In a message dated 12/8/08 10:29:11 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > Is there such thing as a blurred object? > Not sure about that ! > Almost every line we write provides the fodder for a lesson in philosophy of language and ontology.
We tend unthinkingly to assume there is a "referent" for every noun, pronoun, verb, adjective and adverb we use. And we tend to assume all members of our audience will have in mind the same notion of that referent. Most of the time, those assumptions make for serviceable efficiency in our thinking and communication. But it's unlikely any of us has had a thought-through notion of "blurred". A moment's reflection suggests we use 'blurred' to apply to an image of an object, and never the object itself. Even when our sentence-form appears to say the blurriness is "in" the object -- as in "It went by so fast it was just a blur." -- we aren't claiming, say, that the surface of the object itself was fuzzy, discontinuous, unlimited. We're saying our "impression" of it was. And yet a physicist might want to correct us. He might say that no matter how fixed, solid, and definitely-bordered an object may seem to us, its surface is in fact porous and as continually changing as the whirling electrons of the atoms of the molecules of the object. Also note: There are all sorts of things we might call the image of a given object: its "image" on our retina, the mental "image" in our consciousness, the "image" in a photograph. We might, with slightly varying notions, call all of these more or less "blurry". In sum, Luc's dubiety seems well-placed to me. ************** Make your life easier with all your friends, email, and favorite sites in one place. Try it now. (http://www.aol.com/?optin=new-dp& icid=aolcom40vanity&ncid=emlcntaolcom00000010)
