this is untrue

At Spoonerized Alliterations, Asher Kay responds to my remarks on images as follows:

“To the extent that scientific theories are armies of images, all ontological theories are armies of images. They’re all conceptual frameworks for understanding the nature of reality.”

But the question is not whether the theories are images, since of course they are. The question is whether what the theories are about are simply images. And if you think that the reality of the real can be adequately modeled through a series of discursive propositions, then you are treating the real in the same fashion as an image, and are left with the exercise of distinguishing between good and bad images. And that’s not realism.

If you think instead, as I do, that every proposition or model is a translation, then you have an ontology in which not everything is reducible to a manifest image or a scientific image. People are still too trapped in the following rut: “if we speak of the ineffable, then we are speaking of it, and hence it is no longer ineffable.” It is unwise to ground the whole of philosophy on an ambiguous word trick of this sort, but that is precisely what’s been done for much of the past 200 years.