>From: Richard Plourde <rplourde@scoot.netis.com>


>From Robert Heinlein's _Beyond This Horizon_, Copyright 1942:

"Sorry, Carvala.  We agree on the method of symbol communication--the 
symbol is *not* the referent, the map is *not* the territory, the speech-
sound is *not* the physical process.  We go further and admit that the
symbol *never* abstracts all of the details of the process it refers to.
And we concede that symbols can be used to manipulate symbols ...
dangerously, but usefully.  And we agree that symbols should be
structurally as similar as possible to the referents for communication
purposes.  To that extent epistemology is settled;  but the key problem
of epistemology--*how* we know *what* we know and what that knowledge
means, we have settled by agreeing to ignore--like Jonahh and myself
in re theology."