Wittgenstein, Cognitive Relativism, and "Nested Forms of Life"

to posit nested sets

Ancillary point from Grayling:

We can understand the meaning of a word, say the German word for "village" and have not the first clue how to use it in a sentence.

Yet we can also know how to use words without knowing what they mean. For example, plenty of people use "e.g." "QED," "i.e.," or "amen," correctly without knowing what they mean.

And this relates to the idea that all manner of philosophical problems might be dissolved if one pays close attention to how words are used.

I am confident that you yourself disagree with that idea to some extent.

We could debate whether Wittgenstein really was such a relativist. What I wanted to point out though is that, if he does embrace the more relativistic reading, he essentially undermines his entire later philosophy.

Moreover, all of Wittgenstein's complaints about "philosophers using language wrong," can be waved away by simply claiming that Wittgenstein is not privy to the language game used by these philosophers. Perhaps being a metaphysician, a Thomist, etc. are all discrete "forms of life?" I

His arguments are sufficiently enigmatic that none of them are logically valid as stated, they rely on unarticulated but perpetually unfolding and changing concepts. Honestly he's just like Heidegger.

I can't use the word 'to' properly if I don't know it brings about a directional relationship between two objects.

The problem is, as they don't know what the word actually means, and only learn how to use it from examples/contexts

As soon as we know the German word is a "perfect" translation of the English word, we are able to use productively.

signifier to the English speaker but devoid of its meaning and use. But it is precisely to the extent that "hola" has become unrooted from its context that it is possible for its context to be learned: the English speaker learns the use and meaning of "hola" from its own context. Only then is communication possible: To the extent that the sign refers beyond the given context and usage. Significance, the most proper of language, exceeds use but does not exclude it.

Wittgenstein's concept of "forms of life" in his later philosophy is infamously vague, despite doing a lot of heavy lifting.

On some views, the relevant "form of life," is something common to all humanity. It is something like "what we all share by virtue of being human and of living in the same world." Advocates of this perspective often pay a lot of attention to Wittgenstein's comments on pain. When it comes to pain, it seems to be our natural expressiveness, something we share with other mammals, that is the scaffolding on which language about pain is built.

However, there is an equally popular view where the "form of life" one belongs to varies by culture. The more "extreme" forms of this view also tend to posit that we cannot "translate between" forms of life. So, when Wittgenstein says "if a lion could talk, we could not understand him," or "we don't understand Chinese gestures any more than Chinese sentences," this is sometimes taken to mean that we cannot simply discover the differences between different forms of life and convert between them. Sometimes this comes out in almost essentialist terms, where a person from another culture is precluded from ever understanding another culture in its own terms.

Signifiers and significance is also nothing more than use as knowledge is - we observe symbols and physical interactions from the outside world causally affect our internal neural systems. They then can spit out future behaviour that reflects the causal interaction with the symbol in the context of the outside world... a symbol is nothing more than the associations we observe it connected to.

“[t]he world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject who is nothing but a project of the world; and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world that it itself projects”

Wittgenstein, much like Heidegger, ends up not being particularly radical or different from commonplace positions when you force yourself not to think using their specialised terms as a privileged vantage point upon philosophy, language and the world… His arguments are sufficiently enigmatic that none of them are logically valid as stated, they rely on unarticulated but perpetually unfolding and changing concepts. Honestly he's just like Heidegger.

?Joshs I don't think either H or W are regurgitating, but that they've had an influence upon philosophical thinking to a point that anyone whose read philosophy knows these points, even if they are hard to articulate -- especially because they're enigmatic, rather than logically valid.

Not a bad thing, at all. I think the Witti Heidegger comparison holds pretty well, tho I prefer to say Derrida-Wittgenstein is the true duck-rabbit of western-philosophy

My experience has been that there is a small community of thinkers who grasp the most radical implications of Heidegger and Derrida, and a much larger group that misreads them as similar to writers like Kierkegaard, Sartre and Levinas.

a much larger group that misreads them as similar to writers like Kierkegaard, Sartre and Levinas.

If it's a misrepresentation it's not Grayling's, since he is commenting on efforts by some "Wittgensteinians, to clarify what Wittgenstein's philosophy entails."

... the enterprise of creating such problems for how Wittgenstein is read

My personal opinion is that Wittgenstein's work is too vague to decide this issue.

I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.

in the darkness of this time

bring light into one brain or another

Wittgenstein's concept of "forms of life" in his later philosophy is infamously vague, despite doing a lot of heavy lifting.

In effect this means that the concepts in question are not concepts of truth and the rest, as we usually wish to understand them, but concepts of opinion and belief.

Language and mathematics are rule governed. Games are also rule governed.

These rules are developed socially and change over time

We cannot appeal to social regularities or collectively presupposed norms within a practice: there are no such things, I have argued, but more important, if there were they would not thereby legitimately bind us. Any regularities in what practitioners have previously done does not thereby have any authority to bind subsequent performances to the same regularities. The familiar Wittgensteinian paradoxes about rule following similarly block any institution of norms merely by invocation of a rule, since no rule can specify its correct application to future instances (Wittgenstein 1953). Practices should instead be understood as comprising performances that are mutually interactive in partially shared circumstances. (Joseph Rouse)

I’d love to hear what ‘commonplace positions’ you think these writers are regurgitating.

What do you suppose their commonplace critiques of the ‘logical validity’ you obviously prize might look like?

There are, of course, deeper things to draw on in Wittgenstein, but sometimes these get served up as if they are full explanations. E.g.:

"What is logic?"
"It's something humans engage in, an activity."

Despite the theories about forms of life, I do not think it is vague unless one treats it as a theory. He has no theory about forms of life, he is simply pointing beyond language as something existing in and of itself to our being in the world and all that entails conceptually and practically. The boundaries between one way of life and another or one practice and another are not fixed and immutable.

Sometimes this comes out in almost essentialist terms, where a person from another culture is precluded from ever understanding another culture in its own terms.

This presumably applies to expressions like true and real themselves and indeed, it is precisely Wittgenstein's point that such expressions cease to be philosophically significant once we remind ourselves of their ordinary employments.

first, we have to share with the aliens some natural capacities and responses of a perceptual and cognitive type, giving rise to at least some similar beliefs about the world; and secondly we have to be able to share with them certain principles governing those beliefs; for one important example, that what is believed and therefore acted upon is held to be true

How then do we recognize another form of life as another form of life? The ability to detect that something is a form of life and that it differs from our own surely demands that there be a means for us to identify its presence and to specify what distinguishes it from ours.

But this recreates the same Cartesian isolation Wittgenstein wanted to avoid.

all of Wittgenstein's complaints about "philosophers using language wrong," can be waved away by simply claiming that Wittgenstein is not privy to the language game used by these philosophers. Perhaps being a metaphysician, a Thomist, etc. are all discrete "forms of life?"

It seems very possible to me to be able to "speak of something correctly," and not to really understand it.

." For example, the claim that a man who washes ashore on desert Island loses his ability to make and follow rules, but then regains this capacity when a second person washes ashore later. Obviously, a great many Wittgensteinians (as well as people generally) find this to be somewhat absurd.

So on the contrary, I think nothing we do exceeds use. My interpretation is Wittgenstein I don't thing was creating a theory of meaning. But saying that what we think of as meaning is nothing above use and behavior.

You can use Wittgenstein's ideas as a line in the sand between philosophical and non-philosophical use of thought - what counts as bewitched and right thinking.

We find certain things about seeing puzzling, because we do not find the whole business of seeing puzzling enough.

The concept of an aspect is related to the concept of imagination.
In other words, the concept ‘Now I see it as . . .’ is related to ‘Now I am imagining that’.
Doesn’t it take imagination to hear something as a variation on a
particular theme? And yet one does perceive something in so hearing it.

Seeing an aspect and imagining are subject to the will. There is
such an order as “Imagine this!”, and also, “Now see the figure like
this!”; but not “Now see this leaf green!”.

The question now arises: Could there be human beings lacking the ability to see something as something a and what would that be like?
What sort of consequences would it have? —– Would this defect be comparable to colour-blindness, or to not having absolute pitch? a We will call it “aspect-blindness” a and will now consider what might be meant by this. (A conceptual investigation.)

Aspect-blindness will be akin to the lack of a ‘musical ear’.

The importance of this concept lies in the connection between the concepts of seeing an aspect and of experiencing the meaning of a word. For we want to ask, “What would someone be missing if he did not experience the meaning of a word?

In his own metaphorical terms, I think when Wittgenstein says that his spade is turned when he hits the bedrock of "forms of life," many would simply suggest that he buy himself a shovel or a pick axe.

If our culture and language impact brain development in early childhood, there is not just an abstract difference between individuals of different cultures, but a physical one.

Wittgensteinians often make claims that are the opposite of "common sense." For example, the claim that a man who washes ashore on desert Island loses his ability to make and follow rules, but then regains this capacity when a second person washes ashore later. Obviously, a great many Wittgensteinians (as well as people generally) find this to be somewhat absurd.

That's one way of framing it in the "Tarzan Versus Crusoe," discussion at least, but there is also the idea that Crusoe cannot make new rules so long as he is alone, and any continued rule following can only be judged by an absent community.

Unless some "tribe" (a favorite thought example of Wittgenstein) is in possession of the truth itself and the rest itself, we are dealing with opinions and beliefs held at that time and place to be true. The truth is, we are not in possession of the whole of the immutable truth. Throughout history human beings have held things to be true that turn out not to be. This is not something to be solves by attacks on the truth of relativism so understood.

all of Wittgenstein's complaints about "philosophers using language wrong," can be waved away by simply claiming that Wittgenstein is not privy to the language game used by these philosophers. Perhaps being a metaphysician, a Thomist, etc. are all discrete "forms of life?"

Nevertheless when people use Wittgenstein's ideas, they have to interface with other arguments. Perhaps you can do that solely in his terms, but honestly trying to do it equitably makes it very difficult for Wittgenstein. Which is a weakness of his, rather than of philosophy.

Despite the theories about forms of life, I do not think it is vague unless one treats it as a theory. He has no theory about forms of life, he is simply pointing beyond language as something existing in and of itself to our being in the world and all that entails conceptually and practically. The boundaries between one way of life and another or one practice and another are not fixed and immutable.

More broadly, I think the emphasis on language can lead us to overlook something fundamental to Wittgenstein, namely, the distinction and connection between saying and showing or seeing, which remains throughout his writings, as can be seen it his discussions of such things as seeing aspects, aspect blindness, seeing-as, and seeing connections.

there is also the idea that Crusoe cannot make new rules so long as he is alone, and any continued rule following can only be judged by an absent community.

However, I do agree that the "bedrock" metaphor doesn't challenge foundationalism itself, and that's always puzzled me. The radical issue is whether foundations are always necessary. After all, it turned out that there are no foundations of the planet.

96. It might be imagined that some propositions, of the form of empirical propositions, were hardened and functioned as channels for such empirical propositions as were not hardened but fluid; and that this relation altered with time, in that fluid propositions hardened, and hard ones became fluid.
97. The mythology may change back into a state of flux, the river-bed of thoughts may shift. But I distinguish between the movement of the waters on the river-bed and the shift of the bed itself; though there is not a sharp division of the one from the other.

I interpret this to mean that bedrock assumptions are like the river bank. They change along with the river itself, but more slowly.

They're discussed in terms of speech acts and gesturing towards new ways of seeing though, right? There's little psychology in it. Or to put it better, the only things he seems interested in are those elements of perception which are mediated by not just involving acts of speech. The eye under the aspect of language.

… our investigation is directed not towards phenomena, but rather, as one might say, towards the ‘possibilities’ of phenomena.

The name “philosophy” might also be given to what is possible before all new discoveries and inventions.

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something a because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of their inquiry do not strike people at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck them. And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.

I think it does challenge foundationalism, which is why Lee Braver named his book on Wittgenstein and Heidegger ‘Groundless Grounds’.

That's how I understand them: "hinges" are almost too mechanical for foundations: and in a way hinges can only be placed upon structures build on foundations... hrm. The up-down metaphor

I think he presents the hinge metaphor in the context of analysing a debate - elaborating the idea that the debate turns on a fixed point. I would assume that this only applies to the context of the debate, and that what was a hinge may become a bone of contention in another context.

I'll let A.C. Grayling describe this one:

I'm being too poetic for the conversation. I'd take your or anyone elses reading over mine -- just some silly thoughts that came to mind.

I agree that there must be some commonality that allows us to move between games. Obviously people can become fluent in new languages and cultures.

This is why I considered the idea of overlapping, and perhaps somewhat hierarchical "forms of life." Pace Wittgenstein, I think we can often understand Chinese gestures quite well. Hell, we can understand when a dog, lion, or badger is upset because mammals signal aggression in similar ways. The reason "reptilian" and "insect-like," have the negative connotations they do is because these animals don't signal their "emotions" to us in the same way, leading to them seeming unpredictable and alien.

I imagine coming to understand extraterrestrial or synthetic lifeforms capable of language would end up being a good deal more difficult than learning a new human language, although perhaps not impossible.

think he presents the hinge metaphor in the context of analysing a debate - elaborating the idea that the debate turns on a fixed point. I would assume that this only applies to the context of the debate, and that what was a hinge may become a bone of contention in another context.

‘internal’ cognitive system receiving inputs from, computationally representing and spitting out outputs to an ‘external’ world.

In the case of my talking to my self, my present and past selves affect each other to produce new senses of meaning of the words and the criteria of rules I invoke.

On some views, the relevant "form of life," is something common to all humanity. It is something like "what we all share by virtue of being human and of living in the same world." Advocates of this perspective often pay a lot of attention to Wittgenstein's comments on pain. When it comes to pain, it seems to be our natural expressiveness, something we share with other mammals, that is the scaffolding on which language about pain is built.

Yes, I have thought before that a.nice counterexample to Wittgenstein's private language argument is someone writing a note to themself to remind them to do something in the future, a scenario that requires someone to enforce some relationship between words and things in the world for the sake of reminding themselves.

Obviously, Wittgenstein was not a cognitivist (there are hints at it, yes); but, rather an early behaviorist at the time, influenced by Russell's own thoughts about psychology.

I imagine coming to understand extraterrestrial or synthetic lifeforms capable of language would end up being a good deal more difficult than learning a new human language, although perhaps not impossible.

In the context of him analyzing a debate: debates turn on fixed points, and foundations are below those fixed points: a hinge can be replaced, but the foundations take time to change.

Even among those who accept that there is a reasonably self-contained and straightforward private language argument to be discussed, there has been fundamental and widespread disagreement over its details, its significance and even its intended conclusion, let alone over its soundness. The result is that every reading of the argument (including that which follows) is controversial. Some of this disagreement has arisen because of the notorious difficulty and occasional elusiveness of Wittgenstein’s own text (sometimes augmented by problems of translation).But much derives from the tendency of philosophers to read into the text their own preconceptions without making them explicit and asking themselves whether its author shared them. Some commentators, for instance, supposing it obvious that sensations are private, have interpreted the argument as intended to show they cannot be talked about; some, supposing the argument to be an obvious but unsustainable attempt to wrest special advantage from scepticism about memory, have maintained it to be unsound because it self-defeatingly implies the impossibility of public discourse as well as private; some have assumed it to be a direct attack on the problem of other minds; some have claimed it to commit Wittgenstein to behaviourism or verificationism; some have thought it to imply that language is, of necessity, not merely potentially but actually social (this has come to be called the ‘community view’ of the argument).

I'm afraid few decent philosophical arguments can easily be refuted by counter-example. Someone else can read the note, so it doesn't count as private language - even if it's in cipher.

High level functions, like language processing and production, reach down into lower level functions and color them, and everything ends up very interconnected.

I would take the private language to be at its strongest when it is a straightforward rejection of Cartesian absolute privacy. There are always outward signs of any "inner" experience.

This jives with a broadly enactivist view.

If a stronger formulation is taken, e.g. that private rule following is impossible because of the possibility of unknown error

this seems to actually follow on for social rule following too,

So, with the lion, it seems clear we should know what "please bring more zebra steaks sir," means if the lion says it. However, there also seems to be a sense in which the lion's inner experience, which corresponds to outward signs, is more hidden from us because we do not share the same "form of life." Yet per the topic of this thread, I do think mammals might be said to share some sort of "form of life;" we can recognize each other's emotional states decently after all.

And this seems true for any thought to me.

In theory, it seems possible that given enough observations we might be able to determine to some degree "what a person is thinking about." But then the person's body is itself a sign of inner changes, which of course Wittgenstein seems to suggest. The body is just an imperfect sign in this respect, in part because we have a useful capacity for deception.

