Must Do Better
Must Do Better
Long ago, @Srap Tasmaner threatening me with this essay.
It is an erudite, readable defence of analytic philosophy, wide ranging if now somewhat dated. It's also an admonition of the state of play in philosophy just after the turn of the century, and perhaps more recently.
It bears on a few recent topics, including my own on two ways of doing philosophy in that it offers a partial defence of "systematic philosophical theorizing". For Williamson, systematic philosophical theorising is not the problem, but the lack of seriousness and rigour in it's pursuit. Now I think this not so far from my distinction between dissection and discourse, and worth a proper look
It also bears on Reply to Skalidris's thread about a supposed decline in creativity in philosophy. The obvious retort here is that so far we have only the word of Skalidris and a few supporters for there being at all a decline in creativity, and no clear way to assess levels of creativity in philosophy. The Williamson article might offer a way to move that discussion beyond mere anecdote.
The plan here is a systematic reading of the whole essay. Given the breadth of scope, it's likely that there will be more than a few tangential discussions. Theres are of course welcome. But I might also invite PM contributions, especially on those tight and particular arguments that sometimes get lost in the fray.
I'll post this intro now, and start on the first page - and Srap's threat - soon.
Long ago, @Srap Tasmaner threatening me with this essay.
It is an erudite, readable defence of analytic philosophy, wide ranging if now somewhat dated. It's also an admonition of the state of play in philosophy just after the turn of the century, and perhaps more recently.
It bears on a few recent topics, including my own on two ways of doing philosophy in that it offers a partial defence of "systematic philosophical theorizing". For Williamson, systematic philosophical theorising is not the problem, but the lack of seriousness and rigour in it's pursuit. Now I think this not so far from my distinction between dissection and discourse, and worth a proper look
It also bears on Reply to Skalidris's thread about a supposed decline in creativity in philosophy. The obvious retort here is that so far we have only the word of Skalidris and a few supporters for there being at all a decline in creativity, and no clear way to assess levels of creativity in philosophy. The Williamson article might offer a way to move that discussion beyond mere anecdote.
The plan here is a systematic reading of the whole essay. Given the breadth of scope, it's likely that there will be more than a few tangential discussions. Theres are of course welcome. But I might also invite PM contributions, especially on those tight and particular arguments that sometimes get lost in the fray.
I'll post this intro now, and start on the first page - and Srap's threat - soon.
Comments (668)
It's an excellent parody, sharp and well-aimed. We have the system-builders, the groupies, the mockers and doubters; where would you be? I'd be with the doubters, and I'll argue that they were right.
The issue is how we are to mark, as well as to make, progress in philosophy; how to avoid "a feeble
and unnecessary surrender to despair, philistinism, cowardice or indolence". The refinements that bring progress about " emerge in the process of attempting to answer the original rough question".
Williamson is right in rejecting the suggestion that the mere divorce of science from philosophy is sufficient to explain progress, and in identifying the problem here as "that one cannot always tell in advance which questions it will be fruitful to pursue." It is the process that brings about progress, not beliefs and not the doubt alone. This takes us to about p.3
My response: Those who jump too quickly to an answer to "what are things made of?" fall; not water, not fire. The doubters have it right: we can intelligibly ask what bread is made of, but not, at least amongst the presocratics, what everything is made of. It is a step too far to ask what things in general are made of. It was exactly by answering questions like "what is bread made of" that we were able to progress towards the broader question. The answerable questions have a large part in this progress. Understanding the nature of grain and water and heat, and how they interact, lead by degrees and indirectly to the questions of chemistry and physics that constitute our present start of play.
This response should not be seen as a rejection of the essays thesis: it is the process that is important. Speculative ambition is an important part of that process. Discourse, the sweeping, theoretical system building, needs dissection, careful analysis of small, concrete questions. Williamson wants both, but insists that discourse must be disciplined by standards akin to those in the sciences.
He argues his point on a case basis - undeniable progress has been made in modal logic and in truth theory, and there has been at least movement in ontology, with the then-raging debate between realism and anti-realism and the semantics of natural languages. There are developments in paraconsistent and intuitionist logic that look promising.
That the progress here is formal, technical and complex does not detract from the fact of progress.
Within this progress Williams sees lost opportunity. Now at about page eight.
Available here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/9780470696675.after
Thanks to @Heracloitus for this info.
This has great moving parts: theorizing with rigour. Promising.
Quoting Banno
Mere anecdote or, rigorous metaphysics and systematic philosophic theorizing. Philosophic newness, captured in turn of phrase. Creativity is fraught with peril. Continues to intrigue.
Quoting Banno
Great question.
Quoting Banno
I reject that. Thats a sideways move at best, not progress to me.
Quoting Banno
I think you can intelligibly ask is there an ingredient (so to speak) that all things are made of among other ingredients that only some things are made of, but I still agree it is a step too far to ask what things in general are made of.. No need to take a side track, so early.
Quoting Banno
Staying inside the subject matter between the grain and water and heat, moving slowly, methodically towards eventually, bread, and then chemistry, and quantum physics.... always careful before moving on and retesting, before restating again
Quoting Banno
Agree. This, to me, is the world part of the equation. It is what the science says or is about. It is the world ingredient.
Quoting Banno
Yes. Philosophy is a science at the very least; it may be more; it may be about blocks or dead poetry, but science is there in every mix of philosophy proper.
Quoting Banno
For sure. I think that is what Aristotle and Descartes and Hegel and Spinoza and Leibniz and Kant and Wittgenstein and Russell and others were trying to do. Skeptical rigor exists in Platos Parmenides, and really in the fact that he made the question and doubting conclusions so central to making dialectical progresses. But, I wander off again. Need more rigour..
Quoting Banno
From above:
systematic philosophic theorizing and discourse and ways to assess creativity in philosophy
But now with progress, as:
modal logic and in truth theory
debate between realism and anti-realism
semantics
Doubt I can keep up, but Ill try.
From near the end of the article:
In an article about image analysis from 1992, the author berated the whole field for a lack of rigor. Picking out individuals is invidious, but the author referenced 45 articles in a subfield and condemned them en masse:
I wish Williamson had done something like that.
Working through the article. Here are some initial lines I personally would love to hear developed.
It is widely known in 2007 and was not widely known in 1957 that contingency is not equivalent to a posteriority, and that claims of contingent or temporary identity involve the rejection of standard
logical laws.
Thats a tree question.
One clear lesson is that claims about truth need to be formulated with extreme precision, not out of knee-jerk pedantry but because in practice correct general claims about truth often turn out to differ so subtly from provably incorrect claims that arguing in impressionistic terms is a hopelessly unreliable
Thats important. A bigger tree.
Philosophers who refuse to bother about semantics, on the grounds that they want to study the non-linguistic world, not our talk about that world, resemble scientists who refuse to bother about the theory of their instruments, on the grounds that they want to study the world, not our observation of it.
Great line. Forrest issue.
But when philosophy is not disciplined by semantics, it must be disciplined by something else: syntax, logic, common sense, imaginary
examples, the ?ndings of other disciplines (mathematics, physics, biology, psychology, history, . . .) or the aesthetic evaluation of theories (elegance, simplicity, . . .). Indeed, philosophy subject to only one of those disciplines is liable to become severely distorted: several are needed simultaneously.
Also interesting forrest issue. Still reading
I've read about this far with you. Williamson is touching on a favorite topic of mine, the lack of progress in answering traditional philosophical questions. He's more optimistic, of course.
So far in the article, I'd note a couple of things:
- Progress may not be identical with closure on a given topic. I could lament that we haven't answered or achieved agreement on a host of questions, but still acknowledge we've made progress in understanding them. For that matter, rather than lamenting, I could postulate that a lack of closure is a hallmark of what constitutes philosophy.
- One can agree, as I do, that one of the strong points of analytic philosophy is its ability to demarcate good questions that can actually be sharpened and better understood. Within that framework, everything Williamson says about where we stand in 2025 compared to 1925 is correct, as best I know. I'll be interested to see, though, whether he's able to "bootstrap" analytical phil out of the charge that it has selected only those questions which suit its methods.
I think a lot of people feel that way, even people paid to do philosophy. Timothy Williamson is not one of them
This is quite the irony. I criticise the rigour and adherence to rigid principles that prevent the exploration of other possibilities, and you suggest my claims need to be presented with more rigour and adherence to these things.
Quoting Banno
I see science as a product of philosophy and I believe philosophy's power lies in creating disciplines. Im not religious but for the sake of the analogy: its as if God tried to become more human. I dont mean to say science is inferior, but that it does very different things. Copying the standards of science to apply them to philosophy makes no sense to me because I dont believe philosophys goal is to understand the world around us, but to provide various tools to do so.
Would you go so far as to say that philosophy also suggests which aspects of the world need to be better understood? Or is that pretty much up to each culture and/or philosopher?
This is a more promising thread. I appreciate the paper to ground the discussion. :up:
Quoting Banno
So long as you remember that PMs do not contribute to public threads any more than a "private language" is generally accessible. What is done invisibly cannot be appealed to to justify a visible thesis. There is no general continuity between any PM and a public thread. They are two different things.
Which philosophers are exemplary in this regard, in your opinion? The philosophers I am most influenced by provide tools (a method) which presents a world strikingly different from the one we may take for granted. For instance, Husserl discusses how the transcendental-phenomenological reduction discloses a "new field of being".
In the *Crisis of European Sciences* he describes the reduction as leading to "a complete personal transformation, comparable in the beginning to a religious conversion" .
In *Ideas I Husserl writes that the reduction opens up "a new way of experiencing the world" by bracketing all natural assumptions and focusing on the *how* of givenness rather than the *what*. He states:
*"The phenomenologically reduced perceptual experience is not just a method but an *existential shift*what he elsewhere calls "the philosophers genuine rebirth" .
I'd agree with that. It follows form treating philosophy as a method, as something done, rather than as a set of beliefs. This was one of the themes of my thread on two ways to philosophise.
Quoting J
If asking only those questions which suit it's method is asking what bread is made of, rather then what everything is made of, then I think it an agreeable approach. There's a lot to be said for working on questions that are at least answerable.
There's a tension between complaining that philosophy no longer addresses the big issues and agreeing that philosophy must remain incomplete.
I haven't yet read much of his beyond the present paper, but from tertiary sources he seem to have some odd approaches to modal logic and epistemology.
True. I'll hold off until you walk us through the entire paper. But just as an example of a question that isn't an "everything" question, while at the same time is hard to frame in terms of analytic phil: How should we understand the self-reflexive nature of philosophical inquiry? Is there something important about the fact that philosophical inquiry must also be about itself, and must be done from a point of view?
I'm not sure this can be rendered in terms of logical self-reference, but I'm happy to learn more.
I'll happily stand by my preference for rigour. The complaint that quality in philosophy is in decline remains unjustified.
Isn't the present paper just that, an example of self-reflexive philosophy, in analytic terms?
Yes, it is, and reading ahead, I notice that Williamson faults the paper for "exhibiting hardly any of the virtues that it recommends"! So I put brackets around "in analytic terms," above. I hope one of the good questions that will come out this discussion will concern whether it's possible to do what Williamson is doing while staying within strict analytic-phil confines.
Taking the example "...contingency is not equivalent to a posteriority, and that claims of contingent or temporary identity involve the rejection of standard logical laws..." There have been quite a few threads on these topics on the forums. I think Williamson is right here, that there would be few professional philosophers who would seriously question these results. Those who think necessity = a priori or contingency = a posteriori haven't understood the modal logic developed since the sixties.
The discussion of intuitionism might be both novel and more interesting.
Or do we take it as read that there has been progress in these areas? That would be my preference, allowing us to proceed further in to the essay.
That's a misunderstanding of "private language". A private language is one that cannot in principle be made public, such as the sensation "S" in PI. A conversation via PM can of course be made public, and so is not private in the requisite sense.
I remain open to any comments via PM.
Page nine is a defence of the use of philosophy of language.
and
The "linguistic turn" brought with it various philosophical tools that have become quite ubiquitous. Philosophy of language wasn't rejected so much as centralised. Language is the philosopher's main tool, and it will serve them well to understand how it works.
As I've said before, philosophy is more than just making shite up. It also has to fit in with what we know. "Tightly constrained work has the merit that even those who reject the constraints can agree that it demonstrates their consequences."
Is the upshot here that philosophy cannot be done well by an amateur? I don't think so. More that it can not be done well by a dilettante. But also, it is not served by elitism, but discipline.
And now the essay gets more interesting.
Bang on. toe-dipping philosophy is invariably embarrassing, but so too is the tendency to dismiss on that basis, rather than the fact that some particular work is embarrassing.
Edit: That said, it;s always going to be reasonable to dismiss on the basis of a preceding pattern of bad work. But i submit we should still give some room for unusually good work popping up in unexpected places.
I agree. Philosophy is a rigorous science. Has been since Aristotle at least.
Because everyone at some point wonders what is this life? everyone thinks they are some bit of philosopher. Further, children can understand something of philosophic wisdom - nothing to excess or live in the moment or do unto others or if there is one thing I know for certain, it is that I know nothing . For this reason, people who would never pretend to be a theoretical mathematician, or a quantum physicist, or any professor, will pretend to be Socrates over a bottle of wine and teach you what life is really about.
But true philosophy, the rigorous science, becomes nothing more than an art and cannot be practical if it is not shared and taught. It is almost entirely words. Is it an art or is it science after all? It is the science of thinking, and must be demonstrable in application, and so needs to be taught, discussed, and those who are taught philosophy must at least learn how best to think.
But the purely theoretical and the purely analytic are both easily rendered impractical. So the true philosophers need to take care that they do not isolate their expertise from all place in the world of common persons. If the elites who practice proper, scientific philosophic thought do not do as Buddha did, and return to the people, teaching their wisdom to everyone and anyone who listens, then all of the philosopher kings are merely art snobs. For who cares of the difference between idealism and realism in Their kingdoms are sandcastles that very few can even see.
And philosophy will continue to die. At least art has redeeming beauty for the shallow dilettante to enjoy anyway. Every philosopher cant be Nietzsche. If Wittegenstein isnt patiently taught, how quickly do you think it would die to history.
Quoting AmadeusD
That is wisdom. Wisdom can accidentally come from watching a dog. The most elite philosophic scientist has every reason to listen to anyone who claims to offer philosophy. Just to practice the trade and maybe find inspiration.
That is my experience, and from it, my amateur opinion.
So I agree with the article and the quotes above. I just caution there is no wisdom in ignoring amateur philosophers. They should be welcomed as students of lifes mysteries and taught how to be rigorous.
We all need midwives. And compassion.
Especially on an Internet forum (as opposed to a post-graduate classroom, where expectations are more frequently set and met.)
Let's do that. We could disagree with some of Williamson's example without disputing his overall point: Within analytical philosophy, there is better understanding of the problems -- and even some resolutions of disputes -- than there was in Russell's day.
Quoting Banno
Williamson is very good here, because he's not didactic about semantics; he clearly doesn't believe that an exclusively language-oriented method is enough. Rather, he's arguing that, without linguistic self-scrutiny, none of the other good stuff will happen. If anything, his telescope analogy is too generous. As he says, there's a limited sense in which you can study the stars while knowing nothing about telescopes, but I don't think that's even possible with philosophy. What happens, at even the simplest levels, is exactly what you quote here:
As for discipline, I'm not thrilled with Williamson's discussion, but I do agree with what you say here:
Quoting Banno
My issue with W and discipline is that, if we take seriously the various examples he gives of approaches that can provide discipline, we wind up wondering if "discipline" is really the right word for what he has in mind. These sound to me more like guidelines or standards -- which is fine, and that would prevent us from "making shite up." (When will you learn to spell properly? :grin: ). To me, a discipline implies a fairly rigorous practice, something you have to study and get good at. But W says: "To be 'disciplined' by X . . . is to make a systematic conscious effort to conform to the deliverances of X," and I suppose I can live with that.
Quoting p.282
This kind of theory would say that a sentence's meaning is its truth conditions, right? I think the basis of that view is intuitive. It might seem that a little ghostly woo explains how sentences relate to truth conditions. Maybe nothing was built because of that?
The labels 'continental' and 'analytic' are silly but I find it helpful to think of there being arty philosophy and sciency philosophy. They can be mixed in the same sort of way that architecture and gardening mix science and art.
I'm mainly interested in philosophy that is disciplined by mathematics, physics, biology, psychology, history, , AI,
Philosophers must communicate, but they are not obliged to communicate in natural language. Mathematics is a language and in particular, probability theory and statistics provide a much more expressive language than logic. There are also programming languages. I wish more philosophers would learn these languages and use them alongside natural languages. I have Knuth's literate programming in mind as an exemplar.
I am very dubious about using natural language as a tool for reasoning or "using words to think with". That's a double-plus bad telescope.
To my surprise I find myself feeling sorry for anti-realists: have they no competent proponents? I haven't thought much about realism versus anti-realism, and I don't care about the issue. But it's a puzzle, a challenge, to develop natural language semantics for an anti-realist position.
I'd start by thinking about programming an AI agent which learns 'everything' from scratch using
reinforcement learning. This kind of AI is the opposite of LLMs: instead of trying to cram as much human knowledge into a machine as possible you force the agent to work almost everything out for itself.
If you look at the diagram on Wikipedia you'll see there's an agent and an environment. It seems that we are to take the environment as existing independently from the agent. But I look at it from the point of view of the agent: there is state coming in and action going out, but how could you program the agent so that it was a realist even if you wanted to? And even 'there is state coming in and action going out' is saying too much too quickly, for how can the agent even distinguish coming in from going out? In order to construct semantics for an anti-realist position I'd start by answering this question. It's a long long route from there to a community of such agents which communicate using something like natural language but I believe it's possible.
Quoting Banno
Whether we like it or not, and whether we intend to or not, we cannot will ourselves to confine our method to the study of bread rather than the world in general without already presupposing as its condition of possibility a general and primordial origin, that which is always and for everyone the case, regardless of how relative, subjective and contingent the experience. Subjectivty , relativity and contingency only emerge as what they are due to this general and primordial origin.
A bit of history seems appropriate here, given the comments above. A potted history, leaving out whole continents of philosophical discourse in order to map a rough path.
End of the century before last (I have to get used to writing that), the dominant philosophical system was Hegelian, of a British persuasion. Moore and Russell reacted against it, Moore by showing how the way it was articulated was far removed from common sense, Russell by showing how it was far removed from the precision of the new logic developed by Frege.
Quoting GrahamJ Russell's student, Wittgenstein, adopted a similar line of thinking to yours, Graham, developing at least in outline a new language based on the new logic, that could set out all and only the true statements. Having solved philosophy, he went on to become a primary school teacher.
Meanwhile Tarski developed a description of Truth for formal languages that was correct - so far as it appleid to formal languages. Quine, over the puddle, took a different approach, examining how a natural language might be interpreted in a formal language, adopting a holistic approach.
Then Wittgenstein realised that being a primary school teacher was much harder than doing philosophy, and went back to Cambridge. Under the influence of a few very, very good thinkers, he realised that he hadn't actually been paying attention to the complexity and utility of languages. He did a re-think that radically changed the way that he approached the topic, by looking at how language is actually used.
(Meanwhile, a few of the chaps at Oxford did something similar, perhaps on hearing rumours of Wittgenstein's work.)
Nowadays few, if any, philosophers would consider replacing natural languages with a formal language. They don't need to.
Quine's student, Davidson, pulled much of Wittgenstein, Quine and Tarski together in a theory of translation that doubled as a theory of meaning, taking truth as a primitive, proposing that understanding a language involves grasping a theory that could generate all the true sentences in it. This is not a replacement for natural languages. It provides instead a translation of natural languages using formal tools.
It may be intuitive, , but it is also based on some very tight argument from Davidson and others, and formed the basis for much work at the end of last century.
Dummett famously argued that understanding a sentence should be tied not to its truth-conditions per se, but to a speakers ability to recognise or verify when the sentence is true. This position led him toward anti-realism: the idea that the truth of a statement is constrained by our capacity to know or verify it.
The realist/antirealist debate petered out in the first decade of this century. Part of the reason is Williamson's essay. The debate, as can be seen in the many threads on the topic in these fora, gets nowhere, does not progress.
The present state of play, so far as I can make out, has the philosophers working in these areas developing a variety of formal systems that are able to translate an ever-increasing range of the aspects of natural language. They pay for this by attaching themselves to the linguistics or computing department of universities, or to corporate entities such as NVIDEA.
