Quantifier Variance, Ontological Pluralism, and Other Fun Stuff
Quantifier variance is a term generally credited to Eli Hirsch, who in turn claimed inspiration from Hilary Putnam. Its a version of ontological pluralism which poses questions about whether terms like exists, there are, object, and ?x necessarily have privileged meanings or designations.
Heres a good description from Hale and Wright (2009):
Bob Hale and Crispin Wright:Quantifier-Variance is the doctrine that there are alternative, equally legitimate meanings one can attach to the quantifiers so that in one perfectly good meaning of ?there exists, I may say something true when I assert ?there exists something which is a compound of this pencil and your left ear, and in another, you may say something true when you assert ?there is nothing which is composed of that pencil and my left ear. And on one view perhaps not the only possible one the general significance of this variation in quantifier meanings lies in its deflationary impact on ostensibly head-on disagreements about what kind of objects the world contains: [it may be] a matter of their protagonists choosing to use their quantifiers (and other associated vocabulary, such as ?object) to mean different things so that in a sense they simply go past each other.
So this is a way to clarify or dissolve problems in mereology and, perhaps even more basically, to help resolve ancient quarrels between nominalists and Platonists about abstracta. Do numbers exist? It depends on how you restrict/define your quantifiers, and there is no correct or privileged way to do this, says the proponent of quantifier variance. This is the deflationary impact that Hale and Wright talk about: It reduces ontology to something much less than it appears. As Matti Eklund puts it here: Both Hirsch and Putnam take their ontological pluralism to entail that ontological questions are shallow. Hirsch says for instance that the proponent of quantifier variance ?will address a typical question of ontology either by shrugging it off with Carnapian tolerance for many different answers, or by insisting with Austinian glee that the answer is laughably trivial. In other words, there are either many, equally good ontologies that will allow the scientist and/or philosopher to accomplish what she wants to accomplish, or else the whole question is verbal, and silly -- it depends what you mean, and you can mean whatever is consistent, or at least acceptable to your fellow language-users.
This is a super-rough sketch, but I hope good enough to pose the meta-problem I want to raise. To set it up, let me bring in Theodore Sider, not a fan of slapdash quantifier variance. He says, in "Ontological Realism": Every serious theory of the world that anyone has ever considered employs a quantificational apparatus, from physics to mathematics to the social sciences to folk theorists. Quantification is as indispensable as it gets. No one, Sider says, can avoid choosing fundamental notions with which to describe the world. If your fundamental notion is that reality and the world and fundamental are non-objective, that is still a fundamental notion. However, you could claim to accept the idea of structure as applied to logic but deny that there is distinguished quantificational structure in particular. Sider calls this in essence, quantifier variance, and he doesnt think it works.
Can I accept logical structure (aka the rules of logic or rationality or inferential validity) while leaving empty or at least unspecified the existence stuff we want to plug into our ontology? Heres another way of asking the question: Does logical structure entail ontological commitments about things like grounding, simples, existence, ?x, and other tools of the trade? Is there any way that such commitments can be rescued from the charge that theyre either pragmatic or merely verbal? And yet a third, very simple way to pose the question: Can quantifiers really mean different things, as long as inferential rules and other logical apparatus are respected?
I think this question, in whatever version, is a hard one. Just to give a taste of the kind of complexity involved: Borrowing an example from Sider, lets say I am a non-native English speaker who has recently learned the language. I mistakenly believe that the word for number is fish. You and I have a conversation in which we discover were both nominalists. You say, correctly from our shared point of view, numbers do not exist. I agree with you, saying fish do not exist. Sider claims, I think rightly, that this is not a verbal dispute in the classic sense of two people talking past each other because they use words differently. You and I both mean the same thing we are each thinking the same thing about numbers but I have made a verbal mistake. Presumably, genuine disagreements between languages cant be analyzed and resolved in this way. And what about disagreements about quantifiers? (This is me now, not Sider.) If I say mereological composites exist and you say there is no such thing as a mereological composite, which kind of dispute is going on? Are we disagreeing about concepts, while using the same words? Or are we holding the concept of existence steady, while (someone is) making a mistake in terminology? How could we know which of us is making the mistake?!
I dont know nearly enough about quantifier variance to have solid positions on any of this. I know just enough to realize that the question is of critical importance for ontology. So Id welcome any responses, especially from philosophers who have been wrestling with this for a while. Can we have quantifiers without distinguished metaphysical status?
Comments (316)
Quantifier Variance Dissolved
In your example, it is difficult to see how folk could come to agree that they are both nominalists in such circumstances...
That is, I think the fourth objection is the most telling.
I'm thinking that in order to interpret charitably, the domain must be held constant - we presume that we share the same beliefs. I don't understand how we could have a conversation if we were each talking about a different domain.
But that might be contentious, and needs work. And it has profound implications - relativism and antirealism are waiting in the wings...
Thanks for appreciating the thread!
For those who don't see the point of the topic, consider
Quoting Finn and Bueno
Concerning Finn & Bueno: as I said, a wonderful paper, full of insight. Im particularly grateful for the four-part counterclaim to quantifier variance around which they structure the paper, because you can then use those four issues as a kind of checklist for any defense of QV. That will be part of another post Ill write, but for now I want to consider a different question.
Finn & Bueno write that ? invariably has the function of ranging over the domain and signaling that some, rather than none, of its members satisfy the relevant formula. Yet the quantifier-variance theorist requires ? to have multiple meanings. . . . This raises the issue of how the meaning of a quantifier can differ, and what the other meanings could be. And it is this issue that we tackle, arguing that one cannot make sense of variation in quantificational apparatus in the way the the quantifier-variance theorist demands.
I think theres a subtle but crucial equivocation going on here, around the term meaning. Consider this from the Sider paper referenced above: Sider also wants to know what these candidate meanings could be, but he lays out the question differently. Understand a ?candidate meaning henceforth as an assignment of meaning to each sentence of the quantificational language in question, where the assigned meanings are assumed to determine, at the least, truth conditions. ?Candidate meanings here are located in the first instance at the level of the sentence; subsentential expressions (like quantifiers)[my itals] can be thought of as having meaning insofar as they contribute to the meanings of the sentences that contain them.
If Sider means can be thought of as having meaning only insofar as they contribute to the meanings of the sentences (which I believe he does), then we have an important distinction. It would be possible, on this view, for the meanings of sentences containing quantifiers to vary according to ones chosen L, while the quantifiers themselves do not vary. They still get used only one way, the way Finn & Bueno think they must. We would thus fulfill the requirement that ? always has to mean what it ought to mean in well-formed logical expressions. But theres still room for quantifier variance if the meaning resides not at the level of the quantifier but, as Sider suggests, at the level of the sentence.
An example might be helpful. I say numbers exist; you say numbers do not exist. Each of us would have to use ? to formulate our position in Logicalese. What Im arguing is that were each going to use ? the same way, as we state our respective contradictory positions. The difference in our statements is not at the subsentential, quantifier level. We have no quarrel about "variation in quantificational apparatus." We differ on what exists, not on the use of the quantifier.
Is this still quantifier variance? I say yes, in spirit if not in name. It sharpens the question of multiple ontologies rather than dismissing it. Granted, Im also suggesting that the term quantifier variance is perhaps poorly chosen, since it does seem to imply that its the meaning of the quantifier per se, rather than any sentence formed using it, that can change. But the reason why someone would want to posit QV is unaffected. The question never was Can we find multiple meanings for ? (or ?& or ?? or any of the other operators)? Rather, what Hirsch is interested in is the question, Can sentences about existence (which logicians express using ?) change their meanings based on what criteria the speaker is using for existence? Can people talk past each other because their sentences, as a result, mean different things? If so, is there one privileged or distinguished way we ought to write these sentences in order to capture something true about the structure of the world? If we accept ontological pluralism, then the last question (usually) gets a no, but all those many ontologies will still be expressed with well-behaved, consistent operators, satisfying Finn & Bueno. (And yes, I agree with them and with Sider that logical pluralism is untenable as an argument for QV.)
This analysis overlaps with another problem I want to raise about the entire debate, concerning whether ?? is uniquely troublesome in that its used to refer to both a quantifier and a predicate. But Ill save it and invite comment on this question of equivocation on meaning. To summarize: Is it the quantifier whose meaning changes, or the sentences in which the (unchanged) quantifier occurs? And if the latter, is it still QV?
As mentioned in the other thread, I have been very interested in this question since first posting on forums (even though I can't really get my head around the technicalities of the arguments presented in the OP so my comments here might be tangential to those.)
My intuition about the matter is simply that numbers are real but that they don't exist.
In everyday speech, of course, it is fine to say 'the number 7 exists while the square root of 2 does not'. But if I ask you to point to the number 7, what you're pointing to is a symbol. It can as easily be symbolised 'seven', 'VII', 'seben', '0b111' and so on. But while the symbolic form exists, what it symbolises, a number, is an act, namely, the act of counting, which is grasped by the mind:
Quoting Frege on Knowing the Third Realm, Tyler Burge
And the act of counting does not exist in the sense that phenomenal objects exist. But I don't know if there's provision in the current philosophical lexicon to allow for phenomenal and intelligible objects to exist in different ways (although perhaps that's a matter for modal metaphysics.) At any rate, I'm of the view that the unspoken assumption about the matter is that existence is univocal, i.e. something either exists or it does not, whereas here I'm pointing out entities that don't exist as do sensible objects.
About the only discussion I'm aware of that elucidates this distinction (albeit in relation to universals rather than number per se) is in Russell's Problems of Philosophy>The World of Universals:
My bolds. My sense is that rational thought is shot through with these kinds of relations, that they hold reasoned argument together - something that we don't notice because we look through them, rather than at them. So in that sense, numbers and universals are real as the constituents of reason - athough not, as conceptualism says, as 'products of the mind', for the reason that Russell gives in the bolded phrase.
I believe that this supports what I am calling the philosophy of phenomenological idealism as outlined in The Mind-Created World op - that the so-called 'external world' is held together by such rational cognitive acts.
This looks agreeable.
Quoting J
Isn't there variation in the domain, in what we are talking about, while quantification remains constant?
That is, we can bring in Davidson's argument against relativism. If we are even to recognise that there are two domains, we must thereby hold quantification constant.
(This is too brief - just me trying to recall the line of thought I was following.)
Quoting Eli Hirsch
Might be interesting.
Sure, that's a perfectly good intuition, based on restricting "existence" to a certain range. All the problems come up when someone then asks you, Why make that choice? I don't mean just you, I mean anyone who wants to say something using words like "real" and "exist". What sort of case are philosophers supposed to make for their choices here?
-- Russell
Russell's distinction here is good to keep in mind. See Popper for an even better explanation of how thoughts differ from the objects of thought.
"We shall find it convenient only to speak of things existing when they are in time."
--Russell
Back to the point above, notice Russell's justification for his choice about "existence": convenience! I think most of the good arguments for how to use words like "existence" are pragmatic -- we want to use the words in the ways that will help us frame the questions we're trying to ask. There is, arguably, some sort of "best way" to do this, but it doesn't start by sending a team of metaphysicians to beat the bushes and bring back an actual sample of "existence" or "reality".
I think this is a version of the question that was worrying me, about whether " ?? is uniquely troublesome in that its used to refer to both a quantifier and a predicate." I've tried several times to sort out what I mean but I can't seem to nail it down. If you have time, can you expand on your question? Maybe it will jog my brain.
Quoting Banno
Yes, that would follow. Are there two domains?
This talk of mereology reminded me of Francisco Suarez, maybe it is of interest:
But I am of the opinion that this has nothing to do with the meaning of "there is", I am not on the side of pluralism.
I say there is a crucial but neglected distinction between 'what is real' and 'what exists'. It is found in apophatic theology - the stance of Paul Tillich and others that 'God does not exist' (see this brief OP.) Ultimately this goes back to the distinguishing of reality from appearance - which is at the root of the Western philosophical tradition, although generally neglected in current philosophy. Philosophically, the root can be found in Parmenides and the subsequent Platonic tradition, in which 'the One' is understood to be 'beyond existence and non-existence'. But as all of that is now gone and forgotten to anyone other than a few specialist academics, I don't expect it to be understood.
I don't recall this - where is it?
Nice use of Russell. It looks to be a precursor to discussions of private language.
seems to want two sorts of quantifiers, real and exist. He's immediately committed at least to some sort of free logic. He is giving us permission to talk of things that do not exist, but are real - like numbers.
That's one way of using ? as a quantifier and as a predicate - in this case, ?!, such that ?!t=df?x(x=t). But this is just to create a short form, and permit empty singular terms.
Are there two domains? Well, here I am not on secure ground, but I think there are good arguments for making use of multiple domains. For example, if there is only one domain then every individual exists in every possible world... Uy??x(x=y). But I do wish to be able to say that it is possible that some things might not have existed. See Quantifiers in Modal Logic.
is content with mysticism; but I'm not. I'd prefer to remain silent than to lurch into inconsistency.
So I'll go back to the point made elsewhere, that it seems to me that domains are stipulated, not discovered. This by way of agreeing that Quoting J
I say it's a real philosophical distinction which has become lost due to specifics of intellectual history. I can make the case for it, but it would be a very long one. I'm not 'content with mystisicm', a term generally spat out as a pejorative, especially by analytical philosophy. But it is a real and crucial issue which overflows the bounds of propositional language (as I believe Wittgenstein hints at in the mystical aphorisms at the end of his book.)
Go on - you've nearly caught me, in terms of post count! :wink:
The historical theme that I refer to is the long aftermath of the dispute between realism and nominalism amongst the Medievals. I say that nominalism won the argument, and that, as history is written by the victors, it is now so thoroughly embedded in the philosophical lexicon that we no longer notice it, it has become axiomatic.
Due to some long-ago epiphany, I became interested in Platonic and Aristotelian realism (as I've mentioned many times). The fact that numbers and the like exist as intelligible objects strikes me as having profound philosophical importance, because, while they're indispensable to natural science, they are transcendental in the sense of being 'true in all possible worlds'. I don't believe they have a naturalistic explanation, as they are epistemologically prior to any coherent naturalism (which must assume the soundness of logic and math to establish any of its claims.)
It seems to me much modern philosophy wants to ignore this or explain it away (hence the convoluted Indispensability of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences argument by Putnam and Quine.) This is subject of one of the stock articles I now refer to What is Math (Smithsonian Magazine). James Brown, a maths emeritus, argues for the Platonist view, while the representatives of empiricism pour scorn:
I think that speaks volumes! It goes on....
Ain't that the truth.
See, they're all actually getting close to the issue I'm talking about, but they flee screaming, because of the metaphysical implications. And nobody likes metaphysics. It's like Basil Fawlty's, 'don't mention the war'. :wink:
All respect to Dr. Pigliucci, but if his argument really obtained, we would not see platonism (lower-case!) being such a common position among philosophers.
I don't think that is the claim. The opposite seems true, an advantage of platonism over nominalism is exactly how math applies to the sciences.
Quoting SEP's Nominalism in the Philosophy of Mathematics
But in the "[...]" paragraph we see that we can still thrash the platonists on that point. But such is the issue with every kind of non-monism, the interaction/relation problem.
Edit: But not exactly the topic of the thread.
On another note, it is good to see Otávio Bueno being cited here. I remember seeing his name on a few papers I have read in the past.
I just think there is a category error in supposing that numbers must exist or not exist.
Rather, they are something we do. A way of talking about things. A grammar. I've filled this out elsewhere and in previous conversations with you.
But this is not the topic of this thread.
And I don't think you understand the argument, nor want to understand it.
I've made an attempt to tighten up your claim by pointing out its relation to free logic and modality. You have not addressed this. Presumably, if I have not understood your argument, you can point out how what you claim differed from what I offered.
So here, we are in basic agreement:
Quoting Wayfarer
And presumably we agree there is some reification, where the act of counting is treated as if we were dealing with a series of individuals - 1,2,3...
But whereas you seem to be saying that these individuals are "real", I'm pointing out that they remain shorthand for an activity we can perform.
And sure, we can quantify them as needed.
So what is the argument I don't understand - is it the same one you could make a case for, but is too long? Then you might forgive my not understanding it until you present it...
Excellent point and I will respond soon.
So whatever you mean when you say numbers don't exist, it can't be that.
Certainly counting may be an act, indeed I believe it is, but that doesn't address the issue of the realness or otherwise of numbers - which is the ontological issue. And why that is significant is because of the centrality of mathematics to science, mathematical physics in particular, and because of the challenge that poses to physicalism. (I'm baffled that this is regarded as trivial.) Again I'll refer to an IEP article The Indispensability Argument in the Philosophy of Mathematics which I'm sure will be amenable to you, as it is based around an argument by Putnam and Quine, whom you probably know better than I do. So I would like to get your view of the matter:
What are these 'best epistemic theories', and why are they irreconciliable with knowledge of mathematical objects? Well, the article goes on to explain:
And further along:
I think this is the nub of the issue. Our 'best epistemic theories' are, of course, naturalist - as I'm sure Quine would affirm - and are underpinned by empiricism - that knowledge originates from sensory experience. And also, there is the suggestion that mathematical ability is innate - another strike against rationalism, from the empiricist point of view.
And yet, I can't help but think that it's obvious that humans do indeed have a 'non-sensory capacity for understanding mathematical truths' and that if that does throw shade on the view of humans as 'physical creatures', then so much the worse for it.
What say you?
That they have a common reference, that the value of a number is not a matter of opinion or choice. I would like to say 'objective' but I don't think 'objective' is quite the right term - we refer to numbers to ascertain what is objective, but they are not really known as objects except for in the figurative sense of 'object of thought' (which actually is near to the original, as distinct from Kantian, view of the meaning of noumenal')
I agree. We can all immediately recognize a small number of whatevers. Larger numbers of things we can count, and there is no room for disagreement. Each number is a kind of recognizable pattern or configuration. So, I would say number is real because it is instantiated everywhere. But I can't imagine any sense beyond that in which we could say numbers are real.
That is what you see in practice though. There are no modal operators in propositional logic. But both modal and propositional logic are great. Their semantics also differ considerably. When you write the possibility and necessity symbols in a modal logic, you quantify over possible worlds. When you write them in a quantified modal logic, you quantify over worlds, and there's also quantification within worlds in the usual logic way.
Those quantifiers are introduced differently, and as the paper "Quantifier Variance Dissolved" notes that provides a strong argument for a form quantifier variance without a reduction of quantifier meaning to underlying entity type it quantifies over, and without committing yourself to the claim that there's a whole bunch of equally correct logics for the purposes of ontology.
I had in mind his Three Worlds conception, where Russell's individual brain-events would be thoughts in the World 2 sense, whereas the universals or objects of thought would be World 3 items. I like Popper's discussion because he recognized that the World 2/World 3 distinction isn't just about universals, but concerns any "contents of thought" or propositional meaning. That said, I don't know how seriously we need to take the talk of "Worlds".
Quoting Banno
Yes, good, and that does help me recapture my puzzle about using ? that way. One picture: The existential quantifier is austere, a mere operator, and doesn't add anything to whatever terms it operates upon. This matches up with the traditional arguments for why existence can't be a predicate. Another picture: When we make a statement in Logicalese to the effect that ?x(x=t), we are indeed providing new information; we are predicating existence of 't'. And in that case, if we go on to say ?!t=df?x(x=t), we're having it both ways -- quantifier and predicate. This looks right, but . . . what does that commit us to, in re quantifier variance? We'd been exploring the idea, above, that ? doesn't actually vary, but rather the sentences differ in what they pick out as existing, i.e., having the predicate 'existence'. We're supposed to be able to hold some sense of 'existence' steady, and my puzzle is, Which one? Existence as ?, or existence as the predicate 'exists'? What's worse, the more I try to put this into words, the less certain I am that the question is even a good one. I may have merely muddled the terms.
Perhaps relatedly, the "two domains" question is still murky for me. I'm not a strong enough logician to have a worthwhile opinion.
I'm sympathetic to that view, and offer a homely analogy. We can say true and false things about Sherlock Holmes. That he had lodgings in Baker Street is true. That he wore a long beard is false. Etc. Now we also want to say that, in some important sense, Holmes didn't exist at all. So how can we make T/F assertions about a nonexistent item? This is where "reality" becomes a tempting term to introduce. Holmes didn't and doesn't exist, but he is real if we let "reality" mean "capable of T/F predications".
The analogy with numbers breaks down, though, when we acknowledge that Holmes is without question nonexistent, whereas a mathematical Platonist (not @Wayfarer) would disagree with the way I'm divvying up the terms -- for her, numbers also exist, just not as empirical objects . . . and the dispute goes on. (Perhaps Holmes himself also exists, as a Form, on this view.)
Phenomena - apparent, appearing
Noumenal - object of nous/intellect
Imaginary - fictional and literary
There are three clear ways of using "is". Quantification, "There is something that is green"; equivalence: "Superman is Clark Kent"; and predication: "Wayfarer is a human".
That numbers are a way of doing things does not mean that we cannot quantify over them, equate them or predicate to them.
What we have done here is to hypostatise the action of counting. This is not at all an unusual thing to do, we do this sort of thing with stuff all around us. Property, for instance, marks a difference between the actions you can perform and the actions your neighbour can perform. Money marks a difference between what a pauper can enact as opposed to what can be done by a comfortable middle-class retiree. Rank marks a difference in ability between an officer and a civilian.
But we do not spend time arguing over whether property, money or rank are "real" in the way trees and such are. Your article says "We learn about ordinary objects, at least in part, by using our senses." We do not learn who owns an object or what it is worth by simply examining it. Value and ownership are not physical attributes of an object.
We stipulate what counts as your property, what counts as five dollars, who counts as an admiral. And we stipulate what counts as two, three or four. That is we make it so by treating it as if it were so. See the various threads on Searle.
And it seems to me that this utterly undermines the misguided search for a platonic world of numbers.
Quoting Wayfarer
That capacity, if it is anything, consists in the capacity to have something count as... An act of social intentionality of the sort that underpins much of our world.
Oh, Ok. "world three" corresponds, in broad terms, with the stuff invented by playing language games that I describe in the post above, to @Wayfarer. See Quoting Banno
For me the problem here is the lack of a clear account of what quantifier variance is. Hence,
So i think we can pass the argument back to those who might support quantifier variance, and ask them to set out explicitly what it is they might mean.
Fair enough - but its not my article, its an encyclopedia article on a genuine controversy. Why its a controversy, and what the implications are, are what Im interested in. Quite agree that rational abilities underpin our world, but not that they can be reduced to social intentionality (which sounds like the kind of thing a Joshs would say :yikes:)
The difference form Joshs is that Searle gives at least an outline of how social intentionality works. It's not complete, but it is better than looking for platonic realms.
I wasn't quite able to follow your point here. Are we in agreement that advocates of quantifier variance have failed to give an adequate account? That
and that this has not been provided?
Do you agree or disagree that mathematical knowledge is incompatible with our best epidemic theories? That is the point on which the argument hinges.
Seems an odd position for you to be defending.
See this comment I made earlier today:
Quoting Banno
How am I defending it? Ill come back to this later.
And Lloyd Gerson lays out the thesis, in Platonism and Naturalism: The Possibility of Philosophy, that (1) philosophy proper is Platonist, and (2) is incompatible with naturalism. This is what I believe is the underlying issue but Ill fill that out later
SO I must be misunderstanding what you are saying.
Quoting Banno
Why words, though? I'm not googling, but isn't there somewhat robust evidence that some non-linguistic animals (crows, isn't it?) and infra-linguistic children have some rudimentary understanding of arithemetic? (With numbers befitting their size, of course.)
What's more, there are, or have been, human languages -- and thus functioning human communities to speak them -- that only have "1, 2, many". So language doesn't directly lead to mathematics more advanced than crows and infants possess, even if it enables it (as it does, you know, everything).
I think the gist of your approach is right -- that numbers are to do with us. I just wonder why you think it's to do with how we talk.
Language allows far more complexity. That's all.
Indeed you are. I will reply later, dealing with domestic duties today.
Quoting Banno
Take it aside and explain to it the meaning of prime number.
Im not arguing in favor of it. Im asking why its even necessary. Im questioning the claim that according to our best epistemic theories, mathematical knowledge ought not to be possible. It obviously is possible, so what does that say about the shortcomings of our best epistemic theories?
I quoted the paragraph which says 'rationalists claim that we have a special, non-sensory capacity for understanding mathematical truths, a rational insight arising from pure thought. But, the rationalists claims appear incompatible with an understanding of human beings as physical creatures whose capacities for learning are exhausted by our physical bodies.' And I think the 'rational insight arising from pure thought' is, in fact, reason. But according to this article, this appears to contradict naturalism. So I'm saying, so much the worse for naturalism.
@Srap Tasmaner may recall the debate over the 'argument from reason'.
Here it is again, but as I'm yelling into a gale, I'll desist.
Yes, since the discussion needs a natural stopping place, we could certainly toss the ball back to the friends of QV. And yet . . . haven't they given us a pretty good explanation of what they mean? To re-quote:
I think a lot of our discussion on this thread has focused on whether these "equally legitimate meanings" are attached to the quantifiers at all. The best anti-QV position is that the existential quantifier always means the same thing, it's the predication of "existence" that changes. So let's say that's true. With a wave of the hand, we can eliminate quantifier variance strictly understood. But as I was saying in a previous post, I don't think we've laid to rest, or explained, the doubts that Hale and Wright express. They want to know whether the "perfectly good meanings" of "there exists" are equally legitimate, equally assertive of truths, equally undistinguished in terms of how well they correspond with or describe reality. They propose QV as a possible explanation of how this could be. Even if we reject that view, the real problem remains, which is, I suggest, ontological pluralism. But that can wait for a new OP.
"Numbers are something we do," suggests the question: "why are numbers something we (and animals) do?" All activities have causes, right?
IMO, attempting to answer that question is going to bring us back to questions about the nature of numbers, their ontic status, the "presence" of mathematics in nature, etc.
It's the same thing with words and meaning. We can say words and their meaning are part of social practices, but there remains the questions: "why are social practices what they are? why do they evolve the way they do? etc."
I don't see how an account that is social practice or activity "all the way down," is going to work.
Quoting Wayfarer
Well, I've long argued the incompleteness of naturalism. So I don't agree with the premise of the argument - that naturalism is our "best" epistemic theory.
'(R)ational insight arising from pure thought' is a bit of nonsense, so far as I can see. I've set out an outline of how our language permits the invocation of intentional facts- things that we bring into being by collective intentionality, such as money, property, and the prime numbers that crows find so difficult to follow.
Quoting Wayfarer
I've tried to have you fill this out explicitly. If what you say here were so we would have a neat case of quantification variance to work with - the difference between real and existent. But i do nto think you have been able to proved a coherent account.
We quantise over numbers, a clear sense in which they do exist.
I'm thinking that in order to make explicit quantifier variance we would need a case in which it is clear that the difference between two languages was not found in the domain, but in their quantification.
Take the example:
This is pretty clearly a case in which one language has in its domain a thing which is a compound of this pencil and your left ear, and the other does not.
That's not a difference in the use (meaning) of quantification.
I'm not so enamoured with causes. Nor do I take evolutionary explanations as inherently fundamental.
But leaving that to one side, isn't it enough that we want to share the six fruit equally amongst the three of us, to explain the need for counting?
Thanks for that, we have some agreement. Maybe to you the issue I'm commenting on 'goes without saying' but I think there's something that needs to be spelled out:
Quoting Banno
So you wouldn't endorse
//
I will try and re-state what I see the difference between real and existent at a high level.
By 'existent' I refer to manifest or phenomenal existence. Broadly speaking, this refers to sensable objects (I prefer that spelling as it avoids the equivocation with the other meaning of 'sensible') - tables and chairs, stars and planets, oceans and continents. They're phenomenal in the sense of appearing to subjects as sensable objects or conglomerates.
I am differentiating this from what used to be called 'intelligible objects' - logical principles, numbers, conventions, qualifiers and so on. For example, if I were to say to you, 'show me the law of the excluded middle', you would have to explain it to me. It's not really an 'object' at all in the same sense as the proverbial chair or apple. You might point to a glossary entry, but that too comprises the explanation of a concept. The same with all kinds of arithmetical proofs and principles. Even natural laws - the laws of motion, for example. All of these can only be grasped by a rational intelligence. I could not demonstrate or explain them to a cow or a dog. They are what could be described as 'noumenal' in the general (not Kantian) sense, being 'objects of intellect' (nous) - only graspable by a rational mind. (Significant that the Collins Dictionary definition of noumenal is real as distinct from phenomenal appearance, echoing scholastic realism.)
As I said at the outset, in regular speech it is quite clear to say 'the number 7 exists'. But when you ask what it is, then you are not pointing to a sensable object - that is the symbol - but a rational act. (That's the sense in which I mean that 'counting is an act', but it doesn't mean that the demonstrations of rudimentary reasoning in higher animals amounts to reason per se.)
In Plato these levels or kinds of knowledge were distinguished per the Analogy of the Divided Line . Those distinctions are what have been forgotten, abandoned or lost in the intervening millenia due to the dominance of nominalism and empiricism. But In reality, thought itself, the rational mind, operates through a process of synthesis which blends and binds the phenomenal and noumenal into synthetic judgements (per Kant).
That is the back-story of why the need is felt for 'the indispensability argument for mathematics', and the difficulties of accomodating mathematical knowledge into the procrustean bed of empiricist naturalism.
No surprise there. You've differentiated between things that exist and things that are real, and while there are issues here that at least makes some sense. You've just re-plastered Descartes mind-body dualism by calling it "manifest" and "ineligible". But the problem with any dualism is explaining how the two interact.
//but thank you all the same//
You still want mind on one side and matter on the other. It's inveterate in your posts.
//theres nothing in the post youre responding to which suggests mind-matter duality. The contrast, rather than the dualism, was between sensable and intelligible. But in reality, mind synthesises both elements in arriving at judgement.//
Because we have a brain with trillions of parameters capable of extremely complicated abstraction and inference tasks!
With all respect to @Banno, the formula "Numbers are something we do" could use some clarification. For one thing, it lends itself to the interpretation you're querying here -- that "doing numbers" is just a practice, something we might have chosen to do differently, or not do at all. I don't think this is right, and I don't think Banno needs to hold this position in order to make his point -- though he can tell us if that is so.
I read his position as saying that we wouldn't have numbers if we didn't have mathematics as a whole; that is, numbers "come into existence" as they assume their place within mathematical practice, which is a doing, an activity. You can't "find" 3 but overlook or do without 4, to put it crudely. With numbers, it's all or nothing.
But that understanding, if expressed as "Numbers are something we do," doesn't distinguish between two sets of alternatives, two different questions. The first set of alternatives is: Numbers are either a) found or b) invented. (Let's not worry about getting this more precise, for the moment.) The second set is: Numbers are either a) reflective of the basic structure of reality, or b) arbitrary/pragmatic. (Same caveat here.)
Now if we say "Numbers are something we do," this could mean that we perform them -- or, to put it in more ordinary talk, do mathematics -- as a kind of invention, rather as we might dance or sing. This would be option B of the first set of alternatives. Then again, "Numbers are something we do" might mean "Numbers are [just] something WE do" -- they are indeed arbitrary choices that might have been made differently, had we practiced a different mathematics. This would be option B of the second set of alternatives.
