On Jun 13, 2009, at 6:25 PM, William Conger wrote:
You can't acquire what is not there. You can be urged, through some abstraction or direction, to project some quality onto-into something other than yourself. A miner is urges to look for something glittery and is told it's valuable, and so that's the projected quality he sees in gold.
This sounds suspiciously like Cheerskep's adamant assertion that there is no "meaning" in the written or spoken words, but only in the reader's (hearer's) mind. I reject that position. I believe that the mountain or the words contain some persistent structure that can properly be called its essential qualities or its meaning. The knowing of those qualities or meanings occurs in our heads, true, but the tangible properties exist in relatively stable and persistent form outside us. Otherwise, how could many different people separated by many miles and many years and centuries offer reports that concur on many points about the mountains or words?
The photographer shows you the light and shadow complexity of a craggy mountain -- by emphasizing some visual patterns -- and you project that abstraction to the mountain and say, "wow, look at that craggy mountain, it's like a pile-up on the football field". In other words, we carry around in our heads all sorts of pre-packaged qualitative ideas we readily project into the world. And that world is without meaning (qualitative valuing) Which is not to say it is without substance (various quantities of this or that).
But the quality of the mountain isn't "football pile-up." Every responsible commentator would say that the "it's like a pile-up" part is a metaphor; the "craggy" part, maybe not. In fact, that (craggy) is what you say the photographer recorded; the viewer added the analogy.
Moreover, it makes little logical sense to assert that the X quality of a thing Y "is like" some other thing, by analogy. That defeats the purpose of naming X *as a quality* of Y.
The more I think about this discussion, the more I see we are using "quality" in two different and largely incommensurate ways. I use "quality" to refer to essential and persistent properties in a given thing, but you seem to be using it as a form of expression that conveys the commentator's value onto the thing being discussed.
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