Metaphysics: Painting by Numbers (A Summary)

So... I thought that I'd just put up a brief summary of my last post, sans supporting details and verbosity. I probably ought to have put up a summary at the same time, but better late than never.

Language is a representational tool, for instance, "That is a chair," is really a sentence token for something like, "That object matches the criteria for being referred to as a chair according to our agreed upon conventions." So, what a chair IS, is actually just an object that contains a semi-ambiguous set of qualities. The word chair refers to a concept rather than an object, it refers to the list of qualities that an object necessarily has in order to be validly referred to as a chair. The art of speaking and conversing relies on the presupposition that the difference between concepts and objects are functionally negligible. That is to say that even though the word chair refers explicitly to only the concept of chair, it doesn't really matter, the conversation can go on.

So what about non-object based words, like truth or cause? Neither of those two words refer to any objects in the world, but like object words are merely concepts, just not anchored to anything external. Well, words like truth and cause function like mathematical symbols like + and =, they allow mathematics to occur. Without + and = then a 2 and a 3 are rather uninteresting and can't do much, but 2 + 3 = 5 and you have something quite amazing. Raw numbers, like raw objects, unmended by mediating concepts, serve little functional purpose for the human mind. We require these mediating concepts (e.g. +, =, truth, cause, and etc.) as grease in order for objects and numbers to do work.

What's the big payoff then? The world we live in is colored by linguistic equations, "That is a chair," is not relevantly different than a mathematical equation (2 + 3 = 5). While objects do actually exist, they are not identical to our concepts of them, the concepts are on our end, so "chairs" don't actually exist outside of us, even though the object of reference does. Likewise, truth, cause, and other functional mediators serve only as that, truth and cause don't actually exists external to us and to language, in essence "There is no truth," is valid if one is referencing the reality that exists outside of our linguistic reality.