2 - Objectification

Summary

The greatest magician … would be the one who would cast over himself a spell so complete that he would take his own phantasmagorias as autonomous appearances. … We (the undivided divinity operating within us) have dreamt the world. We have dreamt it as firm, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and durable in time.

Jorge Luis Borges

They recalled that all nouns … have only a metaphorical value.

Jorge Luis Borges

Our investigation is therefore a grammatical one. Such an investigation sheds light on our problem by clearing misunderstandings away. Misunderstandings concerning the use of words, caused, among other things, by certain analogies between the forms of expression in different regions of language.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The claim, made in the last chapter, that some foundational work may be needed before the resilient, long-standing quandaries can be resolved will now be reinforced by showing that these quandaries may, in fact, be the product of the way we speak. More specifically, it is posited that the source of the problem is in the way we think about human activities in general and, in particular, in the way we communicate with others and with ourselves about the activity of thinking, mathematical or otherwise. I am arguing that the different keywords around which the five quandaries revolve are not operational enough to ensure effective communication. I also show that most of them are metaphorical in nature, and metaphors are often like Trojan horses that enter discourses with hidden armies of unhelpful entailments.