The Meaning of Identity and the Bounds of Reason by Thomas Tinnin

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The Meaning of Identity and the Bounds of Reason
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And then there is the story of the Barber of Seville, whose
motto was He Who Shaves All Those Who Do Not Shave
Themselves. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? It goes something like
this: When a customer asked whether the man shaving him
also shaves himself, the man replied that if he didn’t, who
would? to which the customer replied, “the Barber of Seville,”
to which the man exclaimed, “I am the Barber of Seville!”
The customer asked whether he was not then violating his
own motto, to which the barber admitted as much, and so an-
nounced he would no longer shave himself, whereupon the
customer immediately replied, “then you should!” And so on.



TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ................................................................i

LOGICAL IDENTITY ...........................................................1
MEANING AND THE CONCEPT OF IDENTITY ...............................3
THE INTENSIONAL EXPANSION OF A LOGICAL IDENTITY ................7
Literal Interpretations of Symbols
Denoting Identity...................................................10
A Digression on the Particular and the Universal....12
Words as Particulars and as Universals...................17
Pure Nominal Meaning ........................................... 28
Pure Nominal Meaning and Referring ..................... 34
The Liar’s Paradox and Other Logical Anomalies ....37
Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem ............................ 43
THE EXTENSIONAL EXPANSION OF A LOGICAL IDENTITY ..............49
Analytic versus Synthetic Revisited.........................52
THE ANTIREALISM OF MODERN ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY...........66

PHENOMENOLOGICAL IDENTITY ..................................81
THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL IDENTITY OF THE OBJECT: PURE
PHENOMENAL MEANING ....................................................88
THE EMERGENCE OF LANGUAGE: THE SYMBOL-AS-OBJECT..........95
NOMINAL MEANING: THE SUBJECT-AS-OBJECT ......................109

Theories of the Collective ....................................122
Karl Marx and Classical Political Economy............ 127
Neoclassical Economics and Positivism................. 146

Positivism as Rational Existence............................163
THE NEGATION OF SUBJECT-AS-OBJECT: EXISTENTIALISM ..........167

Paradox Resolved.................................................179
THE NEGATION OF EXISTENTIALISM: MY AMERICAN EXPERIENCE,
OR … WHEN LOGIC AND PROPORTION FALL SLOPPY DEAD .......184

Main Street ..........................................................186
The Catcher in the Rye ........................................195
From Steinbeck to Kerouac ..................................202
So the Wind Won’t Blow it All Away ....................217
Walden Two.........................................................225

THE SUBSUMING OF THE PHENOMENAL
UNDER THE NOMINAL..................................................232

REALISM VERSUS ANTIREALISM REVISITED ..............................235
SPECIALIZATION AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE .......................243

Social Conventions and Social Science.................261
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENT ENCLAVES.......................................272
EPILOGUE: THE DIALOGUE OF THE DIALECTIC .......................289
APPENDIX: THE LOGIC OF GRAMMAR..................................297

Predicate Logic ...................................................300

BIBLIOGRAPHY/LIST OF REFERENCE MATERIAL ..........309

INTRODUCTION

IN THE TWENTY-FIRST century, as in the preceding century,
most Western philosophy begins with the analysis of language,
including mathematics and symbolic logic. There really is no
escaping this. Though it has arguably always been so, this
was not explicitly recognized until around the late nineteenth
century. Before that, language and mathematics were per-
ceived as cloaks for more fundamental phenomena for phi-
losophers to study, namely concepts, reason, and ideas, often
enveloped in the all-encompassing inquiry into the nature of
mind or spirit. The importance of the mind grew in the quest
to answer what was knowable and how we knew that we
knew. In the eighteenth century, the philosopher Immanuel
Kant attempted to synthesize what were, by then, recognized
as two sources of knowledge, experience and reason. Kant
was refuting the skepticism that David Hume had sown in that
century. Hume held that not only was all knowledge derived
from sensory perceptions but in fact sensory perceptions were
all we knew. Consequently, knowledge of whatever existed
beyond these sensations, i.e., reality, was forever beyond our
grasp.

