doesn't it come down to naming? as soon as we call something something, we suddenly open up that ground on which it sits, giving us a whole new "thing" to name.

infinite infinities, indeed...


Well, I reckon that's part of it. It starts with our perception that there's a "thing" to name in the first place. So we name it and then we realize that the "thing" we named is actually several things that are distinguished by some quality.

But there's also the entire mindscape that gets opened up to us. New thoughts, new ways of thinking. I've always been fond of Ecclesiastes "There is no new thing under the sun," but I think it's a bit of an exaggeration. (True writ small in that there's not a whole lot of new things, but not writ large in that there certainly are *some* new things, or so I believe.)

The more experience we have with the object and with the label the more we come to understand how well the label corresponds to the object (or how the *real* object corresponds to our connotations about the object). "Oh, wait! This doesn't work how we thought it worked! Do we come up with a new label or do we revise our definition?"

k