Words - a tidbit

Sometimes I am in the midst of something (in this case, an all night paper writing session), and I have thoughts I don't want to lose entirely...which I will if I don't write them down somewhere. Sometimes I'll try to preserve them by making incomplete posts about them. In other words, this will be disjointed and incoherent.

Words - thinkers of language make the mistake of treating words as if proper nouns for ideas (idealism). Idealism hangs on often not because Plato sticks in the back of throats, but because we treat words like names, and assume they must have their unique subjects. Just as "Mike" and "Mike" can be two differnet people, we think that a word that adopts two meanings is split in twain in all but superficial means. Say "sanction" - a word that is its own antonym. A ruler sanctions an activity...another ruler puts sanctions on another country. Permission/restriction. No one doubts that words can have wholly different - or even opposing - meanings. But people persist in their belief that each word carries with it a footnote to one specific meaning, and the first sanction is really just "sanction1" in the dictionary, and the second is "sanction2". But a word does not mark an evocation to a trailing static definition - it is a conduit to openness to the other. The depth at which radical intersubjectivity runs is proven by any single word in the dictionary. Analytic philosophers, those who are afraid of language becoming relative, etc....are extremely pessimistic about the capacity of humans to create meaning-giving context!!