the same approximate shape, volume, and location. They also exist, from our point of view, continuously (that is, there is no discernable lapse of time between there being a woman in spot x and there being a pillar of salt there).
These are the kinds of qualities of this process that “turns into” relates better than “is replaced by.” If, for whatever reason, it makes more sense to you to emphasize these qualities of the process over certain others, then it makes perfect sense to say that the pillar of salt is Lot’s wife (as, for example, Drastic seems to say). In any event, its use here doesn’t strike me as ridiculous in the least (though it is not my preferred way of describing the situation).
Lib may have to correct me, of course, but I don’t think that’s exactly was he’s saying. Or, perhaps he is saying that, but the point he’s trying to make is that those propositions which are either satisfied or not are arbitrary.
But why should we say that? We’ve already conceded that the descriptions or identities we use are not actually the things they represent, and that they cannot be “correct” or “incorrect.” What’s left is a set of arbitrary identities which we can use, not use, or alter as it suits us. We can use whatever we like as “snapshots” of identity (what we decide to use might not be very helpful [describing an apple as a kind of spaceship, e.g.], but it’s still not “wrong” to use it).
The first seems irrelevent to me; the second seems to make the point most clearly. For is the question really how we know Lot’s Wife is Lot’s Wife, or is it, how can Lot’s wife be a pillar of salt? The latter notes, “Well, she was standing there, just so, and then there was a pillar of salt.” This would be an account of what Lot might have seen (for example, I haven’t really read the story). But this sort of answer would come from the question, “What do you mean ‘she turned into a pillar of salt’?” And the previous answer satisfies that. Imagine that, some days later, while he is stadning in front of the salt, his wife steps up behind him and asks what he’s doing. “Why, dear, I thought you had been turned into this pillar of salt!” And here the expression is just as useful, even though she hadn’t turned into anything (God just teleported her away or something). And if she asked what he meant, wouldn’t he say substantially the same thing? That he saw her there one moment, then salt the next?
Well, this is an easy thing to say, and no one would insist that the words “Lot’s Wife” has some sort of ontological import. Similarly, looking at them individually in order to discern what they refer to seems to lead us astray. Nothing here has changed except the expressions Lot would now use to describe his wife. The role that “Lot’s Wife” plays in their speech has changed substantially in some ways, and not at all in others. But from this can we then say, “Surely something must be the same between them, if he used ‘My Wife’ to describe both the lady we knew and this pillar of salt!” Why “surely”? When does a pillar of salt have anything to do with someone’s wife? Well, for instance, when someone saw their wife one moment, and then a pillar of salt the next.
The words don’t have to point to something at all just by their virtue of being a word.
And to be perfectly clear, whether she was really “somehow” turned into a pillar, or wasn’t, and just replaced, the phrasing is the same, and the identity of the salt piller as “Lot’s Wife” remains, given the appropriate prompting. No one, for example, would expect Lot to bed this salt, nor feed it, and so on. The role identity plays here is in an act of signifying, or identifying something.
Consider, for example, that a friend of Lot sees him several weeks later and knows nothing of the event. He asks, “How is your wife?” And so what do we have here? Can Lot answer the question? If the sign is supposed to indicate something (a la Lib’s example), and Lot understands it, then he cannot answer the question, as the wife Lot’s friend refers to is not so and that sign is meaningless; he recognizes the word, but not the referent. But of course, Lot answers: “She’s a pillar of salt” (or something). (and a discussion ensues) And it isn’t a role the salt plays in his life (though it couldn’t be), as salt cannot either play the role of a wife.
“A” and “Not A” are true from an atemporal perspective, but they’re not true of the same part of time. In one part, “A” is true; in the other, “Not A” is true.
Again, consider the circle with a two-dimensional critter inside it. His law states that “Inside” and “Not Inside” are never simultaneously true. But you as a three-dimensional critter can see both the inside and the outside of the circle simultaneously.
VarlosZ wrote:
That’s exactly what I’m saying, and Eris is proving my point. He doesn’t want the pillar of salt to apply in identifying Lot’s wife, and so he selects an arbitrary span of time for which to describe her.
Eris wrote:
Stop being so dense. If you insist on identifying “Lot’s wife” as the woman married to Lot, then Lot’s wife is true from the time they are married until she dies. Lot’s wife is not true when she is a little girl. And Lot’s wife is not true when she is a pillar of salt.
I get the not-so-subtle feeling we are approaching this problem from vastly different perspectives, and are at this point (if not from the beginning) talking passed each other.
I must bid the SDMB farewell for a while. Work requires that I travel, and I’ll be out all week. Then I travel back to Ohio to see some family for the holidays. I hope this thread doesn’t die, it is a fascinating question.
I suspect I am missing out on a great chunk of the depth of this topic, but isn’t this all handled by the definition of the word ‘became’ and/or ‘change’?
In the sense that a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, it isn’t that the butterfly we now see is also still entirely a caterpillar, it’s that the caterpillar has ceased to exist and has been replaced by a butterfly, but some attributes of the caterpillar are carried over to or inherited by the new entity (in this case, the spatial location and much of the physical matter, although it is rearranged).
There needs to be some continuity or inheritance, but not necessarily the same kind of inheritance in every case we can think of.
