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Gnomic : a rarely mobilized genre for historical and philosophical insight.

“Uttering or containing maxims and aphorism, and pertaining to the gnomic poets, certain Greek poets whose writings are of a gnomic character.”

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April 2007 An excerpt From Joe Petrulionis,’ Cognitive Verification and Conventional Coherences in Theories of Knowledge, an unpublished essay which will be reworked until the riddle is solved or upon Joe’s permanent departure from the forum.

No skepticism runs so deep as to enable the claim that nothing exists at all. For at the very instant of this claim, two things would already exist: the claim itself, however inchoate the initial utterance, and either the maker of the claim or the textual or mental reservoir of the information comprising the claim. By the conditions of the skeptical claim itself, therefore, should any of these things exist, in isolation or in plurality, the skeptic’s claim must be false.  

Other indications of the implausibility of this ultimate skeptical claim may be found in the logical structure of most languages, assuming that language has evolved as a useful tool for modeling reality. In English, for one instance, the statement that “nothing exists” is an incomprehensible postulate. “Nothing” and “non-existence” are such close synonyms that our systems of meaning reject our efforts to combine “nothing” with its opposite state, “something.” We can not create a subject that means “not is” and tie it meaningfully to a predicate that means “is” and result in a coherent sentence.

Then there is another metaphor, mathematics. Within the mathematical logos of numbers theory can be found yet another indication. “Something” can be represented by any number, real or otherwise. The exact number zero may be only a representative place holder for the concept of “nothing.” But upon closer scrutiny, if we accept this place holder designation of zero as nothing, then how do we account for the possible operations in which “nothing can happen to other digits” and still major changes in the values thereof are the result? A very simple example of this idea is the operation, 4 x 0 = 0. Finally, linear geometry sidesteps the question, “can there be anything less than nothing,” by setting the origin of a line, value zero, as an arbitrary point on that line and creating the idea that there can be “less than zero” in the existence of negative numbers, while leaving the notion of “less than nothing” for the theorists to clean up later.

January 2007

Funny things are words, how they can change their meanings. If a sign is just an “acoustic utterance,” coupled with a mental image, then please tell me how the image can change so quickly, with no apparent modification in the signifier. Let’s start with the words LIBERAL and CONSERVATIVE. My home Latin expert tells me that “liberal” means “free,” “to free” or a “person of literary interests.” And she informs me that “conservative” is derived from the Latin “to hold onto,” “to enslave” or “with slaves.” These days, of course, the meanings have changed dramatically. Liberals are for balanced budgets, protection of communal property and natural resources, individual liberties for EVERYONE, restraint in the use of military power, the abolition of torture, and the universal freedoms of speech, religion, and privacy (even for those people who may disagree with us.) So what are conservatives for? Can it be conservatives stand for “traditional family values” (like patri-powerful petty dictators in the home) and the unbridled abuse of the national credit rating to fight unnecessary wars against peoples posing theoretical, verbal and future threats? Is it now “conservative” to apply torture to our “enemy combatants” even when we know it does not work very well for information gathering or even to help prosecute legal challenges? Is it conservative to control the flow of information through the generous application of national security classifications, in a democracy depending on the free flow of information? And what is conservative about the designation of communal properties like air, water, and wilderness as resources for someone’s personal profit venture? I think I am going to have to spend a little time in tracing what these two words mean, and how they got into their present usage.