This is in line with Augustinian semiotics. The body is sacramental, an outward sign of inner/higher realities.

We can understand the meaning of a word, say the German word for "village" and have not the first clue how to use it in a sentence.

Yet we can also know how to use words without knowing what they mean. For example, plenty of people use "e.g." "QED," "i.e.," or "amen," correctly without knowing what they mean.

Bats, Mary's room, philosophical zombies.

Well, I would accept that if there is social agreement on how a rule applies in a new situation, that's how it applies. Rules of etiquette, for example. Linguistic rules.

5.1361 The events of the future cannot be inferred from those of the present. Superstition is the belief in the causal nexus.

Per Wittgenstein, they can't be sure that they ever understand a rule.

5.1361 The events of the future cannot be inferred from those of the present. Superstition is the belief in the causal nexus.

Hence he could never really pin down rules outside of "custom," which in turn leaves them floating free from the world in an infinite sea of "possible rules."

How does any individual ever know that they are properly chastising someone for following a rule wrong? Per Wittgenstein, they can't be sure that they ever understand a rule

Take the example of telling someone to follow a rule, say, repeatedly adding two. It isn’t that when we teach this procedure to her we don’t know what we want her to do, but that this knowledge shouldn’t be mod­eled on the picture of a mind encompassing the range of the function “Add two” in its gaze, even though our reflexive correction of a wrong answer makes it appear as if we were comparing the series coming out of her mouth
with a written list.
“When I teach someone the formation of the series . . . I surely mean him to write . . . at the hundredth place.”—Quite right; you mean it. And evidently without neces­sarily even thinking of it. This shews you how different the grammar of the verb “to mean” is from that of “to think.” And nothing is more wrong-headed than calling
meaning a mental activity! The interlocutor here argues that since we know that 1,002 should follow 1,000 when we issue the order “Add two,” a sequence not explicitly consid­ered at the time the order was issued, something queer must be plugging us into the entire series. Wittgenstein reverses the polarity of the argument.
We know what should follow 1,000 and the humble cogitative actions we find do not consciously anticipate every step—so understanding the rule must enable us to correct immediately without explicit thoughts. The mirage of the meaning-object’s containment of all future applica­tions shimmers into existence here to supplement the woefully underpow­ered act of comprehension.

The standard view has the PLA resting on verificationism: the objection is that the private linguist cannot reliably verify the recurrence of the same sensation, since all he has to go on is his feeling that the present instance is of the same type as the previous one. Without an external check on my reidentification of the Gorignak, I cannot satisfactorily determine whether I have applied the term correctly or not, that is, whether this entity here now is a token of the same type as the one previously so baptized. My attempts to evaluate the consistency of my own applications cannot suffice because, being at the same level as the acts of identification themselves, they provide
no justification of these acts; on my own, I’m just buying multiple copies of a given newspaper to check the headlines of the first. Without such an external check, then, the difference between merely believing I am following a rule correctly and actually doing so collapses, taking the very notion of a rule, and that of language in general, with it.

Some commentators have denied that this argument appears in Witt­genstein’s discussion of PLA at all, but I find it expressed too clearly in too many texts to dismiss it entirely. However, as has been pointed out, this kind of verificationism clashes with many of his other ideas, in particular his frequent claims that we neither have nor need justification to carry out many rule-governed activities perfectly well, a claim that, in fact, often appears within his discussions of private language. For example: “‘but when I in my own case distinguish between, say, pretending that I have pain and really having pain, surely I must make this distinction on some grounds!’
Oddly enough—no!—I do distinguish but not on any grounds.” Wittgenstein believes that every interpretation must bottom out in some unjustifiable immediate reaction in order to escape the infinite regress of interpretive rule-following, so demanding an overt justification for the correct recognition of sensations even to be conceiv­able seems odd. I believe that Wittgenstein uses verification to indicate the purposelessness rather than the intrinsic incoherence of private language­ games, as clearly stated here: “you have to remind yourself of the use to get
out of the rut in which all these expressions tend to keep you. The whole point of investigating the ‘verification,’ e.g., is to stress the importance of the use as opposed to that of the picture.”

I personally think Wittgenstein never fully got away from Russell and Hume's influence re causation. That is, the influence that made him write:

5.1361 The events of the future cannot be inferred from those of the present. Superstition is the belief in the causal nexus.

Part of what helps cement rules though is causal consequence. Bad applied math results in bad consequences regardless of what the majority thinks for instance

Metaphysics attempts to escape one’s worldview or form of life in order to latch onto something that transcends all perspectives, something that can rule on and rule over all individual views; but the entities posited as
transcending all systems, such as Truth or Reality in-itself or God are, like Hegel’s thing-in-itself-for-us, posited by and only function within systems. These systems or games can be incommensurable, with no possibility of common measurement or neutral judge, a Great Umpire in the Sky. “Some­body may reply like a rational person and yet not be playing our game.”
We should say no more than that their behavior is just not what makes sense to us: “there’s only one thing that can be wrong with the meaning of a word, and that is that it is unnatural . . . unnatural for us. . . . We just don’t go on in that way.”182 While we cannot take up a wholly external point of view, we can inhabit ours critically, without the illusions of metaphysical grounding.

This incommensurability also means that we cannot get the players of strange language-games to start acting normally (that is, as we do) simply by reasoning with them, since the very thing we’re trying to teach them is
our way of reasoning. Just as a child isn’t rationalized through arguments— were she susceptible to arguments, she would already be rational—but through training, so bringing others to think as we do happens through
nonrational means. Supposing we met people who did not regard [the propositions of physics] as a tell­ing reason. Now, how do we imagine this? Instead of the physicist, they consult an oracle. (And for that we consider them primitive.) Is it wrong for them to consult an oracle and be guided by it?—If we call this “wrong” aren’t we using our language­ game as a base from which to combat theirs? (Lee Braver)

I do not think he is a skeptic with regard to rule following. There is, for example, a right way of following the rules of addition. If someone does not add correctly they are corrected. If someone makes a move in chess that violates the rules they are corrected. It does not matter what they might or might not understand as long as what they do follows the established rules. But it would be quite odd if someone did not understand the rules and yet consistently acted in accordance with them.

There is a difference between human beings acting in compliance with established rules and the question of whether nature obeys rules. It makes sense to say that if someone does not follow the rules of a game she may be playing a different game, but does it make sense to say that if the sun does not rise tomorrow it is playing a different game?

Are you claiming that there are transcendent, fixed, eternal laws that human beings should follow that Wittgenstein fails to account for?

Wittgenstein believes that every interpretation must bottom out in some unjustifiable immediate reaction in order to escape the infinite regress of interpretive rule-following, so demanding an overt justification for the correct recognition of sensations even to be conceiv­able seems odd.

The problem as I see it is that his arguments (if they can be called that) for rejecting private rule following don't seem to limit the problem to private rule following. They apply equally to public rule following.

"from whence rules?

Presumably, if nature "follows rules" it is in a way that is at best analogous to how we follow them.

Why do disparate cultures that developed in relative isolation often develop similar rules?

I think the answer is one that you seem to reject - convention. Given our species nature the rules from one group to another will have much in common based on our needs and characteristics as a species.

The interpretation I dislike is the one that says that to ask "why are their clouds and why do they produce rain?" is to have become bewitched or fallen into incoherence.

It's just incomplete.

Of course we can say: "but this is no issue. It would be a total violation of common sense to say we can't follow public rules. When someone violates a rule in chess we can see it and point it out to them.

Right, but the questions I think his philosophy points to is: "from whence rules? Why are they useful? How do we come to understand them? Why are they natural to human behavior?"

258. 'Let us imagine the following case. I want to keep a diary about the recurrence of a certain sensation. To this end I associate it with the sign "S" and write this sign in a calendar for every day on which I have the sensation. I will remark first of all that a definition of the sign cannot be formulated. -- But still I can give myself a kind of ostensive definition. -- How? Can I point to the sensation? Not in the ordinary sense. But I speak, or write the sign down, and at the same time I concentrate my attention on the sensation -- and so, as it were, point to it inwardly. -- But what is this ceremony for? for that is all it seems to be! A definition surely serves to establish the meaning of a sign. -- Well, that is done precisely by the concentrating of my attention; for in this way I impress on myself the connection between the sign and the sensation. -- But "I impress it on myself" can only mean: this process brings it about that I remember the connection right in the future. But in the present case I have no criterion of correctness. One would like to say: whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And that only means that here we can't talk about 'right'."

Someone else can read the note, so it doesn't count as private language

How does any individual ever know that they are properly chastising someone for following a rule wrong? Per Wittgenstein, they can't be sure that they ever understand a rule

Would that question not be simply what produces clouds and how do they in turn produce rain— a scientific question? I can't think of any other way to coherently frame the question. I mean you could feel a sense of great wonder that there are clouds and rain, and indeed a world at all, but I don't see any coherent question that sense of wonder could be transformed into other than the scientific ones.

Imo the private language argument is about showing that when you have no external enforcement of these criteria, any kind of stable foundation for word meaning evaporates...

The counterexample introduces the same kind of practical enforcement as the social case and so it doesn't contradict the point being made imo.

Right, but you see the problem here right? How does any individual ever know that they are properly chastising someone for following a rule wrong? Per Wittgenstein, they can't be sure that they ever understand a rule.

analytics cut themselves off from most pre-analytic philosophy, did everything "in-house" which entailed a lot of reinventing of the wheel in ways that look horribly philistine and only appeal to a very specific niche of people who like goofy decontextualized thought experiments, [...]

[...] and then at a later phase, claim to have been conversant with the wider philosophical tradition all along / rediscover the wider philosophical tradition, but still subordinate that tradition to goofy analyticisms and still somehow retain the decontextualized feel of early analytic philosophy.
[...]

It just means that analytic philosophy is less special than it thinks it is.

every new philosophical approach thinks that

Yes, that's true. But both have their uses in a building. Whether the same proposition can be a hinge and a foundation is hard to say. We could perhaps say that the same proposition might be used as a hinge in one context and a foundation in another. But not, I think, at the same time. Case studies would be interesting.

I agree with holding to the metaphor

I am not sure if that arrogance is universal. Wittgenstein had quite the temper.

To me I don't see the inherent distinction between a public language and a private one other than only one person uses it. So to me it is a counterexample to the private language used by only

that language is meaningless without the need for the communication of inaccessible information, whether that communication being with other people or yourself.

Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought

Isn't the rule following paradox, which philosophers still debate to this day, solved by the way the language center of the brain is uniform for many newborn children? I don't see how else one would solve the rule following paradox.

Maybe that is a naïve point, but, since rats and other languageless animals are known to be able to perform mental simulations, doesn't that show in a straightforward manner that language is not necessary for thought?

inaccessible

I wouldn't fight over the question of priority. That it has multiple uses is not in question, I think.

We don't need language to think about things.

"Thinking" is a very flexible concept.

But you could also say that you don't need language to communicate

Its about the idea that language is not identical to thought. We don't need language to think about things. When

Language isn’t simply a tool that we use to access concepts , in its very instantiation it uses us to transform the sense of our concepts and percepts by enacting them in the world.

For Merleau-Ponty, perception is ‘languaged’, but this cannot be understood in terms of a split between thinking and communicating.

To think and perceive is to communicate with oneself by way of the world.

Language isn’t simply a tool that we use to access concepts

To think and perceive is to communicate with oneself by way of the world.

True. I would say that communication just generalizes language.

Similarly, what an animal communicates about is different to their actual perceptual/cognitive/physical engagement with what they are communicating about.

What are we communicating to ourselves?

To think and perceive is to communicate with oneself by way of the world.
— Joshs

What are we communicating to ourselves?

When we speak to another we have certain expectations concerning the response, which will never be precisely fulfilled.

Likewise when we think to ourselves we are communicating with an other, since the self returns to itself slightly differently moment to moment.

We always end up meaning something slightly other than what we intended to mean.

But, having thought about it, I want to emphasize the multifarious uses of language, many, but not all, of which involve communication in one form or another.

Could you break it down for me?

AC Grayling: "One need not take as one's target so radical a form of the thesis to show that cognitive relativism is unacceptable, however."

One way to deal with [relativism/skepticism] would be to posit nested sets of "forms of life" that people belong to.

As rules are private, a rule-based language must also be private

For an individual, all the rules that they are aware of must be of their own invention, even if based on information received through their senses. As the tortoise said to Achilles, how can an individual discover just from the information received through their senses that a rule is a rule. Where is the rule that determines whether something is a rule or not, a problem of infinite regression.

We imagine chaos because we want to only accept undeniable certainty and agreement (as “knowledge”), and cast everything else as “belief” or emotion or persuasion. But Witt shows is that the world has endless ways of being “rational” (having ways to account, though different), and so we can disagree intelligibly in relation from those practices. Ultimately we may not come to resolution, but that does not lead to the categorical failure of rationality, because a dispute also only happens at a time, in a context (which also gives our differences traction).

But Witt shows is that the world has endless ways of being “rational” (having ways to account, though different), and so we can disagree intelligibly in relation from those practices. Ultimately we may not come to resolution, but that does not lead to the categorical failure of rationality, because a dispute also only happens at a time, in a context (which also gives our differences traction).

Now we can NOT understand lions, as a physical impossibility

I don't disagree with this. But I think that our practices are a bit more complicated than this seems to propose. If we say that rationality is a question of our agreement in ways of life, we seem to eliminate the distinction between those agreements that we call "correct" or "incorrect" by some standard that is not set by our agreement and those agreements that are simply a matter of making a deal, so that "correct" and "incorrect" do not apply. You will understand, I suppose, that I think that agreements that are correct or incorrect are, by and large, rational agreements and the other kind are, roughly, matters of taste. (The difficulty of agreements about values sits awkwardly between the two.)

?Antony Nickles

But Witt shows is that the world has endless ways of being “rational” (having ways to account, though different), and so we can disagree intelligibly in relation from those practices. Ultimately we may not come to resolution, but that does not lead to the categorical failure of rationality, because a dispute also only happens at a time, in a context (which also gives our differences traction).

I don't think Wittgenstein shows this at all, as evidenced by the extremely diverse directions this thread is taken in by different Wittgensteinians. He leaves this incredibly vague; vague enough that a common take is that rationality just bottoms out in cultural presuppositions that cannot be analyzed. This view in turn makes any conflict between "heterogenous cultures" or "heterogenous language games," either purely affective/emotional or else simply a power struggle— i.e. "fight it out." This is especially true if the individual subject is just a nexus of signifiers and power discourses

92. However, we can ask: May someone have telling grounds for believing that the earth has only existed for a short time, say since his own birth? - Suppose he had always been told that, - would he have any good reason to doubt it? Men have believed that they could make the rain; why should not a king be brought up in the belief that the world began with him? And if Moore and this king were to meet and discuss, could Moore really prove his belief to be the right one? I do not say that Moore could not convert the king to his view, but it would be a conversion of a special kind; the king would be brought to look at the world in a different way. Remember that one is sometimes convinced of the correctness of a view by its simplicity or symmetry, i.e., these are what induce one to go over to this point of view. One then simply says something like: "That's how it must be”. (On Certainty)

Can I make a rule for myself, privately? Here "privately" means "not subject to enforcement by anything else (human or otherwise)". In other words, is it possible for the correct application of my rule to be solely determined by my application of it? In yet other words, if I make my rule and determine what is the correct application of it, is it meaningful to say that I am bound by it?

In An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding and A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume proposed that the origin of our knowledge of necessary connections arises out of observation of the constant conjunction of certain impressions across many instances, so that causation is merely constant conjunction—after observing the constant conjunction between two events A and B for a duration of time, we become convinced that A causes B. However, this position raises problems, as it seems that certain kinds of constant conjunction are merely accidental and cannot be equated with causation.

An individual sees the sun rise in the east on 100 consecutive days. They become aware of the rule that the sun rises in the east, and then live by the rule that the sun rises in the east.

However, as Hume pointed out, perceived constant conjunction of events in the world may be as much accidental as a rule.

Even if within the community that B lives in there are public rules, B will only know about them from what she perceives through her senses. But as before, what she perceives through her senses to be a rule may in fact be accidental, meaning that if she does live her life following a rule, she must have made it herself. IE, B also lives by private rules.

RussellA;920986:IE, if individuals live by rules, as Hume's principle of constant conjunction shows, the individual cannot have discovered them through their senses, but must have made them, and in this sense are private rules. If an individual has made the rule, then they must know how to correctly apply it. However, even if the individual has made the rule, they may or may not decide to be bound by it.

