Problems studying the Subjective
If two people have headaches there is no way of comparing whether both of them are having the same type of pain.
This is a basic problem first of even knowing whether similar/the same phenomena are experienced the same way because the experience is private and only accessible first-person.
Following on from this problem, there are many things that people experience first-person where we don't know if they are referring to the same phenomena such as:
Memory. Belief. Desire. Thought. Dreams. Just any experience that is rich and detailed including historical recollections of an event. Values. And so on.
I was surprised when a sighted person told they didn't dream in images because I dream in life like images and sounds.
So is the is this a resolvable problem? Does this mean we are closed off from others in some kind of profound way?
I think it is all a problem form brain correlations because if you can't define something accurately how can you correlate it?
I have never been in a romantic relationship and I feel that if I do I still would not have insight into another person mind however intimate we get because actual subjectivity is solipsistic and impenetrable. When I do feel a connection with someone that is good but somewhat inexplicable but you just feel like the other person understands you better than most people you meet.
This is a basic problem first of even knowing whether similar/the same phenomena are experienced the same way because the experience is private and only accessible first-person.
Following on from this problem, there are many things that people experience first-person where we don't know if they are referring to the same phenomena such as:
Memory. Belief. Desire. Thought. Dreams. Just any experience that is rich and detailed including historical recollections of an event. Values. And so on.
I was surprised when a sighted person told they didn't dream in images because I dream in life like images and sounds.
So is the is this a resolvable problem? Does this mean we are closed off from others in some kind of profound way?
I think it is all a problem form brain correlations because if you can't define something accurately how can you correlate it?
I have never been in a romantic relationship and I feel that if I do I still would not have insight into another person mind however intimate we get because actual subjectivity is solipsistic and impenetrable. When I do feel a connection with someone that is good but somewhat inexplicable but you just feel like the other person understands you better than most people you meet.
Comments (178)
I don't see this as a problem. The act of seeing other people as people requires we make a metaphorical connection with them. We intuitively, empathetically recognize they experience the world in ways very similar to the way we do. Without that recognition we could not even communicate. So, is my headache the same as theirs? Are my memories, beliefs, desires, thought, and dreams the same? Maybe. We can ask questions to figure that out.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Not at all. I like people and wish them well. I like to hang around with them, live with them, and work with them. I try to understand the way they think and how thy feel. I try to treat them with fairness, kindness, and respect. I feel a connection with them.
Nice. Totally agree.
I had a late diagnosis of autism and that is a condition it seems where people see and experience the world differently to other people.
Initially they claimed it was a deficit of empathy in autistic people but now a better theory is that neurotypical and autistic people are having different experiences and it is a failure of communication.
I don't know if feeling comfortable around other people means you are sharing experiences. I am not convinced it overcomes a barrier in true knowledge of someone else's subjective life.
I also come from a strict religious background. People in this kind of religious situation create an environment that is closed of and only people growing up in it can empathise with the experience. That has probably been a personal problem for me not growing up "normally" so to speak and not sharing common experinces.
I think familiar experiences can be created in this kind of culturally closed of self enforcing way and emotional bonds created.
But my issue is with theoretically explaining psychological states. Because it may well be true we have a certain of understanding people like us in our culture but I wouldn't class it as scientific knowledge.
I don't know to what extent our differences in experience are caused by the fact that I am neurotypical and you are autistic or are just the regular differences that all people have. Many people here on the forum see the world differently than I do. Just before I read your post I was writing another on the "Pop Philosophy and Its Usefulness" thread. In that discussion, @Mikie and I are having a very similar difference in how we experience the world as the one you and I are having. It happens to me pretty often.
Muscle memory is considered part of playing the piano or riding a bike. Where you remember how to position your body (also including general proprioception) So this may involve the brain's motor cortex.
Episodic memory is something like remembering when you took your driving test.
Flashbulb memory is like a vivid memory such as of 9/11. where you were and so on.
Semantic memory can include memory of general knowledge and the lexicon.
So these things may all involve different parts of the brain. But when you explore your own idea of memories some memories are combinatorial or vague and constructed (like false memories)
This may be where phenomenology (detailed phenomena analysis) may come in.
So take 9/11, I had been to the dentists. I was in the UK. It was in New York. I was asleep. I woke in the evening. It was September. It was a warm day. I was very upset. And so on. This memory has various components.
Is this all just some series of neurons firing in the brain? Is it an accurate memory? Also how am I transmitting all this information by symbols on a screen.
Or:
"All mental states have a subjective aspect and Qualia (experiential feel)"
Empathy is a controversial issue because it usually involves the alleged ability to imagine someone else's experiences.
I think this may be possible in a few cases but:
Can you imagine having HIV or Cancer if you don't have them? Can you imagine being a serial killer? Can you imagine being the opposite sex? Being (pregnant/menstruating). Being gay/straight/bi?
There is just a huge range of potential states and situations to empathise with. Are we succeeding to create a decent society based on empathy or are we actually committing serious failings?
I think it is possible to get too concrete with these sorts of matters. To 'imagine' doesn't require 100% match of another's experience. That's why it is called imagination. For instance, I have my own experiences to draw upon that may be used to imagine how others are experiencing things. I have been very sick - I can imagine the debilitations and complexities in having cancer or any illness (not to mention that I have watched many people die).
Serial killer? I can imagine being persecuted by obsessions and having the need to release myself through predatory behaviour.
Being gay? Is it difference to being straight? Love and sex are pretty much interchangeable. The experience of discrimination I can imagine, having experienced discrimination before.
Again, I don't think it is necessary to map onto another's experience 100% in order to imagine another's situation in a useful way to generate empathy. We have access to glimmers of another's experience.
The Roman poet Terence made the point that, 'I consider nothing that is human alien to me.' I think this resonates with many but perhaps not all of us.
Are we really imagining someone else's experience or just remembering our own experience?
When I was involved in the care of my seriously disabled brother with Multiple sclerosis I never knew what his experiences might be like such a creeping paralysis, vision loss, pressure sores and so on.
I just had to ask him what he wanted done to make him comfortable. With caring work they suggest you don't assume you know what the person wants but just listen to their experiences and requests.
I feel that people's imagination can be wrong and they impose a false representation onto someone else. It could be they diminish or exaggerate someone's experiences.
But that's not right...
Quoting Here's How to Accurately Describe Your Headache to a Doctor
and so on.
So the premise of your argument is misplaced.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
No, they are not. All such phenomena are public: we can and do talk about them. The Private Language argument applies here.
The notion of "subjective", private stuff is fraught with incoherence, misguiding many a discussion. If it is private, then it lies outside our discussion. If it is part of our discussion, then it is not private.
In order to know what a pulsating headache is like you have to have had one. My mum has never had a headache and doesn't know what they are like.
Likewise if I read a list of pregnancy and menstruation symptoms I would still not know what the experience was like because I am male bodied. I can't experience having a uterus.
As I said in my last post I think imagining someone else's experience may just be revisiting your own.
I am not saying there are no accessible aspects to mental states but that we cannot truly compare two peoples. And then defining conceptual, abstract mental states requires some way of knowing what we are actual referring to and if it is even something physical.
Some food for thought from Normal Malcolm's "The Privacy of Experience."
"Giving the location of one's sensation is not locating it in the space of physics or astronomy, but in a space of sensations that has one's own body as its frame of reference. If A locates a sensation in his space of sensation (e.g. in his right shoulder), and B locates a sensation in the corresponding place in B's space of sensation (e.g. in his right shoulder), then B's sensation is in the same place as A's sensation. If B located his sensation in a non-corresponding place (e.g. his right foot), then B's sensation would be in a different place from A's. Tis is how we use the expression "same place,"different place", in regard to sensations. Therefore, A and B are not giving different descriptions when each says, "in my shoulder."
One needs to keep in mind how we use "pain" from a first and third person perspective.
However (in addition to @Banno's point about private language) as I said, we don't need to be too concrete about this. I am comfortable with notion that my pain/experience is similar enough to other people's pain/experience, sufficient for me to generate empathy. That's the point. I'm not saying it is an exact match or qualitative equivalent. It doesn't need to be.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
You wrote 'may just' but it may not... the point is our own pain is enough to understand that pain is not good, not fun, not desirable and therefore we 'feel' for the other in their pain through our own experience and humanity. We can still retain the notion that everyone is slightly different in their experience yet hold enough commonality to share the experience of being human.
What's a pulsating headache like? Well, it's pulsating...
So you don't have to have had one to know what it is like.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
You won't have experienced it, sure, but it doesn't follow that you know nothing about what it is like.
Quoting Tom Storm
Also, consider mirror-sensory synaesthesia
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/philosophy/article/is-there-anything-it-is-like-to-be-a-bat/EC6290746D630C343A661C8C0F4D8B8E
Because if something is available only to you, and to no one else, then it cannot be a useful part of our conversation.
You may not be familiar with this:
This seems to me to be the same as the beetle. The beetle "happens" to one person but no other, and as a result drops out of conversation.
Now imagine I was shown a copy of what is in your box. Would I recognise it as being a beetle? Only if it looks like whats in my box. Irrespective of how I use the word, it refers to and means something to me.
How can it do either to you? You are you.
You think of an X, then use the word 'x' to privately refer to the X you just thought of? But you're already thinking of it. What is referring doing here?