I want to hold out for option B in the first set, and option A in the second set, and I don't know whether "Numbers are something we do" represents a disagreement with me. It needn't, as I'm trying to show. My assertion could mean that numbers as such -- numerals, individual items with names like '7' -- aren't "out there," they aren't found, but nevertheless our choices within mathematics are far from arbitrary or free. This latter clause could be extended to the point of claiming that math (or logic) is perhaps the most basic structure there is, absolutely ontologically fundamental.
The challenge to that position is, How could something so basic not be "out there"? What do I mean by "structure" and "fundamental"? Yeah, that's worth a tome or two, and fortunately Theodore Sider is trying to help us out . . . see his Writing the Book of the World.
Yes. (I actually think that the illusion that quantifiers are straightforwardly univocal is a deep problem in contemporary logic)
I was asked to comment on this discussion, which is getting away from the OP. As to the OP I would say that the problem of quantifier equivocation is significant but not insuperable. For those with a "low" epistemology ("ontology is beyond our pay grade!") it will appear insuperable, but for them it will always come down to a putative overreach of human inquiry. A form of positivism is also lurking here insofar as the presumption is that we can somehow scientifically or logically demonstrate the truth or falsity of QV, which seems to me a false assumption. Public demonstration is a limited epistemic tool which will not measure up to the task at hand.
Quoting Wayfarer
There is a longstanding dispute over the univocity of being (and predication) between the Thomists and the Scotists beginning in the Medieval period. The Scotists held to univocity (and Heidegger's first dissertation was on this topic, on a text then believed to be Duns Scotus').
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
This is a good point, and points to the fact that "what we do" is presupposing ontological commitments, just as varieties of logic do.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Agreed. I think it reflects a "hermeneutic of despair," in the sense that the logical positivists and their progeny are saying something like, "It's not ideal, but it's the best we're capable of." Besides, no one disagrees that mathematics is something we do. That it is something we do does not answer the question which asks what is involved in mathematics.
Quoting Wayfarer
I would want to slice the pie between epistemic optimists and epistemic pessimists, so to speak. The former believe that the human intellect has access to deeper levels of reality, whereas the latter do not. This is probably the biggest difference between you and Banno. The English-speaking tradition tends to fall in with the latter, especially in the secular sphere. Thinkers like Husserl and Heidegger are much more aligned with the former, at least in a relative contemporary sense. The differences are also strongly influenced by anthropology and, in due turn, experience. Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Heidegger, etc., are spiritual thinkers with a higher human anthropology. The difference between such thinkers and a Russell or even a Wittgenstein is that Russell hamstrings himself into a low anthropology, and this has the effect of limiting his epistemology and horizon. To be blunt, someone who lives their whole life with their head stuck in the sand will naturally come to the conclusion that only sand exists, and that Plato's divided line is a naive fiction. The difference is faith. One must have faith that something more than sand exists if they are ever to find anything other than sand. Without faith one hamstrings themselves and artificially truncates the horizon of knowledge and reality.
Intellectual naivete is, to my mind, a form of idolatry. Namely, it absolutizes the relative. The project of the logical positivists is a paradigm example of this idolatry. They absolutized one form of logic, assumed that it was associated with no controversial ontological commitments, and fell into all manner of folly. They made a nifty hammer and then assumed that everything was a nail. Students of philosophy should be wary of thinkers of this sort. They should begin with Plato and only descend to Russell if they feel the need. This is difficult because our inherited anthropology and epistemology is now very low, very technocratic. In any case, a general rule of thumb is that most intellectual perspectives or vantage points are not unconditioned. To take the example of the OP: quantifier meaning is not unconditioned by ontological commitments.
I don't see any argument being presented for why this example must be a matter of domain and not quantification, and if this is right then you are begging the question. The example is intended to suggest the opposite conclusion, for the only linguistic difference pertains to quantificational terms. It should of course also be remembered that any quantification difference will also result in large or small domain differences (and as noted above, the meaning of quantification is conditioned by one's ontological domain, just as one's ontological domain is conditioned by quantification).
- I don't want to get embroiled in this thread, but a central question is to what extent quantifiers can be rigidly defined. The problem here is that quantification derives from the meaning of 'being' or 'exists', and this is one of the most elusive and foundational concepts, inextricably bound up with one's fundamental intellectual stance. "Being" is not like "apple" in that we can give a relatively straightforward definition and be done with it. Because of this adjudicating QV becomes increasingly difficult, and to stipulate a meaning for quantification is at the same time to make the dependent logic to that extent artificial. This is one of the places where the weaknesses of positivism begin to show.
Me neither. I've already spilled a lot of virtual ink on the forum about quantifiers.
Quoting Leontiskos
But this i disagree with, so here we are.
I don't think quantifiers have much of anything to do with existence or being or any of that. They're entirely about predication -- classification, categories, concepts. Quantifiers are about what things are, not that they are.
It's amusing that Quine is more or less directly responsible for the revival of metaphysics in English-speaking philosophy. By suggesting that there's not quite nothing to say about ontology, and that what little there is to say is covered by logic, he cracked the door open for everyone from Dummett to his own former students (Lewis and Kripke). He tried to build a dam to hold back modal speculation and caused a monumental flood of the stuff. And so it goes.
I've learned that the dissident theological movement, Radical Orthodoxy, sees Duns Scotus' univocity (in combination with Ockham's nominalism) as the source of the decline of modern culture.
[quote=Richard Weaver, Ideas have Consequences]Like Macbeth, Western man made an evil decision, which has become the efficient and final cause of other evil decisions. Have we forgotten our encounter with the witches on the heath? It occurred in the late fourteenth century, and what the witches said to the protagonist of this drama was that man could realize himself more fully if he would only abandon his belief in the reality of transcendentals. The powers of darkness were working subtly, as always, and they couched this proposition in the seemingly innocent form of an attack upon universals. The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence.[/quote]
Many thanks for your perspective.
Can you state just why you think that incompatibility obtains? Many animals appear to have extraordinary capabilities, capabilities that we call instinctive without being able to explain them. How can we understand the idea that we and other animals have resources and capacities which would not be possible for the body/ brain alone when we really understand so little about these unimaginably complex organic beings.
It is questionable whether we have the intellectual capacity to comprehensively understand biological complexity.
That's not my claim. It is in the article that I referred to, The Indispensability Argument in the Philosophy of Mathematics. That article says that mathematical knowledge and rationalist philosophy is incompatible with 'our best epistemic theories' which as @Banno pointed out is a reference to naturalism. Make of that what you will.
As for the unfathomable subtlety of living organisms, I'm all for it. I think many things we describe as 'instinct' are impossible to fathom, but that's a completely separate issue.
Quoting Wayfarer
It's not a separate issue if we include mathematical understanding as one of these unfathomable capacities of living organisms, a capacity much more developed in our own case, itself a fact which would seem to have much to do with our command of symbolic language.
You mean I can't jump head into philosophers 3 thousand years deep into the dialogue? Jeez...
Quoting Janus
He outlines his argument clearly in this post:
Quoting Wayfarer
Putting into silly-willy terms:
We learn things through senses
Mathematical objects, if they exist, are abstract
Abstract objects can't interact with senses
So if mathematical objects exist we can't have knowledge of them
The nominalist will agree with the argument above. Wayfarer instead will deny that "we learn things [only] through senses".
I think it is clear as such, but it is his words so he can correct me anyway.
I have asked him to explain what could be meant by saying that numbers are real beyond our recognition of number in the world, and the formalization of the idea of number in the symbolic language of mathematics, but he does not seem able to proffer an answer.
From an essay on the issue:
Actually I think theres a sensible answer to that question, which is that empiricism is tremendously effective at finding things out and getting things done. But the nature of mathematical objects is not itself an empirical question. Thats the nub of the issue.
I presented the argument here https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/902998
which was somehow misconstrued as Cartesian dualism, although with an acknowledgment that I had at least distinguished real from existent.
Many people will ignore that too because they will say that numbers aren't real (Field, Azzouni).
[hide="Reveal"]I, personally, think mathematics is an empirical endeavor.[/hide]
Quoting Janus
The dualist will say that they are abstract objects (not spatial, not temporal, causally inefficacious).
A sample
You still haven't given an answer as to why the reality of number (as "sensably") instantiated could not possibly explain our understanding of mathematics. Nor have you explained in what sense an abstract "object" could be considered to be real beyond its being thought by humans (or other suitably competent beings).
Quoting Lionino
Yes, and unfortunately, we have no idea what it could mean to be such an object, apart from, as I said above, it being thought by some mind.
I would say that the logic will inevitably be applied to real things, at which point the logical domain must grapple with mapping itself to an existent domain. I actually find it odd to hear you say that quantifiers do not implicate existence (real or imagined).
I would like to believe that this position is nearer to Kants transcendental idealism. Theres no way I posit anything like Descartes res cogitans or the seperatness of mind and body.
There are things you can't 'learn from experience'. All the math experts on this forum know things that I know I'll never understand, even if sat in the same room and looked at the same symbolic forms. They have an intellectual skill that I and others lack. Nothing to do with experience, although it can be shaped and augmented through experience. But the innate skill has to exist first. You'll never teach the concept of prime to a Caledonian crow ;-)
I mean, of course they implicate it, in the exact sense that they presuppose it -- but they don't have anything to say about it. Rather like the status that "truth" has in logic ... (Existence being not a real predicate, and in any given language neither is "... is true" -- need the metalanguage for that.)
What's asserted in an existentially quantified formula is not really, say, "Rabbits exist," but the more mundane "Some of the things (at least one) that exist are rabbits." Or "Not all of the things that exist aren't rabbits," etc.
And then there's all the complications that arise --- sortals and unrestricted quantification, vacuous singular terms, the elimination of singular terms, projectibility, the substitutional interpretation, et bloody cetera.
Also I always think it's worth rememembering that Frege's quantifiers, and the rest of classical logic so many of us know and love, was not designed as an all-purpose logic at all, but was what was needed to formalize mathematics. It's got some very rough edges when applied more broadly, about which there's endless debate, but it runs like a champ on its home turf.
Hmmmm. You know that sounds a lot like one of those things people say because it's so obviously true, right up until it's proven false. (Heavier than air flight? Are you mad?)
There are simple algorithms for determining whether a number is prime; it's a mechanical process that doesn't require what you call "rational insight". Our intellectual superiority to the crow, in this case, is our greater capacity for purely mechanical, algorithmic thought-work. (In similar fashion, teenagers with essentially zero grasp of the niceties of algebraic geometry can solve quadratic equations for you all day long.)
Ah, but the concept, you'll say -- what extraordinary insight did it take to come up with the concept of primality? Eh. Primality is not subtle or complicated. If you do a lot of arithmetic, you're bound to notice that some numbers are a bit incorrigible in a similar way.
I don't say that a crow would notice. I'm just pointing out that, as with everything, it's practice first then theory, if ever, and that what gets noticed is something about the experience of doing arithemetic -- no portal opens to reveal the crystalline realm of mathematics, with an altar to primality at the center.
Neither am I denying that the noticing is where the action is, and we're damn good noticers. I would just want to be clear about what the noticing is and how it occurs before drawing any conclusions. --- And none of this says anything about whether numbers "exist" or whatever. That's the tail wagging the dog.
Machines are artefacts, are they not?
I'd be interested in your take on this paper I often cite, Frege on Knowing the Third Realm, Tyler Burge - about Frege's implicit Platonism concerning number.
It's about the extent of my knowledge of Frege, but I've always found it an interesting paper.
Well yeah, Frege was a platonist. He was a pretty good logician, but he wasn't a god, and platonism is an inevitable and understandable mistake. :smiley-face:
Quoting Wayfarer
What of it? Natural selection, for instance, is a mechanical, algorithmic process. Nature is full of them, without the need of a mind to have conceived them. That recognition is why Dewey thought Darwin would finally put paid to platonism in its many guises. That was over a hundred years ago, I believe, and people have yet to get the message. And so it goes.
Are you not arguing for two kinds of realitythe reality of the body and the different reality of the mind?
Quoting Wayfarer
This just seems to be an ad hominem deflection. I have asked for an account of the reality you want to claim for abstracta, which is alternative to the account that says they are real insofar as they are thought, and you have not been able to give me any account to comment on.
So, it's a bit rich for you to be claiming that my position is "unquestioned" and that I am incapable of seeing anything that challenges it, It is my long and deeply considered view that the only kinds of intersubjective justification that are possible for beliefs are the empirical and the logical/ mathematical, but I am open to having my mind changed if someone presents an alternative to those that is convincing. I hold that view because I am yet to see such an account.
And I shouldn't have to remind you that it is my position that people can be justified in believing things which cannot be empirically or logically supported on the basis of their own intuitions or experience, but I maintain that that cannot be justification for anyone else believing those things (unless of course they share the same intuitions and/or experience).
So, my position is not positivism, despite your repeated attempts, despite repeated corrections, to paint it as such. And in any case even if it were pure positivism, that does not let you off the hook from being called upon to actually give an account instead of the constant hand-waving and claims to be misunderstood you do generally present.
:up:
I think if you're going to argue for something more along the lines of "mathematics is invented/arbitrary," a compelling argument at least needs a good explanation of why such a practice arises, is so incredibly useful, and seems so certain. By way of analogy, swimming is also something we "do," but any decent explanation of how swimming works is going to involve, at the very least, mentioning water. Certainly, you don't need an in-depth explanation of "how swimming works," to swim, but swimming itself, or the fact that it is an activity, is not an explanation of swimming.
But since mathematics underpins all of science, it's obviously going to be an area of intense curiosity, which is why...
I would say no. Knowing what mathematics [I]is[/I] seems like one of the biggest philosophical questions out there. Not to mention that a number of major breakthroughs in mathematics have been made while focusing on foundations, so it hardly seems like a useless question to answer either.
As for causes, in this case I don't think you can do without them. If you want to say that "three" is something "stipulated" in the way that the concept of private property is, the obvious next question is: "ok, conceptions of property vary radically across time and space. Numbers do not, and they are stipulated the same way across cultures, including those that have been isolated from one another. Moreover, we have a very easy time imagining worlds were private property, marriage, etc. do not exist, but people have long thought it not incoherent to be asked to imagine a world where basic arithmetic works differently, where two and two make five. Why this huge difference?"
I think mathematics is an empirical (as well as logical) endeavor also, so we agree on that. But note I said number is real, not numbers.
Quoting Janus
If number is real in the sense I say it is, that is in the sense that there are numbers of objects, then number would be a real attribute of objects, and the objects would be real, but the numbers themselves would only be real as ways of thinking and dealing with objects, and also as elements in formalized systems of rules elaborated upon that basis.
That's a tough sell, though. It was one of Frege's brilliant examples, that the logical form of "The king's carriage was pulled by black horses" is different from the logical form of "The king's carriage was pulled by three horses." This is the guy who (independently of Peirce, I believe) is going to invent our modern regime of quantifiers, because he noticed things like this.
But what does that mean? Is "different" a property an object can have?
Yes, I'm being a little cagey, but you can do better than a shrug.
(And that's all for me tonight.)
How does this square with this?
Do you mean numbers as abstracted from any particular instantiation if them?
What do you think of the claim that discrete entities only exist as a product of minds? That is, "physics shows us a world that is just a single continuous process, with no truly isolated systems, where everything interacts with everything else, and so discrete things like apples, cars, etc. would exist solely as 'products of the mind/social practices.'"
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I may be reading between the lines of the OP, but here is what I see. I see a question about intractable philosophical disagreements and the possible answer of quantifier variance. That at least in some cases the culprit is a notion of quantification that is not shared between the two parties. Now if quantifier variance is occurringsuperable or insuperablethen the existential quantifier is doing more than presupposing a univocal notion of existence. Or, if you like, the two secretly competing meanings of existential quantification are each presupposing a different notion of existence, and this is the cause of the disagreement. Thus arises the very difficult question of how to adjudicate two different notions of existence, and this is the point of mine to which you initially objected. ...Regarding metalanguage, my earlier contention was that language shapes metalanguage, and does not merely presuppose it. There are no metalanguage-neutral languages, and logicians are prone to miss this.
I actually think 's post may be most instructive and fruitful.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yes, and this is an important way that the logic reflects the commitments or intentions of its creators. It is not logic qua logic; it is logic qua mathematics.
---
- :up: I should say that while debates about universalsmathematical or otherwiseare interesting, I dont want to enter that fray given my time constraints. Its also one of those mountains that requires preparation and gumptionnot something I would want to do impromptu. :smile:
We don't see individual objects in isolation, but as embedded in and different from their surroundings, so difference if not a property of some putative completely isolated object, but a property it displays in its situatedness.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes that sounds about right.Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I don't see any reason to think that we carve up the world arbitrarily, but rather I see many good reasons to think that we are constrained by its actual structures.
Well, I brought up the issue, so I'm bound to say there's something to this.
On the other hand, I'm hesitant to endorse what you say here because mathematics is special, and there's a sense in which mathematics is the goal of logic, the goal of thinking as such. (I think there are hints of the excitement of this discovery almost everywhere in Plato where he rattles off the list -- argument, mathematics, astronomy, and so on.) --- And that means "qua mathematics" is not generally a restriction of anything, a limiting of it to this one domain, but an idealization of it.
And it's historically backwards -- but maybe that was deliberate? Frege was trying to reduce mathematics to logic, not the other way around, and that turns out not quite to work, but in trying to do so, he came up with a formalization of logic which could be extremely useful to mathematics rather than providing its foundation. A sort of logic "adapted to" mathematics, or to the needs of mathematics, which is what I was suggesting --- although this time around I've already suggested this isn't necessarily a deformation of logic by focusing on a limited domain, so much as an idealization of logic by focusing on the domain that most cleanly, we might say, represents human thought. And as it happens, I think Frege thought so as well. I think he was mostly of the opinion that natural languages are too much of a mess to do sound work in.
Do all those steps amount to "logic qua mathematics"? Maybe kinda, in a dyer's hand sort of way. There's a lot that makes it look like a branch of mathematics, and the advanced stuff tends to be called "mathematical logic" and get taught in math departments. But that's a deeply tricky business because basic logic is the fundamental tool of everything done in mathematics, absolutely everything -- it's just taken as given at lower levels of learning, without any suggestion that you're actually borrowing from some rarefied advanced field of mathematics.
So I think advanced "mathematical logic" is something like "mathematized logic" -- that's qua-ish maybe in the sense you meant -- but what that means is applying the tools and techniques of mathematics to the given material that is logic, which mathematics can treat of, because mathematics is good at treating of anything. (That's the whole point.) And one of the techniques mathematics brings to bear in treating of logic is, well, logic, because mathematics was just borrowing it for free in the first place.
Still agree?
Quoting Leontiskos
Wouldn't be the first time, but he was addressing the topic, and I have yet to develop an interest in doing that.
Quoting Leontiskos
Do as you like, I just don't see the point. We can talk about existence all we like without dragging quantifiers into it, and people -- they're always wandering around the forum -- who get worked up about the meaning of the "existential quantifier" are generally just confused by the name (a name I note Finn and Bueno would like to retire).
It's a funny thing. This is all Quine's fault, as I noted. "To be is to be the value of a bound variable" comes out as a deflationary slogan, but what we was really arguing for was a particular version of univocity: the idea was that if you quantify over it, you're committed to it existing, and he meant "existing" with the ordinary everyday meaning; what he was arguing against was giving some special twilight status to "theoretical entities". If your model quantifies over quarks, say, then your model says quarks are real things, and it's no good saying they're just artifacts of the model or something. --- The reason this is amusing is that all these decades later the consensus of neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists, so far as I can tell, is that absolutely everything we attribute existence to in the ordinary everyday sense -- medium-sized dry goods included -- is an "artifact of the model" or a "theoretical entity", so the threat to univocity Quine was addressing never actually existed, if only because the everyday meaning of "exist", the one Quine wanted to stick with, is in fact the "twilight" meaning he wanted to tamp down. And so it goes.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I don't think we are any more justified in saying this than we are in saying the world is full of distinct objects. All we have is signal processing. Is the source one signal? Two? Two trillion? How can you tell when you're receiving and analysing them all at once? It makes a difference in your metaphysics, but in nothing else at all that I can see.
Quoting Janus
And you don't see any circularity here?
Remember the issue was whether number could be a property of an object, and it just obviously can't unless sets count as objects. It's really straightforward and it pissed Quine off considerably.
[hide="What's more ..."](It is curious that we don't adjectivize numbers much at all, so even sets aren't said to be two-ish but to have cardinality of two. ((We have "once" "twice" and "thrice" for adverbs, but then it's on to "repeatedly" or "continually" or something.)) Maybe it's an Indo-European thing.)[/hide]
But then you brought in this other stuff about "diversity, sameness, and difference being real" which just begs another pile of questions. I'm at a loss.
That its the kind of thing a Parmenides would say?
Quoting Janus
Not two kinds but two levels, phenomenal and noumenal - and the role of the mind in synthesizing them to produce a unity.
Is this a property it acquires naturally, along with its chemical composition, its mass, etc?
Or do we deem each object to be an instantiation of One?
@Count Timothy von Icarus @Wayfarer @Leontiskos et al.
Here's what I think, if you're interested.
Kant -- damn his eyes -- was right: we only understand of the world what we put into it.
We distinguish one bit from another, sort those bits and classify them, even paint them different colors to make it easier to keep track of them.
Mathematics is, first of all, our analysis of what we're doing when we do all that. More than that, it's a simplification and idealization of the process, to make it faster and more efficient.
It's all signal processing. The brain is not fundamentally interested in the world, but in the maintenance of the body it's responsible for, and the signals the brain deals with are about that body: they have an origin and and a type and a strength, and so on. Some of this is instrumented, so there's a reflective capacity to see how all these signals come together, and that's the beginning of mathematics.
Individual neurons themselves do this in microcosm, actively resisting firing until they absolutely have to, to sharpen and compress their signals from the analog toward the digital. And there's layer upon layer upon layer of this, simplifications of simplifications of simplifications. (The world itself is computationally very far away.)
Signals always have noise, and it's an efficient simplification not to pass through to the rest of the system the whole mess with a peak around 7 MHz and just say "7". We do this in well-known ways with phonemes, for example, counting a considerable range of sounds someone might make as an "r" or an "a".
Simplification and idealization makes it all possible, and that's mathematics. The world is in essence a mathematical construction of our brains, so of course it's a bit puzzling whether math is "in here" or "out there".
That's the gist, or part of a gist, of my view.
Just commenting on this to remember/"bookmark" it because I thought it was interesting.
Mathematics has this double role: it's the ideal we strive towards in our thinking, but it's what enables our thinking in the first place. Out brains have already been doing the sort of clarification and simplification we want when we model something mathematically -- so of course it feels like we're discovering that structure, not inventing it; we're just doing more of the same.
That's my working hypothesis anyway. Philosophy is almost entirely puzzling out the nature of idealization and its role in our thinking, and this approach makes some sense of that. To me at least.
I was addressing the topic as well, and so your attempt to address my post without addressing the topic would be difficult. If quantification and/or existence is straightforwardly univocal (as some here seem to hold), then it is hard to see how a theory like QV could even be entertained. @fdrake managed to "save the appearances" in both directions, so to speak.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Quickly, not quite. I do acknowledge that mathematics is a paradigm of logical thinking, and that Plato was heavily influenced by it, but I don't think logic is inherently mathematical, I don't think "mathematics is good at treating of [everything]," and I don't think mathematical logic is necessarily the epitome of logic. In fact at my university mathematical logic was very much acknowledged to be but one kind of logic, and I think this is correct. As someone who has formally studied computational logic, mathematical logic, and philosophical logic, I see no reason to universally privilege mathematical logic.
If we want to see this we need look no further than to one of Plato's direct successors, Aristotle. Aristotle is the father of formal logic, and his logic seems to have more to do with knowledge, biology, and classification ("substance") than with mathematics. In particular, as a scientist Aristotle would begin to develop systematic ways of thinking about non-necessary properties of real objects (proper accidents, accidents, etc.). Aristotle was more interested in representing the way the human mind draws conclusions than adhering to an a priori mathematical paradigm, and I think this makes for a much stronger logic. I think one could pick out mathematical logicians and philosophers throughout history (Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, right up to contemporaries like Frege), but to reduce logic to mathematics (or to privilege the mathematical paradigm as primary) would be to overlook lots of other, more natural-scientific thinkers along the lines of Aristotle. I don't think a priori mathematization is ever more plausible than Aristotle's a posteriori approach.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
The question here is different. It is the question of whether we can speak about quantifier variance without talking about notions of existence.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Interesting, but this seems to prove the point insofar as Quine's notion of existence (and quantification) differs from the approach of neuroscience. Here enters again the questions of the OP.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
It is a common view these days. I will leave my objections for another day. :wink:
Thanks for your thoughts! Have to work, but I'll definitely get back to you after a bit.
Glad to hear you say that. I'm not innovating here, I think, just trying to connect the dots.
Quoting Leontiskos
I get that. I'm using "mathematics" pretty broadly. What I have in mind is the mathematical impulse, the attempt to understand things by schematizing them, abstracting, simplifying, modeling. A musical scale is such an abstraction, for example, and "mathematical" in the sense I mean.
You're right, of course, that as commonly used the phrase "mathematical logic" is just a branch of mathematics, but to me logic is very much a product of the mathematical impulse, as when Aristotle abstracts away the content of arguments and looks only at their form -- and then follows up by classifying those forms! And we end up with the square of opposition, which is a blatantly mathematical structure. You see what I mean, I'm sure.
Quoting Leontiskos
As am I, in fact. I think the foundation of logic is the idea that one thought "follows from" another, and this in many more senses than are covered by material implication, for example. But I also think this is so because this is how our brains work, though we are not privy to the details. Hume noticed this, that the mind passes in some cases freely and in other cases with difficulty from one thought to another.
But I still say the foundation here is mathematical because with the brain we're really talking about prediction, and thus probability. The brain is a prediction engine that is constantly recalibrating. It instantiates a machine for calculating probabilities. The "following from" here is neural activity, which is messy and complicated, but has effects that are in principle measurable, and whose functioning itself is parametrized (concentration of ions and neurotransmitters, number of incoming connections and their level of excitation, distance to be covered by transmission, and so on).
Quoting Leontiskos
But his just thinking that doesn't get you there, to my mind. He was mistaken -- only because he was too early, really, and I think he'd be fine with how cognitive science has naturalized epistemology -- but does that eo ipso ground an alternative but legitimate meaning? Does QV amount to a claim that no one can be mistaken?
You seem to be dragging me into the actual topic, but alas my lunch break is over.
If an object has a unique identifying chemical composition and mass "naturally" would this qualify it as being one thing naturally? If we go down the road of thinking that some properties are merely "ascriptions" where would we draw the line?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
When I think about the visual field, comprising many things, it has the property of number. We can think of it as one or many. Do you think our seeing it as comprised of many is constrained by actual structure, actual diversity, difference and configuration, or does the brain make it all up from scratch?
Below is quoted from you on this;
Quoting Wayfarer
Kant's phenomenal/ noumenal distinction as I understand it is not between sense objects and abstracta, but between what we can know and what we cannot.
You seem to be claiming there are two kinds of objects: the physical (phenomena) and the mental (abstracta)_and claiming that at least abstracta are real independently of the mind. If you claim both phenomena and abstracta are mind independently real, then that would be dualism. I guess if you claim that only abstracta are real then that would be idealism, but certainly not of a Kantian kind.
Just what your position consists in remains unclear to me.
Sure. :up:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Okay, I understand. I tend to follow Aristotle and Aquinas, and for them the intellect or the reason deals with form (as opposed to matter); thus any kind of intellectual operation will deal with "abstracted" forms (e.g. shape, color, number, etc.). This is all the more true when it comes to discursive reason (and logic). Mathematics deals with one kind of form, namely number or quantity, and this is a very stark and useful form as far as pedagogy is concerned, but the intellect is able to handle all sorts of non-mathematical forms as well. So I don't know that we disagree very much, but I would want to say that mathematics is logical or rational rather than saying that logic or reason are mathematical.
Beyond that, I am wary of the mathematization of reason insofar as our technological age has a heavy predilection for mathematics. In other words, I think we have a bias in favor of math, given our modern Baconian desire to shape and control nature.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Okay. I am not a physicalist and you will never hear me talk about the brain in these ways, but I don't really want to get into those things. I think that if one were to grant the premise that the human being is basically a kind of survival-oriented prediction machine, then a kind of Kantianism and pragmatism does follow, and human reason (and logic) will then be understood in this same light. Yet what I said earlier about faith is also relevant here, for I think that the reduction of the human mind or soul to logical-mathematical functions of this kind is "pidgeonholing" or "hamstringing." At the very least I think one should be open to the possibility that the human mind is able to engage in other, less pragmatic activities. (I get the sense that your understanding of mathematics is pragmatic, and that you would not be inclined to simply contemplate mathematical Forms with Plato.)
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Perhaps, but I don't know that he has to be. I'd say that Hume's constant conjunction and the probability theories that tread similar ground are intellectually problematic insofar as they pre-pave a meta-rut for cognitive bias. For instance, we are now prone to mistake anthropological habits for natural probabilities. For example, one could look at our contemporary world and conclude that the human mind is inherently (and reductively) "mathematical" and technological, but I would contend that the evidence at hand is not a result of natural probability, and is instead a result of choices we have made, individually and collectively. Similarly, one might have grown up in Bavaria and have drawn the conclusion that all humans do, and always have, preferred Weizenbier. A wider scope would demonstrate that the preference for Weizenbier is conditioned, and is a human habit flowing from free choice and circumstance. When reason is reduced to constant conjunction or probability repeated decisions become self-justifying, and the distinction between knowledge and opinion dissolves.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Hopefully. But I've said too much, and you are returning just as I am leaving, as I am planning to take a hiatus from TPF. Hopefully this doesn't draw me in too far. :grimace:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
This thread has developed far and wide, with the discussion quality very high, and I dont mind at all the divagations from my OP. Unsurprisingly, thinking about quantifier variance opens the door to basic questions about existence and the nature of philosophical thinking itself.
So, just a few responses: The above statements about Frege are right, I believe. Responding to the messiness of natural language, he/weve gone on to develop the quantificational apparatus and the ability to speak Logicalese, which really does clear up some of the mess, quite often. But it leaves us with puzzles too, like this one about whether quantifier variance is a coherent idea. The underlying problem doesnt go away just because we declare (as I think we should) that ? never actually changes its meaning, or, better, its use. If I say, in English translation, Numbers exist, and you say, Numbers do not exist, were disputing what it means to exist, not how to use the quantifier correctly. This is even clearer with a mereological example such as There exists an item composed of my left nostril and the planet Venus. We very much want to deny that such an item exists, but we cant do it by claiming its impervious to quantification. To argue for a common-sense meaning (or any other) for exist is done in a natural language, not Logicalese.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
This makes the same point well. To say that "Some of the things that exist are rabbits" doesn't tell you a thing about what "exist" means.
Quoting Leontiskos
This would be the pro-QV position, but suppose we said instead, The meaning of ?existence is not unconditioned by ontological commitments. This seems unproblematically true in fact, if were not careful, it becomes redundant. But Im recommending it because it rids us of the assumption that quantifier meaning is about ontological commitments the very point that needs to be demonstrated. (And no, I dont think simply saying To be is to be the value of a bound variable demonstrates it, catchy though that is.)
