``Maybe I misunderstand, but aren't you now saying that you can access what nature is like, unmediated by any framework. how do you know that this fuzziness is what nature is like?'' shag
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And thanks to the folks who brought up the underlying physics of all musical scales, i.e. the rules of harmonic frequencies appearing as numerical ratios...
That was excellent example. I know so little about music that I couldn't continue on that theme.
Let's go back to the essentialist-constructionist objection. We don't have to access the orders of nature unmediated. All we have to do is learn how they work, and figure out how to manipulate them with our own instrumentation, hence musical string instruments of all sorts based on the same general principles, with wildly different results.
In more modern example, we still don't know what gravity is, in itself, but as Newton said, we can write a mathematical equation that describes how it acts as a force on all things.
The world is pretty much saturated with these sorts of what science calls constants and principles.
Now switching to Cassirer's analysis of this problem. It is the mythic mind, (the metaphysical mind) that seeks to understand the essence, name it, and then work on various principles from the repertoire of mytho-poetic systems or metaphysical systems to manipulate these essences and explain them, in and of themselves---or alternately, give them symbolic forms in the arts. Thus we can dance like a snake.
The most typical of these mythic systems of thought personifies and animates the natural world, in order to attempt to control it and to bring it into the intelligible constructions of the mind, that, is render it in symbolic forms, and therefore draw it into the matrix of the embedding culture. This is the basic rational process. Whether such a systems of thought and action are valid in our scientific sense of the term, is pretty much irrelevant, as long as the incantations, evocations, explanations, representations and activities (all symbolic expressions of some sort) make sense within the particular social construction of the cultural world within which these activities are performed.
>From a scientific point of view, we can use the example of gravity or
light as a counter-example. We don't need to grasp the essence of
these phenomenon. All we need to do is have a reliable and useful
symbolic system that describes how these phenomenon work. We can then
manipulate the symbolic system (mathematics) and figure out from these
manipulations how to make things. We may not know what the EM spectrum
is in itself, but we know enough about how it works to build a world
of electronic technology based on what we know, and most of this
technology works most of the time.
CG