Ex hypothesi, this cannot be done. You can't show me a copy of your pain, or your red qual. Quoting Michael
Even if you can refer to it, and that is not clear, it does not refer to anything someone else can refer to, so it drops out of the conversation.
And how could you tell that what you are referring to, by "x", now, is what you were referring to when you christened it "x"?
Quoting Banno
These seem like inconsistent claims. You start by referring to my pain, seemingly accepting that its inaccessible to you, and then say that you cant refer to my pain.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
I think of my subjectivity as my point of view. My point of view is my own--only I can stand right here, right now--and expecting someone else to share it is to expect them to be me, and that doesn't make sense. It's too much to ask. Does this count as being closed off? Maybe it would if we didn't have language to communicate what we perceive and feel (having lived in countries where I don't know the language well, I know the feeling of isolation and powerlessness)--but then if we didn't have language we wouldn't be the kind of creatures who worried about being closed off. Maybe it follows that the conditions that lead us to think we are closed off--a rich inner life that owes its existence to the essentially social fact of language--are precisely those that allow us not to be.
How?
By what mechanism are they 'referring'?
I might say, for example, that when I say "give the hat to John", my use of 'John' refers to John via drawing your attention to the public label for the person called John. I could give an account of your learning John's name by experiment, I could even give an account of the neural processes connecting your auditory perception to that learned label (though I suspect you'd thank me to not).
What I don't seem able to do is give a similar account of what using a word privately to refer to your own private thought might be. It certainly can't be drawing your attention to it (it was already there), it can't be connecting a label (the connection is already made), it can't be learning by experiment (as says, by what test could you possibly learn)...
So what are you claiming is going on when you privately use a word to refer to a private sensation?
You make the same inconsistent argument that Banno made above. Presumably the phrase "your own private thought" refers to my own private thought.
That's what I reject. Just because it only happens inside my head isn't that I can't talk about it. Just because you can't see the contents of my box isn't that I can't talk about what's inside.
But if you can talk about it to others, then it is by definition not private.
And so, since we are talking about it, it's not happening only inside your head.
You're equivocating.
We might use the word "private" to mean "something that can't be talked about" or we might use the word "private" to mean "something that only happens inside my head" but these are two different definitions.
So let's just not use the word "private" and I'll simply say:
I can talk about something that only happens inside my head.
Of course you can. So it's not private. That's the point.
A private language is one only you understand.
Indeed. I should have written...
What I don't seem able to do is give a similar account of what using a word privately to refer to one's own private thought might be.
What is one supposedly doing when one is using a word to refer to a private thought? What does 'refer' mean in this heterodox context you've placed it?
Why not? If a phrase like "one's own private thought" can refer to one's own private thought, then why can't a word? Is there some bizarre condition that a single word can't refer to a private thought but a multiple word phrase can?
Again you seem to be equivocating. I'm not saying that there's a language that only I can understand. I'm saying that words can refer to things that only happen inside our heads. The word "pain" for example refers to a thing that happens inside our heads. It doesn't refer to some public expression of pain, like saying "I'm in pain" or taking aspirin.
See Quoting Andrew4Handel
If "Only accessible first-person" means that one can only talk about it to oneself, then it is private in the requisite sense, and drops out of consideration.
But we do talk about red and pain, so they are not private.
So they are not "only accessible int he first person"
You can talk about my pain. Pain is not just "in my head". It is public, shared, part of the world. Sure, you cannot feel my pain, but that's just what it's being my pain means.
Quoting Michael
:grin: If the words only refer to things inside your head, then it's private. As in, If only you can refer to your pain, then I cannot refer to your pain. And if no one else can refer to your pain, then you are " using a language that only (you) can understand".
I dunno. Can't see why you are not following this. It's certainly not equivocation.
Yes (though I'd quibble with 'bizarre'). The expression "one's own private thought" is a placeholder into which any private thought can go. It itself is a public placeholder - we're all agreed we have private thoughts, so the notion, it's full content and meaning are public. It is, in Wittgenstein's example, the label given to the box.
A single word would suffice but it would suffice to describe the container, the set, {one's private thoughts}, which itself has a fully transparent public meaning.
The contents of that set are different to the set itself.
I'm not saying that only I can refer to my pain. You can refer to my pain as well.
My feeling of pain is private in the sense that only I can feel it. But it's "public" in the sense that we both can talk about it.
And the beetle I see inside my box is private in the sense that only I can see it. But it's "public" in the sense that we both can talk about it.
I'd say it's the label given to the contents of the box. That's why we use the word "private" in the phrase "one's own private thought". If it was a label given to the box, which is public, then the phrase would be "one's own public thought".
Or, to use Wittgenstein's example, the phrase "the contents of the box" refers to the contents of the box, not to the box itself.
And I don't see why we can't coin a single word that refers to the same thing as the phrase "the contents of the box". How about "beetle"?
Yep. That's why your pain is not just a thing inside your head that only you can refer to. If it were, no one else could talk about it.
That's the problem with @Andrew4Handel's proposal that "the experience is private and only accessible first-person" - it implies that only he can talk about such an experience.
I didn't say that only I can refer to it.
Pain is a thing inside my head that we can both refer to.
This is where you equivocate. To say that an experience is private is just to say that no-one else can experience it. It says nothing about who can or can't talk about it. There's no prima facie connection between not being able to experience something and not being able to talk about that thing. I don't need to see something (like the beetle in your box) to talk about it. The blind manage just fine in that regard.
Seems pretty clear that he's only saying that because we can't experience another person's experiences we can't know what it's like to experience as they do. Doesn't seem to say anything about what we can or can't talk about. It may be that his pain is nothing like my pain, but that's not to say that we can't talk about his pain being like, or not like, my pain.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
You're going to have to explain the connection there. What does not being able to access something have to do with not being able to talk about that thing? I can't access the contents of your safe, but I can talk about the gold bullion locked inside.
We are born in a body that has been conditioned by natural selection for millions of years and a collective unconsciousness that has been conditioned biologically and socially.
And on top of that, our conscious has been conditioned by one's current society.
So we are kind of doomed on so many layers of conditioning to feel ourselves as a completely separate entity from the Other.
The world becomes an arena where "I" has to affirm itself and the Other is inevitably separated from you.
So the I-thou/it dichotomy is born.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
I would say yes but it is very difficult to resolve since one has to deal with such a deep conditioning on many levels.
And it can only be resolved experientially.
As Heraclitus beautifully said:
Quoting Wayfarer
The many live in the Subject V Object dichotomy.
The awakened dissolve the object into the subject where the observer becomes the observed.
As expressed by stories of deepest love the I-Thou merges into One.
Right. Ever since we became selves, back on the African plains.
Or in religious symbol, since we fell from Eden.
It is easy just to say all of the mind is in the brain and leave it at that. A bit like using a computer. You don't know how it works but are happy to use it and assume it all takes place in the circuitry.
It is inducing apathy. I think we need an actual causal explanation with the phenomena clearly described and given a causal pathway with no explanatory gaps.
Let's take the example of colour. My blue could look exactly like your green. When I say "the sky is blue it actually looks green to me. But we can never know this because all that matters is that blue and green are different. The words do not capture the essence of what we are seeing despite dividing up the world.
How would you prove that my blue and your blue were the same colour?
Language gives us limited access. For example we might both say "I have a dog" but my dog could be a tiny chihuahua and your dog a large deer hound. The word dog can refer to a wide array of dog types. I don't see one word having the power only to refer to one thing which is identical to everyone.
In the case of words relating to mental states what they are referring to are entities we have yet to have an agreed upon definition for like intelligence, emotion, beliefs and so on.
My mother has never had a headache so what is she referring to with that word? Blind people and deaf people can use a lot of words that relate to things they haven't experienced.
In my experience a lot of illnesses can be hard to describe and detect.
People have died of cancer a few month after diagnosis with moderate symptoms like a persistent stomache ache.
I was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder in my early 40's after years of problems. People do not seem to come with a prepackaged set of tools or rules for assessing other peoples maladies etc.
Medicine would it seem be much easier if you could diagnose or your own illnesses by introspecting on the symptoms.
Most people will experience at least one diagnostic error in their lifetime, according to a 2015 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
In which case, whatever legitimate doubts you might have regarding the quality or existence of "someone else's" experiences, is it not the case that for those doubts to be intelligible to you, your doubts must at least be defined in terms of empirical criteria that you yourself could observe in principle?
In other words, doesn't the privacy of experience actually imply that the problem of other minds is solvable in principle, contrary to popular opinion?
How so? I dont need to experience something to talk about it.
I would say from a physical perspective that the genes that encode pain receptors and endorphin release mechanisms determine how "sensitive" someone is to pain stimulus.
But that is very reductive. Genes aren't the only thing that determines our pain perception. For example a headache has dozens of different causes and pathways that all lead to the same "head pain" experience: for example muscle tension, migraines, dehydration, meningitis and concussion (trauma) all of which influence the severity of the headache. For example a subarachnoid hematoma causes a "thunderclap headache" which is described as "the worst headache one can ever have" (my career is medicine).
Furthermore psychology and mental state also influences pain perception. A person who experiences a headache during something highly negative in emotional aspect - like a cancer diagnosis or divorce tend to have enhanced pain perception while someone who experiences the same headache source while just having great news, falling in love or getting a big reward experience the pain at a lower degree.