You are right to point out that each individual in a community needs to learn the rules for themselves It follows, therefore, that each of us must formulate the rules on the basis of our experience and apply them for themselves. What you seem to neglect is the point that our formulation and application of the rules is corrected by further experience. (Hume doesn't say that, but it is implicit in Hume's argument. Moreover, it is how we can distinguish between mere regularities and rules.)

Quoting RussellA

An individual sees the sun rise in the east on 100 consecutive days. They become aware of the rule that the sun rises in the east, and then live by the rule that the sun rises in the east.

Quoting RussellA

But as before, what she perceives through her senses to be a rule may in fact be accidental, meaning that if she does live her life following a rule, she must have made it herself.

I guess you mean when she makes a "leap" from the limited sample to a generalization and then treats that generalization as a rule, she has made the rule for herself. I also guess that the rule takes the form of "when the clock shows that it is morning, you can expect the sun to rise."

Quoting RussellA

If an individual has made the rule, then they must know how to correctly apply it.

Well, let's suppose that's correct. Then, in this case, what she knows is that she does not determine what is correct or incorrect. The sun does. That is, if the sun doesn't rise, she will need to abandon or modify the rule.

You have not recognized the paradox implicit in the idea that I am the final authority over my own rules. If it is true, it means that nothing that I do can conflict with the rule. Which means that the rule is empty, has no force.

Quoting Richard B

There is quite a lot of stage setting that would occur to understand if such an individual had such a rule.

Yes. Hume's version of this seems to me to be that it is a brute fact of human nature that we build up expectations as a result of constant conjunctions. I'm not sure how far Wittgenstein would disagree.
[quote= Phil. Inv. 217]Once I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: “This is simply what I do".

If we say that rationality is a question of our agreement in ways of life, we seem to eliminate the distinction between those agreements that we call "correct" or "incorrect" by some standard that is not set by our agreement and those agreements that are simply a matter of making a deal, so that "correct" and "incorrect" do not apply.

You will understand, I suppose, that I think that agreements that are correct or incorrect are, by and large, rational agreements and the other kind are, roughly, matters of taste or convenience or pragmatics. (The difficulty of agreements about values sits awkwardly between the two.)

does [saying disagreements happen at a time and place] mean that such failures can eventually be overcome at other times and in other contexts? If so, then limitation doesn't seem to lie in reason itself, but in people's finite use of it, their patience, etc.

If the lion comment is taken head on it is just stupid.

There is quite a lot of stage setting that would occur to understand if such an individual had such a rule.

“Agreement” is here not the same either. We come to an agreement on some criteria—like how long one foot will be—but we do not agree “to” our practices (it is “agree” in the sense more of aligning, over our entire history of doing things). Still, we do judge whether, say, an apology, is correct or incorrect, but the criteria for that are different than true and false, as I can accept an apology that you do poorly (“accepting” is part of how it works differently, its “rationality” or “grammar” as Witt calls it).

It is exactly this framework that interprets skepticism as a theoretical “problem”, rather than the discovery that there is no fact that will ensure resolution of our moral conflicts, thus we are responsible for solving our ongoing disagreements, because we do have the means.

All criteria reflect our interests in our lives (what and how we value something), it’s only metaphysical criteria that wish to step outside of any particular practice or situation.

Sorry, it is not that we cannot understand lions, just not talking ones; it is meant to be the statement of a fact, not a scientific claim (which I try to explain here), because it is said in contrast to when we CAN work out other cultural practices, to show that we sometimes just choose not to.

agreement is different from agreeing with someone else where we shall go for lunch

I'm not sure that all moral disagreements can be resolved

I would add that the wish to step outside any particular practice, however, is incoherent. Any attempt to do simply generates a new context.

2. Are you suggesting that we could work out the common ground with a lion, but that we choose not to? Which suggests that we could if we wanted to.

Are you saying that we can understand lions, but that if a lion could speak to us, we would not be able to understand what was said? Of course, communication would not be instant, but Wittgenstein seems to be suggesting that there is some insoluble problem. I can't see why he would think so.

Your example of apology is a very interesting one, that I would love to discuss separately; it is very relevant to ethics.

But the metaphysical problem is generalized and abstracted out of time, place, actors, i.e. anything we would call “a context”.

Yes, a “form of life” is not a conclusion or argued, etc (though “acquiesce” implies choice; we are indoctrinated, assimilated—Rousseau’s “consent” unconsciously.) That is not to say we don’t have forms of argument or refutation, means of judging loyalty and fairness (“you picked last time”).

But the point is that that frailty is only a possible occurrence, and so should not be interpreted into a systemic problem (concluding that there is no “rationality”, intelligibility).

He wanted something that would be an uncontroversial “very general fact of nature” (PI #143 and p. 230) that he presumes would be accepted as a fact, such as: parrots don’t talk to themselves (#344).

And Witt’s idea of a moral dilemma is not like a clash of interests about a certain type of topic (say about abortion), but when everyone is at a loss as to what to do, how to go on—which is an event (and could involve any of our practices).

I would say he choose poorly (though perhaps, as worse with Nietzsche, he can’t help poking people in the eye).

This is Witt’s arrogant style on full display, as he will even state without argument the implications he posits for, say, “believing”, as if everyone would agree.

J.L. Austin’s A Plea for Excuses is a work about ethics in that way.

once you've learnt the skill, it's too late to ask questions

It's the idea that you can (should) present examples and observations and leave the reader to work out their significance

A similar thing that crops up in these relativistic accounts is a sort of cognitive relativism. I'll let A.C. Grayling describe this one:

Cognitive relativism is a troubling thesis. Consider the point that it makes the concepts of truth, reality, and value a matter of what sharers in a form of life happen to make of them at a particular time and place, with other forms of life at other times and places giving rise to different, perhaps utterly different or even contrary, conceptions of them. In effect this means that the concepts in question are not concepts of truth and the rest, as we usually wish to understand them, but concepts of opinion and belief. We are, if cognitive relativism is true (but what does true now mean?), in error if we think that truth and knowledge have the meanings we standardly attach to them, for there is only relative truth, there is only reality as we, in this conceptual community at this period in its history, conceive it.

I am going to start a read-though of The Blue Book soon, but the Anscombe sounds interesting.

Also, because we have a practice is why and how it can be rational to question, push back, live differently, etc.

As well, the part people skip over is that his examples (rule-following, pointing, “seeing”, etc.) are practices that everyone can weigh in on (we each have an equal right to claims/there is no privileged position), so the proposed criteria we use, and the “grammar” of how they work, have to be accepted (by you) for it to be philosophical worth drawing conclusions from (as evidence).

I guess there is a lot of "trouble" to go around when it comes to this thesis.

I should say that I feel more inclined to just say that their concept of "truth" no longer resembles mine; so sooner or later they are not part of the family but mere strangers.

Do we need to police the use of the words "truth", "reality" and "value", so we can ensure a unifying meaning for each of these terms?

Oh, surely, members of the same family can disagree without ceasing to be members of the family. There's no black-and-white rule here - just shades of grey.

Well, herein lies the difficulty of relying too heavily on metaphors. When it comes to family relations, it seems that they can exist even if no one believes they do. For example, if Ajax is the biological father of Ophelia, this relation of paternity exists even if neither Ajax nor Ophelia (nor any of their family members) are aware of it. And not only that, but evidence of the paternity relationship is "out there" to be discovered.

I should say that I feel more inclined to just say that their concept of "truth" no longer resembles mine; so sooner or later they are not part of the family but mere strangers.

Yet because this holds for families does it mean it holds for notions o f the True or the Good?

'm not sure how the vague metaphor here is supposed to address the point TBH.

But funny enough this is a point of contention in Wittgensteinian circles precisely because he uses a lot of vague metaphors.

As I see it, A.C Graying desire is to hold on to the idea that there is one common essence for "truth", "reality", and "value" because the only alternative is "cognitive relativism." However, what I was suggesting is we need not fall into relativism either. First, words like "truth", "reality", and "value" will have multiple uses and thus have family resemblances that will related these word conceptually. These multiple uses are discovered by examining the forms of life which are grounded in the some human activity. That said, these concepts can take place in such radically different forms of life, the family resemblances are not strong enough to call them related. Hence, I introduce the term "stranger" to describe such a case. For example, if we visit another world where the inhabitants utilize symbols like 1, 2, +, -, etc and made expressions such as 1 + 1 = 3 were carried out, would we want to say this is some sort of arithmetic that was carried out? Or is the judgment so radically different that we would not want to call it "arithmetic"? To say "truth" is relative seems to presuppose that there is something conceptual linking all these words together but somehow the outcomes conflict. But that need not be the case, if these concepts are used is such dramatically different ways in which humans act and judge in entirely different ways, why should we even talk as if they had some relationship that deserve to fall under the banner of "truth".

There are different family structures, there are half siblings, step siblings, etc. Yet, what culture believes in people who do not have biological mothers or fathers? Outside of miracles or myth, where do people accept: "that person was never in the womb?" or "oh yes, Jessie over th[u]ere is another immaculate conception?"

Absolutely nowhere is the answer. It is truly miraculous for there to be a human being without a biological father or biological mother. A cloned human being would still have a "parent" who had two biological parents and they would still (barring astounding scientific progress) need to be born.

If someone told you they had no father and had never been born of a woman would your reaction be a shrug and the thought: "why yes, people of some cultures aren't born, I suppose they spring forth from rocks fully formed? There is no truth about biological parentage in these parts." You have to be on a severe overdose of pomo to believe it.

And to be honest, I think the continual contrasting of pernicious forms of relativism with "Final Answers" (capitalized of course), "One True Canonical Descriptions," "The Only Right Way," and the like, is a strawman/false dichotomy.

if these concepts are used is such dramatically different ways in which humans act and judge in entirely different ways, why should we even talk as if they had some relationship that deserve to fall under the banner of "truth".

But to my mind this capability doesn't jive well with the concept of entirely disparate, sui generis forms of reason (e.g., that Chinese reason is entirely different from French reason).

But has not history shown that what intelligent people called “reasonable” and “unreasonable” has changed from time to time

And yet this thesis seems entirely implausible. For instance, I have never heard of a culture who does arithmetic completely different from any other culture. Where is the arithmetic that is untranslatable?

And aside from that, it seems to leave the door open on an all encompassing skepticism, for on this account how can anyone be sure that they truly share a form of life with anyone else?

I think these sorts of biological constants (constant across diverse historical/cultural variances) is what Wittgenstein is sometimes pointing to with the "form of life."

But this is cultural relativism, not cognitive relativism.

We would share with extraterrestrials all that is common to all corners of the universe, limits on the information carrying capacity of various media, ratios, etc. And this might profitably be thought of as an even broader "form of life," the form of life common to all organisms living in our universe.

On this view, if one reads Aristotle's Organon, it might seem that Aristotle is discussing a logic quite similar to our own (and to "common sense") but really there is no way for us to know if we mean the same thing. Being separated by vast cultural differences, it rather seems we should not mean the same things when we refer to syllogisms, premises, etc.

Now the cognitive relativist can always claims that different forms of arithmetic and logic only seem translatable—that we don't really understand Aristotle or Shankara at all. However, this seems pretty far fetched. And aside from that, it seems to leave the door open on an all encompassing skepticism, for on this account how can anyone be sure that they truly share a form of life with anyone else?

Wittgenstein's point that any set of actions is still consistent with an infinite number of rules still holds. This holds with the study of nature as well. Any sort of "natural law," based solely on past observations seems doomed to underdetermination.

But has not history shown that what intelligent people called “reasonable” and “unreasonable” has changed from time to time.

Yep, and this was my point, if they are completely different in action/ judgement, why call it arithmetic at all.

Well it will not be from some self evident absolute certain proposition. But that we act and judge similarly in most case to sustain the form of life.

One need not take as one's target so radical a form of the thesis to show that cognitive relativism is unacceptable, however. This can be demonstrated as follows. Suppose that cognitive relativism is the case. How then do we recognize another form of life as another form of life? The ability to detect that something is a form of life and that it differs from our own surely demands that there be a means for us to identify its presence and to specify what distinguishes it from ours. But such means are unavailable if the other form of life is impenetrable to us, that is, if it is closed against our attempts to interpret it enough to say that it is a form of life. This means that if we are to talk of other forms of life at all we must be able to recognize them as such; we must be able to recognize the existence of behaviour and patterns of practices which go to make up a form of life in which there is agreement among the participants by reference to which their practices can go on. Moreover, if we are to see that the form of life is different from our own we have to be able to recognize the differences; this is possible only if we can interpret enough of the other form of life to make those differences apparent. And therefore there has to be sufficient common ground between the two forms of life to permit such interpretation.

The supposition is not really specific enough to sensibly answer the question. We have to make decisions step by step, acknowledging mis-steps as we discover them

Wittgenstein RFM:In short this money, or what looks like money, has among them a quite different role from among us.

And yet this thesis seems entirely implausible. For instance, I have never heard of a culture who does arithmetic completely different from any other culture. Where is the arithmetic that is untranslatable?

However, it is not impossible for the observing community who can see these differences to carry on conversation among themselves since there is agreement in use and judgment in their language.

Re PI 65, I think this has simply been proven wrong by advances in linguistics and information theory. We can identify similarities. I find it hard to even imagine Wittgenstein wanting to argue this point in the modern context given his respect for the sciences.

Re PI 65, I think this has simply been proven wrong by advances in linguistics and information theory. We can identify similarities. I find it hard to even imagine Wittgenstein wanting to argue this point in the modern context given his respect for the sciences.

Re PI 65, I think this has simply been proven wrong by advances in linguistics and information theory. We can identify similarities.

"Family resemblances" is not an "idea" or "theory" that can be proved wrong.

My point is that given advances in the study of language it is certainly now too trivial to warrant much attention.

We might make a similar move in getting rid of the concept of "game" and moving to the broader concept of "system," (which seems to be far more common in linguistics).

So I am not sure I would conflate "triviality" with generality.

I don't really understand what you mean here by warrant attention. You either agree with the claim or you don't. People can do advanced, even rigorous, linguistics study about the structure of language and still agree with the notion of family resemblance. So unless you are suggesting that modern linguistic contradicts it, I don't understand the consequence of what you are saying. It's like saying that someone who studied the mating behavior of a certain kind of insect is not interested in questions about the definition of life - so what? People interested in specialist linguistic fields are not necessarily going to be interested in a more general concept from the philosophy of language. I suspect you conflate Wittgenstein's philosophical arguments and rhetoric against the logical positivism at the time for a full-blown scientific theory of language which it clearly is not.

there now exist ways to describe similarities in languages and codes with much more rigor."

The question is not: "is it wrong " but "is it so broad as to be trivial," i.e. "all languages must share some things, but I shall not identify any," is a claim that really doesn't say anything of substance, (nor is it a novel claim).

Hence the reference to information theory. It turns out there do seems to be things all physical systems of communication must share if they are to communicate at all. And there are lots of things we can say about the throughput of codes, redundancy, etc. and these do indeed seem to explain a good deal about human language and its structure.

I have no idea why you thought I was referring to the vague concept of "family resemblance" in the first place and not PI65's far more provocative claim that there is no way to define what is common to all languages.

What I was objecting to is the idea that such vagueness has to be how we speak of language because it isn't possible to do better.

My comments were specifically in the context of that section being supplied in defense of the cognitive relativism thesis

Hence the reference to information theory. It turns out there do seems to be things all physical systems of communication must share if they are to communicate at all.

I think Wittgenstein's initial disappointment may have swung him a bit too far over towards seeing difficulties vis-á-vis language as insoluble

For example, the biological definition of life lists certain characteristics which are important to consider, without committing all of them being instantiated in any particular case. Or again, lists of symptoms in medicine are not always offered on the basis that all of them will be instantiated in every case.

"Family resemblances" is not an "idea" or "theory" that can be proved wrong. It's a vague metaphor that one could call "true" so long as there are any shared similarities between whatever one considers to be a "language-game," (which is also a term that is left vague).

I am saying "this level of vagueness is no longer necessary or helpful; there now exist ways to describe similarities in languages, animal communication, and codes with much more rigor—to actually say something beyond the trivial and banal."

*And I should note that plenty of Wittgensteinians make admirable attempts to dispell the vagueness, even at the risk of theories that sound wildly counterintuitive and implausible. It is only a certain type that seems to really thrive on the vagueness and the ability to avoid error by never really saying anything of substance.

