metonymy4u

Though language may be influenced by antecedent and contingent conditions out there somewhere in the world, that does not mean that it is therefore anchored to the world. It might be useful to think of it as a supervenient phenomenon.

The heart of Kant’s epistemological model is the notion that the model is not the phenomenon, that our verbal behaviors are not the things that we speak about. But, you could say, this was not the understanding that Kant had of himself. Well, probably not. I doubt very much I can have the understanding of Kant that he had of himself, because he never lived with Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Darwin, Bergson, Einstein, Sartre, Wittgenstein, Anscombe, Searle, Arendt, Hegel, Heidegger, Piaget, Skinner, Linehan or Rorty. The point is that we create different experiences, not that we can lash ourselves to an eternally stable event out there somewhere. Space-time as we understand it has no identifiable anchor.