So in summary considering headaches: they have different sources, different genetic influence, and different psychological influences that combine to determine the qualitative difference in experience of the pain.
We are closed in a profound way. Our perceptions and awareness develop with reference to our individual environment. Our individual relationship with everything else.
What I mean by that is none of us occupy the same temporospatial point. So the environment we experience is never the same/perceived from the same perspective as another object (person) in the environment.
So we always have unique relationships with the remainder (external reality - which includes others). Therefore our conscious experience can never be the same and so the sensations we feel are inherently subjective/unique.
Every experience, interaction and memory you form is yours alone. No one is identical in this respect not even identical twins.
This doesn't mean we aren't all fundamentally based on the same physical laws that determine interactions. It's just that the interactions rely on 2 separate or distinct things at 2 separate points in 4 dimensional reality, and those 2 things are inherently different by nature due to this.
So to calculate "you" - ie to make a perfect simulation of you and your experience and behavior (and thus predict your entire life, thoughts and choices) - we require identical environmental variables, identical genetic variables, and identical interaction between the 2 for how ever many years you have existed this far. And we need to calculate them faster than you are experiencing real time, to keep up with your current state of being or ever predict your future.
To reproduce the same phenomenon (you). This is a level of computation that is simply not possible and may never be. The amount of data and control required would be essentially trying to duplicate the entirety of realities information from within said reality. A condensation - but condensing things (number crunching) invariable loses informationnalong the way.
Every atom, every synapse, every single piece of of you at every single moment in your lifetime. That level of information is not possible to calculate in real time die to the limitations of information transfer (speed of light) .
You're correct. There is no way of comparing. Because there are genetic components (pain receptors and endorphin production), anatomical components, the source of the headache (tension, migraine, meningitis, subarachnoid hemorrhage, dehydration etc) and your psychology/mood/attitudes towards pain/suffering to factor in before we can qualify the perception of a headache and whether it's the same as another's.
The variables there are massive alone. And that list is influences is not exhaustive.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
We are closed in a profound way. We are spatiotemporal points of conscious awareness. No one else can occupy the same space as you at the same time as you without you both being in one another.
Thus, conscious perception is always a unique perspective on the external environment as referenced to your spatiotemporal location. In other words, your consciousness awareness is fundamentally unique by you being a physical object from which such an object experiences.
Furthermore, in order to "calculate you" - ie gain access to your private experience non-consentually, using universal laws of physics, chemistry and biology, with computation, we would have to account for every variable of your existence from birth to your present moment - genes, every atom of food you eat, every gram of shit you produced and when. Every person you ever met (which requires calculating an entire other individual) as well as the full interaction, every memory you ever formed and why.
Everything about you, and thus everything that isn't you by proxy.
This degree of information processing is simply not possible to emulate as it would be a duplication of the entire universe from within the universe.
No calculation from within the universe can formulate an algorithm for everything, everywhere, all at once without being identical to the real thing. There is no algorithm for reality.
So you are truly private in nature. No one has access to your mind without you allowing them "in" and even then, their interpretation of you is not you hit an approximation.
However all is not lost. This does not mean love and intimacy is not possible between 2 people that can never fully "know" eachother in entirety. A couple in love cannot show eachother their entire life from start to finish and yet are still in love nonetheless. Because relationships don't require full knowledge to work, they require trust. Vulnerability. Love despite uncertainty.
I can only interpret you as referring to something, in relation to an understanding of what your referring consists of. If my experience is private in the sense meant by philosophers, then ordinary means of referring that appeal to a causal linkage between another speaker and my experiences are ruled out. In which case, how I am supposed to interpret a speaker as referring to my experiences?
I dispute that requirement. I can talk about the future.
Love John Fowles. Is "The Aristos" worth reading. It's not available electronically. It's been so long I can't remember how to turn pages. I keep getting cuts.
Insofar as referring is a meaning-making activity, it's inherently public. You can't then refer to "your pain" if it's purely private because you can't complete, by definition, the circuit required to make meaning, which subsists in the public space of language. You can't refer to a private beetle because your beetle only becomes a beetle through public confirmation. It is as if you think what's in your box somehow can define what's in everyone else's box. You can map the inherently public concept of "pain" onto any subjective experience you deem appropriate but you cannot refer to a purely private experience for the reasons outlined. When you say "pain" you can only mean pain in the sense which is publicly accessible and is therefore not private because that is how meaning-making works.
I dont understand why you and others think I must be able to see something to talk about it. The blind can talk about things just fine.
I took it out of the library decades ago. It is his meditation on Greek philosophy with a large collection of Heraclitus aphorisms, that one has always stayed with me.
:up:
This might be the unjustified (yet automatic?) assumption that causes all the trouble.
Quoting Michael
But doesn't the fact that the bornblind can talk about color support the thesis that meaning is public ? They don't need an 'internal' referent for 'red.' Meaning looks to be 'out there' with stopsigns and handshakes.
You're being overly literal with the analogy and misusing it. The point is that you can't refer meaningfully unless you have a shared basis for referral and a purely private experience cannot, by definition, provide such a basis. (Whether you're blind, deaf, mute or unimpaired is irrelevant. Anybody with access to a linguistic community through whatever mode qualifies). But let's take it a step at a time, do you agree with that much? You seem to be confusing a private experience of mapping with the necessarily public act of referring.
To me the problem is we don't have a semantic grip here. It's not that I don't relate to what you and those in your camp are saying. I get it. But I've been convinced by certain books to rethink what seemed so obvious back then. We 'are' our past in the sense of taking for common sense now what was once an invention.
An analogy would be Michael saying "I am feeling what I'm feeling' and claiming that since he had a private experience of feeling pain, he was referring to that private experience when actually he was just expressing an empty logical truism. Again, that which we refer to is not purely private because it takes a social space for meaning to tango, otherwise we're dancing in the dark. We understand pain not because we have access to each other's private experience's through language but that it is a concept that allows through its nature a public shared conceptualization.
We do not have the language to accurately describe everything we experience.
This doesn't matter in the case of something like human anatomy where we can see body parts without needing to describe them and we can see causal relations occurring.
The problem is that we do have a box with contents hidden to other people and then we try and describe to some extent what is happening inside us.
Language may continuously mislead us because we are using the wrong words and definitions and language is a tool to manipulate and deceive not to just transmit accurate information.
My primary concern is that there are mental states that only we experience that can never be compared to any kind of model or to other peoples also private mental states.
Language is very flexible. People like Einstein developed new revolutionary ideas be manipulating pre-existing words ann forms. In that sense his language initially referred only to his self generated private ideas. I don't think language is all private or all public. It can start off publicly than become solely private with private mediation of a solitary walk.
I would go with their being behaviourally undetectable, after Wittgenstein. That is, if your red is my blue, and yet we use the same words in the same situation, the difference is irrelevant.
Here's the rub: colour words do not stand for our subjective sensations. If what I see as red is what you see as blue, and yet we both use the words "red" for red things and "blue" for blue things, then "red" and "blue" cannot be referring to our sensations, since our sensations are not the same.
And yet we do talk about our symptoms. They are not private.
Again, and yet we do.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
And that is not the same as not being able to describe anything we experience. Again, we do describe things.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
The beetle argument shows this to be a poor analogy. It works on the assumption that words are all labels for things; they are not.
This is the basis of the criticism of our assumptions about language found in the latter Wittgenstein, who advocated not looking for what our words refer to, but instead examining how they are used. Quoting Andrew4Handel
I think Wittgenstein's analysis can help you untie this knot.
Red and pain are somewhat mysterious because they are qualia.
Descriptions of the nervous system and electromagnetic spectrum do not allow us to know what pain and colour are if we haven't experienced them.
I don't know what conclusion to draw from this but it is hard to imagine how colour and pain could exist without consciousness.
In this sense when we are talking with others about something, we may just be talking about an experience or idea/concept and not referring to something in the external world. These ideas can be grasped by reference to one's internal states.
What is private is the sensation like redness or pain that is not captured in the physical description of body parts.
No, I think that when I talk about what I am feeling I am referring to what I am feeling, and that you cannot feel or see or smell or taste my feelings. They are hidden from you. That's why you have to ask me what I am feeling, or thinking.
But that's not peculiar to mental phenomena. My use of "Andrew" does not "captured in the physical description of body parts". Your use of "Paris" does not include an account of the sewage system. Words do not haver to show everything in order to show something.
So while one might not be able to say everything, it would be wrong to conclude that one can therefore say nothing...
Think on this for a bit: Tell me what there is that you cannot put into words? And notice that even as you tell me, you are putting it into words.
The world is all that is the case.
That is what I am questioning here. I am suggesting we are giving a superficial unsophisticated accounts of complex mental states.
I gave the example of memory earlier and how it turns out to refer to a diverse range of things.
When we ask people. "What do you remember" We tend to be referring to autobiographical memories.
But people remember how to ride a bike, play the piano, what words mean and where the kettle is. When you see how many diverse things actually include memory it becomes unclear what memory is referring to. (Images? Words? Motions? Emotions? The lexicon?)
