RE: RARA-AVIS: Murderous geniuses

From: Kerry J. Schooley ( gsp.schoo@murderoutthere.com)
Date: 11 Apr 2004


At 02:05 PM 09/04/2004 -0700, you wrote:
><<The label is the thing.>>
>
>Not at all, except in nightmare scenarios such as the age
>of the image and of pseudoevents... Seriously, very often
>there is no "thing" to go with the label.

Exactly. These are abstractions that are nothing but their labels. The labels are the things, the ideas, the concepts.

But this is true even with more concrete "things". I have a dog. Well, dogs are so loyal and faithful that it is hard to imagine them with their own lives and purposes, so let's make my dog a cat. Cats are more independent. They seem to possess an independent point of view. I, and others have agreed to label the categorization of observed biological details and behaviours that this animal exhibits as "cat". The cat itself may have a night job doing stand-up comedy, and I can conceive that such behaviour is possible, but neither I nor anybody else, to my knowledge, have seen this happen (outside of the comics- which would make my dog a comic-book character, not truly a cat) and so we would have to adjust the abstraction behind the label if we were to stumble into a cat comedy club.

Meanwhile my dog, for the purposes of argument, remains a cat, bred and trained to loyalty and faithfulness, and whatever behaviours and appearances that match the human ideas of what a dog should be. Some dogs, it seems to me, have been bred to look more like cats.

>Best, and have a nice weekend.

Oh dear. More abstractions.

Kerry

------------------------------------------------------ Literary events Calendar (South Ont.) http://www.lit-electric.com The evil men do lives after them http://www.murderoutthere.com
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