dear friends,

in re: Trevor & Kevin

The most obvious and important lesson is probably to remind us how easy it
is to lose the thread of discussion in a forum like this.  I'm happy to
call people whatever they wish to be called, and apologize liberally when
I mess it up...

But on the principle that no molehill is too small to be made into a
mountain....

        Perhaps "Kevin" is the voice of "cultural arrogance and oppression" that
we acknowledge as a risk, one of those who "have used modern science as
a barrier to exclude alternative ideas."  (Bad Kevin... good Trevor.)

If I say you're Kevin, and you say you're Trevor, what do we do? Your own
self-concept (whatever that is) cannot be the only criterion, and it may
not be possible to find "internal evidence" that will persuade one or the
other of us. We may have to appeal to other sorts of evidence (such as
social conventions) and/or pragmatic concerns... We work out how to go on.

("Of course you're Trevor, " said the nurse, as she deftly slipped the
needle in...)

Of course I'm being a little silly. But there is a great deal going on
with this business of "naming" that I think is not well illuminated by
focusing on objectivity & reality & all that. There has been a lot of
criticism of the idea that "names" and "things" have some kind of
intrinsic relationship; but there are also those who argue that names are
not just incidental 'labels' stuck on autonomous 'things'. Names are
central to how things are presented and re-presented to us, how we present
things to each other.

Language is how we call things into being, into our presence... Names have
social consequences (there was some talk here about this recently,
something about a bus...?), but even more importantly, names --  and ways
of talking, genres and gestures, etc -- have social *locations*, uses and
meanings.

Those locations, uses, and meanings are precisely the kinds of "multiple
and contradictory truths" that my research is directed toward. So in that
sense, debates about "objective reality" are perhaps beside the
point. Those models of science simply aren't that useful to me, at least
in this domain.

So when whoever-he-is says,

        "...it is not merely in my reality that my name is Trevor; it is
        an objective fact about me, a truth which is there to be discovered."

        I wonder, where is this objective fact? Is it on his skin, in his
bones, a subtext of the DNA? To the extent that it is a fact, it seems to
me primarily a *social* fact, a fact about him-in-context. Names change,
are contested, re-deployed, guide us home & mislead us.  Our names, in the
end, are what we are called by others, and I want those
others-doing-the-calling to be in the picture, too.

Have I been "seduced by open-mindedness"? (sounds awful, doesn't it?)
Am I after some other kind of truth -- 'poetic, artistic' -- rather than
'scientific' truth?  Maybe; but I don't think so.

        Call me Ishmael...

        Or:     Stephen

        Or:     He-who-should-be-writing-a-paper-not-doodling-on-email