I‘m working through Kripke again because I know it’s a half truth and I can’t quite put my finger on what’s missing. I know what is wrong with analytic philosophy (sets): their construction destroys information, causation, and operational construction, and therefore existential possibility. I know what’s right with information analysis: marginal difference (cause of change in state).
So analytic philosophy is a sort of dead end in the sense that language is always informationally incomplete.
But his understanding of names is correct. Even if his examples are not (the referent Aristotle isn’t identical to the referent Aristotle if he dies at age two and never creates the set of properties Aristotle). We cannot construct the references to the two year old without the reference to the man Aristotle. Therefore operationally, the example cannot exist. I can refer to Aristotle at the age of two, but I cannot refer to a greek two year old with the name of Aristotle. and convey any meaning without the existence of the aforementioned Aristotle as an accomplished adult.
Meaning does not tell us much about truth – if anything. And the verbalists (analyticals and rationalists) are working with too little information to achieve much. Existence tells us a great deal about truth. Even if other methods tell us a lot about meaning. But even where they tell us about meaning, they tell us nothing about truth. And I think this is the area of confusion, because of hermeneutic conflation. We see this coming out of judaism and christianity and into law, where it did not previously exist. But this conflation of truth and meaning has imposed a catastrophically damaging influence on western thought. And in both the ancient(agrarian), modern(industrial), and current (information) eras, it has constituted a revolt against truth and the undesirability of truth for the parasitic and unproductive classes, peoples, and cultures.
Meaning is dependent upon the content of one’s mind, and analogy to experience, but has little to no dependence upon truth content.
Truth is dependent upon reality that is independent of the content and mechanism of of one’s mind – even if it is dependent upon the reduction to analogy to experience so that the mind can grasp it.
But meaning is required as part of the process of free association. It is useful in obtaining information (hypotheses) that we may pursue and turn into truth candidates. It is useful in the transfer of experiences whether or not those experiences contain truth content. We must construct hypotheses out of concepts we can grasp, and we can only grasp concepts reducible to analogies to experience. So we must accumulate analogies to experience in sufficient number that we are able to run tests for possibility.
This is one of the reasons for the value of scientific thinking (theories of general rules) since they reduce the informational content we must process in order to identify patterns and test perceptions and information against them.
My hope (my suspicion) is that truthfulness once practiced like any other set of general rules will have an equally influential impact on human demonstrated intelligence and cooperation as has science.
My concern is that we have passed peak human and are damaging our gene pool, and that we must reverse our century and a half of dysgenia before the accumulated damage is not correctable through assortative mating.
Curt Doolittle
The Philosophy of Aristocracy
The Propertarian Institute
Lviv Ukraine