Commenting on a photo by the masterful Garry Schaefer

It’s a fine still life, and yet, and yet...this doesn’t look and feel like an authentic G.S. I’m fishing for a good way to express it. Let’s see.

OK: this is notional; a classic G.S. is relational. Yes, that sounds right; I’ll stand by it.

For those who’ve forgotten their high school philosophy, “notional” and “relational” have special meaning in discussions of language and epistemology by modern philosophers like Frege. As I’m using the words here, the word has is notional in the phrase “he has a million dollars,” relational in the phrase “he has gone home.” Better yet, consider this abstract I just found in a Web search: The Components of Content –http://www.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/papers/content.html. Article by David Chalmers proposing an account of narrow content based upon a distinction between notional and relational content. Notional content allows us to describe the ‘subject-eye’ view of the world, whilst relational content allows us to give observer independent analogues of notional content.