Subject: BHA: RE: Re: Against "primacy"
Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2003 09:42:43 -0500


Hi Tobin,

Well, since I continue to keep at it, I guess I don't regard the primacy question as a complete waste of time.  On the evolutionary question of a "non-chicken" laying an egg from which a "chicken" hatches, I don't see this as an ontological issue so much as a labeling issue.  Ontologically, I don't think there was ever a sharp line between the "non-chicken" and the "chicken."  I think that the "chicken" in question would still be inter-fertile with the birds whom some human observer might say were still "non-chickens," because they were more like the maternal egg-layer than the fowl hatchling.  

Our words often draw sharp lines around "things" in a fuzzy world.  We create a "coloring-book" world that misrepresents a world in which "things" are constituted by their relations with other "things."

Regards,

Dick

-----Original Message-----
From: Tobin Nellhaus [mailto:nellhaus-AT-gis.net] 
Sent: Tuesday, November 18, 2003 6:40 PM
To: bhaskar-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU
Subject: BHA: Re: Against "primacy"


Dick wrote:

> It often seems to me that a lot of time is wasted over the question of 
> "primacy" -- whether of mind over matter, or vice-verse, or of 
> practice over theory, or vice versa, or of chickens over eggs, or vice 
> versa. Chickens have eggs inside 'em, and eggs have chicken inside 
> *them*.

Um, I hate to undermine an old saw, but if you accept the theory of evolution, then there's a clear answer to the chicken/egg conundrum: the egg came first.  What laid it was not quite a chicken.

Likewise, I don't think it's a waste of time at all to struggle with the primacy issue.

Yow, T.

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



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