Whatchu know about Witt?
September 23, 2011
All modes of thought are predicated, implicitly or otherwise, on one rather religious belief: that a thing is.
What we may say, with all rhetorically conjunctive elegance, is that a thing is in a sense. A thing is in a mathematical sense, or a biological one, or an aural one, etc.
It is senseless and misleading to consider anything beyond the domain of its emergence, outside of or independent of the sense that bears it.
As Wittgenstein points out, the sense is a special thing, it neither is nor is not. It may be distinct, present, unified, subtle, or not. From differences in sense arise clusters and edges, the basis of things.
The phenomenon of sensory discreteness is the basis of the phenomenon of cognition.
Some sophisticated behaviors are possible without cognitive tools (as a brainless slime mold may find the most efficient way through a maze to food).
But by making sense discrete and holding it there, enabling recall and reinvocation, cognition and its offspring language open up what may be learned or understood. The paths to other sense are shortened.
The tradeoff is the potential for inaccuracy, or put more generally, for greater incompleteness.
Work is in minimizing the space between thing and sense, and in curating the systems of understanding they support.
This may be handled best by bearing in mind that any thing is a predicate of sense.