Neuroscience theories of memories rely on fairly naive analyses of memories to be mapped onto neuronal spikes with the slogan "neurons that fire together wire together" But when the complexity of defining a mental state is revealed that mapping becomes somewhat meaningless. My memories of my grandmother are complex multifaceted, temporal/chronological, emotional etc not suitable to be mapped onto the hypothetical "Grandmother neuron". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandmother_cell
So I think we need to have a meaning for something like memory that truly maps a detailed and accurate but private) mental state onto the brain. The problem I have is with how accurate a mental definition can be and how it can be validated and compared.
I think the reason we have a shared concept of memory is because humans have a complex society and we have a lot of analogies to create words for mental states. Memory (etymologically) derives from a concept of history. Humans record events chronologically and we apply that to the mind in some way it seems. So I think we are using external analogies for internal events.
(apologies if I am being long winded).
Everything.
I am using words to transmit ideas and concepts not to transmit my veridical experiences.
As I mentioned with Blue versus Green. My green could be your blue the word doesn't transmit the sensation or qualia of seeing the colour. It is a concept. With words we are always struggling to communicate and make sense of life. (I am anyway)
That said I do believe that there may be some naive realism transmitted through language. We may be referring to the same thing in the external world but based on our own perceptions and network of beliefs.
Sciences model of a tree is far more detailed and sophisticated then what we consider a shared perception.
:up:
I think the temptation is to think that we all meet in our depths, in some kind of shared immaterial-internal space, where the same 'pure' pain ('under' the concept) is right there for the labelling. Even if one denies this shared internal immaterial space, Aristotle's assumption, stressed by Derrida, seems equivalent: Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images.
It seems more plausible to me that we make such an assumption is a 'logical illusion' that's based on just how good we've become at organizing cooperation with public concepts.
I have had people tell me about speaking to God, seeing ghosts and witnessing miracles. Conspiracy theories. Implausible life stories. Crazy moral beliefs.
So I don't think we take language as true and literal and accurate. And other people don't take us or me seriously.
That is interesting because it suggests we don't treat language as just truth bearing and serious and literal.
That person who thinks he is being stalked by aliens may be telling the truth!!
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Quoting Andrew4Handel
You are using that terms a lot. I'm sugesting that it might be misleading.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
I don't think you are. As it, transmitting ideas and concepts is not the whole of what words do. Rather, we do things with words. So my green could be your blue, and yet you still manage to hand me the green cup when asked. So something more is going on here.
It seems you are working with a theory of meaning that says words stand for things. The suggestion is that this theory is the source of the problems before you.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Sure, you cannot say everything. But that does not mean you cannot say something.
I would say we understand pain because we experience our own, and were smart enough and sympathetic enough that we assume that other people experience much the same thing. Were very good at projection.
That suggests we have shared concepts.I think our concepts about our internal world are less shared.
I am certainly not arguing it is impossible to communicate them but it is difficult. The examples I have given is a sighted person who doesn't dream in images like me and My mother who hasn't had a headache. They can use the words "dream" and "headache" without referring to the same thing.
That said yes we appear to communicate successfully in various scenarios. But I think language in itself is a profound mystery. How do symbols and sounds represent and carry meaning?
People used to believe gods created language and imbued meaning into things/symbols.
Theories of language I have seen try to root themself onto some very basic primary sensations like colours or basic concepts. The theory is we might build language up from some basic universal concepts and then meaning escalates to more complex concepts.
But what these basic perceptions might be is controversial and as has been said congenital blind people use language effortlessly without being able to refer to basic visual properties.
Again, there is a model of communication, ubiquitous outside of philosophy, that holds that words stand for things. It's wrong.
But I think you are using it.
And I think it has led you to the problems you are addressing.
:up:
But is this assumption logically justified as a foundation for meaning ? Or is this projection encouraged because we successfully learn to cooperate in the context of trading signs ? I agree that love feels universal. I 'just know' that my cat loves me as I love her. But I predict this will happen with lovebots too, and we will steer their evolution to ensure it. Will they be 'conscious' ? People will fight in the streets over this.
Here you say its difficult to communicate ones experience, but as support for this you give the fact that your mother can talk about experiences she hasnt had. I would think this shows rather that the barriers to communication in these cases are not too high at all.
The set {all things inside this box} is not the same as the things inside the box. The set could be empty. Just like the set {6,7,8,9} is neither 6, 7, 8, nor 9. The set {all things which are both A and not-A} has no members, one ca refer to the set, but one cannot refer to the members of it, since there are none.
You can't. Language may be shared but meaning is not. Each word has different and nuanced meaning and associations depending on who you ask.
So the same sentence is conceptualised/interpreted differently to different people. That is subjectivity.
Therefore any communication between minds is an approximation. Perfect communication (Thought, articulation, receipt and interpretation) could only ever occur between 2 identical minds following the same perfect logic/coding. And even then the distance (external environment) between the speaker and the listener may interfere with the information.
Well, certainly I can accept that the word "future" has sense to you, as it does to me, but one can dispute that the word has reference beyond the immediacy of one's present. For whatever thoughts one presently identifies as being of tomorrow, one will presumably no longer regard them as being of tomorrow once tomorrow arrives...
If I say the thing inside your box has wings and theres nothing inside your box then this phrase doesnt refer to anything. Or if theres more than one thing inside your box then its ambiguous as to whether or not it refers to anything. But if there is a single thing inside your box then it refers to that thing, and is true if that thing has wings and false otherwise.
Much like the phrase your oldest brother is older than you. Even though I know nothing about whether or not you have a brother, I am in fact referring to him if you have one.
I dont need to see something or know something about it to talk about it.
I think it quite straightforward that it refers to the future.
So in your view, what makes a proposition future-contingent?
Suppose that a person looks at the sky and says
A. "There are ominous dark-clouds in the sky"
B. "In five minutes it will rain"
What makes B a future-referring proposition, in contrast to A that is merely a present observation?
Isn't the difference accounted for by the attitude of the person towards each case? In which case, isn't it fair to suggest that B isn't objectively speaking, a future-contingent proposition?
The fact that they mean different things, with the first referring to the present and the second referring to the future.
Well yes, one might take it to be analytically true that a prediction is future-referring, meaning that skepticism regarding the future-contingency of a prediction is ruled out a priori as a matter of linguistic convention. But in that case, the future-contingency of the prediction cannot mean anything about the world in itself, and only speaks of present linguistic conventions, speaker attitudes and so on.
When we speak of "failed predictions", we interpret past utterances as referring to the present. Relative to this convention, it might be considered to be analytically true a posteriori that a past utterance is present referring. But to say that past utterances are present referring, is again not to speak of reality but of linguistic convention.
As a matter of interest, do you consider ChatGPT's responses as future-referring?
Then what else is to be said?
Quoting sime
Not sure what youre saying here. Is it just that predictions dont talk about the world as it presently is? That is, as you say, analytically true. Not sure how that entails that they dont talk about the world as it will be in the future.
Quoting sime
If it says something about the future then yes.
I don't know how often blind people use colour terms.
If they have never seen colour I can't think of a context they would use them in unless someone has told them how to use a colour term contextually. "They have probably heard people say thing like red means stop and green means go".
So they may understand the context in which colour terms are applied.
When we are using a term we might not be referring to anything concrete but referring to a concept Like "gods and ghosts" or The Afterlife.
I think the network of meaning could all be derived from within our head in conjunction with experiences.
The public aspect of language may be the rules of application but whether what is being said refers to something is an open question. But my issue is whether mental terms like memory and beliefs etc refer to the same thing between individuals.
Eliminative materialists go to the extreme of saying that don't refer to anything or only refer to brain activity. Such as "love" just mean Oxytocin levels.
You might like this: https://hub.jhu.edu/2021/08/17/blind-people-understand-color/
Quoting Andrew4Handel
You have your finger on the issue. Immaterial private referents are problematic. Bots are better at English now than children are, than most adults are perhaps. Do they 'really' 'understand'? As I see it, we mostly don't know that we don't know what we are talking about -- beyond an undeniable foggy goodenough vagueness of course. Making this darkness visible, digging out the question, getting some sunshine on it, seems like a good start.
A more reasonable approach is to include everything in the same inferential nexus. A drug or injury may disable a certain kind of love. As I see it, there's nothing that's purely internal or purely external. (I claim that we can't really make sense of such talk...that it's confused.) All entities 'live' in the same 'system,' else they could not make sense for/to us.
Assume for the sake of argument that first person experience isnt immaterial or private. Assume that it is reducible to the physical. The feeling of pain is identical to a particular kind of brain activity. Is this a problem? Can the word pain refer to this particular kind of brain activity?
This is the motte-bailey issue I've been trying to point out. I have no objection at all to a blurry continuum that runs from more physical to more mental. We can publicly establish that reports of pain (public speech acts) are correlated with a particular kind of brain activity. We can imagine a kind of pain stuff (somewhat indeterminate) as a disposition to make such reports and grimace. No problem.
Quoting Michael
I don't think that would quite work. The grammar of 'pain' would allow for anomalies like reports of pain that were not accompanied by the expected brain activity.
We can think of how reports of pain are treated differently than reports of seeing so-and-so commit a crime. I have more authority (am less likely to be challenged) when it comes to 'internal' things. This is maybe why they are 'internal' : they are relatively incorrigible. I say look to social norms for meaning.
Thats true of every word in every circumstance. I can report that its raining when it isnt.
