Paint-bottle

Trying to explain the basics of the philosophy of language to my brother, I ended up being more disillusioned than I had need to be. I couldn’t convince him that a paint-bottle was not a paint-bottle, but that we had invented both the object and the name, but that isn’t quite it, isn’t it? Now things like the sky and moon and water, we have named, things which we cannot claim to have created, things which are natural. So, going by this, arbitrary naming of natural phenomena and objects is precisely that, arbitrary naming. In other words, doing things which we had no business to do. But a paint-bottle, how does one quite explain that? A paint-bottle is something that we have created, and we have named. Does that not justify our actions? We name our children, don’t we? But we might still argue that even though we may claim to have created a paint-bottle, we cannot claim to have created it from nothing, that is, it consists of materials which already naturally existed, or which, in rare cases, we have created. But that is not quite it. No matter if it is made of materials natural or artificial, it exists, and the materials exist, in a sphere which we cannot control. Creating does not presume ownership. No, not ownership, but understanding. We claim to know the things we create, so it’s all right if we wish to assign it a name, a marker. Coming back to the original point, a name is not quite the object.

But, looking at a paint-bottle, can you think of it in any other name? Can you even acknowledge it without acknowledging the name? Then is the object reduced, distorted or worse, not even referred to when I say paint-bottle? This brings us to the next part: names are intertwined with meaning. Names are not empty shells, but they hold meaning. But that meaning itself is what we have created through names, so is it invalidated? When I’m thus holding forth on things having names, I’m implicitly imagining a blank, dark space, where objects are afloat, to be the empirical real, which has nothing to do with our empirical real. Though empirical presupposes sensory perception, my empirical real is not so. It is a blank, dark space with floating objects like space debris.

This brings me to a tacit ackowledgement of the idea of the perverse obtuseness of objects. But this imagining itself is positive, and not quite the depressing scenario which faced me while I was done explaining (if I can call it that). That objects are unknowable does not depress me quite so much, because that means (to me) that they are knowable on some other worlds, in some other sphere. But this bullshits my idea of the empirical real.