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
It had better not. But its not the only position in the neighborhood that threatens that consequence, so denying QV is only a beginning. As I was saying to Banno previously, the real question is ontological pluralism, which at the very least seems to imply that, if you are mistaken (about basic ontological questions), youd never know it.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
One of my friends is a distinguished physicist who also knows a lot of philosophy. He is adamant that logic precedes math, in just the way you suggest. (Im trying to get him to opine about Reality-with-a-Capital-R but hes being coy. Claims he doesn't understand the question . . . what a cop-out.)
Yep An incipient notion. It probably relates to Austin's treatment of abstracts in Are There A Priori Concepts
Quoting Wiki article
Something I wrote quite a ways back. The salient line for this discussion is "from the observation that we use "grey" and "circular" as if they were the names of things, it simply does not follow that there is something that is named".
I'm extending Austin's point, made about universals, to individuals. We do, after all, use names for things that don't exist. Frodo, Sherlock Holmes, and so on. That we talk as if Frodo walked into Mordor does not imply that you could walk in to Mordor, nor that you might met Frodo on the road.
We can quantise over these non-existent things. That Frodo is a hobbit implies that at least one thing is a hobbit.
The point is here applied to numbers. From the observation that we use "7" and "One Million" as if they were the names of things, it simply does not follow that there is something that is named. And we can quantise over numbers. That seven is a prime implies that at least one thing is a prime.
So we have an apparent contradiction; as if we are to say that there is a hobbit who does not exist, or there is a prime number that does not exist. Hence the temptation to treat these as cases of different uses of "exits", and the view that fictional characters and numbers exist in a way that is different to you and I.
One might supose that talk of numbers is different to talk of fictional characters not because they are quantified in a different way, but because the domain of quantification differs. Fictional characters and not numbers. But we do want to be able to talk about seven dwarves, for example. Hence we obliged to include "seven" in the domain of fictional characters.
All this by way of repeating the fairly obvious point that numbers are not like other individuals.
Another point that seems to need reinforcing is the nature of quantification. If our domain is {a,b,c} then "U(x)fx" is just "fa & fb & fc"; and "?(x)fx" is just "fa v fb v fc". If the domain changes to {a',b',c'} then "U(x)fx" is just "fa' & fb' & fc'"; and "?(x)fx" is just "fa' v fb' v fc'". That is, the definition of each quantification doesn't change with the change in domain; but remains a conjunct or disjunct of every item in the domain.
Quoting J
I'm going to maintain that the domain, and hence the ontology, one way or another, is stipulated. And see where that leads.
Sure. I don't see how what I have said counts against this. Maths as a language, a set of (or sets of) grammatical rules that set out what we might consistently say.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Good questions. The property analogy will only go as far as "counts as..." or "as if...". And as I've said, we do treat numbers to quantification, equivalence and predication - all nice neat uses of "is". Numbers are in many ways not like property.
So where would causation fit here? I don't see that it does.
As I also noted somewhere in this thread, I am using the term slightly differently to Kant. Some points from the wiki article on noumenon:
However, the article also notes that noumenon is customarily taken to denote 'an object that exists independently of human sense.' Elsewhere I quoted Russell saying that 'universals are not thoughts, but when known they appear as thoughts.' And this causes confusion, because we confuse them with 'the act of thinking' even though (and here's the clincher) they're independent of any particular act of thought. As Frege says (previously cited):
Quoting Frege on Knowing the Third Realm, Tyler Burge
So, here's the intriguing thing. Empirical objects *cannot* be truly 'mind-independent' because information about them is received by the senses, which is invariably interpreted by the mind (through apperception). But as far as universals and other abstract objects are concerned, the mind must conform to them. I think this is the sense in which empiricist naturalism gets it backwards when it come to the metaphysics of cognition (putting descartes before dehorse, as Hofstadter said.)
That same Wikipedia entry also observes in respect of noumenon:
What I'm trying to understand and articulate is along these lines - more Platonist than Cartesian, but also drawing on non-dualism.
//
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I agree with you about Kant, but the later analysis is reductionist. I think it's a mistake to try and explain mathematics in terms of signal processing. Why? Because to explain it reductively requires that we are able to stand outside, apart from or above it - to treat it objectively. But, from Thomas Nagel's recent book (and in comments that are also germane to the overall subject):
[Quote=Analytical Philosophy and Human Life, Thomas Nagel, p 218] In ...Engagement and Metaphysical dissatisfaction, Barry Stroud argues that the project (of metaphysics) cannot be carried out, because we are too immersed in the system of concepts that we hope to subject to metaphysical assessment. This "prevents us from finding enought distance between our conception of the world and the world it is meant to be a conception of to allow for an appropriately impartial metaphysical verdict on the relation between the two."
Stroud believes that we cannot succeed in reaching either a positive (often called realist), or a negative (anti-realist) metaphysical verdict about a number of basic conceptions that we cannot show either that they succeed in describing the way the world is independent of our responses, or that they fail to do so. He argues for this claim in detail with respect to three of the most fundamental and philosophically contested concepts: causality, essentially, and value. The argument has a general and powerful form. Stroud contends that the use of the very concepts being assessed, and judgements of the very kind being questioned play an indispensable part in the metaphysical reasoning that is supposed to lead to our conclusions about these concepts and beliefs.[/quote]
He's saying, in effect, that such constructs are 'too near for us to grasp'. And any account of signal processing, indeed neurological and evolutionary accounts of cognition, like all science, already assume the efficacy of numerical and logical analysis. We can't 'stand outside' those elements of our own cognition and observe how they arise from primitive constituents, as we must already be utilising these very elements to detemine what those constituents are.
(This is something well known to non-dualist philosophies mentioned above. There is a well-known and often-cited passage from the Upani?ad, 'the eye can see another, but cannot see itself, the hand can grasp another but not itself' (source)).
This video review is also worth the time. Neuroscience, it seems, is coming to terms with the way in which the mind 'constructs reality'. Names mentioned in these discussions include Beau Lotto, Donald Hoffman, Anil Seth, Bernardo Kastrup, David Chalmers, and Christoff Koch among others. There's a plethora of video presentations and panel discussions about it on social media. There are, of course, a huge range of views about what it all means (you'll notice a rather panicked cameo from Richard Dawkins at the end lamenting the 'whispering campaign' against objectivity :yikes: )
Quoting Quantifier Variance Dissolved
And the conclusion to that section,
, it seems is talking about some supposed ontological role, the E, not quantification, ?.
Good call. Think I'll scarper as well. Cheers, everyone.
I am interested in discussing ontology. By the way I checked in with ChatGPT about the relevance of quantifier variability, which produced some useful summaries and sources which can be reviewed here.
In the same way the rules of chess, or the value of money could be said to exist and be mind-independent. Likewise for the perfect form of the turd or the pile of vomit. Do you want to claim noumenal (in the platonic sense) status for those?
Do you believe logic existed begore it was formulated by humans? Frege in that passage says that planets and their interactions with other planets existed before they were knownI bet you don't agree with that.
The real problem I see with saying that universals are mind-independently existent or real is that no one has the foggiest notion of what kind of reality or existence they could enjoy.
Unfortunately I don't have the rhetorical skills to fend of such exalted polemics. And, as always, you declare what you yourself don't understand as the limits to what anyone else might consider.
I've noticed that if anyone disagrees with you or questions your ideas you fall back on the claim that they don't understand. I think that if you understood what you meant by saying that universals are real, you would be able to explain it. But no such explanation is ever forthcoming, which leads me to conclude that you don't understand it yourself.
I have no problem with you believing that universals are real entities in some way on the basis that it "feels right intuitively" or whatever, but when you enter a forum like this and want to argue for your belief then you'd better have a strong case to support it, otherwise discussions will devolve into "yes, it is", "no, it isn't".
I'm actually not saying that universals are not real, just as I don't positively claim that God doesn't exist, but I freely admit that I cannot positively imagine any such reality or existence or see any evidence to lead me to conclude that I would have rational justification for believing that there is such an existence.
Doffing my rational hat, I do tend to be intuitively drawn to such ideas, and I allow myself to entertain them in my feelings, and in my poetry and art practice, but I don't claim to have any rational arguments to support my doing that.
I would say that natural language always takes precedence over artificial languages which derive from natural language, and that trying to grant an artificial language autonomy seems to go hand in hand with positivism. Whenever we move from natural language to an artificial language we must be mindful of what is happening, along with the limitations inherent in any artificial language.
Quoting J
No, I actually don't think so. As is happening at various points in this thread, you are jumping to an extreme. I think you are under the spell of a pseudo-exhaustive dichotomy (false dilemma), "Either quantification is perfectly univocal, or else QV holds." This is the standard dichotomy of univocity positions, but if we spin things around then it seems obvious that both options are false, and therefore there must be a third option. The key is to discover this third option, this tertium quid. For Aristotle the mean between univocal and equivocal predication is called "pros hen" predication; and by the time of Aquinas it was developed and called "analogical" predication. Cf. SEP.
fdrake's post deftly exorcises both sides of the false dilemma:
Quoting fdrake
Your claim that "? never actually changes its meaning" is refuted by the simple fact that there are different forms of quantification available in different kinds of logic; thus falls the first, univocal horn of the dilemma. We are well aware of the problems with the second, equivocal horn of the dilemma (unrestricted QV). He points to the paper for evidence that an unproblematic variety of "quantifier variance" is possible ("variance" is to my mind a poor choice of word for the theory, for what is truly at stake is incommensurable variance or equivocation). In Medieval terms the unproblematic variety would be an instance of analogy, where the semantic relation between various forms of quantification is one of analogy. Wittgenstein's notion of "family resemblance" is perhaps not too far off the mark, although I cannot speak to that notion with any expertise.
Edit: For a quick lesson in how quickly logicians become confused when they try to talk about natural language, see section "4. Ontological Pluralism," of Quantifier Variance Dissolved. There is some frightful confusion occurring there. What is happening? Logicians are treating natural language as if it were logical. Note, too, that one of the primary formal differences between natural language and logical languages is that the former includes analogical predication whereas the latter does not. Because of this the authors are not able to truly entertain the view they pretend to be considering, namely the view of ontological pluralism whereby there are "different ways of existing." Such an analogical claim is not representable in logic. This failure plagues their examples and argumentation. Wherever there can be found a border between natural and logical language these incommensurability problems arise, such as the border separating existence and quantification. This is the Achilles heel of analytic philosophy writ large. Logic is a two-edged sword, a tool like an exceedingly fine pencil that can be used to do marvelous, detailed work, but is incompetent in other, more broad-ranging matters. This is why some are apt to criticize analytic philosophy for being skilled at saying relatively unimportant things with exceptional precision. Aristotle was aware of all of this, along with the fact that substantial inferences are usually not perfectly sound, and that perfectly sound inferences are usually insubstantial. A work which combines enough strict demonstration to arrive at substantial conclusions without boring or losing the reader is very rare.
I have provided references to many other sources, including, in this instance, Frege, Russell, Nagel, and Advaita Vendanta. I believe that I make a coherent philosophical case, but that you haven't demonstrated a grasp of what that is. I'm not saying that to 'anyone', I deal with every interaction on its merits, or lack thereof. I'm saying it to you.
What is it precisely you think I don't understand about your position? You should be able to pinpoint that and you should be able to lay out your case clearly if you have a cogent one, and I haven't seen you do that. When, or if, you do then I will respond.
Quoting Wayfarer
Why is it that you cannot tolerate disagreement? Surely you know that when it comes to philosophical questions there never has been consensus, or any way to prove the truth or falsity of positions. I'm not demanding any kind of proof from you; there is no proof even when it comes to scientific theories. But you have stated many times that your views are in the minority on this forum, and there is nothing intrinsically wrong with that, but it should give you pause when you want to level accusations of "misunderstanding" to your interlocutors. It just makes you look defensive.
The fact that you think all the sources I cite are mistaken, would be a major one.
I can tolerate disagreement, but not pointless arguments, of which this is one.
It wouldn't be a pointless argument if you could actually make an argument; then we might actually get somewhere.
If you don't want to try, then I'll conclude that you don't have such an argument.
Tell me, then, exactly where this goes wrong:
Quoting Wayfarer
I think it is fine to refer to logical principles, numbers, conventions, qualifiers and so on as objects of thought, by analogy to the way we refer to physical objects as objects of the senses. As you say to present an object of thought to another it must be explained, because it obviously cannot be seen, heard, touched, smelled or tasted.
Quoting Wayfarer
They cannot be explained to a dog, because dogs don't speak English. You would not be able to explain them to someone who spoke a different language from you either without consulting a dictionary, or a translator. From this it does not follow that animals are not rational. I think there is plenty of good evidence that some animals are capable of reasoning, although obviously not in English or any other language.
Quoting Wayfarer
That's true and it's a loose kind of usage. If you ask anyone just how the number 7 exists, they won't be able to say. I've often said to you that number exists, and it seems obvious to me that it does. We see numbers of things all the time, so number in a sense, exists in the phenomenal world. It could be said that numbers exist as numerals, and it is true that without those anything more than the most rudimentary counting or arithmetic would be impossible unless an abacus were to be used, and even then I don't think you could get too far in your mathematical endeavours
Quoting Wayfarer
In this passage you appeal to Plato as someone who thought as you do. But there is no argument to support that way of thinking, just the claim that it has been "forgotten, abandoned or lost" which may be so, but says nothing about whether those ideas were right or had good rational support.
The last paragraph just seems to say that we synthesize sensory experiences (particulars) and ideas about them (generalities) into judgements. This is uncontroversial, but says nothing about what, if any, inferences we could draw from that fact regarding the reality of universals.
So, I find nothing there to disagree with other than the exclusion of animals from the "rational club", which I see as an example of human exceptionalist thinking. I think the latter is mistaken and also a net negative in relation to human and other biological life
I don't agree, although I also don't think it's of particular relevance. I agree that some experiments and observations demonstrate a kind of 'proto-rationality' amongst animals, but I don't agree that it amounts to reason in the sense that h.sapiens demonstrates it.
Quoting Janus
I refer to it as historical background. I'm simply making the point that Plato's epistemology differentiated between different levels or kinds of knowledge in a way that modern philosophy does not. I agree that to elaborate that would require a much larger argument but I still think that it is germane. You might be aware that Lloyd Gerson's most recent book Platonism and Naturalism: The Space for Philosophy, argues that the history of Western philosophy proper is essentially Platonist, and that Platonism and naturalism are essentially incompatible.
The last paragraph is a reference to Kant's idea of synthesis and synthetic a priori judgements. I think there's an important point here, which you've gone from objecting to, to seeing nothing significant about (although I'm hesitant to explain why I think it's important). But, thanks for the feedback, appreciated.
Quoting Leontiskos
By the way, here's a relevant essay on scholastic realism and nominalism, WHATS WRONG WITH OCKHAM? Reassessing the Role of Nominalism in the Dissolution of the West, Joshua P. Hochschild.
I agree it doesn't amount to reasoning in symbolic language, since animals don't have symbolic language.
Quoting Wayfarer
Again, I agree, but that historical background says nothing about the relative value of Platonic versus modern epistemologies.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't recall ever objecting to Kant's idea of synthetic a priori judgements, but as you may recall I think they are made possible by reflecting on the general nature of human experience, perception and judgement. For me that is the foundation of phenomenology, which I think you should know I have a great deal of respect for as a discipline.
Anyway, the main thrust I see in the idea of 'synthesis' is how it connects to cognitive science and the discovery of the way 'the brain creates reality', which is the subject of the video Is Reality Real? (which apparently drove almost everyone else away.) Can you see the convergence between Kant and cognitive science in this respect?
Precisely, although arguments of this sort, made from contemporary physics, tend to also have a bit of Heraclitus too. Even "fundemental particles" are not truly "fundemental," having both beginnings and ends; particles are "shadows on the cave wall." Everything must be, in some sense, "One," since everything interacts with everything else and energy, information, and cause move across all "discrete" boundaries effortlessly. However, everything is also always changing. The One is a field of fields, a single continuous [I]process[/I].
I think the Problem of the Many and the One is still central to contemporary debates about direct vs indirect realism, the existence of logic, Logos, and number "out there," etc. However, shifts in the way we talk about this obfuscate the close connection.
The modern Problem of the Many seems to me to just be a sub problem of this general problem. This is the problem of dilneating discrete entities. E.g., a cloud is a collection of water droplets. You can draw a line around any ensemble of droplets and say: "this is Cloud A." But you could just as easily draw a line around a slightly different ensemble of droplets and it would be just as much a cloud, although with different but overlapping physical constituents. So do we have one cloud, or perhaps millions all nested on top of one another? The same problem shows up with cats and cars, since these are just "clouds of atoms," or perhaps a better way to put it would be "sub-processes in the universal process proceeding cat-wise and car-wise." Solutions to the Problem of the Many often deny any true part-whole relations, make them "brute facts," or have to settle for a sort of ontological vagueness.
Exactly my thoughts. Although I do think the challenges to the existence of discrete entities (discussed above) are quite serious and might be part of revising metaphysics and epistemology.
However, if one takes the position that all discrete entities are illusory, and our names for them and their properties "inventions," it seems that it is impossible for us to truly say anything about anything (something Parmenides gets at). But, there is a good argument to be made that these discrete things don't exist "outside minds," even if it is the case that minds do not create these identities ex nihilo or at all arbitrarily. To my mind, this should call into question the idea that "the view from nowhere/anywhere," should be the gold standard of knowledge. Rather, things most "are what they are," when known.
Any physical system only manifests a tiny number of its properties across any interval. Properties are the result of interactions, so they are context dependent. A banana does not "look yellow," if no one looks at it, but properties that involve mind are in no way unique in relying on interaction in this way (and so they are not "less real" on this account, as Locke would have it). A banana peel [I]also[/I] does not reflect light of the wavelengths corresponding to "yellow" in the dark. Salt doesn't dissolve in water without being placed in water. The only epistemicly accessible properties are interactions and any thing only interacts in one context over any given interval. It's only in the knowing mind that all of a thing's properties across disparate contexts are "present" (phenomenologicaly) at once. This makes the relation of "being known" a special sort, one where things most "are what they are," rather than it being a sort of "less real" relationship.
Well this is the big problem with universals. They are hard to understand and this has led to them often being explained as simply existing in a sort of "magical" realm outside space and time. This is often how Plato gets simplified, whereas Hegel's argument re universals (which I see as a sort of completion of Plato's) just gets passed over because the Logic is a bear. Universals are always going to seem implausible if they are sitting to the side being as a sort of magic counterpart to it. Here, there is a real tendency to mistake Plato's "images" for his myths.
The Platonist and Hegelian arguments re universals and vertical reality are about necessity, not a special spirit realm. A rock is "less real," than triangularity in the sense that a rock is largely a bundle of external causes.
And whereas I have never seen anyone manage to condense Hegel's view into a "soundbite," I think that Robert M. Wallace does a decent job at getting at the core of Plato's insight re self-determination and vertical reality:
Whereas the Logic gets into the issue of necessity even for those things that are not self-determining in the way the men can be.
Presumably, humans in disparate environments did not have the idea of numbers spring into their minds out of the aether uncaused. Likewise, animals presumably did not develop some rudimentary mathematical reasoning "for no reason at all."
Consider for instance the term carcinization.The term refers to a specific type of convergent evolution, whereby many different species come to evolve crab-like traits. The word carcinization itself has a history situated in human social practice. The way it is pronounced or spelled is, to some degree, arbitrary. However, the term also relates to the world. It calls forth a feature of the world, a property of several types of species, namely that diverse species have evolved a similar body shape, a tough outer shell, etc.
This term developed as part of the human conversation, through discussions that spanned lecture halls, laboratories, and journal articles. People, wanting to know the truth of the world, took a very close look at the types of animals they found in it. Discovering things about DNA, gene sequencing, and natural selection allowed them to discover new things about these animals, namely that, despite sharing many traits, they evolved from diverse backgrounds. The term is bound up in social practice and history, but it relates to how things are, outside of human social practice and history.
So, IMO, part of explaining why we developed and use the term carcinisation has to involve the the actual process of carcinisation in nature, which predates humanity by millions of years. If carcinisation hadn't occured (the counter factual), we wouldn't have a word for it. This implies that the natural process itself is in some way involved in causing the development of the term.
Now, if you want to say "numbers are a human invention," that seems like fair game. But there has to be some sort of explanation of their usefulness and development across disparate, isolated societies. Pointing to mathematics as a social practice and then denying the meaningful explanations can be given for why they are a social practice just seems like a non-answer.
I don't think metaphysics is all that separable from the rest of our attempts to know the world. The "anti-metaphysical" movement simply enshrined a very particular sort of metaphysics as the prevailing dogma for a time. But this dogma has implications for areas outside metaphysics.
For one example, we might consider the effort to stop any work on quantum foundations up until the late 1990s (Becker's "What Is Real?" is a great book on this period). People were hounded out of their field for pursuing lines of inquiry that later provided the foundation for some Nobel Prize winning work in physics because it challenged the (supposedly non-existent) metaphysical orthodoxy.
Likewise, after more than a century, the basics of chemistry has still not been reduced to physics. In turn, a number of people have argued that molecular structure is an example of strong emergence. However, one of the most compelling arguments against this makes a very interesting turn. It claims that chemistry can, in theory, be explained entirely by physics, but that it [I]cannot[/I]be reduced to atoms, protons, electrons, etc. alone, i.e., "molecules' 'constituents'." Rather, the enviornment, myriad interactions between atoms and the rather active "void," universal fields, is essential for explaining molecular structure (as opposed to just the particles conventionally thought to define a molecule). This is interesting because it defaults on the position that molecules just are the atoms that make them up, that H2O would have the same properties in any possible world, etc. Rather, the whole is defined by its context.
At the very least, this would seem to cut against conventional superveniance physicalism where things are the sum of their fundemental particles(icle)s, but I think it also fits in better with a process view that avoids the need for strong emergence.
Either way, it's clear that metaphysics is going to play a role in these discussions. If our background assumption is that things simply are what they are made of, this sort of solution to a problem is going to be a lot less obvious. If water just [I]is[/I] H2O, you're never going to look beyond interactions between hydrogen and oxygen to try to determine its internal structure.
Thus, my line would be that the "anti-metaphysical" stance simply allows calcified metaphysical assumptions to go unchallenged and unnoticed, even though these will invariably determine how we approach problems. Which in turn makes metaphysics relevant.
I don't have time to respond to your other post, but I will agree that the computational view seems to get something very important right. However, the emergence of first person subjective experience, and an explanation of how decisions made as part of that experience can affect our actions, would seem to require some sort of paradigm shift here, something akin to Einstein's revision of space and time.
Currently, this strictly mechanistic computational view would seem to preclude the idea that our subjective experiences ever have anything to do with our behavior (i.e., casual closure). E.g., we can never eat certain foods "because they taste good," etc. Aside from the major plausibility issue here, this would also suggest that characteristics of subjective experience can never be something that natural selection directly selects on (since behavior is never determined by subjective experience). This simply seems implausible given how many good evolutionary explanations of subjective experience there are.
Is this really right? I haven't worked with modal logic deeply enough to say. Certainly I had in mind the standard use of ? in non-modal logic, and I was under the impression that '?x' means '?x' no matter what may then be done to it in terms of possibility and necessity. But I'd welcome any help with this, as it's germane to the QV issue. (Is there a reason Finn and Bueno don't cite modal logic as an instance of QV?)
Yes, good spotting. "Ontologically neutral quantification" (which I bolded, above) is exactly what we want. It's a good way of describing the difference between the "exists" of quantification and the "exists" of ontology.
By my lights if the meaning of the existential quantifier varies in different logical systems then a basic premise of QV succeeds. fdrake is the king of logic in these parts, so I believe him. To be honest I would need to read more about QV to understand the exact contours of the thesis. Here are some related thoughts I put down when I was offline:
The more I think about this, the more it seems parallel to the debates on the univocity of being. This is, in fact, a debate on the univocity of quantification.
Quantification and predications about being are, in one way, like pointing. They point up the subject of discourse in order that it can be spoken about. Just as there is ambiguity inherent in pointing at something, so there is ambiguity inherent in quantification, but this ambiguity is always external to the pointers frame (that is, the frame of the person who is pointing). If I point at something, you may be confused at what I am pointing at, but I will never be. The same holds in logic. The variance that Hale and Wright suggest is not internal to a single logicians frame. This would be impossible, for if the meaning of the quantifier varies in this way even within a single frame, then first-order equivocation results and the logic is destroyed. Quantifiers were designed to avoid this problem.
For this reason it makes sense for a logician to balk at QV and, despite all appearances, declare that the misunderstanding must be produced by the language, not the quantifier! (). From the strictly logical and axiomatic sphere, this tautologous assertion makes sense. But the problem is that the example does not present a scenario where the meaning of the quantifier varies within a single logical frame; instead it presents a scenario where the meaning varies between two different logical frames. The person who holds that
The other thing to note is that while I am convinced that the inability of single-frame logic to capture analogical predication is at the root of the problem, there are plenty of philosophersparticularly Scotistswho hold that bona fide analogical predication does not even exist. But the Scotist would be much more careful with proposition (**) on page 303 of Quantifier Variance Dissolved. While the paper flat-footedly denies existence to mental entities, the Scotist would acknowledge that mental sets and instantiated sets both exist in the same way, and they would attempt to quantify over the genus or superset of these two existent sets before making the finer distinction. For example, they might try to say, Among all existent sets, some are in the external world and some are only in the mind.* Because quantification within a single frame must always hold steady, this finer distinction can never be done at the level of unqualified quantification.** Given its univocity axiom, this is really the only option for a formally logical approach, but to presume that the univocity axiom is more than an axiom is a mistake.
Finally, whether equivocation at the level of pointing or quantification is inevitable and insuperable depends, I think, on whether there is an objective ontological structure. Aristotle is explicit that the ontological structure of reality is substance-primary, and this means that thinking, pointing, and logic will always take their point of departure from substances. It is hard to understand the full implications that would result from denying that there is an objective ontological structure. Lots and lots of philosophers after Hume have attempted to erect dams to mitigate the damage that results if that levy breaks, but in the end those attempts may well be futile. I certainly think there is an objective ontological structure.
* This is not expressible in first-order logic without introducing existence as a predicate.
** One of the complications in all of thisand one of the ways that first- and second-order equivocation overlapis that quantifiers are unarguably capable of capturing any one aspect of existence in isolation, but they are arguably required to lock in on that single aspect of existence within a given discourse once it is chosen. Quantifiers can never shift, at that unqualified level, between two different aspects or modes of being. One cannot quantify over mental sets and instantiated sets within the same discourse without introducing the superset. More generally, quantificational logic presupposes the ability to think about non-existent things, and therefore commits itself to the view that mental entities in no way exist.
If you read the paper I don't think it is giving sound arguments for its claims, particularly in the section quoted. It is trading in "substantial inferences that are not sound" (). Perhaps it is aware of this insofar as it is using poetical words such as "illustrates" (certainly this "illustration" does not rise to the level of coherent argumentation). As is set out on pages 301-2, there are a plethora of different opinions on the relation between quantification and existence, and this itself seems to be good evidence that quantification does not have one univocal meaning.
As I see it too many questions are being begged. For example, the distinction between the "two roles" of quantifiers is also present in existence-predication. A phrase like, "There are some things better left unsaid," is primarily "quantificational" and not "ontological." Beyond that, the very claim that the "quantificational role" is entirely separable from ontology is the very question at stake. It can't just be assumed. Quine certainly didn't think such separation was possible. Part of the problem here is that the meaning of quantification, like the meaning of existence-predications, depends on the context and intent. Sometimes quantifiers are used with an ontological emphasis and sometimes they are not. But with Quine I would say that even where the emphasis is not on ontology an ontological commitment is still implicit. This is only escaped by stipulating that mental entities have no existence at all, which is clumsy and tautological in the sense that favors logical pluralism.*
* Edit: I see that is prepared to swallow this stipulation-approach whole and bite the bullet of excluding ontological structure. Again, ontological pluralism immediately rears its head. The question arises, "If the domain, the ontology, and the attendant quantifier semantics (and the logical system) are purely stipulative, then how is it that one stipulation could ever be more correct than another?" Positivism redux.
.
Quoting Banno
Now to be sure there are issues when applying this to quantification in modal logic. But those issues are to do with the nature of the domain, not the nature of quantification. They concern whether a,b,c... are the unique to each possible world or alternately if say "a" can refer to a in any possible world in which a occurs, and so on.
There are different ways of applying quantification in modal logic. But each is a way of applying quantification, not a different way of quantifying. Which is "correct"? Well, asking that question that shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of logic. Which is "correct", French or German? Better to ask which is more appropriate, or more useful in a given situation.
Let's add Gillian Russell to the mix: Logical Nihilism: could there be no logic?. Lemma incorporation is also preferable to monster-barring, in which Russell argues that ad hoc logical pluralism to be preferable to both arbitrary monster-baring and to nihilism.
Specifically,
There remains a difference between quantification and ontological commitment that is not recognised by quantification variance. Quantification sits within a logical system, ontological commitment remains external to logical systems.
Logic gives us a variety of ways in which we might talk about how things are. It does not commit us to this or that ontology.
Logic is the view from nowhere? Would you say that it is possible for advances in logic to take place?
If you want to say "nouns are a human invention," that seems like fair game. But there has to be some sort of explanation of their usefulness and development across disparate, isolated societies.
Will we say that the world consists of objects, and we just give them names? Or will we say that the names are arbitrary, we just invent them?
Is the world already divided up, or do we divide it up arbitrarily? But that's a false dilemma. carcinization works.
Logic was codified by Aristotle and his successors in the context of an assumed ontology and metaphysics which was to become an integral part of the Christian worldview. According to The Theological Origins of Modernity, M A Gillespie, the advent of modernity is characterised by the decline of scholastic realism and the ascendancy of nominalism:
[quote=Religious Modernity; https://kirkcenter.org/reviews/religious-modernity/]For Gillespie, the epochal question that gave birth to modernity arose out of a metaphysical and theological crisis within late medieval Christianity and became manifested in the nominalist revolution. Prior to nominalism, Christianity was defined by scholastic philosophy, which posited the real existence of universals: reality was ultimately not composed of particulars but of universal categories of divine reason. The experience of the world as universal categories became articulated in syllogistic logic that corresponded to divine reason, and man was believed to be created as a rational animal in the image of God and guided by a natural goal and divinely revealed supernatural one.
Contrary to the scholastics, the nominalists believed reality was composed not of universal categories but of particulars. Language did not point to universal categories but was merely signs useful for human understanding; creation was particular and therefore not teleological; and God could not be understood by human reason but only through Biblical revelation or mystical experience. Nominalism challenged and eventually destroyed the great synthesis that started with the Church Fathers that combined the reason of Greek philosophy with the Christian revelation. [/quote]
This is the disconnect or disjunction which I keep going back to, because I believe it has a real ontological or metaphysical basis (although it goes almost without saying that I don't expect any agreement with it.) Current philosophical debate takes place against this background which renders metaphysics moot and undecideable and is reflected in questions such as:
Quoting Banno
A question which has deep roots.
I wonder if that shows up here:
[quote=TLP;https://www.wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php?title=Tractatus_Logico-Philosophicus_(English)#6:~:text=The%20solution%20of%20the%20problem%20of%20life%20is] 6.5.2.1 The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem.