People can lie, but that's not the issue. To be sure, the grammar of the word 'pain' could change, but currently (as far as I can make out) it's more about behavioral dispositions than brain states. "My leg hurts terribly when I stand or walk on it, so let's climb a mountain." See Brandom's inferentialism for more on the meaning of concepts as (roughly) the inferences they license or forbid.
Time matters here. We do not have static concepts tied to platonic essences that hover in eternity. We keep track of one another. You hold me to what I've said and the implications thereof, as I do you. We make predictions and excuses and arguments. How is all of this structured ? How is pain used to explain and excuse? I say find the big picture and work inward. I don't think we can construct the situation from 'atoms.'
If that were true then we wouldnt ask people if theyre in pain. Or for related feelings, whether or not theyre happy or sad or have a secret crush.
I can understand not believing in non-physical mental phenomena and raw sense data. I cant understand this devotion to the idea that words can only refer to some publicly verifiable activity.
As I mentioned in the other discussion, I take aspirin because Im in pain. It just isnt the case that taking aspirin is being in pain. If it were that simple then Id just never take aspirin and live a pain-free life.
If that disagrees with Wittgenstein then Wittgenstein is so self-evidently wrong that I struggle to believe that anyone believes him. I can only assume that youre all just pulling a prank on me.
Why not ?
Quoting Michael
I don't have a finished theory of reference. I just think immaterial references don't make sense, for the same kind of reason I don't believe that 2 has a square root. The absurdity of such a concept has been demonstrated to my satisfaction.
Quoting Michael
Yes. I agree.
"I have a headache, so I'm going to take some aspirin."
"He went to the doctor, because his back was killing him"
That's within the inferential nexus. That's roughly how we learn to use "headache" and "pain" -- in terms of what implications are thereby licensed. Or that's a theory that seems reasonable to me. We can talk about quarks and confusion in the same way. Imagine meaning living 'between' these signs as norms governing their interaction in inferences. 'Internal' entities need not refer to immateriality.
"He hired a tutor, because he was confused."
"She called to check on her father, because she had a weird feeling."
Were assuming brain states here, not immaterial stuff.
Quoting plaque flag
People have headaches even if theres no aspirin. We invented painkillers because of pain.
Quoting plaque flag
Because we wouldnt need to. Wed just look to their behaviour. But behaviour isnt enough. There really is stuff going on in peoples heads that we dont know about, and when we ask about things like pain were asking them to tell us about this stuff going on in their heads.
If you want to pretend that 'pain' has a different grammar than it does, we can try to play that game and see what happens.
Im suggesting that we assume that what we think of as first person experience/consciousness is reducible to brain activity. I wasnt assuming anything about the grammar of pain at this point.
It's not too outlandish to think technology will become powerful enough to know our socalled insides better than we do. "Hold on a moment: let me see if I'm in pain."
We already see how people fail (in others' eyes) to know their own motives or level of ability.
I suggest approaching the self more as a normative entity than a ghost full of hidden states.
Yes, thats implied by my assumption here that consciousness is identical to a particular kind of brain activity.
I don't see how that can be done. Norms might be primordial or irreducible. They are the foundation of sense. We can't 'think away' language.
I don't think the self makes sense as a present-at-hand object (it's never just a body.) It's temporally stretched, socially constituted. It's more of a dance than a pair of legs.
Im sorry but I dont do well with metaphor.
What I will say is that I dont need a second person for me to be conscious. It is both logically and physically possible for me to be the last man alive.
Yes, I believe that your hardware (your brain, etc.) carries an independent copy of the tribal software. You can end up as the last man alive. But you have already absorbed the tradition of thinking of yourself as a self, as a unified voice responsible for its claims and other deeds. What Descartes takes for granted is all the software that's talking to 'itself' as a [unified] self. Even 'it thinks' is too much, for that unity is not purely given but inherited. Whence the thinker ? Why thoughts and not just signs ? Why not a random emission of words ? Attributed to no one ? Semantic chaos ?
I think that we can apply such concepts, and I think we can do that now with pigs being treated badly in processing plants. The baby could be hungry or in pain, yes. Why not ? So could the pig. "We should stop creating pork this way, because pigs suffer, because it's wrong to cause unnecessary suffering." What does it mean to attribute pain ? How does such an attribution relate to other assertions ? Does immateriality add anything?
And when we say that the baby is in pain or scared or hungry, what are we referring to? What does it mean for it to feel something?
Quoting plaque flag
Ive given my answer. Pain is a type of experience that occurs irrespective of any overt expression recognisable by other people.
Quoting plaque flag
Im not sure what youre asking here. If experience really is immaterial then the claim that experience is immaterial is true. But again, at this point Im not really arguing this point. Im happy to say that consciousness and experience is reducible to brain activity.
"The private language argument argues that a language understandable by only a single individual is incoherent"
Well, it clearly is possible for only one person to understand language because dying and dead languages tend to have one last speaker left alive.
But most animals if not all of them don't have language and can form bonds without out it. They certainly don't seem to have a form of communication to express complex internal states.
My feeling of being closed off is knowing that others have a rich inner life inaccessible to me and knowing I have a rich inner life I can't share.
Or something like that.
One can feel lonely around other people it seems maybe because one's internal world is not compatible with what others are expressing externally.
When I wrote that, I chose the wording with care. I had in mind the very misinterpretation you make, and hence chose "a language understandable by only a single individual" against "a language understood by only a single individual". Subtle stuff.
So Taushiro is understood by only one man, but might be understood by others. But the private language argument concerns a language that could not in principle be understood by another person - a language about private sensations.
Do you think quantum physics is in principle understandable by everyone?
Are there not things that are only understood by very few people?
I gave the example of Einstein earlier. He formulated private ideas about physics/time/light and he didn't need to share them so they could have stayed unique to his own mind.
I don't see in principle why an idea and experience might not only be accessible to one person. For example someone's visual system may make them see the world different with more colours, less colours and all sorts of subtle or big differences in perception that crop up in neurology with brain abnormalities. Taushiro may have words for phenomena in this sense for experiences living in that community. (See the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis)
"a hypothesis, first advanced by Edward Sapir in 1929 and subsequently developed by Benjamin Whorf, that the structure of a language determines a native speaker's perception and categorization of experience."
I didn't think the issue was about hypothetical privacy though. Everything could hypothetically be shared but as is the case with Taushiro that possibility just doesn't exist anymore.
He didn't have to use a private language to express his ideas. It appears that language use requires some sort of stable, external grounding to keep the rules straight. That's the intuition behind the private language argument.
The language became private when only he understood it. People can combine words from the current languages to create new meaning. That meaning may only resonate with them.
What I have noticed is that there are many interpretations of what the private language argument is and that Wittgenstein does not present formal arguments.
It would help if we replace "private" with "unique and unsharable.". That's what Wittgenstein meant. It's hard to even conceive of a unique, unsharable language, that only you know. How could it have developed?
Imagine that you have some sensation that is unique only to you and there's no way to communicate what it's like to anyone else. The private language argument suggests that you might not be able to remember this sensation for lack of any external foundation for naming it.
More likely, your awareness of sensations is shaped by the language community you grew up in, since naming and remembering are grounded there.
That's true. It's not actually an argument. It's just a set of observations.
Yes I remember that part of the argument.
It seems clear that we are able to remember a lot of sensations without words attached such as different tastes and smells and the feel of different textiles.
But that part of the argument has led to people including I believe Daniel Dennett influenced by Higher Order theory advocates (David Rosenthal) of going to the extent of arguing that animals without language aren't conscious.
I guess the question is: how would you confirm that odor-x that you're sensing now is the same thing you've smelled before? If you could attach it to some category like "herbal" or "plastic", then it would be easier, right?
This reminds me of genesis versus structure. 'Language is received like the law.' But language does slowly mutate thanks to the creativity of individuals. New memes (new metaphors, new equations) are created and become popular, and old memes are forgotten.
If sensations are understood as radically immaterial, perhaps it's not so clear. I can however easily imagine experiments where people smell something and recall the name for it, etc. But what role is 'sensation' playing here ? Does it clarify or obscure ?
Does it cause confusion for you?
We both hear a piece of music. I dislike it you like it.
But it is the same input to both of us. So what is happening when we perceive the same input as good or bad? We do not seem to be having the same experience of the same thing.
But we could both put a name to it such as "Beethoven's 5th"
The phenomena I am concerned with here are not sensations received from the outside world but mental states like memories and beliefs and dreams that we need to define but only we are having the experience.
No one else can have my dream or share my dream. Part of what seems to make them, irreducibly private is that language is not adequate to represent them.
But I may be wrong and we may, with adequate phenomenological analysis and finer language, be able to describe them such that a correlation between them and physical mechanisms can be made.
:up:
I claim that irreducibly private basically means or implies nonconceptual.
It's like money. We can discuss the idea that each of us has our own 'immaterial feelings' toward 500 euros, but it makes more sense to me, in discussing what euros mean, to see how those euros are traded out in the open.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
A correlation between sign use and brain states makes sense, but I can't imagine any investigation of all of elusive and paradoxical immaterial private states, for these seem to be strategically defined as exactly whatever sneaks through every discursive or technical net. (I think this is related to 'the forgetfulness of being.' It's a strange issue.)
This seems like a strange way to go about it. I don't need any metaphysical issues laid to rest before I decide whether or not I have sensations.