Something like that.
Say the professor points to the board with a 2 written on it and says "That's a prime number"
A realist would say the professor referenced a state of the world. Davidson allows us to dispense with propositions and correspondence to understand this. But isn't Davidson's stuff offered as a possibility? There was never any empirical testing, was there?
An anti-realist would emphasize that meaning is use, and truth serves a social function. We don't need to get caught up in trying to understand what the professor is referencing. Reference is kind of poetic anyway. This view is also built on assumptions, and has never been "tested."
I think the conflict is really about two conceptions of the nature of thought.
I differ with him here - philosophical problems are overwhelmingly the result of poor choice of wording; to the point where that's an alternative definition of philosophical problem. Once the plumbing of language is done, what is left might be physics or politics but not philosophy.
So in this regard I am somewhat at odds with Williamson.
But we might agree on a methodology, such that working out a suitable language in which to state the problem comes first, then we see if there is anything left over that looks like philosophy.
I'm unconvinced. Mostly because I don't quite see what you mean. We might start with the brute fact of bread, presumably, and work from that. No need for Plato.
Sure, that's reasonable. As you know, I think philosophical disagreement is all too often only a wrangle over terminology, which is probably similar to what you mean. But once there's a tentative agreement on terms, what's left over does look like philosophy to me, at least enough of the time to be worth pursuing. "Solve or dissolve" sounds good in theory, but it seems contrary to the way philosophy has been practiced over the ages. Granted, a strict linguistic approach has an answer to that: It's been wrongly practiced. But it's not clear to me whether that determination can be made on a linguistic/semantic basis alone.
A huge topic, obviously.
And then:
That "assumption that our allegiance automatically confers on us methodological virtue" is quite accurate. You can see it in the reply I made to @Joshs, a couple of posts up. I didn't spend much time on the reply at all, instead presuming that my lack of understanding was down to a lack of clarity on Joshs' part, and so I threw the post back at him, expecting him to do the work of clarification. Quite rude, by some standards.
Trouble is, I think that what I did is the right approach. It should be down to the poster to make their case. And I think Joshs would agree, but perhaps say that he had made his case sufficiently, and I should be able to follow it; that it is my lack of comprehension of certain philosophers from outside the analytic tradition that is at fault.
And it's not clear that we cannot both be right.
What is clear is that there is much more that needs to be said, were Joshs and I to pursue that discussion. And so to
but also
We ought pick our fights with care.
(, happy to come back to your point. I'm not saying that your point is not worthwhile - how could I, if I haven't grasped what it is?)
No, no, no, no, no, that is not anything like my position.I don't know much about Wittgenstein, but enough to know I prefer the later version. (See my comment here https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/985967 for example.)
I embrace Box's position 'all models are wrong but some are useful'. This is nearer to using a formal language in which only false statements will ever be made! Probability and statistics avoids the worst of the errors, which is why I want philosophers to use the language of probability and statistics.
Quoting Banno
Thank you for that account. It sounds... not ideal, but a lot better than I had imagined. It's NVIDIA.
Again, with these comments, I don't see a clear way to respond. I don't see why, for instance, "a formal language in which only false statements will ever be made" could be a "better" (more foundtaional?) tool for understanding reasoning than lambda calculus. It's not clear that formal logic and probabilistic reasoning are opposed. In fact, theres a rich space of logics Bayesian logic, probabilistic lambda calculus, epistemic logics with uncertainty that treat probabilistic inference as a continuation of formal logical methods, not a rejection of them. So I wonder whether your contrast isnt overstated.
I don't know how to explain, because I don't know how much you already know. In the other thread I mentioned the four components of Bayesian decision theory: model, prior, data, utility. Are you familiar with these? Could you put them to use in a simple example?
I am reading SEP's account of Bayesian epistemology. How you you get along with that?
And what does the honest philosopher (language plumber) think politics is? Total bullshit? Totally kidding ourselves about natural rights and platforms and ideology and voting for worldview change? All of these value anssignments and statements have no solid source, similar to plumbing. There is no true plumbing outside of the plumbing of language. Correct?
Amen, if that is how it has to be.
Yes, and notice how this paragraph begins: "Of course, we are often unable to answer an important philosophical question by rigorous argument, or even to formulate the question clearly. High standards then demand not that we should ignore the question, otherwise little progress would be made, but that . . ." and then your quote follows.
My worry about both (some) analytic phil and (some) Witt-derived phil is that the thus-far unanswered questions are indeed ignored, or rather ruled out as nonsensical. "Solve or dissolve," in other words. Let me ask you directly: Do you think there is a warrant for that, or is Williamson correct here? This clearly goes to the heart of the meta-discussion about method.
Quoting Fire Ologist
The pairing of politics with physics suggests an answer. Neither is bullshit in the least, but (on this view) neither one is philosophy either.
Let me put the question more rigorously (I slipped into metaphorical speak feeling the use of plumbing gave me some leeway. I like the language plumbing metaphor by the way. Useful.).
My Question: If analysis of what is and is not done with language, or analysis of what can and cannot be done with language, is the most scientific of philosophical activity (so much so that one would say once the plumbing of language is done, what is left [is] not philosophy), then can any other discipline that relies on language be considered truly scientific? (Total bullshit was my metaphorical and absolutist way of saying not science or not philosophy). Or asked another way, if philosophy of language is the most scientifically rigorous use of language, are not all other uses of language less scientific?
By raising the pairing of physics and politics, it seems you are placing activities we do with language on a scale where maybe analytic philosophy (logic, Frege to Witt to etc.) is the most purely scientific pursuit, and then below that, something like physics admitting additional suppositions and assumptions to its game and way of thinking, history admitting more, politics admitting many more, metaphysics admitting more than that, maybe as much as poetry, myth and legend; and then fiction not even pretending to be science but is purely supposition. But language about language remains the clearest domain of the most scientific statements we can make. As in, Once the plumbing of language is done, what is left might be physics or politics but not philosophy.
Is this all in the right neighborhood of what Banno is saying?
The other notion that I might be missing here is that the measure of progress in science has emerged from sciences like physics, and not from analysis of language. We learned from physics how to be rigorous and how to measure progress, and then applied this as a tool to philosophy, and all that remained standing of philosophy as it was formerly called, after we applied this new tool, was analysis of language, the remaining philosophy qua philosophy.
But if that is the case, doesnt that position philosophy, even if it rigorously keeps its attention on language, as less valuable and less universally applicable type of knowledge? That could be ok and could be the case but doesnt philosophy become the study of the best ways to talk about physics? So if you learn rigor by doing physics well, there is really never any need to narrow your mind to thinking about language and logic in themselves; philosophy merely shows why two physicists understand each other. If they already understand each other, who cares about the philosophy of it all?
Maybe that is the neighborhood (domain) of philosophy? On my bullshit scale, physics is most scientific, and a sub-issue within physics that simply says when and why physics language is logical or, not nonsense, is philosophy which applies the rigor it gleaned from doing physics to the language physicists use when talking about doing physics. But philosophy qua philosophy, oversimplified, is the glossary, or plumbing, within the physics text book.
Further, if a philosopher tried to tell Einstein you dont know what you are saying. Maybe that is even true, but for a physicist like Einstein to pose something nonsensical to the philosopher might just be the philosopher not able to follow Einsteins meaning, as opposed to Einstein not being rigorous in his language. New rigor will always emerge ahead of the philosophers ability to codify it, axiomize it, and analyze the language this new rigor produces.
In which case I am back to thinking there can be a hidden philosophic rigor in any subject, such as metaphysics or politics. And the philosophy of language (analytic philosophy) is always secondary and post hoc, and things like physics, or metaphysics or even poetry, or politics are really only accidentally different, but each, like physics, could produce their own rigor.
So in the end, maybe Wittgenstein has eliminated philosophy as some sort of universal science of all sciences. That may be true. And we have moved philosophy inside each separate subject of study. So that we have physics, and then philosophy of physics (language rigor surrounding physics speak); or we have politics and philosophy of politics (language rigor surrounding politics, or political science).
But the difference between the subject of physics and the subject studied by a politician, from what I can say, is a metaphysical distinction. So I am back to wondering if there is a subject known as metaphysics that can be rigorously studied as well as the others. Or are we kidding ourselves that there is a real object called the political? Is that a figment like a platonic form, an ideal? Can one really be rigorous about politics? Or anything outside of language?
None of what I am saying or asking is meant to refute the article. Merely to understand it. I see myself as using implications to discern things prior and post the idea of true philosophic rigor, or the idea of philosophy as a progressing science with a distinct subject matter. I am not trying to recover metaphysics. Consequences be damned. I want to understand as much as I can.
All brute facts about things in the world are subjective, relative and contingent. Even so, they rely on idealizations. Where does the conceptual category of bread come from, if not an abstractive construction? Whether I cite Husserl and talk about the fact that the moment to moment perception of a spatial object reveals continuously changing sense of phenomena which we idolize as this self-identically persisting object, or the sense of bread within a Wittgensteinian language game, one is dealing with the contingent and relative. To stabilize it for self-reflective analysis is to idealize it. The only aspect of experience which escapes ( because it is presupposed by) the changeable and relative is the temporalizing process itself ( the synthetic structure of pat, present and future). This general origin is at the same time utterly particular, because it is not itself outside of time.
Perhaps he thinks that "political philosophy" is an oxymoron.
@Banno will have to speak for himself. I don't think so. I looked back to try to see where you got "scientific" from and couldn't find it. Could you explain why you're casting this in terms of what is most or least "scientific"?
The Wittgensteinian Ur-picture, which I don't share, is that "philosophy leaves everything as it was." It is a diagnostic tool to help us understand where our language led us astray. Once we've done that, we'll be left with very little to worry about. Genuine problems will be assigned, or promoted, to the disciplines that study them, such as physics and politics. You can see why this is often viewed as a therapeutic understanding of philosophy -- or, less elevatedly, as plumbing out the pipes.
I think this is what Banno is describing. Again, he will tell us, I'm sure. Personally, I think a dose of Doctor Witt's therapy is a very good thing for all of us from time to time, especially when we get a strong hunch that our terminology is backing us into implausible corners. As I said to Banno above, I don't think all the important philosophical questions can be treated and dissolved in this way, but it's a fantastically useful technique to have at the ready.
Dissecting, analytic, rigorous, scientific philosophy.
Discursive, narrative, not as scientific (or at all scientific) philosophy.
ADDED:
Quoting Banno
Instead of a sharp line between science and philosophy, place the analytic Witt type activity as the most scientific of philosophic activities, and the others fall below it. Isnt the way I talking here in the spirit of the article? (Despite it not being rigorous, like the author admits he isnt being rigorous.)
Understanding Witts therapeutic project in the context of consonant efforts in phenomenology and poststructuralism allows us to see that he doesnt so much dissolve all philosophical questions as shows us that scientific , logical and mathematical domains are not self-grounding but instead are contingent and relative products dependent for their grounding on an underlying process of temporalization. Unlike writers like Husserl, Heidegger and Deleuze, Wittgenstein was reluctant to call the questioning that uncovers this process philosophical. He thought of philosophy as the imposing of metaphysical presuppositions (picture theories) on experience but not the self-reflexively transformative process of experiencing itself.
Have fun.
That sounds good in theory, but how does it play out to the person interested in making progress? For instance, doesnt that mean telling a politician that liberty and equality for all may be an incoherent fantasy and should probably not be discussed? Cant really discuss non-existent universals and Platonist ideals, and impossible frameworks called free agency as if they can be demonstrably measured for all to see.
Im just using politics as an example. I dont care to discuss politics.
Im saying, if the article successfully convinces the reader about the rigor that should be applied to all things spoken, (the rigor I have been calling scientific), then you can set up a game called politics and stay rigorous during game play, but once you question the existence of or value of the game itself, you are being metaphysical, and run out of tools and rigor and measures. In other words, politics becomes the bullshit it may actually be. Same as metaphysics. And really this would seem to be true of Physics. Which is how physics was once Euclid and Ptolemy (which are now mostly bullshit.). We may one day think Einstein was a joke, like the earth being the center of the universe is a joke.
We are stuck on a sliding scale of bullshit, except when we talk about language and logic and make these the subjects of our science - the ultimate game. Or in other words:
Once the plumbing of language is done, what is left might be physics or politics but not philosophy.
Banno
Shouldn't we demand clarity as much from those asking questions as those seeking answers? So in Joshs' case, it is not just legitimate but incumbent to ask how we unpack "presupposing as its condition of possibility a general and primordial origin".
It's also legitimate, given our practical limitations, not to give full weight to every question, but to focus on those that appear most promising.
Analogously, not every reply in a thread deserves a response. It is at least to some extent incumbent on those posting to check their own work and see if they have erred, or could present a clearer case.
Why does the question remain unanswered? Why is it ignored?
No.
Yes, I thought that might be what you meant, but since physics is science par excellence, I wasn't sure I understood you. Actually, it raises an interesting question: There is the rigor of science, such as seen in physics, but also something else in phil which doesn't claim to be science at all.
Quoting Joshs
All well said, thanks. The part I bolded is where the question of method, obviously, remains open for us. We need not agree with Witt about what constitutes philosophy, while still valuing his accomplishments, under whatever description.
Yes.
Quoting Banno
Yes, these are the right questions to pose. If you think they're legitimate in any given case, I'll take that to mean that you agree with Williamson to some extent. And yes, we can't address every problem, but must pick the most tractable and interesting.
Is this to be read as a stipulation? It doesn't correspond to, say, Searle's use of 'brute fact" as mind-independent, non-institutional and (at least usually) physical.
Quoting Joshs
Arguably, they are interpreted so as to be stated... We'd have to look in to what is involved in "idealisation" to see how that fits.
And so on, by way of sense-making - my putting in my terms what I think youa re saying, you putting in your terms what you think I am saying, such that we seek some common ground from which to see what is at issue. I'm sure you will agree that there is much more to be said here, and we could go on in kind for quite a bit. I think we'd be matching your more phenomenological approach to Davidson's triangulation, itself a huge topic, but one that might well be worth pursuing.
All somewhat tangential to the topic here, which is analytic method.
Oh, yes. I think this the topic of the next few pages.
Quoting Banno
It does correspond if we follow Husserl in taking concepts like mind-independence, non-institutionality and the physical as subjectively constituted idealizations. Understood naively in their non-reduced forms, in the way that Searle does, brute facts and subjectivity are external to each other. But when we bracket the presuppositions of the naive attitude, we reveal the genesis of brute facts in processes of subjective constitution. The same method of bracketing reveal Williamsons analytic method to be mired in naive presuppositions concerning the logic of progress in analytic method, which when reduced reveal its genesis in subjective syntheses.
Quoting Banno
You dont have to answer the question, but could explain why it will not be answered, why it should be ignored.
Quoting Banno
Ok, ok. Fine. Ill do better without you, and leave you to it. Enjoy.
Its like a sub-forum inside TPF - they who shall not be questioned improperly or uninterestingly.
I'll have to leave you to it.
Thank you for the example.
You are basically painting with a roller rather than a brush.
Quoting Banno
Ok, fair. Hence my neighborhood analogy. Im looking to see if Im in the neighborhood as opposed to at a specific address, or sitting right across the table from you.
You and J both seem to be saying Im not even in the neighborhood.
Is the picture I made with the roller at least grossly similar to something the artist with the brush is trying to paint?
Dont answer. Ill see if I can tighten up what Im saying and asking.
Quoting Banno
I admit that Husserls work is extremely arcane stuff without a proper introduction, but let me ask you this. Williamson is concerned with progress in method. What does a progress of anything presuppose? Doesnt it assume that what it is that is presumed to undergo a progress be held still over the course of its development? Im referring to the qualitative sense of meaning of the substrate for the progress. A progress implies the ability to to count differences of degree in something which doesn't undergo change in kind over the course of the counting. What would you say guarantees the fixity in qualitative sense of meaning of concepts and methods that we make use of, such that something as assured as a progress can be assumed?
That said, it seems to me that Williams has a narrower vision in mind than I (or Schindler) might. I will also just add (and I say this as a great admirer of Big Heg), that philosophy that tends to be written in a more obscure fashion seems to be more prone to slipping into the cult of personality. At the limit, this gets every bit as bad as debates about esotericism, where no one who critiques the preferred master has ever "truly understood them."
Certainly, any thinker, particularly systematic thinkers, can become an authority figure in inappropriate ways, but the ability of people to read their preferences into obscure works, or to easily accuse others of misreading them, tends to make this worse.
To be fair, some topics lend themselves to more obscure formulations, so obscurity isn't necessarily blameworthy. Indeed, Heisenberg had a very interesting unpublished philosophy paper on a linguistic analogy to his famous Uncertainty Principle, where the key thesis is that, the more we try to lock what we are describing down with precision, the more the full ambit of reality is excluded and slips by us (and this explains why a Horace or a Petrarch can do so much with so little, or how Heraclitus' few fragments could spark so much thought millennia later). Plotinus or Dionysius could hardly have written otherwise (Hegel maybe could have at least tried though :rofl: ). But it's certainly a risk when one has to rely on less clear language. Being minable for aphorisms by people of all different persuasions is not necessarily a testament to one's philosophical legacy.
Right, one might see the open-endedness as a feature and not a bug, or one might also judge the complaint as being akin to condemning nutritional science because people still eat poorly, or condemning ethics and law because there are still miscreants and criminals. For instance, an advocate of "philosophy as therapy" can object that the failure of some to undergo therapy can hardly be taken as an indictment of the effectiveness of the therapy.
Quoting J
Right, particularly the focus on language seems like it will leave some things out. Just for example, for a paper I had an idea for I'm reading Rowan William's book on Dostoevsky's philosophy and Harold Bloom and some other folks' analysis of Hamlet and King Lear, as well as Milton's Paradise Lost. These secondary sources all treat these literary works as being deeply philosophical. My paper idea uses them as examples of particularly modern "pathologies of reason," (i.e. the tendency towards a straight-jacket, procedural intellectualism, or else an ultimately groundless voluntarism) that largely express themselves in the history of philosophy and literature.
Maybe my paper will be tripe, but William's book is very good. Point being, this is certainly the sort of stuff that has historically be called "philosophy," even if some of it might fall into literary analysis. It isn't just literary analysis though, because it moves from fiction to universal statements about man and being. Yet I am not sure how a view of philosophy as beginning and ending in linguistic analysis doesn't have to cut out this sort of work, in which case, what is it? It still seems to be a sort of philosophy, and arguably it is more so, which seems to make the move to make all philosophy analysis a sort of equivocation.
Or more simply, on the narrow view, are Nietzsche and Dostoevsky even philosophers anymore?
Quoting Joshs
Good point. Obviously, I interpret this differently. I see Wittgenstein the way I see Hume and Nietzsche, as great diagnosticians for the pathologies on modern thought, although I do not accept their conclusions. They follow out the dominant presuppositions of their era to their furthest (and IMO flawed) conclusions. Wittgenstein in particular shows the flaws of philosophy as a "system" and reason as wholly ratio, a sort of discursive rule-following. Here, reason ceases to involve ecstasis and an erotic Other, such that we become trapped within the fly-bottles of our own interpretations and systems, within human finitude. Procedural reason is raised up as the guarantor of ethics and political life (Rawls, Kant, etc.), but ultimately reveals itself to be groundless. Man is stuck within his own finitude, despite his natural "appetite for the infinite" (e.g. Leopardi).
I'd extend Przywara here and say that the situation of modern man is analogous to the way in which the creature is not the source of its own being. What it is does not explain that it is. The creature is always referred to something outside of itself. Even the what of a thing, its quiddity/essence, is not wholly intelligible in itself.
So too for reason. It is oriented outside of itself. We have come to see logos as a finite tool, the creation of man and his culture, but it is rather, I would argue, that man participates in Logos. The nature of logos is to transcend; it is always already past its limits and with the whole.
The relevance to the larger topic here is that modern philosophy is defined by its move to "bracket out" all sorts of considerations as irresolvable by reason, or beyond the limits of reason. The boundaries vary, it can be the phenomenal, the mind, language, culture, etc., but in each instance the bracketing involves a methodological move that assumes much about the world and reason.
In the reading, he's talking about theories of meaning that were supposed to be assessed by testing them against language use as we find it. He's saying no fleshed out theories ever appeared, so there's nothing to test. I think the progress he's talking about was just the fleshing out part. People sharpen their wits to express ever more refined versions of the hypothesis and stop there.