(Is not this the reason why men to whom after long doubting the sense of life became clear, could not then say wherein this sense consisted?)
6.522 There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical.[/quote]
My view is that although what things are in themselves is unknowable, we have good reason to think that the structures of things constrain how we perceive, differentiate and understand them. Of course, I don't know that for certain.
In other words, we simply don't know whether things exist outside minds, but that they do has always been the default assumption on the basis of our shared experience and the fact that the behavior even of animals shows that they perceive the same things we do.
Other than positing some hidden connection between all minds, there is no way to explain the commonality of human experience, a commonality that extends even to some animals.
That humans share 99.9% of their DNA (essential for development, survival and reproduction) with other humans may explain the commonality of human experience (https://thednatests.com)
How does commonality between humans work because of their shared DNA?
For the same reason that there is more commonality between humans who share 99.9% of their DNA than commonality between humans and chickens who only share 60% of their DNA (https://thednatests.com)
: "Logic gives us a variety of ways in which we might talk about how things are. It does not commit us to this or that ontology."
: "Would you say that it is possible for advances in logic to take place?"
: "[Logic first took root within a transcendental metaphysic]"
: "perhaps logic has advanced since then?"
@Leontiskos: :roll:
I am seeing a bad argument against QV being made in the thread:
All language is subject to second-order equivocation, including logical language. The meaning of one persons concept is never univocally the same as the meaning of another persons concept. There is no magical reason why this does not apply to quantifiers, and there is no magical reason why some disputes should not be reducible to quantifier equivocation. This is the first point.
Now one might object that even though all linguistic terms are subject to second-order equivocation, they still want to see how in particular quantifiers run into this problem. I think the example that Hale and Wright give is one way to see it (Bannos fiat rejection notwithstanding). More simply, someone might contend that second-order equivocation occurs with the term apple. An apple univocalist might take two different people and ask what they mean by the term. Both answer, A red fruit. He then shows each person a picture of a paradigmatic red apple, and both identify it as an apple. Has he defeated the thesis? The proponent of the thesis would probably say that he has only defeated a trivialization or strawman of the thesis. The proponent would probably take edge cases to demonstrate that second-order equivocation is occurring in more subtle ways.
Maybe the proponent would take each person, sit them in the same room, and ask them to evaluate the sentence < ?x(R(x) ^ A(x)) > (There exists an x such that x is in the room and x is an apple). In the corner of the room is a painting by Cézanne, and within the painting is depicted a paradigmatic red apple. One person says that the sentence is true and the second person says that it is false. Upon inspection we realize that the disagreement is not over whether the painting depicts an apple, but is instead over whether the quantifier captures it as an apple. Specifically, it is over whether an imaged thing exists through the image. This is an extensional evidence for quantifier equivocation, different from @fdrake's intensional evidence. The paper itself admits this possibility. It begins an argument:
Quoting Quantifier Variance Dissolved, p. 293
But eventually goes on to admit that there are many problems with its attempted response:
Quoting Quantifier Variance Dissolved, pp. 295-6
The gist of the counterargument is that wherever the maximal domain is substantially disputed there is (second-order) quantifier equivocation, and there is no shortage of disputes about the maximal domain. The apple-gazers and those who disagree over mereological composites in your OP are two examples of second-order quantifier equivocation, as is Hale and Wrights example.
A primary objection is presumably that
Quoting Leontiskos
Edit: For a more mundane and perhaps clumsy analogy, consider a scenario where we both drive a Jeep Wrangler. Now if I think Australia exists and you do not, then I will think I can drive my Jeep on Australia and you will not think you can drive your Jeep on Australia, but our dispute is over Australia, not the Jeep (i.e. "If Australia exists then quantify over the unicorn the same way you would quantify over a horse"). But if we go out driving and we find a rock formation, and we are both looking at this same rock formation, and I say "yes" and you say "no," then our dispute is no longer over the territory, it is over the Jeep. Or, it is over the territory insofar as it is related to the Jeep. This would be something like the paper suggests, where there is a dispute over whether it is possible to quantify over some thing that both parties take to be non-existent. The point here is that the claim that ontological disputes cannot be related to quantification is false.
Quoting J
I would have thought "first-order equivocation" would be "the classic sense of two people talking past each other because they use [the same] words differently," but maybe that's not what you mean. And in the follow-up situation about mereology, the question would be: Is "disagreeing about concepts while using the same words" an example of first-order equivocation, while "holding the concept of 'existence' steady while (someone is) making a mistake in terminology" second-order equivocation? Note that we don't need to talk in terms of "mistakes," in this situation; it's enough that there be a difference.
Yeah, sorry about that. If I do end up getting away I wanted to leave some wood on the fire.
Quoting J
Right, I am calling that second-order equivocation. As I said above, equivocation in the standard (first-order) sense has to do with a single frame or speaker using a term in two different senses. Ergo:
Quoting Wikipedia | Equivocation
Or:
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting J
What Sider calls "talking past each other" is a form of second-order equivocation. Sider's example is the opposite, where instead of two people having one word with two senses, they have two words with one sense ("number"="fish"). In this case the two will think they are saying different things when they are really saying the same thing. In the case of second-order equivocation they will think they are saying the same thing when they are really saying two different things.
Quoting J
The prima facie answer is that it is neither, and that a factual disagreement is taking place. At the root are disagreements of fact, such as disagreements over the maximal domain or disagreements over ontological structure. To simply assume that disagreements of fact are impossible is to have begged the question in favor of pluralism or Sider's, in essence, quantifier variance.
Thanks, that's helpful, and I will mull my response to this. But just one thing . . .
Quoting Leontiskos
No one is assuming that such a disagreement is impossible. The puzzle goes deeper than that: We want to know how we could recognize or describe this kind of fact, so as to have something to disagree about, without stipulating a meaning for "existence" that would also be disputable. I'm sure you're not saying that there is a plain fact of the matter as to whether mereological items or universals exist, but I admit that I'm not sure just what you are saying. Is there a sense of "fact" you're wanting us to understand and accept? Is it related to the Quinean "To be is to be the value of a bound variable"?
(And for the record, this isn't about skepticism concerning everyday objects. It's about how to divvy up metaphysical structure.)
I am saying that to claim that a dispute over [mereological composites] must be either conceptual or terminological is to ignore the possibility that it might be substantial, a dispute of "fact" or truth. It is to ignore the possibility that one person might be right and the other might be wrong about what they are intending to claim. This is another instance of the sort of relativism that Nagel generally opposes in The Last Word, for the legitimacy of the two philosophers' first-order arguments are precisely what is being dismissed when one thinks it could only be a conceptual or terminological dispute. Conceptual-or-terminological is a second-order reduction.
Quoting J
If one person is right about how to divvy up metaphysical structure and the other person is wrong, then the dispute is not merely conceptual or terminological. In that case pluralism is false and Sider is correct that there is a true ontological structure. I would guess that Sider is not saying that every dispute must be substantial, but that he is saying that it is false to claim, "There is no ontological structure and therefore all of these ontological disputes are merely matters of communication breakdown."
Right, but I was talking about commonality of particular perceptions, for example seeing the same things in the same places and being able to agree about all the details of those things. I don't see how DNA would explain that, rather it might explain why we see things in the same kinds of ways.
As I said the behavior of animals shows us that they see the same things in the environment as we do, but they probably don't see those things in just the same kinds of ways we do due to their different perceptual setups.
Of course this can feel counter-intuitive because we really want to believe that, once we lay out the map, it will obvious which of our ordinary terms must correspond to Gorp, Vulp, and Cheeb. Surely it will be obvious which of them exists? Maybe Gorp is the most fundamental bit, so thats the one that exists? Or maybe we ought to call the most fundamental bit real -- is that a better match with our concepts? But theres just nothing we can point at (within philosophy, anyway) to settle it and say, Obviously, this area is what exists or "Since Vulp depends on Cheeb, Vulp must be our 'object'." As I said before, in a phrase I quite like :wink: , To argue for a common-sense meaning (or any other) for 'exist' is done in a natural language, not Logicalese. And that argument can go on, in terms of pragmatics, even as we work to figure out the metaphysical structure we believe is most accurate.
:kiss:
Nice example. The issue is whether ?xA(x), whether there is something that is an apple in the domain. The existential quantifier plays out as a disjunct of the domain. List all the items in the domain, and if any one of them is an apple, then the existential quantifier will be true.
The two folk in your example agree with this definition of quantification.
If the painting is an apple it will be true, if not, it will be false. That is a difference in the domain, not in the definition of the quantification. One domain includes a painting, the other an apple.
The two folk disagree as to the domain.
This is not an example of quantifier variance. It is a disagreement as to the domain.
In the example of the paining of an apple, it amounts to our attempting to resolve the issue by combining the two domains of the two folk in the room. Do we list the item in the corner as an apple or as a paining? But notice that this is not a decision about quantification, but a decision about what is included in the domain.
Of course, if we allow for a maximal domain, a domain containing everything, then there can be no such variance:
And we come back to the main objection: the lack of a coherent explanation of what "quantifier variance" might be.
*That is, "something is f" means by definition that individual a is f or individual b is f or... for all the individuals in the domain.
Humans have a general commonality, in that all the self-reproducing cellular organisms on the Earth so far examined have DNA as the genome (https: //onlinelibrary.wiley.com).
I agree that even though humans share a commonalty because of their shared DNA, in that both the Nominalists and Platonists accept that numbers exist, they may differ in their particular beliefs. The Nominalist's belief that numbers are invented and exist in the mind, and the Platonist's belief that numbers are discovered and exist in the world.
It is true that two identical objects may behave very differently when subject to different environments, whether a pebble moving down a slope or a pebble stationary on flat ground, whether a human living in Reykjavík or a human living in Pretoria. It is therefore hardly surprising that humans, even though they share a general commonality, may differ significantly in their particular beliefs and actions. It may well be that someone who is now a Nominalist who had had the life experiences of someone who is now a Platonist may well have turned out to be a Platonist and vice versa. As regards general commonality between humans, perhaps nature outweighs nurture, and as regards particular actions and beliefs, perhaps nurture outweighs nature.
As regards Quantifier-Variance, as Hale and Wright wrote: "[it may be] a matter of their protagonists choosing to use their quantifiers (and other associated vocabulary, such as ?object) to mean different things so that in a sense they simply go past each other".
Particular differences are especially noticeable. The Nominalist may say that numbers exist in the mind and the Platonist may say that numbers exist in the world. But perhaps QV is pointing out a hidden commonality in seemingly different beliefs, in that an individuals actions and beliefs are determined as much by their lived life experiences as by innate characteristics, as much as by nurture as nature
An individual's actions and beliefs should not be considered in isolation at one particular moment in time, but should be thought of as part of a process stretching back many years. If someone does say "?there exists something which is a compound of this pencil and your left ear and someone else says ?there is nothing which is composed of that pencil and my left ear, perhaps QV is making the point that these statements should not be considered in isolation as necessarily contradictory, but rather should be considered as a glimpse of an ever-changing process stretching back in time, embodied not just in one or two individuals but in the multi-various life experiences of whole communities.
IE, perhaps QV is saying that individual statements, such as "numbers only exist in the mind", should not be judged as true or false in isolation from the wider community out of which it has emerged, in that particular words only have meaning within a wider context.
These are good questions. I would say they lie at the center of modern philosophy with its focus on the "escape from subjectivism," or contemporary philosophy with its focus on "the escape from the box of language," (or similarly to the widespread attempt to redefine everything as "pseudo problems only arising from the misuse of language.") And they lie at the center of the ancient problem of the One and the Many, which often just returns in alternate garb throughout the history of philosophy.
I'm totally willing to accept that a dilemma between the two options is "false," that the two are not mutually exclusive. But just stating the trivial fact that "numbers are something humans use," or "words are things we say," as if this pivot to activity makes the explanation an unanalyzable primitive strikes me as essentially a non-explanation. Swimming is something people do, and it's useful, etc. I don't think an explanation of it that leaves out water and solely focuses on the fact that it's an "activity" that "works" amounts to much.
You can just as easily turn all of truth into another pseudo problem, something that is merely defined by a game that "works"something that both defies and needs no metaphysical explanation. But when we reach a point where Goodness, Truth, our words, and now even our own conciousness itself have all been "eliminated" or "deflated," so as to avoid pseudo problems, things start to look a lot like Protagoras (or at least Plato's caricature of him). If it's games and feelings of usefulness all the way down, no one can ever be wrong about anything
If we are thinking about the intractable "metametaphysical" disputes that you seem to have in mind, then suppose someone calls an area a Gorp and another disagrees and calls it a Vulp. If second-order equivocation is occurring (a terminological or conceptual difference) then there may be only an artificial disagreement, not a substantial disagreement. But if second-order equivocation is not occurring then there would seem to be a substantial disagreement. When one person says, "This is a Gorp," and another says, "No, it is a Vulp," they are disagreeing on what exists in that area. If we are to exclude ontological pluralism, then the dispute is over what actually exists.
Quoting J
Concepts are important, not terms, and I would say that the concept of existence is "privileged." If one person says, "A Gorp exists in this area," and another person says, "No, a Gorp does not exist in that area," then in order for the disagreement to be substantial the concept of existence must be common between the two speakers. Furthermore, in order for ontological structure to exist, there must be a true and normative understanding of existence. To say that no one concept of existence is any truer than any other is to fall into pluralism, and to close oneself off from the possibility of a true ontological structure.
What follows is something I wrote after thinking about your claim about the mereological composite alongside the other things I know about your background.
---
I am wondering if you are laboring under the now common assumption that reason is nothing more than discursive reason. In writing my thread on the breadth of the moral sphere I was attempting to rectify a common and radical moral error that lies at the root of so much moral confusion. If I were to do the same thing in attempting to rectify a common and radical error about the nature of the human intellect, I would write a thread about the idea that not all truth is known discursively. In fact when I first came to TPF I chipped at this problem here and there.*
To take an example, consider the proposition that 2+2=4. If someone does not understand this proposition or disagrees with it it is fairly easy to explain it, precisely because there is a discursive process by which we come to know this truth. We can break it down into (1+1)+(1+1)=4, and if more is required we can show that 1+1=2, 2+1=3, and 3+1=4. All of these steps are discursively accessible. But the simplest steps are not discursive, such as understanding the nature of unity (1), or understanding the nature of succession or combination. If someone does not understand these things then the base, 1+1=2, will not be accessible; and if these simple, atomic pieces of knowledge are not known (what Aristotle calls first principles) then there is no base for the discursive knowledge to build on, and 2+2=4 will be inaccessible.
Someone who thinks that all truth is known discursively will believe that discursive-syllogistic explanation is always possible, and that where such explanation fails knowledge does not exist. So they will think that if discursive-syllogistic adjudication fails in the case of claims about the existence of mereological composites, then knowledge of such a thing is not possible (i.e. it is not truth-apt). Or that if the basis of arithmetic, such as the existence of unity and succession, is not amenable to discursive-syllogistic demonstration, then arithmetic truths such as 2+2=4 will not be knowable (prescinding for the moment from the ontology of number).
More succinctly, the modern reduction of the intellect to ratiocination or discursive reason is reflected by the idea, If you cannot explain how you know something, then you cannot know it. I believe this is largely a result of the democratization and pragmatization of reason, where questions of consensus and therefore adjudication become supreme. But it is also a result of the Baconian manipulation of nature and the ascendency of science and logic (note that discursive-syllogistic reason is just logic). Habermas' understanding of reason as pragmatic also seems to be at play. The obvious problem with this, as Aristotle notes, is that logical demonstration is not self-supporting. Logical demonstration presupposes simple or primitive truths in order to get off the ground.* What this means is that someone who says they know something that cannot be explained is not necessarily a charlatan when that something is a first principle or a simple truth.** To claim otherwise would be to cut off the branch on which knowledge and logic rest.
So when you say that the dispute about the mereological composite must come down to conceptual or terminological equivocation, it is possible that you are drawing this false dilemma because you think that explanation must reign all the way down, like turtles. This is inextricably bound up with reducing human reason to discursive reason or logic, even though your motivation comes from what I would call the democratic turn. As I have learned in trying to explain this in the past, it is often very difficult for someone subsumed in modernity to grasp the fact that ratiocination presupposes intellection (that discursive reason presupposes non-discursive acts of the intellect). Even once it is grasped, working out the implications is a gradual process.
(One way to see this is to observe the way that modern logicians wish to make stipulation and axiom the king of the hill. Doing such a thing is like donning a blindfold to avoid looking at the glaring problem of how ratiocination (logic) could ever function or have any traction on the real world in the absence of intellection.)
* Some of my posts related to the topic: one, two, three. Cf. Aristotelian Non-discursive Reasoning (IEP)
** Strictly speaking it is not the truth which is simple but the means by which it is known (intellection). Truths are always simple, even though English philosophy is more quantitatively concerned with sound propositions than mere truths.
You can be shown to be wrong about logical, mathematical and empirical claims. How could you go about showing that someone is wrong regarding a metaphysical, religious or aesthetic claim?
Sorry, Russell, I'm not seeing the relevance to the point we were labouring over.
There is a bit more going on.
Our issue was, what sort of things are numbers? And one answer is that they are real, like trees, sticks and rocks, but that they are in a special world that makes them unavailable for examination in the way that trees and sticks are available. Roughly, Plato's world of forms.
The alternative on offer is that numbers are a way of treating the things around us. Choosing three sticks is an act directed at the sticks, whether done by a human or by a crow.
Humans have a capacity to extend this process using words. A crow might be able to decide to collect three sticks, but is not able to decide to collect three sticks next Tuesday.
The human world is suffused with creations of our language. This piece of land counts as your property. This piece of paper counts as five dollars. Your making certain utterances counts as giving an order or asking a question. Property, money, orders and questions are parts of our world, yet we do not expect to bump in to them in the way we might with sticks, trees and rocks.
This counts as three sticks. That counts as four sticks. Together they count as seven sticks.
And we build on this. "7" counts as seven, and with a few extras we can write "3+4=7". These count as numbers. A shape with three sides counts as a triangle. And so on, the whole edifice of Maths being built on working out how we can treat these things in a consistent way.
And all without needing Plato's magical realm. Just as our shared intent towards the piece of land makes it count as property, and our shared use of the piece of paper makes it five dollars, our shared use of "seven" makes that seven sticks, seven dollars, or seven triangles.
There are no dollars or property without our using paper and land in a certain way. There are no numbers without our using the things around us in a certain way. It's not just that numbers are things we use, but that our using them is what they consist in. Same for words.
I understand what you're getting at, but it's a bit of a strawman, isn't it? "Unanalyzable primitive" doesn't seem to capture what philosophers mean when they talk about numbers and words as instances of human activity, though I suppose a deeply pragmatic view might support that. On this thread, and pretty generally, I think, we're merely trying to make some ontological sense out of numbers and quantifiers. If numbers aren't "out there," Platonically, if they represent a human construction based in the activity of doing mathematics, they can still be as real as you'd like them to be. We mustn't fall into the trap of believing that nothing could be real, or be said to exist, that isn't "out there" with or without humans. And yes, I fully agree that there are versions of scientism that encourage such a belief.
The kind of explanation you want, if I'm understanding you, is one that would show us one of two things: either why numbers are so marvelously suitable to our human inquiries, or why they correspond to features of the world that aren't arbitrary, and hence are part of saying true things about that world. Ideally, an explanation of their correspondence to reality would also explain their usefulness.
There is implicit reification in this statement (and please forgive me for flogging what is probably a dead horse.) This is based around the instinctive conviction that only objects are real, or that the scope of what constitutes real things is entirely exhausted by what exists as objects or collections of objects. This is what leads to the erroneous idea of 'ethereal realms' or 'Platonic worlds'. Is 'the set of natural numbers' a real realm in an objective sense? Not at all - but there is nevertheless 'the domain of natural numbers', which are discerned by reason, as distinct from sense.
The following excerpt pertains to Plato's forms, generally, although it's not difficult to extrapolate it to the understanding of number also.
[quote=Thinking Being - An Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition, Eric D. Perl, p28]Forms...are radically distinct, and in that sense apart, in that they are not themselves sensible things. With our eyes we can see large things, but not largeness itself; healthy things, but not health itself. The latter, in each case, is an idea, an intelligible content, something to be apprehended by thought rather than sense, a look not for the eyes but for the mind. This is precisely the point Plato is making when he characterizes forms as the reality of all things. Have you ever seen any of these with your eyes?In no way Or by any other sense, through the body, have you grasped them? I am speaking about all things such as largeness, health, strength, and, in one word, the reality [??????] of all other things, what each thing is (Phd. 65d4e1). Is there such a thing as health? Of course there is. Can you see it? Of course not. This does not mean that the forms are occult entities floating somewhere else in another world, a Platonic heaven. It simply says that the intelligible identities which are the reality, the whatness, of things are not themselves physical things to be perceived by the senses, but must be grasped by thought. If, taking any of these examplessay, justice, health, or strengthwe ask, How big is it? What color is it? How much does it weigh? we are obviously asking the wrong kind of question. Forms are ideas, not in the sense of concepts or abstractions, but in that they are realities apprehended by thought rather than by sense. They are thus separate in that they are not additional members of the world of sensible things, but are known by a different mode of awareness. But this does not mean that they are located elsewhere, or that they are not, as Plato says, the very intelligible contents, the truth and reality of sensible things. [/quote]
Quoting Banno
The attempt to reduce mathematics to 'speech acts' is inadequate to account for the 'unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences' (Eugene Wigner). It is the predictive power of mathematics and the synthetic a priori, which has given rise to many of the astonishing discoveries of mathematical physics in the last several centuries. That is exemplified by Diracs equations, which predicted the existence of antimatter based purely on the mathematical necessity of solutions to these equations. These solutions (positrons) were not derived from empirical data or observation but from the mathematical theory of quantum mechanics. This aligns with the notion of the synthetic a priori because it extends our knowledge in a substantive way, yet was not derived from empirical observation.
So the idea that mathematical reasoning can be reduced to speech actsverbal or written statements within particular contextsis inadequate to capture instances like Dirac's prediction (and countless other examples from mathematical physics.) Speech acts emphasize the role of language and context in constructing meaning, but Dirac's work suggests that mathematical constructs can correspond to real physical entities, indicating a deeper, non-linguistic form of truth and reasoning. His prediction was based on the internal consistency and logical implications of quantum theory, not merely on the performative use of language.
The successful experimental verification of antimatter substantially supports the idea that mathematical descriptions can unveil aspects of physical reality that are yet unseen. This challenges purely empirical or nominalist views of science and supports a more Platonist or realist view, where abstract mathematical forms have a real, albeit non-empirical, connection to the structure of the world.
You don't need to go all quantum to say "mathematical constructs can correspond to real physical entities". The three sticks will do exactly that. And it's not magic that seven sticks take away four sticks is three sticks. Dirac's derivation is no more than that. You talk as if his calculations brought antiparticles into existence. They didn't. They allowed for a conversation about antiparticles, inspiring folk to take a look for them. It's no more mysterious than looking for the three remaining sticks.
Perhaps you can use a couple of sticks to learn to make a fire. It might be more in line with your proclivities.
Cheers, Wayf. Keep trying to say more than can be said.
Right, exactly my point. If some society somehow stipulated that 8/2 = 5, we tend to feel we could give them a good demonstration of why this is not the correct way to do division. But if everything is just games and rules then it seems that you certainly can show that aesthetic, metaphysical, or religious claims are "wrong" in the same way that computations can be wrong. Error, in both cases, would consist solely in the fact that stipulated rules are violated. Trials for heresy would then be essentially the same sort of thing as disagreements about how to compute a harmonic mean, which doesn't seem to be the case to me.
Right, and I don't mean for my criticism to apply to any theory that posits that activity or practice might be fundemental for defining mathematics or language. I am responding specifically to the assertion that there is no need to explain "causes" or "reasons" for why mathematics or language has the form it does. At the very least, the fact that subjective experience includes numerically distinct entities that can be categorized together (e.g., "I see many things and they are all rocks) has to come into the explanation. But then this element of perception does not seem bound up in stipulated practices, but is rather part of human nature; there are not any cultures where people fail to recognize numerically distinct entities.
An example from language might make my objection more clear. The London Underground (arguably) has its own species of mosquito. It is descended from a wild mosquito, but it no longer behaves like that mosquito and will not mate with it in the wildhence it being put forth as its own species. I find it implausible that one can explain the coining of the term "London Underground mosquito," without reference to the facts about what has occured in nature (i.e., there is a [I]cause[/I] external to practices). Likewise, as I think Banno would acknowledge, carcinisation "points to," or "calls forth the intelligibility" of a process observed in nature. But an explanation of how the term develops then needs to include the existence of that phenomena as far as I'm concerned. Causes certainly seem to come into it.
But then the question of numbers just seems like a more opaque version of the same sort of question. If the development of the term carcinisation needs to be explained in terms of the real existence of a process by which many disparate lineages developed crablike traits, it seems at least plausible that the development of numbers works similarly. Indeed, we have a number of good explanations like this; we can explain why humans delineate colors the way they do in terms of the photoreceptors in the human eye. If in the case of numbers it doesn't work similarly, i.e. numbers don't exist in nature in the way carcinisation, metamorphosis, evolution, etc. exist, then there should be a compelling alternative explanation of them.
That the meanings of words is fixed by use is a good insight, but it's not a whole explanation of language. Use itself doesn't float free of the rest of the world.
Wouldn't you conclude that one of the terms had been mistranslated? Perhaps "8" was their symbol for 10, or "5" their symbol for 4.
That is, we might apply the Principle of Charity and assume that what they said was correct, interpreting their utterances accordingly.
That such things are stipulated does not mean that they are arbitrary.
But if it isn't arbitrary and arithmetic must be the same for all peoples, what explains this? Plenty of other practices do vary widely across cultures.
Pretending 8/2 = 5 won't get you very far. You will not be able to divide the berries between two people fairly. It will be functionally inadequate. It won't work.
Edit:
To put it otherwise, and bring my last two posts together, thinking you can start with eight berries and from that give five to each of two different folk is to misunderstand how "eight", "five" and "two" are used.
It's not to misunderstand eternal universal facts about platonic forms.
Right, because there are eight berries that exist. But if eight "just is" the act of counting, then there are only 8 berries when one counts them as such. Why would they be counted as such? How is this explained without reference to the 8 berries existing prior to counting? What I am objecting to is an explanation that seems to say that prior to an act of counting there is nothing that affects how counting is done.
If you want to say, "people divide 8 berries into 4 and 4 evenly because there exists 8 berries in the world and dividing 8 by 2 gives you 4," that seems fine to me, but then it isn't the case that numbers just [I]are[/I] actions, they also determine actions. And if you don't want to go as far as saying "numerically discrete entities exist prior to counting," it still certainly seems like they must be perceivable prior to counting (and then is must be explained why they are perceived).
And this use came into existence because...?
Quoting Banno
As it happens, this is what the thread should be about.
Quoting Banno
It's a side effect of a particular version of charity:
Quoting Hirsch & Warren
Quoting Ibid
It's not far from here to ontological pluralism or what have you.
@Leontiskos
I almost posted about this the other day, but decided I didn't care enough. This charity metasemantics they've cooked up, I mean, it's the sort of crap mainstream (analytic) philosophy has been getting up to for a long time. It's depressing.
I think it's a holdover from an earlier and more exciting time when philosophers thought there were maybe a few levels of logic and categorization between our minds and the rest of the world. If you were clever enough, you might work out a reasonable toy model of how we assemble patches of color into objects, or parse the intentions of someone speaking to us. Alas, it's not a few layers, but hundreds, thousands, millions. How living organisms manage to be sensitive and responsive to their environment and their own state is orders of magnitude more complex than the stuff philosophers come up with.
All of which is why I agree halfway with this:
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Leontiskos
But it's toward the end there that I disagree. Yes ratiocination rests on something that isn't that, but I wouldn't call what it rests on intellection, which seems to suggest something like the grasping of self-evident truth, or something.
Instead, as you know, I'm with Hume, and I think modern science is bearing him out. Down below whatever reasoning we do is habit and custom and our natural inheritance. When I described the brain as computational before, I may not have placed enough emphasis on the fact that it's all probabilities. The brain is not a deterministic, clockwork machine, but a probabilistic one, and again Hume intuited this -- all our reasoning concerning matters of fact is merely probable. He was horrified enough to discover that reason rested upon something not describable as reason, but I think nowadays we have to go even further: Ramsey was headed this way, linking logic with probability, and suggesting that inference rules were essentially habitual.
So yes, I'm inclined to agree that there is a sort of fatal flaw in much modern philosophy -- the pointless and unrealistic model building like we see here -- and that it can diagnosed as a failure to understand what the foundation of reasoning really is, but I see that foundation quite differently.
What's more, I'm inclined to think that this
Quoting Leontiskos
describes much of the nature and use of reason as we understand it. (See Mercier & Sperber, The Enigma of Reason for a related view, and the beginnings of research to support it.)
The berries are there, counted or no. Those berries can be divided evenly. Dividing berries evenly is something we do to the berries. The direction of fit is that we change the world from a bunch of berries to two bunches of berries.
Why would they be counted as such? Because that's the way "eight" is used. How is this explained without reference to the 8 berries existing prior to counting? There are presumably eight berries before they are counted.
And yes, it isn't the case that numbers just are actions, they also determine actions. You can't divide seven berries evenly without making a mess. Language games are not just words, they are things we do in the world with words.
And I do not want to say ""numerically discrete entities exist prior to counting", because that seems to be quite an odd thing to say. I will say that there were eight berries before they were counted. And this will have been so, regardless of any perception.
Keep going. This is interesting.
Yes, indeed. Thanks for the link, which I will take on notice.
Consider that berries grow, ripen, and then rot. Can you think of an edge case where it's not clear whether something counts as a berry?
Strawberries don't count as berries when one is doing botany. They do not grow from a single ovary. But if folk order berries and cream, one might expect strawberries in the bowl.
So do we have two incommensurable languages, the one in which most folk are happy with a bowl of strawberries and blackberries, and the other in which the botanist expected the bowl of berries to consist of grapes and bananas? Well, no. We understand the difference between doing biology and ordering breakfast.
The things in the world do not change between the lab and the dining room. The way we use the word "berries" is what changes. Not the way we use "is".
So we perhaps agree that "quantifier variance" is a poorly chosen term; and that what we do is more significant than what we say.
The rest looks to be hokum.
Maybe, but it's not really "A is B" that's at issue here, but "Something is B".
Now how exactly do we manage that? Attributing a predicate to an identified individual looks straightforward, but in ordinary life we only reach for the existential quantifier in the absence of such an individual. (One of you drank the last beer. Someone left these footprints. There's something really heavy in this box.)
Is predication still the same thing here? Is this even predication?
I'm always inclined to translate these things in my head to a sort of "second order" predication -- that is, to a claim that some class (last-beer-drinkers, footprint-leavers, heavy-things-in-this-box) is non-empty. Not a claim about a thing -- as yet unidentified -- but a claim about a class. I think it's a habit I picked up in case the class does turn out to be empty -- I'm not left apparently talking about something that doesn't, ahem, exist. The class is usable either way, with or without members.
If you're looking for something you can pry open a drawer with, there's deliberate, strategic vagueness in the class -- now we're almost "third order": we want something we can use to do something that will count as getting the damn drawer open, and what that will turn out to be depends a bit on what we find. "I'll know it when I see it" means I'll define the class I'm identifying when I find a member of it. That's a neat trick.
