There is a set of combinations of words or images, which is larger than what is logically possible (it includes round squares, ungrammatical sentences, any combination that can be made even if it cannot be said or thought in any unified way). This 'unreal' space of combinations is larger than the 'logical' space of 'really possible combinations,' but it is still definite because it depends on a combinatorial explosion based on a repertory of given elements.
But that repertory of elements that are combined, where does it come from? Is there an even larger super-combinatorial space of possible repertories of elements, corresponding to all possible languages? If the historicity of language makes us resist the idea that language and imagination issue from some formless power (be it the Neoplatonic One, or God, or the Subject, or the Community) acting arbitrarily, do we then end up with a super-Leibnizian set of possible elements and a super-combinatorial space?
If there is no definite super-combinatorial space, have we reinstalled an old problem? There would be an excess of possibility which gets determined into a definite set of elements (and so a consequent combinatorial space with its restriction into a logical space). How is that transition from formlessness to form* accomplished?
One option would be: there are some conditions for the possibility of combinatorial and logical spaces, and those conditions themselves are reflected in the possible structures of those spaces throughout history.
The problem of origin and differentiae would still remain. One could be more strongly Hegelian by claiming that the changes throughout history are themselves part of the one necessary logical development of the space of possibilities. However, the differentiae problem returns here too.
(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001