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Definitions:
Eris : Gr. Myth. the goddess of strife and discord
eristic : of or provoking controversy or given to sophistical argument and specious reasoning
THE SACRED CHAO
THE SACRED CHAO is the key to illumination. Devised by the Apostle Hung Mung in ancient China, it was modified and popularized by the Taoists and is sometimes called the YIN-YANG. The Sacred Chao is not the Yin-Yang of the Taoists. It is the HODGE-PODGE of the Erisians. And, instead of a Podge spot on the Hodge side, it has a PENTAGON which symbolizes the ANERISTIC PRINCIPLE, and instead of a Hodge spot on the Podge side, it depicts the GOLDEN APPLE OF DISCORDIA to symbolize the ERISTIC PRINCIPLE.
The Sacred Chao symbolizes absolutely everything anyone need ever know about absolutely anything, and more! It even symbolizes everything not worth knowing, depicted by the empty space surrounding the Hodge-Podge.
HERE FOLLOWS SOME PSYCHO-METAPHYSICS.
If you are not hot for philosophy, best just to skip it.
The Aneristic Principle is that of APPARENT ORDER; the Eristic Principle is that of APPARENT DISORDER. Both order and disorder are man made concepts and are artificial divisions of PURE CHAOS, which is a level deeper that is the level of distinction making.
With our concept making apparatus called "mind" we look at reality through the ideas-about-reality which our cultures give us. The ideas-about- reality are mistakenly labeled "reality" and unenlightened people are forever perplexed by the fact that other people, especially other cultures, see "reality" differently. It is only the ideas-about-reality which differ. Real (capital-T True) reality is a level deeper that is the level of concept.
We look at the world through windows on which have been drawn grids (concepts). Different philosophies use different grids. A culture is a group of people with rather similar grids. Through a window we view chaos, and relate it to the points on our grid, and thereby understand it. The ORDER is in the GRID. That is the Aneristic Principle.
Western philosophy is traditionally concerned with contrasting one grid with another grid, and amending grids in hopes of finding a perfect one that will account for all reality and will, hence, (say unenlightened westerners) be True. This is illusory; it is what we Erisians call the ANERISTIC ILLUSION. Some grids can be more useful than others, some more beautiful than others, some more pleasant than others, etc., but none can be more True than any other.
DISORDER is simply unrelated information viewed through some particular grid. But, like "relation", no-relation is a concept. Male, like female, is an idea about sex. To say that male-ness is "absence of female-ness", or vice versa, is a matter of definition and metaphysically arbitrary. The artificial concept of no-relation is the ERISTIC PRINCIPLE.
The belief that "order is true" and disorder is false or somehow wrong, is the Aneristic Illusion. To say the same of disorder, is the ERISTIC ILLUSION.
The point is that (little-t) truth is a matter of definition relative to the grid one is using at the moment, and that (capital-T) Truth, metaphysical reality, is irrelevant to grids entirely. Pick a grid, and through it some chaos appears ordered and some appears disordered. Pick another grid, and the same chaos will appear differently ordered and disordered.
Reality is the original Rorschach.
Verily! So much for all that.
5. Hung Mung slapped his buttocks, hopped about, and shook his head, saying
"I do not know! I do not know!"
HBT; The Book of Gooks, Chap. 1
Source:
• http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tilt/principia/introh.html
• http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tilt/principia/body.html
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Charlton Laird, Language and the Dictionary, Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language (David B. Guralnik, editor in chief), pp.xxvi-xxvii, 1978 and 1974, 1976
Language and the Dictionary
by Charlton Laird
pp.xxvi-xxvii
IX. Dictionaries and Meaning
<skip the first paragraph of section IX.>
Part of the difficulty arises from the fact that, in any strict sense, words do not have intrinsic meaning. The meanings and the sense of words are in the users of the language, in the speakers and writers, in the hearers and readers. The words are stimuli that call forth senses of meaning, one sense in the speaker and writer, a somewhat different sense in the hearer or reader, and in reality a different sense in each hearer and reader, since no word can ever have quite the same impact on any two people, nor, if one wishes to push the investigation far enough, does a word have precisely the same meaning any two times it is used. Thus, the lexicographer, when he tries to define a term, is not trying to put into words an ideal, objectively existing meaning which could be completely and exactly revealed if his defining practices were without flaw.