And we could find many other examples that illustrate how variously "philosophy" has been understood. I like keeping the umbrella open wide. @Joshs reminded us that Witt didn't view his later work as philosophy at all. (Or so he said! I wonder about his rhetoric sometimes.) (Witt's, not Josh's!). Would it matter? I'm Hegelian in the sense that I believe philosophy is constantly trying to understand its own nature, but using definitions and discriminations to try to winnow the field doesn't seem like the right way to get this knowledge.
So nothing need "guarantee the fixity" apart from our own preferences. If we agree that modal logic represents an improvement on predicate logic, what more is needed?
You (or Tim) may argue that we need something external or absolute or a platonic form or some such to fix the judgement. But [s]that there is such[/s] choosing to abide by such a thing is itself a normative judgement. And yet we judge.
No, it's not. For example, Plato's belief that the Forms exist was not a normative judgment.
Deciding to conform to such a thing is a normative judgment, yes. That's not what you said. You said, "that there is such a thing is itself a normative judgement."
Thanks for pointing out the lack of clarity.
(The issue strikes me as substantial.)
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
For Husserl reason returns to itself in the self-affecting presence to itself of the present moment, the speaking that hears itself speak in the same moment that it speaks. Once we bracket off all that consists of reference to all that which is not present and can never be present ( the idealizations of logic and empirical science) , what is left is the presence-to-self which grounds reason as pure self-identity.
I'm getting vague on what the "neighborhood" analogy was for. I think it was about whether linguistic/semantic philosophy can be likened to the most rigorous way of doing science? -- you were asking if seeing linguistic phil that way was "in the neighborhood" of what @Banno was talking about? I said I didn't think so, and tried to say how I saw it.
Well, neighborhoods aside, the thing to focus on here is probably that "language about language" is an essential tool. Philosophers from Witt to Quine to Banno to me will differ about its role. But it's always appropriate to call a time-out, so to speak, and say, "Now hold on. Notice how we're using the words here. Do we agree on terms, for starters? And is there something about the structure of language that may be influencing what (one of us) takes to be obvious, or capable of only one interpretation, or producing some necessary metaphysical inference?"
To me, that's just being a "disciplined" (to use Williamson's term) philosopher. I don't require such analysis to set the philosophical world aright, and as that hasn't happened yet, I doubt it will.
Quoting J
See, I think Im following you and can just say I agree. And be done.
But I also think if I rephrased what you seem to me to be saying, and questioned metaphysical above about the inference, and if I expounded on the structure of language being referenced here regarding what is obvious to only one of us, or addressed capable of only one interpretation - if I spoke about what you are saying you would probably say I was still getting it all wrong. Because I would say the following were in the same neighborhood and you didnt.
Quoting J
Quoting Fire Ologist
essential tool similar to clear scientific.
Not the same, but neighbors, or showing family resemblance, if you will.
Or here:
Quoting Fire Ologist
Quoting J
These are more distant, and I had to pull more context from my use to show what appears to me to be both of us recognizing physics as a prototypical science - the gold standard.
And this point you make:
Quoting J
Fully agree. I am blathering on with terms and context and asking am I in the neighborhood, just to, paraphrase your words, check whether Hold on, how am I using my words, where is any agreement?
Im hoping Im close, explaining why and how I think that, and asking you to work with me to either dissect and clarify what I said, or agree and/or build on it.
Quoting J
I agree.
Someone says something.
The next one says something about what has been said to, for starters, form some agreement about terms.
The first one says yes or no to the second ones reuse of terms. If saying no, hopefully showing why not.
The second one can then say ah, I see and hopefully shows what they now see.
The first one again says either yes or no (the no process starts the restatement process attempting to come to agreement for starters )
Once they agree, they can either end the short conversation or one of them builds on the agreement forged.
To me too, thats just being disciplined.
Where you just said I dont require [we] set the philosophical world aright
I also agree. I find it is a major achievement when agreement can be reached at all, ever, on just the word neighborhood for instance. (Insert jokes like no wonder, given you have such a thick skull )
One tiny step at a time is progress enough.
But although I do not require we set philosophy aright either, I, personally wouldnt say say I doubt it. Despite all odds against it, I nevertheless do believe it can happen, or I could not see the cost benefit of going through all of this painful rigor. Id rather learn about rigor doing physics, or carpentry, or any other trade than philosophy, if setting the philosophical world aright was only doubtful.
My biggest philosophical interest and justification for all of the painful rigor, is something eternal. Thats the hope. To know something about being a person worth knowing. Anything permanent. Anything I can teach to a God or a person born 100,000 years from now, or an alien 10 million years advance, or that would make Siddhartha Buddha smile. Something like is there something about the structure of language that may be influencing what (one of us) takes to be obvious. If I follow your meaning. Something like agreement on anything between persons is a miracle.
high, as it often is in current debates about realism and truth, wishful thinking may be more powerful than the ability to distinguish good arguments from bad, to the point that convergence in the evaluation of arguments never occurs."
There's the inevitable example of science. It'd be difficult to deny that scientific approaches do not lead to progress, but far more difficult to set out explicitly what those processes are and why they lead to progress. And this: "A small difference in how carefully standards are applied can make the large difference between eventual convergence and ultimate divergence."
Williamson apparently sees convergence as an indicator of progress. An interesting thought. While we might properly question if the methods of science are suitable for philosophical enquiry, we might admit that what is a problem for scientific method at least overlaps what is a problem for philosophical method, and we might further agree that convergence might indicate a good direction for further study.
The size of one's brush is not a bad way in to the next part of Williamson's essay.
Quite so, and not just with analytic philosophy. The temptation to jump ahead, to overgeneralise, to use the big brush, is great.
Precise errors over vague truths. It would be a mistake to characterise this as marking some considerations as irresolvable, rather we should be open and explicit about our inability to formulate some issues clearly enough for due consideration, to put the effort into those areas that show the most promise.
Quoting Banno
If I remember right, the original philosophical reason for the "translation" into logic was to clarify natural language, so that at least some philosophical problems could be resolved or dissolved. The other (possibly philosophical) project was the attempt to provide a foundation for mathematics. But I had the impression that both projects were abandoned, though to be honest I have forgotten exactly what the reasons were. My question is simply what is the aim of the translation project now? Is it the same, or something different?
Or make unwarranted assertions.
Is one of those scientifics supposed to be philosophical?
Quoting Banno
It is interesting. People can converge on a number of things. One type of convergence is an agreement on a solution to a problem. That's not always what happens in analytic phil, though sometimes it does. Another type is convergence on a question as being an important one. Yet another type is convergence on how to formulate that interesting question in the most precise and helpful way. I could go on, but just one more: Convergence can also mean increasing agreement on the right methods to use when inquiring into a problem.
My point is that "mere" convergence -- as opposed to some allegedly demonstrated answer -- can indeed be an indicator of progress, as long as we don't insist on the narrow type of convergence that means "problem solved."
Would divergence indicate a problem then?
It doesn't seem to indicate a problem for biological evolution.
Possibly Williamson, or Banno-interpreting-Williamson is thinking of a very specific convergence, of philosophical and scientific methodologies.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
It could. Like "convergence," there are a lot of ways people can exhibit "divergence." To pick one of my examples, if there's no agreement on what the important questions are within a discipline, and the result is that there are many research programs that have difficulty talking to each other, that would be problematic, I should think.
Or, just as convergence is not a sure sign of progress, divergence may wind up being healthy. Sometimes you have to let a hundred flowers bloom, and see what happens. In the context of Williamson, I think we're talking about a kind of convergence we're all familiar with, when an intractable or muddy issue starts to gain form, and those in the field see daylight ahead and begin mutually to use new concepts and methods. Not infallible, of course.
I don't know, but I know something I would like it to include, which is prior elicitation. It is usually thought of, as in that article, as capturing the knowledge of scientists or experts of some kind. A very different kind is to formalise what psychologists can tell us about what we all know. I recommend the book What Babies Know. Some AI researchers are on to it.
Help! Can't follow this, sorry.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Again, I'm not sure what's at stake with the "neighbor" analogy. If you're asking me, "When you say 'language about language' is an essential tool, do you mean that it resembles the clarity of science?" my answer is no, that's not what I meant. I tried to explain what I did mean.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Happy to continue talking, but I admit it's often difficult for me to grasp your points. It helps me, when drafting a post, if I write it out first offline, and let it sit, and think about what I'm trying to get across, and then edit the shit out of it!
Quoting Fire Ologist
Are you open to the thought that the eternal something might inhere in the process, and not the (unreachable) result of certainty and eternal knowledge?
I'm saying, we are both expressly saying "language about language" and both saying things about this like "essential tool" and "clearly scientific" which seem relatable to me, so we seem to me to be making similar observations in response to the article. Like we are in the same neighborhood (although I'm am starting to feel like I need to find a realtor.)
You don't seem to even see what I am saying. I see us saying a lot of the same things.
So your answer to whether I am understanding anything from the article or from what you said must be "no" (that is, if you, in fact, understand the article - we could both be misunderstanding each other and the article, and we might never know it from how this conversation is going).
I think this exchange between us is a performative example of what the article is trying to say: little to no advancement (be it of philosophy, science, this discussion, etc.) is the result of a lack of attention to rigor and standards, and is the result of leaps, using vague terms like "neighborhood" instead of building clear questions that, thanks to rigor in the building of the question, have possible resolution that two might be able to work on together.
I think I'm following the article just fine.
Be rigorous if you want to create something where progress can be marked. I could say much more, but... me talking continues to be a non-starter, too broad, and unhelpful.
I am a plain, natural language guy. I think, sometimes, not always, we can discern the rigor without strangling the discussion. I think we can tell who is rigorous and who is not without always repeating the ground rules. Sometimes we can't. You see what I am saying as too vague. So does Banno. I think we all see me trying to further clarify what I'm trying to say as not really helpful to the thread, and probably uninteresting to you all anyway at this point.
_______
This is the place where I sit when approaching philosophy. Struggling to move as high above the weeds as possible, often contradicting myself for sake of some even higher vantagepoint, something hypothetical, something yet to be disproved and begging some method to disprove it. I don't want to miss the forest for the sake of the tree stump; but that is precisely because everywhere I go are tree stumps so I know there is a forest that eludes:
So last attempt, hopefully, to point to something interesting I've gathered while reading the article (which is really a restatement of Banno's Two ways to Philosophize thread). Rigor is a tool, not an end. Maybe Siddhartha Buddha was not speaking with scientific rigor, but a deeply logical thinker, schooled in modal logic and analytics, can nevertheless glean useful data about the human mind from his words, learn of things worth further inquiry, and maybe even turn his words into something analytic for rigorous scrutiny.
It is important (I think) to note in all of this, that developing the virtues of rigor cannot simply be for sake of having rigor. The development of rigorous, analytic methods, like modal logic, are truly an advancement in philosophic tool-making; but these tools are new, and there is much work to be done before these advancements might salvage the profession from the basement of the humanities department at some crusty old university.
Dissolving has a finite half-life, and an end.
But again, as I've probably completely confused the issue for so many, none of this is meant to side-track or refute or downplay the more express lessons in the article. Lessons that, in the minutia, are clearly over my head (or that I am incapable of restating in my own terms). I agree, rigor is essential to anything approaching science, and if philosophy wants to be able to make progress and measure progress, the science of language, logic and rule-making is an essential part of it, in all of the ways raised in the article.
You're right that I'm having trouble seeing what you're saying. We may well be saying a lot of the same things.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Not at all. The fact that I'm having trouble grasping your thought is quite separate from what you do or don't understand.
Quoting Fire Ologist
I'm glad of that. All I can do is repeat my suggestion that, for better communication, it can really help to pare down a post to a couple of carefully expressed questions or observations. But this is no reflection on your grasp of the article.
Quoting Banno
We dont need anything external to our preferences to fix them. While the analytic methods Williamson chooses to apply to world are considered as external to that world, this is not the case when we submit formal logic , mathematics and empirical methodology to a Wittgenstienian or Husserlian analysis. We can find the ground for analytic methodology from within the structures of our use of preference, judgment and norms, as what is being concealed, forgotten , ignored and flattened over.
Williamson illustrates how the distinction between analytic and continental is more than geographic. He believes we have made progress in understanding our analytic methods; we know much more about topics like modal logic, possibility and necessity, and the technical aspects of truth than previous generations.
In Wittgensteins sense , Williamson champions improvements in precision, clarify and integration in what for Witt is a picture theory of judgement. Williamson takes for granted methods derived from the natural sciences, mathematics and formal logic and uses themes as his starting point, but it never occurs to him to inquire back to the basis of those methods. Doing so allows one to take account of the possibility that those methods may at some point be replaced by a different set of methods without disturbing their ground.
Wittgenstein, Husserl and Heidegger would all agree that All three would likely agree that Williamson's "progress" is actually regress** - a movement away from what philosophy should genuinely be concerned with. They would also agree that mathematical/scientific methods are inappropriate for philosophy's fundamental questions, and that the problems philosophy addresses require a different kind of approach than the one Williamson advocates.
Williamson's critique of "continental" philosophy misses the point* the apparent obscurity reflects the difficulty of the phenomena being investigated, not methodological sloppiness.
Each would argue that Williamson's paper represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what philosophical thinking involves and what kinds of problems it legitimately addresses.????????????????
Got it.
Im firing off a few, what I think are, sufficiently pared down ideas, hoping maybe one will stick.
So, ignore what I just said. All Im saying is, thanks for the above tip.
Excellent question. Long answer, again.
The original aim was to provide a foundation for maths in logic. This was not entirely dropped as a result of Gödels incompleteness theorems. While it's right that the whole of mathematics cannot be deduced from a single logical foundation, it's not quite right to suppose that mathematics cannot be given a basis.
Gödel didnt show that mathematics is not logical, but that not all mathematical truths are derivable from within one particular formal system. It didnt show that reduction to logic is impossible, but that no axiomatic system will do everything originally hoped. ZFC set theory and type theory are alternative logical foundational systems.
Philosophers came to see that formalisation often misrepresents the richness, context-sensitivity, and performative dimensions of ordinary language. But to walk away from formalism was to give up a valuable philosophical tool. Better to see if and how that richness can be treated formally, to see what can be done.
While other logicians provided formalisations of various aspects of language, Davidson provided a methodological basis for such an approach using Tarski's work of truth. Oversimplifying, Davidson suggested using a truth conditional semantics to develop an interpretation of aspects of natural languages in an extensional first order logic. With Russell and the Tractarian Wittgenstein the aim was to replace natural language. With Davidson, it was to understand it.
Davidson deliberately moved from talking of "translation" to talk of "interpretation" in order to make clear this methodological difference. So Davidson accepted that meaning cannot be separated from use, while still looking for ways to understand language in more formal terms.
Logicians and philosophers now look to see both where formal systems can display the structure of natural languages, and were aspects of natural languages can suggest ways to develop new approaches within logic.
Perhaps his point can be seen as pragmatic, that convergence, many folk working together on an issue, indicates a problem worthy of consideration.
Added: Quoting GrahamJ
Yep. Convergence might indicate utility, if nothing else.
I agree.
Quoting Joshs
How do you ground that? It seems a hollow accusation, given the ambiguity of "world".
What, exactly, is "being concealed, forgotten , ignored and flattened over"?
Quoting Joshs
What's that, then, and why should we take your word for it?
All this by way of showing that you are doing the sort of thing that Williamson complains about.
Now I'll give my own summation and evaluation when we have finished working through the paper, and I suspect that at that point we will find ourselves not so far apart. But let's not jump to the conclusion quite yet.
Cheers. Worth noting. Here I am reading the text as a more general critique and defence of analytic method - I think that's how @Srap Tasmaner intended me to see it when he suggested the paper.
You there, Srap? Have we lost you?
That notion only begins to make sense when we have a way of peering within what is taken for granted as an irreducible basis for philosophy. In Williamsons case, what is taken for granted is a set of abstractions common to mathematics, formal logic and empirical science. For him this is a genuine beginning for philosophy, because he fails to see the plumbing making it possible. Now of course, this is just my assertion that is, until you see what I see. Then Williamsons efforts become a perfectly respectable superstructure. Not wrong, but not grounding questioning and thus not genuine philosophy, just the regurgitation of an unexamined technical method. Williamson is aiming to improve a technology, but technology is not philosophy.
And yes, that's a trite argument. Yet
Consistency is a necessary precondition for explanatory adequacy. While the point is logically elementary, it bears repeating: in philosophy, the real danger isn't just explicit contradiction, but the glossing over of inconsistencies in the name of elegance or rhetorical flourish. Thats where Williamsons critique really bites.
The criticism of Dummett in the next paragraph is clear enough. Either a mammoth stood on this spot a hundred thousand years ago or no mammoth stood on this spot a hundred thousand years ago is either true or it is false; false for my case since there were no mammoths in Australia. Clumsy stuff, on Dummett's part? Or mischaracterisation?
As I recall, Dummett moved from a classical logic to an intuitionist logic, since the absences of warrant for the conclusion, in an intuitionist logic, permits the rejection of the law of excluded middle - we just don't know for sure whether there was a mammoth were Dummett stood, a hundred thousand years ago - and saying "I don't know" is commonsensical.
But we can still take on board Williamson's point: it is important that we are clear what logic - what "constraints" - we are using. It's just that Dummett may be using intuitionistic logic rather than just relying on Williamson's common sense.
What you say is clear enough, but I'm still missing the warrant for "genuine philosophy." I appreciate questions about grounding very much, and consider them important, but by what standard is it genuine, as opposed to ersatz, philosophy? Are there some uninterpreted "grounds" that are meant to be obvious?
(@Fire Ologist)
What is one to say to the claim that philosophy studies language, or is engaged in plumbing, or leaves things as they were, or must focus on precise tools? I think the response is simply that, more than anything else, we know that philosophy and Plato go together. When one wrestles with Platos dialogues he is most surely doing philosophy. This does not exhaust philosophy, but it is the most certain orientation for an understanding of philosophy.
Now if Wittgenstein was right, or if philosophy only studies language, or is only engaged in plumbing, or leaves things as they were, then Socrates and Plato were not philosophers at all. But this is absurd, just as it is absurd to claim that Wittgenstein was a more paradigmatic philosopher than Socrates or Plato. It would be absurd to claim that things like Platos Republic or his Symposium are not philosophy, and what this means is that none of this about plumbing is remotely correct. Philosophy can do lots of things. It can even do plumbing if it likes. But the idea that it is restricted to such menial work is not at all plausible. Such theories are parochial, both temporally and geographically.
There is virtually no disagreement on the fact that Socrates and Plato are paradigmatic philosophers, and therefore I think this is the most decisive argument against strange reductionisms regarding language or plumbing.
This is basically correct. If Williamson or others refuse questioning and refuse to examine their premises, they are failing to do philosophy. A superstructure with no capacity to examine the foundation is an example of that. The Wittgenstenian who refuses to go beyond their "hinge propositions" and tries to end the argument with "it just is" is another example of a non-philosopher.
Much appreciated.
Just trying to engage, see if I could learn anything useful.
Ive been forced out of the neighborhood at this point. Like an undocumented migrant philosopher. Dont speak the language.
You have the property developer, the architect, and the carpenters and builders. You even have the folks down at Home Depot. I never have any problems speaking with any of them. Analytic philosophers seem like code enforcement - all post hoc and redundant when they dont point to some rule book violation that usually only actually matters to other code enforcement officers.
We need code enforcement, but we need all the rest. And so do code enforcers.
Thanks for the explanation. It would seem that there has been considerable progress on this issue since the bad old days.
Right, but is this even a "grounding" or just mere description, tracing the way reason shows up in experience? How does this justify the authority of reason? And doesn't this risk absolutizing the epoché?
There is also the question of individual judgement here. For Hegel, sheer sense certainty is contentless, it needs to go beyond itself to be anything at all. Instead of being pure immediacy, it turns out to be pure abstraction, and in a sense, a myth, since it is always already caught up in the Concept, which is mediated and self-developing. I suppose Hegelians and Husserlians can both accuse the other of falling into different illusions, but that hardly seems to go anywhere.
So, first, we have the difficulty of judging different conclusions drawn from sheer sense certainty. Then we have to ask, from whence these different judgements?
But as noted before, something of the materialist's presuppositions seem to still loom large in Husserl. The concrete particular is "most real," despite this elevation coming from what is supposed to be a methodological move in the order of [I]our[/I] knowing (not the order of being). Yet even if one accepts that "everything in the intellect is first in the senses," this wouldn't necessarily imply any sort of ontic priority to the giveness of sensation itself.