Motte and bailey. Ordinary mentalistic talk is fine, but the metaphysical dualistic radicalization of this mentalistic talk (private immaterial referents) is confused. It's a pretty dry issue though. Bad metaphysical theses are mostly harmless and therefore widely available.
Strange. I thought you were describing pretty well why 'private language' doesn't make much sense.
Maybe this will help :
Words don't mean whatever you or I want them to mean or think they mean.
Money isn't worth whatever you or I want it to be worth or think it's worth.
Do you both agree / disagree ?
I'll take your word for it. I'm not sure what metaphysical dualistic radicalization of this mentalistic talk is exactly. I know exactly what sensations are, though.
You know exactly what sensations are ?
Did you discover their exact nature ? Or is it a tautology ? Synthetic or analytic ?
I'm guessing it's analytic, just the 'grammar' of the word, which is to say the role it plays in claims and explanations. Tomorrow's bots will make the same claim perhaps.
Private language doesn't make sense. Most of us have private sensations, though. It's two different uses of "private."
Quoting plaque flag
If you don't know what sensations are, I probably won't be able to explain it to you. I definitely know what they are, though. I have them all the time.
https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Texts/Panoramas_of_Mind_and_Meaning%20(1).pdf
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Descartes worries about responding to the threat of epistemological skepticism: things may not in fact be at all as we take them to be. Or at least, we cant show that they are. Kant worries about responding to the threat of a deeper and more radical semantic skepticism. This is the claim that the very idea of our mental states purporting to specify how things are is unintelligible. Kants most basic transcendental question does not, as his own characterization of his project suggests, concern the condition of the possibility of synthetic knowledge a priori, but the conditions of the intelligibility of representational objectivity: of states or episodes that answer for their correctness to how it is with the objects they represent.
In asking this question, Kant moves to an issue that is clearly conceptually prior to the one that is central for Descartes. And this move is not of merely historical interest. The principal argument of Sellarss masterwork Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind is that the soft underbelly of both traditional and logical empiricism is their implicit semantics. Broadly Cartesian foundationalism depends on there being a semantically autonomous stratum of thoughtwhat is given, both semantically and epistemologically. It is this semantic givenness that Sellars ultimately takes issue with. So Sellars offers Kantian semantic arguments against the epistemological Myth of the Given. More specifically, Sellars argues that there cannot be an autonomous language gameone that can be played though no other isthat consists entirely of making non-inferential reports. Unless some claims (endorsements) can be made as the conclusions of inferences, none of them can count as conceptually contentful, in the sense required for them even potentially to offer evidence or justification for further conclusions. That is, nothing that cannot serve as the conclusion of inference can serve as the premise for one.
******************
A 'language' in which you can 'call' something 'pain' or 'blue' lacks content. These labels would have no grip, no relation to reasoning or justifying actions.
I experience pain. As I said, I don't need to dredge any metaphysical swamps to know that.
Personally I don't mind if you think Wittgenstein is boring. It's dry stuff. But to me, on this particular issue, you might as well be a chat bot. There's no question that Everybody knows that Everybody definitely 'experiences pain.' To me, this is not a discovery (you checked in your immaterial secret interior and found the Form of Pain there) but just the coughing up of training. One says that one experiences pain. Please note that I do not mean this to sound rude. I'm just looking for vivid words, trying to build a bridge between us. Can we see around our botlike training ? That there's strangeness in all this ? What if you say 'pain' 12 times in the dark ?
If you were an idealist, you'd tell me that my assumptions about the material world around me are the product of training. You'd tell me I'm indistinguishable from a chat bot with all my talk of concrete.
You're a metaphysician. I'm an ontological anti-realist.
Calling something 'red' or complaining of 'pain' only makes sense within a larger system. Who cares that something is labelled 'red' if nothing follows from that ? What does it mean to claim to be in 'pain' if this claim is unrelated to other claims and actions ? Mentalistic talk is part of a larger system. 'Mental entities and 'physical' entities function in the same inferential nexus. 'He had a headache because they were out of coffee at work.' 'She stopped feeling nauseous because the dramamine kicked in.'
From the same source.
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Here is perhaps Kants deepest and most original idea, the axis around which I see all of his thought as
revolving. What distinguishes judging and intentional doing from the activities of non-sapient creatures is not that they involve some special sort of mental processes, but that they are things knowers and agents are in a distinctive way responsible for. Judging and acting involve commitments. They are endorsements, exercises of authority. Responsibility, commitment, endorsement, authoritythese are all normative notions. Judgments and actions make knowers and agents liable to characteristic kinds of normative assessment. Kants most basic idea is that minded creatures are to be distinguished from un-minded ones not by a matter-of-fact ontological distinction (the presence of mind-stuff), but by a normative deontological one. This is his normative characterization of the mental.
Drawing on a jurisprudential tradition that includes Grotius, Pufendorf, and Crusius, Kant talks about norms in the form of rules. Judging and actingendorsing claims and maxims, committing ourselves as to what is or shall be trueis binding ourselves by norms. It is making ourselves subject to assessment according to rules that articulate the contents of those commitments. Those norms, those rules, he calls concepts. In a strict sense, all a Kantian subject can do is apply concepts, either theoretically, in judging, or practically, in acting. Discursive, that is to say, concept-mongering creatures, are normative creaturescreatures who live, and move, and have their being in a normative space.
It follows that the most urgent philosophical task is to understand the nature of this normativity, the bindingness or validity (Verbindlichkeit, Gültigkeit) of conceptual norms. For Descartes, the question was how to think about our grip on our concepts, thoughts, or ideas (Is it clear? Is it distinct?). For Kant the question is rather how to understand their grip on us: the conditions of the intelligibility of our being bound by conceptual norms.
This master idea has some of Kants most characteristic innovations as relatively immediate consequences. The logical tradition that understood judging as predicating did so as part of an order of semantic explanation that starts with concepts or terms, particular and general, advances on that basis to an understanding of judgements (judgeables) as applications of general to particular terms, and builds on that basis an account of inferences or consequences, construed syllogistically in terms of the sort of predication or classification exhibited by the judgments that appear as premises and conclusions. In a radical break with this tradition, Kant takes the whole judgment to be the conceptually and explanatorily basic unit at once of meaning, cognition, awareness, and experience. Concepts and their contents are to be understood only in terms of the contribution they make to judgments: concepts are functions of judgment. Kant adopts this semantic order of explanation because judgments are the minimal units of responsibilitythe smallest semantic items that can express commitments. The semantic primacy of the propositional is a consequence of the central role he accords to the normative significance of our conceptually articulated doings. In Frege this thought shows up as the claim that judgeable contents are the smallest units to which pragmatic force can attach: paradigmatically, assertional force. In the later Wittgenstein, it shows up as the claim that sentences are the smallest linguistic units with which one can make a move in the language game.
...
Kants idea is that his normative characterization of mental activityunderstanding judging and acting as endorsing, taking responsibility for, committing oneself to, some content is the place to start in understanding and explaining the nature of the representational, objectpresenting judgeable contents of those judgings. This explanatory strategy is Kants pragmatic turn.
It is this order of explanation that is responsible for the most general features of Kants account of the form of judgment. The subjective form of judgment is the I think that can accompany all our judgings, and so, in its pure formality, is the emptiest of all representations. Thought of in terms of the normative pragmatics of judgment, it is the mark of who is responsible for the judgment. (A corresponding point applies to the endorsement of practical maxims.) The transcendental unity of apperception is transcendental because the sorting of endorsements into co-responsibility classes is a basic condition of the normative significance of commitments.
Committing myself to the animal being a fox, or to driving you to the airport tomorrow morning normatively preclude me from committing myself to its being a rabbit, or to my sleeping in
tomorrow, but they do not in the same way constrain the commitments others might undertake.
The objective form of judgment is the object=X to which judgments always, by their very form as judgments, make implicit reference. Thought of in terms of the normative pragmatics of judgment, it is the mark of what one has made oneself responsible to by making a judgment. It expresses the objectivity of judgments, in the sense of their having intentional objects: what they purport to represent. The understanding of the intentional directedness of judgmentsthe fact that they are about somethingis through-and-through a normative one. What the judgment is about is the object that determines the correctness of the commitment one has undertaken by endorsing it. (On the practical side, it is normative assessments of the success of an action for which the object to which one has made oneself responsible by endorsing a maxim must be addressed.) In endorsing a judgment one has made oneself liable to distinctive kinds of normative assessment. What one is thinking and talking about is what plays a special role, exercises a special sort of authority in such assessments. Representing something, talking about or thinking of it, is acknowledging its semantic authority over the correctness of the commitments one is making in judging. Representational purport is a normative phenomenon.
Representational content is to be understood in terms of it.
*****************************
In general we seem to be thrown into a way of saying and doing things that we mostly don't even notice enough to begin to question. Descartes took the meanings of his words and the unity of his voice for granted. Fine, right ? But if one makes a certain kind of philosophy a relatively serious project, it's not fine. Why is the voice unified ? What the fuck is a self ? Who decided on one ghost per machine ? If meanings are anchored or founded on immateriality, how are bots so good at it ? And so on. To be sure, almost no one in my practical life cares that I care. But I don't care that they don't care. It's a good way (?) to pass the time that would have passed in any case.
If you play the guitar by yourself, you'll get better over time, but you'll be limited. If you play with others, your skill level will explode.