Kant conceded that certainty in knowledge of reality was
indeed beyond our grasp. But there was order, and that order

i

was real. However, the order lies within our minds, as the
order of reason or “intuition.” Our minds provide form and
relation to the universe—necessarily so for us to exist at all.
An illustration of this understanding is manifested in what
he called synthetic a priori propositions, i.e., statements that
are known to be true prior to experience, allowing of course
that the meanings of each of the terms are known. An ex-
ample is a simple arithmetic statement such as 2 + 1 = 3.
Later, Georg W. F. Hegel developed this line of thought and
summarized it in the famous refrain “The real is the rational,
and the rational is the real.” Whereas Kant alleged that reali-
ty—things as they are independent of our perceiving them—
could never be known, Hegel believed that this reality was
slowly revealed through the evolution of a single conscious-
ness, or the Absolute, and is realized as a social conscious-
ness. For Hegel, all human history was the development of
this consciousness through the dialectic of opposing ideas.
The Absolute revealed itself as an inexorable unfolding
through human history, with the greatest nation-states and
the greatest names in history playing their unsuspecting parts
in bringing about each stage in this grand scheme of the
Absolute—God?—becoming aware of itself … through us.

Karl Marx followed in the tradition of the Hegelians,
paying homage to that “mightiest of thinkers” while setting
Hegel “right side up.” Marx drew heavily upon Hegel’s ideas
and methods yet rejected the spiritualist or idealist aspects
of Hegel’s view of human history. Instead of social evolution
proceeding through the clash of ethereal ideas conveniently
borne about in the minds of mortals, for Marx, human history
was the history of class conflict that served to develop the
material conditions of human existence, i.e., the capital stock
of a society, and in particular, the corresponding labor force.

ii

The labor force included the combined skills and knowledge
of society. Therefore, an individual’s perception of reality was
determined by their relation to society’s means of production,
so that the evolution of a social consciousness (as manifest-
ed under a truly communist society, albeit not necessarily a
“single” consciousness) was a by-product of the material or
economic development of society’s labor force.

In the twentieth century, the French philosopher Jean-Paul
Sartre replied to this materialistic determination of our con-
sciousness with the now famous slogan “existence precedes
essence,” meaning the material conditions of our existence
do not strictly determine who we are; rather, each individ-
ual must consciously choose this in spite of their day-to-day
existence, even though they may rightly acknowledge the
influence of their past and their surroundings. Sartre, and ex-
istentialists in general, reject the notion that the individual is a
pawn in human history, carrying through some grand scheme
envisioned by philosophers like Hegel and Marx. The indi-
vidual cannot be reduced to an object, a means to an end,
but is rather an end in himself. Ironically, in his lifetime, Sartre
himself chose to align his views with Marxism, declaring it to
be the “inescapable philosophy of our time.”

In all these philosophies, philosophy became the study of
the structure of our minds, being either the structure our minds
imposed upon our existence, or the structure our existence
imposed upon our minds. Perhaps more than anything else,
this is the legacy these philosophers have handed down. Only
in the nineteenth century was it realized that natural languag-
es, geometry, mathematics, and logic were the tangible rep-
resentations of these structures, the medium through which
we perceive the world and ourselves. Accordingly, concepts
of meaning, truth, and logic became central to philosophy.

iii

When the English mathematician and logician George Boole
developed his calculus of logic in the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury, he believed—in keeping with the spirit of that time—that
his system of logic was abstracting the pure form of human
thought. Subsequently, however, these formal calculi were
not seen as generalizations of human thought processes, but
more as statements of universal laws of truth independent of
human thought processes. In other words, they were not laws
about how we think or how we come to believe that what we
know is true; rather, they were laws about how we must think
if what we believe is to be considered true. By the time of
Gottlob Frege and then Bertrand Russell in the early twentieth
century, there had not only been a separation of logic from
psychology, but a purging of the metaphysics that had come
to be perceived as infesting the so-called classical logic of the
great philosophers, notably Hegel.

However, metaphysics had not really been purged from
logic. What had been purged was, for the most part, German
idealism, particularly Hegelian idealism. For Russell and this
new breed of philosophers, there was a real world indepen-
dent of our knowing it or even of our perceiving it. This set
of beliefs is called realism. Logic, for them, tapped into this
reality by avoiding the confusion and ambiguities inherent in
the grammatical structures of natural languages. Formal logic
was even perceived as a foundation for mathematics, fast be-
coming the language of choice for scientists. Therein arose
a new philosophy called logical positivism. Crudely stated,
logical positivism is the doctrine that only within the spe-
cialized sciences and mathematics are found those activities
wherein real knowledge is obtained. All-encompassing meta-
physical and religious doctrines are, for the most part, distrac-
tions yielding nonsensical solutions to nonexistent problems.

iv

Instead, the focus shifted to the minute observations intended
to answer specific problems or questions. Armed with the
powerful tools of the logics and mathematics for correctly de-
ducing one set of empirical statements from another, all that
remained was for scientists to study this world, piecemeal,
within their separate fields of inquiry. With logical positivism
finally came an end to the age-old belief that all knowledge
could be systematized, with the consequence that one who
masters such a system could proceed on the assumption of
knowing or eventually coming to know more than the spe-
cialist in their field. Now, we take it for granted that unless
someone has specialized knowledge of a subject or a degree
in that field, they cannot know whereof they speak.