If the immediacy of experience is the ground of being (as opposed to merely first in the order of knowing) wouldn't this imply that it is subsistent in itself? And yet it seems radically contingent, with causes outside itself, always being referred outside itself. How is this not supposing a spontaneous move from potency to act if sheer experience is said to be ontological ground, and thus prior to all things? That the transcendental ego is always already active doesn't explain [I]why[/I] this is so.
So for instance, Stein recognizes the need for metaphysics to complete the description, Jean-Luc Marion recognizes that giveness exceeds the subject and must come from without, Ferdinand Ulrich probably extends this the furthest, countering the forgetfulness of being with an understanding of being as gift.
Agreed. "Ugly, convoluted, and ramshackle" need some specific instances.
I've sometimes wondered whether aesthetic criteria are more like correlations than causes. In other words, let's not say that the beauty or elegance of a definition somehow explains why the definition is a good one. Rather, we could note that good definitions -- ones which we approve for other reasons -- will often have the characteristic of also being aesthetically admirable. We might even be able to make a tentative identification of useful, fruitful definitions by first noticing their elegance. And vice versa. Emphasis on "tentative."
Quoting Banno
This is one of the real dangers, true. Another that I think is equally important is the danger of becoming attached without warrant to a method that assumes what it sets out to prove -- usually something about consistency or the role of logic. Of course, "without warrant" is the argument-starter here!
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes, the religious phenomenologists (and we could include Henry, Scheler, and perhaps even Zahavi and Levinas in this group) believe that to exceed the solipsistic self-givenness of the subject requires metaphysics. But why? How does the transcendence of the subject toward a substantive in-itself (the Goodness , Height and Righteousness of the divine other) not represent a backsliding away from Husserls content-free ground towards an arbitrary substantive beginning? How does it not end up reifying both subjectivity and alterity? If we want to critique Husserls ground of pure presence as excluding Otherness, we can follow the path set by Nietzsche, Deleuze, Heidegger and Derrida, who dont fall into the trap of imprisoning transcendence with a substantive divine content.
:lol:
Quoting Fire Ologist
Yes, well said. :up:
I have no problem with the code on this (or other) forums. But laying down, and enforcing a code on philosophy as such seems like a futile project.
Think of it this way. One cannot legislate for language. What determines the language is the continuous use of the language and the consensus of users determines what works. (Yes, there are exceptions in France and Sweden. But those systems depend on acceptance and application of the code.)
Philosophers are a big enough and disparate enough community to make observation and enforcement of a code very difficult to impossible. In the end, what gets accepted by philosophers is what philosophy is. Yes, there are social forces at work here as well as the core reading and responding to texts. They may pollute the ideal, but one must acknowledge their existence.
I just don't think that's quite fair.
I agree with @Leontiskos that one particularly appealing way to figure out what philosophy is, is to look at Socrates and Plato. Whatever they're trying to do, it's what we call "philosophy".
So I'll give a simple definition of what they were trying to do, which I hope is not controversial: philosophy is thinking well about what it is important to think about.
There are two elements or moments there, and maybe they can't be fully disentangled, but they can be thought about distinctly, within limits that might themselves be interesting.
Socrates spends more time on moral and political matters than someone like Williamson, but his mission is not just to think and talk about these important issues, but to think well about them, and to lead others to think well about them.
The work of philosophers lands somewhere in a space measured by these two axes. Those most concerned with the "thinking well" part tend to focus on logic and language, moving a bit along the other axis into metaphysics and epistemology. All of this together is the territory most strongly associated with academic analytic philosophy. If it's technology, it's the technology of philosophy.
Does it leave untouched important areas? Morality, politics, spirituality, art, culture? Of course. But thinking poorly about those important areas of human experience doesn't deserve the name "philosophy".
Better still, we would want figuring out what's important to think about to be part of the practice of philosophy, and not something we can assume we already know. (I'm reminded of a certain German philosopher who suggested that no one devoted any time to the single most important question there is.)
If we're going to begin the task of figuring out what's important to think about, I think we would want to do a good job of it, so we would begin by thinking about how we could figure out something like that. Right from the start you have to face the challenge of thinking well, and reflecting on how that can be done.
Maybe too many philosophers never quite get past that. They become absorbed entirely in the matter of thinking itself. But philosophy is a communal project, so the fruits of their labor are available to others ready to get to issues of more "relevance," as kids in the sixties are supposed to have said.
We should know better than to exalt the theoretical physicist while denigrating the experimenters, the engineers, and the technologists without whom their work would be just a peculiar way of decorating a whiteboard.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
How well is a philosophy thinking if its results are of immediate practical relevance to a wider community?
As a certain German philosopher wrote:
I don't know what I was expecting, but that sure wasn't it.
I'm just going to congratulate myself for being directly on-topic and move along.
Thank you.
Beautiful. Shining.
Previously, the two moments seem to have been tagged thinking well, and making shite up.
On a different note...the burgeoning partisanship on this site is becoming nauseating.
It's an . . . unusual claim. Does anyone know whether another philosopher besides Heidegger ever said something similar? Reminds me of Beethoven saying that his final music was "for a later age."
Edgar Allan Poe famously said there is no such thing as a long poem.
I would say there are people who are naturally suspicious that the grander the edifice you've built, the less we should trust that you put equal care and effort into each part.
The systematic philosophers people continue to read generations after their passing are the ones that stand up to such scrutiny, if not quite entirely then more than enough to credit their discipline.
On the other hand, even the less gifted, or less stubborn, might manage to make at least some small thing well. Such contributions are the meat and potatoes of science.
Nietzsche was known to say his philosophy was for the thinkers of the future.
From "On the Genealogy of Morals"
"The man of the future who will redeem us not only from the hitherto reigning ideal but also from that which was bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism; this bell-stroke of noon and of the great decision that liberates the will again and restores its goal to the earth and his hope to man; this Antichrist and antinihilist; this victor over God and nothingnesshe must come one day."
In Beyond Good and Evil , Nietzsche frequently refers to "philosophers of the future, positioning his philosophy as preparation for those who will come after. He writes about philosophical "free spirits" who are precursors to future philosophers who will create new values.
In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche explicitly states that he writes for posterity, not his contemporaries, famously declaring himself "a man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow."
Nietzsche consistently positioned his philosophy as being ahead of his time, written for future generations who would be capable of understanding and implementing his ideas about value creation, self-overcoming, and the rejection of traditional moral systems. He saw himself as preparing the ground for future philosophers and cultural creators who would build new foundations for human flourishing.
[/quote]
Without agreed-upon constraints, philosophical debates become dominated by style, authority, and local jargoneach little sub-school operating as a fiefdom, each debate carried out on terms untranslatable to others. Sound familiar? has a point. It was rather neatly described elsewhere as Quoting AnsiktsburkIt captures a recurring phenomenon in both contemporary philosophy and in this forum: the appearance of rigourcomplicated argument-mapping, textual scaffolding, with little real pressure placed on foundational assumptions or cross-framework intelligibility.
Williamson's suggestion:
Indeed, and this requiers agreement, convergence. This is Williamsons minimalist prescription: no methodological revolution, just a re-commitment to being explicit. What logic are you using? What counts as evidence? What assumptions are you allowed to make? These are, in a sense, procedural constraints, shared norms that allow for adversarial argument without descending into chaos.
Williamson isnt pushing a single method (e.g., scientific naturalism or conceptual analysis), but calling for transparency: if youre doing verificationist semantics or paraconsistent logic or metaphysical grounding, say so. And make it intelligible.
For that matter, Heidegger did not exactly shy away from praise, or conversation with peers.
Yes. I am not opposed to that thesis, which is a much softer form of Gerson's. Still, I was trying to be more conservative and say
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Good enough for me. :up:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
This is all very good and very helpful, but I am going to disagree with the bolded. I don't think "thinking well" has any need to leave untouched areas of importance. Crucially, I would say that if (say) Wittgenstein's approach to thinking well does not allow us to think well about those important areas, then it is not a sufficient or complete approach to thinking well. I would even say that if a kind of "thinking well" is incapable of thinking about any important things, then it fails even as a "thinking well." It would be like if I created a measurement tool that simply cannot measure anything worth measuring. "It's capacity for accurate measurements is unprecedented, but unfortunately it simply cannot measure any of the things that most need to be measured."
All this assumes procedural constraints and shared
norms can be willed into existence on the basis of some imagined neutral playing ground. I can play your game according to your rules only if I can relate to that game and those rules. William doesnt think he is pushing for a single method but he is doing exactly that.
Also beautiful.
The fact that what you just said is the case, and I think it is, means to me that the qualitative difference between what the analytic tool-makers do (essential to scrutiny), and what the system builders do, is important in itself. It is something to consider and develop. We cant expend all of our efforts on only one or other. Either one, when taken alone, loses at least some, if not all of its value.
But is that admirable? It could also be seen as a mere dog-whistle to those who would think of themselves as part of an intellectual elite, pretending to understand words that were hollow.
Is he a radical voice ahead of his time, misunderstood because of the profundity of his insight? Or is he a clever ironist, whose appeal to future generations flatters the vanity of self-anointed "deep thinkers," regardless of the actual content?
Quoting Joshs
Willed into existence, yes, but not on some "imagined neutral playing ground", so much as by the hard graft of making oneself clear and explicit.
And a certain amount of good will.
This is @J's particular genius.
Quoting J
Neither Heidegger nor Nietzsche said they did not want to be understood by their contemporaries. They wanted desperately to be understood, tried every way they could to be understood, but also knew that fundamentally new ways of thinking are not commodities whose communication is guaranteed by use of the right words. This is a mentality shared by analytic philosophers, technologists and the corporate world. If one spends ones whole intellectual life surrounded by conventionalized and communized ideas, then one assumes that anything worth saying can be summarized in a good sound bite or logical formula.
The point isnt whether Nietzsche is right about the status of his work, its the very idea that concepts arent bits of data and we arent data-processing computers. Interpretation of the sense of particulars is dependent on their role in a wider framework of understanding, which as Wittgenstein shows, is discursively produced. But different discursive communities cant rely on good will to overcome incoherence in interpretation between groups, even of procedural issues as seemingly benign as the one Williamson discusses.
He couldn't, becasue the essay is not an argument as such, so much as an aesthetic critique. He is showing us again what is beautiful in philosophy, and what isn't.
Despite all the talk of rigour, logic, clarity, and convergence, Williamsons piece is fundamentally rhetorical: it persuades not by example, but by tone, stance, and value judgment.
Is transparency and clarity enough? We might add a need for responsiveness, a desire to be both understood and to understand. That, too, is a constraint.
But that is an attitude, and so depends on what one wants, on what one is doing here.
What is philosophy for?
That's the question that will decide what you think philosophy is, and how you will do philosophy.
Good. That makes Heidegger's hyperbole here a bit suspect, doesn't it?:
The bolded statements are kind of criticism-proof, aren't they? Reading them as a literary editor (which I am, partially, IRL) they also seem defensive and self-consoling in the face of lack of acceptance. Why couldn't he just say, "My stuff is hard. It'll take a while," instead of making it a hallmark of "essential thinking" or "genuine philosophy" or whatever?
But human, all too human . . . as are we all.
Sure. But absent good will, and there is no hope at all.
Quoting Banno
Quoting Banno
Isnt all of that off topic? Thats psychology that can apply to any type of philosopher or non-philosopher.
-
Quoting Banno
I think he shows what he sees as most beautiful in philosophy, but does not show what isnt. He just characterizes it as ugly. Maybe that is a function of him not using names for the ugly philosophers.
Quoting Banno
:up:
True. But surely Williamson is proposing no such definition, is he?
Quoting Leontiskos
Not "has to", no, but might. Not everyone writes about everything, or even thinks about everything.
(Peter Strawson quipped that he would get around to writing about ethics once he was in his dotage, so near the end of his career he wrote a single lovely and extremely influential paper.)
But I should add that your insistence on pulling the object of the verb into your interpretation of the adverb sails right past the distinction I was trying to offer.
It's a somewhat tenuous distinction, but I think if used cautiously it could be useful. There's something about the facts on the ground that almost seems to demand it, and it seems to be a distinction Williamson believes in, so there's that.
So if the vorhanden is that which merely exists in a contextless way (as for example a hammer is merely a configuration of material or materials), the zuhanden is the hammer as a useful tool that exists in a context of nails, timber, building design and construction and so on. The realm of "knowing that" can be seen as a realm of mere factoids, whereas "knowing how" can be seen as the realm of practical wisdom and creativity in general.
Can you take a stab at what you think it means?
That's not crazy and reminds me that when talking about Plato I wanted to point out that changes in technology, and especially in expertise and "know how", are well known as social factors driving the dialogues.
These experts and artisans have a new sort of authority based on their specialized knowledge. Well, what sort of knowledge is that? What kinds of specialized knowledge are there? Can you have special knowledge of wisdom? Of goodness? Etc etc
Sure will, but probably not tonight, life calls. Appreciate the insight.
No, I don't think so, though I do think he tends to overemphasize the "thinking well" side of the equation. Or perhaps he is focused on a particular kind of "thinking well."
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I actually want to say that if someone thinks well about some subject, then their "thinking" can be transposed into other areas. Contrariwise, if their "thinking" cannot be transposed into other areas, then I would doubt that they were truly thinking well about their particular subject. This is vague, but one way it cashes out would be in my claim that someone will improve their own thinking in their own particular field just by reading an excellent philosopher who is speaking to a different field, though they may not know exactly how the improvement came about.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I definitely doubt how separable they are. I would say that the quality of thinking will naturally correlate to the importance of the object, in much the same way that a beautiful and intelligent man will want to marry a beautiful and intelligent woman. If this is right then a culture which focuses on the highest objects of thought will develop the best ways of thinking. At the same time, a culture's mode of thinking will always be related to the objects it chooses and desires to think, whether these are low or high.
But I will end by highlighting the importance of this, lest we go too far astray:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I seem to remember that in Aristotle's' understanding phronesis or 'practical wisdom' acquired by artisans in their practices could assist them in understanding the arguments regarding goodness, beauty, justice and so on.
Is there an absolute, context-free wisdom? Most of us here are probably familiar with Socrates' notion of wisdom regarding virtue, goodness, justice etc. consisting in knowing that we do not know. Within some context we may know, in the sense of wisely judge, what is good, virtuous or just, but beyond that...?
Not to be "Mr Woke" but do you want to try another simile here?
Quoting Leontiskos
Is this to say that the most important objects of thought are only accessible to the best thinking?
I'm having trouble following you throughout. Maybe I get where you're headed, but maybe you have another way you could explain it.
Quoting Leontiskos
Two thoughts. (1) this is almost literally the goal with spending time on logic, but people who work on "logic" are actually mostly people who work on metalogic, which to me is, well, a different thing. And different again from philosophy of logic and from philosophical logic. (2) The other way round is important too, maintaining exposure to other fields or at least subfields, other disciplines and pursuits entirely. (I know I've mentioned this before with chess, the importance of having a broad "chess culture," not being too specialized.)
For my money, Williamson strikes his best chord in the second paragraph on page 10, beginning, "Discipline from..." That is all spot-on, and it is very closely related to ' idea that wisdom must have some determinate content.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Nope, I don't. Why would I? I am thinking of the male/female synergy, and I see nothing wrong with male/female similes.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Sure, that would follow in its own way.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
So one theorem which flows out of what I said is this: if an analytic philosopher claims that any subject which his analytic philosophy cannot handle is eo ipso unimportant, then his understanding of "thinking well" will be limited and incomplete at best, particularly when such a subject is widely recognized to be important. This is pretty common among analytic philosophers.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
That's right, but I actually define logic as the art of thinking or else reasoning well, so I don't think it has a specific object. In fact good logic courses incorporate a lot of translation between formal languages and natural language, and they naturally use examples that are of interest to students. Showing a student that she can reason well about important things is the best way to teach her how to reason. Indeed, if the student does not understand the applicability of logic, then she arguably isn't even learning logic (as opposed to symbol-manipulation).
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I agree.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yes, and I think that's sort of the same thing. It's something like, "Anyone who thinks well about one thing also thinks well about other things." Or else:
Quoting Leontiskos
None of these points would hold if "thinking well" in one field were entirely different and disconnected from "thinking well" in another field.
You have to appreciate these remarks in the context of Heideggers critique of technology. When he says that the immediate effectiveness must remain foreign to all essential thinking, because such thinking, in its truth, must be prevented from becoming familiar and understandable to contemporaries , he equates the the familiar and immediately effective with the technologizing instrumentalism of empirical science as well as the Cartesian metaphysics that grounds it.Philosophy cannot be the mere putting into practice of a pre-conceived plan.
We often talk about philosophy as if its a single activity. Traditionalists would probably argue that many versions of philosophy arent truly philosophical, or are simply dead ends and mistaken paths. One issue with philosophy is that it has no clear starting or end point. Its an umbrella term for a range of activities and ideas, so disparate and complex, its a wonder we have any agreement on this site at all.
To determine whether philosophy helps us live better might amount to a kind of conceptual trap. An infinite regress, even. How can we do this without relying on philosophy to decide what living better even means? And even the verb help is somewhat ambiguous.
I don't think the right way can be determined, if by "right way" is meant " one way for all". Humans are diverse, which means we are left to find our own ways. I don't have much patience for authoritarian or traditionalist thinking, because those modes of thought and their ideologue adherents do inevitably posit one way for all.
So, it is not "philosophy" which we can rely on to determine what living better means but our own individual experience and practice of philosophy?philosophy as such cannot decide anything?it is individuals who must decide for themselves what living better means for them (and not for others) or else blindly follow others if they don't want to or can't make such decisions. The term 'help' may be ambiguous, but surely it is possible for individuals to come to know, even if only via trail and error, what helps, and what hinders, them? Can anyone else decide for you?
Quoting Janus
Not sure if that helps. To a Marxist help is going to look very different than to a Randian. I'm not convinced we all inhabit the same world, see the same things, recognise the same barriers or enablers of good practice (for want of a better term).
So thinking being the male and its object being the female?
Metaphorically. Or maybe archetypally.
Quoting Leontiskos
Another way to say this might be that good thinking is portable, which I think most of us want to believe, but I suspect the evidence there is a little mixed. Right from Socrates we get, "If you want to know about horses, do you ask a physician or a horse breeder?"
Yet another way to put this might be that the good reasoning that went into a good piece of thinking, or the good thinking that went into a good decision, ought to be 'extractable', that you in your field (or life) could learn from someone else doing something else.
And that again relies on a distinction between the movements of a mind and its object. To draw them back together, as you are inclined to do, would be instead to distinguish reason from instrumental rationality, giving to reason not only the expertise in reaching the desired result but something like the 'proper' selection of a goal, or of an object of thought. Instrumental rationality would then be only part of reason, not the whole thing.
Is that close to your view?
Thanks, I agree. Studying philosophy is obviously not for everyone. But there is a sense in which everyone practices philosophy, even if they unconsciously adopt presuppositions about how they ought to live. I favour the broadest sense of the term 'philosophy'.
Quoting Tom Storm
Again I agree?but for me both Marxists and Randians are ideologues like the dogmatic religionists just because they posit some old "one way for all". It seems to me we all inhabit the same world in the empirical sense of "world"?but on the other hand beyond that we each inhabit our own worlds, which are microcosms, along with our family, friends, acquaintances, colleagues and so on. We inhabit the world of the Philosophy Forum, for example.
I'm happy to listen to different people's philosophies, but I lose interest when people assert that such and such is so, and then try to back it up with walls of text cut and pasted from some other philosopher or source, as though they believe that constitutes an argument for why everyone should agree on whatever point they are labouring or bias they wish to confirm. On the other hand if they present well-considered arguments, then I'm happy to listen and consider, and then either agree or offer critique. Ideologues always seem to take umbrage at critique.
Quoting Janus
Are you comfortable with an approach to philosophy which takes as its subject matter not claims for universally true content (a dogmatically correct way the substantive world is , whether ethically, epistemologically, or ontologically), but the sorts of content-free general descriptions that you have offered (there is a sense in which everyone practices philosophy, even if they unconsciously adopt presuppositions about how they ought to live, we each inhabit our own worlds). This is a way of using philosophy to speak generally of the utterly particular.
Quoting Janus
Yes, good point. But the ready to hand can itself reify experience. My response to J focuses on Heideggers critique of technology, which turns everything into order-able standing reserve, including human beings.
