Denis Fodor wrote:

>Stirling S Newberry argues elegantly:
>
>>...The form guides ideas and actions even before there is concrete
>>expression - and hence the form is operative and predictive of the results
>>of actions - but we engage in those actions to produce the result. One may
>>be a very musical and poetical soul without producing a great performance,
>>but one is not a virtuoso unless one can - because the definition is that
>>the technique applied to the inner life yields the transmission to
>>others...
>
>The form-idea way of underpinning cognition goes back (at least) to
>Aristotle's teacher, Plato (to whom form = idea).  And this philosophical
>idealism is with us still today, though in a variety of forms, some owing
>more to Kant or Berkeley than to Aristotle and Plato; indeed, today's
>cognitional science is still affected by it.  One form of modern idealism
>is more crisply identified if called anti-rationalism, and it is that, I
>think, which animates Stirling's pitch.

Nope, that isn't at all what I said, nor is it what I meant.

Form in the sense I am describing can be very precisely defined in
mathematical terms - it is as rational as one gets.  I know I'm doing
well when the rationalists tell me I'm an anti-rational idealist and the
idealists tell me I'm an unpoetical rationalist...

The mistake then Dennis makes in parsing what I have said is that he
assumes I mean that the form is generative of the result.  This is not
the case, the form is a description of the potential results, and a tool
for understanding their interections.  The mechanism generates the results
(which is why I pointed out the difference between being a poetical and
musical person - and being a virtuoso performer.  The one must merely have
the mechanisms to feel certian kinds of interconnects, the latter must have
the technique to transmit them.)

The "form being present" is a sign - a pattern we recognise as having
predictive use, and, as I was at pains to point out before - not in the
least being invoked as if it has motive force of its own, except in so far
as it is recursive (that is the mechanism has a means to recognise when it
is - or is not - in a certain pattern).

Stirling S Newberry [log in to unmask]