I still don't see anything hereabouts to do with existence. Classes turned up, and they're supposed to be an ontological conundrum, but they're just a way of talking about my behavior, my predictions about what will work, what I decide and then actually try to do. They're handy for the mental work we do, as you suggest, whatever purpose we're pursuing at the moment.
It is night-time here. What is your point?
What's my point?
Is there a substantive disagreement here? If so, what is it?
(Edit: I posted that previous comment before finishing it, then lost the edits. I've not much more to add, but will repeat the point that what quantifier variance amounts to remains, at least for me, either trivial or ambiguous. )
There is an x such that x drank the last beer.
There is an x such that x left these footprints.
There is an x such that x is heavy and x is in the box.
All standard first order stuff.
Not seeing an issue.
Is there an x such that x will pry open the draw? First order.
Absolutely, that's one of the great difficulties in philosophy. This sort of problem crops up even with normal exemplars of terms, e.g. "the Problem of the Many," https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/problem-of-many/
It's also a problem because we tend to think of eidos as being immutable, but this causes a number of problems to crop up in terms of the mutable world (e.g. the Ship of Theseus, or the Clay and the Statue).
I think Hegel's Logic has a very good intuition here in that it is clear that our understanding of universals and concepts is not arbitrary, even if it is situated in culture and evolves over the course of human history, which both include a good deal of contingency. Explanations then are attempting to track down the necessity involved, and this would seem to involve both the realms of Nature and Giest (or Mind) rather than trying to reduce an explanation of how concepts emerge to one or the other.
Right, and so the reality of "discrete numbers of things" determines how things are counted. But then this seems to me to denote that facts about numbers exist outside of and prior to the human practice of counting, and indeed that facts about "numbers of things," "ratios in nature," etc. are instrumental in bringing about the practice of mathematics. Likewise, human beings wouldn't have come up with various [I]different[/I] signs for different animal species but for the fact that distinct species existed prior to man. This doesn't mean that mathematics or language can be explained without reference to practices or in terms of some simple correspondence between terms and the world, it just means that one needs to look outside the ambit of human culture to fully explain the phenomena, since there is a bidirectional chain of influence between culture and practices on the one hand and the rest of existence on the other.
But then pointing to the fact that the use of mathematics is a practice is itself not an explanation for why that practice exists. Likewise, an explanation of counting seems to require some mention of the fact that the world already has things that we can count in it. If this is the case though, there remains the question of the status of numbers in nature, or more perhaps better phrased, the question of "how the notion of number emerges?"
Hegel's doctrine of the emergence of "notions" might be convoluted. However, it gets at least something right in that it appears to be a mistake to try to reduce explanations of concepts to either an objectivity that has no reference to mind or entirely to the subjective or social realm. Adequate explanations will wrap around both of these instead of trying to reduce to either of them. IMO, another crucial insight here is that we should not downgrade the ontological status of relationships involving minds; appearances are part of the reality of things.
Right, and they are part of the world and are shaped by it. So they aren't explainable in terms of only "words" and "actions," because there are facts that determine how language evolves and how people act that are not themselves reducible to words and actions.
I find "language game," tends to stretch the meaning of "game," to the point where it loses any connection with the original insight about the ways in which language is sometimes used as a sort of game. There is a strong tendency in analytic philosophy to want to try to reduce things down to "just this one thing." Language is games all the way down, or it's explained by information theory all the way down, or it's about nothing but communicating internal mental states, or its about falsification and truth conditions for sentences, etc.
It is, stepping back, a very strange way to approach a complex problem. Obviously we use language to communicate internal mental states. Given how information theory has allowed us identify commonalities and to a degree unify disparate fields from physics to biology to economics, and given it's foundational role in communications technology (and really in neuroscience too), it would be extremely strange if an adequate explanation of language didn't involve involve information theory at some stage. But the jump to totalizing theories seems to require saying bizarre things in every case. Partly, I think this problem is bound up in the tendency to work on various "problems," in isolation. The idea that such problems can be tackled in isolation from systematic thought from say, metaphysicsitself presupposes a number of assumptions (e.g., that an adequate theory of universals isn't required to explain the use of universals as terms assumes a lot).
I don't think "language games," can generally be thought of as discrete entities either. The term "game" tends to imply a fixity that doesn't really exist; neither scientific language nor everyday language is static in the way chess is. They are constantly evolving and affecting one another. Metaphysical assumptions and the language of metaphysics end up affecting scientific language for example. Phlogiston, caloric, élan vital, etc. all end up posited and making their way into the lexicon because assumptions about how sui generis substances must underlie different phenomena in the world. Likewise, it's incredibly common for people to reference their brains and hormones in everyday speech, self-help books, etc. or to use terms that only computer scientists knew forty years ago to describe what they are shopping for. I think it would be strange if the scientific understanding of the world didn't affect natural language, since surely an understanding of the natural world has always driven language evolution.
We say a lot of strange things in philosophy. "Numbers are something we do," or "carcinisation works," are also sort of weird things to say. For biologists and the laity, carcinisation isn't a sort of action we perform, but something that exists in our experience of the world and in the world itself. Numbers are spoken of in the same way generally.
In the world we see an object on the left and we see an object on the right, and we say in the world there are two objects. From this we conclude that numbers exist in the world, as the object on the left and the object on the right exist independently of our observing them.
However, as objects in order to exist in the world have to be extended in space, the object on the left has both a top and a bottom. We can then justifiably say that in the world are three objects, the top object on the left, the bottom object on the left and the object on the right.
So are we looking at two objects or three objects? It depends on what an object is. Numbers cannot exist independently of the objects being numbered.
However, there is no means independent of the human mind to determine what an object is. IE, there is no means independent of the human mind to determine what makes a discrete object a discrete object. As @Srap Tasmaner pointed out, the problem of the edge case, and as you pointed out, the Ship of Theseus problem.
As there is no means independent of the human mind to determine what an object is, and as numbers are dependent upon the existence of discrete objects, numbers cannot exist independently of the human mind.
IE, it is a problem of circularity, in that there are two objects provided we have already determined that there are two objects.
:up:
I do not think this is a vicious circle though. There is only one Being, and it includes both sides of the Nature/Geist distinction. As Heidegger points out, the world is always already with us. Plurality in being, particularly the plurality of distinct phenomenological horizonsmindsis a given since we only become aware that we are an "I" in the face of the "Thou."
Rather, this circularity says something about being, what Ferdinand Ulrich, building on Heidegger, Aquinas, and Hegel, terms its "gift-like quality." Things are dependent on what lies outside of them for what they are. This is true from the naturalist frame and in terms of the content of concepts. For example, it's impossible to explain the natural, physical properties of something without any reference to how it interacts with other things, the context it is situated in, etc. Explanations of elements involve reference to universal fields, enzymes are defined in terms of what they do with other things, etc. Likewise, the concept "red" relies on the external concept "color."
There is a fundemental sense in which, conceptually, things can be defined in terms of "what they are not." This is what allows us to play the game of "Twenty Questions," with any degree of success. On the face of it, narrowing down "anything someone can think of," the entire universe of potential entities, using just twenty yes or no questions seems doomed from the outset. In reality, it's quite doable, since knowing which category something falls into (e.g. real/fictional, living/non-living, etc.) excludes a huge swath of the universe of entities.
Explanations then, will tend to overflow boundaries, including those of Nature versus Mind. If we don't fall into the trap of thinking that relationships between knowers and objects are in some way "less real," than relationships between objects and other mindless objects, I think we avoid a lot of the problems of this distinction (also at play here is the realization that not everything is infinitely decomposable in terms of analysis, e.g., structuralism).The relationship between a thing and a person who knows it is in a way the paradigmatic relationship, the place where a entity most "is what it is," since properties and potencies can be brought together and be made phenomenologicaly present "all at once," whereas in nature things are diffuse in time and space and mutable.
In PhR Hegel makes the very Aristotlean claim that a dead hand that has been removed from a body is not an "actual," hand in that it no longer (fully) instantiates the coherence of what it is (likewise, a state that doesn't promote freedom is not an actual state). IIRC, Aristotle says something similar about a blind eye in De Anima. This is a fairly confusing statement at first glance, but I think it calls out the idea of necessity inherent in concepts. Concerns about the forms of "grue and bleen," or a distinct eidos for each individual pile of mud generally seem to miss the point that, if concepts unfold historically à la Hegel, they clearly do not do so arbitrarily. That we can imagine a vast horizon of potential concepts does not entail their historical actualization. That things' "intelligibility,"* might be described in infinitely many ways or that a thing can exist in infinitely contexts, doesn't preclude a knower having any grasp of its intelligibility.
* Where we might think of "intelligibility" as the sum total of true things that can be said of a thing throughout the entire history of the "human conversation." This is clearly dependent on the evolution of concepts, languages, the sciences, etc. and also on Nature, the two being part of a single whole, Being, in which entities exist.
Okay, but the joke sidestepped the question. Are there advances in logic? Do these advances include advances in quantification? Once we begin to understand the history of logic we understand that advances in quantification are some of the most important kind. Your claims seem to commit you to the odd opinion that modern formal logic and its theory of quantification are eternal and unchanging. I think I spoke about idolatry earlier. :wink:
Quoting Banno
I think you are failing to recognize just how stipulative/tautological your approach to this question is. You have defined away quantificational disputes, but does your definition have any real basis?
Quoting Banno
There is a close relation between quantification and the domain. So close, in fact, that to merely stipulate that every dispute about quantification is really only a dispute about the domain is a petitio principii. One person will say, X is not in the domain and therefore cannot be quantified over, and another person will say, X cannot be quantified over and therefore is not in the domain. An alternative understanding of quantification will result in a different domain, but a different domain need not necessarily result in an alternative understanding of quantification. I gave two examples: the unicorn and the Jeep (). The point is that there are two different kinds of differences of domain: merely quantitative differences and qualitative differences. A (merely) quantitative difference of domain results in an artificial difference of quantifier-qua-extension. For example, if one attempts to quantify over all mammals but omits unicorns because they were not known to exist (or vice versa) then a quantitative difference of domain results in a merely artificial difference of quantifier-qua-extension. But if one attempts to quantify over all things but omits universals because they are a nominalist (cf. QVD 295) then a qualitative difference of domain results in a substantial difference of quantifier-qua-extension. What we are concerned with are qualitative differences of domain, not merely quantitative differences of domain, and these qualitative differences of domain are what imply qualitative quantificational differences.
The nominalist and the universalist think about the contents of reality in a fundamentally different way, and because of this they quantify reality in a fundamentally different way. It is inaccurate to merely chalk this up to domain, as if radically different domains do not entail radically different quantifiers. In order to ignore this one would need to hold that quantification over a name or thing is the same as quantification over a universal, and this is untenable. As soon as we move beyond an empiricist domain and introduce different modes of being we also move beyond quantifier univocity. To ignore this is to beg the question in favor of empiricism, and obviously this will not do since the debates that the OP envisions can obviously take place between empiricists and non-empiricists. When we are thinking in this deeper sense of domain, quantifier and domain go hand in hand. We could artificially define one to encompass the other, but in reality they are two subtly different things that shift together.
Beyond that, I think that you are defining quantifiers in accord with your predilection for stipulation, and in turn with ontological pluralism. If domain were stipulative and arbitrary then quantification would be univocal, as you say (and this unique understanding of logic brings with it its own unique understanding of quantification). Yet if Sider is right that domain is not stipulative and an ontological structure holds, then a correct ontology will co-implicate a correct understanding of quantification and logic, and an incorrect ontology will co-implicate an incorrect understanding of quantification and logic. As history attests, there are different kinds of quantification and different kinds of logic.
Simpson has a nice paper that ends up looking at the way Wittgensteins logical inheritance from Frege leads him to to conclude that:
Quoting Peter L. P. Simpson, Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein on Self and Object, p. 10
Earlier:
Quoting Peter L. P. Simpson, Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein on Self and Object, p. 7
The nice thing about someone like Simpson is that he studied more than a few decades of the history of philosophy. Simpsons point means that not only is modern logics theory of quantification substantial, involving its own presuppositions, but that theory of quantification is precisely what led Wittgenstein to some of his errors, such as his exclusion of dynamism from ontology. This absence of dynamism is a good example of a qualitative difference of domain that goes hand in hand with a specific theory of quantification. In Wittgensteins case it was his theory of quantification that led to his ontological error. :kiss:
The reason you see modern quantification as invisible, unimpeachable, and inescapable is because it is the water you swim in as someone embedded in the modern paradigm. Yet the more one contextualizes that paradigm, the more visible and contentful Fregian quantification becomes. In a hundred years it will be even more cleanly delineated in its historical context.
Yes, good.
Quoting Peter L. P. Simpson, The Definition of Person: Boethius Revisited, p. 6
---
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yes, I agree. Good post.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Not self-evident, but immediate. If knowledge (scientia) is truly possible via logical syllogism, then the atomic simples that logic presupposes must be known immediately (non-discursively). I am posting some quotes from Peter Simpson because I accidentally stumbled upon a paper where he discusses Wittgensteins use of Freges logic as leading Wittgenstein to treat formal logic as a mirror of the world (Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein on Self and Object). So I looked through his works for related topics, and this paper comes close to our topic:
Quoting Peter L. P. Simpson, The Nature and Origin of Ideas: The Controversy over Innate Ideas Reconsidered, pp. 22-3
See also Simpsons, The Rejection of Skepticism, and Waking Realism, and Strombergs, "An Essay on Experimentum," This is all somewhat related to 's point about Platos divided line.
Simpsons primary interest is moral and political philosophy, but he sees the same thing there that you point to in analytic philosophy. For example, he notes that Rawls thinking is axiomatic, and ends in a blind appeal to current cultural intuitions. It is not pure stipulation in that it appeals to cultural intuitions, but it explicitly abstains from attempting to rationally justify those intuitions. The input for democratic thinking is consensus.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yes, and I am very much against Hume.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
It seems like we are both reticent to get into a long conversation, but are you saying that everything should be simplified in favor of a simpler, probabilistic theory? What seems to be in question is that input that Simpson speaks of. I want to say that logic works quite well, and yet seems to be left hanging ten feet from the ground. The difficulty is anchoring it, filling in those last ten feet. I dont find probability to be a great anchor, but Im not sure how far we want to get into this.
One can't count things unless there are things to count. But it cannot follow that there being things logically precedes there being numbers of things. This is not asking which came first, the chicken or the egg, it's asking which came first, the egg or the egg.
Language is not games all the way down; at some point one must recognise that this is just what we do.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Sure. I don't believe that what I have said implies otherwise. language games are embedded in the world. What was novel in their introduction is the idea that we do things to the world by using words.
It's not that the world is already quantified - divided into subjects and predicates - nor is it that we might quantify the world in any arbitrary way and achieve much the same result. We stipulate the way things are, in a way that is restricted by how things are.
The question of which came first does not have application here. Nor is the historical development of these considerations relevant. Again, it's just what we do.
Why do Bishops move diagonally?
This bit of history only partially answers the question. It remains that we might move bishops anywhere we like on the board, but to do so would be to cease playing chess, or at the least to play it differently. There is a way in which the answer to "Why do Bishops move diagonally?" is, that is just how the game is played, that its what we do. Seeking further explanation is redundant.
Could we change the way we use quantification in logic? Sure, why not. Indeed quantification is done slightly differently in each of the various logics. As the domain changes. I don't believe what I have said commits me to logic being "eternal and unchanging". The way quantification works changes as the way the domain works.
Quoting Leontiskos
What? I can't make anything of this, nor much of what follows. Talk of nominalists and universalists seems oddly anachronistic.
Whatever point you are making remains unclear. If you wish to talk of changes of domain as changes in quantification, go ahead, but that seems to me to obscure more than it reveals. I'll leave you to it.
Can we list them? We have the is of predication: the cat is black; the is of quantification: there is a black cat; and the is of equality: The cat named Tiddles is the cat named Jack.
There might be more. First order logic at least allows us to differentiate these three.
Very good point. I think what this point really alludes to from my perspective is that numbers is not strictly a passive consequence of objects in the world but are consequences of our ability to create cognitive maps or models we use to navigate the world. Spaces with dimensions, distances, transformations. We develop the ability to deal with metric information (even rats can deal with distance, duration, numerosity) just in virtue of a brain which can sequentially sample environmental inputs, has memory, can act to manipulate those sequences, and can abstract regularities or overarching structure from that kind of sequential sampling of the world, one viewpoint or location at a time. Counting on a number line is like tracking a location in a 1D space.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
There is only one World
Yes, there is only one World. Humans are part of this World. From an Enactivist perspective, humans have evolved in synergy with the world, and the human mind has developed from its embodied interactions within the World.
As you rightly say " If we don't fall into the trap of thinking that relationships between knowers and objects are in some way "less real," than relationships between objects and other mindless objects, I think we avoid a lot of the problems of this distinction".
The mind is different to what is outside the mind
Within our minds we have the concept of "object", such as apples and tables, and in our minds we have the concept of number, such as the number 1 and the number 7. The question is, accepting that the human has evolved as part of the World, because we have in our minds the concepts of number and object, do numbers and objects of necessity exist in the World outside the mind.
The question can be extended. Because we have the concept of the colour red in our minds, does the colour red exist in the world outside the mind. Because we sometimes experience angst, does angst exist in the World outside the mind. Similarly, does pain, anger, fear, disgust, joy, surprise, anxiety, sadness and happiness exist in the World outside the mind.
It is true that there is one World, of which humans are a part, but it does not follow that what exists in the mind of necessity also exists outside the mind, otherwise, to make my point, the mining of anxiety would be as common as the mining of lithium. This is clearly not the case.
As you say "For example, it's impossible to explain the natural, physical properties of something without any reference to how it interacts with other things, the context it is situated in, etc." This is true, but as with angst, any such interaction is not of necessity between a world outside the mind and the mind, but may well be contained within the mind.
So we know that what exists in the mind does not of necessity exist outside the mind. This leaves the question as to whether our concepts of numbers and objects also exist outside the mind as numbers and objects.
Numbers and objects
Numbers and objects are Formal Concepts, in the sense as introduced by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus 4.126, and are to be distinguished from Proper Concepts such as "apple" or "table". Formal Concepts are part of the syntax of language rather than its semantics. Other Formal Concepts include the existential quantifier ? "there exists", also a part of the syntax of language rather than its semantics. For this reason, as Wittgenstein notes, we cannot meaningfully say "there exists", "there are 100", "there are objects" as one can say "there exists a mountain", "there are 100 books" or "there are grey objects".
The concept of number is intimately linked with the concept of object, in that we cannot say "there are 100", as for the expression to be meaningful we must say "there are 100 apples", where the number 100 refers to the object apple. Any Formal Concept within a grammatical expression must involve a reference, ie, a Concept Proper.
I can say "I see one object, an apple". I can also say "I see two objects, the top of the apple and the bottom of the apple". I can also say "I see four objects, the top of the apple, the left of the apple, the bottom of the apple and the right of the apple". I can continue dividing the apple up, and increasing the number of objects I can see at each time.
But, as you say "That we can imagine a vast horizon of potential concepts does not entail their historical actualization". For practical and pragmatic reasons we just say "I can see one object, an apple".
The human mind can judge that a particular set of atoms exists as a single form, in this case, as a single apple. But the question remains, in the absence of a human mind, what determines that a particular set of atoms existing in space exists as a single object or not. What determines whether for example the loss of a single atom from an object causes the object to disappear from existence. What determines whether that atom was a necessary or contingent part of the object. The human mind can make such a judgement, but what what in the absence of the human mind can make such a judgement.
How can objects exist in the absence of the human mind if there is no mechanism for differentiating between different particular sets of atoms. What determines whether an individual atom is a necessary or contingent part of that object.
If objects cannot exist in the absence of the human mind, then numbers, which are intimately linked to the existence of objects, neither can exist in the absence of the human mind.
Quantifier Variance
As regards Quantifier Variance, we can consider the expression ? n; n * n = 25. As the number n doesn't exist in the absence of the human mind, the expression cannot be referring to existence in the absence of the human mind but must be referring to existence in language and thought. Therefore, in this particular instance, it is not the existence quantifier E that is varying, but rather the predication of the existence quantifier that is varying.
Expanding on your thought that "There is a fundamental sense in which, conceptually, things can be defined in terms of "what they are not", I believe that we can better understand numbers when we appreciate that they have no existence in the absence of the human mind.
I think we are largely on common ground then. Where we differ might be on this assumption:
I would say that "what we do" depends upon and evolves according to "what we know" about the world. Metaphysics, philosophy of mind, etc. are all part of that equation.
The question of "what comes first," even if it is phrased in a misleading manner, is obviously of intense speculative interest. This makes it important for the simple reason that "all men by nature desire to know."
But I also don't think speculative thought can actually be divorced from practical concerns. Metaphysics is always in the background; it affects how science is done. The anti-metaphysical movement just made it harder to question metaphysical presuppositions by dogmatically obscuring them. For example, we ended up with "unique substances" to explain heat, combustion, and life in the 19th century precisely because of the dominant corpuscular metaphysics of the day. Likewise, the very practical concern of mental health treatment is bound up in neuroscience, which is itself heavily influenced by things like the Computational Theory of Mind. Why is CTM so dominant? For plenty of reasons, but certainly one of them is how nicely it plays with popular metaphysical conceptions. The two realms don't stand neatly apart. The very practically useful idea of intrinsic and extrinsic properties in physics for example first crops up in Hegel of all places, who is not at all dealing with the "practical."
IIRC the move to including distinct existential quantifiers is itself the result of Kant making a metaphysical argument vis-á-vis "existence" being a perfection (property) in response to St. Anselm's famous ontological proof.
I am not sure this is so obvious. What you think about the relationship between logic (or mathematics) and the world/being itself is going to affect what you think about the value of seeking further explanation here. The assumption that any digging here is redundant seems to carry with it its own assumptions.
The question of "what is logic?" has historically three main flavors of answer:
1. It is formal systems, essentially the systems (games) themselves or the study of the properties of all such games.
2. It is the essential "rules of thought." Or in more deflationary terms, the rules that lead to correct judgement.
3.Logic is a principle at work in the world, its overall order. Stoic or Christian Logos, although perhaps "disenchanted" (Hegel's objective logic, C.S. Pierce's "logic of being).
Depending on which you lean towards, what counts as a full explanation will differ.
Logic is not just a stipulative game, like chess. The analogy doesn't work.
Quoting Banno
And as I said, if you embrace logical pluralism then it doesn't matter how you quantify or which logic you use, for everything is stipulation and no one stipulation is any better than any other. Sider, @J, @Count Timothy von Icarus, and I all seem to agree that this is plainly wrong. I think you are entertaining it because you think the anchor problem is too messy to venture.
Quoting Banno
To reiterate, this means that even within a single logic qualitative differences of domain reflect qualitatively different understandings of quantification. Disagreement can come down to these differences, and therefore (second-order) quantifier equivocation is possible.
Quoting Banno
It's not. Peirce was a universalist and Frege was a nominalist. The story only continues, and universals is but one of the many examples the paper gives.
Quoting Banno
I've been quite clear:
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Banno
You like stipulation. If one does enough stipulation then quantifier equivocation becomes impossible. If you stipulate the logic and the domain, then the quantifier will be stable. But one does not understand quantification without understanding the qualitative scope of the domain, and the qualitative scope of the domain is only ever partially determined by the logic.
To reiterate some of the points you ignored: logic and quantification have changed throughout history, and are not immutable. Wittgenstein's understanding of quantification strongly influenced his domain and his philosophy (as does yours). Quantification changes in large ways throughout history and from logical system to logical system, and in smaller ways within a logical system given the presuppositions of the various logicians. This isn't odd, for quantifiers are part of language and all language is susceptible to such equivocation. You simply haven't provided a reason to believe otherwise. Presumably you would continue to offer the tautology that you do it your way because you do it your way, like "chess". The question is whether you have a reason to do it your way, or any one way rather than another.
I actually find the role that chess plays on this forum a bit bewildering. Sometimes it almost feels as if chess is the foundational hermeneutical key to all reality. Folks launch into chess examples as if it is the most obvious thing that "morality is like chess" () or "logic is like chess" () or "epistemology is like chess" (). The obvious rejoinder to this unspoken presupposition is simple, "No it's not." Things like morality, logic, and epistemology are not like chess; they are not just arbitrary games we made up for the fun of it. Their overlap with chess is quite small. These chess-claims usually function to underwrite some kind of arbitrary reasoning or foundation.
Is this just Wittgenstein playing out, with his assumptions that philosophy is the study of language and language is fundamentally a kind of "game"? These are two false assumptions which contain partial truths, and which fail badly as a foundation or first philosophy. As Aristotle points out, small errors in the beginning become large errors in the end. It seems to me that the attempt to massage them to make them more plausible tends to ignore their foundational-ness, as the thing which qualifies them never ends up being more foundational or pervasive than the metaphor itself, and because of this the metaphor continues, unperturbed and still largely false.
Funny enough, international bodies tried, and then gave up on developing a single canonical set of rules for chess, finding it too difficult. Differences in rulesvariants asidewill tend to only affect high level play (e.g. how a draw is forced, etc.), but they are real differences that have not been settled.
I'd say it's the consequence of a certain use of Wittgenstein, one that tends towards totalizing and reductive explanations (which is ironically something he explicitly cautions against in PI).
Particularly, in PI Wittgenstein is equivocal about use defining meaning in [I]all[/I] cases. "For a large class of cases of the employment of the word meaning [I]though not for all[/I] this word can be explained in this way: the meaning of a word is its use in the language (Philosophical Investigations 43, emphasis mine). Thing's like Kirpke's assertion that Robinson Caruso can't form or follow new rules despite knowing what rules are because he lives in isolation, or Davidson's claim that Swampman, the molecule for molecule replica of himself who carries out his exact behaviors has no content to his thought, are the sort of assertions you get when you try to squeeze a big set of phenomena into a tiny box of explanation. Carnap-Bar Hillel Information would be a similar example from the more positivist camp.
I think you can lay some blame on Wittgenstein for the concept of aiming to reduce hard problems to "pseudo problems" though. If our goal becomes not to solve problems, but rather to dismiss them, we should not be surprised if problems begin to seem intractable. It is the difference between starting with the question: "how do I understand this?" and beginning with the assumption that the real question is: "why do I not need to understand this?" or "why is it impossible to understand this?" Perhaps some problems really are problems of language or pseudo problems. However, having discovered this, it will not do to view the aim of philosophy entirely as the project of discovering how problems are not really problems. It's a bit of the old: "discovering a hammer and deciding the world is made of nails."
I think the move to viewing philosophy as a sort of "therapy" does have some strong points. There is a sense in which much classical and medieval philosophy is practically oriented, itself a type of "therapy." The ideal philosopher from these eras is a saint, even in the pagan tradition (e.g. Porphyry's Pythagoras or Philostratus' Apollonius of Tyana). They are not ruled over or disordered by desires and passions. They do what is right and just.
However, it is odd when philosophy is offered up as a sort of "therapy" or "pragmatism" is invoked by schools of thought that deny the reality of the Good, making it either into something we "create" through some sort of sui generis power, or else an illusion, since everything is reducible to atoms in the void, etc. For, what is "pragmatism," when the Good, the object of practical reason, is itself either something that must be created according to "pragmatic" concerns, or else is illusory? I really don't like dismissing things as "incoherent," but this is one area where I think the vicious circularity might be real.
Do you mean this?
Quoting FIDE Handbook
This is a catch-all for weird practical issues, a lot of which are covered, but shit happens.
I assume the reference to draws concerns this:
It goes on at some length, but kids in particular pick up on this idea of repetition of moves, which the rule immediately addresses.
What "real differences" did you have in mind?
Chess is interesting because it involves decision making under uncertainty, and it is moderately surprising that its complexity is just great enough to provide scope for style and creativity. Computers have kinda ruined it for me though.
Okay, interesting.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes, that makes sense to me.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Is Wittgenstein's the idea that philosophy is therapy in the sense that it can properly order our desires and lives, or is it the idea that in recognizing that things we thought were problems are not really problems, a therapeutic resolution takes place?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes, good.
I'd be surprised if there were a substantive difference.
We should explore whether the "three main flavours" are properly independent. To my eye the third, "Logic is a principle at work in the world, its overall order" might well be an illusion that drops out of something like the first, that logic is working through, formally, what we can and cannot consistently say.
Pressing the chess analogy further, the third is as if a child marvelled at the fact that one bishop always stayed on the red, and one on the white, and supposed this to be "a principle at work in the world" or perhaps posited some transcendent force that makes it so, rather than seeing a consequence of the rules.
Metaphysics can be seen as the discussion of the background against which talk of the physical world can take place. I've Watkins and similar in mind, explicating the logical structure of conservation laws and so on. The more speculative types of metaphysics are best left to themselves.
It's still in some sense a change of domain, but it's change you sort of delegate to the quantifier itself, treating it as a filter. In one case "all" means all, but in the other "all" means all but the usual exclusions.
You could absolutely see analysts at loggerheads if one of them filtered, and assumed everyone did, and the other didn't, with a similar assumption.
Nothing to do with *kinds* of objects here, but to do with *how* we range over a collection of values.
I was thinking something not too dissimilar; that there is an approach to doing philosophy that looks only at the large scale, using a big brush, and in doing so paints a misleading picture.
Seems to me that this is part of the disagreement - so far as there is one - in these pages.
At the very centre of this thread is the question of what quantifier variance consists in. And it seems to me that those who advocate quantifier variance as a way of explaining broad-brush disagreements have a vested interest in never quite answering that question explicitly, while those who dismiss quantifier variance perhaps take on too tight an explication.
Hirsch & Warren make it clear at the bottom of Page 2 that their topic includes the rules of quantifier introduction:
The paradigmatic example is existential generalisation, f(a)??(x)f(x). The claim is that Universal Instantiation, Universal generalisation, Existential Instantiation and Existential generalisation have differing uses in different logics. And indeed, these do vary in form from one logic to another.
So in second order logic - an infamously burdensome topic - existential generalisation is something like
f(a)??(X)X(a). So in second order logic we can conclude validly, from say "the shoe is blue", that the shoe has some property. Notice well the difference here, between generalising over the individual, "a", and generalising over the predicate, "f".
(I am only making use of second-order logic here because others have made mention of it, and yet it was unclear from the context what they were attempting to do with it. The argument seemed to be along the lines of "there are instances of second order logic, therefore quantification varies", which just does not work.)
Now look at the difference between these two examples of existential generalisation. They are different. And yet they are recognisably both instances of the application of the same rule.
Hnece Finn and Bueno can say, correctly,
Quoting Quantifier Variance
While I was typing this, gave yet another examples of where quantifier variance is variation in the domain.
Now I am quite happy to agree that domains vary. But I am far less incline to agree that these are instances of a variation in the quantification rules themselves.
And I think Srap was quite right that we might progress if we head back towards the principle of charity. I stand by what was claimed in the second post here, that the most telling objection to quantifier variance is that we do indeed translate (make use of) what we loosely call different languages. It seems to me that attempting to explain this by introducing "quantifier variance", and not being clear as to whether we are talking about changes in domain or changes in quantification rules, is doing us a disservice.
This by way of attempting to use a fine brush to keep some of the discussion on the titular topic.