I agree with the critique of the human tendency to view nature and other humans as mere resources. I'm afraid I cannot understand just what the quoted passage is getting at. Would you care to unpack it according to your understanding?
But from a Heideggerian or Derridean standpoint, Williamson is doing bad philosophyblind to its own historical situatedness, epistemologically naive, and overly committed to scientistic ideals.
How do we move past this?
Acknowledge that there are different styles of philosophy with very different aims. It seems that the Postmodernists aimed to develop new conceptual lenses?novel ways of thinking. I see this as being a kind of literary philosophy?about as determinate as the aesthetic ideas of beauty or quality.
Is Williamson "blind to his philosophy's historical situatedness? Does he need to take that into account? If he tried to do that would not his accounts of our historical situatedness be themselves historically situated? Then we might need an account of the historical situatedness of the account of historical situatedness. Easy enough to see where this is headed. It seems we inevitably must begin from where we are and we cannot attain a "god's eye" view of our situatedness, and nor do we need to to begin to inquire into whatever it is we wish to inquire.
The demand to include historicist considerations seems like the idea we've encountered on these forums of a purported "blind spot of science".
Why should, for that matter how could, any investigatory discipline in the natural sciences take into account "the subject"? For example, how to include an account of the subject in geology. I've asked this question of the proponents of the "blind spot" and received no answer, or even an attempt at an answer.
Well, consider my original question, in what way is this even a "ground?" Does it secure the authority of reason? Does it explain it in virtue of its causes or principles? Is the cause of giveness giveness-itself, man self-moving and spontaneously self-creating? The purely descriptive is not really a "ground" in the traditional sense. It is not a first principle either. And there is the issue I mentioned before where other "Great Names" attempt the same exercise and come to a radically different conclusion from Husserl, which seems to me to cast doubt on what we are to make about claims to have stepped behind all mediation. This same issue haunts the Greater Logic. Even advocates like Houlgate readily admit people following the same method are unlikely to come to the same "deductions."
[Quote]How does it not end up reifying both subjectivity and alterity?[/quote]
Many ways, consider for instance personalism. Persons are ontologically basic, but people are also more fully persons when they are unified in the Good, etc.
Like I said in the other thread, the idea that immediate sensation is maximally unabstract is a presupposition that enters the door with Enlightenment materialism. I don't think it's an obvious conclusion; indeed Hegel's point is that this is the sort of least stable phenomena, devoid of content, and so the least itself and its own ground, the [I]most[/I] abstract. The inability to transcend these sorts of presuppositions is partly why I think there is no truly post-modern philosophy, just the same trend of nominalism and individualism cranked continually upwards.
Consider the etiology of "reify' in "res," and it becomes clear that the idea that moving away from immediate sensation as "reifying" is itself a loaded metaphysical supposition, just one that is often being ignored and taken for granted by "bracketing" (arguably, simply dogmatically assumed if this is then used to supplant metaphysical inquiry). It's true that some thinkers do the opposite, and elevate the universal inappropriately. But I think the more subtle thinkers on this topic are often at pains to elevate neither of the "two streams"particular or universalover the other. Rather, they are like Ezekiel's two wheels, passing through one another, each reflecting the other and revealing it.
Of course, if one just assumes nominalism as a starting point by bracketing out realism a priori, one has already elevated the individual, but that's not the same thing as justifying that move, so I think that's one of the difficulties to be addressed. If we presuppose that phenomenology can be understood without reference to what lies outside the bracket we have already cleaved the part from the whole and declared the whole subsistent; or declared the part the whole (solipsism).
Subsistent-Bing-Itself cannot be an "abstraction." It is rather most subsistent, most determined by itself, etc. Being truly infinite, it is not contained in any "abstraction,' hence the via negativa and analogia entis. Whereas the giveness of human phenomenology is always referred outside itself. Being radically contingent, it cannot be its own ground (unless it is self-moving potency), or so the concern goes.
Plus, we might consider descriptions of an a full move around intelligibility and mediation. Jill Bolte Taylor's description of her stroke is an interesting one. Yet it is not obvious that we best know being, cutting through illusion, when we are undergoing severe brain damage that disrupts our faculties
[Quote]if we want to critique Husserls ground of pure presence as excluding Otherness, we can follow the path set by Nietzsche, Deleuze, Heidegger and Derrida, who dont fall into the trap of imprisoning transcendence with a substantive divine content.[/quote]
How can you imprison transcendence? If it is imprisoned, it has simply failed to be truly transcendent. The true infinite isn't a prison, because it is beyond all concepts; e.g. Dionysius, Plotinus, etc. That Nietzsche never studied this tradition and projected the popular 19th century German Protestant pietism he grew up with backwards onto the whole of Christian (and Jewish, Islamic, and Pagan) thought is not really a failing of those traditions, but of Nietzsche as a source of historical analysis. This is also why I wouldn't put him beyond modernity. The God of the German Reformers looms large in the Overman. So too for Heidegger, projecting Suarez back onto the whole of scholastic philosophy, although I will allow he has a vastly better grasp.
Quoting Joshs
Thanks, that's helpful, and probably connects with @Janus's insight about "knowing that" and "knowing how." As long as we acknowledge that Heidegger's context in re technology is not the only one from which terms like "essential thinking" can be evaluated, I'm fine with it. Well, that's not quite true . . . in general, I wish Heidegger and other continentals could be a little less pompous in their language. But as I don't read German and would to have struggle through difficult French, I don't really know their language, so perhaps that's unfair. Suffice to say, it doesn't translate well.
Quoting Janus
The connection seems right to me. I'm willing to believe that Heidegger at least had this partially in mind, especially given what @Joshs says above, about the tension between the two types of "rationalization" that so many philosophers were concerned with at that time. As Josh writes, the fear is of a process "which turns everything into order-able standing reserve, including human beings." How do we prevent "rationality" from becoming Weberian "rationalizing," the instrumentalization of the world? What is "at hand" can be taken either way.
But I also think the Heidegger passage is more combative than that. He writes:
"Prevented" is very strong, especially when coupled with "in its truth." If he'd said, "in its misunderstanding" or "in its misapplication," that might be different. But H seems to want it both ways: "What I'm saying is true, but don't you dare claim that it is 'understandable.' That would be to turn it into a technology."
What I really think: This is all rhetoric of a bygone moment in philosophy. We can find plenty to think about in Being and Time without worrying about whether H was often defensive and hyperbolic.
Quoting Janus
Exactly, we must begin from where we are. But if we take where we are in a traditional way that understands temporality in static terms as an endless series of punctual nows , where the past and future are interpreted on the basis of an already fixed present, then taking historical situatedness into account would seem to involve an infinite regress. By contrast, if beginning from where we are is beginning from a more radical notion of temporality and history, where our past and present come to us already remade by where we are headed, then thinking historical situatedness is thinking past, present and future together as the now, and thinking from within the now as the event of transit.
Quoting Banno
This is possibly the most interesting part of the paper, for me. We could take W's remark to mean two things:
1) I have not lived up to the highest possible standards of rigor here, though I have tried.
2) The nature of what I am saying in this paper contradicts, or at least blurs, the whole idea that the only good philosophy is "rigorous" philosophy of the sort it advocates.
I rather take him to be saying the former. But I think he ought to say the latter, perhaps along the lines that you paraphrase.
Quoting Banno
If "rhetorical" is taken as the alternative to "argumentative," then yes. But rhetoric often gets rejected as not philosophy at all -- and sometimes for good reason. W's paper is very clearly philosophy. But from its very title, "Must Do Better," it is meant to be ameliorative. A certain course is being recommended, not merely analyzed. What sort of philosophy is that?
Quoting Banno
Or we can pose a question Witt might pose: Is this language on holiday? in this sense: We seem to be asking for a definition, or at least a useful description, of an activity that, among other things, constantly asks the question "What is philosophy?" Does a question about itself still mean anything?
I think it does, and believe strongly in the self-reflexive character of philosophy, but I'm not sure how to fit that into a question about what philosophy is, or is for. Not saying it can't be done, I'm just uncertain how to proceed.
I don't disagree with you. But I would go much further. We warp our understanding of philosophy by thinking that rhetoric is something that can be removed from our use of language, like cutting out the rotten bits of an apple. Rhetoric is often assumed to be an optional strategy, mostly relied on by those who do not have good arguments. Argumentation is not an alternative to rhetoric. When arguments are presented to an audience/readership, it is an attempt to persuade and consequently rhetoric. Much of what is labelled rhetoric is not an alternative to argumentation, it is simply bad argumentation.
Rhetoric covers a wide range of facets of writing. Good writing always invoves these as well. It's a cliche, that when we dress, we never simply cover our nakedness or announce our membership of some social group. Whether we intend to or not, we give an impression of the kind of person we are how we are feeling and much else. So we think about the effect we will have on people and dress accordingly. It's no different with language.
This post is intended to draw your attention, not necessarily to persuade you. But it is not difficult to see it in whatever you read, if you look for it. After a while, you can see the rhetoric in any writing - including the writing of whatever brilliant philosophers you love most.
Consider this from Williamson's last paragraph. He is talking about Dummett:-
So he is representing the debate as something like a boxing match. When a foul is committed the referee stops the match and makes the participants start again. That's not even possible in a philosophical discussion. If Dummett has committed a foul, someone will likely call him out and he will either accept the criticism and take the remark back or not. There's no referee. Why does he present things in this way?
The argumentation is not at issue here. It's about the way that (professional) philosophy works.
I think that's actually an open question, particularly given Williamson's standards.
It's certainly chitchat *about* philosophy, but it's not a piece of philosophical work itself, if that work is understood as rigorously analysing some issue, building a theory, criticizing another theory, addressing a criticism, all that nuts and bolts *work*.
And I have some sympathy with that view, and have said before that the overwhelming majority of my own posts are just chitchat, sometimes gossip, like talk in the faculty lounge or at a bar. Now and then I've done some actual work here, but not often. There is, for example, no actual philosophical work by anyone anywhere in this thread. At least on this view. Strictly speaking.
You'll want an example. Suppose a couple old friends, mathematicians, are having dinner, and the Continuum Hypothesis comes up. They could chat about their intuitions, about implications of a result, prospects for a result, work that's been done. Very well-informed discussion, and possibly a discussion that would give one of them the impetus to work out and publish something related, but it's not really the work itself. It's still just chitchat. Possibly valuable, and no doubt this sort of thing is very important to the progress of the field, but it's not the actual work.
It looks like there's room to theorize about that, as a contribution to the sociology of mathematics or something, but that's still not mathematics.
Anyway, that's the hard view. I'd like to be able to state the opposing view as clearly, but it's quite a bit more difficult. I think you'd want to abolish the distinction between the practice of mathematics and its products (proofs, concepts, etc), so that there's a point to blending together proof-making practice and other things like chatting about math. You might even want to abolish the individual mathematician as the agent of a practice or author of a proof. In other words, a rigorous, coherent version of treating chatting about math as part and parcel of mathematical practice, just as much as working out proofs, is going to look awfully continental awfully quickly.
Or so I suspect. Maybe there's a less revolutionary way to pull that off. But I don't think acknowledging the truism that mathematicians talk to one another and that's important amounts to a real theory.
More simply, the idea that beauty and intelligence seek out beauty and intelligence. Thinking well will seek out a high object of thought, and a high object of thought will attract strong thinking. It doesn't really matter which is associated with male or female, but even sociologically we see that males tend to take on the role of pursuer, and therefore it is natural to compare the beautiful and intelligent man seeking out a beautiful and intelligent wife to the "thinking well" seeking out a beautiful object.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I don't find that mixed. Anyone who thinks well about one thing will thereforeceteris paribusthink well about other things. It doesn't follow that the physician knows more about horses than the horse breeder. What follows is that the physician will think better about horses than the non-physician (i.e. ceteris paribus).
Maybe the point you are making is that generalists tend to be better all-around thinkers than specialists? I agree with that too.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Right. :up:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yes, that seems fair. But I don't think I've said that explicitly, and I would be wary about how someone is inferring that view.
For example, when you say, "philosophy is thinking well about what it is important to think about," you have already drawn together thought and object according to the very definition of philosophy. So I feel as though I can also draw them together simply in virtue of your own definition. In fact the whole notion of "what is important to think about" is presumably going to be troublesome for any view which resists the thesis that some things are more important than othersfor any view that privileges methodology over object.
-
If we take a step back I think we have this:
How do we adjudicate this question? I would point to all of the non-Analytic philosophers who think well about what is most important. First and foremost, we have again Socrates and Plato. After that I am thinking of people like Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Maximus the Confessor, Thomas Aquinas, Jacques Maritain, Charles De Koninck, Peter Simpson, Gyula Klima, etc. (I could also add continental thinkers, but I omit them for the sake of argument). Analytic and rigorous methods have been used for millennia, and I myself was trained in a kind of Analytic Thomism which was very comfortable with ethical, political, metaphysical, and religious reasoning. This whole notion that one must choose between rigor of method and import of subject matter strikes me as a non-starter.
Gödel is a very interesting example. A theist who thinks well, applies his thinking to God, and thinks quite a bit better than the Logical Positivists (in virtue of his incompleteness theorems). He is the guy who does Analytic philosophy better than the Analytic philosophers, and who also does not limit himself to the objects of thought to which Analytic philosophers tend to limit themselves. I don't see that as coincidental or uncommon.
[hide="*"]Quoting Srap Tasmaner[/hide]
The opposing view that I favor can be brought into view by looking at amateurs rather than "professionals." It's not as easy to tell the difference between an amateur who is engaging in "chit-chat" (or else unprincipled reasoning), and an amateur who is engaging in philosophy.* Nevertheless, that difference is still crucial in the case of the amateur, and yet it cannot turn as heavily on what are essentially professional methodologies. More simply: just because the amateur is not capable of understanding or utilizing professional methodologies, he is not therefore barred from true philosophy. This is precisely where I see Williamson faltering. He highlights very well the crux in the paragraph I pointed out, but then he seems to at least partially fall away from that clear insight, into a preference for specific methodologies.
(In Plato we see clearly the idea that the "professional" is not necessarily the most philosophical.)
* In fact I think it is also hard to tell in the case of the "professional," but I am leaving this aside for the sake of argument.
I know it sounds like hes celebrating obscurity for its own sake, as critics of postmodern writers have a field day accusing them of doing. But what hes trying to say is that, as Wittgenstein would agree, to understand anything in a fundamental sense is to understand it in a new way, in a fresh context. To treat what is understood as already familiar as a derivative of a pre-existing scheme or picture is to render it meaningless, to fail to understand it in Heideggers primordial sense. We do of course comport ourselves toward things in this everyday way all the time, but in doing so we fail to recognize this mode of interpreting the world as derivative and secondary.
For the record, of course I didn't say that, even inadvertently.
Quoting Leontiskos
This, on the other hand -- I'll admit I was trying to coax someone into saying exactly this. Not with any particular goal in mind, it's just that this is what people always say about philosophy in the analytic tradition, so I wanted to sort of set a place at the table for this view.
@Hanover did you read the other essays in the Dover collection that has "The Will to Believe"? In one of them -- and I can't dig it out just now -- James makes a similar claim about the human mind needing an object adequate to its capacity, or something, and that object is God, the ultimate object of thought. Does that ring a bell?
[I] Maybe that's also in the title essay, I don't remember. [/I]
Well I gave the quote where you seem to say that implicitly, and in the context of comments about Analytic philosophy.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
:up:
Those are two well-represented views on TPF.
...discourse and dissection. So I'll go back to the suggested demarcation criteria, that we stop just making shit up when we start dissecting, and that this is what marks the move form myth making to doing philosophy.
Quoting Janus
He explicitly situates himself within realism within the realism/antirealism debate within analytic philosophy. But the expectation is that he explicitly situate himself in Heidegger's history.
Quoting J
The work done on Heidegger that made progress was that which interprets it in analytic terms, and dissects it accordingly - Dreyfus, Brandom, Carman...
All somewhat tangential.
[quote=Timothy Williamson]Unless names are invidiously named, sermons like this one tend to cause less
offence than they should, because everyone imagines that they are aimed at other people.[/quote]
I was impressed by that because I began to think while reading "Is this just a sermon?"
Well, not just -- but an earnest sermon to pay attention to.
Still mulling, but there's a lot of good reflections in there. (And, actually, I thought the paper had demonstrated its point at around page 15-ish)
thought Williamson didn't go far enough in naming names.
The mind asks for a universe that suits it, and must believe in such a universe or despair.
And also:
The deepest need of our nature is not to be rational, but to believe that life is worth living.
The unapologetic idea that belief arises from needs and wants is such a profoundly different worldview than a scientific one that pretends objectivity. "Pretend" is my bias in that sentence.
Quoting Leontiskos
Let's talk about that then. Here's the whole paragraph:
There's a bit of a muddle at the beginning, because he says
is false.
Insufficient, so something else must be needed. But then he says you need something else when the following condition holds:
But the denial of (P) already guarantees that when philosophy is disciplined by semantics, it must also be disciplined by something else as well.
The condition suggested in (P) is a conjunction:
Then (P) is the claim that philosophy is disciplined when both (D/s) and (D/o) hold.
But that means there are two ways for (D/s-) to hold: failure of (D/s), or failure of (D/o).
Suppose (D/s-) holds because (D/s) fails: philosophy needs another source of discipline because it is missing semantics. If it happens that (D/o) holds ? so there already was another source ? you need yet another one. Which he will address:
Only (D/s-) seems to rule out the possibility of being disciplined by a single field, so this condition can never hold.
But what about the other way for (D/s-) to hold: (D/s) holds but (D/o) fails; philosophy is disciplined by semantics but not by anything else (and so is not disciplined). Then philosophy needs to be disciplined by something else, precisely because it is not already disciplined by something else.
I think part of the problem here is that "disciplined" is being used in two different ways ? not quite two different senses. It's rather like the way we use the word "hot" in two ways: you can ask if something is hot or cold, and you can ask how hot something is (or similarly, how cold). Similarly, discipline seems to be, on the one hand, a matter of how firmly your inquiries are guided by other disciplines, and by how many; but on the other seems to be something that can be achieved, and that stands as the contrary of "undisciplined".
This is rather unfortunate. Because Williamson is a classical logic man, the language of sufficiency and necessity comes readily to hand (it's all over that paragraph), and he's inclined to piece together his thoughts in conditionals (which point one way or the other, depending). But what he wants to describe is quantitative, not an all or nothing business, so by the end of the paragraph we're relying more and more on quantifiers to round out the picture ? one is not enough, several are needed, and "not any" is right out.
But what he really seems to need is measurement: how disciplined is this practice, to be answered by checking first how many other disciplines are brought to bear, and then checking how well the practice is disciplined by each. He seems to recognize this because he points out that "different groups in philosophy [might] give different relative weights to various sources of discipline," which is to say that their practice might be more or less disciplined by a given field.
The numerical model is clearly what's needed ? so why didn't we start there? Why does the model begin with "is" and "isn't", "insufficient" this and "necessary" that? Why does it sound like he wants to say "Be disciplined rather than undisciplined" when it will turn out, quite soon, that he means "Be more disciplined by more things, rather than less disciplined by fewer things"?
It's not a very interesting question, in itself, but I think there's an answer: this is a quirk of the way Williamson's mind works.
His two central pieces of work are on vagueness and knowledge. As I understand it, the work on vagueness supports the view that vague predicates do, as a matter of fact, have a sharp, definitive cutoff for when they apply and when they don't: there is a number of hairs on a man's head, having one fewer than which makes him bald. But ? and this is the curious bit ? we are unable to know what that cutoff is. I understand this was called the "margin of error" argument.
Come along to knowledge ? much of this I've actually read. There are several theses to this work, but one of them is the "luminosity" argument: knowledge is a mental state which an agent definitely is or is not in, but it is generally not luminous, meaning the agent generally cannot know whether he is in that state or not. Why not? Because the difference between being in a state of knowledge and not being in a state of knowledge is too fine for us to reliably discriminate between them. He argues for this by showing that between two states apparently easily distinguished you can interpose stages that take you gradually from one to the other, so gradually that failing to reliably discriminate each step, you cannot claim to reliably discriminate the easy cases. It's a boiling frog argument. Or a slippery slope.
It's obvious enough that the positions are related. (I don't remember clearly whether he notes the similarity in his book, but I do recall him mentioning the work on vagueness, so he probably does.)
Now what about discipline? Here again, he seems to want to stake out what we might call "realism about discipline" ? i.e., that there is a fact of the matter about whether you are or aren't ? but where he ends up is with this scale of gradations between being disciplined and undisciplined.
