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To be able to reason about things, our human brains are set up like God intended, we use three things: symbols, referents, and reference.
A symbol, also known as a sign, is a word, gesture, picture, name or similar.
A referent is the thing in-and-of-itself.
And reference is the relationship between the two.
Regardless of whether or not you wanna reason for or against the existence of dogs, butterflies, roads, next Friday, or the lost moon Chrysalis, you’d be using some kind of reference to do so.
Since language is fragmented (Gen 11:1–9), sometimes words can mean different or even opposite things. For example, I might say that a scientist has a problem to solve and mean that they have a mystery they would like to try unravel or learn more about. This is confusing since “problem” also sometimes means a crisis or trouble like a ship with a leak, but that’s not what I mean in this context.
And it’s important to realize that there’s no way around this. That’s just how it is and that won’t change. Here on the pre-eschatonic Earth, there’s never gonna be a “corporal Carrot”–universe where every word has precisely one meaning and is always used in exactly that one meaning.
Luckily, most people use the Gricean maxim of quality when they talk, meaning that they are trying their best to say relevant things concisely, most of the time.
So even if you wanna say “I currently believe that Chrysalis never existed”, you’d be using a reference (such as the name “Chrysalis”) to do so. Now, again thanks to the Gricean maxim of quality, we don’t need to do this about every Russell-teapot out there. We don’t need to try to think of every variation of every non-existing thing and name it. Chrysalis received this attention since a lot of people believe it existed and they were talking about it.
One of the reasons they believe that, and don’t shoot the messenger on this, is that the rings have similar composition as one of Saturn’s other moons, Iapetus, and they mathed out that if a Iapetus-like moon got smashed, something similar to Saturn’s rings would probably happen.
No-one knows for sure but that’s why, even though science meant “to know” in Latin, science really is just a big “hmm, maybe like this? Let’s put it here for now” sorta like when you’re doing the first pass of sorting the pieces out of a jigsaw puzzle box. Sometimes it really does feel like pieces fit together perfectly, while other times it’s more tentative or even flat-out wrong.
The same goes for our relationship with God. The book is full of examples of how we go astray, either on a personal level or with humanity as a whole. Young Earth creationism is only one of many ways to tentatively sort the jigsaw pieces. It’s part of protestant hermeneutics which arose in modern times (16th century) in an ever-more curious and science-minded world.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that as an art, technique, or philosophy evolves, there are always gonna be fans of a particular stage or era. “I like baroque music”, “I like 80s thrash metal”, “I like sock-hop”. These nostalgic fans are not necessarily wrong: things evolve in many-branched trees, of thought and counter-thought, of steps in the wrong direction or in the right. It’s good to be able to go back to what worked from what doesn’t work. You might have to think of how you got started sitting in your little room.
At the same time, something that starts as a “hey guys, can we maybe try to think kind of differently about this stuff?” so often freezes and itself becomes a means of killing new thought.
Jesus, for example, praised both serpents and doves in Matthew 10:16. If God created everything, where can I put my feet that’s not holy? We’d need to, with every word we write, credit the Highest. For example, that previous sentence should read “We’d need to, with every word our God-given ability to write lets us write, credit the Highest”, and this sentence itself should start “For example, that previous sentence that God let me write…”, but, just like the Gricean maxim of quantity predicts, we can omit some things once we know that the person we’re speaking to already know them.
It’s all the same re-gifted sixpence but it’s also all pretty darn special. Jesus praising those animals are like if you were to praise your own toe, but, you know, sometimes you wanna do that. You find this li’l part of reality, like how a butterfly flies out of a pupa, and it makes you wanna go jouez haut-bois, résonnez musettes! Psalm 104:25! Every li’l sparrow and bug and butterfly and grain-of-sand is accounted for, as is every moonshard across the night’s canvas.
You don’t get mad if your explanation turns out to be false; in fact, you’re generally EXCITED because that means you now have more evidence pointing to what ACTUALLY happened!
The messed up corruption in academia does not always reflect that ideal, but, yes, that’s the ideal! That’s what I was trying to say, too.