[Buddha-l] Meditating Buddha

[Robert Morrison]

Robert Morrison: 

>>
Descriptive:  In dependence upon A, arises B.
Soft (subjunctive) prescriptive:  IF you want B, then you SHOULD do A.
<<

R. Nance replied:

>
OK -- but, of course, neither of these constitutes a criterion. A
criterion of the sort that Stefan was after would allow us to decide
whether a particular linguistic string, symbol, etc. functioned (i.e.
was intended and/or received) prescriptively or descriptively (or
both). Sometimes, such functions surface in the form of the sign
(e.g., the capitalized SHOULD in the statement above). But not always:
a sign may lack explicit prescriptive markers and still function
prescriptively.
<

Do you mean those sqiggly things that appear in books on symbolic logic?
Surely we can make one up (someone must have made them up in the first
place).  These sqiggly things are the reason I ended up doing Religious
Studies instead of Philosophy at London University - it was a requirement of
the BA in Philosophy that one did Symbolic Logic for the whole three years,
and quadratic equations were not my favourite subject.  The Religious
Studies degree was more philosophical! Perhaps it was too much of a leap to
go from Jefferson Airplane to symbolic logic (see Richard's recent posting).

I would argue (conta Hume) that my little statement above shows how one
might derive a prescriptive statement from a descriptive one, providing
that, if one is a Buddhist, one would surely accept the descriptive
statement a 'true' (as far as words go) as the the nature of life.

Cheers,

Robert Morrison