This one came through exactly as keyboard. (Reminder: It was originally keyboarded in Final Draft, and then copied and pasted into an AOL email sent to aesthetics-l. Down below is an early incomplete draft of an email to Aesthetics-l for Kate that I never sent. We'll see if Word is incompatible with Databack. On Dec 29, 2012, at 4:00 PM, [email protected] wrote:
> In a message dated 12/29/12 3:06:35 PM, [email protected] writes: > > >> Pretty sure it's when you use something on your computer and then copy >> it to your email program....... >> > Good tip, Kate. Here's something not from Word, but from Final Draft, the > progra,used by screenwriters and playwrights. > > KIT > -- "Inert"? I'm not sure what you're after. What's that mean, "Words and > names are inert"? > BREN > Suppose I write 'Aristotle' on a piece of paper. You believe that scribble, > 'Aristotle', is doing something. You believe that while it lies there, > there's mysterious, mystical activity going on called referring, designating, > naming. Or you may say, "No-no, words can't refer, only people can." So > statements can't be false, only staters can? Or would you ever call a statement a > liar? [This is a test.} > In a message dated 12/9/12 12:10:24 PM, [email protected] writes: A mark is not a word. A mark shaped to resemble a small part of something is not intended to carry memories or notions and if the viewer insists that it brings memories and notions he is not looking at the mark itself in a field of other marks . He is you might say missing the mark. Kate Sullivan Agreed -- a mark "is" not a word. But neither is anything else a word. There's no such thing as a mind-independent category of entities that "are" words. There are all sorts of sounds and scriptions that are CALLED words by someone or another on this globe, but "calling" something a "word" does not make it "BE" a "word". The notion of wordness is entirely a mental concoction. As are, for examples, nounness, verbness, adverbness etc. Stipulation is not creation. "Marks" can occasion notion in the mind of an observer just as those things you call words do. Consider all those marks mathematicians use to convey plus, minus, equals etc. People are convinced the marks "mean" something because they occasion similar notion in most observers, but in every instance all that's happening in the observers minds is a recollection of how the mark was used before. For example, an instructor at the front of the class may talk about the "square root" of a number until we get the idea. Eventually he gets around to introducing that peculiar mark, the "radical". When next we see a radical we remember much of what he said. What comes to mind when we see the radical are bits of our memory; it's an error to think that, each time we see a radical, the radical's "meaning" is shafted down into our head by a bolt from Plato's warehouse of "meanings". When the painter paints a hand, we may consider it "a mark" or a series of marks but the painter is counting on the observer's memory. He counts on his mark being "recognized" as a hand, and look! how speckled and wrinkled with age it is! Why would he put that hand on the babe in his Madonna and Child painting? What does it MEAN? What the maker of a mark "intends" may be interesting, but the observer does not see an intention, they see the "mark" i.e. a line or color in painting, a word or phrase in poem, a note, melody, or trumpet in a music composition. Very, very often, the effects on the observer are essentially dependent on the observer's memory.
