Original Sin and the Post-Truth Condition Part 3

By Razie Mah

This works challenges both theologians and sociologists.
For theologians, original sin is portrayed by Saint Augustine, around 1700 years ago. His formulation has been discredited by the science of genetics. If Adam and Eve associate to the Developed Neolithic, then they cannot be the parents of all humanity. On January 2, 2024, Razie Mah proposes, in his blog, that a second doctrine of originial sin should be proposed, with the hypothesis of the first singularity in mind.
For sociologists, who have set forth the notion of the post-truth condition as a way to model post-modern society, especially after 1989, theory flounders on the rocks of explicit abstraction. Explicit abstractions cannot picture or point to the inherent relationality within implicit abstraction. Triadic relations cannot be observed and measured. Yet, humans adapt to their potentials. This work shows diagrammatic techniques that place explicit abstractions into relational structures characteristic of implicit abstraction. Diagrams of judgment and the category-based nested form abound.
In short, when a theologian looks at sociological theory concerning the post-truth condition, reflecting in the mirror of theology, the image should call to mind original sin.
When the scientist looks at the second doctrine of original sin, reflecting in the mirror of science, the image should call to mind the post-truth condition.
Look and see.
Part 3 of 3.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Razie Mah
• Release date: Jun 23, 2024
• ISBN: 9781955931182

Razie Mah

See website for bio.

Book preview

Looking at N.J. Enfield's Book (2022) Language vs. Reality

0841 This is an encore performance to the sequence of blogs on the post-truth condition.

As such, this examination wraps up Part Two of Original Sin and the Post-Truth Condition (available at smashwords and other e-book venues).

Take a gander at the full title of Enfield's text, Language vs. Reality: Why Language Is Good For Lawyers and Bad For Scientists.

Surely, that sounds like a book that belongs to a set of books on the post-truth condition.

So, the numbers continue to build from the last examination.

0842 The book is published by MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The author is a professor of linguistics at the University of Sydney and the Director of the Sydney Centre for Language Research.

0843 The title of the book is a play on John B. Carroll's (editor) collection of essays by Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941 AD), published in 1956 under the title, Language, Thought and Reality.

To me, this implies that thought has transubstantiated into versus. The substance of the word has changed, so to speak. The word, versus, derives from the same root as the word, adversary. So, if thought once used to nominally stand between language and reality, then today, thought is confounded with adversary, and that might serve as a hint concerning the nature of our adversity.

Perhaps, this is not the only notable feature of the title.

Then again, a book titled, Language, Adversary and Reality, might not fly off the shelves in feel-good book-outlets. It is not as if, next to the Self-Help section, there is a Come To Grips With Your Doom section.

So, expect me to play with the title throughout this examination.

0844 Another notable feature of this book, at least to me, is that the author is not acquainted with Razie Mah's re-articulation of human evolution, in three masterworks, The Human Niche, An Archaeology of the Fall and How To Define the Word Religion (available at smashwords and other e-book venues). The evolution of talk is not the same as the evolution of language. Language evolves in the milieu of hand talk. Plus, the evolution of talk comes with the twist, humorously called, the first singularity.

So, Enfield's work serves as a marker for the twilight of the Age of Ideas and the dawning of the Age of Triadic Relations.

0845 Okay, let me dwell on the idea that the evolution of language is not the same as the evolution of talk.

Comments on Michael Tomasello's Arc of Inquiry (1999-2019) (by Razie Mah, available at smashwords and other e-book venues, and also, for the most part, appearing in Razie Mah's blog for January, February and March, 2024) divides the evolution of talk in the following manner.

0846 The first period starts with the divergence of the chimpanzee and human lineage (7 million of years ago) and ends with the bipedalism of the so-called southern apes (around 3.5 to 4 million years ago).

In the second period, australopithecines adapt to mixed forest and savannah by adopting the strategy of obligate collaborative foraging. Eventually, Homo erectus figures out the controlled use of fire, leading to the domestication of fire, starting (perhaps) around 800 thousand years ago.

The third period, lasts from the domestication of fire to the earliest appearance of anatomically modern humans. During this period, hand talk becomes fully linguistic, religion evolves as an adaptation to large social circles (of 150 individuals and more) and hominins use the voice for synchronization during seasonal mega-band and occasional tribal gatherings. Then, sexual selection does the rest and the voice comes under voluntary neural control.

0847 The fourth period starts when the voice, now under voluntary control, joins hand-talk, resulting in a dual-mode way of talking, hand-speech talk. Hand talk retains the iconicity and indexality that grounds reference in things that can be pictured or pointed to. But, speech adds a symbolic adornment, which starts as a sing-along and ends up taking a life of its own. Four centuries ago, the North American Plains Indians and the Australian aborigines still practiced hand-speech talk, with full fledged sign and verbal languages. Now, their hand-speech talk is all but dead.

0848 That death, along with the demise of all hand-speech talking languages, comes (and came) due to exposure to speech-alone talk, which has significantly different semiotic qualities than hand-talk and hand-speech talk. Hand-talk is iconic and indexal. The referent precedes the gestural word. Speech-alone talk is purely symbolic. The spoken word labels 'something', and sometimes that 'something' cannot be imaged or indicated.

Well, it must be real because speech-alone talk provides a label for an explicit abstraction!

0849 Here is