Balder brought this paper by Thakchoe to my attention. I go into Thakchoe extensively in the Batchelor thread, as well as the Gaia predecessor thread called "letting daylight into magic."* The link let me download the article. I gave it a quick skim and it seems to address the issue only in terms
of the various traditional Buddhist formulations. No mention of
contemporary cognitive linguistics, which for me provides more relevant
answers to the issue. And which would add to and inform Thakchoe's
linguistics.
For
example, my translation is that we cannot
help but use our categories in designating anything, hence we can only
know or translate reality via such categories. Which is not to say that
reality is our categories, only that any reality we can know it filtered through those categories. 'To know' meaning to have meaning, hence semantic
nominalism. This is not linguistic nominalism, since our basic
categories/image schema are pre-linguistic but have semantic content via
our embodied relationships. Hence there is this non-dualistic
relationship between our pre-linguistic basic categories and objects
which still allows for real objects to exist without that relationship.
But when going linguistic we might make two mistakes: 1) forget this
embodied grounding and separate the linguistic words from the
pre-linguistic meanings; and thus 2) separate embodied meanings in words
from reality as such into two distinct and separate ontological realms,
one samsara and the other nirvana. Or a formal, metaphysical view by
another name.
Per Balder's paper, it might be more akin in modern practice to
comparing Chomsky's linguistics v. semantics with Lakoff's embodied and
mutual entailing variety.
* It is stored at Google documents. Sometimes it takes a long time to
load, if it loads at all. One can instead use the 'file' menu and
download it into a Word document, which only takes a few seconds.
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