Yet a strange phenomenon has accompanied this shift
from metaphysical logic to positivist logic, from natural lan-
guage to mathematics. Although the equations and formulas
the physicists employ can explain and predict the behavior
of objects as large as stars or as small as subatomic particles,
physicists have trouble trying to figure out the picture of the
universe these equations are revealing. As theoretical physi-
cist Richard Morris put it, “The problem is this: no one re-
ally understands the meaning of quantum mechanics.” They
“know” more about the universe than ever before, but the
meaning of what exactly they know tends to slip from their
grasp. Ironically, the universe revealed through quantum
physics underscores the essential role of the subject observing
for a meaningful interpretation of experimental results. This
perspective is embodied in such paradoxes as “Schrodinger’s
Cat,” i.e., a cat in a hypothetical closed box with a random-
ly triggered dose of poison, wherein the cat is literally in a
state of being neither dead nor alive … until we open the box
and observe that state for ourselves. Another is the duality

v

exhibited in the subatomic realm of photons and electrons, as
waves “collapse” into particles only when and if we observe
them, thereby revealing their actual position in space-time.
Similarly, we cannot know both the position and momentum
of such a particle at the same time, as Heisenberg states in his
famous uncertainty principle. There are other such “paradox-
es,” but the point seems to be that realism—the notion that
there exists a determinate world independent of our perceiv-
ing it—is being challenged by the idea that the fundamental
nature of objects is somehow dependent upon our conscious
observations.

This view of the world is called “antirealism.” Nor is it
peculiar to quantum physics: for although today’s economists
can explain the behavior of those engaged in market transac-
tions, and even predict their behavior with a great deal of
accuracy—at least statistically—the value of what they record
in today’s prices reflects nothing more than what a confluence
of buyers and sellers in the market believe that value will be
tomorrow. Again, the very metaphysics that the new logicians
and mathematicians sought to purge from scientific inquiry is
finding its way back into scientific inquiry.

Meanwhile, as science and mathematics usurped more
and more of the material that was the domain of philosophy,
philosophy devolved to the seemingly sorry state epitomized
by the philosopher and linguist Ludwig Wittgenstein—that
philosophers have been reduced to analyzing the structure
of language. Ludwig did not like philosophers or philosophy.
The great philosophical questions of the ages were for him
word puzzles that could be “dissolved” by showing how the
language was being misused. Ludwig had even come to re-
ject the underlying metaphysical assumptions held by many
of his colleagues, including Russell and logical positivists.

vi

As part of their adherence to essentialist or realist doctrines,
logical positivists had attempted to distill the essence of natu-
ral languages down to formal and rigid systems of symbolic
logic—ideal languages—that scientists could rely upon to
separate fact from fiction and meaningful propositions from
metaphysical nonsense. Wittgenstein came to argue that the
natural languages are much more complex and diverse than
the logical positivists had made out. Natural languages such
as English cannot be distilled into systems of formal logics.
He ushered in a new philosophy, which although related to
logical positivism, became known as analytical philosophy.
Analytical philosophers study natural languages as they are.
Instead of seeing a common foundation for meaning, they in-
stead see a myriad of diverging uses wherein the meaning of
a word or expression is inextricably bound with the situation
in which it was initially learned or used. Indeed, analytical
philosophy is not just about words and how we use them; it
is about the larger philosophical questions. We think about
the great philosophical questions through words, and how we
use those words reveals how and what we think about these
questions.

However, there has been in the literature a fairly common
refrain that analytical philosophers are dissolving their move-
ment into tedious analyses on the meanings of words. Their
work often appears far removed from the everyday concerns
of the average person. Indeed, with their technical analyses
they have rendered philosophy a series of specialized fields,
no longer something readily accessible to the general public,
no longer something one would even recognize as philoso-
phy. Yet language, after all, is only a part of our experiences.
We may try to express what we experience through language,
but language—words, logic, argument—cannot and does not

vii

encompass all our experiences. There are other means be-
sides language and logic by which we may know and under-
stand the world around us.