Now what you'd expect from his other work (I believe this paper falls between vagueness and knowledge) is that the important corollary to the discovery of this area of gradation between disciplined and undisciplined, is that we cannot know for sure where we fall on it! We may indeed be doing proper disciplined philosophy, but we cannot know it.
Well, he certainly can't say that! The whole point of the lecture is that you should make sure you are properly disciplined, so this must be something you can do, and you must be able to know whether you are doing it or not. Otherwise, it's just "try to", which he's clearly not going to countenance.
One more little note. I think I've told this story elsewhere, but it'll have a different point now. Williamson somewhere tells the story of explaining Gettier problems to an economist, who was entirely nonplussed. "What's the big deal?" he asks. "So there are exceptions, so what? All models are wrong." Williamson reflects on this and thinks maybe the economist is onto something and that philosophers should take a stab at this model-building business. (I believe he took his own advice and collaborated with more numerical types on at least one paper.) ? So this is the odd thing: Williamson is a diehard realist of the first order, all of whose work seems to force on him a recognition of degrees and weights and multiple factors that should be considered in building a model, but either he cannot bring himself to join the Bayesian revolution @GrahamJ has recommended to us (and where I'm inclined to land, truth be told), or his own practice already falls on the "more Bayesian" end of the scale, but he is unable to know it.
"The Sentiment of Rationality" is one of my favorites, but not the one I was thinking of. I found what I had in mind in the next essay, "Reflex Action and Theism":
I think he's saying you could discipline your philosophy purely by semantics, but it's likely to end up "distorted." He might mean that you could end up with a theory that's semantically unafflicted, but which carries a glaring logical fallacy. Obviously the reverse could happen if you just use logic as your discipline: it's logical, but it's language on holiday. We end up using multiple disciplines because experience warns us that we ought to.
I know what you mean, and the mathematical analogy makes clear what "actual philosophical work" might look like, on this view. But I think -- and don't you? -- that this view is wrong. Two reasons: First, to hold the view, you have to dispute or ignore the overwhelming consensus; you have to deny that all the "non-mathematical" philosophers are also doing philosophy.
Second, this view is ameliorative. It proposes a way that philosophy should be understood and practiced, and suggests that we come up with a different word for what the others are doing. This seems unnecessarily radical. As was pointed out elsewhere in this thread, we have the same situation involving the post-structuralists or continentals, to speak loosely. I don't think we should encourage wrangles between overarching schools of thought and practice about who is "really" doing philosophy. I'm happy to read the Williamson paper as a defense of more rigor and care within analytic phil. I don't need to be persuaded additionally that this is the only way of being philosophical.
At any rate, we read a number of articles on "The Problem of Evil." Did analytic techniques help here? I am not sure. I put the Brother's Karamazov far above any of the influential articles we read. Is it philosophy? Arguably not. But it's lent itself to a great many philosophical treatments. I mentioned Williams earlier. David Bentley Hart's book on theodicy also focuses on BK, as does a quite large body of scholarship that crosses from the literary into the philosophical and theological. But the methodology here is obviously going to be quite different from the analytic school. Likewise, MacIntyre probably cites more poems, dramas, and novels in After Virtue than philosophers, or at least it's about equal, but it's better for that.
Or, for a more direct example, we might consider how someone like Plantinga goes about showing how "God cannot create a rock so heavy he cannot lift it," is merely logically equivalent with "God can lift any rocks." Does this bit of work resolve the issue?
Not really, it simply misinterprets the problem by trying to squeeze it into formalism. The problem is much deeper. It is twofold. First, there is the ultimately contradictory nature of freedom as a total absence of constraint and sheer, undetermined movement of the will, constrained by no determinancy, which itself collapses into the contradiction that any choice at all, in being determinant, is a limitation of freedom (a point Hegel makes towards the opening of PR).
Second, we have a sort of self-reference in play in that the ability to "do anything" presumably would include to ability to make it so that one "cannot do anything." The unlimited contains within itself the potential for limitation. We perhaps have something of Hegel's "bad infinite" in play here. Either way, it's a thorny issue the formal solution simply obscures.
And I would say the exclusion of this sort of option is precisely why academic philosophy is increasingly irrelevant. If one looks at the best sellers on Amazon or Audible in "philosophy" it is overwhelmingly New Age, informed by Eastern thought, or religious. If one looks at philosophy sections in bookstores, which normally bracket out the religious and New Age to either side, you see Nietzsche and other, older existentialists dominating, as well as the old perennials (Plato, Aristotle, etc.) and a smattering of Enlightenment tomes. Some Continental stuff shows up, very little analytic.
Arguably, Continental philosophy still has a fairly large effect on culture through the arts and the humanities, although the effects on some fields like Classics hardly seem to its credit (e.g., publications quadruple as enrollment plunges by 80+% and big names in the field start openly calling for its own destruction). Analytic philosophy? Not so much. I suppose there is "effective altruism" and New Athiesm, but these aren't as obviously "analytic." Obviously, liberalism remains immensely influential, even totalitarian in some respects, but this isn't really "analytic" philosophy, but almost a sort of parallel, less Enlightenment-skeptic thread of Anglo-American thought that largely exists in the sciences and politics. This birthed the very influential, now hegemonic "neo-liberalism;" again, probably not to its credit.
A common theme in the move towards bracketing and siloing down philosophy, and these aforementioned streams, seems to be a sort of skepticism of man's capacities (a key thread of modernity from Luther and Calvin) and of logos itself, and also an almost tyrannical irony, particularly wherever optimism is concerned (e.g. "liberalism is the worst of all ideologies, except for all the others"). I think this helps explain New Age and Eastern texts supplanting these in book sales to some degree.
The difference is perhaps most obvious in ethics, where the entire focus seems to shift over to "what is right," theoria, and not "how do we make ourselves do what is right," i.e. praxis. What the New Age, Eastern, and religious texts have going for them is that they don't neglect praxis, or the need for "rhetoric" in motivating praxis.
One way this plays out is in the absolutely catastrophic job market for philosophy PhDs. This is, in a way, less extreme for some areas of philosophy, which can take advantage of adjacent fields and work in religious institutions. Particularly, the boom in classical schools offers a lot of positions with pay better than many university positions, but that's also a praxis heavy area of focus. By contrast, the main outlet for analytic PhDs tended to be computer coding, a field which seems to be facing its own devastating wave of automation. And, to my mind, teaching younger students at a classical school is vastly closer to the original aim than being forced into coding shopping and finance apps. But this is just part of a much larger issue in academia, the German model of the "research university" making "progress" the chief focus, and not cultivation and education. I will allow that the case for bracketing down philosophy to focus on tractable "progress" is at least significantly stronger than it is for some disciplines such as classics, and yet the same drive has been present in those fields as well.
Yes, this idea shows up a lot. There is, for instance, even in the athiest Leopardi a recognition of our orientation towards an infinite good, a desire that finds its rest in no [I]thing[/I]. Robert M. Wallace is pretty good on this in Plato's conception and psychology of the Good and Hegel's true infinite. David Bentley Hart has an interesting article on this in "Ye Are God's" focusing on Nicholas of Cusa:
The idea that the goal of philosophical education was to become "like onto God" was common to both pagan and Christian education in late-antiquity. I don't know if these can be excluded we philosophy without making some pretty dramatic assumptions about philosophocal anthropology.
So wouldnt one have to do some philosophical work before one could draw that conclusion?
Could you be wrong here, and there is some degree of philosophical work buried in the thread?
Or is the point that, even observations like this one (namely, that this thread and Williamsons afterword contain no philosophical work), are not properly good philosophy until we can expressly show and see the work that goes into them? (Not meaning to call your observation improper philosophy, or maybe you are actually okay with that for purposes of this thread.)
I'll take another swing at it, and recast the question using a different analogy, instead of the mathematicians talking over dinner. (This will be something else I've talked about before, but there you go.)
If you look at a grade school math book, one with a chapter about "word problems", you'll see something like this:
And from there you'll get equations that translate the conditions set out in the problem, and a demonstration of how to solve the problem once all this setup is done.
Introductory logic textbooks do something similar. In both cases, some students find it extremely difficult to do this "translation" into formal notation.
What's curious is this "Let A = ..." business. On its face, that's not ordinary English such as the problem is written in. It's also not just mathematical notation, and apparently isn't exactly math at all what kind of "equation" could that be?!
"Let A = ..." is a sort of snapshot of the translation process. A bit of intermediate work product. Not exactly ordinary English, not exactly math, but some of the connective tissue that embeds mathematics in our lives and without which mathematics would be pointless, meaningless, and inapplicable.
There are some corollaries: the learning of mathematics is inconceivable without this intermediary "mathematical English," which is what math teachers speak most of the day, and what students speak when answering questions; similarly, the work of mathematics, the practice of mathematicians, is mostly carried on in a more developed form of this same mathematical English. No article in any mathematics journal has ever consisted entirely of notation not to mention the fact that published proofs are not genuinely formal proofs but more like sketches or summaries of what such a thing would look like.
And so it is with philosophy.
Now, there are still differences between the three sorts of paragraphs you find in a math textbook, the English, the mathematical, and the transitional. Not all of them exactly *are* math, but all are necessary to math and for math even to be a thing.
And so I think it is with philosophy. It's not really a matter of formalism at all, but more like the distinction in a legal opinion between the actual decision, the language of which is binding on parties, and obiter dicta, which could be important to understanding the decision and complying with it, but which does not have the force of law. (Maybe I should have gone for this analogy first.)
So would you still have to say?:
Quoting Fire Ologist
Yes. There are some topics that benefit greatly from literature. Ethics is a prime example; Politics is another. A thumbnail sketch may be good enough for logic, but the issues in ethics really require a good imagination, so they benefit from a good story-teller. Raymon Gaita's books "The Philosopher's Dog" andin a different way, "Romulus, My Father"are a good examples. They sell well, too.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Is there a formal solution to the problem of free will?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Forgive me, but, in my book, proper (i.e. traditional, socially responsible) liberalism was hi-jacked in the eighties by capitalist interests. It has very little to do with neo-liberalism.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Well, given that analytic philosophy has very little to say to or about the arts and humanities, that's hardly surprising. I have an impression that there's a good deal of suspicion of science, and a desire to distance philosophy from science. But, to be fair, analytic philosophy looks much more towards science than continental philosophy does. Some would say that it often approaches scientism.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Well, it's hard to sell a non-vocational qualification in the present climate of absolute obsession with The Career. But I do think we should try not to think of an educational qualification as primarily a qualification for a career. Nor is philosophy the only subject facing those issues. Fine Art and English (and languages in general) face the same issues.
Though I can't believe that students enrol for a philosophy qualification at any level expecting to get a job on the strength of it. Lots of them do other things, and, I hope, feel that they benefited from their philosophical training. When I enrolled for my Ph D, I expected to have to start a proper career when I had done the three years' residency. I was not at all sure that I even wanted a job in academia and getting an offer was quite a surprise.
Okay.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
It seems to me that we do not need (D/o) at all, and that this is the point of (P). (P) is the claim that, "Discipline from semantics is by itself sufficient..." If (D/o) were necessary then (D/s) would not be sufficient.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I think I understand what you are trying to say here. I think you are trying to say that, "failure of (D/s), or failure of (D/o)," result in a non-philosophical approach. I would simplify this whole thing and just say that philosophy must be disciplined by something, whether that is semantics or something else. "But that is no reason to produce work that is not properly disciplined by anything."
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I agree with this, by the way. Those sorts of muddles are why I am not fixating on the paper itself.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Or else "semantics" is being used in two different ways.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Why is it unfortunate? I don't see a problem with using "disciplined" in that way, just as I do not see a problem with using "hot" in that way. This is a form of analogical predication, where we simply do not have any obvious "unfortunate" equivocation occurring.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I don't find his point hard to understand. "Be disciplined, not undisciplined. That means adhering to at least one standard, and hopefully more than one (e.g. semantics, syntax, logic, common sense...)." This will of course involve rigorously adhering to the standards one adopts (for rigor is a form of discipline). It also involves adhering to more than one standard, supposing this is what discipline requires. The wrinkle is that, depending on how one views 'semantics', it could be a necessary standard that cannot be done without. Either way, the point he is making seems clear to me.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I don't find his ideas here uncongenial. I would phrase it this way:
This is extremely close to an Aristotelian or Thomistic understanding of goodness and badness. It provides the proper initial orientation without foreclosing on the conclusion (e.g. see my post <here> where I answer Banno's charge that if we have a vague target then we already have a conclusion).
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Why in the world would someone think degrees and weights are incompatible with realism? Realism and teleology have always gone hand in hand, and you don't have teleology without degrees and weights.
That all seems fine to me, and relates to what I said here:
Quoting Leontiskos
But I don't see why anything you are saying would entail that, "no actual philosophical work by anyone anywhere in this thread." I think that if we move away from a focus on formalisms or professional methodologies, then philosophy is taking place in the commonest of places.
To be clear, are you claiming that there is no distinction being made in this thread between the "legal opinion and the actual decision," and therefore there is no philosophy occurring? If so, I would have to think more about the claim.
Probably.
I tried to do a bit of logical analysis of the text, but I didn't try all that hard. And I connected what I found to what I know of Williamson, but my knowledge has obvious limits. I'd call that post "quasi-philosophy," how's that?
The labeling is not all that important to me, but I don't think it's helpful to ignore the difference between what is clearly technical work and what isn't. Call it all "philosophy" if you want, but you'll still need some terminology for that obvious distinction.
Hear, hear. This is what is important: There is an obvious distinction, and we can probably find some consensus on terminology that eschews the "phil/not phil" binary. I've grown used to thinking of what you're calling technical work as simply "semantical or logic-derived analytic phil." A bit cumbersome, maybe, but as you say, we all more or less know what we're talking about.
I think we should also try to avoid a value judgment about what is better or worse philosophy -- style-wise, that is, not in terms of interest or rigor or clarity.
One could say, if we want to say what we are doing is philosophy, if we want to label it philosophy, we must do better.
But, I see the more substantive point. The distinctions being made here are the important point, and where someone wants to overlay the label or official domain called philosophy isnt itself the real point. Like for example, its all philosophy, sure, but good philosophy will stand apart (maybe with subtlety at times only recognizable as such by good philosophers) and is worth its own distinguishing terminology.
Very good. Reminiscent of Rodl's "naive" questions about what 'p' is supposed to represent.
I think the elephant in the room is that we don't know what we mean by "technical work," or, "professional work." We can agree that philosophy requires rigor, but we don't know what we mean by "rigor." That's what is trying to be deciphered.
Again, I'm curious what this amounts to without the hyperbole. To understand anything in a fundamental sense is to understand it in a new way? Why? Couldn't the old way have been fundamental too?
And "to render it meaningless"? Why so drastic? Why not just "to construe it in a less interesting way than the writer intended"? And I'm sorry, but what the heck is a "primordial sense"?
You see where I'm coming from (hopefully with both our senses of humor intact :smile: ). I would very much like to see Heideggerians and others who followed his path stop treating all these matters as if they were do-or-die, right-or-wrong, essential-or-meaningless, succeed-or-fail, agree-or-you-haven't-understood, etc., etc., and aim for more modesty and, dare I say, humility. We're all in this conversation together.
I would sum this up by saying that natural language is much more powerful than artificial languages, such as formal languages (which in fact depend on natural language). I would go back to this:
Quoting Leontiskos
This is why Scholasticism's rigor is so much more robust than Analytic Philosophy's rigor:
Quoting Luká Novák, Can We Speak About That Which Is Not?, 168
I'll argue now for a slightly different position.
A lot of students have trouble with word problems not because they lack the needed technical mastery ? are unable to solve simple equations ? but because they are stymied by the "setting up" process. They'll say that they just don't know where to begin. There's this little story that involves numbers, but how do get that into a form that you can solve algorithmically?
(I think the issue here is a little different from the "translation" that goes on in introductory logic classes, which is mostly about understanding which words in English map to which logical constants. Not important.)
What I want to say here is that this is a problem of seeing. The question is whether you can detect the picture that the sentences of the word problem are painting and detect the part of the picture that is left blank.
One thing that's a little odd about this is that mathematical notation itself is completely superfluous, and only exists to make understanding such "pictures" easier, to make their structure graspable at a glance.
What the students who struggle lack is this mathematical perception. The real point of word problems is to develop this perception.
Now, as it happens, a great deal of philosophical writing is concerned not with technical issues per se but with changing how you see things. (Among innumerable examples, Wittgenstein is an easy one.) A great deal of work goes not into demonstrating that A is a subset of B, but in getting you to see A and B as sets at all, and particularly for getting you to see that, for the problem at hand, A and B are the relevant sets.
Now to Williamson's point: what he demands is "setting up" work that is through enough that you can reduce a "natural" question to a technical one.
I think we have to call the "setting up" work philosophy; Williamson adds a stricture on the aim of setting up, a way to compare different ways of setting up a problem, and a criterion of success or at least improvement.
Please just stop doing this. No one wants to hear it.
I'm quite serious. But while we're at it, please stop with your condescending posts where you instruct other people how to behave, what to write, and how to rewrite their posts to adhere to your own standards. No one wants to hear it.
You have a point. I apologize for giving in to a moment of pique.
Thanks, I appreciate that.
My point that a philosophy which places natural language above formal language is more robust than a philosophy which does not was serious, and I am willing to defend that point. This is a thread about scrutinizing philosophical quality, after all.
Dont get your knickers in a twist . Im not in philosophy to insist on do-or-die, right or wrong ( Heidegger spent his career deconstructing the concept of truth as correctness). However, as to agree-or you havent understood, what if we instead put it this way: summarize the ideas of a philosophical school in a way that is reasonably consonant with the community of scholars who inhabit it or you havent understood. Before we can get to the agree or disagree part, we have to get past this key first step. Then its fine to say,there, Ive shown that Ive done my due diligence and I still disagree.Modesty and humility are lovely qualities, but we cant apply them until we know what it is we are trying to be modest about.
Quoting J
So heres an opportunity to familiarize yourself with an important set of ideas grounding Heideggers equating the concept of understanding with novelty. Once we have mastered these ideas we can together put on our modesty and humility hats and ask skeptical questions about how essential or primordial they are. Like Deleuze, Foucault and Derrida, Heidegger makes use of Nietzsches principle of the Eternal Return of the Same. Rather than viewing it as a cosmological principle, or as imagining that we would have to live the same content of our lives over and over again eternally, they read it as eternal return of the different. Difference must be understood as ontologically prior to identity. Identity is a surface effect of difference. So for instance, in referring to the old way, they ask how we know what is old except through recollection. Does recollection retrieve a past like fishing out a stored file from a cabinet? Or does memory reinvent what it recalls? Deleuze writes:
Heidegger et al are not interested in proving the assumptions of identity and a self-identical past incorrect, they want to offer an alternative view that leaves the old ideas alone and burrows beneath them. This way we can keep the naive assumptions but understand their basis more richly. There is no experience that is completely devoid of meaning, but some ways of thought can produce confusion and arbitrariness, as Wittgenstein pointed out. Its not just Heidegger and his ilk who pound the table for a notion of understanding as transformation. It has made its way into the popular culture in many forms. For instance, John Vervaekes popular youtube series on the modern meaning crisis introduces his notion of relevance realization, while Buddhist-influenced approaches teach an idea of ethical coping as practical context-immersed involvement. What these have in common is a view of understanding as primordially enaction and active production rather than epistemological representation.
Which also reminds me of:
In terms of the focus on method, there is perhaps a risk of going too far over into either side here, either the retreat into formalism (abstraction), or a sort of totalitarian empiricism. And I suppose the difficulty here is that the question of method relies to some degree on questions about being itself. It's a bit of a chicken and egg issue. For instance, the conclusions of the elimintivist do support their methodology, but then the methodology is also what leads to their conclusions, and I'm sure this applies in many cases.
There is a tendency in this thread to use "continental philosophy" as a foil to rigorous philosophy, but that does seem odd to me. Do continental philosophers lack rigor? Not usually. But the key may be that the person who reads them casually lacks rigor, and this reflects back on them. It's almost like the phenomenon where the casual reader who tries to express Einstein's theory of general relativity lacks rigor and precision, and then the listener assumes that Einstein himself must also have lacked rigor and precision.
This also accounts for why analytic-type philosophy is popular on philosophy forums such as this one: because it is easier to understand and learn. It's not a coincidence that Russell gets discussed more than Heidegger. Russell is much more accessible. This presents a problem for continental philosophy, at least if it wishes to be discussed in popular circles.