Interestingly enough, Wittgenstein has some interesting things to say about vagueness of concepts. ... Is an indistinct photograph a picture of a person at all?

Also, the argument in the quote from Grayling in the OP is pretty much the argument Davidson presented in "On the very idea of a conceptual scheme". Davidson's triangulation of speaker, interpreter and truth comes in to play here, at least as a first approximation.

Forms of life cannot be incommensurable because they must all occur embedded in our activities in the world. So despite not being able to speak Chinese (an increasingly inappropriate example for all sorts of reasons) we will recognise a Chinese builder or grocer by their activities… Forms of life are fastened together by all of them occurring in the world.

Fair enough. I don't view Wittgenstein in terms of relativism.

To take a hackneyed example, an extreme metaphysics might hold that we can say nothing about things outside of our perception. So they can say nothing about the cup when it is put in the cupboard - not even that the cup is in the cupboard. But if, when you ask them for the cup, they open the cupboard and retrieve it, they put the lie to their metaphysics by their acts.

Forms of life cannot be incommensurable because they must all occur embedded in our activities in the world. So despite not being able to speak Chinese (an increasingly inappropriate example for all sorts of reasons) we will recognise a Chinese builder or grocer by their activities.

Is there not a sense in which worlds are intersubjectively constructed through forms of life?

I can think of no better example of this than John Searle's analysis of "Proper Names." In his analysis, he asks if proper names are just a set of descriptions. What follows in his conclusion is that proper names perform a great function in language by not being precise descriptions.

Epistemic vagueness is not really much of an issue. What becomes the interesting issue is whether it is meaningful to describe reality itself as being ontically vague in any proper or useful sense. And a Peircean might rather think it does.

That someone is following a rule is shown by what they do. Indeed, there is in a strong sense nothing more to the rule than what one does in a particular circumstance. There is no "understand rules as we do... following the same rules, etc." apart from what we do in particular case. The rule is not understood by setting it out in words, but by enacting it.

What one says has less import than what one does. And what is meant by "this form of life" is displayed by what one does - don't look for a form of life just in language, look at what is being done.

Folk are following the same rule as you if they do what you would do.

But there are cases where a similar vagueness suits the particular needs of other sciences. For example, the biological definition of life lists certain characteristics which are important to consider, without committing all of them being instantiated in any particular case.

"ontically" confuses me.

Is there not a sense in which worlds are intersubjectively constructed through forms of life?

Wouldn't this just be behaviorism?

Can Nature be actually indeterminate and not just always determinate? Is there a state where there is no fact of the matter, and thus not even properly any "state"?

We shift from talking about yes or no absolutes – such as determinism – to graded relativities. That gives us more options that might better fit what we see.

To exist can always be some mix of the definitely constrained and the radically free. As in chance and necessity.

There is no "One True Feature," to point to for defining life, but we generally don't have much disagreement over whether prions or self-replicating silicon crystals are alive.

Is a fossil alive? Does it have the right sort of family resemblance? Obviously, to answer the second question means being a specific about what might constitute such a resemblance.

That someone is following a rule is shown by what they do. Indeed, there is in a strong sense nothing more to the rule than what one does in a particular circumstance. There is no "understand rules as we do... following the same rules, etc." apart from what we do in particular case.

Pedantically, I think you must mean "was a fossil alive". You are right. We can be (but may not be) quite specific about the criteria that determine each case. It's just that different critieria apply in different cases.

We can be (but may not be) quite specific about the criteria that determine each case. It's just that different critieria apply in different cases.

My point is that if people are thinking about rules differently then there is a difference, regardless of whether or not their behaviors are identical. Your wife might act the same way if she feels duty bound or somehow coerced into acting like she loves you as if she really loved you, but surely her interpretation of what she is doing (playing the loving wife versus being in love) matters.

But I'm not sure that "graded" necessarily implies "relativities". The colour spectrum is a series of graded stages in a continuum, all of which is, in a sense, deterministic (definite).

This doesn't convey any clear meaning to me. Perhaps I'm just being dense.

A rule isn't just "whenever behavior is the same."

But on an account that there is "nothing more to the rule than what one does in a particular circumstance," I'm not sure how you're supposed to explain these situations.

...people move the bishop diagonally because they know that's the rule.

Learning the rules is not playing the game.

And how does one demonstrate that they understand the rule, apart from moving the piece?

ou posts do not come through on my mentions. That's somewhat discourteous.

There is no "One True Feature," to point to for defining life, but we generally don't have much disagreement over whether prions or self-replicating silicon crystals are alive.

Right, learning the rules is a prerequisite to playing the game.

understanding

Yes, this is pretty much the point of family resemblances so I just don't really understand what you are criticizing about it when you agree with it. I feel like you are attributing more to this concept than required and criticizing it for things not intended.

And what is understanding over and above the ability to enact or demonstrate understanding?

Attributing rules to the behavior is chronically underdetermined / indeterminate on some level, and this issue regresses chronically. You can observe some behavior whose description by a rule is completely indeterminate; nonetheless, a person attributes a rule anyway.

Chance and necessity, flux and stasis, are various ways of saying the same thing, capturing the same systems logic, that should be familiar from Greek metaphysics.

Its systems science. A system is the hierarchical story of top-down constraints shaping local degrees of freedom, and those local degrees in turn acting bottom-up to (re)construct the globally prevailing state of constraint. So in Peircean jargon, the continuity of global lawful synechism and the discreteness of local tychism or chance events.

Actually, I meant "is." A fossil bears a close resemblance to the organism it is a fossil of. This could be considered a "family resemblance" in the metaphorical sense, no?

Right, well, this is precisely what my comment was on. Wittgenstein knows he is being vague. He calls himself out on it. And he seems to say "yup, but what can you do?" Well, I think we can do better. If you're vague enough, you can avoid ever being "wrong" (a plus I suppose), but potentially at the cost of triviality.

One could conceivably learn the rules of a game without ever playing a game, which is a problem for your description.

How does this connect to Wittgenstein?

In classical physics, which is known to describe correctly macroscopic objects (to a hitherto practically unlimited accuracy) when quantum effects are imperceptible, all magnitudes have a definite value at any given time that can in principle be simultaneously known with certainty at that moment by their measurement, even though they may not always then be predicted with certainty; for example, when the classical evolution is chaotic, or may be difficult to measure. Hence, vagueness is considered alien to classical physics.

In the case of microscopic entities to which Quantum Mechanics pertains, there is vagueness the origin of which is substantially different. Vagueness in quantum mechanics appears endemic, arising directly from the indeterminate nature of quantum entities themselves rather than a choice of concepts within a flexible theoretical framework. Indeed, in quantum physics spatial location can be almost entirely indeterminate, such as when the momentum is specified with extremely high precision, say in the case of a free electron.

Unlike the situation of macroscopic entities with vague geographical characteristics, it is not the case that the concept electron is overdetermined in the sense that the criteria for it to have a unique spatial location—or for that matter, for it to be spatially dispersed—cannot be satisfied in principle; nor is the concept of electron underdetermined in the sense that the definitions of its physical properties are insufficiently precise.

In the case of quantum systems, properties can be considered objectively indefinite and sets of propositions regarding them complementary to specific other sets of propositions, so that it becomes impossible to jointly attribute them. Thus, quantum mechanics involves a unique form of vagueness distinct from those considered before.

It would be vacuous for a biologist to say "all life shares a family resemblance," and to stop there. Whatever "all life," is it must surely have some sort of resemblance to be deemed "all life" in the first place. What biologists do in reality is posit a constellation of features that make up this "family resemblance," e.g. having a metabolism, undergoing selection, etc. If one stops at the metaphor and introduces nothing else one hasn't said anything. All of being can be said to resemble all that is in some way or another.

I suspect you conflate Wittgenstein's philosophical arguments and rhetoric against the logical positivism at the time for a full-blown scientific theory of language which it clearly is not.

I feel like you are attributing more to this concept than required and criticizing it for things not intended.

I would say no, understanding has a phenomenological element.

As a previous poster already pointed out, all empirical science is undetermined. The problem of underdetermination is about as broad as the Problem of Induction or the Scandal of Deduction. It would seem to make most knowledge impossible if one demands "absolute certainty." That's why I never found the arguments about rule following from underdetermination particularly convincing. You could make the same sort of argument about Newton's Laws, quantum mechanics—essentially all empirical claims, or about all induction. That the future is like the past is "undetermined," as is memory being reliable. Thus, the issue of under determination is as much a factor for any sort of social rule following as it is for some person designing their own board game and play testing it by themselves; democratization doesn't eliminate the issue.

But I don't think this warrants nescience vis-á-vis phenomena like "understanding a rule," that we are well acquainted with either. The demand for "absolute certainty" is the result of a good deal of ridiculousness in philosophy

Yes, of course you're right. It's just that that it isn't like the resemblances between one dog and another, but between a dog and a sculpture of it. We wouldn't confuse a fossil with a living member of the species, would we?

Family resemblance isn't intended as a basis for biological theorizing. The notion of family resemblances is not intended to do any intellectual work for a biologist.

The "oh, now I get it, moment" you mention is definitely included as part of enacting or demonstrating understanding, and I have many times had that kind of thing in mind when thinking about it.

The idea is not to resolve indeterminacy. The idea is that we enact appropriate behaviors even when a characterization of them is simultaneously indeterminate in principle. Social interaction doesn't make rules less indeterminate. We learn how to act appropriately by interacting with our environment, including the appropriate use of words when we interact socially, para-socially or whatever.

It would be vacuous for a biologist to say "all life shares a family resemblance," and to stop there. Whatever "all life," is it must surely have some sort of resemblance to be deemed "all life" in the first place. What biologists do in reality is posit a constellation of features that make up this "family resemblance," e.g. having a metabolism, undergoing selection, etc. If one stops at the metaphor and introduces nothing else one hasn't said anything. All of being can be said to resemble all that is in some way or another.

67.” I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than "family resemblances"; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way.— And I shall say: 'games' form a family. And for instance the kinds of number form a family in the same way. Why do we call something a "number"? Well, perhaps because it has a—direct—relationship with several things that have hitherto been called number; and this can be said to give it an indirect relation ship to other things we call the same name. And we extend our con cept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres. But if someone wished to say: "There is something common to all these constructions—namely the disjunction of all their common properties"—I should reply: Now you are only playing with words. One might as well say: "Something runs through the whole thread— namely the continuous overlapping of those fibres.

But it is appropriate for the linguist, philosopher of language, or semiotican? Don't grunts and screams share a family resemblance with speech? The issue is that you still need the "right sort of family resemblance," since all things resemble each other in at least some ways.

If someone's behavior is expanded to include their thoughts, experiencing, etc

isn't saying much of anything.

Ok, but wouldn't this hold for all activities, not just social ones. And wouldn't this be true or animals as well?

I do think Wittgenstein brings in social interaction to fix the underdetermination problem. That part seems fairly straightforward. I think I might disagree that it actually addressed the problem though. The argument from underdetermination is too strong, it proves too much.

I would say the intention is to dissociate the idea of categorizing actions, based on some rule which is inherently indeterminate, from the actions themselves. We act regardless of the indeterminacy

Kripke understands Wittgenstein's “skeptical paradox” to be that since rules and, by extension, the meanings of words can be interpreted in indefinitely different ways, “there can be no such thing as meaning anything by any word. Each new application we make is a leap in the dark; any present intention could be interpreted so as to accord with anything we may choose to do. So there can be neither accord, nor conflict. This is what Wittgenstein said in §201.” 48 This is the problem that reveals the need for social interaction for both Kripke and Davidson. But, as has been pointed out many times, PI §201 continues past where Kripke stops reading:

“it can be seen that there is a misunderstanding here from the mere fact that in the course of our argument we give one interpretation after another…. What this shews is that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call ‘obeying the rule' and ‘going against it' in actual cases.” 49

The skeptical paradox that Kripke fixes on is actually being presented as “a misunderstanding,” a pseudo-problem produced by the artificial perspective that gets foisted on us when we cease interacting naturally:

“the confusions which occupy us arise when language is like an engine idling, not when it is doing work.” 50

When we stop performing the daily activities in which understanding comes easily, strange possibilities pop up that cannot be ruled out by reasoning alone. This is when it strikes us that “any interpretation still hangs in the air along with what it interprets, and cannot give it any support.” 51 Rules suddenly look terrifyingly unsupported and we are tempted to cry out in despair, as Kripke does, that “the entire idea of meaning vanishes into thin air.”

Luckily the point of PI §201 is not the endless interpretations but the non-interpretive immediate grasping that occurs “in actual cases.” The infinite interpretability functions as a reductio of the idea that we are interpreting rules rather than just following them in a more direct and practical sense. 54 If we can recover this mundane understanding, overlooked because of its ubiquitous inconspicuousness, 55 then we will dismiss the skeptical paradox the way Hume's philosopher laughs at his own bizarre thoughts once he gets a good beer and a pool cue in his hands.

“‘How can one follow a rule?' That is what I should like to ask. But how does it come about that I want to ask that, when after all I find no kind of difficulty in following a rule? Here we obviously misunderstand the facts that lie before our eyes.” 56

Wittgenstein considers his job to be assembling reminders of our normal immersion in the meaningfulness of everyday life.

Sociality then becomes this invoked as this "causal" mechanism. Obviously though this is not much of an explanation by itself and I think probably much too restrictive. The deeper answer IMO is brains, which cannot be inherently be interpreted representationally (human-interpretably symbolic to be more specific [since the word representation can be plausibly used in an extremely vague sense]), interacting with the environment, and sometimes other brains.

Isn’t the naturalized, empirical concept of brain an attempt to rescue a picture theory of meaning by recourse to a causal physiology as a ground for the seeming ungrounded indeterminacy of symbolic interaction?

blindly

"[i]On a moment-to-moment basis, the brain is assimilating dynamic, multidimensional information about the world in order to produce rich, context-dependent behaviors. Confronted with such complexity, experimental neuroscientists traditionally design controlled experiments to reduce the dimensionality of the problem to a few factors conceived by the experimenter (Fisher, 1935). This reductionist program relies on a core commitment to the assumption that the neural computations supporting many of our cognitive functions can be decontextualized and decomposed into a handful of latent features, that these features are human interpretable and can be manipulated in isolation, and that the piecemeal recomposition of these features will yield a satisfying understanding of brain and behavior.

In parallel to the research in neuroscience and psychology laboratories, artificial neural networks (ANNs; see Box 1) are attaining human-level behavioral performance across many tasks ... This research program effectively abandoned traditional experimental design and simple interpretable models ... Such models learn how to recognize faces or respond to natural-language inquiries directly from the structure of the real world by optimizing millions of parameters (“big” models) over millions of examples (“big” data;
LeCun et al., 2015).[/i]"

"Although the human mind inspires us to touch the stars, it is grounded in the mindless billions of direct-fit parameters of System 1. Therefore, direct-fit interpolation is not the end goal but rather the starting point for understanding the architecture of higher-order cognition. There is no other substrate from which System 2 could arise. Many of the processes in System 1 are shared with other animals (as in perceptual systems), and some are unique to humans (as in grammar learning), but all are executed in an automatic, fast, and often unconscious way. The brute-force direct-fit interpolation that guides learning in these systems, similar to evolution, can go further than we previously thought in explaining many cognitive functions in humans (e.g., learning syntax in natural text without imposing rule-based reasoning; see Box 2)."

"It can be tempting to impose our own intuitive or folk-psychological interpretations onto the fitted model, but this is misguided. If a generic network learns such a rule, this rule is likely inherent in the training set and is thus not so much a meaningful property of the network as it is a property of the data (see Figure 2). These interpretable rules arise incidentally, as an emergent byproduct of the fitting procedure. The incidental emergence of such rules is not a “goal” of the network, and the network does not “use” the rules to extrapolate. This mindset, in fact, resembles pre-Darwinian teleological thinking and “just-so stories” in biology [as opposed to blind Darwinian natural selection] (Gould and Lewontin, 1979, Mayr, 1992). Evolution provides perhaps the most ubiquitous and well-known example of a biological fitting process that learns to act in the world while being blind to the underlying structure of the problems and their optimal solutions."

Without further elaboration/clarification, I am not sure what I see written here is much different from Kripke's sceptical solution. Rules are indeterminate but we act coherently anyway blindly.

