I wondered whether I should look back at where we got started on this hot gravity topic and see if maybe the mistake was somewhere there. > RICK: > Would we all agree that: > (1) "The Law of Gravity" is a description...? Yes - but a lot hangs on what "description" means. One mustn't assume that a description is a description because it refers to something. Descriptions aren't just names for things. A description draws a picture. Pictures can be good or bad pictures regardless of whether or not they "refer", and in fact it's the goodness or badness of a thing that is it's primary attribute for MOQ - so reference would be a fact somehow in virtue of (derived from) that goodness. Reference as a variety of the Good - another MOQish refinement of James. Another way to the same point is to say that it's only once we've drawn our pictures that there is anything discrete to refer to - otherwise it's all a continuum (Dynamic Quality). The picturing creates the depicted, if by the depicted we ever mean the discrete and the relations between the discrete (such as laws), rather than the aesthetic continuum. So: "The Law of Gravity" *is* a description, but not a description *of* anything (beyond itself), not a description *of* the galaxy, but rather a part of the picture of (or which includes) that galaxy. It's that big picture (Quine's "corporate body of beleif") which faces the test of experience as a whole, not just the law of gravity, which is one component of that picture. Well, this is one direction in which we might go back to forst principles on this question of gravity. Just some thoughts. Puzzled Elephant ps. A varient of this description topic concerns the measured and the measure. The equivalent of what I've just said in terms of description and described, applied to measurement and measured, would say that ultimately it's only the aesthetic continuum that's measured, and that the measure includes the law of gravity, but that the law of gravity is part of some big measuring kit - not something that can really be measuring anything on it's own. It is important to distinguish the measured and the measure, (that was what the clocks stuff was about, and why I was so glad to get that first perceptive comment from Rick), but after distinguishing them, we then have to be sure that we are applying these distinctions corrrectly to the world. IMHO only DQ can count as the described - everything else falls into the description category, including this mythical "gravity itself". MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/ MD Queries - [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at: http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