But only if you learn to listen.
Wittgenstein was talking about sensical language, not merely the possibility of forming words. the words the 'The Jabberwocky' all make a kind of flow and are grammatically correct, but it's nonsense.
It doesn't make sense for us to hold a conversation about my brother when I have no brother. That I can string together the words "your experience of red" doesn't mean those words have any sense. This is what Wittgenstein meant by the "bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language".
He is apparently saying you should not talk about things that you are not certain about. Which rules out everything.
In the film "Caro diario" by Nanni Moretti it is partly about how he had an undiagnosed cancer
"He visits many doctors and specialists, but they all dismiss him with different diagnosis, prescribing to him a lot of costly drugs and prohibiting him to eat most of his favorite food. Seeing no improvements, Moretti unsuccessfully tries alternative cures like reflexology and acupuncture."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caro_diario
"After almost a year, a doctor notices his developing cough during a visit and suggests him an X-ray. That reveals a mass on his lung, which after a biopsy is discovered to be a still-curable Hodgkin's lymphoma. "
This is a fairly common experience. People can feel ill but fail to get a quick diagnosis. They have to rely on there private subjective symptoms. If we dismiss people at this stage by saying:
"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence."
We are needlessly shutting down investigations and condemning people to harm. The value of language is that we can start an investigation that may lead somewhere it never needs suppressing.
He's not saying that.
The philosophical problem is created because we are focused on the number of things and their being identical. "They are two people, so how do we know their, say, pain, is identical". And we picture this as when there are two blocks but the identical color; we say the color is the same, and that it is one color.
But with people it is more like when we both have cars; we each have our own car, but if both of our cars are Porsche 911s, we have the same car (to the extent they can be described the same). Wittgenstein puts it like this:
So we can have the same pain ("I have a searing headache on the back of my head", "me too!", as @Banno points out), and memory, dream, thought, etc. However, the real issue is that we each have our own body, so you have to express your pain for it to be said it is the same as mine (my pain is "private" like a secret, not "private" as if unable to be had by another). So we feel unsure of this descriptive solution, as if the problem remains. Philosophy mistakenly takes it as a ("hard") problem of knowledge, in the sense of certainty (and so "correlation" or "identity" become the sticky points).
But the simple truth is that, yes, we can be closed off from others in a profound way. You may not express your pain as the same as mine, and I may reject your expression of pain. This knowledge is different than certainty, it is the acknowledgement of pain. In this sense, I may not acknowledge that you are in pain, react to your claim that you are in pain with: "I know" (your pain). I may not accept that my heartache is the same as yours (I am putting on a brave face; or I won't let you make a fool of me).
Not to be known is thus your conviction (PI, p. 223 3rd), not an intellectual lack (me not being certain of your experience @Michael). Language can bridge any divide between us, but we must remain responsible to being intelligible to each other (Cavell).
I think that Descartes showed that by thinking one proved to oneself that one exists in some form.
Now I come to think of it seems to me that Descartes proves that Language works.
In order to understand a sentence language must work (successfully carry meaning).
We could never communicate if language didn't refer to anything at all. Or didn't work in some form. We can be skeptical that the object of language is represented successfully but not dispute that something is being communicated to us.
Some language like "pain" we understand with reference to our own transparent experiences. The experience does not require language in any way but it becomes transmittable as an idea somehow through as yet unexplained features of language.
But anyway essentially you can't doubt that language transmits meaning and understand a sentence.
I think that language can refer by referring to likeness. For example "Dog" can just mean things that share attributes pertaining to dogs" or "Doglike"
So a cake can look like a dog, a bush at night maybe be mistaken for a dog, a fox maybe mistaken for a dog because they share traits or likeness. One is not commented to veridical representation or total truth. maybe it is a form of pragmatism. Such as "Pain" "successfully refers to a set of experiences with some shared features". And also language can evolve to more accurately and subtly represent discovered features.
No. That's the problem. Descartes took the voice (language) and its unity (the self) for granted.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Language works, yes, but it's not clear we need the vessel metaphor. I suggest that an equivalence class of phrases as tools or flags is just as good. Language is central to my thinking. What is it to be rational ? I claim that it is to conform to various norms, especially perhaps a coherence norms. You aren't allowed to contradict yourself. That, I claim, is what a self is. It's a unity to which we as talking bodies aspire in tribes like ours (and probably all tribes.) 'I' refers to this process or infinite task. The self is like an avatar in social-discursive space, tracked for coherence, including how its deeds fit its words.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
This has been shown to not work, as I see it.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Yes. I claim that we see the world 'directly' but can still make incorrect judgments. We can withdraw judgements. 'I thought it was a dog but it was just a bush.' We don't need 'private images' for this. If the self is understood as a primarily normative entity within the space of reasons, one is not tempted by the screen metaphor --- or to construct reality as something like the overlap of these screens, etc. The thing that makes claims is in the world. 'Seeing a tree' is mystical nonsense until it's integrated into this space of claims for which one can be held responsible (or, at the very least, use in inferences.) [s]Thus spank blank flag.[/s]
There is no way to talk about the existence of ANYTHING (I feel compelled to capitalise this.) if you are not conscious and don't have language.
Everything we describe as reality and the physical can only be perceived and known through consciousness.
So if my mental states are illusory why would my belief in a physical external world be reliable and the existence of planets and atoms be reliable?
So if I can reliably assert that the moon exists because I believe A) I have veridical experiences and B) can use language I think that then that skepticism is greatly undermined.
People can have illusory perceptions but then science has produced many false theories but we don't throw science out because of mistakes yet people like eliminative materialists are trying to discredit all mental states and I actually view it as a form of bullying because undermining people's mental states is a personal attack.
Robert Brandom like Daniel Dennett and Gilbert Ryle seem to be behaviourists in any other name. The external manifestation of thought in behaviour is not equivalent to the thought. Thought can take place without observable behaviour.
Do what now ?
:chin:
You have misunderstood me completely. I don't blame you or take it personally. I just want it on record. I may able explain more later.
and I am referring to the general tenor of skepticism around this issue and semantic skepticism as quoted via you from Robert Brandom.
This is just a general comment now.
"From Wikipedia"
"Skepticism, also spelled scepticism, is a questioning attitude or doubt toward knowledge claims that are seen as mere belief or dogma"
I think that Skepticism can simply be a value judgement about someone else's claims. Not an analysis of those claims but a dismissal based on one's own attitudes and beliefs.
I think a lot of skepticism in philosophy is hypothetical and tool for thought but it becomes made concrete/reified.
So for example I think the question of whether we are a brain in a vat is useful to explore the nature of perception.
But there is no evidence we are a brain in a vat but there is huge amounts of evidence for our mental lives that we have all days of our lives that we have no reason to doubt and that allows us to negotiate life.
So my idea now in this thread is like that of Descartes, that our selves and experiences are immune from doubt but external reality is not immune from doubt. In this sense rather than rely on academics to tell us what our mental life is we have reason to trust our own intuitions and explore our own experiences.
I grew up in a religious cult myself and along with other experiences I have been in a position for long periods where people try to insert ideas/beliefs in you and override your intuitions. Maybe that is why I am passionate about this? I can cite several philosophers trying to cast aspersions on peoples solid experiences that they have no reason to doubt and peoples thoughts and experiences are valuable to them.
I am not aiming this at you in particular Plaque.
No offense taken, just to be clear. I'm pretty much an antiskeptic. I reject mental images as a bad invention, a bogus middle man, that encourages a mistaken skepticism that hilariously takes for granted the very machinery it hopes to use to hide from reality. I agree with Kojeve's Hegel that skepticism is a 'slavish' ideology -- that it glorifies interiority as a substitute for fighting for status in the real world, possibly at the risk of its life, but certainly at the risk of being made to look foolish.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
This is consider to have been shown absurd by philosophers who followed Descartes. It assumes all kinds of machinery for which it can give no account. It mistakes itself as exceedingly careful when it's accidentally recklessly credulous. To see where I'm coming from (and it's not your duty to give a damn, of course), you might look into how Heidegger had to fix Husserl, with Husserl being something like Cartersianism done better but not well enough, given the faults in its basic orientation or founding metaphor of its magic bubble.
I will say that Brandom puts conceptual norms between us rather than in us. As I take him, there's no supermatterstuff or supermindstuff. There's us in our shared world in our shared language making claims, and the self is the kind of thing that is held responsible by itself (autonomy) and a community. A dualist might think that meaning is being made into supermatterstuff but that whole framework is irrelevant in a lifeworld which is not mediated by Sensations in the first place. We are always already, as discursive creatures, thrown into one and the same world, the one we talk about, even when we paradoxically try to say that we can never talk about it.
This is a strange line of questioning.
For the most of human history we didn't know about lymph nodes, neurons and the pancreas. But they didn't cease to exist and didn't stop being essential.
Why can you not believe in the self before someone gives a causal/material explanation for it?
A good reason a for a self is the unity of perception.
In order to understand a sentence one person must hold it before his or her mind.
For example take the sentence " This dog is big, black and loud" If three separate people or 3 souls in one body each processed one part of the sentence it would be meaningless so we need one conscious perspective to hold before it a sentence meaning or perception.
