thread: 2009-07-13 : How About Some Q and A
On 2009-07-26, cc wrote:
Re: "international treaty", sure I agree with that analogy, but it only highlights the problem - there being no external authority the only recourse that either party has is recrimination and hostility. And it was to obviate that very outcome that we agreed and appointed an authority over the IS in the first place.
Consider the problem from the point of view of a third party who has not assented to the "new fact" asserted about the chamberlain; they have not even been asked to assent, and the due authority has not confirmed it. Should they act on it? Should they include it in their vision of the IS? The coherency of the IS, the very act of it being shared has been undermined by the unilateral arrogation of authority over its content - to which arrogation this third party player has not assented either.
On "hypothetical constructs", I think this is a very dubious argument. Societal norms and cultural values certainly do exist, even if they are not prescriptive at the individual level. As generalisations they are valid and useful descriptions of really existing positions held by significant numbers of people. Similarly it is invalid to say that there is no IS in actuality; the IS may not be real, its content may not exist, but the IS does actually exist. If you read a book and describes the vista of a natural landscape, it evokes an imaginative act on your part. The vista may not be real, but your act of imagination certainly was. And while the IS may not be something that exists distinct from what those players do, in the sense of what they imagine, precisely because it is also shared it is synthetic and mediated, and thus independent of any one of them. The SIS may not have content independent of what the group does, but it can have content independent of what a given individual within that group does.
