 
                         20060201.01

     The confrontation of legal proceedings compensates for
the incongruities and contradictions implicit in the
underlying ethics and epistemology.  Even though all
definitions of "action" fail, there can yet be, and usually
is, unanimity about what is meant by that word, by any word,
in a given context; just as, for example, although it might
be difficult if not impossible to give a (rigorous)
definition of the word "house", yet in any given controversy
there is likely to be unanimity as to its meaning in the
specific application.

     Communication, discourse, in other words, is _not_
reducable to its elements.
Just as the meaning of a word cannot be inferred (predicted)
from the constituent letters or their arrangement,
just as the meaning of a sentence cannot be inferred (predicted)
from the constituent words or their arrangement,
just as the meaning of a paragraph cannot be inferred (predicted)
from the constituent sentences or their arrangement,
just as the meaning of chapter cannot be inferred (predicted)
from the constituent paragraphs or their arrangement,
so the meaning of a treatise cannot be inferred (predicted)
from its constituent chapters or their arrangement.

     But meaning is universally deduced (inferred) ad hoc,
from the particularities of each situation.  Indeed, these
particularities are intuitively inferred from the behavior,
from the actions and reactions of the participants in the
hypothetical discourse or confrontation.  That is the
metascientific basis of Hippocratic medicine.  It is
similarly the metalogical basis of all social and political
activity.

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Copyright 2006, Ernst Jochen Meyer