I don't believe each cell in our body is aware of forming one human and many are replaceable but we have unity of perception to know we are an independent entity and can differentiate between unified objects and concepts
I feel like skeptics of the self put in almost no effort to characterise it sensibly before dismissing it and as with most of mental content they do not feel under the same obligation as a biologist for example to present something that is solid, testable and can be manipulated.
I hope so.
Come away my friend from this Cartesian obsession with certainty.
It's not about whether P is true.
It's about whether we know what the flunk we are talking about when we say P.
We emit these platitudes without hearing ourselves. Proximally and for the most part, we are bots, as I've said before and botlike must say again.
If you can tell me what a self is supposed to be, then I will consider not believing in it.
I think this is an angle. But what is the unity of perception ? Is this linguistic ? Is it part of our convention or habit of [s]thinking[/s] about [s]ourselves[/s] as a single ghost trapped in a single skull ? Why can't two fit in there ? Or four and twenty ?
I think Brandom's theory of the self is pretty good. He bothers to do what Descartes couldn't even grasp as necessary, which was to explicate the philosophical situation itself.
As I have suggested if you don't believe in the validity of conscious states and language meaning you can't have a meaningful conversation. It is self defeating skepticism. I am at the juncture where I am not sure what you believe is true or communicable or why.
The reality of a perception is not a theory. Consciousness and self and language are not theories they are immediacies. Pain is an immediacy. We don't believe we are in pain we just have a state of pain.
The unity of perception is an immediacy.
We know the world consists of parts, trees have leaves and branches, we have eyes and ears but we perceive wholes not just parts and can only communicate because of whole's.
Like I said about language each individual part of sentence only makes sense as a whole not on it's own. Consciousness allows for unified perceptions. This logically requires one perceiver which is my self.
We don't even need to posit a homunculus or ghost in the skull because we have one unified brain and body. We don't need someone elses heart to pump blood around our body. We are very well self contained so it is no surprise our visual system should present unified perceptions. You do seem to be supporting a position of extreme skepticism not warranted by anything we know.
Language works. Someone says "The building is on fire" I leave the building and save my life. Only in philosophy does such an extreme level of meaning skepticism exist that nobody applies to real life. And then we have to clarify which sense of meaning we mean pointless. Semantic meaning is the ability of language to carry accurate information. Language is not a game it works.
Ah Lou ! [ Fight Club reference ]. I don't doubt the self or language. I'm the opposite of a skeptic in some ways.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
No they not. That just they grammar. In other words, that's a kneejerk metaphorical frame which one usually doesn't question, until some 'insane' person loans you a crowbar to pry it off. Maybe maybe maybe there is pain below the concept of pain, but the concept is social --just like the negative concept of immediacy.
Says who ? I dare you to say that ten times in a row until its nullity is audible.
How ? Why ? Says who ? I'm not just messing with you. I think there are decent tentative answers to these questions.
I'm arguing from the success of language. I am looking under certain rocks [foundational concepts], not pretending they don't exist or don't do their job. The issue is how. Can we get clearer on what it is we are ? What is it to be a self ?
I thought you weren't a skeptic because this appears to be skepticism.
Do you know what I mean when I refer to a "dog"? I certainly do. I see dogs every day.
I am aware of my self and mental states everyday. You don't have access to this because of the privacy I am talking about in this thread. You can be skeptical about other people's mental states because they are invisible to you and I can't comment on your mental states because they are invisible to me.
But your skepticism about my mental states has no bearing on their validity and may have no relevance whatsoever because I have no requirement to prove my mental states to you only to myself.
If we cannot agree on the nature of self that does not undermine my viewpoint because neither of us accessed each others private mental states to settle disputes.
Say I was sexually abused as a child. Only me and the abuser were there and the abuser dies and I am the only witness and my memories, that this ever happened. I cannot prove this to you so should my failure to produce shareable evidence mean it didn't happen?
It is illogical to rule out people's testimony on the grounds that you choose not to believe them and that there evidence is not publically available. Things don't cease to be true when you are on your own and not sharing your experiences.
Ah I see. So let me be clearer then. We obviously have some kind of average blurry understanding of what words mean. So we can go to the grocery store, chat with the neighbor, etc.
But with metaphysical beliefs this ordinary language takes on new roles. You said: The unity of perception is an immediacy Now it's hard to imagine this is anything like: pass me that screwdriver. So it's fair to ask what exactly or at least more exactly that's supposed to mean. Maybe I tell you : everything is God's will. And for some people that's comforting, as if an itch has been scratched. But what does it mean ?
To me philosophy becomes sensitive to how 'deaf' we mostly are when we toss words around so causally. We have only a hazy idea of what we meme as we pass on the metaphysical gossip.
I have posited that the unity of perception is why we understand a whole sentence and see a whole object. Do you have a competing theory of how this is possible? And possible without a perceiver. Who is having experiences?
Quoting plaque flag
I don't know where you are getting the "blurry" bit from. Language successfully transmits veridical information. "I am a male of 46 yrs" It this initial ability of language to transmit facts that allows us to then extend it to trickier concepts.
If language is not initially fact based then it would have no meaning but it clearly does. From the fact of "horse" and "wings" we can create the imaginary Pegasus.
We are not travelling from the Mythical Pegasus and then discovering the concepts wings and horses. All we need to do is to attach a sound/word/symbol to something in the external world to establish a relationship of fact. So I could start calling a Dog a "Quaggle" but the real existence of dogs can make this refer.
There is enough going on in perception and time and space to allow concepts to form. It is not as thought we exist in a sparse environment with nothing to form a language from. The huge diversity of reality is enough to explain the initially diversity. To me semantic skepticism is somewhat ridiculous if it requires us not believing in the huge amount of perceptual information we receive and acting like we are blindly clutching in the dark when we aren't
I explained earlier. Make sense of a sentence where the words are distributed between several different perceivers in different bodies and time frames.?
Your stance of not understanding just illustrates the point of this thread it seems. I allegedly cannot transmit my knowledge or experiences to you and vice versa, which rather than creating a societal, community based group understanding has degenerated into solipsism.
I'm actually just trying to pass on mainstream philosophy from the 20th century in my own playful way. As I see, it is pretty radical at first, so it's hard to make sense of at first. It sounds crazy. I studied constructivism in education briefly, and I think it's correct that our assumptions get in the way of interpreting statements that question the basic framework of those assumptions. As I see it, you are forced to understand me using the very system of concepts I'm trying to put in question. But I'm not at all trying to reduce you to some skepticism. It's just about looking at familiar things in a new way.
According to this: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/sberker/files/phil159-2018-lec15-cart-found.pdf
"We can define foundationalism as follows:
foundationalism:
a. There are immediately justified beliefs.
b. All other justified beliefs are justified in virtue of their relation to immediately justified beliefs."
I disagree with experiences being characterised as beliefs. My beliefs are justified by my experiences but my experiences just are.
Nothing would have a foundation if it were all described as beliefs. I don't think there anything semantic about my perception of sunlight which I may then attempt to explain. I attempt to explain The sunlight not my beliefs about it.
My overriding point here then is that to be skeptical about your very experiences and language meaning doesn't do anything but destroy your ability to explore your reality and communicate things about it.
It is a dead end. If you believe we can understand each other and communicate facts about experiences you have abandoned skepticism or even pragmatism. Then what we are trying to discover is what is causing our experiences and thoughts.
The answer to that could be anything but we cannot doubt we are having experiences it makes no sense and doubting itself requires an experience.
I studied Philosophy at degree level myself and the Linguistic turn in philosophy. To me the Linguistic turn was sycophantic to science and destructive. It defeated itself because it could justify its foundations by its own philosophy.
It tried to put mental and conceptual entities on the same footing as the physical objects described in science which obviously meant they would not longer exist because they are nothing like physical objects nor perceptible in the same way.
I also believe academic trends have had a destructive effect on society. When they are not criticised and if they become the overarching paradigm and silence critiques.
I think if philosophy is just being done for fun or entertainment that should be stated clearly at the outset but if a philosopher attempts to influence fields like psychology, science, politics or social development I think they then have a social responsibility.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Or basically when their limitations aren't understood and just taken at face value in the most simple terms. Perfect example is economics (or political economy). Politicians can announce to be following one economic school or ideology, yet actually do usually everything else. But that understandably gives a bad rap to the school of thought as micromanagement of the economy usually (if not allways) fails.
I agree with this. At a basic level experiences are not mediated by beliefs. But there are plenty toady who disagree and claim that perceptions themselves are inferential and further claim that neuroscience confirms this,
Leaving that aside, I would say the most important thing about human life is how it seems to us; this is the living reality. A so-called objective purported refutation of that based on what is interpreted to be delivered to us by science is secondary to and derivative of how things seem to us. Even in regard to what science shows there are multiple interpretations, so we are again back to seeming.
The only way to judge the value of contradictory seemings is to assess what affect they have on the quality of our lives. As Nietzsche said, the importance of the truth of ideas (which is mostly not demonstrable anyway) is secondary to how those ideas contribute to or detract from human flourishing.
In this arena of undecidable values why should we give a fuck about trying, per impossibile, to be correct, anyway? That is the question the analytic dogmatists of normativity who see the substance of human life, of being a self, as consisting in making claims, and philosophy as contest, cannot answer. The reality is that we each choose the ideas we want to live with, and by. Fuck the mind police I say!
As you can see I'm passionately opposed to the impossible dream of normative correctness and the machineman ethic.