waste

Thereby completing the analogy

Intransitive verbs denoting being in a physical configuration often have transitive counterparts that denote moving something into that state; it is also often the case in English and German, in my limited experience of the latter, that the state-expressing verb is irregular, while the motion-expressing verb is regular (or at least more regular): lay has the past tense "laid" (phonologically if not orthographically regular), while "lie" has the confusing "lay"; "sit" has "sat", whereas "set" has … "set", again, though I hypothesize that it was once something like "setted" (like "setzte") before haplological intervention. And in Latin we have "sedēre" and "sedere", and "iacere" and "iacire" (which apparently derives from the same word as does German "jagen"). Hence "Now I lay me down to sleep". (Though directional adverbs complicate things—one could also say "I lay down to sleep" meaning that that is something one did—so we should really ignore them; "I lay down asleep" is more the thing. This doesn't really matter at present. In fact the fact that "down" doesn't seem to modify the sitting in "I sat down" the way "there" does in "I sat there" makes me wonder if it's really an adverb there at all, something I might have half a chance of thinking intelligently about if I really knew anything about English grammar.)

But what of compounds of these words, even those that do not denote physical configurations or movements? Well, take "possidere": to possess. Profligate Latin also has "possidēre", to come into or take possession of; there appears to be a similar contrast between "besitzen" and "besetzen". But poor English has no analogous term! Fortunately, that there should be one, and what it should mean, are so obvious that the only real issue is orthographical.

The issue is somewhat complicated by the fact that "sit" is the state, "set" the movement, but "possess" is the state again; it strains the relationship. (Also, "possess" is regular, though perhaps with diligence "possass" can be made to catch on.) A bout of confusion led me to think that "posit" was a possibility before remembering that it already exists in English and means something quite different (and comes from a different Latin word, "ponere"; it is interesting, to me, that German sometimes uses "setzen" to match Latin "ponere", as in "voraussetzen"/"praesupponere" [1]; I have always thought that this is a calque, but I don't really know—there would be a mismatch, in that the "sup" comes from "sub", and that doesn't fit with "aus"). So perhaps we should restore vocalic symmetry, even though the words cannot match directly, and neologize thus: "possiss". As in: "I possiss the house on Tuesday." A fairly useless word, since it will mean nothing that "take possession of" does not currently adequately express, but perhaps it will find a niche. (Tricks with scansion?) In any case, the utility of the word is hardly the point.

[1] It was only after I realized the connection between the "pose/pos" of "suppose" and "posit", the fourth principle part of "ponere" (= "positus"), and its second that I was able to understand the names of the modi ponens tollensque.

I am not a synaesthete

But I can think of no way to describe the flavor of okra other than to say that it tastes dark green. This description isn't even the result of a searching-about for the apt word or phrase; it seems, to me, to be the most natural way to describe it. (I have also long had the very strong sense that four plus five is purple, and that two, four, five, and seven are green, orange, red, and yellow respectively (which is convenient since it makes my colorful arithmetic correct at least sometimes), but I am otherwise completely free of number-color links.)

I am my body

Having recently got a copy of McDowell's talk from the Anscombe conference in Chicago of several months ago, I have been able to confirm the suspicion that arose in me while reading part one of The Phenomenology of Perception, namely, that, at least in its closing sections, it is strikingly Merleau-Pontyan. (This is actually an apparent affinity that Dreyfus notes in the beginning of "The Myth of the Mental", though I haven't gone back through that whole exchange to see if it comes up in McDowell's half as well.) Unfortunately while the suspicion has been confirmed for me, I'm pretty much unable to confirm it for or even engender it in anyone else; I can't quote from McDowell's talk, for obvious reasons, but also I can't quote from The Phenomenology of Perception, for the reason, I suspect, that since I read it both somewhat swiftly and for no particular purpose other than that I thought it might be interesting and useful (but how?)—and I'm really not sure which of these factors might bear the greater responsibility—it has left only a fuzzy impression in me. "The Spatiality of One's Own Body and Motility" is presumably the section to revisit—or perhaps I'm actually thinking of some programmatic claims in the (surprisingly technical) The Structure of Behavior.

I believe that in "The Spatiality …" M-P mentions a patient (presumably the ubiquitous and unfortunate Schneider) who can only tell where his limbs are if he is first allowed to move them. Something like that. And ah ha: It is never our objective body that we move, but our phenomenal body…" (p 106).