“A” and “Not A” are still never simultaneously true at the same place at the same time. Something inside the circle isn’t outside it, and something outside the circle isn’t inside it.
If we’re truly interested in completeness and correctness, we’re obligated to include temporalspatial coordinates in our claims. If I make the claim that “A”, I’m not usually claiming that “A at all places and times”.
In this case, “A” is an ontological statement. It isn’t a matter of whether the critter is inside or outside the circle, but of whether there IS both an inside and an outside to the circle at the same time. The 2-D critter will say “no”. The 3-D critter will say “yes”.
Any number of reasons — e.g., there might be small circles inside his large circle, and so he knows what both the inside and the outside of a circle are like. But he cannot say for a certainty that any of them have both an inside and an outside.
I grant you, this is a bit of a hijack, because people here have been discussing the nature of matter and existence, using Lot’s wife as a point of reference. Lot’s wife herself, and the Biblical story of her transformation, are secondary matters in this discussion, at best.
Still, it’s worth noting that, even if you’re a Christian who takes the Bible seriously, you don’t have to take the account literally. I’m not even saying that the Genesis account was a lie, simply that it may have reflected an imperfect knowledge of what happened.
I’ve used this analogy before, but I’ll try it again. Any physicist will tell you (heck, he can PROVE to you) that there’s no such thing as a rising fastball. NO pitcher in baseball history has ever thrown with enough velocity to make a rising fastball possible. And yet, most fans (including me) would SWEAR to you that they’d seen Randy Johnson’s (or Nolan Ryan’s or Goose Gossage’s) fastballs rising. Are we lying? No- we’re accurately telling you what we think we saw. To put it simply, a 100 mile an hour pitch drops less than our brains are conditioned to expect, so we expect it to, so we perceive it as rising.
Now, did Lot’s wife really “turn into” salt? Maybe. Or, maybe, she foolishly ran back to a town that was about to be struck by a volcano, and was buried in volcanic ash. And when her family found her, encased in white ash, she appeared tio have been transformed.
IF that’s what happened, the issue of transformation is moot.
astorian, that ties in neatly with what I was about to propose:
The thing that remains constant from before Lot’s wife (can we just call her Latoya?) was “turned” into a pillar of salt to after is not her molecular composition, and not necessarily her location, but the fact that that Lot perceives her as being the same. From his frame of reference, they appear to be one in the same object. His perception may change over time (as he accepts that his wife is gone or she jumps out from behind the pillar and yells Surprise) and the nature of her existence from his perspective may change. If we assume this, the way he discusses her will change over time (“My wife is dead and all I have left is this salt, but it sure do taste good on lambchops.” or “My wife played an awful trick on me so I conked her on the head with a chunk of salt that looked like her arm.”) in ways that appropriately reflect our intuitive understanding of how people behave.
OK, I have a few minutes available here at a Kinkos in Sunny Tampa Florida to compose a response.
The point I was trying to lead up to was that we would primarily say that “Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt” because one would still identify the pillar of salt as “Lot’s Wife”. E.g.—a friend stumbles upon the scene and asks Lot where his wife is, and he points to the pillar. The pillar is identified as “Lot’s Wife” even though the physical and social qualities she had played have shifted immensely.
There is no “A / not A” to bring into it unless we start talking about specific criteria of identity other than “How we identify stuff”. Of course, “How we identify stuff” is by pointing and naming (in the case of people and objects). Thus, the role the pillar of salt plays in the expressions of Lot (et al) has not changed. “My wife is over there” holds just as true now as it did before. Lot’s wife is a pillar of salt.
The “turning into” expression was where I tried to focus my previous posts. Under what circumstances do we use the phrase, “X turned into Y”? There are many; they tend to indicate an uncharacteristic change of state (that is, how the object appears). Fairy tales of princes and frogs. Naturalistic investigations into (as Mangetout mentioned) caterpillars and butterflies. I myself fancy the creepy-crawlies that climb out onto trees and “turn into” locusts or cicadas.
We also use the phrase to indicate an uncharacteristic change in behavior. “He turned into a madman”, for instance.
The time it takes for such changes is not as relevant as the interpretation we give it. The caterpillar goes through many changes as it turns into a butterfly, but we are most familiar with specific characteristic appearances. We draw the line at “caterpillar” and another at “butterfly”, and the changes that lead from one to another are simply glossed over in the phrase “turning into”. Similarly, behavior changes may be sudden or may occur over time; it is instead the awareness or recognition of a new characteristic state (arbitrarily circumscribed or defined—and I don’t mean formally defined) that triggers in us the need to describe what happened. That description only elucidates the very characteristic qualities that triggered its emission in the first place. Because of that, we might not remember, we might not have been privvy to, or we simply might not have cared to notice all the “innocent” changes that had taken place. What is important is, “Here it was described by X, here it was described by Y”. And no, the ‘it’ in that phrase doesn’t beg the question, it refers to what motivated the beginning of this post: the place all these descriptions (X, Y, etc) take in the language of the parties involved. This is what links them together.
I must bid the SDMB farewell for a while. Work requires that I travel, and I’ll be out all week. Then I travel back to Ohio to see some family for the holidays. I hope this thread doesn’t die, it is a fascinating question.