Isn’t the naturalized, empirical concept of brain an attempt to rescue a picture theory of meaning by recourse to a causal physiology as a ground for the seeming ungrounded indeterminacy of symbolic interaction?
— Joshs

I don't really understand what's been asked here. The brain can provide an explanation for blind intelligible behavior without symbolic interpretation. The brain as a prediction machine that can correct or update the parameters (from "error") responsible for its behavior, and underlies our ability to act coherently

Evolution is a blind fitting process by which organisms become adapted to their environment. Does the brain use similar brute-force fitting processes to learn how to perceive and act upon the world? Recent advances in artificial neural networks have exposed the power of optimizing millions of synaptic weights over millions of observations to operate robustly in real-world contexts

“[t]he world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject who is nothing but a project of the world; and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world that it itself projects”

and yet, you will never know how it is to be Chinese, because you were not raised in China, it wasn't the culture within which you learned about the world, you didn't attend Chinese middle school and your first friends weren't Chinese.

Here's my contention:That someone is following a rule is shown by what they do.

Of course not. But if one wants to explain why we don't confuse them one has to move from the vague metaphor to something more concrete.

In recent years P.P. models have moved closer to fully embodied 4EA approaches in recognizing the inseparable reciprocity of interaction between brain, body and environment.

Put differently, Kripke comes up with rules describing the behavior of an autonomous subject which are not indeterminate, and then attempts to use them to explain the indeterminate use of rules in social situations.

We cannot say that we all respond as we do to '68+ 57' because we all grasp the concept of addition in the same way, that we share common responses to particular addition problems because we share a common concept of addition. (Frege, for example, would have endorsed such an explanation, but one hardly needs to be a philosopher to find it obvious and natural.) For Wittgenstein, an 'explanation' of this kind ignores his treatment of the sceptical paradox and its solution. There is no objective fact - that we all mean addition by '+', or even that a given individual does - that explains our agreement in particular cases. Rather our license to say of each other that we mean addition by '+' is part of a 'language game' that sustains itself only because of the brute fact that we generally agree. (Nothing about 'grasping concepts' guarantees that it will not break down tomorrow.) The rough uniformities in our arithmetical behavior may or may not some day be given an explanation on the neurophysiological level, but such an explanation is not here in question. 77

Note again the analogy with the Humean case. Naively, we may wish to explain the observed concomitance of fire and heat by a causal, heat-producing, 'power' in the fire. The Humean alleges that any such use of causal powers to explain the regularity is meaningless. Rather we play a language game that allows us to attribute such a causal power to the fire as long as the regularity holds up. The regularity must be taken as a brute fact. So too for Wittgenstein.

This leaves us in the thrall of a Cartesian skepticism, a gap between the subject and a social world outside of the subject (parallel to neural models positing an internal prediction machine adapting itself to an impervious external world).

How does agreement emerge in the case of a term for a sensation, say 'pain'? It is not as simple as the case of 'table'. When will adults attribute to a child mastery ofthe avowal "I
am in pain"?80 The child, if he learns the avowal correctly, will utter it when he feels pain and not otherwise. By analogy with the case of 'table', it would appear that the adult should endorse this utterance if he, the adult, feels (his own? the child's?) pain. Of course we know that this is not the case. Rather the adult will endorse the child's avowal if the child's behavior (crying, agitated motion, etc.) and, perhaps, the external circumstances surrounding the child, indicate that he is in pain. If a child generally avows pain under such appropriate behavioral and external circumstances and generally does not do so otherwise, the adult will say of him that he has mastered the avowal, "I am in pain."

Since, in the case of discourse on pain and other sensations, the adult's confirmation whether he agrees with the child's avowal is based on the adult's observation of the child's behavior and circumstances, the fact that such behavior and circumstances characteristic of pain exist is essential in this case to the working of Wittgenstein's sceptical solution. This, then, is what is meant by the remark, "An 'inner process'
stands in need of outward criteria." Roughly speaking, outward criteria for an inner process are circumstances, observable in the behavior of an individual, which, when present, would lead others to agree with his avowals. If the individual generally makes his avowals under the right such circumstances, others will say of him that he has mastered the appropriate expression ("I am in pain," "I feel itchy," etc.).

Where is the social component in the operation of this prediction machine?

To put the question in enactivist terms, does it make sense to analyze behavior in terms of subpersonal mechanisms solipsistically ensconced within a brain? This is the critique often leveled against active inference predictive processing approaches. In recent years P.P. models have moved closer to fully embodied 4EA approaches in recognizing the inseparable reciprocity of interaction between brain, body and environment.

What’s missing here is the crucial normative character of perception and cognition. Perception is not not a one-way fitting process between organism and world in which the organism must adapt its perception to the facts of an environment external to its functioning. It is instead a reciprocal process where the nature of the ‘external ‘facts’ confronting the organism arrive already pre-interpreted in accordance with the organism’s normative purposes and goals.

"Our affordances are constrained by our bodies and brains, and there is an intimate relationship between how our bodies and neural networks are wired and what we can learn."

"Direct fit, as an algorithmic procedure to minimize an objective function, allows neural networks to learn the transformation between external input to meaningful actions, without the need to explicitly represent underlying rules and principles in a human-interpretable way.

A major task taken up by the school of ecological psychology was to characterize each animal’s objective functions, conceptualized as affordances, based on the information the animal needs to behave adaptively and survive in the world (Gibson, 1979, Michaels and Carello, 1981). For cats, a chair may afford an intermediate surface for jumping onto the kitchen counter, whereas for humans, it may afford a surface on which to sit while eating. Like in evolution, there is no one correct way to fit the world, and different direct-fit networks, guided by different objective functions, can be used in the same ecological niche to improve fit to different aspects of the environment. Furthermore, as argued by the school of ecological psychology, information is defined as the affordances that emerge in interactions between the organism and its ecological niche. As opposed to strongly representational approaches common in computational neuroscience, the direct-fit approach learns arbitrary functions for facilitating behavior and is capable of mapping sensory input to motor actions without ever explicitly reconstructing the world or learning explicit rules about the latent structure of the outside world. Marr (1982), for example, speaks favorably of Gibson’s theory of vision but, unsatisfied with the theory’s vague treatment of information processing, instead suggests that the goal of vision is to recover a geometrical representation of the world. In contrast to the representational stance, the direct-fit framework is aligned with Gibson’s treatment of the goal of vision: to recover information in the world that affords the organism its adaptive behaviors.

Gibson believed that animals are entangled with their environment in a closed perception-action feedback loop: they perceive to act and act to perceive. Furthermore, actions and affordances are shaped and constrained by the structure of the environment and the organism’s physiology. Similarly, from the direct-fit perspective, neural networks implicitly learn the structure of the environment as a means to an end, but this learning is ultimately driven by internal objectives aligning perception to action with an eye toward adaptive fitness (see Box 3)."

I see this as a variation of argument like "Mary's Room" and "What it is like to be a bat?"

But I don't think anything follows that is relevant here.

I might say that our direct aquaintance with our own intelligence is accompanied by an ineffability because it is automatic, unconscious, "brute-fitting".

I feel like the emphasis on sociality comes from the feeling that language for insular, private individuals is redundant and unnecessary

This sounds a little reductionist. Sure, I am all for this kind of predictive/enactive/semiotic understanding of the neurobiology involved. The brain and nervous system are the basis of the modelling relation we call "consciousness". But then on top of neuro-semiosis is stacked socio-semiosis – humans learning how to think and behave at the level of "parts of a larger sociocultural organism".

Socio-semiosis shares all the same general processing principles. The same Darwinian and thermodynamic logic. Yet it is still a further level of "embodied intelligence".

I would put it the other way around. The requirement for becoming the higher level thing of a social organism is to have a culture that can shape all its individuals into precisely the kind of self-regulating and socially-cooperating agents that would allow such a social organism to exist.

So that's a critical difference.

it is a simple practical fact of life: actual Chinese people share core experiences that you don't.

I would say the intention is to dissociate the idea of categorizing actions, based on some rule which is inherently indeterminate, from the actions themselves. We act regardless of the indeterminacy. I would also say such a view is in direct contrast to views where thinking is something more than sequences of our surface experiences, e.g. computational theories of mind, "language of thought hypothesis" and views that there is some intelligible, determinate semantic representations / symbols / modules underpinning those sequences.

Put differently, Kripke comes up with rules describing the behavior of an autonomous subject which are not indeterminate, and then attempts to use them to explain the indeterminate use of rules in social situations.
— Joshs

I think this is ass-backward. He starts with indeterminacy of rules and then uses sociality to explain why we seem to pick out specific concepts for our experiences when they are in principle indeterminable. I find Kripke's interpretation of Wittgenstein very agreeable; it makes sense to me and I have never been tempted to look at Wittgenstein in a way incompatible with the Kripkean view of rules.

The evidence justifying us to assert or judge that Jones means green by “green” is our observation of Jones’s linguistic behavior, that is, his use of the word under certain publicly observable circumstances. We can justifiably assert that Jones means green by “green” if we can observe, in enough cases, that he uses this word as we do or would do, or more generally, as others in his speech-community are inclined to do. This is the only justification there is, and the only justification we need, to assert that he means green by “green”.( I.E.P)

As commentators continue to instruct Kripke's interpretation, Wittgenstein's discussion is a reductio of traditional conceptions of thinking. He is not bringing to light a profound discovery that exposes a heretofore unknown vulnerability of understanding, but charting a particularly virulent distortion introduced by philosophical contemplation. The philosopher's bafflement before suddenly mute or excessively permissive signs is an artificial product of the characteristic philosophical behaviors discussed in chapter 1: stopping ongoing usage and staring.

Wittgenstein writes:

“It is felt to be a difficulty that a rule should be given in signs which do not themselves contain their use [that is, which are not meaning-objects], so that a gap exists between a rule and its application. But this is not a problem but a mental cramp. That this is so appears on asking when this problem strikes one. It is never when we lay down the rule or apply the rule. We are only troubled when we look at a rule in a particularly queer way. The characteristic thing about all philosophical problems is that they arise in a peculiar way. As a way out, I can only give you examples, which if you think about them you will find the cramp relaxes. In ordinary life one is never troubled by a gap between the sign and its application. To relieve the mental cramp it is not enough to get rid of it; you must also see why you had it. (AWL 90)

..we cannot appeal to social regularities or collectively presupposed norms within a practice: there are no such things, but more important, if there were they would not thereby legitimately bind us. Any regularities in what practitioners have previously done does not thereby have any authority to bind subsequent performances to the same regularities. The familiar Wittgensteinian paradoxes about rule following similarly block any institution of norms merely by invocation of a rule, since no rule can specify its correct application to future instances (Wittgenstein 1953). Practices should instead be understood as comprising performances that are mutually interactive in partially shared circumstances.

The intelligibility of performances within a practice then depends upon the anticipation and partial achievement of appropriate alignment with others' performances and their circumstances, toward what I described above as their "end," as Aristotelian energeia. Through discursive niche construction, human beings have built up patterns of mutually responsive activity. These patterns make possible newly intelligible ways of living and understanding ourselves within this discursively articulated "niche.""

"Brandom's talk of "norms" is then misleading: norms are not already determinate standards to which performances are accountable but are instead temporally extended patterns that encompass how we have already been living this part of our lives as well as the possibilities open for its continuation. Just what this pattern of practice is-what we are up to, and who we are in our involvement in it-is always partly ahead of us, as that toward which the various performances of a practice are mutually, but not always fully compatibly, directed. The temporal open-endedness of our biological niche construction and that of social practices are two ways of describing the same phenomena."

"This understanding of conceptually articulated practices as subpatterns within the human lineage belongs to the Davidsonian-Sellarsian tradition that emphasizes the "objectivity" of conceptual understanding. Yet the "objects" to which our performances must be held accountable are not something outside discursive practice itself. Discursive practice cannot be understood as an intralinguistic structure or activity that then somehow "reaches out" to incorporate or accord to objects. The relevant "objects" are the ends at issue and at stake within the practice itself. "The practice itself," however, already incorporates the material circumstances in and through which it is enacted. Practices are forms of discursive and practical niche construction in which organism and environment are formed and reformed together through an ongoing, mutually intra-active reconfiguration.

models do not learn simple, human-interpretable rules or representations of the world; rather, they use local computations to interpolate over task-relevant manifolds in a high-dimensional parameter space.

Note again the analogy with the Humean case.

models do not learn simple, human-interpretable rules or representations of [categorizations]; rather, they use local computations to interpolate over [categorization]-relevant manifolds in a high-dimensional parameter space.

The only form of justification that can be used legitimately involves determining assertability conditions in the public realm .

There is no fact of the matter that can determine whether the meaning for me of a rule like the plus sign is the same as I apply it now as when I applied it last year

Kripke doesn’t deny that we form meanings of words that bring with them determinate (by determinate I mean that they are unchanging in their sense for as long as they are in effect) instructions , rules and criteria on how to apply them.

Kripke thinks of a word meaning as an interpretation, a picture that determines how it is used, and we swap out pictures all the time.

we cannot appeal to social regularities or collectively presupposed norms within a practice

Any regularities in what practitioners have previously done does not thereby have any authority to bind subsequent performances to the same regularities.

“It is felt to be a difficulty that a rule should be given in signs which do not themselves contain their use [that is, which are not meaning-objects], so that a gap exists between a rule and its application. But this is not a problem but a mental cramp

If we had no basic intuitions, then each rule would require further rules setting out how it is to be followed—infinite regress follows.

If we had no basic intuitions, then each rule would require further rules setting out how it is to be followed—infinite regress follows.
— Janus

Yes, we can say the same for all word meaning, I mean!

As I understand it, Kripke’s argument begins with the skepticism that ensues from rejecting a classical realist approach to the factual justification of meaning interpretation. There is no fact of the matter that can determine whether the meaning for me of a rule like the plus sign is the same as I apply it now as when I applied it last year.

How do we use a basic intuition to avoid an infinite regress of rules?

It seems like it should just as well apply to all memories and all sense experience, resulting in exactly the sort of all encompassing skepticism Wittgenstein was trying to avoid.

Is an intuition a robustly persistent interpretive content of meaning that we can consult again and again to tell us how to follow a rule? Is an intuition an internal cognition as opposed to a socially discursive practice?

Because its just acting blindly, and "social discursive practise" is just an extension of that involving many individuals.

A picture of meaning would present a determinate , "objective" view of things; but the point is that no such thing can be presented to us.

If it applies to those things then surely, the skeptical solution also applies.

Is an intuition a robustly persistent interpretive content of meaning that we can consult again and again to tell us how to follow a rule? Is an intuition an internal cognition as opposed to a socially discursive practice?
— Joshs
Because its just acting blindly, and "social discursive practise" is just an extension of that involving many individuals.
— Apustimelogist
You both seem to me to have got this the wrong way round. You are positing the individual's interpretation of the rule as primary. But we can only interpret rules because we have learnt to do so - from other people. No doubt it is a complex process, but it seems overwhelmingly likely that it is develops by trial (responses of whatever kind) and error, coupled with positive and negative reinforcement

How do we use a basic intuition to avoid an infinite regress of rules?

You are positing the individual's interpretation of the rule as primary.

I have no idea what a determinate objective view might be

So not only can Tarzan not follow rules, but he has no memory and no sense experiences. Seems hard to believe.

No, I’m not positing individual intuition, I’m trying to show how Wittgenstein deconstructs the idea. I should add that Wittgenstein was no behaviorist, and training into following a rule involves more than reinforcement contingencies, it requires understanding the relevance of the rule, what is at stake in following it.

Apparently the Vienna Circle read TLP aloud to one another and members got so fed up with it that they began screaming "metaphysics!" at certain lines. Which, given their views, amounted to yelling out "bullshit!"

Not at all. Acting blindly is primary.

There is no good presenting another picture because prior assumptions are required,

If it applies to those things then surely, the skeptical solution also applies.

No, I’m not positing individual intuition, I’m trying to show how Wittgenstein deconstructs the idea. I should add that Wittgenstein was no behaviorist, and training into following a rule involves more than reinforcement contingencies, it requires understanding the relevance of the rule, what is at stake in following it.
— Joshs
I'm afraid I couldn't detect how what you said was a deconstruction. There must be something earlier that I missed or have forgotten. Can you explain or refer to your explanation?

Sorry - what is the sceptical solution?

That phrase suggests that it is possible that I could act not blindly.

I think that "This is what I do!" is, essentially, an ostensive definition, so neither blind nor not blind.

Yes but then there is the opposite perspective on these things where someone might say that we do not act blindly.

And the reference in ostensive definition is equally indeterminate!?

I'm afraid I couldn't detect how what you said was a deconstruction. There must be something earlier that I missed or have forgotten. Can you explain or refer to your explanation?
— Ludwig V
I discussed it here:

which I think is incompatible with Wittgenstein's arguments.

