IDENTICAL DIFFERENCES

Something to ponder on:

Identity is viewed in non-essentialist terms as a construct, and because constructs only produce meaning through the interplay of differences inside a "system of distinct signs".

In philosophy, non-essentialism is the belief that any given entity or subject cannot be propositionally defined in terms of specified values or characteristics, which that entity must have in order to be defined as that entity. For example, some humanists may have an idea of what the essence of being human is: there are specific traits which make something human.

A non-essentialist theory of humanity would believe that there are no essences or traits that make something human (for example, Sartre's theory of existence preceding essence).

This view is somewhat problematic, however, as an entity not defined by any specific values or characteristics may lack any meaningful existence to an observer. Since entities in the real world are defined by their observers in some way, and in terms of characteristics, it would be impossible for a non-essential entity to be found in the real world, though this does not imply that they could not exist in the real world.

A non-essentialist would argue otherwise though, that it is impossible to find anything that has only its essential characteristics, that since every thing is a particular, that which is accidental is just as important to the particular as what is essential.

Non- essentialism can also be related to culture: that a person of a culture does not possess all of the traits that are labeled with it. An essentialist view on a culture can lead to racism.

Essentialism is the view that, for any specific entity (such as an animal, a group of people, a physical object, a concept), there is a set of attributes which are necessary to its identity and function. In Western thought the concept is found as early as the work of Plato and Aristotle: Platonic idealism is the earliest known theory of how all known things and concepts have an essential reality behind them (an “Idea” or “Form”), an essence that makes those things and concepts what they are. Aristotle's Categories  proposes that all objects are the objects they are by virtue of their substance, that the substance makes the object what it is. The essential qualities of an object, so George Lakoff summarizes Aristotle's highly influential view, are "those properties that make the thing what it is, and without which it would be not that kind of thing".  

THE BASICS

Cuneiform is the first known form

of written language, but spoken

language predates writing by at least

tens of thousands of years

Languages rely on the process of semiosis to relate signs with particular meanings. Oral and sign languages contain a phonological system that governs how symbols are used to form sequences known as words or morphemes, and a syntactic system that governs how words and morphemes are combined to form phrases and utterances   

75–80,000-year-old artefacts from Blombos cave,

South Africa, including a piece of ochre engraved

with diagonal cross-hatch patterns, perhaps the

oldest known example of symbols.

 The invention of the first writing systems is roughly contemporary with the beginning of the Bronze Age in the late Neolithic period of the late 4^th millennium BC. The Sumerian archaic cuneiform script and the Egyptian hieroglyphs are generally considered to be the earliest writing systems, both emerging out of their ancestral proto-literate symbol systems from 3400–3200 BC with the earliest coherent texts from about 2600 BC. It is generally agreed that Sumerian writing was an independent invention; however, it is debated whether Egyptian writing was developed completely independently of Sumerian, or was a case of cultural diffusion. A similar debate exists for the Chinese script, which developed around 1200 BC. The pre-Columbian Mesoamerican writing systems (including among others Olmec and Maya scripts) are generally believed to have had independent origins.

A writing system is an organized regular method (typically standardized) of information storage and transfer for the communication of messages (expressing thoughts or ideas) in a language by encoding and decoding (known as writing and reading) with a set of signs or symbols (with the set collective referred to as a 'script' or ‘text’) often including letters and numbers. These texts are displayed in any number of ways, in any number of places.

Even more basic