S. K-Bootle: Science (capital S) addresses the properties/relations of those
objects that can be observed/measured using the Scientific
method!
JM: No room for "psychic reality",
no human sciences, linguistics, semiotics apply in
this case. No Goedel, no Meinong... just Bertrand Russel and
his elimination of any B-type unicorns and
angel "consistencies"?
S K-B:Your term
"verbal objects" requires caution because we apply useful, often overlapping,
names to both type-As and Bs. For example, compare the type-B "stiff vane"
formerly on Shade's roof with the type-A "stiff vane" on my neighbour's roof
[...] We particularly admire VN's Type-B descriptions because he has carefully
observed the corresponding Type-As and reports properties/relationships we may
have overlooked. But the more interesting Type-Bs include (i) Unicorns and gods!
(ii) Square-triangles; members of the empty set (iii) Hilbert spaces (iv)
thoughts, beauty, love ...
JM: You
placed, under Type-B "realities", unicorns, members of the empty
set, beauty, love and even "thoughts". Your former experimenter,
R.L.Gregory, if I remember it correctly, concluded one of his articles
by prophesizing a world in which computer machines and mathematical
systems would converse with one another whereas we, poor humans, shall
be left out, unable to understand a thing ( thing, or whatever).
I already feel that way most of the time and we are
simply discussing time and relativity in literary spacetime, enriched by
emotion, humour, sensoriality and metaphor! (I suppose the use
of metaphors is not encouraged in capital Science for this
realm cannot be observed and measured?)
Victor Fet (The Nabokovian, 60,2008) on
"Zoological Label as Literary Form" illustrates your point about
VN's "Type-B description in correspondence to carefully observed
Type-As". He mentions "biogeography" and offers the VN example of a boy
walking into the picture from a Russian to a US spruce forest while noting that,
in Russia, the spruce forest is latitudinal but in America it is
altitudinal: "the movement is not just east to west as any
Russian emigrant's; it is also clearly directed quite literally upward -
from the Russian lowlands to the American highlands."; three-dimensional
labels and their "pre-Babel condition". There are many other works,
I'm certain, dealing with this particular talent uniting VN as a scientist
and a writer. VN's "method" justifies explorations, such as Jerry
Friedman's tour into a lepidoptera crossing in New Wye.