Help me find this philosophical idea
 

I recall reading about this but the material escapes me. Can you please point me in the right direction:


When we name or label something we take away some qualities.

or

When something is given a label the true essence is lost.



Thanks!

I don't think it's what you're looking for, but one thing we General Semanticists insist on IS labelling to avoid unsanity (e.g. Greywolf2011 is NOT Greywolf2010, but only the direct spatio-temporal successor to Greywolf2010 in this time-space).

On the other hand, two of the prime tenets of General Semantics are: the WORD IS NOT THE OBJECT; the MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY.

Do I, um, "grok" you? I don't know that that's possible, but it's something to be wished for by this one. The labelling idea, even narrowed to the thought that it narrows your perception of the thing, has been expounded by so many from their own angles, that I believe the original is probably lost.

Wolf is that the same thing as making a catalog of all books and that you cannot include the catalog book inside the catalog? If you include it then it's not the catalog if you don't then it's not the entire catalog since that book is now outside of the catalog.

Do you recall whether it's an ancient philosophy or a modern one?

These statements are based on a long history of thought, tracing back all the way to essentialism, based Plato's idealism and theory of forms: there is the object's form (which we label), which is distinct from the ideal (which we also label). A "tree" that we see in form is distinct from the ideal "tree," though they may have the same label.

In modern philosophy, there is Ferdinand de Saussure's theory of the sign: language is made up of two sides, 1) the signifer, and 2) the signified:

Visually:
http://i170.photobucket.com/albums/u...ure-sign-1.jpg

Saussure's theories worked to distinguish between language (the sign) and that to which we refer (concept + sound-image) by pointing out the disparate components.

Tree is very basic, but words such as war bring up some interesting problems. When I say "war," the concept will vary in my mind compared to when a Somalian refugee to Canada says the word.

I think maybe that's along the lines of what you are referring to: the difference between the word and the concept and how language poses a number of problems with regard to its relationship to concepts (or, basically, the essence of things).

Does any of this ring a bell?

The best I can think of is Hardy's Paradox, discovered (quite technically) in studying quantum mechanics.

Hardy's paradox - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A non-technical explanation I found: "Hardy's Paradox, the axiom that we cannot make inferences about past events that haven't been directly observed while also acknowledging that the very act of observation affects the reality we seek to unearth"

I reckon there is a layman's (philosophical) analogue to the concept, but I'm not familiar with it.

i don't understand the formulation of either sentence:


When we name or label something we take away some qualities.

or

When something is given a label the true essence is lost.


because both seem to presuppose some knowledge of the things themselves that's extra-linguistic (the second)...the first is less problematic, but seems a banality simply because a name is a category so a generality that groups according to certain commonalities. categories don't account for all commonalities. and the general does not account for the specific.

the most explicit walk-through of these kind of problems i know of is in husserl's transcendental phenomenology. there, the project was about getting to a level of certainty as to the meaning of categories; the procedure (the reductions) built in a phase of constructing the commonalities (edetic variation).

but i'm not sure that's what you're looking for. is it?

there are other versions of the statements you have that are more well-formed. the one that jumps to my mind is from wittgenstein's tractatus logico-philosophicus. i'll try to locate it and paste it up when i find it (i'm at work and have stuff to do at the moment)...

hope this helps.

EXACTLY! General semantics deals with "the meaning of meaning". One of the many types of "unsanity" (as opposed to insanity) that occur in the world results from people confusing the word with the object. People who fear snakes become terrified when someone says the word... obviously not a perfectly sane reaction. A second type is such as when a person bitten by a dog a year ago on a day that dog had been badly abused, may refuse to believe the dog is not now a danger, no matter what assurances are given. Labelling the two situations with Dog-last-year, and Dog-this-year tends to help eliminate that problem.

Finally, as with your catalog (a map of your books), a perfect map would include the map itself, which would include a smaller map, ad infinitum. Obviously this cannot happen, so just as we must not confuse the word with the object or the spatio-temporal successor with its predecessor, we must not confuse the map with the territory. The two are NOT the same.

Roachboy, your being at work surely helps.

Wow you guys rock! I have much reading to do.

I think a lot of philosophers discussed the idea of categorization. I wrote a paper on Nietzsche's theory of language that might be what you're referring to. It's been a while but basically Nietzsche's thesis was what you said, when we categorize or label things we lose the objects true essence. Pretty much the opposite of Plato's theory which was that essences or forms are reality and their representations are less real. In the end I didn't really agree with Nietzsches philosophy although I can't remember why. Plato's philosophy is too far-fetched to be believable to me.