Quoting fdrake
I think I see what you mean. I just want to devil's advocate though, that you can provide an extensional definition of the filter in that case, and that would turn it into a kind (it'd be an indicator function on row number, right?).
Another way of parsing that is the hypothetical disagreement between the two analysts is whether they're quantifying over all the rows, or all the rows satisfying a predicate. There's a stipulation that you're using the same spreadsheet in the background.
Though I do think that's a dodge for various reasons. That spreadsheet mean evaluation could be made into a macro and output somewhere, so any difference would be counted as part of the spreadsheet's normal function. In that case one analyst who believed the formula did X and one analyst who believed the formula did Y would be able to disagree on the interpretation, and thus disagree on the intension of introducing quantifiers over spreadsheet related expressions. As in, if Alice thought the spreadsheet was taking a raw mean, and Bob thought the spreadsheet was taking a trimmed mean. They could both agree to the statement "the mean is less than five", while not having the same intension for mean.
Thinking it through, I think this is related to intension quite heavily. Bob could introduce the quantifier (given his premises of a trimmed mean) that "there doesn't exist an X such that X in in the upper and lower 1% pf the distribution of quantities which goes into the mean" based on his belief that the trimming predicate removes such entities. And Alice could not, based on the belief that those quantities were not removed.
I do think, though, that you could provide another extensional dodge there. By introducing a modal operator to model the differing beliefs, and perhaps a modal operator to model the differing possible spreadsheets. Then you'd end up with Alice and Bob agreeing on quantifier meaning, given fixed beliefs and with fixed possible world with a fixed domain in each world, and a fixed symbol set shared between them... and fixed symbols in the underlying language etc.
I suppose the question of pragmatics rears its head again at that point, does it even make sense to think of introducing or eliminating any quantifier having an exact specification. Or is it simply that the majority of such uses are relatively insensitive to differences in intension. And are later qualified or disambiguated with inquiries into another agent's modal status.
How would you account for people's differences in use? As in, plenty of people don't know that (A implies B) implies (Everything which counts as A also counts as B). That slide from propositional to first order logic you get from the diagrams. Their quantifier introduction rule would vary over people, as you wouldn't have universal generalisation working the usual way for at least one person. (P(x)=>Q(x) where x is arbitrary lets you derive (for all x P( x ) => Q( x ) ), and they can't do that).
The challenge I see that presenting is that people can believe statements that block applications of inference rules, or otherwise not believe in appropriate inference rules. Even when two people share the theorems of the underlying logic... You just have to hope that every person innately believes every theorem. If they don't use the quantifiers in the same way, they don't have the same intensions over people.
Can you set out why or how the analogy does not work? In what salient way is logic not a game of stipulation?
Quoting Leontiskos
Why doesn't it matter how you quantify or which logic you use? Isn't that of the utmost import? That there are multiple logics does not imply that they are all of equal utility or applicability. Propositional logic will be of little help with modal issues, and modal logic might be overkill for propositional problems. Some art is involved in the selection of a logic to use.
Quoting Leontiskos
What? For example, how could a "qualitative" difference in domain in a first-order logic lead to a difference in quantification? The quantification rules are defined extensionally.
I honestly do not follow what you are claiming here.
Quoting Leontiskos
Seems to me that such equivocation is still about the domain. I think I showed that , above. Can you show otherwise?
Eh. It might be a crap example, and maybe there only are crap examples.
What interested me was two things:
(1) This shouldn't be the usual one side saying "There are more things in heaven and earth..." and the other saying "No there aren't."
(2) I like the idea of this exchange:
"You left out some values."
"No I didn't."
"But I can see that you did. That's why we got different results. You left out these two."
"But you don't count those."
"But they're in the data set."
"But they don't count."
I like the idea of each side being baffled by what the other could possibly be thinking.
Yes. I'm of the opinion that there is something substantive here to talk about. Lots of substantive things in fact. One thing we've done so far is treating terms as individuated entities. I think you problematised that in a post here a while back regarding the neuroscience. That whole issue gets occluded once you can already apply a name to a thing. But the metaphysics in that kind of discussion gets dicey real fast and the science gets incomprehensible even quicker.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Is that bafflement gesturing toward incommensurability? I could see people having irresolvable disagreements about how they (their bodies?) individuate entities, even if they agree on everything under heaven and earth. Maybe related to intension again.
I'm not sure I follow what you are suggesting here. Yes, sometimes folk make invalid inference, or fail make valid inference. But in order to recognise this, we must understand the distinction between valid and invalid inference.
In order to recognise a failure of translation, you must have an idea of what success would look like.
Quoting fdrake It might but I don't see that it does - those unbound variables make it hard to see what is going on here. But (Pa?Qa) does not allow (?x (Px ? Qx))... You've lost me.
Thanks.
You can introduce the quantifier onto (Pa->Qa) to get (for all x P(x)->Q(x) ) if you made no assumptions about a anywhere in your reasoning. If someone just comes up to you and hands you some constant with some properties, you cannae, but you can show that if (P( a ) for arbitrary a) then (P( x ) for all x).
Quoting Banno
How does translation play into it here? What I would get from successful translation is a set of equivalent uses, you've not provided a guarantee that such an equivalence between utterances involving quantifiers would preserve quantifier rules.
Hang on.
(Pa?Qa) ? (?x (Px ? Qx) is not valid.
How does "if you made no assumptions about a anywhere in your reasoning" change this?
And P( a )? ?xP( x ) is also invalid.
If "a" is arbitrary, doesn't that just make it a variable instead of an individual? Sure, ?yP(y)??xP(x) is valid.
I remain lost.
Edit: that is, A?B gets parsed into predicate calculus as (?x(Px?Qx)), not as (Px?Qx). Leaving out the quantification is not using a different quantifier...?
Second edit; that is, "...for arbitrary a..." just is "for any a you might pick", or "for any a" - it's introducing a quantifier.
Well, that's what I'm asking, by way of answering this:
Quoting fdrake
I'm still wanting an example of where quantifier variation is not also domain variation. I don't think it can be done - quantifier variation just is domain variation.
That is, you asked me
Quoting fdrake
And my answer remains, perhaps they are talking about different domains.
A blatant misrepresentation. Here is the linked passage:
Quoting Janus
It says nothing whatsoever about epistemology being like chess. :roll:
@fdrake has been consistently talking about intensional differences in quantifiers, namely by way of introduction and elimination rules for quantifiers.
@fdrake has been consistently talking about intensional difference in quantifiers, namely by way of differing introduction and elimination rules.
Quoting Leontiskos
Has he? Ok. So what are these "intensional differences in quantifiers"? How are you using "intensional" here? How does that play out?
How do introduction and elimination rules differ in intensional logic?
And, significantly, classical first order logic is extensional.
So fill that out; what are your intensional introduction and elimination rules for quantifiers, and how do they differ from extensional introduction and elimination rules for quantifiers?
Fill it out.
Just to be clear, here's the extensional intuition behind quantification:
Quoting Banno
I granted that and pointed out that there are two different kinds of domain differences: quantitative and qualitative. I gave at least three examples: the apple, the Jeep, and the nominalist. You haven't interacted with any of this.
Going back to the apple, the quantificational difference is over whether the imaged thing exists through the image. This is simultaneously a different understanding of quantification and a difference of domain. You have been begging the question by asserting that the domain difference is primary, and the different understanding of quantification is accidental or artificial (or, on a carefully placed definition, non-existent). Yet it is simply false to claim that domain differences are always primary and quantificational differences are always secondary or derivative, and Simpson's analysis of Wittgenstein shows this to be the case (because Wittgenstein's quantificational understanding is precisely what shaped his domain, not vice versa).
With the apple one might buddy up to pluralism and say, "Ah, well the difference is inconsequential. Use the quantifier-and-domain that let's Cézanne's apple exist or use the quantifier-and-domain that does not let it exist. It's all the same. There is no right or wrong way." Yet I wrote that example to @J because he is a Christian, and in Jewish and Christian history this was always a substantial question in relation to iconoclasm (beginning with the Hebrew commandment against images of God, and continuing with various iconoclastic controversies, but most pointedly for Christianity the Second Council of Nicea). So it is not necessarily inconsequential, and those who believe that a reality can truly manifest through an image (think Orthodox icon theology) are involved primarily in a quantificational commitment, and only secondarily in a domain-extension commitment. They quantify reality differently, namely because they quantify images differently. This has the effect of altering their domain, but the alteration of the domain is merely a consequence of the way that they catalogue reality. You can't just say, "Ah, well Orthodox Christians posit a larger domain, but they quantify icons the same way as a secular person quantifies a portrait." They surely do not do this, just as the nominalist and the universalist do not quantify reality in the same way (or the people who disagree over mereological composites, or possible worlds, etc.).
Quoting Banno
In what salient way is logic like chess? Why would we assume such a thing? Chess is just a made-up game we created to have some fun and amusement. Logic is at the very least supposed to substantially help us to interact with reality. These are not the same thing. "Why do bishops move diagonally?" Because we said so in a made-up game. "Why does modus ponens hold?" Because reality said so, whether we like it or not.
Quoting Banno
If art is involved then we've moved beyond stipulation, and you should follow that string.
Their treatment of quantifiers is straightforwardly functionalist and unobjectionable: they note that if you can derive phi(x)Fx from Fa, then phi() is the existential quantifier in the language you're dealing with. So they rely on at least one standard introduction rule, and I'd assume all the rest.
Quoting fdrake
Not by me. Incommensurability is not a useful or interesting idea.
Quoting fdrake
I seriously doubt it. QV seems to be the love-child of incommensurability and a bizarre over-promotion of the principle of charity. I don't know why I'm even posting, it's so stupid.
Here's another sort of variance with its feet on the ground (since you mentioned OLP a while back): in everyday speech "all" carries existential import, but not in Frege's logic; in everyday speech "some" implicates "not all" but not in Frege's logic. (I did not say "entails"; the implication is cancelable, but using "some" this way is patently uncooperative.)
It is a fact that not everyone in every context means the same thing by "all" or by "some". But this is nowhere near the sort of variance our heroes are promoting, in my limited understanding.
Who are "they"? :chin:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Theres more than one way to translate this quote, and Anscombes may not be the best way.
Sorry. Eli Hirsch and Jared Warren, Quantifier Variance.
I see what you did there.
Ah okay. I think this is the first time that paper has been quoted in this thread. I don't think Sider's paper has been paid any attention at all.
I think part of the problem here is that we have been focused on a random paper that was not included in the OP, "Quantifier Variance Dissolved." The "titular topic" that speaks about is arguably not quantifier variance per se, and it surely isn't the presentation of quantifier variance found negatively in QVD. It seems to me that the OP is actually about Theodore Sider's thoughts in his paper, "Ontological Realism." This is what the OP draws most heavily upon. To expand the central quote from the OP:
Quoting Sider, Ontological Realism, pp. 37-8
It seems to me that @Banno is opting for some variety of the third approach.
What does Sider mean by quantifier variance? He explains at some length beginning on page 8, and we have covered some of that same ground. On page 11 he gives a summation, and he seems to be much more careful than "Quantifier Variance Dissolved" in understanding this notion of quantifier variance. On page 11 he also begins his argument against @Banno's idea that the meaning of a quantifier is merely a matter of domain. On page 22 he begins arguing for what I have been arguing for, which I will call the "substantiveness" of quantifiers.
Quoting Leontiskos
So you haven't been reading my posts. Fine.
Quoting Leontiskos
and logic...
:wink:
FWIW, here first, which happens to be a post of mine you responded to, but I quoted it in the section responding to Banno, so understandable that you missed it.
The SEP article deals at length with Hirsch and Sider, but I won't be reading it.
Isn't it wonderful that we can agree on things like this even while being at loggerheads on Hume and probabilistic logic? :grin:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Quoting Banno
Ah, I actually did read those but I didn't realize at the time that a previously-uncited paper was being introduced.
It's just this.
Just to be clear, what do you believe our heroes are promoting? I'm not sure any more.
Cool. Took me a while to catch on. My apologies. SoQuoting Banno
This is pretty clear: How Universal Generalization Works According To Natural Reason Salient is that the item chosen as the exemplar could have been any particular x in S. One can't conclude from "Socrates is mortal" that "all men are mortal", but one can conclude from "Any particular man is mortal" that "All men are mortal".
But I'm not sure how this relates to
Quoting fdrake
It was an example of people disagreeing about quantifier introduction rules. That one is tricky!
Right, this would be the equivalent of refusing to consider use. Arguably, an analysis of "use" [I]should[/I] already bring in the rest of the world. But there does seem to be a truncated definition of "use" employed by some of Wittgenstein's intellectual descendents. This would be the equivalent of trying to understand a chess tournament or a chess institution while refusing to ever look at anything [I]but[/I] the board, including the players themselves, i.e. totalizing attempts to reduce meaning to "rules," ignoring the question of how and why rules are created or evolve.
Now, the "examination of the queen," might actually have a role in the explanation of language. Here we might substitute the queen for "the human sensory system, psychology, neuronal structures/signaling, etc." That is, the properties of our "pieces," will tend to explain part of how language emerges and has the structure it does. But you can't focus [I]just[/I] on this. This is what I was talking about before when I said it would be strange if information theory didn't shed [I]some[/I] light on language, or human communication in general, but it also doesn't seem like it could possibly adequately explain everything. Same for semiotic principles adequately explaining the particularly of language.
Pretty much. From what I recall reading about it, the move to make the single canonical rule set was attempted a few times, IIRC in the 1980s was the last time. There ends up being a bunch of little odds and ends that are hard to get people to agree upon, and so they eventually just decided to delegate some points to local institutions.
These won't tend to alter how chess is played except in unusual situations. For example, most draws are quite obvious because players just end up making the same 1-2 moves back and forth in a stalemate. However, in cases where both parties have a very small number of pieces left there can exist multiple paths for players to make moves that make victory for either impossible, even iftheoreticallythere are enough pieces left for at least one party to achieve checkmate if the opponent makes "just the right sort of blunders." Depending on how a draw is "forced" there can more time for one party to give up and allow checkmate to occur intentionally, or blunder into it through exhaustion, which does end up changing the outcome of the game.
At least in other games, in order to avoiding even implicit metagaming in group play, there can sometimes be requirements for draws too so that players don't accept draws easily due to both being sure to advance on a draw. I am not super familiar with tournament chess, but I know this is an issue in other games, where even if there isn't explicit metagaming the statistical likelihood of people accepting draws jumps if a draw allows both players to advance.
But this seems like an analogy that cuts against your standpoint on the merits of such inquiry. As you pointed out before, the rules of chess have evolved according to the preferences and purposes of entities that transcend the game itself. Not only were the rules formed according to the desires and intentions of a group of entities, but they are formed according to some telosaccording to what makes for an interesting, dynamic, and appropriately-paced game.
And, whereas we might not care to know the history of chess even if we enjoy the game, the rules you're talking about presumably dictate [I]everything[/I] about our lives: our tastes, our sciences, what we love and hate, the nature of Goodness and Beauty, and our ability to know the world. It would be bizarre to be indifferent to the principles, telos, or conscious preferences shaping such rules. If chess is the model here, then it is in fact quite possible to know how the telos of the game affects the rules.
This is sort of what I was getting at in the thread on bugs in video games. Rules are determined and evolve according to a telos intrinsic to the games themselves (and, even if the telos of natural entities is denied, that there is telos related to artifacts and games seems obvious). To a certain extent, this makes games self-determining, in that not everything about their evolution transcends/lies extrinsic to them.
On the earlier topic of uses of "is:"
Eriugena has five discrete modes of the existential "is." The analogies entis would seem to suppose at least two. I am not sure how these would be formalized without some convincing formalization of analogy and dialectical.
Eriugena's fourth mode of being, the existence of free, self-determining persons versus unfree, unredeemed humanity (which is simply just a bundle of external causes) is a particularly interesting one because it would seem to potentially denote a continuum for existence. We might question the merits of Eriugena's particular distinction here, but there is a very long tradition in philosophy of thinking of existence in vertical terms, as a continuum of "more/less real." It's an issue not completely unlike the "exist vs subsist" distinction, or debates on "possible worlds," that has played a larger role in analytic philosophy, but also quite different in a number of ways.
Never seen one. I vaguely recall learning about it as a way to think of what happens when you "undo" universal instantiation to get the universal quantifier back in a natural deduction proof. But it crops up much more, without caring about the order of the underlying logic, in maths proofs. You end up saying "let x be a (blah blah)", at the start of a proof, then "every x is a (blah blah)" at the end, of many. But you do so in natural language. So you don't care about the underlying formal logic.
EG you'll write it the same in the Cauchy sequence proof here and in the proof that at least one solution of (x+1)(x-1)=0 is less than 0... Even if the first result needs an underlying second order logic and the second just needs first order. You write it all the same.
I think the formalisations are thus red herrings in the discussion regarding quantifier variance. Since if even mathematical reasoning has both ambiguity and commonality regarding the underlying logic and its quantifier introduction rules, why would we expect logic to behave as more than a prop, crutch or model of quantification in natural language? Never mind ontology!
Well, sure, and chess is notorious for this. But there is no game the rules of which can compel players to try to win.
Chess competitions also produce the opposite problem: it is an established fact that white begins the game with a slight advantage, but because of tournament or match standing a player with the black pieces might "have to" play for a win, and so take risks he or she generally wouldn't.
Even the existence of the rating system forces higher-rated players to take risks against lower-rated players, because a draw will cost them points.
All of that is external to chess itself, the play of which is perfectly settled, and has been for a long time.
What else do you have in mind in terms of explanation?
Edit: To clarify - in terms of other explanations that cannot be explained by "the human sensory system, psychology, neuronal structures/signaling, etc."
Right, and that is why I think Sider's analysis is a great deal more incisive than Finn and Bueno's. For example, here is his shorter version of explaining what quantifier variance is:
Quoting Sider, Ontological Realism, p. 11
The article can be found here.
The last few pages of the article are worth a read.
After thinking on it, it seems not to be a possibility.
Quoting fdrake
Indeed, since Universal Generalisation is taken as granted in first order logic. The formalisation is trivial.
Quoting fdrake
Formal logic can serve to clarify usage in natural languages. The primary case being how first order logic sets out and separates the three uses of "is" - predication, quantification and equivalence.
I still do not think that a sufficient case had been made for quantifier variance. We could not have two languages that talk about the same thing but which differ only in the way they introduce quantification. Generalising that, we could not have two languages that vary only in how they quantify, without their also varying in their domain.
The metaphysical notion (@Count Timothy von Icarus) grounding this is that logic can have no ontological implications. Logic does not tell us how the world is. I suspect you will agree with this.
:up: I totally agree on that front. Although the phrasing does get at the suitability of chess as an analogy for mathematics and language, brought up earlier ITT. What is external to systems is often the very point in question, right? Are the players and their reasons for playing or for creating/changing the rules external to what chess is?
If we say that the bishop is only intelligible in terms of the other pieces and the rules of chess, or that words are only intelligible in terms of other words and the rules of a language, then it seems like the same thing should apply at a higher levels. That is, chess should only be intelligible in terms of its role in human culture, and language should only be intelligible in terms of its role in the world at large.
Generally though, the analogy is not always used like this. Chess pieces are said to only be intelligible in terms of the other pieces, (the formalist mantra: "a thing is what it does") but chess itself sits off alone in analytical space as a self-contained entity. Within the actual playing of these sorts of games, strategies come and go. People will talk about how "the game has changed," due to the use of data analytics, computers, etc. But is this change solely external? And if it is, how does this flow with the intuition that pieces, words, etc. are ultimately only intelligible in terms of their context?
I think the lens for looking at this probably depends on your questions. If your goal is an analysis of rules and games, it makes sense to think of them as discrete entities. If the question is something more like "how do words get their meanings and what is the relationship here to universals?" or "why do we do math and why is it useful?" I don't think the rules can be the limit of inquiry for exactly the same reason that you cannot explain the bishop without reference to all the rules.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Great points. :up:
Yes, it does.
An adequate explanation of "what quantifier variance is" would show the difference between at least two forms of quantifier. The quote says that there are two differing forms of quantifier, but does not say how they differ.
Folk hereabouts can verify this for themselves.
Whether there is a better explanation elsewhere in the text remains undecided.
Elsewhere:
DKL includes tables in his domain. PVI does not. Both make use of the very same rule for quantifier introduction.
No case has been presented for a variance in the quantifier introduction rules, as opposed to a variance in the domain.
No, this is completely wrong. Quantifier variance is a kind of insuperable second-order equivocation. Sider does not need to explicate two concrete usages of quantifiers to set out quantifier variance, any more than someone would need to explicate two equivocal terms in order to set out the meaning of equivocation. You are saying, "Sider didn't give an example of quantifier variance, therefore he didn't define quantifier variance." You're like the anti-Socrates, who receives a definition and then says that because it wasn't an example, therefore it wasn't a definition.
Quoting Banno
Mmk, Banno.
D says that this is a table; P says that this is not a table. D can introduce a quantifier so: This is a table, therefore there are tables; tables exist. P introduces a quantifier thus: For any item you choose, it is not a table, therefore there are no tables, tables do not exist.
They can agree that the argument the other presents is valid, but disagree as to the premise, and so as to the conclusion.
Notice that they are both using natural deduction of the first order; they are using the very same logic.
Hence calling their difference a quantifier variance is misleading. They are taking the same logic and applying it to a different range of things.
This thread seems to have run its course.
I'm not one of the people making these analogies, but I don't see any harm in distinguishing "how to play chess" from "why to play chess" or even from "why to play this game of chess this way." I can belabor the point if you'd like.
In fact, here's a little belaboring: consider Grice's distinction between what a sentence (literally) means and what someone means by uttering that sentence on a particular occasion. Now consider a question like "Why did you move the bishop to b5?" Would you answer "Because bishops move diagonally"? No you would not; you'd explain something about the position and why you thought Bb5 was a good move. (Ryle talks about this, the difference between your moves being in accord with the rules and your moves being determined by the rules.) ---- But also, a beginner might ask, "Why didn't you take his knight with your rook?" And you might point out that a pawn is in the way, and rooks can't jump.
Now consider the different sorts of questions you might ask about what someone said, or the different sorts of explanations you might have to give in different circumstances. Some of them, particularly with children, are very much on the "how to play" level, some on the "how to play well" level, and others are past that, and amount to actually playing -- but again, only in accord with the sort of rules you yourself were taught as a child. (Or not. Rules change. And sometimes you help change them.)
Your move.
Quoting fdrake
Conceptual relativism on stilts. Which honestly I'm not absolutely against (unlike both @Banno and @Leontiskos) but I'm unsympathetic with the whole approach and nothing I've read was at all persuasive.
This is literally the first objection that Sider dispatches on page 11 after giving the summarized form of QV, but I already told you this <here>.
That's fair.
I recently watched a lecture on evolutionary neuroscience, which included a striking slide at 7:13 defining teleology as 'the explanation of phenomena in terms of the purpose they serve rather than the cause by which they arise.' I found this definition marvelously succinct.
In the context of your analogy, distinguishing between "how to play chess" and "why play it?" is indeed relevant, albeit obliquely, to the broader issue of quantifier variability. The question of "how to play" presupposes the existence of the game. In a culture unfamiliar with chess, the question of "why play it?" must be addressed first, if only to find someone else to play with. Chess is an artificially constrained experience with a definite aimwinning. However, real philosophical questions are not so constrained.
In chess, the existential quantifier is tied to the game's rules and objectives, which provides an implicit purpose. In real life, existence encompasses a broader and more varied range of possibilities and outcomes, without the clear constraints of a game, and with the existence of a purpose being harder to discern.
Thus, using chess as an analogy for existential questions might constrain our understanding in ways that don't necessarily apply to real life. This is the sense in which chess is a poor analogy for the question of different kinds of existence, as I understand 'quantifier variability'.
Am I getting it?
However, the idea that there are different "types" of existence (e.g. exist vs subsist, actualism, etc.) is often presented as part of a single comprehensive theory, one ostensibly using a single language and focusing on a single domain (normally "everything") For example, when Eriugena discusses his five modes of being, he clearly is intending one domain and not using "different languages," despite lines to the effect of "to say man exists is to say logoi do not exist (in the way that man 'exists')."We could consider here Meinong, Parsons, etc.
But it hardly seems in line with charity to presuppose that the positing of these distinctions in "ways of existing" (or levels/degrees of "reality") is always just a confusion of language. This is basically saying that these philosophers are:
A. Wrong and certainly not making real distinctions about how things are in the absolute sense they seem to be claiming.
B. Confused and obviously either varying their language or domain. This is essentially assuming that they [I]must[/I] be making a mistake regardless of what their argument/theory looks like.
B in particular is why I think the linguistic turn often leads to a failure of the principle of charity. To simply assume that a whole swath of discussions in philosophy must only arise from philosophers' "confusion," rather than real problems is not charitable. At its worst it's question begging. For example, to say that Przywara must be switching languages or domains with the analogia seems to be saying he is wrong in an important way, or even moreso, just refusing to take his thought the way it is intended.
Second, multiple uses of "exists" or distinctions of "more/less real," do not seem to be to entail any sort of relativism or anti-realism. It is rather Hirsch's move to "resolve" disputes by reducing them to language that threatens this.
This definition, at least taken in isolation, seems to avoid the issues above to some degree. "...either because there is no such notion of carving at the joints that applies to candidate meanings, or because there is such a notion and C is maximal with respect to it." It is more the bolded part that leads towards relativism, not different uses of "exists/subsists/etc."
Well for one, an explanation of the words "dog" or "swimming," seems like it should require reference to dogs and water respectively, rather than just neurons. Explanations that draw a line around the brain seem to forget that brains do not work in isolation and do not produce consciousness in isolation. A constant exchange of information and causation across the boundaries of the human body is required to maintain consciousness. Place a human body in most of the environments that exist in the universe, on the surface of a star, in the void of space, in the deep sea, in a room filled with nitrous oxide, etc. and consciousness is not going to be produced. Context matters then for explaining how minds emerge (and minds must emerge for language). Any process of perception requires relations between the objects of perception, the observer, and the enviornment, and you can't seem to have language without first having perception.
:up: Yup, this is sort of what I was thinking about with my last paragraph there.
This image is helpful, but one should bear in mind that the outer circle in the classical tradition really should be infinite, without border, we just can't draw it this way.
The idea of different sorts of being, of analogy being the only way to tie them together is sort of like this: to be for finite being is to be [I]contained[/I] within the inner circle. Infinite being is [I]in[/I] the inner circle, but it isn't contained in it, it transcends it. Everything is part of the outer circle in some sense. The outer circle is generally the domain under consideration in metaphysics.
This is, in some ways, an inadequate image. It misses the distinction that subsistent relations only exist in God (Exodus 3:14).
So, are we simply switching to domain when we discuss different types of being? I don't think so. If the domain under discussion is the inner circle then infinite being is included but also transcends the domain. If the domain is the outer circle, then entities in the inner circle stand in a different relation to the whole, hence the "different sort of existence" (and bear in mind here that the ontology generally employed here is inherently relational.
The "is" of predication, identity, and existence are not separated out in the same way in this tradition. In part, this is because they were seen as deeply related. Given the view that things just [I]are[/I] their properties (which are relational), a not unpopular view in contemporary metaphysics, the the sum total of what can be predicated of a thing [I]is[/I] its identity, or at least something very close to it. Consider Leibniz Law: ?F(Fx ? Fy) ? x=y
Likewise, if existence (or actuality) is simply another predicate, then the "is of existence" is deeply tied to the "is of predication" which in turn is deeply related to the "is of identity." Finite existence then is of a different type in that finite things can be defined in terms of all other things, and indeed their properties and identity are bound up in this relationality. They are also mereologically distinct due to the principle of divine simplicity (a major motivator here).
This doesn't quite capture the idea of God as "nothing through excellence," (nihil per excellentiam) versus the "nothing of privation," (nihil per privationem), which is also key to the distinction. I do think this is a distinction in existence that flows from the ontology itself though
and cannot be reduced to differences in language.
In such a view, there is no Porphyryean tree that has infinite and finite being alongside each other. The image might mislead on this front. God is being itself whereas finite being has being through participation in infinite being. For God alone, existence and essence are the same.
That's right, just as it is question-begging to assume that the different uses of "to be" are compartmentally distinct.
This is what Sider refers to as a "hostile translation" on page 14. It is interpreting or translating someone's utterance in a way that they themselves reject.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Sure, but this is not quantifier variance, or even quantifier equivocation. One could represent the five modes with predicates, or else with alternative quantifiers.
The debates about univocity of being can apply between parties or within the thought of a single party, but quantifier variance occurs between two parties using two different notions of quantification. If the two parties have five different sub-quantifiers, and they agree on all of them, then quantifier variance is not occurring. ...All of this is also reminiscent of the duplex veritas debates of the Middle Ages.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I think that distinction that Sider makes is important, and I see what you are saying. What I would say is that the bolded part leads to a more thoroughgoing conceptual relativism, but the latter option is still a form of conceptual relativism. It's just that in the latter case both candidate meanings do a good job, and an equally good job, of carving at the joints. This latter form, when applied to logic, represents Banno's logical pluralism.
---
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Right. I'm glad you saw this on your own.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Right. See the paper I linked earlier, "Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein on Self and Object," for an argument that Fregian logic is unable to capture ontological dynamism.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
It should perhaps be noted that analogical predication (or also analogical being) cannot be captured by anything like a Venn diagram. To say that two kinds of being are equivocal is to separate them, and to say that two kinds of being are univocal is to collapse them into one. Analogy is the strange mean. I said more on this earlier in the thread.
I've changed my mind a bit, and now no longer deem this debate a waste of time. I also better see why @J is interested in this topic. I wish I had looked at Sider's paper earlier.
"Quantifier variance" is the logical instantiation of the pluralism that the West struggles with culturally, religiously, morally, et al. The "principle of charity" is the newest version of the Enlightenment's doctrine of optimism, "Stop fighting wars over religion. The disputes probably aren't that important." The aversion to disagreement is a child of the aversion to wars, and "charity" is just a mask for "peace." All of this has simply been funneled down into the field of logic. Or so I say.
So I agree that the ideas are dumb, but the motivations are intelligible and they are not going away anytime soon. If logic can overcome "relativism on stilts" then all the better, but I obviously prefer Sider's more robust approach to Finn and Bueno's (or Banno's) flatfooted approach. I wouldn't say that logic is the last line of defense, but if we can't even avoid relativism when it comes to logic then we're probably too far gone.
:up: yeah, you're right. I wrote that during a bout of insomnia. My thinking was, if you assume QV, then when people who embrace those sorts of systems have disagreements, in a way, QV seems to assume that they are either wrong in their metaphysics or else not saying what they are saying. So the original example I thought of was comparing something like the classical Christian tradition to Shankara. In ways, the conception of infinite being is similar, but Shankara denies the existence of finite being, it being entirely mayaillusion. If QV is maintained by a third party, it seems like they can't take either of these claims in the way they are intended, which doesn't seem charitable.
I had a similar discussion with Joshs re truth being true withing a given metaphysics versus being true universally. It seems to me that if you tell a lot of people, "yes, what you're saying is true...but only in your context," you're actually telling them that what they think is false, because they don't think the truth is context dependent in this way.
I guess my intuition, which might very well be wrong, was that if they do an equally good job then there would be an morphism between them, and so it's pluralism of a limited typeperhaps the way some models for computation end up equivalent.
