The aim of this paper is threefold. Firstly, I wish to descibe a brief history of the world from traditionality to modernity by applying the idea of 'disembeddedness' as proposed by Karl Polanyi, not only to the sphere of the economy, but also to the spheres of lifeworld, community and personhood. Secondly, I want to apply a linguistic twist to the discussions of disembeddedness. Finally, I will prove that some of the consequences of modernity are logically wrong. I want to show that we are, as it were, living in an age of fallacy. In the first section, I deal with four kinds of disembeddedness. First, I expound how nature became disembedded from the lifeworld of people. By referring to sevela ethnographic works, I show that people in hunter-gatherer cultures tend to represent human-nature relatedness in terms of personal relationships. Nature is considered to be 'what we are,' and, therefore, considered inseparable from us. It is thanks to Galileo and others that the Western world came to isolate the objectifiable world from the lifeworld. Thus came the disembedding of nature from the lifeworld, with nature becoming a silent physis subjected to mathematicization. Nature is now considered to be 'what we have,' that is, resources lying there to be exploited. The second subsection deals with the disembedding of individuals from the community. As a seminal work by Mauss shows, the western idea of personhood (as a bounded, unique and independent universe, that is, as an individual) is a historical construct. Ethnographic works, such as one by Leenhardt, show that individuals in so-called traditional societies are so conceptualized as to be embedded in communities. Then came the dualism of body and mind propounded by Descartes, in which the physical body came to be disembedded from personhood, and the remaining living aspect of personhood was to be labeled 'mind.' Now, one's mind is regarded as private and inaccessible to others; the body, on the other hand, is a mathematicized entity, there to be exploited, as in organ transplantation. The process of modernization was completed by the final disembedding, that of the economy from society. Works by Polanyi have described the said process well. The second section marks a linguistic turn of the paper, in which each disembedding process is couched in linguistic terms. The disembedding of nature from the lifeworld is shown to be actually a logical separation of primary predicates (describing measureable properties of an object) from secondary predicates (describing humanly appreciated properties of an object). The two terns were originally coined by John Locke, and are used, in that context, with slight modifications. The disembedding of the individual from the community is a separation of I-predicates (predicats which do not refer to social institutions at all) from S-predicats (predicats which refer, in one way or another, to social institutions). Both terms derive from a work on the philosophy of history by Arthur C. Danto. The disembedding of the body from personhood is a separation of M-predicates (predicates that can be applied to all objects, person and non-person) and P-predicates (predicates that can only be applied to person). Those terms come from P. F. Strawson's philosophical work on personhood. Finally, the disembedding process of the economy from society is shown to be a logical separation of what I call 'market-predicates' from 'gift-predicates.' I have thus far introduced four pairs of predicates (primary and secondary, I and S, M and P, and finally, market and gift). Let us call the former of each pair 'small predicates' and the latter 'big predicates.' Now, we can say that disembedding is a separation of small predicates from big predicates. Only at that stage that I can make my intention explicit: by traditionality and
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