Dualism: Semantics or Truth

In recent months I have reviewed my hypotheses thoroughly; in the process I felt it necessary to question every perception that lead to Nihilism. By my own standards, a hypothesis must be the result of perception, otherwise it is simply a belief. I identified two issues on the path to Nihilism: the second half of the axiom of Nihilism (which I covered in a previous post), and my perceptions that lead to Dualism.

When I initially articulated Dualism on this blog, I offered as proof the truth of the contradicting statements "Strength is in Weakness" and "Weakness is in Weakness". I must now, however, question whether such an action is valid, or simply a device of rhetoric. Before I can answer this, I must better articulate semantics and the patterns behind them.

Semantic mapping is the attribution of concepts to communicable patterns. Words are meaningless in themselves, understanding is only gleaned from them due to this mapping. Often these mappings are performed poorly: mappings are incomplete, mappings overlap, mappings don't exist, etc. Homographs and homophones will not be discussed here, as they are artifacts of our mapping of sound patterns to character patterns. Similarly, discussion of homonyms is unnecessary as conceptual ambiguity is an artifact of contextual use, not semantic intent.

An example of an overlap are the words tall and large. Tall describes a disproportionate exaggeration in the physical dimension perpendicular to an external origin. Large describes the proportionate exaggeration in all physical dimensions. Both words contain the concepts of relation ("-proportionate"), more ("exaggeration"), nature ("physical"), and attribution ("dimension"). Tall also contains the concepts of relation ("perpendicular"), entity ("external"), and absoluteness ("origin"). Considered together, the words contain the concept of opposition ("dis-").

These concepts are interrelated, and some even overlap. In the case of overlap, the concepts should be reduced to their atomic forms. For example, "more" can be separated into measure and relation. Curiously, "less" could also be separated into measure and relation; however, considering both "more" and "less" we find the concept opposition.

It is likely that you will describe the words "tall" and "large" differently, and as a consequence end up with different atomic concepts. This is because each of our semantic mappings differ. Even if each of us were to read the same dictionary definitions of "tall" and "large", we would still end up with different atomic concepts. The reason for this is that the words we use to describe these concepts are themselves open to semantic interpretation (different mappings within their own definitions). Unless each of our complete semantic maps were the same, we would inevitably interpret some words differently.

Consequently we can see that semantic interpretation is relative to perspective; but is this grounds for Relativism? No. This establishes that the meanings of words are relative, but demands that concepts are absolute. Consequently it is established that my original proof is a play on semantic interpretation, and, as such, a device of rhetoric: invalid. I will now take a step further, however, and establish Relativism through two other means.