He is trying to describe what he trusts is a consensus, even though a mainly unconscious consensus, of the ways in which users believe they are employing the word, for interestingly enough, the fact that words have no objective meaning does not prevent users from believing they have. In fact, users believe this so strongly that they will fight about the meaning of words, and those fights are national and international as well as personal. Constitutions are drafted, laws are made, cases at law are decided, and books and articles and newspaper are written on the tacit assumption that words do have meanings. On this assumption the maker of dictionaries must work. He knows that although philosophically he cannot describe meaning, he can attempt to describe the common convictions about a word, aware that language can function and can serve mankind on this working assumption, and that for practical purposes words can be defined.
Within limits, meanings can be pinned down. Most words have what are called referents, something to which they refer. The name Rabbi Abraham ben Meir Ibn Ezra probably refers to only one poet-grammarian, since it is unlikely that there was another Spanish Jewish divine by the same name. Similarly, as usually used, Jesus has only one referent, although the word is used as a given name in same countries. That is, proper names presumably have referents, one referent to a name, since theoretically the proper name attaches to only one object, even though the same linguistic shape may be the proper name for another object or kind of object. Molly Mog, the heroine of The Fair Maid of the Inn, is quite different from a Molly Maguire Riot and different also from the sheep in one of Chaucer's tales “that was called Molly”. Similarly, almost any concrete term is likely to have an identifiable referent. Words like goat and automobile refer only to one referent at a time, whether it be a single object or class of objects. But the concept of referents has its limits; no two people would be likely to agree as to what truth refers to, except that they would agree that it does not refer to something false. The concept becomes even less useful with grammatical terms like but, a, and of. In the consideration of many other words, for instance, terms like full, somewhat, and beautiful, the concept of referents seems to do little more than confuse the issue.
Furthermore, even for those words that have identifiable referents, a word obviously does more than identify an object. Almost always and inevitably it has more meaning than that. The mere fact that a word is heard or read assures us that it will do more. A word like Hiroshima, although it has as its referent a certain Japanese city, today means more than just a specific community. A word like Mary, whatever its referent, is likely to mean more to all Christians than to most Buddhists, more to Roman Catholics than to Unitarians, more to nuns than to most cowboys. Here an old distinction is useful, if not very precise──the difference between a word's denotation and its connotation. The denotation has been defined as the total of all the word's referents. Its connotation concerns the personal and especially the emotional impact that the word can arouse. Obviously, neither of these identifications will bear examination, but every word has some sort of recognized use, some denotation that can be generally described and will be roughly the same for all people, and most words will call up associations that will be unique in each person. These connotations will vary greatly, in degree as well as character; presumably words like God and mother will have strong connotations for all English-speaking persons, even though different connotations for each person, whereas ichthyology and symbiosis will move few readers deeply.
(Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language, second college edition, David B. Guralnik, editor in chief, 1978 and 1974, 1976, )
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Richard Koch, Greg Lockwood, Superconnect, 2010 [ ]
p.188
Imagine, for instance, the bewildering profusion of tongues and dialects Meriwether Lewis and William Clark encountered on their epic voyage of discovery into the uncharted and sparsely populated American West in the early 1800s. They were the first white men to travel the length of the Missouri River in search of a route to the Pacific, and they came across a plethora of tribes and languages - Mandan, Cheyenne, Hidatsas, Sioux, Pawnees, Lakotas, Nez Perce, Cayuse, Blackfoot, Piegan, Wishram, Yakima, Wananpam, Shoshones and Salish.
(Superconnect: harnessing the power of networks and the strength of weak links / Richard Koch, Greg Lockwood--1st American ed., 1. social networks., 2. success., 2010, )
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