Local and Universal Hinges

Abstract

Some hinges are culture-linked. They are linked to our localized forms of human life¹ — those forms of life that have resulted from the extension of our instinctive, animal experiencing of the world into an active consideration of it. The term local has both a geographical and a temporal application. It applies to the world-picture of some human beings at a given time. Other hinges are not linked to specific cultures but have constituted the human world-picture, the scaffolding of human thought ‘for unthinkable ages’ (OC 211), and will go on doing so. These hinges are bounds of sense that are internally linked to our concept of a human form of life. If some remote tribe, which has never heard of Armstrong’s giant step, cannot be said to share our local hinge: ‘Man can walk on the moon’, they cannot but share our universal hinge: ‘Most adult men can walk.’ Let us first examine our local hinges.KeywordsHuman FormLogical NecessityCategorial DifferenceEmpirical PropositionIdentical SentenceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.