I suppose you are referring to Wittgenstein's point that many algorithms are compatible with any finite series of numbers.

But that doesn't mean there is no criterion for correct and incorrect applications (and for which cases are problematic). That's what the practice is for. So the rule is determined as it is applied.

Well he uses the word himself!

That may be a good example; but I was more thinking that with "pointing" at something, it is similarly somewhat underdetermined what is being pointed at, so pointing is also "blind" in that sense.

Yes, this is part of the skeptical solution albeit I would say it doesn't actually solve indeterminacy, just is used as a way of explaining how coherent word-use emerges.

I read your discussion. I think I agree with it. It doesn't mention (or use) the word "intuition", so I'm no further forward in understanding how that concept comes to be a part of Wittgenstein's deconstruction. I must have missed something.

186. "What you are saying, then, comes to this: a new insight — intuition — is needed at every step to carry out the order '-f-n' cor-rectly." — To carry it out correctly! How is it decided what is the right step to take at any particular stage? — "The right step is the one that accords with the order — as it was meant" — So when you gave the order -\-z you meant that he was to write 1002 after 1000 — and did you also mean that he should write 1868 after 1866, and 100036 after 100034, and so on — an infinite number of such propositions? — "No: what I meant was, that he should write the next but one number after every number that he wrote; and from this all those propositions follow in turn." — But that is just what is in question: what, at any stage, does follow from that sentence. Or, again, what, at any stage we are to call "being in accord" with that sentence (and with the mean-ing you then put into the sentence — whatever that may have consisted in). It would almost be more correct to say, not that an intuition was needed at every stage, but that a new decision was needed at every stage.

213. "But this initial segment of a series obviously admitted of various interpretations (e.g. by means of algebraic expressions) and so you must first have chosen one such interpretation."—Not at all. A doubt was possible in certain circumstances. But that is not to say that I did doubt, or even could doubt. (There is something to be said, which is connected with this, about the psychological 'atmosphere' of a process.) So it must have been intuition that removed this doubt?—If intuition is an inner voice—how do 1 know how I am to obey it? And how do I know that it doesn't mislead me? For if it can guide me right, it can also guide me wrong. ((Intuition an unnecessary shuffle.))

In PI, Wittgenstein treats intuition as an inner picture one consults:

Intuition explains nothing. Drill (learning what to do by repetition) is the explanation. That's the basis of practices.

Yes, I think we are basically in agreement, as far as I can tell!

I remember also thinking that the Robinson Caruso argument should also apply to all learning, but the idea that it is impossible for an isolated feral human being to learn anything or to ever be wrong about what they think they've learned seems implausible to me.

Kripke is not even advancing a skeptical position but a nihilist one. He isn't saying facts about meaning are impossible to pin down with certainty, but rather that they don't exist.

This would seem to offer another way out of the meaning dilemma, since meaning is grounded in the mind's access to the intelligibility of being.

and pointing out that his bar for "certainty"

However, given that the sky is blue, it is true to say that there is a fact of the matter that makes the statement "the sky is blue" true… our access to - no, better, our practices in - a world "outside" language does ground meaning. I think the game may be differently played in fields like mathematics and logic - though even there, there are facts that kick us in the face; we are not simply in control. IMO

There is no determinate scheme or context that can fix the content of utterances, and hence no way to get outside of language. How a theory or practice interprets the world is itself inescapably open to further interpretation, with no authority beyond what gets said by whom, when…. we can never get outside our language, experience, or methods to assess how well they correspond to a transcendent reality.“

The question isn’t whether the sky is blue , as though there were such things as neutral facts whose meaning could be isolated from contexts of use, motive and purpose that define their sense, but why it matters to us and in what context it becomes an issue.

I don't believe that for Wittgenstein we ever have access to a world outside discursive practices, which is not the same thing as saying that our discursive practices are hermetically sealed within themselves and closed off to an outside.

That's self-refuting. If there is no determinate scheme or context that can fix the content of utterance, then the content of this quotation (utterance) is not fixed.
In particular, the phrase "outside of language" has no determinate meaning.

I'm not sure it is actually self-refuting. If anything it complements itself in a weird way. It would be self-refuting if there was a determinate meaning to the phrase, since it would be its own counterexample.
Hmm, it does seem like a paradox though; maybe the solution to the paradox is the skeptical solution.

It's a while since I've read Kripke's text, but that seems to be right. But it's a bit more complicated than that. If the thesis is that meaning is established by practices, then it does not seem to be wrong to say that there is no fact of the matter that determines it. However, given that the sky is blue, it is true to say that there is a fact of the matter that makes the statement "the sky is blue" true. IMO.

I'm always uncomfortable with those grand philosophical concepts. But I would agree in many cases that our access to - no, better, our practices in - a world "outside" language does ground meaning. I think the game may be differently played in fields like mathematics and logic - though even there, there are facts that kick us in the face; we are not simply in control.

But you just said his view wasn't about certainty?

Imo, I don't think you are offering any solution that is inherently different from the sceptical solution since what you are saying seems to come down to just ignoring indeterminacy, which then brings up the question of "how are you doing what you are doing?" which comes to be the same kind of acting "blindly".

In arguing that being qua intelligible is not apart from but is the content of intellectual apprehension, Plotinus is upholding what may be called an 'identity theory of truth,’ an understanding of truth not as a mere extrinsic correspondence but as the sameness of thought and reality. The weakness of any correspondence theory of truth is that on such a theory thought can never reach outside itself to that with which it supposedly corresponds.1 Thought can be ‘adequate’ (literally, ‘equal-to’) to reality only if it is one with, the same as, reality. In Aristotle’s formulation, which as we have seen Plotinus cites in support of his position, knowledge is the same as the known.2

If thought and reality are not together in this way, then, as Plotinus argues, there is no truth, for truth just is the togetherness of being with thought. Plotinus’ arguments against the separation of intellect and being thus resonate profoundly with the nihilistic predicament of modernity. If
thought and reality are conceived in modern terms, as ‘subject’ and ‘object,’ extrinsic to and over against one another, and truth is conceived as a mere correspondence between them, then thought cannot get to reality at all,
then there can be no knowledge, and in the end, since nothing is given to thought, no truth and no reality. We must rather understand thought in classical Platonic, Aristotelian, and Plotinian terms, as an openness to,
an embracing of, a being-with reality, and of reality as not apart from but as, in Plotinus’ phenomenological terms, “given” (V.5.2.9) to thought. This, again, is the very meaning of the identification of being as ????? or ????. Being means nothing if it is not given to thought; thought means nothing if it is not the apprehension of being. Hence at the pure and paradigmatic level of both, intellect as perfect apprehension and the forms as perfect being,
they coincide. “We have here, then, one nature: intellect, all beings, truth” (V.5.3.1–2).

If it isn't "for no reason at all," then we have something sitting posterior to any individual language game or any hinge propositions, namely metaphysical truth.

So your solution is basicallythat we just know things inherently?

Or perhaps a functioning brain.

Presumably the evolution and individual development of each functioning brain depends on physics, chemistry, etc., and presumably no language games existed before individuals with brains, so the point stands that something sits prior to usefulness. Brains don't spring from the void uncaused, and what constitutes proper function for a human brain is dependent upon "how the world is."

Trying to ground language games in the sovereignty of empirical truth (how the world is) misunderstands the larger
ontological implications of the concept of language games, reducing them to the human side of a mind-world divide and treating world as sovereign legitimator.

It would seem strange to say that nature, or the scientific study of it, is defined entirely by the expectations of members of the natural/scientific community, which are in turn based on usefulness. From whence usefulness? Usefulness is defined in terms of nature and then nature is defined in terms of expectations and usefulness. Surely there must be a truth about what is actually useful though. What is useful to us cannot be whatever we currently think is useful, else we can never be wrong about anything.

Ok, but where are we doing that? The claim is that language is not social practice and expectation "all the way down," and that what we expect or find useful has causes/explanations outside of social practices themselves. There is no need to divide the mind and world at all. The world is indeed sovereign, because minds are part of the world.

But then the difficulty is that underdetermination is as much of a problem for making any inferences about nature as it is for inferring meaning. For example, all the observations consistent with Newton's Laws or quantum theory are also consistent with an infinite number of other rule-like descriptions of nature. Yet the same sort of solution doesn't seem open to us here.

It would seem strange to say that nature, or the scientific study of it, is defined entirely by the expectations of members of the natural/scientific community, which are in turn based on usefulness.

From whence this usefulness?

Surely there must be a truth about what is actually useful though. What is useful to us cannot be whatever we currently think is useful, else we can never be wrong about anything.

The madman's explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness. If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ's

Nevertheless he is wrong. But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large. A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world. There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions. Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable mark of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic's theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way. I mean that if you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air, to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument.

Well Kripke's Crusoe is isolated from birth IIRC. The distinction is important and has led to the differentiation between your Tarzans (always isolated) and your Crusoes (isolated at some later point).

The error is to assume that language games, theories, models, words, ideas, etc. are what we know instead of that through which we know. It's unsurprising that a deflationary reader of Wittgenstein like Rorty uses the image of words and ideas as "a mirror of nature" as a foil through which to dismiss metaphysical notions of truth, while a phenomenologist relying on the pre-modern tradition like Sokolowski would rather have us speak of "lenses we look through" (not at).

If it isn't "for no reason at all," then we have something sitting posterior to any individual language game or any hinge propositions, namely metaphysical truth.

But if we're willing to allow that we and our language games have causes external to ourselves, then there is no need to question the existence of "facts" that lie outside any specific game.

Or perhaps a functioning brain.

After all, the absolute view is not reality as set over and against appearances, but rather must itself include all of reality and appearance.

When Kripke or Rorty want to appeal to usefulness they have to allow that there is some truth about what is actually useful, and presumably this will be determined by factors outside of any language game.

Regardless of which hinge propositions you hold to, if you jump off a building, it seems truth will show up to hit you on the way down.

I'm sort of puzzled by the presence of Heidegger on that list. The idea of aletheia as "revealedness" or "unconcealment" seems to straightforwardly be a metaphysical vision of truth, as opposed to one where: "all that can be significantly said about truth is exhausted by an account of the role of the expression ‘true’ in our speech," or of truth being in a way dependent on hinge propositions for its existence

Instead of saying that we construct the way the world is, we could just as well say that the world shapes the meaning of our words and deeds. But it would be better to say that our interac­tion with the world takes precedence over any dichotomy between interpreting and the interpreted. This is what Heidegger meant by saying that we are “Being-in-the-world.” Neither world nor our ways of being in it come “first.” Each becomes determinate only in relation to the other. ( Joseph Rouse)

What is useful to us cannot be whatever we currently think is useful, else we can never be wrong about anything.

Instead of saying that we construct the way the world is, we could just as well say that the world shapes the meaning of our words and deeds. But it would be better to say that our interac­tion with the world takes precedence over any dichotomy between interpreting and the interpreted. This is what Heidegger meant by saying that we are “Being-in-the-world.” Neither world nor our ways of being in it come “first.” Each becomes determinate only in relation to the other. ( Joseph Rouse)

That's an interesting suggestion. I'm inclined to accept that there must (!) be an evolutionary explanation for the development of language games, including mathematics and logic. But that seems reductionist. Nonetheless, the brain/evolution idea has the interesting property of setting up a circle of explanation. No beginning and no end, or perhaps a self-sustaining structure.

Maybe the difference is you place "metaphysical truth" at the center where I place an instrumentalist brain.

The brain idea is that it doesn't matter if rules are underdetermined because what causes our behavior is not platonic representations of rules but a functioning brain acting under the laws of physics. It is the explanation of how we act blindly and is linked to the possible idea that brains and any kind of neurons learn to perform tasks without any human-interpretable rules

The distinction between the observable and the unobservable is a pragmatic one that has no ontological implications. Observation and observability should not play an important role in an account of science. Philosophers of science have traditionally thought of science as a system of representation, whose aim is to describe accurately a world that is indifferent to how it is represented. Observation was important because it provided the only link between the world as we represented it to be and the world itself. Only in sense experience does the world impinge upon us in a way that constrains the possibilities for representing it. Thus we have Quine’s claim as typical: “Whatever evidence there is for science is sensory evidence.” Things look considerably different from my perspective. The question is not how we get from a linguistic representation of the world to the world represented. We are already engaged with the world in practical activity, and the world simply is what we are involved with. The question of access to the world, to which the appeal to observation was a response, never arises.

The question isn’t whether the sky is blue , as though there were such things as neutral facts whose meaning could be isolated from contexts of use, motive and purpose that define their sense

hence no way to get outside of language.

This is a false dilemma; as if the sky cannot be blue and facts cannot exist unless they can be intelligible isolated from the world in which they exist. It amounts to a demand that contingent being be wholly subsistent if it is to be being at all.

Or as if it must be the case that a truth cannot be truth unless it can expressed in a language spoken by nobody from nowhere

In saying that what is real is indepen­dent of what we do or say, the realist has a definite picture of the relations between our interpretations of the world and the world
itself. Our interpretations say something definite about the world, which sometimes matches the way the world is and sometimes does not. This is the case not just with our sentences, but with our actions: sometimes what I pick up and (try to) use as a hammer is a hammer, and sometimes it is not. This difference is what accounts for whether the nail goes in or not. Any correspondence or fit between our in­terpretations and their intended objects is therefore contingent.

The problem with this picture is that it takes as already determined both the way the world is and our understanding of how our in­terpretations take it to be. The realist of course recognizes that we do not know in advance how the world is. But once we have some definite interpretations of the world, we can use them as the basis for our actions, which in turn test the adequacy of our interpretations. If our actions fail to achieve their aims, something must be wrong with the interpretations they were based on. If our actions succeed, this success
of course does not entail that their underlying interpretations do accord with the reality they interpret. But if a wide variety of actions in differing circumstances generally succeed, the best explanation for their success is that those interpretations at least approximately ac­cord with the way those objects really are.

But where do we acquire our understanding of what cur various interpretations do say about the world and of what would count as success in our actions? The realist needs to give some account of understanding such that we can understand how our interpretations take the world to be independent of how the world actually is. Otherwise the alleged independence of object and interpretation can never get off the ground. Sentences and practices do not have ready-made meanings, nor do they acquire meaning by convention. (How could the parties involved understand what they were agreeing to?) They acquire meaning only in their performance or use.

The question we have been circling around is why language should be the way it is instead of any other way? Social practices seem malleable and contingent, so in virtue of what are they the way they are?

To be intelligible—to not be arbitrary—social practice must have its explanation in something outside itself. On the view that being is intelligible, such an explanation must be possible. My position is that the tools of reason (language, theories, logic, etc.) are what join us to these explanations—to metaphysical truth.

In the same way, a view of truth that is limited to the confines of individual language games explains truth in a “small way.” Reason is no longer ecstatic, taking us beyond what we already are.

For Chesterton, the mark of madness is this combination of “logical completeness and a spiritual contraction.” In the same way, a view of truth that is limited to the confines of individual language games explains truth in a “small way.” Reason is no longer ecstatic, taking us beyond what we already are. Rather it runs in tight, isolated circles.

On such a view, reason represents not a bridge, the ground of the mind’s nuptial union with being, but is instead the walls of a perfect but hermetically sealed cell.

Well, the similarity might be that you seem to be saying that all your talk of brains is true in the sense of metaphysical truth.

Would my claims be equally true as yours, "truth" being merely how the term is used with some given language-game?

Kripke's other philosophy seems a lot more consistent with that sort of naturalism

On a conventional naturalistic view there is no indeterminism problem or finitude issues

All experiences of meaning are describable in terms of determinant physical interactions. Any instance of the experience of meaning is uniquely specified by facts about the relevant physical system. How language evolves can be explained entirely in terms of physical interactions, which of course involve the environment and not just language users' expectations.

I'm not totally sure where Kripkenstein fits in his development.

Maybe you would agree that the brain idea must incorporate into its assumptions that natural scientific concepts such as functioning brain, neuron and physical law are not the product of human observation and representation of a world independent of our representations, but practices of interaction with others in the world

It is not only that words model or describe sensory experiences; trivially, they are experiences, as much a part of our same stream of sensations as any others. Words and any models, therefore work precisely by being directly situated and enacted in the dynamics of experience in very complicated, nonlinear ways, whether in conversations with other people or ourselves, writing up and reading descriptions, learning, making predictions, engaging with math or pictorial representations, etc. Again, it is not a matter of models having some kind of essential nature as objects independent of the living context in which they are embedded; such a view is an idealization. There is no independently existing singular model of quantum mechanics or evolution; what exists are people with shared knowledge who enact that knowledge.

