He thinks he reads philosophy

>he thinks he reads philosophy
However

>These three investigators- Korzybski, Ogden and Richards agrees broadly on two besetting sins of language. One is identification of words with things. The other is misuse of abstract words.

>Odgen and Richards contribute a technical term, the "referent", by which they the object or situation in the real world to which the word or label refers.

>indeed the goal of semantics might be stated as find the referent.

>When people can agree on the thing which their words refer, minds meet. The communication line is cleared.

>labels and names for things can be classified, roughly, into three classes on an ascending scale.

>1, labels for common objects, such as "dog", "chair" or "pen". Here difficulty is at a minimum
>2, Labels for clusters of collections of things- "mankind",, "consumer goods", "germany", "white race". These are abstractions of a higher order, and confusion in their use is widespread. There is no entity "white Race" in the world outside of our heads, but only some millions of individuals with skin of an obvious or dubious whiteness.

>3, Labels for essences and qualities such as "the sublime," "freedom," "individualisim," "truth,". For such terms there is no discoverable referents in the outside world,, and by mistaking them for substantial entities somewhere at large in the environment, we create a fantastical wonderland. This zone is the especial domain of philosophy, politics and economics.

>we normally bed the hard question of finding referents and proceed learnedly to define the term by giving another dictionary abstraction, for example, defining "liberty" by "freedom" - "thus peopleing the universe with spurious entities, mistaking symbolic machinery for referents." We seldom come down to earth, but allow our language forms or symbolic machinery to fashion a demonolgy of absolutes and high-order abstractions, in which we come to believe as firmly as Calvin believed in the Devil.

>you doubt this? Let me ask you a question: Does communisim threaten the world? Unless you are conscious of the dangers lying in the use of abstract terms, you may take this question seriously. You may personify "communisim" as a real thing, advancing physically over the several continents, as a kind of beast or angel, depending on your politics.

>but you have identified the word with the thing, and furthermore you would be very hard put to it to find lower-order referents for the term. I have been searching for them for years. The question as it stands is without meaning.

Bump, does anyone actually have any thoughts?

>positivism

meditate so that you will learn to sotp thinking

Kek. So you did not understand one word.

I don't read garbage.

>I didn't read what you post
>here is my opinion
Good show.

I read what you post, not the garbage book. What you posted amounts to positivism.