Now, the greatest philosophers of our day are, on the one
hand, philosophers of science and language, and on the oth-
er hand, philosophers of phenomenology and existentialism,
the latter sometimes included under the name of “continental
philosophy,” referring of course to the European continent.
For the most part, these two branches of philosophy are dia-
metrically opposed—particularly regarding logical positivism
and existentialism. The ultimate end of logical positivism (i.e.,
science and mathematics) seems to be the objectification of
all phenomena—including the individual—with the express
purpose of quantifying, explaining, and predicting, with
ever-increasing precision, through the abstract languages of
mathematics and logic. Perhaps the epitome of this way of
looking at things is represented in modern neoclassical eco-
nomic theory. This economic theory is based on calculus, and
through calculus constructs the model of the rational, utility-
maximizing machine that is Economic Man.

On the other hand, for the existentialists, the objective
seems to be the conscious negation of the former, to reverse or
slow the irrevocable tide to objectify and quantify the human
condition, seeking instead to reestablish the human psyche as
the subject that perceives rather than the object perceived. If
Hegel were alive today, he would likely identify existential-
ism as the “antitheses” of the increasingly austere and formal
logics of our age.

Moreover, associated with these two philosophies, with
these two ways of perceiving life, are two somewhat oppos-
ing concepts of meaning, that affect each and every one of
us, no matter that we may not be philosophers or scientists

viii

or logicians, just everyday ordinary people. First, there is
from the existentialist and phenomenological perspective an
emphasis on what I call phenomenal meaning. Phenomenal
meaning is the meaning of objects or events as part of the
continuous interaction between the subject perceiving and
the object perceived. Pure phenomenal meaning is the mean-
ing of things prior to and independent of language and it is
intensely personal and immediate. It is the meaning of our
experiences when we have no awareness of ourselves in this
relation, i.e., when we are immersed within the very object of
our intent, that being other than ourselves.

On the other hand—again for everyday ordinary peo-
ple—from the analytical perspective there is an opposing em-
phasis on what I call nominal meaning. Nominal meaning is
the meaning of our experiences as understood through the
medium of language or systems of symbols. Roughly put, it
is what we “think” to be the case upon reflection, whether
that is casual observation and reflection, or rigorous scientific
method and mathematical reasoning. Moreover, the nomi-
nal meaning of all things is intricately interwoven into our
sense of self, whereas with phenomenal meaning, there is
little or no sense of self. More specifically, nominal meaning
is derived from awareness of ourselves in the role of the ob-
server in the subject-object relation, which is inculcated and
conveyed through the medium of symbols. At times, these
symbols seemingly will have no referents attached to them,
meaning there are no objects or events in our daily lives with
which certain statements can be correlated. Symbolic expres-
sions with no referents to our immediate experience have
pure nominal meaning. Many abstract mathematical expres-
sions are of this kind. Finally, and most critically, this mode of
comprehension is inherently collective in nature, as opposed

ix

to purely phenomenal meaning, which is inherently personal
in nature.

Between the purely phenomenal and the purely nominal
meaning there is a blending of opposing modes of under-
standing ourselves and the world we inhabit. Indeed, pure
phenomenal meaning and pure nominal meaning may be
regarded as opposing limits of a continuous spectrum made
up of degrees of self-awareness, such that either limit can be
approached but never quite achieved as a mode of operation,
at least for any length of time. As adults we not only operate
somewhere along this spectrum, but frequently find ourselves
operating at different points along the spectrum, with the re-
sult of trying to reconcile who we are when no one is looking
with who we think we are.

Finally, and most critically, there is a personal as well as
a historic interaction between these two modes of compre-
hending, with nominal meaning having originally evolved
from pure phenomenal meaning—through the course of one’s
own life as well as through the course of recorded human
history—and thereafter gaining ascendency to such an extent
that phenomenal meaning is being steadily subsumed under
a nominal comprehension of ourselves and the world. The
major supposition of this work is that this subsuming of the
phenomenal attains its culmination with the development of
artificial intelligence (AI), to the point where it is physically
embodied and fully integrated into our living spaces, whether
that constitutes our homes, offices, schools, or entire cities, all
eventually being virtually tied into the world. For lack of any
better description, I will refer to these physical structures as
Artificial Intelligent Enclaves, or AIEs, and they will become
the physical embodiment of pure nominal meaning and com-
prehension. Their ascension will usher in a qualitative change

x

in the world’s economic, social, and political organization.
What follows is an unorthodox and detailed exposition

of this brief outline—unorthodox because it is presented by
means of a nonclassical logic. This nonclassical logic at first
constitutes the form and logical progression of the argument,
but then ends as the very subject of the exposition.

xi