I've said similar things myself, even in this thread, even recently, but at the moment the question of priority is less pressing for me than the issue of how the two are related, so that's what I've been writing about.
@Banno's position here is interesting because he is strongly committed both to the primacy of natural language and the usefulness of classical logic. The argument he often makes is that classical logic is not something you find implicit in ordinary language, as its hidden structure, say, but you can choose to conform your language use to it.
I think that view actually rhymes quite well with the description I've been trying to develop of how formal, technical language can be embedded in natural language, much as mathematical language is and must be embedded in natural language.
Quoting Leontiskos
Absolutely. Its hard to explain to someone , especially if their standards of clarity are shaped by the corporate world, how a set of ideas can be rigorous yet not instantly accessible.
I want to say that the crux of the paragraph on page 10, along with @Count Timothy von Icarus ideas about wisdom being determinate, as well as my thread on transparency, all get at a central concern.
The concern is that if something is to be philosophy then it must say something. To "say something" is to offer up something which one believes, which one is willing to defend, and which someone else might deny. Even Williamson's very minimal criterion of "disciplined by something," generates this "saying something." If one offers something that is conditioned and answerable to no discipline whatsoever, then one is not actually saying something.
That's a low water-mark for philosophy, but I find it not only helpful, but also commonly accepted and commonly deployed. A common critique of, say, Heidegger, is that he is just engaging in word-salad without saying anything at all. The rejoinder is never, "Oh, well I agree that he is engaged in mere word-salad, but that's a-ok!" Rather the rejoinder is, "No, he is not engaged in mere word-salad (and if he were then I agree that would be a problem)."
I want to say that this minimal criterion can run much farther than might at first seem possible. This is why the questions, "But what are you saying?," or, "But why does that matter?," are so often helpful. Further, definitions, formal argumentation, and obiter dicta are all aids to saying something, albeit not necessary aids. If they were necessary then I would agree that philosophy could not be done without them.
Yes, and also "fruitful" alongside "rigorous."
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Intention and intuition, potency to act and action are not separated in poststructuralist thinking, except artificially. Repetition and difference are prior to this distinction. But difference does have its reasons. For Husserl, the associative synthesis tying one moment of experience to the next links the two consciousness on the basis of some relevant dimension of commonality and similarity (this is quite different from Humes external principle of temporal association). For the poststructuralists as well, relevant relationality is the basis of reason. We are never without criteria of justification.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
It is not just man that is self-moving, it is the world that is self-moving. And self-movement does not mean willing what one chooses to will. The movement is as much passive as it is active. One finds oneself in motion. One is throw into situations. The meaning and relevance of what we find ourselves thrown into, its reason emerges out of the fact that we bring our history with us into new situations. The blending of this history with the situations it enters into makes the world always recognizable and familiar to us at some level. We can remain within a stable social structure for quite a long period of time, during which we can lay down the kinds of metaphysical grounds of reason and ethics that we can consult and depend on to be absolutely authoritative.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
And you didnt read Husserl as uniting the universal and the particular in his concept of the living present, which is precisely a rejection of the myth of the given?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
What we are bracketing, especially when done by Heidegger or Derrida, are idealizations which exclude from consideration the outside which is their condition of possibility.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
The true infinite can only be considered infinite to the extent that it is an endless repetition of the same finite quality. A transcendence which is transcendent to everything else but immanent to itself is no true transcendence. It only has ontological status when we think its iteration, imagining this same quality of Goodness again and again and again. But in doing so, its sense returns to us differently, in endlessly shifting valuative and affective textures of meaning. This is true transcendence, the eternal return of the different.
But isn't the claim that "mathematical language is and must be embedded in natural language," actually contrary to the claim that, "classical logic is not something you find implicit in ordinary language"? At least if mathematics is on par with classical logic? At the very least, you are claiming that some kind of formalism (mathematics) is implicit in ordinary language.
Let me try for two birds with one stone: both this question and the question of philosophical "rigor" or "discipline."
My nephew is four years old. At Halloween we were playing with figurines who had interchangeable costumes. One of the costumes had eight legs. During our taxonomy my nephew claimed that it was an octopus. I disputed his claim and said that it was a spider.
My initial argument was clear enough:
1. All octopus have suckers
2. This thing has no suckers
3. Therefore, this thing is not an octopus
He considered my argument, but he wasn't altogether convinced of my first premise. His rejoinder was also clear enough, and valid:
4. No "animal" has the same number of legs as another animal
5. Therefore, because an octopus has eight legs, therefore a spider does not have eight legs
6. This animal we are playing with has eight legs
7. Therefore it must be an octopus and not a spider
My next argument was as follows:
8. Some "animals" (species) have the same number of legs
9. Therefore, Octopus and spiders might have the same number of legs
10. Therefore, this eight-legged animal might be a spider
My task was to justify (8), but that wasn't too hard since he knows that dogs and lions and giraffes all have four legs, and from this he was able to see that (4) is false. It still took awhile to clear away the certitude-debris that had accumulated from his former way of thinking, but clear away it did. It's also worth noting that (4) is not wholly wrong, insofar as it flows out of the fact that each species is different. It's just that they aren't necessarily different qua number of legs.
Now here's the question: Was my nephew doing philosophy? Was it rigorous? Was it disciplined? Was there logical inference at play, even at four years old? It seems clear to me that he was doing philosophy (and logic, and zoology), perhaps not unlike the budding geometrician in the Meno. Note that my argument is not, "He was doing philosophy because we aren't allowed to say that some putatively philosophical things are not in fact philosophy." Rather, my argument is, "He was doing philosophy because he was involved in the mental rigor and discipline that philosophy requires." If he was not doing philosophy, then what did he lack?
Yes.
I find children are pretty open to philosophical exploration, especially with respect to adults. Obviously they're children and do it their way, but it bears all the hallmarks of wonder, asking questions, making distinctions, pointing out what doesn't count, making up rules, etc. etc.
For sure. :up:
I've also tried to help his parents in their quest to keep him well-fed by utilizing philosophy. "When you eat food, your stomach transforms it into you, and you get bigger and stronger and faster. What goes into the toilet is just leftover waste from that process. Therefore it is good to eat food!" His response, translated, was, "You're full of shit, uncle Leontiskos!" :lol:
Knickers untwisted! :razz: But the binaries "essential-or-meaningless, succeed-or-fail" are from the Heidegger quotes, and if he doesn't believe he's correct about what he says, he's doing a very good imitation.
Quoting Joshs
Yes. And so often the step is skipped. It raises a huge question -- bigger than can fit in this thread, probably -- about whether the conditions for understanding are the same as the conditions for verification. But in a case like this, since my understanding of Heidegger on this subject is shaky at best, I have no opinion on whether he's saying something insightful.
Quoting Joshs
OK, I'd like to understand this. Do you believe it's possible to offer a explication that launches from common English uses of the key words (difference, understand, ontological, identity), or would an explication necessarily bring in further technical terms?
I'm reminded of how one of my good friends, who's a physicist, talks to me about his work. At a certain point, inevitably, he'll say something like, "Well, you'd need the math now," and we both know I don't have it. But . . . before reaching that point, he's able to use my language -- non-technical but educated English -- to explain a great deal. He believes that, as a specialist, he has an obligation to do this, as best he's able, which I appreciate very much, since I learn a lot. I will never completely understand the topics he talks about, and as for having an opinion about whether he's "right" about some thesis he puts forward . . . that would be ludicrous. But there is absolutely some translation going on.
So I guess that's my question to you. Can something like "Difference must be understood as ontologically prior to identity" be translated into my language? In my language, neither difference nor identity have anything like ontological priority, because they aren't entities. You see what I mean . . . I can think of some possible paraphrases that do make sense in my language, but I'm afraid they would miss Heidegger's point.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Relative and absolute senses. She will be huddled under blankets while I am comfortable in my tee shirt. But we at least agree that she is cold while I am hot; that this is the fact of the matter. And this will be so regardless of what the thermometer shows, it would be impertinent for me to say she was mistaken here. So let's not suppose our differences to be merely subjective.
Perhaps Williamson needs a thermometer and thinks it will solve his problem. But we don't, since we can easily see what is the fact of the matter. It doesn't stop us from adjusting the thermometer.
So the issues is, can we find a setting that is comfortable for us both?
I'll take Williamson's line, not with respect to your nephew, but this question and your answer to it: is your approach here disciplined by the decades of relevant research on how children acquire concepts? It looks to me like the answer is "no". You have, it appears to me, worked out an armchair account of the rational inference that it seems to you *must* underly the process. I don't believe the relevant research supports this account.
So you claim:
1. If an approach is not disciplined by the decades of relevant research, then it isn't philosophy
2. Leontiskos' approach is not disciplined by the decades of relevant research
3. Therefore, Leontiskos' approach is not philosophy
Is that fair or do you want to tweak it before we examine whether it has any merit?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I would think the question for a rigorous philosophy is how to navigate between formal logic and natural language but to highlight features common to both that beguile us and turn us away from doing rigorous philosophy. Both formal logic and natural language involve idealization. For instance, the symbolized meanings of phonemic elements of words are abstracted away from the actual context in which they appear. So too are the categorical meanings of words like lion , which are meant to transcend situational context. It is this idealizing feature of language that allows us to assign it a sense which can be repeated as identical regardless of time or place, and in the absence of any actual speaker. But natural language is at the same time
bound to the specific contexts of its use.
If I say lion I cant guarantee that the image which appears in your mind doesnt change its sense from instantiation to instantiation. Formal and mathematical logic are purer forms of idealization. We start with our perception of narural features of the world we interact with. We create idealized shapes and colors out of this axrual world, concocting the abstractions we call self-persisting objects. We then take these idealized forms and further perfect them into perfect lines and circles. We never see such pure idealities in nature. We do something similar in our invention of formal logic, taking our idealized natural objects and fixing them abstractively as purely self-identical objects which maintain their precisely identical sense as we cobble them together into a predicative judgement.
We never allow the parts of a predicative assertion to change their sense as we go back and forth between subject and predicate. Like the pure geometric idealizations of line and circle, none of the components of a predicative judgement are seen in nature . They are a garb of ideas we drape over our experience. They are of course derived from our actual experiences with objects , but when we make use of formal and mathematical logic , we replace purposeful, relevant engagement with the regurgitation of a machine-like method. Our intent is to use these methods for our relevant purposes, but we run the danger of mistaking the method for the actual experiences they are abstracted away from.
So whether we make use of formal logic or natural
language in service of philosophy, if our focus is on reducing our experience of the world to fit the idealizations of logic or the categorical universalities of language we are failing to address the most fundamental philosophical question; what is the nature of our subjective comportment toward the world such that it makes possible the invention of abstractions which leave out the relevant and purposeful way in which we encounter the meaningful world?
Perhaps it will suffice to be disciplined enough.
If you and I agree, will that suffice?
I think what Williamson wants is for you and I to be rigorous enough that if we disagree it is clear that we do, and, in the best case, we can agree on what would count as resolving the dispute, and, in the very best case, we agree on a way of getting there and know what it is.
Oh no, that's literally the definition of the "bad infinite," the infinite that is defined in terms of the finite. And I don't think continual variation on the finite counts either. We'd be in a pickle if we were stuck with that:
Or, as Saint Augustine says, God is "within everything, yet contained in nothing," and "more inward to me than my innermost self."
Sure, but I don't think this addresses the concern of the metaphysicians. What spontaneously moves itself from potency to act "for no reason at all" (is causeless) has no reason to be one way and not any other. To say being somehow generates its own regularities and intelligibility doesn't really address this issue, since for it to generate any particular sort of regularity would assume a sort of prior actuality. Nor does an evolutionary account really fix things because selection still requires some sort of prior actuality to work by, else anything "selects" as well as anything else.
This seems like it might just be a translation error in concepts. At least in the traditional usage of the terms, it is incoherent to say there is repetition and difference prior to actuality, for then they wouldn't be "difference and repetition," since to be anything at all, anything determinant, is to be actual. The two couldn't be really distinct without being actual.
There is a neat article on the physicist David Bohm's work on difference and similarity that might interest you:
But any "difference that makes a difference" is of course actual, sheer potential itself being nothing at all. Difference presumably presupposes something to be different. It might be that one cannot have a 1 without some background to constitute a 0 (finite things refer outside themselves), but you still need to actuallyhave the 1 and the 0 to have a difference.
I am not sure Bohm has this all correct though. To return to your reference to Hume, the difficulty in the idea of the "bundle" is that if each component were truly sui generis, there would be no bundle. You would have a bunch of wholly unrelated moments, and to even be aware of them as a bundle presupposes something that unifies them for consideration. Likewise, cognizance of difference seems to require comparison. On the other hand, anything that is anything (different or similar) is the same in possessing being. If participation in being is fundamental, as it seems it should be, then this is an overarching similarity. Or, if we follow Parmenides, "the same is for thinking as for being" there is a fundamental similarity (the same is true if all thought/being is predicated analogously).
Well, one difficulty is perhaps a conflation between specificity and rigor. For instance, I love Robert Sokolowski's The Phenomenology of the Human Person, but one of my criticisms while reading it was that it didn't always specify what it was talking about as much as I would have liked. However, I came around on this, that this was actually a wise choice, in line with Aristotle's advice in the Ethics that we ought not demand greater specificity than our subject matter allows. Wittgenstein's appeal to a "family resemblance" is another good example (although it's funny to see this then sometimes transformed into an appeal to a sort of formal "concept of family resemblance"). Actually, I think this is one of the points Grayling (who is quite analytic) criticizes Wittgenstein on, being too vague in these ways.
I don't think that charge is totally without its merits in some cases. The degree of specificity needs to be in line with the subject matter, and it is possible to err in either direction. But it is easy to mistake a lack of specificity with a lack of rigor. The drive towards reductionism and atomism is a sort of pernicious demand for specificity in some cases, often paired with questionable metaphysical assumptions.
I'll just say that I am very interested in the role of ideals in our thinking, in our communication, in our lives. I tend to see them as things we construct rather than discover, and I'm curious why we do that, what role they serve (language as idealization is a crucial example, certainly), and also how we do that.
There's a bit of a sense in your post ? at least in what I quoted ? that ideals are a problem, and that their leaving stuff out is a problem, especially because they leave out what's most important. I may come to agree with you someday, but that's not really my sense of things. I guess I'm approaching them more neutrally ? idealization is a fact of human life and thought and behavior. Some clear upsides, some just as clear downsides, and something there's no reason to think we can get along without.
Right, and a kind of light bulb should go off once one realizes that Sokolowski's lack of specificity is intentional, and that it is intended precisely because it is most appropriate to the subject matter. Earlier I was pointing out that thinking is guided by subject matter, and it seems that the reason our current thinking is so one-dimensional is because the subjects that concern us are so one-dimensional. For example, a materialistic horizon creates thinking that is largely quantitative and empirical. When the domain of subjects is small, the preference for a very determinate and narrow form of thinking follows (in the case of the Analytic it is univocal thinking).
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Quoting Fire Ologist
:lol:
So regardless of Williamson's odd metaphysical notions, we might have some agreement?
I think it's clearly a pretty good idea for positions that are pretty close.
For ways of seeing and ways of setting up problems that begin very far apart, I'm not sure it's much use at all.
The obvious examples are pretty bad, and I don't want to give them the oxygen.
Do you think Russell and Wittgenstein, after 1930 -32, could have managed something like this? I'm really not sure.
Its not idealizations that are the problem. I agree that they are very useful. The problem is when philosophy takes them as its starting point and adopts them as its method rather than delving beneath the facade to explicate the underlying processes. Many find fundamentalist religious beliefs to be very useful. We can recognize that usefulness while at the same time examine the genesis and justification for those beliefs from a philosophical vantage that doesnt simply take them at face value.
He has the back-up:
So the idea is that Russell and Wittgenstein could agree on what follows from a set of constraints, even if they disagree on the constraints. I.e. "This line is valid given these constraints, but because I reject the constraints I do not call it sound." That's the "step back" that is possible, and which retains some common ground.
We're not just in agreement, then, we are brothers!
Look, I know Williamson takes a lot for granted, has a sort of philosophical ideology. My long post from yesterday, the "silliness" post, was intended at least in part as a demonstration of how he was tripping over his own tools.
In my own case, I long for the serenity I suppose he feels, the certainty about how to do things. When I had firmer ? well, any ? commitments to this or that school, this or that thinker, it was a lot easier, and I absolutely miss that.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Phil-bros?
He does, you're right, but I think this sentence
is pie in the sky. Who's the "we" tallying the results and scoring the competition?
The TPF mods, naturally.
The same ones who decide how much research is necessary before something is to count as philosophy?
But no, I was focusing more on the second sentence than the first. The second is more concrete. As to the first, the answer that is usually accepted somewhat unthinkingly is, "History decides."
I agree with this, with the caveat that there is nothing wrong with "making shit up" provided we don't take it to be real, or to be the truth.
Quoting Banno
I see what you mean, and I tend to agree. My point was simply that he need not explicitly situate himself at all, unless such situating would be an integral part of his analysis and discourse. I say that because I take it as read that we, and all the thinkers of the past, present and future are always situated within a cultural and historical context.
I think this is pretty much it.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Did I misunderstand you here? I had understood that this was becasue of the topic, not the degree of formality...
I think I'm having trouble with the apparent juxtaposition of formal and natural languages. I understand formal language as a subclass of natural language, not as its antithesis. "A = apples" is as much a part of English as "May I introduce you to George?" The difference is in the rules around "=" that permit substitution extensionally...
Formal language is just natural language with more explicit restrictions and explanations.
So what is philosophy? The demarcation criteria I've suggested a few times, to little effect, is that doing philosophy involves going back and looking again at what we have said, and checking how it hangs together.
So 's nephew is applying and doing a bit of nomenclature, but not philosophy. If he had been challenged to count the legs on a spider - an activity that might have involved some discussion of the difference between pedipalps and legs, and quite a bit of fun - and then challenged to decide whether a spider is an insect, or whether insects have six legs - then he might be doing philosophy, by giving due consideration to the way he was using "insect", "Spider", "octopus" and so on. The key shift is from naming to examining concepts and categories.
In this account, any formalisation is a tool for doing philosophy well.
@Ludwig V, this also is a part-answer to our PM chat about the place of logic in the analysis of language. I like simple.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yep. I'm pleased and flattered to see this clear reflection on my view. Thanks.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
And again, very much Yep!
Seems to me as examining "the nature of our subjective comportment toward the world such that it makes possible the invention of abstractions which leave out the relevant and purposeful way in which we encounter the meaningful world?" just is examining concepts and categories - language.
The mistake here would be restricting such contemplations to "subjective".
And that's why I'm sceptical about phenomenology.
Excellent example.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Well, it's clear enough that Russell and the later Wittgenstein disagreed; could they resolve the dispute?
Curious that Russell put so much effort into ethics - especially in his later life; yet so little into aesthetics. But I think Russell recognised that Wittgenstein had moved on to doing an aesthetics of philosophy; and didn't like it. So no resolution between them; however we might be able to see what their differences were, and to articulate the psychology that prevented Russell from dealing well with Philosophical Investigations.
Russell could not reach an accomodation with Wittgenstein, but we might at least see what was of concern in their disagreement.
And we head into issues of Charity. We may not be able to agree on a method of resolution, but we can try to interpret the disagreement charitably enough that we understand what was at stake for each of them.
I'll try this (and see what I think tomorrow).
In fields that have a perspicuous notation available (mathematics, chemistry, music, etc), the moments when a professional reaches for that notation are often the moments when he is doing (or demonstrating) the work of that field rather than talking about it. That's why they have the notation. English was already available for talking about the field. (This is not meant as an absolute, obviously.)
Philosophy doesn't really have its own notation like this, and probably cannot, but that doesn't mean there isn't still a distinction between doing the work of philosophy and just talking about it. It's just that we can't rely on differing modes of expression to identify which is which. We can do this a little ? there's logical and mathematical notation philosophers find use for, and you can draw attention to definitions or theses for which the precise wording is important (something like the house style at the SEP).
So I have not been trying to claim that real work can only be done in a more formal mode of expression, only that in other disciplines the choice of that formal mode is an indicator that we're working (or demonstrating, etc), rather than just talking about it.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
There's a similarity between Deleuze and Wikman, but you've added an 'a', which changes the meaning.
