I don't have anything exciting to add today, just a vague thought and a vague question about the sense in which etymology, here, is a normative discipline (i.e., what falls under the purview of the dialectician who evaluates the rule-setter). The vague thought is that the real, "dialectician's etymology" may involve much more than determining whether or not a particular name is correct or adequate for expressing/capturing something's nature. That is, it might consist in much more than supervising the finished work of the rule-setter. Additionally, it may also involve discovering or setting the rules themselves - articulating the content of the rules - which the rule-setter then uses (as a tool) in capturing the nature of things in their respective names. So what the dialectical etymologist would do is (perhaps!) not only corrective, but foundational normative work. It could even be revisionary: if our rule-setter isn't using the proper rules to begin with, it could fall within the purview of the dialectician to replace the improper rules with better ones, to scrap the language and begin again.
The vague question(s) is: To what extend is Socrates's long train of etymologies in our reading today (and tomorrow, too) supposed to conform to the dialectical conception of methodology suggested in the preceding pages? And if Socrates's etymologies are supposed to be dialectical in some sense, then what might they be able to tell us about (1) when a "rule" is being applied correctly, but also (2) which "rules" for names are *the right rules,* and why?
I don't have anything exciting to add today, just a vague thought and a vague question about the sense in which etymology, here, is a normative discipline (i.e., what falls under the purview of the dialectician who evaluates the rule-setter). The vague thought is that the real, "dialectician's etymology" may involve much more than determining whether or not a particular name is correct or adequate for expressing/capturing something's nature. That is, it might consist in much more than supervising the finished work of the rule-setter. Additionally, it may also involve discovering or setting the rules themselves - articulating the content of the rules - which the rule-setter then uses (as a tool) in capturing the nature of things in their respective names. So what the dialectical etymologist would do is (perhaps!) not only corrective, but foundational normative work. It could even be revisionary: if our rule-setter isn't using the proper rules to begin with, it could fall within the purview of the dialectician to replace the improper rules with better ones, to scrap the language and begin again.
ReplyDeleteThe vague question(s) is: To what extend is Socrates's long train of etymologies in our reading today (and tomorrow, too) supposed to conform to the dialectical conception of methodology suggested in the preceding pages? And if Socrates's etymologies are supposed to be dialectical in some sense, then what might they be able to tell us about (1) when a "rule" is being applied correctly, but also (2) which "rules" for names are *the right rules,* and why?
Not that I have an answer to my own questions.
Happy reading!
Oops, I meant "dialectical conception of etymology" in my last post. Must have been tired last night.
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