Yes, I agree with all of this. Earlier I said something similar:
Quoting Leontiskos
As above, I think what is at stake is peace, not charity. The way that "charity" gets misused in these ways is a pet peeve of mine. Of justice, faith, and charity, only one is blind, not all three. :razz:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Right. It is to ignore the fact that the person was not intending to make a context-dependent truth claim. This relates to the edit I made to my last post to you regarding Sider's "hostile translations." Duplex veritas arose because there were multiple conflicting sources of truth (e.g. theology, philosophy, science, etc.). It arises in our culture for the same reason, except the conflicting sources are individuals, for individuals have now been made to be sources of truth in their own right. "To each their own truth."
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
This seems likely, and perhaps in this case the "principle of charity" makes more sense (because translation is legitimately possible). Still, if translation is possible then it could be determinedeven by the parties themselvesthat the two parties are saying the same thing without resorting to a "principle of charity."
Reading the last few posts, I wonder what folk think the Principle of Charity is.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I'm not quite against conceptual relativism. You might recall my fascination with Midgley, who emphasises the difference between various conversations, ways of speaking, in her essays - her evisceration of the scientism of Dawkins, her defence of personal identity and free will and so on. I pointed to one form of relativism earlier in this thread, where a bowl of berries contains strawberries and blackberries at breakfast, but bananas and grapes in the botany class.
Language is extraordinarily flexible. With some care we can trace paths and find patterns. But we can also make sense of A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs. "We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases", as Davidson shows.
Language is not algorithmic, nor will it ever be complete. There cannot be a "maximal quantifier", a language that talks about everything, without sacrificing consistency. But this is not a problem since we can differentiate between breakfast and botany. We avoid the inanity of insisting that one use of "berries" is the correct use.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Th thread should have finished there. Logic does not have ontological implications.
But here we are.
I would say it is generally taking arguments in the strongest, most compelling sense possible. However, if one starts to think that the most compelling sense of the arguments is to take them as fictions or games, when they are clearly not intended to be, it seems to go off the rails, no longer fulfilling its intended function. Foisting pluralism onto anti-pluralist positions sort of ignores what the non-pluralist is actually saying.
This is why I don't think Davidson's formulation is at all appropriate without plenty of caveats. Taken to an extreme, you can "maximize agreement," by simply taking everyone you disagree with as presenting artistic fictions.
Hmm, I don't think anyone could create any kind of explanations for language or the use of words without including what words are referring to or connected to - that wouldn't make sense! I don't think many people are that reductive. Similar I think can be said for other questions you talk about like the why and how word use is created. I think word use is more or less about the contexts that surround the utterance and reception of words (maybe counterfactually), whether you want to talk about context in terms of experiences or the role of the brain and physical interactions with external stuff (at least in principle). I think the questions of why and how is just a matter of expanding these contexts, the chains of causes.
I get the impression you won't disagree with what I say and maybe you have been just attacking this truncated version of use you briefly mentioned which is not intuitive to me.
Consider;
Would it be more charitable to keep or remove the inconsistencies? On the account you gave, it would be best to remove the inconsistencies.
It's not always an argument that is being translated.
To be fair, is this obvious? I think for most "naturalists," there is going to be a path between "how the world is," and "what exists" and human logic. For those who embrace the computational theory of mind, which is still fairly dominant, parallel stepwise logical operations are what philosophy, human logic, language, and perception all emerge from. For those that buy into theories that explain physics in terms of computation, the universe is a sort of quantum computer.
And then for other schools the link is close too. For ontic structural realism, the world is a sort of mathematical object. For Hegelians, ontology is the objective logic. For much of the classical tradition, Logos is key to explaining "what there is."
For my part, I've always understood full deflation and anti-realism much more than any sort of split. I can see where these guys are coming from. I have never been able to fully wrap my mind around "splits" that involve naturalism with scientific realism on the one hand, but then full deflation on the other (i.e. truth as defined by games, or games as wholly intelligible in isolation from the world). To my mind at least, the scientific realism seems to suggest both an explication of the evolution of human logic and the idea that the formalizations of science really do "carve up the world at the joints."
But I do know a lot of naturalists still maintain a sort of Kantian dualism that allows for this sort of split
Well, IME, they certainly can be, but they tend to be reductive while embracing a different school of philosophy, where logic and language ultimately are reducible to particle physicseliminitive materialism and all.
Yeah, I think the insight that meaning comes from use is a stellar one. The issue is, like you said, truncation, what counts as "use." Maybe it's just the stuff I've read, but some of it seems very behaviorist, a sort of arch empiricism where subjective experience can't be part of explanations because it cannot be objectively observed. As another sort of example, from a guy I like on a lot of things, but who seems to have a truncated view of use there is Rorty. I don't have any qualms with his attack on certain notions objectivity, but rather the claim that it is impossible to ever see how language "hooks on to the world," because of how it is bound up in social practice. Sellars on how facts are bound up in language might be another one.
It is obviously false. As already noted, if logic had no ontological implications then there could be no historical progression in logic vis-a-vis ontology, there could be no better or worse logics vis-a-vis ontology, and Wittgenstein's logic could not have excluded dynamism from his ontology, <which it did>.
Well, yes. First order predicate calculus does not render ontological conclusions.
Be charitable here.
Quoting Leontiskos
:grin:
Seems we are getting to the real point of disagreement.
Quoting Leontiskos
I've posted this before but here it is again:
There's a touching passage in Tarski's little Introduction to Logic that I'll quote in full here:
That's Tarski writing from Harvard in 1940, having fled Poland before the German invasion.
Does any one else see this as a bad argument? @Count Timothy von Icarus? @Srap Tasmaner?
If logic does not have ontological implications, then there are no better or worse logics regarding ontology.
But it remains that there may be better or worse uses of logic in ontological arguments.
Or is there a more charitable way to read this than as a transcendental argument with a false conclusion?
See 's post.
For my money, so-called "principles of charity" are always destructive of intellectual honesty, even in the one or two sentences where they appear in Aquinas. At best they fail the test of Occam's Razor, and are superfluous.
Consider the popular "steelman" interpretation. Is it good to steelman someone's argument when you are dialoguing with them? No, actually. You should try to interpret them accurately, neither engaging in "strawman" or "steelman." One does not need to appeal to "charity" to preclude advantageous misrepresentation.
Now, if one is not in a dialogue context but is instead reading an unfamiliar author, then I would say that one should give them the benefit of the doubt, ceteris paribus. This is a kind of charity, but I would say that it is more accurately a kind of maximization of the philosophical activity. If you are exploring ideas, then you should desire to explore the strongest ideas and arguments, for the sake of this activity.
I would say that charity pertains to the practical realm, and it influences speculative reason only indirectly, through the practical reason. For the understanding of the speculative reason, it is a non-starter.
Very interesting. Thanks for sharing. :up:
I think Tarski is right that logic pulls more weight than it appears to at first glance, and it is for this reason that I think varieties of logical pluralism are especially problematic.
I'm trying, lol, maybe I missed the point. Well, you can see the direction I was thinking in anyhow.
I don't see it that way. For an example of my thinking on this, some Hindu philosophy seems to embrace
the excluded middle. I don't think it would be charitable to try to iron this out in translation, because it wouldn't be taking the ideas seriously. I guess in some cases it seems more charitable to just say, "I hear you but I think you're wrong."
Quoting Banno
I think this is a good example of the standard sort of strawman that you engage in. You took "vis-a-vis ontology" and replaced it with "regarding ontology," and then pretended that I was referring to ontological arguments like Anselm's. The context about Wittgenstein should have been enough to preclude such a strawman, for obviously I have not claimed that Wittgenstein gave a bad "ontological argument." But even if it wasn't, the context of this debate that has already taken place earlier in the thread is obviously about the topic you raised: ontological implications of different logics, not ontological conclusions arrived at from pure logic.
This is bad-faith argumentation, and it's no secret you are engaged in it all the time.
(I suppose it is worth pointing out here that those who struggle with intellectual vices could use a "principle of charity" as a medicine, whether that vice stems from old age, pride, or other such things. Again, this is a practical consideration, but on point.)
You'd know. I'll leave you to it then.
Edit: "vis-a-vis" and "regarding" are not so dissimilar. Nor does anything in what I have said reference Anselm or the other ontological arguments. Leontiskos is not responding to what I said.
These are examples of the sort of "bad faith" that Leontiskos has displayed both here and in other threads, where he has relied on perfidious reinterpretation.
The mention of age is simply puerile.
The thread has gone in other directions. Enjoy.
It's high time you started taking responsibility for what you say.
Well. Several things going on here.
It's an interesting point, but how broadly it applies isn't clear.
I'm desperately trying not to become an expert on QV, but I want to start by pointing out something a little odd about Hirsch's formulation of charity that I posted before:
Quoting Hirsch & Warren
Surely "true" here is short for "true in L, under I", but I find it odd they didn't just say that, since all the model-theoretic machinery seems ready to hand.
So that's caveat number 1 to your point: truth is always truth in a language, under a particular interpretation. It doesn't even make sense -- heh, in this theoretical context -- to say otherwise, to say "just plain true, dammit!"
Caveat number 2: it's widely understood that even statements of fact -- observations and such -- in the context of science are relative to a given theoretical framework. There's no pure non-theory-laden observation to be had, and no one pretends otherwise; rather, it's the theory that enables the observations to be made at all. (More Kant, etc. And absolutely every philosopher of science.)
Caveat number 3: Goodman, in Ways of Worldmaking, makes the point that reduction is essentially a myth in science, and if that's so, he can claim for his relativism that rather than it being anti-science, it empowers him to take each science at "full force", to endorse the work of biologists and chemists, for instance, without treating them as second-class citizens whose science isn't quite as true as physics. That's appealing.
Caveat number 4: one of your interlocutors is claiming to have the regular old absolute truth, not truth relative to anything, and it's only because of that claim that contextualizing their substantive claim is either necessary (for the listening relativist) or offensive (to them making the claim).
Well, what do you intend to do about that? Goodman's line is to say that their being right -- assuming they are right -- doesn't preclude there being other perspectives that are also right. (A picture doesn't invalidate a verbal description of the same scene -- just different versions, doing different things.)
I think you want to give them the respect of telling them they're wrong when you think they are, and that's fine. Pluralism doesn't have to mean everyone's always right. It just means understanding something about how you're right, and that there may be other ways to be right. (Note that I am not here addressing charity and Hirsch's use of it.)
In short, you can separate their claim into two: the substantive claim, and an additional claim that all other versions are wrong. [hide="*"](I mean, the latter is not even true in basic arithmetic, because of bases. Yes, you can claim that "10" is ambiguous, and with the base specified means one thing. Well, yeah. Keep going.)[/hide] You can take both claims quite seriously, accepting one and denying the other. If they want to fight about it, you're not fighting about the substantive claim, but about their claimed monopoly on the truth, which you have taken just as seriously and denied.
That's enough "How To Be a Relativist."
I am reluctantly going to take a stab at a real paper by Hirsch. I'll get back to y'all on his particular take on charity.
It seems to me that this is already duplex veritas; it is already a premise of quantifier variance. Hence it is part of the controversy, and someone like Sider (and me!) would already disagree with you here. Sider's (really Aristotle's) notion of "carving reality at the joints" is presupposing contextless truth, as does the idea of "ontological structure." Sider partitions out that argument and distinguishes the variety of QV that denies this notion of carving from the variety of QV that does not deny itand his distinction is what sparked some of @Count Timothy von Icarus' musings in the first placebut this is surely one of the very things that is at stake, and is not a common presupposition.
Edit: But I think the question here needs to be refined. It is the question about whether language can speak about something beyond itself:
Quoting Peter L. P. Simpson, A Response to Edge
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Along the same lines of what @Count Timothy von Icarus has already alluded to, to say that some are equally right (and others could be wrong) would seem to imply that there is a standard of rightness that measures both equally-right views simultaneously. So if I say that a claim made in context X and a claim made in context Y are both equally right, then I have already implicitly appealed to a super-context that is capable of measuring both contexts, X and Y.
I guess I had that coming, but it puts me in an awkward position.
I'm already on record, in this very thread, dismissing much of contemporary mainstream Anglo-American philosophy. Easy enough for me, dilettante that I am, but I've given my reasons: science stumbles merrily ahead, leaving the philosophers to argue amongst themselves. If there is something left for philosophy to do, I haven't been able to figure out what that is, and god knows I've tried. (There are people here, @Joshs and @180 Proof and god help me @apokrisis come to mind, who have a program philosophy plays a vital part in. I envy them their conviction, but I'm just a guy who thinks about stuff.)
But I can still play at philosophy, and it's an old habit. Even though the content of philosophy mostly leaves me cold now, I still enjoy the practice of philosophy, the challenge of understanding and evaluating arguments, all that.
So I could do that here, and we could play at arguing about the nature of truth, but my heart's not in it. I don't have a horse in this race; I'm just a guy who's spent an unhealthy amount of time around the track.
I could argue against "contextless truth" and "carving nature at the joints" but I wouldn't be arguing for an alternative philosophical position. And I'd spend a lot of time arguing against misunderstanding positions I don't even hold, just out of scrupulousness I guess. Trying to think well is about as much of a program as I have.
TL;DR. Bait not taken. If you want to opine on Absolute Truth, I won't get in your way.
Lol, okay.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Well, you've already argued against contextless truth, so I don't know what to make of this. I am the one who took your bait, and now it seems that you were engaged in "catch and release." :grin:
I would make the point with Plato that what you have said already commits you to contextless truth. If that is right, then it's not some abstruse academic argument, but rather an entailment of your own thought that hasn't been seen through to the end (unless you were stating something you do not believe for the sake of argument, to bolster QV). There is nothing less programmatic than the simple idea that truth exists and can be known. That's the presupposition for any thought and any program, good or bad. And this isn't off-topic or far away. It is the very topic of the OP. Is it the very thing Sider is arguing for. In a nutshell: if truth exists then quantifier variance and logical pluralism don't.
It might be off the track, but do you enjoy its applications in other disciplines? I'm reading a Deleuze inspired social science book on addiction at the minute.
Did I? Are you sure?
Quoting Leontiskos
There's no need to be insulting.
Quoting Leontiskos
I mean, it's tempting just to let that stand without commentary.
Are you standing up for common sense here, Leontiskos? Against what? Against me? Against a damnable relativism? Has common sense ever needed defending against philosophers?
What common sense usually needs defending against is science. I just heard on the radio an interview with a UCLA anthropoligist who's spent time along the migration trails from Central America to the US. He said his new book was intended just to add some nuance to the public conversation about migration, because nothing in life is black and white, and smugglers aren't just good or bad.
Which way do you want to go here? If this guy is good at his job, and it sounded to me like he is, then we might agree to say he is pursuing the truth, and is in a position to tell us truths we were unaware of. Fine.
But does that mean the statement "Smugglers are bad" must be true or false? Why would it? And what do we say about Jason De León's book? That it's the truth? The whole truth and nothing but the truth? A version of the truth? A part of the truth? But a partial truth can be misleading, so the understanding of truth is not monotonic even if the acquisition of truth is. How do we judge his work? None of us saw what he saw; we can't go back in time and skulk behind a tree to see if his reporting is accurate. We could interview his informants, if we could find them, but even the people that were there might not have noticed something that he did, and anyway some of them are dead now.
What does common sense say here? What does the political or moral philosopher say about human smuggling? What is the truth and how do you propose to get it?
If De León is right then "Smugglers are just bad" is false and "Smugglers aren't just good or bad" is true. That's what he's doing, he's arguing for a truth.
Unless I'm mistaken, your post seems to be a roundabout way of arguing that truth doesn't exist or isn't knowable. I know philosophers have "seen it all," and arguments about performative contradiction now come across as passé. What I would say is that they might be age-old, but the are also, well, true.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I would say that the commitment to truth is behind us, not in front of us. We can churn up the water and get it as muddy as we like, but we have presupposed truth the whole while. And if there is a question that is too complex to answer, then it is to that extent not truth-apt. But other questions surely are.
Desiring-machines run amok?
What I most enjoy, honestly, is everyday reasoning. I eavesdrop a lot -- the rednecks across the street talking about Vietnam, the guy lecturing his buddy on the phone about friendship, etc. One of my first posts at the new site was about my youngest son and I playing catch and, when I sailed one over his head, by way of excusing me, he said, "If I were taller I could have caught it." That strikes as obviously true, but I immediately thought, "But if you were taller, you wouldn't be Michael." What to do, what to do.
My indolent studies over the years (philosophy, cognitive science, evolutionary biology, statistics, linguistics, economics, anthropology, sociology, blah blah blah) have all been guided by trying to understand how people make sense of things, and in particular how they share the sense they've made with each other. Why do you believe what you do? Do you know? Can you know? When people demand or give reasons for beliefs, how does that work, and why do they do it the way they do?
So rather than applied philosophy, I'm interested in what you might call philosophy found in the wild.
Vaguely on topic, I argued somewhere a long time ago, that ontology is peculiar in this respect. People -- by which I mean, you know, people -- talk and argue about how to live, about how government should work, about how they know what they claim to know, about what makes a book or a movie or a piece of music good or bad, about what the right thing to do is in all kinds of situations. You can see the sort of raw material for whole branches of philosophy just laying around in the street. Except for ontology. The only everyday arguments about ontology I could come up with are things like Bigfoot and other cryptids, the Bermuda Triangle, today I might add the secret adrenochrome-sipping cabal of satanist liberals, and usual troubles over Sherlock Holmes and the sense in which Santa Claus and unicorns "aren't real." Philosophers argue about whether there are chairs or numbers or natural kinds, but people don't. (Scientists are likely to say, there are, kinda, for some of those, but not in the way you think, and then we all just need to deal with that.) But there is quite definitely no great body of everyday discussion of whether certain kinds of things exist, nothing anywhere approaching the discussions of right & wrong, of politics, of aesthetics, even of whether you have enough evidence to conclude that your boyfriend is cheating on you. (Austin was fond of reading legal opinions, and thought philosophers were ignoring a great body of practical reasoning.) Ontology, as we here think of it, is a game that only philosophers play. I've seen it argued that physicists, some of them, are now doing metaphysics, and if so, good for them.
Aye. The body without organs concept is pretty natural there. Ironically it is not talking much about chemicals and demographic risk factors for addiction.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I think that's broadly true. Though I do think how people relate the concepts and things in their world counts as an examinable ontology. In that respect, "out in the wild" it isn't sharply distinguished from how people think of institutions, nature, their own bodies, culture and themselves. But it's definitely never thought about as its own thing, I agree with you there.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yes, and this is even avoided in my book group. Who enjoy analysing literature.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yes, broadly speaking these are also avoided in the activist circle I'm part of. Since most of the theory is irrelevant to tangible goals, and the tangible goals are clearly worth fighting for (eg taking a landlord to court for allowing raw sewage to pour into an immunocompromised person's kitchen for months on end).
This is interesting. On many forms of realism predication is an attribution of existence, and if this is right then all discussions involve existence claims (Sider basically defines quantifiers in relation to sentences and truth). Or as says, "how people relate concepts and things."
And there are also claims about primary substances, i.e. hypotheses. "It's cold in this building, therefore the furnace must be out" (i.e. there exists no fire in the furnace). "The crops are dry; there must be a lack of rain." "My car won't start; the (proximity) key must be somewhere else."
Philosophers and scientists often take hypothesis to the next level, where they construct mental entities that may or may not exist in the world, and then go about arguing over them. Then there are the table arguments. But I do wonder what percentage of philosophers in the history of the world spent appreciable time arguing whether tables exist.
I'm more inclined -- you'll be shocked to hear -- to say the opposite.
There is behavior, such as De León's, that we can recognize as "truth seeking". This project started, he relates, by accident. He had finished a project on migration and intended to move on to something else, but he took one last trip down to Mexico, where he spent some time talking to a bunch of young men hanging around the railroad tracks. He told them about his work, and they said, "Why didn't you talk to us?" They were all smugglers. So he took Herodotus's advice, and rather than just talk to them, which we can all see would be a useful step, he went to see for himself.
There is, I submit, no correlate to this, behavior we can recognize as "truth getting".
You're inclined to say there has to be a truth out there to seek, like it's just sitting there, to be found or overlooked or deliberately hidden. Unfortunately for you, "seeking" is an intensional verb, so as Quine patiently explained, just because you're looking for a spy, that doesn't mean there's a spy for you to find.
Of course, if I wanted to make that argument, it would only get me that maybe there's a spy and maybe there isn't, maybe truth exists and maybe it doesn't. I could say that, but what would I have achieved? And, more importantly, what would I say next? Shall we talk some more about the thing that maybe exists and maybe doesn't, which by definition we have no way to determine?
Instead, the behavior, where we started, is a rich territory, with lots to learn, and lots to say. There may or may not be a truth out there, but how people comport themselves toward it is endlessly fascinating.
(I was just yesterday going to look at Hobbes, but I got distracted by the introduction by "the late W. G. Pogson Smith", who must have been an old Oxford don. A couple choice moments:
Ah, they don't write like that anymore. And this:
Marvelous. No wonder, as the other introduction notes, the English Parliament "even claimed that the theories found in Leviathan were a likely cause of the Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666."
There's your enemy, the damnable atheist Hobbes. It's all his fault.)
Sigh. Look at what you quoted:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
People might talk about whether there's money in the bank or beer in the fridge, but they don't talk about whether money or banks or beer or refrigerators exist.
And even for particular cases, you're far more likely to find someone saying "It hasn't rained for a while" than someone who says "There is a lack of rain." What's a lack when it's at home? Always something going on out in the fields -- sometimes it's rain and sometimes it's lacks.
Quoting Leontiskos
Uh huh. What if there does but it's out?
Idling semantic quibbles aside, do you mean "academic philosophy" or "amateur philosophy" or "way of life philosophy"?
Consider this: these variations of philosophy each "do" different things with, at minimum, the same praxis: reflective inquiry problematizing aporias, or what we do not / cannot know or understand about what we think we know or what we misunderstand that reasons towards more probative questions we still do not know how to answer (i.e. philosophical truthes (?)). So, IMO, it does not make sense to apply the notion of "something left to do" to philosophy any more than it does to apply it to other interminable practices (which resemble J. Carse's "infinite games") like martial arts, public health & sanitation, natural sciences, history & politics, personal hygiene, logic & mathematics, fine arts, etc.
If you follow my reply a bit closer, I built up to what you were talking about and implied that the lesser forms are related to inquiries about "secondary substances." The distinction that must be made is between the facticity of something whose mode of existence is not in dispute (e.g. extraterrestrials), and the mode of existence of something like a table. The former is sometimes found in ordinary reasoning, and one could recast disputes over the latter as predication disputes (even though this move will in some cases fall into what Sider calls "hostile translation").
I do grant your point that ontological disputes of the latter kind are more common in philosophy than in everyday speech, but I am wondering if this has more to do with recent philosophy than historical philosophy, at least after the presocratics.
(Sorry, I realize I am posting a bit too fast. I will try to rectify that.)
I'll have to check that out. It seems to me that the track record for reduction is quite weak, and that the empirical support for it is not particularly strong. It's a bit bizarre that it still has the status of "assumed true until convincingly proven otherwise," (especially since what would constitute such proof seems hard to imagine, you can always posit smaller building blocks). I think this is just from inertia and that fact that there are multiple ideas competing to replace it, not just one replacement paradigm.
In particular, I think the arguments in Jaegwon Kim's monographs are air tight (as do a lot of people). If superveniance physicalism works the way it is normally posited, then we have causal closure (and thus epiphenomenalism) but we also absolutely cannot have strong emergence. That brings us to a weird place where:
A. There can be no emergence vis-á-vis first person subjective experience so we seem stuck with panpsychism, denying we exist, occasionalism, etc.; and
B. Natural selection can never select on "what experience is like," because experience never affects behavior (causal closure), which both seems implausible due to how good evolutionary arguments are for "why what feels good feels good" (and the inverse), and causes a host of profound epistemic issues (highlighted by Plantinga and David Hoffman).
Kim points out that this only works for substance metaphysics (i.e. objects properties inhere in their constituents), and IMO this is just another piece of evidence against that sort of thinking (suggesting relational metaphysics à la scholasticism or process metaphysics).
But this is all veering off topic.
Well here, I think the metaphysics of truth come into play. I can see many great arguments for types of relativism. Plenty of thinkers who have a strong conception of an absolute morality still allow for cultural relativity. You can have "the Good," and still have it filtered through social context such that "being a good priest," differs from "being a good soldier," which differs from "being a good king." And culture can obviously affect how things are best explained.
Plus, you can make a case for pragmatic relativism, which addresses caveat 3. I don't think you have to default on the possibility of a language(s) that carve the world at the joints to say "we clearly don't have that, and so different languages are more appropriate for different contexts." After all, the absolute is not reality with appearances removed, but reality + [I]all[/I] appearances.
So I agree with you. I don't see anything wrong with pragmatic cases for pluralism, and they don't need to entail that "everyone is always right." But I would not support the notion that "being right," simply has to do with game rules. For one, you can't ever get to an explanation for why games have the rules they do if you don't look outside of them.
Wouldn't discussions of God fall into this category? That seems like a question of existence that is the organizing principle around which a great many people base their entire lives, and one with huge social and political implications.
The existence of "objective" moral standards would be another one that seems to be apparent in everyday life, often taking center stage. The same goes for the "meaning" and "purpose" of human life or humanity's telos.
The status of universals and numbers doesn't play nearly the same role that the aforementioned do, but people definetly seem interested in it. These creep into politics when we talk about education policy vis-á-vis mathematics. There are similar questions that have become quite politically relevant, i.e., "is gender or sex real?" or "is race real?"
And then you have the adoption of, at the very least, the post-modern lexicon by modern political movements. These days everything is about "deconstructing narratives," and there is "living your own truth," etc. The famous Giuliani retort: "truth isn't truth," appeals to "various ways of knowing," etc. suggest to me that pluralism is definitely relevant outside the context of the academy. I don't think this should be surprising, while most people in Scholasticism's heyday knew little of it, it had a major impact on the Church, education, and devotional life. Likewise, given the role "scientism" has as the dominant world view, it can't help but shape everyday experiences.
The idea of truth sitting "out there," also ends up presupposing some things if the view is that it lies outside us, existing "in-itself," waiting to be uncovered. In a mindless world, it seems to me that the truth/falsity distinction could have no content. Truth cannot be equivalent with being, since we can say truth things about what is not, e.g., "there is no planet between Earth and Mars." This is why Aquinas has truth inheritly bound up with a knower; "everything is known in the mode of the knower." The crucial distinction is that signs are always "how we know," whereas more pernicious forms of pluralism often seems to rely on the claim that "signs are [I]what[/I] we know." But if everything is signs, "appearance," then there can be no real reality/appearance distinction.
This is why I like Robert Sokolowski's concept of "grasping the intelligibility of things," when it comes to epistemology. We cannot grasp a thing's intelligibility in every context, but this doesn't mean we cannot grasp their intelligibility at all.
The modern preference for potency over act comes up here too. Arguments for pluralism often focus on things like: "we could shift the pronunciation of every English word, or change this formal system in infinite ways, etc." Yet, in actuality, we don't have infinite systems, we actually have a fairly limited number of popular ones. But then I think there are reasons that explain actuality.
Sartre asserts that our everyday decisions sustain a two-level ontology. On the lower level, there is a domain of personal matters and choices, so that we ensure particular parcels of social reality. On the upper level, a personal intention resonates with the existence of a global aspects of collective projects. So, people regularly affirm that certain kinds of things and states of things exist. Some portions of the real world become objective facts that are only facts based on human decision and agreement. This kind of reality comes into existence in the performance of intentionality by humans, and it continues to exist only as far as the intentionality maintains it.
"If, moreover, existence precedes essence and we will to exist at the same time as we fashion our image, that image is valid for all and for the entire epoch in which we find ourselves. Our responsibility is thus much greater than we had supposed, for it concerns mankind as a whole. If I am a worker, for instance, I may choose to join a Christian rather than a Communist trade union. And if, by that membership, I choose to signify that resignation is, after all, the attitude that best becomes a man, that mans kingdom is not upon this earth, I do not commit myself alone to that view. Resignation is my will for everyone, and my action is, in consequence, a commitment on behalf of all mankind. Or if, to take a more personal case, I decide to marry and to have children, even though this decision proceeds simply from my situation, from my passion or my desire, I am thereby committing not only myself, but humanity as a whole, to the practice of monogamy. I am thus responsible for myself and for all men, and I am creating a certain image of man as I would have him to be. In fashioning myself I fashion man."
(Sartre, ' Existentialism and Humanism')
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I was referring to the reduction of one science to another, and all of them eventually to physics.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Now and then. I think it usually presents somewhat differently than a philosopher's question like "Do sets exist?" When a believer asks "Do you believe in God?" or "Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?" they're not talking about whether God exists -- that goes without saying; they're talking about you, the state of your soul, your openness to receiving His grace, and so on. We could talk about that more, especially since the non-believer's side is a bit different.
But what's the idea here? I made an observation about how prevalent certain sorts of discussions are among ordinary people, with the suggestion that particular branches of philosophy represent a more systematic treatment of issues people find of concern in their daily lives, and which they often discuss, sometimes with considerable subtlety. And I suggested that the sort of discussions philosophers have about ontology are rarely about the sorts of questions ordinary people have and already discuss.
Is that sort of thing open to a counterexample? Not unless that counterexample is extremely widespread. You noted that belief in God is quite widespread; but that's not quite the same as saying lots of people on a daily basis discuss and disagree about His existence. If I had made a similar suggestion about ethics, for instance, I'd obviously be wrong; people talk about right and wrong all the time. The drunken rednecks across the street are arguing about it right now.
Now let's take a step back. Why did it occur to you to raise a counterexample to my observation? There wasn't much riding on my being right. I hadn't used the claim as a lemma in an argument. If you show that I was wrong, how do you expect that to affect whatever position you think I hold?
There were other arguments offered, which follow a different pattern, but also, I believe, in furtherance of the same goal you had:
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Number2018
The argument form here is "There's another way to look at this that I like better."
And I think that other way is captured, in part, in your usual suggestion that everything we do and say involves a metaphysics, generally unacknowledged and unexamined, and thus properly called our "metaphysical assumptions."
And basically I think that's false, but it's understandable that philosophers are inclined to think so. This is not the same thing as saying that metaphysics is nonsense, or impossible, or any such thing. Different issue.
Here's a sketch of an argument, with a short preamble.
A couple years ago @Manuel started a thread on Hume. I'm grateful to him for getting me to go back to Hume because I've been referring to that discussion ever since.
Hume tried to find some rational justification for our quite evident belief in object permanence, but could find none, and so concluded that Nature deems some matters too important to be left to our fallible reason.
And he's right. Infants acquire the idea of object permanence even before the idea of object identity. They're not born with it, so far as we can tell, but it develops predictably, and so that pattern of development is more or less "built in." And it comes before language, and evidently would have to come before anything like rational thought, so it's not like you could reason your way there anyway.
Permanent objects, in other words, are not a conclusion of ours. From just a few months old, we seem to experience the world as full of distinct and permanent objects. It is something a bit like an assumption, from then on, but an assumption, as Hume notes, we cannot choose to drop.