Models, and any word meanings for that matter, are nothing above the cause and effect mediated by people's implicit neuronal processes that drive the generation of future experiences in the context of the past. The equations in our theories written down on paper and the words we physically say cannot actually do anything independently of the minds that generated them and do things with them; neither is there necessarily a determinate way of expressing models and theories which is not contextualized by what is deemed acceptable by people in the context of their cognitive abilities and neuronal architectures. Therefore, in this kind of view, minds and cognition are only as deep as our experiences and the momentary unfolding of their dynamics.

Well I think it is certainly a better story than just appealing to reason or metaphysical truth without any explanation of how people do it and without being open to the subtleties of people being fallible or interacting with the world in a perspective-dependent way.

And certainly, yes, I would believe my claims were better pr more correct than the immaterial soul. Better arguments in favour of it

I personally like Sokolowski's image here, that we should think of language (and our senses) as a lens we use to investigate the world. A lens is of course something you tend to look through not at. Hence, reason would ground the ability to translate between disparate conceptual schemes.

The equations in our theories written down on paper and the words we physically say cannot actually do anything independently of the minds that generated them and do things with them; neither is there necessarily a determinate way of expressing models and theories which is not contextualized by what is deemed acceptable by people in the context of their cognitive abilities and neuronal architectures. Therefore, in this kind of view, minds and cognition are only as deep as our experiences and the momentary unfolding of their dynamics.

To be clear, "metaphysical truth" isn't some vague term I've concocted.

On the deflationary view, "truth" has no explanatory or metaphysical import.

So my point isn't meant to be handwavey. It's a straightforward denial of the idea that "reason" should be thought of as simply the ability to follow the rules within the context of any specific language game

But the assumption that this precludes access to a non-deflationary version of truth seems to need to assume that statements in language games are "what we know," not a means of knowing, or else that a short-lived positivist notion of correspondence truth is the only possible notion of metaphysical truth and that once it is defeated deflation must follow.

Well, better in virtue of what is the question, right? Better at approaching truth? Or better because they can be demonstrated from dominant hinge propositions in a given community? Is the goodness of an argument determine solely by the expectations of the people who are going to hear it?

I would just add that a thoroughgoing reflexivity between word and world implies that cognitive abilities and neuronal architectures are themselves responsive to, and continuously shaped by, the social world that they are exposed to and intertwined with. We can’t use biological concepts as the court of last appeal and legitimation for grounding conceptual meaning when they are not split off from the social milieu.

Of course, words and concepts must be inherently evolved, developed, learned, used in a social context. Brains in some sense synchronizing with other brains as well as other parts of the environments they navigate.

Forms of life and language games are all just appeals to the blind behavior produced by the brain - in terms of both cognitive and motor-acts - in an interacting community of brains all "acting blindly" together:

Plus, I have already mentioned how I think brains are a deeper explanation more fundamental - brains interacting with their environments, multiple brains interacting together.

It is the explanation of how we act blindly and is linked to the possible idea that brains and any kind of neurons learn to perform tasks without any human-interpretable rules.

The brain idea is that it doesn't matter if rules are underdetermined because what causes our behavior is not platonic representations of rules but a functioning brain acting under the laws of physics.

"people" for "brains"

And then, good understanding of whats happening here wants multiple levels of explanation spanning all fields from microbiology to evolution to linguistics, anthropology, social psychology to history and upward. No one field or level of explanation can do justice to everything.

Of course brains interact with their environments. But they don't interact with other brains

I have no idea what would persuade us to accept that any machine, biological or not, is not working from any human-interpretable rules.

But in that case, we can certainly work out what's going on from the results.

in fact they are not acting at all in the sense that people act.

But the idea that the laws of physics are not underdetermined is a big jump.

I have no idea what would persuade us to accept that any machine, biological or not, is not working from any human-interpretable rules.
— Ludwig V
Its a well-established issue in machine learning and I already had posted a paper talking about it in the context of neuroscience this thread:

But in that case, we can certainly work out what's going on from the results.
— Ludwig V
Which is always our interpretation of what is going on and falls to the same kinds of rule-following issues as initially described - which inevitably would result in another appeal to blindness.

If brains are in their environment then of course they can interact with other brains.

Depends what you mean, I guess; but, not important.

I mean, I don't understand how you could think this as some kind of over-reductive description when I literally said in the same paragraph the following:
And then, good understanding of whats happening here wants multiple levels of explanation spanning all fields from microbiology to evolution to linguistics, anthropology, social psychology to history and upward. No one field or level of explanation can do justice to everything.
This is one level of description, appeal, explanation - made necessary by the fact that it explains how people behave and think, at least in the proximal sense.

Wasn't necessarily imply they weren't underdetermined; but the point was that rule behavior is not determined by rule abstractions floating about in a platonic dimension.

It is determined by extremely complicated mechanistic processes in the world and our brains, as is the behavior which translates to our agreements about the applications of words and categorizations of behaviors.

If the laws are underdetermined, how can they determine those mechanistic processes - except, perhaps, by some version of blind action? I do agree that there are complicated physical processes going on. But we do not know how to translate from the physical level of description to the human - it's called the hard problem. But if there were a translation how would it not be a matter of rules?

“Many philosophers have argued that there seems to be a gap between the objective, naturalistic facts of the world and the subjective facts of conscious experience. The hard problem is the conceptual and metaphysical problem of how to bridge this apparent gap. There are many critical things that can be said about the hard problem, but what I wish to point out here is that it depends for its very formulation on the premise that the embodied mind as a natural entity exists ‘out there' independently of how we configure or constitute it as an object of knowledge through our reciprocal empathic understanding of one other as experiencing subjects. One way of formulating the hard problem is to ask: if we had a complete, canonical, objective, physicalist account of the natural world, including all the physical facts of the brain and the organism, would it conceptually or logically entail the subjective facts of consciousness? If this account would not entail these facts, then consciousness must be an additional, non-natural property of the world.

One problem with this whole way of setting up the issue, however, is that it presupposes we can make sense of the very notion of a single, canonical, physicalist description of the world, which is highly doubtful, and that in arriving (or at any rate approaching) such a description, we are attaining a viewpoint that does not in any way presuppose our own cognition and lived experience. In other words, the hard problem seems to depend for its very formulation on the philosophical position known as transcendental or metaphysical realism.

“I would give up both realism and anti-realism, then, in favor of what could be called a pluralist pragmatism. What the pluralist insists on is that there is no foundational version, one which anchors all the rest or to which all others can be reduced. The pragmatist insists that the world is both found and made: it is made in the finding and found in the making.To erase the boundary between knowing a language and knowing our way in the world gives us a fresh appreciation of the world. That world, however, is not given, waiting to be represented. We find the world, but only in the many incommensurable cognitive domains we devise in our attempt to know our way around. The task of the philosopher is not to extract a common conceptual scheme from these myriad domains and to determine its faithfulness to some uncorrupted reality; it is, rather, to learn to navigate among the domains, and so to clarify their concerns in relation to each other.

when we posit conceptions of the physical and the mechanistic and attempt to found indeterminate intersubjective discursivity on these.

Evan Thompson:The task of the philosopher is not to extract a common conceptual scheme from these myriad domains and to determine its faithfulness to some uncorrupted reality; it is, rather, to learn to navigate among the domains, and so to clarify their concerns in relation to each other.

The pragmatist insists that the world is both found and made: it is made in the finding and found in the making.

But blindness resolves the infinite regress of interpretation and underdetermination, so it is a feature, not a bug.

You think that the AI's hidden rules resolve the "problem" of blindness. I don't see how. If you are accepting that they are interpretable by humans, how do they not have the same problems as any other rules? To put the question another way, if the AIs rules cannot be understood by human beings (or even, if you insist, by other AIs, how would "correct" and "incorrect" have any meaning? To put the point yet another way, if the AIs rules really were uninterpretable by human beings, what meaning would "correct" and "incorrect" have?

Surely brains don't interact directly with other brains, but only via a chain that connects them - roughly, via the bodies they live in.

This is the idea that all science will, in the end, be unified into a single over-arching structure. That's an article of faith, or perhaps a programme of research. It certainly isn't a fact. What's worse, is that, by eradicating people from your causal chain, you seem to be reducing people to their brains. Perhaps unintentionally, but nonetheless, there's no conceptual space for them.

If the laws are underdetermined, how can they determine those mechanistic processes - except, perhaps, by some version of blind action? I do agree that there are complicated physical processes going on. But we do not know how to translate from the physical level of description to the human - it's called the hard problem. But if there were a translation how would it not be a matter of rules?

The pragmatist insists that the world is both found and made: it is made in the finding and found in the making.
That's brilliant. Would you care to share the reference? Then I could quote it too.

However, this is not a simple matter of physical laws, but requires an intervening layer, like the software in a computer.

Those sub-routines will involve implementation of rules - otherwise they cannot possibly be successful or even unsuccessful.

It’s from Is Internal Realism a Philosophy of Scheme and Content?

I was just trying to hit home that meaning behavior comes from processes which are independent of our own notions of meaning.

By physical laws I just meant the way the world tends to behave independently of perspective; obviously this is not coherently accessible, but we infer that there id a world that exists and behaves consistently regardless of who is looking.

Physics is the ultimate grounding since brain dynamics, computational behaviors are in principle implemented in the entities of physics.

know-that is a special case of know-that - or at least that is how it is implemented. Know-that is enacted.

mindless algorithms

Yes. In a sense, the processes act blindly. But that implies that they follow rules, which they don't. They do not differentiate between following a rule and not following it. They don't recognize rules. So they don't explain them - any more than they explain why 2+2=4 and not 5.

If "the world" is not coherently accessible

How is that not reductionist? The bitter truth is the physics is just another way of conceptualizing the world, another lens through which to survey it.

Causes are not correct or incorrect. They just are what they are.

Forgive my ignorance, but I had this naive impression that an algorithm is a rule.

These processes are not meant to explain the rules, they explain our behavior despite underdetermination.

Yes, and they explain in a proximal sense all our rule-following behaviors in principle.

what neurons are doing in my brain are not related to the semantics of "plus" and you don't need the semantic notion of 'plus' to explain how mindless neurons do 'plus' tasks.

you don't need the semantic notion of 'plus' to explain how mindless neurons do 'plus' tasks.

know-that is a special case of know-that - or at least that is how it is implemented. Know-that is enacted.

I don't understand anything beyond that

I don't need to explain how mindless neurons do plus tasks, because they don't do plus tasks.

Saying that I act blindly when I do a plus task is saying that there is no need of and no room for an explanation how I do them.

I think you believe a philosophical thesis that physics is the ultimate grounding of everything

and that you therefore infer that my neurons must be doing something relevant. My problems are first that I don't accept the philosophical thesis that there is/must be an ultimate grounding of everything and second that you don't seem able to explain what the relevance of my neurons is.

I hope there's a typo there and you meant that know-that is a special case of know-how.

a mechanistic component cannot be inherently interpreted in terms of a semantic component. If you look at a brain performing a plus task, our description of 'plus' is not interpretable in terms of our description of how neurons are actually performing the task.

Neurons are precisely what is performing a plus tasks for you. The biology and dynamics of neurons account for everything about your ability to do a plus task.

Physics describes the smallest scales of existence which grounds everything else and upon which all higher scale behavior depends and emerges from.

The bottom-up causality of nonlinear far from equilibrium dynamics is thus truly creative; it produces qualitatively different wholes that are not reducible to sums, com­pounds, or aggregates. Once self-organized, furthermore, these emergent global structures of process actively and dynamically influence the go of their compo­nents, but not qua other. In contradiction to the received views on causality, that is, the whole also actively exerts causal power on itself top down. Self-organization, in short, strongly counsels for a wider denotation for the
term cause, one reconceptualized in terms of “context-sensitive constraints” to include those causal powers that incorporate circular causality, context-sensitive
embeddedness, and temporality. On this interpretation deterministic, mechanistic efficient causes become the limit of context-sensitive constraints.

In what sense do you mean that physics does not ground everything? Physics describes the smallest scales of existence which grounds everything else and upon which all higher scale behavior depends and emerges from.

Of course, words and concepts must be inherently evolved, developed, learned, used in a social context. Brains in some sense synchronizing with other brains as well as other parts of the environments they navigate.

what neurons are doing in my brain are not related to the semantics of "plus" and you don't need the semantic notion of 'plus' to explain how mindless neurons do 'plus' tasks.

I didn't mean mechanistic in such a narrow sense as you do here.

Looking at the level of global self-organizing processes of a living system will reveal a non-linear reciprocal causality that moves between the global and the elemental.

One of the obvious features of life in general and people in particular is that they are autonomous. Whether those systems approaches can answer all the questions is another issue. On the surface, it looks as if they leave out the notion of a person, which implies that their scope will be limited

Francisco Varela provides “a great amount of neuroscientific detail about distributed neural networks to explain the idea of a selfless virtual self, an agent that emerges from a pattern or aggregate of personal processes” ( Shaun Gallagher).

As unenlightened beings, we mistakenly believe on a deep emotional level that there does exist a real “I” or ego within our mind and body, and therefore our experience of ourselves and others is profoundly egocentric… One mentally imposes an intrinsic “I-ness” and an intrinsic “otherness” onto phenomena, but “I” and “other” are simply relative designations imputed onto elements in which there is no inherently existing “I” and “other.” Each “I” is an “other,” and each “other” is an “I.” (Evan Thompson)

“The 'I' (which is not the same thing as the unitary government of our being!) is, after all, only a conceptual synthesis - thus there is no acting from 'egoism'”…
The concept of the 'individual' is false. In isolation, these beings do not exist: the centre of gravity is something changeable…
“If I have anything of a unity within me, it certainly doesn't lie in the conscious ‘I' and in feeling, willing, thinking, but somewhere else: in the sustaining, appropriating, expelling, watchful prudence of my whole organism, of which my conscious self is only a tool.(Nietzsche)

Does physics ground mathematics?

H'm what does "in some sense" mean?

But I don't navigate that environment (under normal conditions); the environments I do navigate are all "external" to the body.

I know what a "plus" task is. Hence, I know that brains/neurons don't do the plus tasks that I do.

Are you by any chance saying that brains/neurons do plus tasks without knowing what they mean?

Can you explain in what sense you do mean "mechanistic"?

Brains in some sense synchronizing with other brains as well as other parts of the environments they navigate.
— Apustimelogist
H'm what does "in some sense" mean?

I know Apustimelogist already answered, but I want to add the following link to flesh out the very literal sense in which synchronization occurs

“Interactions are not simply bits of information to be processed by individual cognizers, but rather, interaction processes move the participants in their sense-making activities, and these include affect. Participatory sense-making reaches directly into the precarious network of self-maintaining processes that constitute a subject's identity. Thus, our encounters with others may not only modulate our very self-maintenance, but to some extent even enable and constrain it. This means that the constitution of our subjectivity can be strongly dependent on the history of social encounters. Thus, self-constitution and self-affection happen with and through others while-importantly and basically-at the same time always retaining an aspect of closure.

This sharing in inter-affectivity comes through participating in a process that is not simply the summation of individual activities, but a jointly created and literally embodied pattern that affects each of our affections. (Hanne De Jaegher)

Does physics ground mathematics?
— Ludwig V

Do the smallest scales of existence ground our use of math?

Absolutely.

Can you explain in what sense you do mean "mechanistic"?
— Ludwig V

I just mean mechanistic in the sense of one event causing the next event and the next event in a way that is divide of any kind of extra meaning. Like knocking down dominos where one falls causes the next and the next and the next in a mindless ways. But I am not assuming any limits on complexity or non-linearity or recurrence or anything like that

Actually, the most complex scale of existence grounds our use of math. Mathematics is a conceptual invention.

The billiard ball model of causality

I suggest that such non-linear reciprocal affecting between cause and effect is more fundamental than the mechanistic billiard ball or domino form of description we might try to foist onto neural processes as their ‘real’ basis.

The fact that you may need higher levels of explanation to make a dynamic system intelligible doesn't negate the fact that ot may be at the most fundamental level just a consequence of simple billiard ball causality. It could not be any other wa since such explanations you talk about are by their very nature not fundamental

I suggest that such non-linear reciprocal affecting between cause and effect is more fundamental than the mechanistic billiard ball or domino form of description we might try to foist onto neural processes as their ‘real’ basis.
— Joshs

This doesn't make any sense since all of the complex behaviors neurons do are emergent from very simple ones at smalled scales - described by morr fundamental laws of physics - such as ions crossing a membrane barrier

I’m arguing that the full implications of the non-linearity of complex systems in living beings makes it impossible to derive them from physical models as they are currently understood.

