ullangoo wrote today at 4:15 AM
No, Mer. If you see a photo of me, you say "that's Ulla", right? But the photo you see can't walk, talk, eat, contradict you, smile ---. It's actually not me, it's a photo. Your statement is simply a short form of "this is a photo of Ulla". Yes, the relation between copy (e.g. a photo) and original is one of similarity. That's how we recognize the copy, so to speak. That's also why the linguistic sign, the word, can understandably be applied to the copy, but we all know that we can't take a pipe from a painting, put tobacco in it and smoke it. For that we need a tangible three-dimensional thing, not a two-dimensional picture, and we all know it although we can't all express it as "thing and picture belong to different ontological categories". Usually, when you connect a particular and a universal by "be", you express predication. "Ulla's face is red" means "Ulla's face has the characteristic (attribute) red". It doesn't mean that my face is identical with the colour red per se. But when you say "God is love", you claim to identify the particular 'God' with the universal 'love', and that's impossible without slurring the categories, as Tim said.