Page 8 - The Irony Board

Section 1: Into the Mind

Things are bound by logic
No thicker than a name;
Those who cut a corner
Won’t be left a frame.

A philosopher depends first upon imagination, the transmitter
and transmuter of symbols flowing from the unconscious. But a tool
with a sharp cutting edge must also be at hand, to evaluate the often
disorganized substance presented to awareness. Without that
transcendent means of truth-testing, metaphors mix and boundaries
bleed. Occam had his razor; Gluckman has his laser, analytic logic.
This poem creates a metaphor of boundedness, the principle
from which he forged his own analytical tool (see Boundedness,
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1973). Briefly stated, the principle is the self-evident notion that
boundaries are fictional (nothing is between an inside and its
outside, also known as the Law of Excluded Middle); it yields a
simple series of logical rules or tests by which the possibility of
supposed entities may be absolutely determined. Impossible entities,
when reduced to the primary attributes of inside and outside, always
reveal their impossible boundaries.
Because its content is fundamental to abstraction in general and
ontology in particular—from Gluckman’s perspective—this piece is
presented first. Before anything else, naming is an operation of
boundary definition; if its logic is not sound, the result has no
integrity, and all secondary attributes of the referent are left in
spatiotemporal limbo. Cutting a corner means defining a boundary
in a way that violates the finitude of what is inside it; the result is
losing the frame, or boundary definition. Cutting corners also
implies sloppy thinking, a dishonest attempt to get by with less than
adequate conceptual effort.

3 (Editor’s note: the updated version is “Boundedness Revisited”, 2018). See also
Section 4.
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