“relations are not secondarily derived from independently existing “relata,” but rather the mutual ontological dependence of “relata”—the relation—is the ontological prim­itive. The notion of intra-actions constitutes a reworking of the traditional notion of causality.”

I’m arguing that the full implications of the non-linearity of complex systems in living beings makes it impossible to derive them from physical models as they are currently understood.

about non-linear systems.

This doesn't make any sense since all of the complex behaviors neurons do are emergent from very simple ones at smalled scales - described by morr fundamental laws of physics - such as ions crossing a membrane barrier.

This neatly inverts things. An informational mechanics is precisely what biology and neurology impose on the physical world. Not the other way around.

This ignores the fact that organisms are organised by codes and so exist in a semiotic modelling relation with the world.

But the world itself is not a machinery of linear cause and effect

For all practical purposes, we may regard a wave function as collapsed as some probe with a switch mounted on its end has been heard to flip state. Holism can be considered localised. Another bit of thermodynamic history has now definitely been added to universe's equation of state.

If neurology relied on ions crossing membranes as its deep explanation, then it would be getting us nowhere

Well this just ignores the context about which of two things is more fundamental

Again, just because it may not be your preferred level of explanation, does not preclude it from being more fundamental or at least perform a role of grounding the other more preferred explanation so that preferred explanation itself would in principle be explained by and depend on this more small scale perspective.

But you said all the complex behaviours of neurons emerge from lower level physics which is quite wrong. They emerge from the information processing which entropically entrains the physical world in a way that brains and nervous systems can be a thing.

I don’t favour computer analogies but what do you think causes the state of a logic gate to flip. Is it the information being processed or the fluctuating voltage of the circuits?

The physics of neurons is shaped by the top-down needs of Bayesian modelling. Bayesian modelling isn’t a bottom-up emergent product of fluctuating chemical potentials.

Does physics ground mathematics?
— Ludwig V
Do the smallest scales of existence ground our use of math?
Absolutely.

I am not going to be able to make you understand what I am saying without you giving up this kind of dualism.

Synecdoche refers to a figure of speech in which the word for a part of something is used to refer to the thing itself (as "hired hand" for “worker”), or, less commonly, the word for a thing itself is used to refer to part of that thing (as when society denotes "high society"). In metonymy, a word that is associated with something is used to refer to that thing (as when "crown" is used to mean "king" or "queen").

I just mean mechanistic in the sense of one event causing the next event and the next event in a way that is divide of any kind of extra meaning.

I know Apustimelogist already answered, but I want to add the following link to flesh out the very literal sense in which synchronization occurs:

The kind of synchronication between internal and external states as described by active inference / free energy principle.

As an engineer I'm a complicator. I have to consider a multitude of details, about the ways physical things interact, in order to do my job well.

But you said all the complex behaviours of neurons emerge from lower level physics which is quite wrong. They emerge from the information processing which entropically entrains the physical world in a way that brains and nervous systems can be a thing.

Complex dynamical systems exhibit nonlinear effects and a type of causality called causal spread, which is different from efficient causality. The interactions and connectivity required for complex systems to self-organize are best understood through context-sensitive constraints
I suggest that such non-linear reciprocal affecting between cause and effect is more fundamental than the mechanistic billiard ball or domino form of description we might try to foist onto neural processes as their ‘real’ basis.

It is not the non-linearity that is particularly problematic when trying to grasp minds/brains. It is the complexity, and lack of anything remotely approaching a detailed account of that complexity.

I don’t favour computer analogies but what do you think causes the state of a logic gate to flip. Is it the information being processed or the fluctuating voltage of the circuits?

A logic gate flipping is a physical process with emergent properties which allow us to treat it as if logic determines the results, by imposing additional constraints by only sampling the output of the logic gate on clock edges.

and, on occasion, mild insanity.

I think you are saying that the a physical process can (under the right conditions) be interpreted as an information processing process, and conversely.

In case you are interested...

You rephrased the question. Surely, applying math to the smallest scales of existence implies that physics and math exist independently.

Would a Popperian ontic triadism be better? I doubt it. I suppose it is time to come out. I do have a view of this. I see your claim as the classic philosophical mistake of thinking that a grammatical device, which is purely rhetorical, has some philosophical significance. "Brains do plus tasks" is synecdoche for "People do plus tasks". You may not know what synecdoche is (I had to look it up to be sure).

Yes, I understand that. So the language that you use to describe the brain process excludes the possibility of describing a plus task. So in what sense can it explain or cause a plus task?

However, the synchronization that is involved here (mirroring) is not obviously the same as the one that Apustimelogist is concerned with. But I don't know what the active inference/free energy principle is, so I could be wrong.

But you said all the complex behaviours of neurons emerge from lower level physics which is quite wrong. They emerge from the information processing which entropically entrains the physical world in a way that brains and nervous systems can be a thing.

I don’t favour computer analogies but what do you think causes the state of a logic gate to flip. Is it the information being processed or the fluctuating voltage of the circuits?

The physics of neurons is shaped by the top-down needs of Bayesian modelling. Bayesian modelling isn’t a bottom-up emergent product of fluctuating chemical potentials.

I'm afraid that my grandiosity detector has become too sensitive to read much of that.

A neuron is characterized as a physical object made up of particles that behave according to the laws of physics. All neuronal behaviors follow from this and we put information processing on top of it. Not the other way round.

You can always in principle describe whatever a brain is doing in terms of more fundamental physics.

So how do you derive the structure of a neuron from the laws of physics?

So how do you derive the structure of a neuron from the laws of physics?
— apokrisis

You pretend to be doing physics; but you are merely reworking Hegel

It's the pretence that is irksome. Reworking Hegel is fine, if one is honest about it.

My biosemiotic position arises within a community of reason that was Aristotelean and then became Peircean. So the reworking of Hegel would have been done by Peirce.

See how this is not physics? QED.

How is this not physics exactly?

Be honest about it. My biosemiotic position arises within a community of reason that was Aristotelean and then became Peircean. So the reworking of Hegel would have been done by Peirce.

But you seem quite ignorant of all these metaphysical distinctions. Time to womble off in the direction of your lunch. Don't pretend you have any training in either biophysics or functional neuroscience.

I'll leave you to your crusade.

Sure, you could argue that the objects in math are not reducible to objects in physics... they are more general and perhaps abstract than physics... but we can make any sets of arbitrary tools we want that are not inherently related or reducible in a hard way to other tools or descriptions. They are, after all, just constructs.

We can acknowledge the conceptual divides between different perspectives but I think we also must acknowledge that if different perspectives map up to each other substantially, like the brain and mind, then its simply seems impossible to me to not talk about those mappings in terms of some kind of underlying commonality.

I really have no idea because I don't think anyone knows exactly how they count or do plus tasks.

But is what a person does independent of what a brain does? No.

Given that, we can always in principle describe the brain behavior in terms of those more fundamental levels.

So here we see the rage of grandiose narcissist in most splendid form. Note the venom dripping out it's mouth when it howls. That is one fine specimen folks.

I like wombats.

When you have no adequate response, you spit. Hegel is not physics.

So how do you derive the structure of a neuron from the laws of physics?

Sure, the laws don’t forbid the structure. But in what sense do they cause the structure to be as it physically is?

Well do so then. Tell me how the physical structure of a neuron is the product of fundamental physics. Tell me how neurons appear in the world in a way that does not involve the hand of biological information.

Indeed - and educative, in explaining the use of commas. You probably know the old joke about the difference between "The wombat eats roots, shoots, and leaves" and "The wombat eats, roots, shoots and leaves".

For those from 'merca, in the English speaking world "roots" is a synonym for "fucks".

Alot of the details are probably out there in the field of biology in terms of things like gene translation and cellular development. Is any of this not mediated through fundamental physics?

Evolution requires the genotype-phenotype distinction, a primeval epistemic cut that separates energy-degenerate, rate-independent genetic symbols from the rate-dependent dynamics of construction that they control. This symbol-matter or subject-object distinction occurs at all higher levels where symbols are related to a referent by an arbitrary code. The converse of control is measurement in which a rate-dependent dynamical state is coded into quiescent symbols. Non-integrable constraints are one necessary conditions for bridging the epistemic cut by measurement, control, and coding. Additional properties of heteropolymer constraints are necessary for biological evolution.

Meanwhile here is the relevant physics - The Physics of Symbols: Bridging the Epistemic Cut

More speculation than physics.

Guess my straylian is not so bad.

An opinion. Served as usual without argument or evidence. You are such a lightweight.

Evolution requires the genotype-phenotype distinction, a primeval epistemic cut that separates energy-degenerate, rate-independent genetic symbols from the rate-dependent dynamics of construction that they control. This symbol-matter or subject-object distinction occurs at all higher levels where symbols are related to a referent by an arbitrary code. The converse of control is measurement in which a rate-dependent dynamical state is coded into quiescent symbols. Non-integrable constraints are one necessary conditions for bridging the epistemic cut by measurement, control, and coding. Additional properties of heteropolymer constraints are necessary for biological evolution.

I had to keep reminding her that we drive on the rights side of the road

You are no lightweight, but what you serve is also opinion, hidden. Speculative physics mixed with rewarmed dialectic.

I just served you with a paper by Howard Pattee.

It's speculative.

So are you saying that mathematical objects don't really exist? What is your criterion for existence? Is it, by any chance, being physical? I don't think Quine's slogan "to be is to be the value of a variable" is perfect. But it's not bad as a slogan.

But notice that in the latter case, the hormones do not map one to one with my emotions.

Nonsense. They know perfectly well how to count. Maybe they can't explain how they count very well, but that's a different know-how. So we say they act blindly. But the point is that they act correctly.

I never said it was. All I'm saying is that what I do is not what my brain does - except by synecdoche.

Quite so. But it doesn't follow that we can in principle describe my behaviour in terms of the same levels. You can describe my running in physical terms. But physics has no equivalent to an intention or to the rules of athletics, so you can't describe my running and winning a race in terms that physics would recognize.

Seems you are trying very hard to do exactly what biologists complain about. Failing to understand the epistemic cut.

I have said a couple times in the thread I see the importance of different explanatory frameworks on different levels but just seems to me all complex behavior are grounded on and emerge from the smaller scales as described by more fundamental, simpler physical laws or descriptions.

This is partly because I am already very biased against attempts to reify meaning and against views that seem inherently strongly representational. The idea of symbols or signs in biology then seem to me something like an additional level of idealization and approximation that is another way of telling stories about biology, perhaps more intuitively - similar to teleology. But it doesn't seem fundamental to me compared to notions like blind selectionism which does not necessarily require things to be packaged up in terms of neat symbols and meanings.

I personally find ideas like active inference and the free energy principle have more clarity, eloquence and mathematical grounding than the Howard Patee stuff, in addition to being prima facie simpler to couple with my enactive inclinations. The epistemic cut idea also seems to draw from ideas in quantum mechanics which I just do not believe to be the case

Sure. You've certainly said how it seems for you. But as a biologist and neuroscientist, I see this as question-begging reductionism.

This just shows that you haven't read or understood the stuff.

All the parts of the puzzle that come together to form a general theory of life and mind.

The question you deny is even a question is a question I've been academically engaged with for a long time.

Why is it reductionist if I explicitly talk about the importance of higher level explanatory frameworks?

When are you going to refute the idea that all coarse-grainings of behaviors over larger scales are grounded on higher resolution details at smaller scales of space and time?

Well, unfortunately that doesn't guarantee anything.

How can I refute that in the face of your refusal to engage with the question of how physics - coarse or fine - accounts for the functional structure of a neuron?

Alot of the details are probably out there in the field of biology in terms of things like gene translation and cellular development. Is any of this not mediated through fundamental physics? Seems implausible. Does any of these descriptions require the notion of "biological information"? I doubt it.

I’m talking about ontology rather than epistemology. Life and mind as a further source of causality in the cosmos. The stakes are accordingly higher.

What I was implying is that all of the events that led to the development of neuronal structure- whether on an evolutionary or developmental scale - can be in principle described purely in terms of particles and how they move in space and time. In principle, such a thing could be simulated using a complete model of fundamental physics - it would just obviously be orders of magnitude too complicated to ever be possible to do.

From this, it would follow that higher-order descriptions are both in principle: redundant, in the sense that they are describing behavior that could be described purely in terms of smaller scales; and also incomplete, in the sense that any higher-level description would have to be missing out on details that actually occur in reality on the smaller scale but are not included in the higher-order description.

Obviously that doesn't mean we don't need the higher level description - but clearly, higher level descriptions will be grounded on the details of smaller scales. How could it not be?

In all fields of knowledge the situation arises periodically where the concepts in use divide into two levels, of which one is more complex, hence 'higher', and there is then a tendency to reduce the higher to the lower or a contrary tendency as a reaction against the excesses of the former. In the field of physics, for example, mechanical phenomena have for long been regarded as elementary and for that matter as the only intelligible elements to which everything ought to be reduced: whence the futile attempts to translate electromagnetism into the language of mechanics. In the biological field there have been attempts to reduce living processes to known physico-chemical phenomena, attempts that failed to note the possibility of change in Aa discipline which is continually being modiied; and the reaction was an antireduvtonist vitattsm, whose sole merit was the entirely negative one of denouncing the illusions engendered by such pre- mature reductions. In psychology there has been the attempt to "reduce' everything to the stimulus-response scheme, to associations,etc.

If these remarks appear strange, this is no doubt because physics is far from complete, having so far been unable to integrate biology and a fortiori the behavioural sciences within itself. Hence, at present, we reason in different and artificially simplified domains, physics being up to now only the science of non-living, non-conscious things.

Why use the higher-level description then? Obviously it is required because it is less complex and doesn't require precise resolutions, maybe it is also closer to our everyday levels of descriptions. The reasons for using the higher-level description or a lower-level description are clearly about epistemic, explanatory needs, not ontological ones -

I don't have a criterion for existence but my assumptions from what science and philosophy seems to say to me is that: there is a single realm of existence;

I think we construct mathematical objects and impose them on the world enactively, which is not really any different from any other concepts or knowledge we use.

Because emotions are much more than just hormones.

From my perspective anyway, everything I am experiencing is literally what it is like to be some kind of higher level, higher scale functional structure in the vicinity of that part of existence which we might label my brain.

So the distinction does not seem so big from my perspective.

Yes, I get that and I have never excluded those things, after all that is the level at which we engage with the world in everyday life. But I think a distinction can be made between: the use of different explanatory frameworks and ways we engage with the world that are perspective-dependent for various reasons; and then the concept of ontological grounding in principle - that behaviors described at one scale will be grounded in those on smaller scales, even if I require different explanatory frameworks to make sense of the world in any pragmatic way.

Well then the only criteria I see for the plus task is that it is performed correctly in the way regular people deem it correct. A calculator can plus correctly imo.

You may not want to say a brain is doing what you are doing but lets see what happens when we stop the brain doing what its doing and knockout that occipital lobe - how that affects what you are doing.

Neural information encodes

So the concept of ontological grounding is not perspective-dependent? H'm

Consider what philosophers have said:-
1 Everything is physics
2 Everything is language
3 Everything is experienced
All true. They are all perspectives and there can be more than one perspective on anything. Physics, from my perspective, is not unique in any respect.

Biology is not reducible to physics because a living body, though it is a physical object, cannot be explained without reference to concepts that have no place in physics. They cannot be understood without taking a holistic view of the organism and what helps to keep it alive - a concept that physics has no room for.
Except I heard that some physicists are talking of causality as information. But I don't know anything about the background.

So I think the point here isn’t that psychology and biology are not in principle reducible to a more fundamental description like physics. It is that today’s physics is not up to the job because it is mired in older metaphysical assumptions. It would have to re-invent itself as a new kind of physics. Maybe it wouldnt even call itself physics anymore.

But you didn't get the memo about categories. I'm afraid the news is that there are many different kinds of existence.

Including physics.

Oh, to be sure they are. My brain is heavily involved. But the point is that my brain is not the whole story. Same applies to plus tasks.

You seriously mean that you live in your head?

The idea that the self or the person is another creature like us inside our heads was the founding mistake of dualism.

And yet you defend your brain tirelessly. So it must be important to you even if it is not big.

So the concept of ontological grounding is not perspective-dependent? H'm.

The calculator neither knows not cares whether it is correct. It cannot evaluate its own answer, in the sense of trying to correct wrong answers.