Riassunto esame Metodologia del Progetto, prof. Bacchini, articolo consigliato The Ontology of Architecture in Japan, Mciver Lopes

Rafael De Clercq

To think of temples as events could, in fact, be strange for the Japanese, who, like the

Westerners, attribute temples, for example, to an age (an event is not an age in the strict

sense). To be precise, what Lopes has to say is that the temple is not a material object. Ise

Jingu is a non-rigid temporal timer, which, in temporal moments, refers to different objects

("Ise Jingu" is old, but its current manifestation is "young"). In this sense, the description "Ise

Jingu" does not differ from the description "The President of the United States". The

standard ontology is thus able to explain the reason of Ise Jingu. What Lopes describes

concerns the attribution of an age.

Reference, Ontology and Architecture: Response to Rafael de Clercq

Dominic Mciver Lopes

What De Clercq seems to suggest is an alternative hypothesis of linguistic, illuminating and

plausible nature. About (O) and (Y) we can ask two questions:

1) What would allow us to say that either (O) and (Y) are true at the same time?

2) What is the ontological reason why West prefers to answer that (Y) is true and (O) is

false?

At the first question we might say that (O) and (Y) designate a different ontological entity: in

(O) Ise Jingu could be a type and a token (a material object) in (Y). The second question

could be replicated by observing that no material object in the West survives the

simultaneous replacement of all its parts.

De Clercq suggests a linguistic hypothesis capable of adequately answering the two

questions:

1) If Ise Jingu refers to the previous temple "A", (O) is true; if Ise Jingu refers to the next

temple "B", (Y) is true.

2) In the West there is a habit of treating the names of architectural works as partially

descriptive temporally rigid names, so the name Ise Jingu, referring to Temple A,

changes when it refers to B (this is the case in which (O) is false). The linguistic

hypothesis is the one that best explains the ontological difference between Japan and

the West, although it is not opposed or opposed (opposta o contraria) to that proposed

by Lopes. Indeed (anzi), both are more true if the linguistic hypothesis is true.

De Clercq compares the description "Ise Jingu" with "The President of the United States" for

which we have:

(OP) The President of the United States has lived for more than a century in the White

House;

(YP) The president of the United States has lived in the White House for no more than eight

years.

(OP) It is true if more than a hundred years ago, a person named "the President of the United

States" lived in the white house. (YP) It is true if the description describes Trump who has

not lived for eight years in the white house.

We could compare Ise Jingu with the description "The fastest person in the world: