From jcowan@reutershealth.com Thu Feb 14 11:20:19 2002 Return-Path: X-Sender: jcowan@reutershealth.com X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-8_0_2); 14 Feb 2002 19:20:19 -0000 Received: (qmail 62467 invoked from network); 14 Feb 2002 19:20:18 -0000 Received: from unknown (216.115.97.172) by m10.grp.snv.yahoo.com with QMQP; 14 Feb 2002 19:20:18 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mail.reutershealth.com) (204.243.9.36) by mta2.grp.snv.yahoo.com with SMTP; 14 Feb 2002 19:20:18 -0000 Received: from reutershealth.com (IDENT:cowan@[10.65.117.21]) by mail.reutershealth.com (Pro-8.9.3/Pro-8.9.3) with ESMTP id OAA11059 for ; Thu, 14 Feb 2002 14:20:41 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <3C6C0DF0.2020209@reutershealth.com> Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2002 14:20:16 -0500 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.6) Gecko/20011120 X-Accept-Language: en-us MIME-Version: 1.0 To: lojban Subject: Re: [lojban] [OT]Argumentum ad elephantum References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: John Cowan X-Yahoo-Group-Post: member; u=8122456 X-Yahoo-Profile: john_w_cowan And Rosta wrote: > You are in effect saying that the narrator is claiming that the text has > the status of a historical document. Not necessarily as such: the story can be true or false. But within the story, the authorial voice claims that the six blind men are referring to the same object, *and* that it is an elephant. This is rank metaphysical spookery. The point of the parable, surely, is that we all see things from our own limited perspectives. But the poem is self-undermining, because of the existence of an authorial voice who uses "the Elephant" = lobi'e xanto, and says "all of them are wrong". This voice can only be the voice of omniscience, and if there is such a perspective, then the notion of limited perspectives falls apart. -- John Cowan http://www.reutershealth.com I amar prestar aen, han mathon ne nen, http://www.ccil.org/~cowan han mathon ne chae, a han noston ne 'wilith. --Galadriel, _LOTR:FOTR_