All our secrets they are tailored trouble
Draped loose now around your hips
The band Taking Back Sunday recently released their song “Liar (It Takes One To Know One)”.
I’m an addict for dramatics
I confuse the two for love
Tony Petrossian directed a wonderful video for the song which is available through the band’s website, and on YouTube – Liar (It Takes One To Know One).
It’s still a question of
How long will this hold?
[*]
I have just attended a mini-conference on truth and knowledge, organized by Manfred Füllsack. Well, you know, it doesn’t take a bunch of acknowledged experts to make you know what you do not know, but then it certainly helps in some way or other.
You don’t need a weatherman
To know which way the wind blows
— Bob Dylan
In fact, I am still pondering over what I have actually been listening to. When someone articulates the need to distinguish tacit and articulated knowledge is this distinction nevertheless articulated, or is it meant to provoke the question which particular tacit knowledge it takes to draw the distinction?
Or, have I simply missed the speakers blink their Epimenidic eyes?
When Herbert Hrachovec compared the truth of knowledge with the expiry date of food might it be that the truth of his comparison had already expired at the time it has reached the audience? Thomas Auinger said this is not an issue of relativism. Quoting him: “Hier gibt es kein Relativierungsproblem.” Besides me wondering about what he was relating to, he might have been right about it if we consider the fact that the word “Relativierungsproblem” pretty much only came into existence when he used it. Or, was Herbert Hrachovec right when Thomas Auinger’s truth expired?
Of course, it’s all a question of definitions, isn’t it? (I love it!)
We have covered disfinism earlier here: The pure disfinism (of no definitions) and the eclectic disfinism (of a great many definitions). I should further extend the concept of disfinism by implicit disfinism.
Implicit disfinism is the science (or art — if you want — unless you define it) of discussing theories which try to explain the nature and scope of specific notions by use of the notions themselves without ever defining them. The little conference serves as a particularly nice example where several theories of epistemology (that’s theories of theories of knowledge) have been debated including plenty of references to truth and knowledge, shamelessly avoiding their definitions.
Thanks, guys!
[Ratta suggests not to move at all since Bertrand Russell said that all movements go too far, and this is certainly true. Those isolated better be independent, of course.]
Stop Making Sense, one of my favorite self-contradictory principles, is also the title of a wonderful video of Talking Heads‘ Stop Making Sense tour in 1983.
Since Ratta reminded us of who we are to do what we do as long as we do (make sense) I’d like to remind myself of the fact that I intended to confront my blog with some more posts about facts (as if this were possible). So, introductory, here is a list of facts about facts taken from lyrics of the video Stop Making Sense:
If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it,
does it make a sound?
— George Berkeley (1561-1626)
Enough people, it might seem, wrote about the term attention whore. The Urban Dictionary expressively explains attention whore. The Uncyclopedia shows some imagery. Wonderful writer Cairo Otaibi pretended to out herself in a comment to No comment is a comment. Google lists a gazillion of results, and even more so, quite a number of people say: We are all attention whores.
I agree!
For it is such a nice example of a lying liar. And of course, we are all attention whores. Assuming some aren’t we wouldn’t know about them, would we?
Attention! A digression: If we are all attention whores, and if we cannot know about those who aren’t, might this prove that we are all liars because we wouldn’t know of people who tell the truth?
Attention again! An answer: Truth is that those telling the truth are the actual liars. — I wonder who could read this out of George Berkeley’s writings.
Thinking of perception, like in how we perceive a tree, does the tree create a mental notion, or does our mind create the tree? Is attention an attention whore’s service, or is she paid by it?
Ouroboros, you are her mother.
Words ought not to be trusted – you can never be sure if they mean what they say.
— Ashleigh Brilliant
Let’s assume that when people say something they generally mean something different. Then, the question “What do you mean?” generally makes no sense at all.
If you think that some people at least sometimes do say what they mean, well, I anyway do understand something different from what they say let alone what they mean.
So, what does it mean when someone says that she or he makes a lot of use of dictionaries and thesauruses searching for word origins? Like Dave Pollard just wrote? Or like half of my own blog?
What does it mean if someone is especially picky about words, if we try to be precise, if we try to avoid obfuscation and ambiguity, and if we moreover foster meaning with references?
Experts of wording driving away from their audience, burying augury of knowledge in wisdom, the paradox of communication, blatant honesty about lying.
Of course, this makes sense to us, anyway.
We are each of us angels with only one wing.
And we can only fly by embracing each other.— Luciano de Crescenzo
Though, he did not mention that his was broken.
Me, I am no angel, I am just a common long-tailed rodent; each of my whiskers a wing, making my mind fly, embracing the world within.
It was forbidden.
It could not be avoided.
The observing system looked at any construction from outside and
Remade it anew.
The building was never completed.
Eternity did not submit to construction.
There was no exit except in silence.
Louis H. Kauffman: What is a number?
Cybernetics & Systems (1999) 30: 113-.
