potential affordances of the hand. In the range of possibilities for a hand.
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There was a tangible thing as a fist at the moment it was formed.
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It’s very popular in music right now. The music rises going faster and faster and then there’s a brief pause just before the bass drops.
That gap is a soundless sound. It could stretch on for an eternity or last for a moment.
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Metaphors upon metaphors. Visual metaphors. auditory metaphors. emotional metaphors. All building upon each other. Concept formation is one of my areas of fascination
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A fist is a feeling of clenching. Clenching is a feeling of a fist. If you never had a hand, could you understand what a fist is? Yes but slightly differently because you’d need a less direct way to relate to a fist, but you could still do it easily enough
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I cannot relate to chronic depression. I’ve never experienced it. But I can relate to melancholy and can conceive of a melancholy that just won’t go away. So by an indirect means I can somewhat understand chronic depression.
But not perfectly. Likewise, a handless person cannot fully understand a fist but they can relate to it in other ways, perhaps imagining it feeling like shifting teeth in a clenched mouth.
You recognize things by experiencing and remembering and you make sense of them by comparing.
A fist does not exist in isolation to the rest of the universe nor separate from ourselves.
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It’s a word used to describe a pattern humans commonly experience from within the womb.
What is a disembodied fist, devoid of context? A definition in a dictionary written by humans to separate a concept from its source, namely us.
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What is a fist can be written as “What” = “a Fist”. I can substitute a lot of words for “What”. I can even use it to form what seems to be a logical paradox, but only if you accept the context from within which the paradox is formed.
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*Could* a disembodied “fist” exist that appears then disappears? Sure. Where did it go? Nowhere because the fist both was and wasn’t simultaneously.
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Where is nowhere? Anywhere.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophatic_theology While this isn’t necessarily theology we’re talking about, similar idea applies.
You can start with everything and narrow down from there. To do that, you start with everything then talk about what parts of everything something is not.
It’s like building a model vs carving a statue. You can build in pieces, such as defining wholes by parts while not iincluding larger wholes, or you can start with everything to get down to wholes and parts.
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etymology wise, a thing is related to a ‘think’, a meeting. A thing is a meeting. A meeting of what? Parts, words, descriptors, etc.
So that’s another way to look at a “thing”.
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