A Second Kind of Objects

Notes on Mood, Modality, Cognition, Soul, Diverse Fluids, &c.

0.

My previous and inaugural piece here at The Hinternet, on “cetacean philosophy”, I confess, even as I hope you already figured this much out on your own, was entirely made up. But I am a real person, a computational linguist and bioacoustician at that, and I really did translate one of JSR’s recent pieces into my native German. And like many real people, I have many real interests, which I intend to investigate in my regular contributions as a Hinternet Featured Columnist… at least when I am not making up outlandish stories about sperm-whale epistemology.

I have been rereading David Lewis recently, for the first time since graduate school, and I am, to my surprise, discovering a newfound interest in the metaphysics of modality. There is still much I haven’t read in this subfield, and it is hardly my aim here to claim any disciplinary authority, or even competence. If I propose to write about it, this is only because it genuinely interests me, and as is my usual mode at this point in my career, I find it fitting to draw on all the resources available to me, from whatever intellectual tradition they may come. And likewise, as is again typical of my approach, I find it fitting to pass through several preliminaries that, I know, might seem distant indeed from our true topic of investigation, before revealing to the reader “where I’m going” with it all. And so there’s a lot to do. And so let’s get started.

1.

Most three-letter consonant-vowel-consonant monosyllables are bound to mean something in several different languages at once, affording rich opportunity for discovering cross-linguistic homonyms. Take kut. In Hungarian kút means “well” (as in a source of water); in Sanskrit कुट् is a verbal root meaning “to crush” or “to grind”; in Dutch kut is a vulgar term for female genitalia, cognate to the well-known Anglo-Saxon monosyllable for those same parts, which likewise begins with a /k/ and ends with a /t/. Indonesian has a word borrowed from Dutch that is spelled kut, but this is in fact a deformation of kist, and means “box”. In both Turkish and Mongolian, kut or qut may be translated as “fortune”, “luck”, “happiness”, “longevity”. If we wish to get a bit loose, we might also note that kut, where the vowel is pronounced as /ə/, also has a meaning in English, sort of, designating the work of a barber in a low-end cash-only establishment with a sign outside that reads “Klips ‘n’ Kuts” or the like.

It’s not surprising, I mean, that kut should mean something — it means many things! But let’s focus on the Mongol-Turkic lineage already evoked in the above litany, and on the word’s several distinct but interrelated connotations in that ethnolinguistic space.