Other life forms organize their surroundings in some fashion, have types/kinds, respond in stereotyped ways to representations of objects
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yes, some kind of abstraction or representation or “digestible clue”.
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“existence” as a condition or state, seems to need …
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yeah this is where my brain fizzles
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Well, it needs an object.
… but a subject.. does it need a subject…
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..ok, the doing of the abstracting, the doing of the representing… would be the subject?
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oh, i know this too. I’ve lectured people about this before. Yes, of course. Right in front of me it was.
Read a big book containing this, chastising the world of the sciences for turning everything into a noun and removing all of the subjects.
MAK Halladay, creator of System Functional Grammar.
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I learned a lot from the text (Introduction to Systemic Functional Grammar – which was the whole thing – there wasn’t a Part 1 or 2 afterwards).
Basically, what scientific and political genres both do is a never ending nominalization.
It’s very powerful. It can turn the most inanimate object into a subject itself “doing” things – and while it’s useful in moving concepts around, it can also be very manipulative.
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They’re what he called “grammatical metaphors” – metaphors that are “structural” as it were, as “they occur” at a “deeper level” than semantics – at the level of grammar.
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Is there a name for the distinction between “ghost town” and “plant”? It’s likely obvious and I already know it but I need to see it.
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I mean, plants for example. We assign a category of plant to these things we call plants. There’s certainly not nothing there but only because we see them, consider them important, and name them.
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ok. Plants exist because they engage with their surroundings.
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Yes. Ok Signal is coming in a bit to my brain. I sit with my fingers frozen above the keyboard for 10 or so seconds, refusing to respond “Yes” until I reasoned it out as fully as I want there.
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More than just living subjects.
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I can work with the notion of composition. inheritance I would struggle with because the children inherit everything from the parents, which to me is just wishful thinking.
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That’s what I didn’t like about object oriented programming: Any properties of the parents were available to the children and then you can turn them off in the children.
Maybe there’s a way to tell it not allow certain properties to be passed on, I don’t know. But I never studied that kind of programming that much, only enough to know it confused me.
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