Subject: BHA: Re: the possibility of naturalism
Date: Tue, 7 Jan 1997 23:02:49 -0500


Hey Ruth, good to hear from you again!

On to the transitive/intransitive business: sorry to sound like a broken
record, everyone, but let me remind you--ideas are *real*.  They have causal
efficacy (otherwise, no agency).  That means, whatever their transitivity
*now*, once they have occurred they have causal properties and therefore may
be taken as *intransitive* to the subsequent thought.  In fact, *anything*
that's in the past is now intransitive (barring Stalinist revisions of
history).  Perhaps our lives would be simpler if we looked on TD/ID as
basically a temporal distinction?  The broader sense of a transitive
dimension consisting of socially-conditioned traditions of thought, methods,
etc would then point to things that people have and *continue* to think or
do.

---
Tobin Nellhaus
nellhaus-AT-gwi.net
"Faith requires us to be materialists without flinching": C.S. Peirce



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