You could here point to Kant, Peter Strawson, Collingwood, and many others as engaging in a "desriptive metaphysics" (Strawson's phrase) that would catalog these sorts of basic assumptions. (Space and time, for a couple of gigantic examples.)
But I don't look at it quite that way, and that's why I don't buy the "implicit metaphysics" approach.
What we might be inclined to call "assumptions" like this are, I would suggest, our attempts to understand the structure of our brain's modeling of the world -- really of our experience, since our brains could give a shit about the world, and really just of that experience as it affects our bodies and their functioning. There might be something like "permanent objects" in those predictive models, or there might not be, even if it seems that way to us upon introspection; there are some things we can learn about those models, but there's probably a limit. Doesn't matter. Our awareness, much less our understanding, isn't necessary for some basic parts of the model to work. (Why we have any kind of awareness is a very interesting question, but to one side of my "argument" here.)
Now, how does all of this predictive modeling the brain does show up in how we talk about things? I think it mostly doesn't: the two are largely unrelated, and that's why I don't think it's helpful to talk about metaphysical assumptions in our discussions, even if by that you mean beliefs acquired from the models our brains build, below the level of our awareness.
I can be clearer, I hope, about what I mean by "largely unrelated". Of course, the systems that produce and consume communicative speech are dependent on the systems that model your physical environment and your body, and what you say is ultimately dependent on the state of those systems, what you experience more or less as "beliefs" about yourself and the world, although "beliefs" is a pretty clumsy description of what your brain is up to.
And speech is behavior, of course, so your brain is busy predicting the effect of your speech, just as it does for the rest of your behavior -- and those predictions guide the behavior you engage in. But speech in particular involves predicting the behavior of other minded beings like yourself. --- This is another capacity humans develop pretty early, perhaps even as early as six months!
These interactions -- with other minded beings -- have a different character from our interactions with much of our environment. We've built up enormously complex forms of interaction, especially with language, and that requires a very different sort of management than, say, walking about, picking berries, steering clear of snakes, etc.
And it's around here that I would place reason. I don't believe the modeling our brain spends most of its time doing looks much like a logical system, but when we communicate with each other, particularly when using language, there are standards of consistency, and expectations that we can, upon demand, support many of the things we say with reasons. The reasons we offer for our beliefs probably bear little resemblance much less connection to how our brains settle on their current favored predictions; reasons are rationalizations, but they meet the standards of discussion, not of "belief formation." which is a completely different thing.
So that's what I mean by "largely unrelated". Our brains, like the brains of many other animals, are busy keeping us alive by running predictive models of the state of our body and our environment as it might impact that. But we're not privy to much of any of that, and what we are aware of is something cast in a form usable for communication with other minded beings like ourselves. Made to order reasons designed to convince others our beliefs are reasonable for us and for them to hold together, as members of a social group. And so far as that goes, it's clear there's a different system at work here, because if you convince someone to hold a similar belief, they'll get there not by somehow (psychically?) sharing in whatever experience you had, but just by listening to you talk. That's pretty weird, but the main thing is that it suggests there's an entirely separate route to belief available: you saw the car accident happen, I only heard you talk about seeing it, and we both hold beliefs that it happened.
Another way I could put it is this: if there are invariants in the models our brains use, something we might call artifacts of those models, then those would in some sense be our "metaphysical assumptions." But I think there's a whole separate set of invariants at work in our linguistic communication with one another, and they need not be based on how our brains are modeling our bodies and environments; they are what we've landed on as the structure of our communication, and I think by and large the structure of our introspective thought reflects that structure, not the modeling our brains are doing below the level of our awareness. Our metaphysical assumptions, if there are such things, are probably no more accessible to us than they are to non-linguistic beings. There do seem to be a whole host of assumptions underlying our speech and our conscious thought, but no reason to think they are the "assumptions" of our unconscious modeling.
There may be a giant hole in this argument. I gestured at the evidence that infants have a concept of object permanence, later acquire object identity, later still recognize other minds, and so on. That's all infra-linguistic, so aren't these very studies evidence that we have such concepts and that they are among the metaphysical assumptions I would place in our unconscious brains?
Maybe, but the tricky part here is that we're interpreting the (mostly attentive) behavior of infants, and then talking about it, so what can we do? We're going to describe it in the terms we have, even though the infants in question don't. So I think here we're seeing something very similar to introspection. We know that infants behave in certain ways, and it's consistent so there's something going on; to describe what's going on we reach for the concepts we relied upon when setting up the experiments, and describe the behavior of the infants in those terms. Doesn't mean the infant's brain is actually modeling "object permanence," but it's doing something we all talk about that way.
I suppose I'm suggesting that thinking a concept like "object permanence" is actually instantiated in the infant brain might be a sort of category mistake. The whole system will behave in a way that we recognize or categorize as embodying such a conception, but that doesn't mean it's "in there" somewhere.
Thanks for the tag. I agree with this. Two anecdotal bits of evidence: it takes a lot of effort to parse everyday stuff in terms of brain and body stuff. And also when you do get some way toward doing that, it comes off as horrifying alien poetry or cosmic horror. Example of the latter, parsed in terms of the every day: you'll have different thoughts motivations and reasons, in an unpredictable fashion, if you sleep well on a night versus if you don't. You have no choice over this. There's all kinds of terror in the subpersonal.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yes. You're forming beliefs "between thoughts", so to speak, they (eg) parse your chaotic sea of retinal images and individuate objects in them. Propositions/statements - declarative language that ascribes statements and intentions to people - at best serves as a summary of the aggregate "output" of this continual filtering and chunking in terms of current task relevance and task reevaluation.
My impression is that when you do philosophy, you take this capacity for aggregation as a given. And form something like a folklore out of it. Which is fine, and as you're saying (I'm reading you say) you can reverse engineer out some of the True Music (tm) our agenthood dances to.
Edit: I wanted to edit to highlight that we do have the capacity to take the folklore and act upon it, without treating it as fundamental. And also without treating the body+brain as fundamental too. Statements like "oxytocin potentiates pair bonding and also jingoism" need to make sense.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I agree with that too. Though I think there's also a critical (as in criticising) role for philosophy in that. I've in mind people like Matthew Ratcliffe (one of @Joshs 's reading recommendations), who do their best to survey the ground of how we live our lives, and use that greater survey to undermine and expand false preconceptions we may tend to have about it.
I don't mean to make that a "handmaiden of the sciences" comment, I also think meticulously categorising the nonsense of our everyday lives is valuable for its own sake.
Yeah. That entire section is just amazing, so powerful and disturbing (in the good sense of the word).
Glad you like it too.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Youre relying on a particular neuro-cognitive approach , predictive processing, to ground your understanding of such social processes as logic, reason and belief. According to that model, we are indeed not privy to the subpersonal processes which underlie conscious behaviors like rational argumentation. But a different approach, neurophenomenology, arising out of the enactivist tradition, while agreeing with predictive processing that there is no homuncular self to be found among all of the bits of interacting brain elements, produces a more functionally integral picture of how neural assemblies are formed and interact within the brain. It doesnt separate an internal realm of representational, computational processing from an outside world but sees brain, body and world as mutually enacted through sensory motor coupling. This allows enactivism to embrace what Buddhist traditions already understood, that cognition is fundamentally the exercise of skillful know-how in situated and embodied action rather than the kind of abstract belief-based reasoning you have been talking about.
You still can have predictive processing in situated and embodied cognition. Friston and Barrett's collaboration in active perception is all that.
Quoting fdrake
The how' of finding oneself in the world that enactivists talk about depends on their viewing a cognitive-environmental system as normative in character, that is, as functioning as an autonomous whole in a certain reciprocal causal exchange with its world. This normativity creates the criteria for what perturbs it , not discrete packets of environmental information that it has to match itself to. And this normativity allows us to talk of emotions as just special versions of an affective attunement toward the world which is always present in cognitive functioning, indicating how interactions with the world either facilitate or degrade the system's autonomy. I could be wrong, but I don't see how one could call a cognitive system's attempt to match external input with internally generated representations fully normative. Friston's free energy model posits minimization of surprise(disorder) in pursuit of homeostasis as the normative aim of a living system in a non-equilibrium steady state, and defines autonomy on the basis of a markov blanket distinguishing between internal and external states, but these are weak notions of autonomy and normativity, in contrast to many enactivist versions. It's not surprising, then, that Friston chooses Freud's realist model ( Friston's characterization of schizophrenic disturbance as false belief' indicates his realist bent) as a good realization of his neuroscientific project, given that Freud, like Friston, turns autonomy and normativity into a conglomeration of external pushes and internal pulls on a weakly integrated system. This is posited as an internal' environment indirectly exposed to an outside, in classic Cartesian fashion, as Barrett express here:
By contrast , autonomy for the enactivist isnt the property of a brain box hidden behind a markov blanket, distinguishable not only from the world but from its own body, but the autonomy of a brain-body system, whose elements cannot be separated out and for whom interaction with a world is direct rather than. indirect.
Quoting Joshs
The different states have different markov blankets. Eg the ones corresponding to touch have objects' topographies as direct relations. As far as I'm aware it's a common misconception that "the" markov blanket of an embodied perceptual system is exactly the same thing as the distinction between representation and represented, or the "transparent veil" the transcendental structure of judgement synthesises over and within the empirical.
Moreover, one might be committed to the idea that some states are principally representational, and some are principally action promoting, so that the entire ensemble of states is simultaneously both and neither.
The ensemble of states, even when construed in a representational manner, are not representations in the Cartesian sense. eg Friston's on record being a huge fan of the extended mind and ecological theory of perception. Hierarchcal signal passing in their model lets you represent nonperceptual, nonsensory and even nonconceptual data through how data is passed through our states as a simultaneous modelling and control structure. You could read that in terms of a state level plurality in representational type (what does each state represent? lots of different things in principle!), an indifference to type (throw everything in lol, it isn't even a thing or type yet)... And also on a broader functional level of embodied agent level patterns representing+(in)en/acting the world.
In that, deviation from a norm can very well be construed as a source of surprise. Paradigmatically so, norms act as a form of perceptual prior. Norms even thus have that antecedent flavour of temporality you would expect from the Husserl-Heidegger heritage in their work.
Moreover, Barrett's work explicitly construes normativity as a site of constraint and novelty in the landscape of emotion - like you would not expect to see a smile on a disgusted face, but you might see a smile as condescending depending on the context. They see their projects as compatible.
I didn't want to get into the specifics of it, just provide a note that the literature there wasn't as clear cut as you presented it. Though I'm sure you can get a lot of mileage criticising any model of human agency, insofar as it is mathematical, under the aspect that it is a mathematical representation of its intended object. And moreover you get similar mileage criticising the endeavour in principle, that such science always already thematises human agency representationally rather than in a situated/attuned/embodied-enactive/rhizomatic/tinkering/co-becoming etc manner.
I am never disappointed when I return to Hume. As a young man I foolishly preferred the Enquiries, so I am eternally grateful to you for getting me to engage more deeply with the Treatise.
Of course!
I don't recall if I discussed it much in that thread, but one thing that was very eye-opening for me was reading Galen Strawson's interpretations of Hume regarding causality and (especially) identity: The Secret Connexion and The Evident Connexion.
Though he can be quite dense in exposition, he's an excellent interpreter of those he discusses. It made me approach the Treatise with a different lens.
I'm gratified you found so much to agree with.
I was very impressed by the idea (in Mercier and Sperber) that participants in a discussion systematically simplify and exaggerate their positions, in both the definiteness of their view and their confidence in it, and that this is strategic: you're responsible for bringing a view to the table, others bring others, and you argue to some kind of consensus that would enable group action. (Reasons are in part excuses you offer others to make going along with you palatable.) We're crap at judging our own views but pretty good at criticizing others.
It reminds me of the way apo talks about "sharpness". It also explains, for me, why I found so attractive Dummett's occasional comparison of assertion to wagering: you can calculate the odds to a fare-thee-well and make your model as complicated as you like, but then you have to bet, which is sharp, rounding all probabilities to 1 or 0, and that's the nature of decisions.
And it's pretty obvious that something like this is right at the root of language use. We talk digital even if we mostly live analog.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Indeed. Whatever model you have needs individuated states in it though. Like if you're simulating the weather, you need states corresponding to air pressure, space, time etc. In that regard air pressure, space, time need to be conceived as distinct but related.
As you were saying with object permanence, or rather as I read it, there is a sense in which we learn to perceptually differentiate our environment into meaningful chunks relevant to a task. Environmental objects can help in this by having stable properties with respect to a (class of) environmental interventions or exploratory activity. Like reflectance spectra, topography, friction, wetness, what chemicals they emit...
I think we tend to talk about talk as if we talk digital. But I remain unconvinced that language is principally made of chunks, or properties/predicates/relations which induce chunks. You can think of it like that, but it seems to be the same thing as above to me. Whatever you lose in words which music expresses is also part of language.
I like thinking of our capacity to individuate along extant joints in the world+nature as building sensory organs out of enacted patterns. Which is obviously pseudoprofound bullshit made out of weasel words, but I believe it all the same. Like you can learn to smell a linear relationship on a graph.
For what we do, sure, but I keep thinking the brain is so much messier. The individuated steps there are each neurotransmitter binding to a site or not, an individual ion passing through a pump or not, all subject to randomness, with overall effects that are more naturally described in analog rather than digital terms. (Slightly more or less this or that.)
Quoting fdrake
Yeah that's better. I was simplifying and exaggerating. I do believe that our misunderstandings about language are not fortuitous, even this one, but almost required. Language is a system that misrepresents itself to us, encourage us to misunderstand it. (One of LW's motivating interests.)
I'm going to continue talking in metaphors because I don't have better structured thoughts. And also because that seems fit for task.
I think the body is very much messier yeah. I was speaking in terms of any model you can write down, it has typed states. Like "this number means air pressure", or "this subset of the model's nodes correspond to proposed actions".
Maybe even for those models, their generated representations don't have states in the pre-typed manner above. We pre-allocated air pressure at a space/time and a value in a model. Our neurones conversely can somehow create an ensemble which tracks such changes, with appropriate "holes" in it for variables and concepts and worlds. Neural networks of sufficient size can synthesise predictive features. We tend to individuate those features ourselves, keep track of them, record them, create sensors for them...
The body somehow solves a problem of individuation. Somehow out of all the passage in and out the permeable membrane of our body-environment, we end up with sensory-conceptual-comportmental organelles sensitised to the body-environment's self differentiating trajectories. I can somehow attune to the undulations in air underneath my desk to feel it rattish, as a rat, but outside it's a suitcase on gravel. I can somehow read an opinion and get a sense of whether it would offend a group. I can know if I'm hangry or whether my partner has been inconsiderate.
Overall, I share your position, and you developed a high-quality argument. I want to add a few remarks.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
You could strengthen your argument by emphasizing the role of the social environment in infants acquiring patterns of permanence. The features of psychological development could be attributed to the historical but most stable factors of a childs socio-communicative medium.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
What do you mean by writing, the structure of our introspective thought reflects the structure of our communication? It looks closely to Searles explanation of the relation between sets of socio-behavioural, potentially linguistically articulated codes and blocks of know-how, built into domains of our institutionalized milieu: There is a set of dispositions that are sensitive and responsive to the specific content of the constitutive rules The Background is the set of nonintentional or pre-intentional capacities, abilities, dispositions, and tendencies that enable intentional states to function. There is a parallelism between the functional structure of the Background and the intentional structure of the social phenomena to which the Background capacities relate. (Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, pg. 143)
So, no unconscious modelling is built into the infrastructures of our brains or conscious thought. Yet, there is still a problem explaining the nature of Searles parallelism or your thesis that the structure of our introspective thought reflects the structure of our communication. Is there an utterly isomorphic relation? Do we rely entirely on the existence of self-sufficient processes built into a socio-technological system that functions independently of the personal motives of the participants? If so, we could explain inherent to ourselves identical repetitions, but the phenomenon of conscious intentionality becomes the secondary effect of the institutional practices conditioned by the Background.
Yeah, just wanted the distinction in print. "Model" is a pretty tricky thing that covers a lot of ground.
Quoting Number2018
I don't actually know what to say about that with object permanence, but a big yes yes yes to social context. Tomasello has this beautiful stuff about triangulating, how the infant doesn't just look at the toy but makes eye contact with the caregiver, apparently in reference to the toy. You can see this in real life any time you like. Very cool stuff.
The questions you raise about introspection being derivative of communication, kinda, that was all pretty hand-wavey for sure. It's the hunch that I quickly had as I found myself addressing how to interpret experiments with infants, which is a little controversial.
Have to think about that a lot more, and you might be right to bring in Searle.
I wouldn't say it is just this, but also organisms acting on the external environment in order to realize the sensory experiences which confirm their own existence - to describe it in a Friston-esque manner.
I would say the bit at the end of your quote, which Thompson accuses standard cognition of leaving out:
Is exactly what Friston's theory is about.
At the same time, I think it's maybe worth noting that on Friston's account, there are Markov blankets within markov blankets on every level. Organisms are comprised of things with Markov blankets; they might also plausibly be construed as part of wider systems which have Markov blankets.
Quoting fdrake
I acknowledge that pp models have moved in the direction
of ecological embodiment, and that enactivism itself is a big tent that overlaps with pp at certain junctures (Andy Clark and Daniel Hutto are examples of this).It is actually a small group of enactivists that I am interested in (Shaun Gallagher, Thomas Fuchs, Jan Slaby, Evan Thompson, Ezekiel De Paolo, Hanne De Jaegher, Matthew Ratcliffe). Their brand of enactivism draws strongly from
Merleau-Ponty, Dewey and hermeneutics. I dont know to what extent Barretts work is representative of pp, but if her model of emotions is the best that pp can come up with, it falls far short of what Ratcliffe has achieved, and exemplifies the extent to which pp hasnt transcended its behaviorist roots sufficiently. Affect and intention are much more intricately intertwined than Barretts approach recognizes. We dont have some general body-maintenance feedback first and then have to decide how to explain its meaning by relating it to a current situation. Emotions come already world-directed. There is never just some generic arousal that then has to be attributed. Feelings emerge from within experiences that are relevant to us in some way. We are never without a mood.
There was something that struck me about Barretts youtube lectures on emotion. She decided to spotlight what I consider to be a relatively minor feature of emotion processing as a prime example of how pp differs from older, essentialist approaches to emotion. In her examples, the brain uses active inference to decide whether certain physiological sources of information amount to anxiety as opposed to indigestion , a heart attack or some other physical malady. I understand her aim is to show that deciding that one is experiencing an emotion is the end product of a complex process of prediction testing that takes into account as many sources of information as are available from the persons interaction with the world as well as their interoceptive states.
In enactivist approaches like that of Matthew Ratcliffe and Varela, the emphasis is not on WHAT is taking place when one has the sort of experience Barrett describes, but on HOW one has it, in the sense of how one is finding oneself in the world, ones comportment toward events. It is not that they are denying feedback from bodily states needs to be interpreted in order for one to have an emotion. I think it is that the various forms of input into affect , the hormonal , physiological-kinesthetic, behavior and social, are so tightly integrated through reciprocal causality that the question of WHAT one is feeling ( angina vs anxiety) is usually much less pertinent than the issue of how the world as a whole is altered for us when we are anxious or sad or elated. It isnt that pp doesnt have the tools necessary to account for mood as global attitude , but I wonder if beginning from computational representation turns integrated holistic comportment into a struggle rather than a given in most situations, something that has to be wrung out from the data first as a what question and then as a how question.
Representational models just seem to me to be clunky when it comes to handling full-fledged ongoing , real-time
reciprocal causality. When Barrett was describing the butterflies one feels when giving a public talk, instead of
suggesting it could have been mere indigestion( which of course it could have) , she could have talked about how ones heart races where one looks up at the crowd , and calms down when one quickly turns back toward the lecture notes , how it races again when looking back up and then calms when one remembers to imagine the audience naked, how ones reflexes seem to be in overdrive at every noise from the crowd, how ones legs seem primed to race ones body out of the room. She could have talked about this constellation of thoughts , feelings, sensations as a coordinated dance, each component implying the next as a meaningful whole rather than a combination of arbitrary elements. Most importantly, she could have talked about the particular ways in which this anxious comportment shapes and orients ones inclinations to relate to other people. I recognize that the dance of emotion is composed of differences in equal measure to similarities , but representationalism seems perhaps to result in an emphasis on arbitrary difference at the expense of what makes the components of emotion belong together as a meaningful whole.
How is the way the world appears to change related to the aims of the system, and what lends coherence to these aims? Is there in fact a system at all for Barrett in the sense of an integrated normative directionality? I get the sense that for Barrett all these sources of input into the system are a jumbled accumulation of semi-independent and semi-arbitrary bits of information , and that human goal-directedness is not much more than a more sophisticated, action-oriented pattern-matching version of S-R( judges in a cited study rule more negatively before lunch than after, thanks to the brain's interpreting of the arbitrary negative interoceptive reinforcement from the body budget'). I imagine Barrett as a psychotherapist treating the client's aims, goals, desires and feelings as being at the mercy of internal and external circumstance, and in fact signifying nothing more than an arbitrary transition from dominating circumstance to circumstance. Better yet, to the extent that her model is in line with that of Friston, the reductionistic plumbing metaphors of Freud's id-ego-superego psychodynamics seem to be a good fit for her approach.
I've nothing much to add aside from gratitude.
Yup, me too. Conciousness comes in because supposedly it can be reduced to physics.
Well, from my view, what people think about the world shapes culture and how they behave. This makes it important. You can't divorce what people think about justice, beauty, and truth from philosophy, and these play a major role in history. Looking back historically, you see philosophical thought playing a major role in politics (and thus everyday life) in the Reformation, Enlightenment, etc. I don't think we have some how "moved beyond" this influence. The anti-metaphysical movement has just obscured this influence by redefining what philosophy is and trying to deny it a determinant role in culture or in the arch authority of "science" (which of course, is its own sort of "philosophy influencing culture").
At least in my experience, "the world is just atoms in the void, atoms don't have purposes, thus either there is no such thing as good and bad or else good and bad is something we 'create'" is a series of statements I see in all sorts of conversations: discussions of politics, discussions of fiction or movies, discussions of romantic relationships, etc. But this is clearly a view that is based on a sort of corpuscular metaphysics, even if it isn't examined that way and is simply taken to be "the way science says the world is."
And similar sorts of things pop up elsewhere. The idea that the world is a "simulation," the idea that reason is fractured and can't apply to certain areas of human life (ethics, religion, etc.). These seem pretty central to human life and identity. To say that, "people don't question if God exists in the way sets do," is evidence that they aren't interested in philosophy just seems to me to be too narrow of a definition of philosophy.
I think there is a lot of philosophy on the non-fiction best sellers list. It just doesn't tend to be written by academic philosophers. Tegmark's "Our Mathematical Universe," Pinker's "The Blank Slate," Scharf's "the Ascent of Information," Eddington's "The Rigor of Angels," Eckhart Tolle, etc. all have plenty of philosophy in them. In general, I think most good theoretical work in the sciences (and a lot of popular science) tends to involve philosophy. Not without reason is Einstein also called "the most important philosopher of physics of the 20th century." Likewise, folks like Rawls and Nozik get assigned to our future leaders in public policy programs, while undergrads in biology get asked questions in the philosophy of that field like: "what is life and are viruses alive?" or "are species real?"
I tend to think the philosophy that permeates the popular imagination often has pretty major consequences, even if it's hard to see in the moment, simply because this seems ostentatiously true vis-á-vis prior eras (now that it's all in the rearview mirror.) This is part of why I am not a fan of the anti-metaphysical movement.
Anyhow, moving back a bit:
Yup, but the conclusions which are drawn from this vary quite a bit. We are drawn to ask: "where do theories come from?" That they have cultural, linguistic, and historical determinants is obvious, but there is a weird tendency to move from this insight to the idea that this makes them in some way arbitrary, and thus disconnected from truth. "X is socially and historically determined, thus X cannot tell us about the way the world [I]really is[/I]." Well, shouldn't history and culture themselves be determined by how the world is? The ghost of the positivist ideal of "objectivity as truth," seems to be lurking behind this, as well as the assumption that ideas, theories, language, etc. are all [I]what[/I] we know instead of [I]how[/I] we know.
Hegel's stance, that knowledge must come to involve an understanding of how it comes into being, seems like the more warranted response here. This will be circular, but all epistemology is circular if "the truth is the whole." Funny enough, there is an overlap between Popper's evolutionary account of science and Hegel's conception of all culture advancing due to internal contradictions.
To the extent that theory ladeness is used to support more pernicious forms of relativism, I tend to see the modern focus on potency over act at work. We [I]can imagine[/I] theories being constructed and differing in seemingly infinite ways, thus we have a problem. But the reality is that we don't have infinite theories, we tend to have just a few competing ones, and they don't evolve arbitrarily.
Essentially, I think the historicity of knowledge is not a barrier to truth at all, but rather an aid to it. Culture, like words and ideas, is something we use to get to/through the world, not merely the object of our knowledge. All effects are signs of their cause, so culture just points back to that from which it emerges. Like you said, pluralism doesn't entail that everyone is right. I also don't think it entails a problem for truth unless truth itself is denied (the pernicious sort of pluralism/relativism). Gallagher puts it well:
Maybe Barrett is explaining how emotions are world-directed in terms of how interoceptive states are integrated with external environmental context and allostatic responses to stressors / in service of some kind of evolutionarily basic goals.
Quoting Joshs
Well think about all the different kinds of scenarios that may coincide with release of (nor)adrenaline in body and raised heartbeat. This is a dimension of the bodies response to scenarios which is present across many different contexts, anger, anxiety, excitement even. It may seem obvious how this can be distinguished in all these different scenarios but I think to some extent your conscious cortical regions actually have to learn to hone your bodies basic allostatic responses to the environment and then recognize different contexts because knowledge about the self doesn't come for free - under these accounts, what we know about ourselves is inferred in the exact same way as learning about the external world. Different social contexts (e.g. in different cultures) may then result in slightly different emotions which, while perhaps sharing a similar underlying basis in visceral(bodily) motor responses and ethological response programmes similar in various animals, is coupled to environmental contexts in different ways (and probably more complex ways than other animals). And we have to recognize these in our selves as well as in others - and we all have various levels of skill at it from very good to very poor.
Quoting Joshs
Quoting Joshs
I am not really sure I see an inherent conflict here. What she talks about just may reflect her priorities on what she wants to describe or explain compared to someone else.
Quoting Joshs
But isn't talking about emotion in terms of components together what she is doing?
Quoting Joshs
If you look at this from a free energy / active inference perspective (not sure if Barrett goes this far but I am trying to show that the contested views you are talking about are not actually inconsistent with each other), emotions would be linked to an organism which modulates its behaviour in response to how well it is minimizing free energy. What is minimizing free energy? It is fulfilling the predictions of an organism about the states it wants to exist in - it is about a goal-directed organism that is actively manifesting the sensory states which confirm its own existence, and when met with different obstacles or successes in this, you may have various emotional reactions and moods which reflect the organisms continual adaptation to its external circumstances in order to realize its own existence.
Right: the absolute does not exclude the relative but the relative does exclude the absolute. I have been wanting to read more Schindler.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I think this point is even better made one step removed. Theological disagreements are implicit in many mundane disagreements. For example, the disagreement over Original Sin (theological or philosophical anthropology) underlies very many moral and political disagreements.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Agreed. I think this is important and I think the oversight of semiotics leads to a lot of problems.
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Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Right: the inferences are not sound. I think Hume feeds into these unsound inferences:
Quoting Leontiskos
The reduction of sense data to constant conjunction brings with it a destruction of a posteriori inference, and with it a posteriori knowledge. This is the logical conclusion, and even those who do not embrace it are still sipping on it unconsciously. Once the idea of demonstrative (a posteriori) inference is abandoned, people can say whatever they like and it will appear just as "rational" as anything else. Thus the claims that things like languages or history exclude truth, despite being inferentially unsound, continue unabated. The real error here is what you have noted: the idea that an absolute cannot account for any form of relativity. It is the idea, for example, that truth cannot be mediated by language or history or what have you.
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Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Compare the way that Sider connects quantification to truth:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
It seems to me that what very often happens with Humeans is that an assumption is made and everything follows from the assumption, but the assumption is contested and question-begging. For example, the neat and tidy understanding of reason as conscious discursive inference is not at all accepted by pre-moderns. If we accept that notion of reason then the infant is not using reason to know that an object has permanence, but why accept such a notion of reason? According to Aristotle repeated experience with, and memories of, an object(s) provides a condition whereby one is able to understand things about that object, such as its permanence. Knowledge is already had long before one gets to the point where they can write formal inferences on the chalkboard.
We could assume with Hume that each time we experience the sun and the sunrise we have a purely separate experience, unconnected to previous experience and memory. If this is right then we could never know anything about the sun, whether this knowledge has to do with its rising and setting or its heat. But why make such a silly assumption? The fact that we do know things about the sun is enough to dispel such a strange assumption. Yet if we do make the assumption then reason becomes weakened such that irrational things will appear rational, just as anything follows from a contradiction. If we make those sorts of weak assumptions universally, then our whole philosophy will be brittle and unsteady, along with everything built upon it. At this point the only reason to retain the odd assumptions seems to be that we have built much upon them, and to abandon the assumptions would be to abandon the edifice set upon it. ...Like a poor foundation that cannot be remedied without demolishing the house that sits atop it. But I wonder if this is really the case.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
These sorts of assumptions, along with the sort of brain-physicalism moves, presuppose a strange skepticism which then makes rationality an epiphenomenon or artifact. Yet the performative self-contradiction again comes to bear, for the brain research you have read is purportedly rational. The scientists who do that research are using reason to access knowledge of the brain and thus behavior, and if rational inferences are nothing more than post-hoc rationalizations of something that occurs for an entirely separate reason, then there can be no reason to favor the scientist's rational inferences to the metaphysician's.
I want to say that the reason this is mistakenly taken to be rigorous is because of the democratic turn that has occurred. In Plato's day the common opinion was largely understood by the philosophers to be suspect. In our day if enough people (and scientists) promote Scientism or related theories, then even the philosophers accept these theories to be true. The Humean and probabilistic premises support such an approach. Reason has become more of a force to be measured, like the wind, rather than an art to be practiced.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Er, this is just testimony or natural faith. It is the thing that the Enlightenment was determined to eradicate, and apparently it worked ("Sapere aude!").
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Or maybe object permanence is simpler than you think. Maybe the infant can recognize an object, and he also believes that when the object disappears from sight it will reappear again. Maybe that's all we mean by object permanence.
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Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
With @Count Timothy von Icarus, I think there are non-sequiturs occurring in these sorts of things. All of this is true, as well as the other things, like neuroscientific research, but does any of it really imply the metaphysical claims at the root of Hume? I don't think so. I'm not really sure why we would think such a thing. "We systematically simplify and exaggerate positions in discussion," ...therefore? What we have here, I aver, are data points that many different philosophical positions can and have taken into account. I don't see how they favor Humean or probabilistic views. :chin:
...So yeah. Hume? I don't see the appeal. I was recently looking at Hume's treatise on the passions, and it reminded me that if one is accustomed to Aristotle or Aquinas' deeply syllogistic method, Hume reads like a popular magazine article. I just don't see a lot of strict reasoning occurring there.
Edit: Worth quoting, I think:
Last night won the National Book Award for Non-fiction.