Posted by Muncie on October 03, 1999 at 18:57:43:

In Reply to: Salute! #1 posted by mike cahill on September 26, 1999 at 16:21:01:

Hello Mike,
Thank you for your response and meeting it with salutations.
Sorry to take so long to reply, but it is not easy for me to find time for posting.

There are two points I would like to make in this piece.
1) That with internet forums you cannot assume that a non-reply is agreement or consent.
2) No, I do not feel that your reply answered the question I raised about object constancy.

1)
First, about assuming that a non-reply is agreement or consent. Although Silence taken as agreement, is often a general assumption, it is really only valid for certain contexts. It assumes that there is free and open communication that is unhampered by any problems that might cut off the dialog without the knowledge of the participants. This is context is best met by friends in a face to face dialog.
The Internet is very different from this. There may be technological problems. There may be difficulties on the responder’s end, such as his death, or needing to take care of other matters. Also, there may be a difficulty with the dialog itself.
By this I mean that the context of the dialog may be such that a potential responder feels that any response he/she makes may not make any significant difference in the dialog. How could this happen?
Here is an example. Suppose a person has a beautiful, but delicate object he wants to show all his friends. He keeps the object wrapped in a nice soft cloth. He gets in the middle of the group and everyone is curious. Some people say they can’t see it. There is a little jostling. Those that can get a glimpse ask if they can hold it to get a closer look. The proud owner feels really nervous. So he decides No, nobody but he can hold it. Nobody can really get a good look to inspect the thing because they can’t hold it. But the owner keeps saying, “Its so beautiful, see how the light shines from it, how it has this sense of warmth.”
After a while the friends just get frustrated or bored or figure they are never going to get chance to really see it anyway, so they just walk away. As his friends are walking away the proud owner says to himself, “none of them were really interested in what I had, they are all selfish and unfair and never deserved to see my pretty thing anyway.”
The one’s walking away may be concluding that their friend wasn’t ever really sincere about showing them the pretty thing anyway, and probably it wasn’t really very pretty anyhow.

2)
For part two. Your reply does not satisfy because you responded to the weaker part of my post, the part about the rose. The stronger part dealt with object constancy. Which, basically, you dodged. How does triadic analysis and your UTK deal with being able to identify an object over time.
If you wish to deal with it in the context of the rose statement, then I will phrase it this way.
When I say “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”, it means something quite different than “If I call a rose by it’s Spanish name, I will acquire knowledge of another culture”. And it means something quite different than “If I give a rose a new name in my own language, there will be some effect over time, perhaps subtle, perhaps not.”
What I mean by the rose observation is something like this.
“We have knowledge of a rose that language cannot touch.” It is that “knowledge of a rose that language cannot touch” that I would like you to do your TA upon. By this sentence, I do not mean for you to do TA on the phrase in the English language, but on the knowledge object to which the phrase refers. I would think that your analysis should include the scent, but not be limited to it.

Regards,
Muncie

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