“For example, in a plane space a circle draws a distinction” (Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form, p. 1). Laws of Form seeks to explicate the laws of distinction by (re-)constructing distinctions.
Epistemologically it hereby endeavours to translate the semantic knowledge of what distinction in general is into the pragmatic knowledge of how one is able to construct a concrete instance of distinction.
Spencer-Brown himself doesn't put larger effort on the reflection of the relationship between semantic and pragmatic aspects in his theorizing, probably because of a deep conviction of some sort of constructive idealism, in which semantic and pragmatic elements are identical by definition. However, if one reconstructs the procedure of Laws of Form with respect to its handling of the relationship between semantic and pragmatic elements, one can recognize a significant shift from the general conceptual account of form as a unity of complements, given in the introduction, and the spatialized variant of it as “perfect continence”, which renders possible the construction of a circle as a so-called example of distinction.
Making explicit the inherent logic of this shift, hereby showing that the so-called example does actually carry the epistemological function of a synthetic differentiation of the very concept of distinction itself, together with the related discussion of predicative and impredicative elements of Laws of Form is the goal of this paper.
Dr. phil. Christina Weiss, born in 1973, is a philosopher interested in foundational questions concerning the relationship between Phenomenology and Constructivism, in dialectical and dialogical logics, German Idealism and its relationship to constructive logics in particular, philosophical semantics in general. Throughout her work in the different fields of research she seeks to expatiate on the foundations of an epistemology of schematization. She currently works on her habilitation treatise and teaches as a lecturer at the Institute of Philosophy at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany.
0 Comments