In a bit (of information as in computer science), there is a difference between 0 and 1. It is a difference that does not make a difference. With a pair of bits there is a difference between pairs which contain a difference (01, 10) and pairs which don't (00,11). There's a difference between the presence and absence of difference. Now the 0s and 1s can be dispensed with entirely, never to be mentioned again, and everything can be built from difference. There was really no need to mention them in the first place.
This is how I (mis?)understand Deleuze.
Perhaps this helps.
Some shit we made up might even be true.
The question is, how do you decide which is which?
Quoting Janus
Yes, fair enough. Others will situate him, of course, but that's their problem, presumably.
Ok, I don't think that addresses my point at all though. A bit has to be a 1 or 0. I was just quoting the article. A non-actual difference on the classical use of "actual" is not a difference.
This is not true of information theory (or complexity studies, cybernetics, etc.) i.e, that a bit is a "difference that does not make a difference" though. I am not sure were you are getting that. Quite the opposite.The phrase "a difference that makes a difference" comes from Donald MacKay and Gregory Bateson, and is hugely influential in the application of information theory (probably in every intro class to help define it). The whole idea is that the media has to allow a measurable difference for it to contain information at all. You can abstract the bit from all physical media, but then you're still positing a difference to be aware of, one that makes a difference. If they didn't make a difference, then 0 and 1 are should be considered identical on conventional views. The notion here is pretty similar to how Hegel thinks that sheer indeterminate being, being contentless, collapses into nothingness. There are parallels between Hegel, Spencer Brown's Laws of Form, and Floridi's work in the philosophy of information here.
Shannon's original theory is in the context of receiving messages (or we could consider making measurements), and in either case a 1 has to be different (be discernible) from a 0 to be a 1 at all. This is why digital physics was lambasted. Bits cannot be "building blocks" that the cosmos is "made of," because they depend on context to be anything at all (and so we might say that they refer outside themselves for their being). For example, an electron measured against a field background that all has the same exact measured value as an electron would cease to be something different from the background. When physicists talk about the information carrying capacity of particles they are still talking about their variance from not measuring said particles (the difference that makes a difference).
This is what Bohm is speaking to. Hence, I don't think he is totally correct about the priority of difference, the two principles are arguably both required to make sense of the other, the bit always referring outside of itself. I suppose we might also ask whether the bit is always essence (form) as compared to other form (background) and not accounting for existence, which must be prior to difference and similarity. Because, in a certain sense, the order of being itself could be considered an overaching similarity. This is certainly something in the Analogia Entis, but it seems true of the wholeness of Bohm's implicate order or even perhaps Deleuze's plane of immanence (though no doubt he would probably want to deny that).
Obviously, Deleuze uses terms differently. This is always a difficulty in translation. In the original sense of "virtual" (as first employed in scholasticism), for instance, it would not make sense to talk of something like a "virtual difference" prior to any actuality, because, in denying all actuality, you would just be talking about nothingness. Virtual has the same root as virtue, it's about a power (potency), but for a specific power to be a power it has to be potency shaped by [I]some[/I] prior actuality, or else it is just the sheer potency of being "nothing at all." So, for instance sight is the power to see, it is potential, but it also isn't totally indeterminate, it has a formal object, etc. Likewise, in the example of an embryo, if the virtual power were prior to all actuality, an embryo would be "nothing at all," or "nothing in particular," on the scholastic usage.
"Indicator"? Perhaps. It's certainly not a sufficient condition. There is no escaping the question of intention in this matter. One can without a formal mode of expression, and they can fail to say something in a formal mode of expression. One can "chit chat" in logicalese. Indeed the way you and fdrake default to model-modes without defaulting to necessarily saying anything is an easy example of chit chat in formal notation. The "equals sign" in a math equation signifies assertion, but it can be intended quasi-assertorically. The "therefore sign" in a logical proof signifies assertion, but can be intended quasi-assertorically or hypothetically. In any case, the subject-predicate form of natural language also signifies assertion (and can also be intended quasi-assertorically).
For example, suppose that tomorrow we find a proof written by Gödel. It is just a block of formal notation. Has he "said something"? Is it "work"? Or is it "chit chat"? Apart from context and intention, we really don't know. It could be a draft or a tentative attempt to salvage someone else's work, or it might be something that he fully believed and wished to publish.
I'd say the only difference between "chit chat" and "work" is the level of assertion involved. The fact that both are necessary is an example of the necessity of certitude-shifting. When professors chat in the faculty lounge they are "floating" ideas or theories. They are proferring possible hypotheses and looking to see how others might test them. It is like testing a foothold before continuing to climb, or feeling out one's opponent before the match actually begins, or surveying stones on the beach before gathering them and taking them to the polisher. All of this involves micro-assertion and preparatory assertion.
But it all aims and builds towards actual assertion, towards actually . Those who are never ultimately willing to say anything are constantly prepping cakes that will never be baked. Those who are most interested in the preparatory work or the syntax have placed the means above the end.
This is the problem Socrates talked about when he said every philosopher longs for death so he or she can stand outside of life and finally see it from that vantage point. We don't have access to that place outside of life.
I think even AP philosophers sometimes build castles in the air and offer that some scaffolding will be provided at a later date, for instance, Davidson. In the meantime, his theory of meaning does work, but it works for realism as easily as it does for anti-realism. That underlying question remains unanswered. And it probably always will.
Quoting GrahamJ
Yes, thanks, and it's close to the sort of paraphrase I would have offered. The problem for me -- in my language, that is -- is that none of this is about anything that could be called "ontological priority." If we said "conceptual priority" instead, what would be lost? What would be gained is that we're now using a much more familiar idea, both within analytic phil and in educated non-specialist discourse. That doesn't automatically make it the best way to go, of course -- especially given the concerns raised earlier about "familiarity" -- and that's why I'm asking what "ontological priority" may be contributing that "conceptual priority" does not.
I associate the phrase 'a difference that makes a difference' with various social sciences. I didn't know where the phrase came from. Your reference to MacKay and Bateson is reassuring: at least we seem to mean the same thing by this phrase.
For this definition of information you need people to whom things already have meaning, for otherwise they cannot know what is important. Duleuze (I think) is trying to get underneath that and construct meaning from something much more minimal.
For Shannon information, a single bit conveys no meaning to the receiver unless the sender and receiver have already agreed what that meaning is. That's no use to Duleuze either. With two bits, you can convey meaning without prearrangement, and the meaning that you convey is either difference or sameness.
If you're prepared to accept 'difference itself' as a starting point you're immediately in business. The only meaning you assume is the meaning of difference. It's quite neat.
As to where I'm going: only that taking difference as foundational to meaning seems reasonable to me and I'm happy to accept that such an approach could be rigorous.
We'll have to see what @Joshs says about that.
Of course, one area where you get a lot of specificity is in scientific terms and jargon, and a common charge against Continental philosophy is that it uses these in cases that seem to fail to understand the original usage, while also not clarifying any alternative usage, which is, so the charge goes, at best a misunderstanding and at worst obscurantistism.
Catherine Belsey covers this in her book on post-structuralism for instance, and in some cases the charge does not seem misplaced. The same goes for seeming misreadings of philosophical sources, if they are to be brushed away by appeals to there being no correct readings.
So, the Sokal Affair, and it's capacity to be reproduced is obviously one of the concerns about rigor that comes up when obscurity reaches a certain level (and this can be true in the sciences as well). However, I think the concerns here can be overblown. Certainly, the high success rate of "Sokal Squared" is concerning, but you'd have to do a comparison to other fields to determine if it's not simply a larger issue unrelated to subject matter and style. Second, prima facie it would be easier to do this sort of thing not only in "litcrit" but also in analytic philosophy, or even more abstract/theoretical areas of the natural sciences, so more convincing evidence would show some real variance there.
Note, however, that some of the responses to this sort of thing seem deficient. For example, simply pointing to seemingly incoherent analytic or scholastic philosophy. This doesn't say much; presumably there can be bad scholastic philosophy, bad theoretical physics, etc.
Right, here Bohm is talking physics, which is one of the places information theory has been most influential. The "difference that makes a difference" here is any physical difference at all, which, assuming physicalism, is simply any difference. Although the qbit also becomes basic here.
But to return to my original point, it is simply that the concerns of the many phenomenologists who see a need for metaphysics aren't addressed by the response that act is posterior to difference because this seems to simply equivocate on the term actuality. Hence, their continued concerns.
This is all very level-headed, Tim. Thanks.
I'll note that the point of Williamson's paper was very much less throwing stones at another tribe, way over there in another village, and more about throwing stones at a particular clan within his own tribe, and ? having done that ? chucking some more stones at his own tribe in general.
I'm hesitant to say this (but conscience demands it): I think it would be fair to say Williamson does this because his standards for philosophy are understood by him to be universal. (He has, elsewhere, chucked stones at the other tribe.) They needn't be. He could say, "If we are to call ourselves analytic philosophers, then we bloody well ought to act like it, and that means adhering to certain standards of rigor and discipline, which I can't believe I have to explain to you." I don't think he says that.
Now maybe that is what he's saying ? I didn't go looking for evidence in the paper either way. In the specific context, it just wouldn't matter because he was addressing his own tribe. He intended what he said to apply to them; it makes no difference if he also intended it to apply to other philosophers as well.
But it will make a difference when it comes time to debate the standards he is proposing, and the justifications he (or anyone else) is prepared to offer for those standards. I was going to say there are conditional and unconditional options, but really it's just a difference in the antecedent class: "if you want to do analytic philosophy then ..." versus "if you want to do philosophy then ..."
We have an interesting mini-case of this in the thread, directed towards Williamson:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Quoting Leontiskos
1. "Disciplined" has two interrelated meanings
2. Williamson's argument leverages both of them
3. This is unfortunate
(This is a classical case of preferring univocal predication.)
The idea was in some ways similar. Use formal criteria and systems to make progress tractable, and to make nebulous issues more concrete. This was a core idea underpinning the Bush era education reforms, COIN efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and dealing with crime waves in inner cities (e.g. Citistat in Baltimore).
The problem is that many of these efforts continued to show "progress" and had their praises sung right up until it could no longer be ignored that the emperor was wearing no clothes and that the "progress" was entirely illusory. The Anbar Awakening was a great victory for data driven COIN right up until the fighters defects en masse to ISIS as soon as they had momentum. Only then was it obvious that the pattern was simply following the time-tested behavior of teaming up with whatever side is currently winning a civil war. The ANA was making progress, until that progress was revised back every few years, right up until it collapsed without a fight. But people in the field doing the training could and did predict the outcome. Likewise, Baltimore and other cities hit all time crime levels, and rigorous testing and accountability did little for education metrics in the long run, leading to many being rolled back.
My point here is that defining progress in formal terms can sometimes prove illusory. I am not sure about the claim that we "know much more about truth then we did decades ago," unless it is caveated for instance.
The amount of specificity and rigor needs to be appropriate to the subject matter, meaning it will only work in some cases. Clearly, it didn't work out great for combating insurgents or gangs, or teaching kids geometry. Might it work in some cases within philosophy? Surely, but it can also create a false sense of progress.
One example of an area I have read about extensively is the "Scandal of Deduction." I am fairly confident that it cannot be explained in wholly formal terms, but plenty of papers bang their head against the wall to do just that, because that's the methodology.
The other issue is that people very quickly learn to game metrics. I don't think this is the only reason that they have failed in many cases in public policy though. At any rate, this is relevant in that the way progress gets defined will come to determine how people do philosophy, and you will invariably get a sort of "gaming" of trends in any field (unfortunately unavoidable; the impulse to novelty for novelty's sake seems endemic to how academia is set up for instance).
This is right, and it should go without saying that I agree with it. Let me bold something in my original quote:
Quoting Luká Novák, Can We Speak About That Which Is Not?, 168
The idea here is that there is a difference in approach to natural language, and that this difference is explicit in Russell, Quine, and many influenced by them. The point is not that there is no nuance to be had.
Srap responds:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
First, I would note that there is a substantial difference even here:
Quoting Leontiskos
Second is the practical fact that in the very thread from which these two have come, @Banno was deeply uninterested in ordinary language use. Indeed, Banno regularly argues against the very possibility of defining words and tends to appeal to "use" in a question-begging manner. So I don't see Banno as some sort of counterexample. I don't see that Wittgenstenians have any rigorous methodology in favor of their putative stand in favor of ordinary language. Philologists and linguists are usually not Wittgenstenians.
The so-called "ordinary language philosophy" was a reaction against an excessive flight from ordinary language, and what this effectively means is only that the "ordinary language philosophers" were more interested in ordinary language than their immediate antecedents. They were in no way part of a millennia-old tradition which honored ordinary language. It would be like if a whole generation eschewed headlights, and then the next generation dubs themselves "the pro-headlight people," placing a rather dim bulb in the headlight of their cars. It is true that they have headlights, but the strength of their headlight is measured against the previous generation which eschewed them altogether. The reason scholasticism is so bound up with ordinary language is because they were developing headlights non-stop for 1500 years.
Edit: I think one very sound criterion for measuring this "organic" merging of ordinary language with philosophy can be found in looking at how much someone distinguishes the meta-language from the language (for this is what Srap's "obiter dicta" vs. "decision" gets at). They were not separate for Scholasticism, and folks like Buridan even explicitly rejected their separation. For Analytic Philosophy they are much more separate; and for some, such as Russell, there is a strong cleavage.
Goodhart's Law.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I'll have to reread if this thread continues, but my memory is that within a page it's clear what he means is the theories are more fully developed, and so brought closer to direct head-to-head comparison. There are other points in there.
Anyway, I can tell you when I read that sentence it struck me as a preposterous thing to say! Stopped me dead in my tracks. But because of his thinking about the role of theory, he means it quite literally. I don't know if it was courage, putting it this way, so removable from context, or obliviousness.
Great post. :up:
I am just going to comment on one small part:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Right. The object which was originally tied to premise/evidence is eventually made into the conclusion/desideratum, once it is seen to be socially persuasive. This is another case of mixing up means and ends.
The odd thing here is that philosophy is a strange dance between reasoning from and reasoning towards (and also reasoning away from). Once meta-criteria are introduced it is possible to mistake a legitimate form of teleological reasoning with post hoc rationalization (and this question came up very explicitly in the recent Supreme Court case, Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton).
For instance, is "p-hacking" permissible? Yes and no. It is very hard to identify when teleological reasoning favoring acceptable p-values crosses over into "p-hacking." It would be a bit much to try to convince someone to never calculate their p-value before finishing an experiment.
Similarly, is gerrymandering permissible? Again, yes and no. Grouping districts together according to culture or ideology is not in itself impermissible. In fact you can't have representation without doing that. But doing it for the wrong reasons or with the wrong intent is impermissible. These sorts of puzzles go deep. They would be great candidates for the Beyond the Pale thread.
Quoting GrahamJ
If I place two identical letters side by side(aa) is this a difference which doesnt make a difference? In formal logic the answer would be yes. For Deleuze the answer would be no. Formal logic assumes we can apply the notion of same thing different time to any object without contextual effects transforming the sense of the object between repetitions. Deleuze argues instead that every time we repeat an object, we change the sense of meaning of that object Put differently, for Deleuze every difference in degree is at the same time a difference in kind. Every quantitative change is a change in quality. Qualities and extensities are mirages. As Nathan Widder(2008) explains:
Quoting J
Let me address this by making a distinction between the content of a set of ideas and their mode of organization.
To illustrate this, I will place on one side of a divide those who offer theoretical explanations attached to a greater or lesser extent to empirical methodology (and of course, what constitutes proper scientific method undergoes shifts over time) and formal logic. This includes everyone from Freud to Einstein, Russell to Williamson. On the other side of the divide are philosophers who associate with Continental approaches, who view formal logic and empirical methodology as derived modes which fail to get to the bottom of things.
Bit since sciences understanding of what it is and does evolves over time (there is no such thing as THE scientific method) as do theories of logic and the status of Analytic philosophy, I think theres a better way of describing the difference between the style of thinking of those on one side of the divide vs the other. I certainly do not believe that innovation and development is the exclusive preserve of Continental modes of thinking. On the contrary, within any era of culture continental and non-continental modes evolve in parallel, and it is not difficult to TRANSLATE between the two modes. Examples include the relation between Einstein and Kant, Bohr and Hegel, Freud , Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Enactivist cognitive science, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty.
In my view, the difference amounts to that between what is left implicit and what is made explicit in a set of ideas. When one stumbles upon what one believes is an original way of looking at the world, there are many styles of expression one can adopt to convey these fresh insights. One can choose poetry, the novel, the visual arts, music, science or philosophy. No one mode has priority over the others in terms of its correctness. They will all inevitably be superseded by a new set of insights (its up to you whether you want to call this movement a progress).
So where does ontological priority or primordiality come in here? Think of a theory in science or analytic philosophy which uses a conventionalized vocabulary. It recycles concepts that are familiar to its audience and defines its terms when introducing new ones. It may in fact be understanding the recycled terms in a new way, but doesnt find it necessary, or perhaps isnt up to the task of making explicit how it is using the old terms differently. In part this is because they may feel it is unwise to try and tie together every conceivable aspect of being within a unified perspective.
Continentals, by contrast, have a zest for beginning with every conceivable question that can be asked about every conceivable aspect of the world , and every domain of culture ( science, religion, art, politics, ethics) and then weaving them all together within a single unified approach, that which must be true for everyone everywhere at all times. (The thinking of authors such as Descartes, Spinoza , Leibnitz, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger and Deleuze have this i. common ). The result is that not a single word of the language can be simply taken for granted by way of a conventionalized meaning, and reading a work requires learning an entirely new vocabulary. Continentals do tend to evince an air of superiority with respect to the more conventionalized approaches, charging them with naïveté for believing that a piecemeal approach isnt already relying on more global implicit assumptions. But I think thats a bit unfair. Is poetry less rigorous than philosophy or science because it traffics in the felt, the intangible, the hidden and the implied?
I should mention, though, that I think the differences between writers like Heidegger and Deleuze on the one hand and writers like Williamson are more than just stylistic. They are also substantive. One doesnt need to look to Continental philosophers to make this argument. There are plenty of authors sticking to more conventionalized modes of explication we can draw from for a critique of Williamsons way of treating mathematics, formal logic and empiricism.
Quoting Joshs
This is what I would have called genetic priority, a statement about method, and it's very true. The ordering of ideas in Anglophone phil is usually pretty clear, and not every idea -- especially the perceived foundational ideas -- is questioned or even mentioned. Whereas with much Continental phil, there is this sense that what comes first, methodologically, really matters, and has been carefully examined. So again, I'm raising a brow at calling this "ontological priority" but so what, the insight is important under any name.
Quoting Joshs
I hope we agree that the bolded phrases are exaggerated -- this is the kind of hyperbole that can be off-putting. I'm fine with saying that most key terms can't be taken for granted, and in reading this kind of phil we have to resist our impatience, our desire to settle for a familiar meaning. Are you OK with that?
Quoting Joshs
Definitely. I've been interested in the comments on this thread which focus on aesthetics, but I don't think that's whole story, and maybe not even the most important part, though it makes me eager to continue that discussion.
Quoting Joshs
I like this way of putting it because it sidesteps the tendency you noted, of throwing shade on ways of doing phil that are either "too conventional" or "too obscure," depending on one's preferences. Questions will come up about the relative value of originality, and whether the insights are in fact insightful, but that ought to be considered within the discourse, not prejudged.
That does seem to be the problem. The even larger problem: many people don't wish to acknowledge that it is undecidable or even that their shit is made up, so some become victims of others' dictatorially deployed made up shit.
There's a difference between taking a bunch of straws and throwing them into the air to form novel and interesting patterns and then clutching at them with the vain hope of finding something substantive there.
Well, since Descartes there has been the idea of discarding all past thought and, through the adoption of the proper method (plus supporting assumptions, since no methodology is presuppositionless [...except for Big Heg of course :cool: ]) [I]solving[/I] philosophy and science. This means [I]a lot[/I] of projects involve tearing down and restarting, which allows singular principles such as "meaning is use" to loom larger than they would when pieced together with past insights that stand up to scrutiny. Eco takes this on in his book on semiotics and contemporary analytic philosophy of language.
So, this sort of thing is maybe a broader trend. But it does seem more pronounced in Anglo philosophy of language (across different "camps" within it even). For instance, the Routledge introduction to the topic doesn't mention anything before the 20th century and anything outside the analytic space (and virtually nothing outside the English language). Neither does the Oxford introduction, and having browsed some other table of contents, this seems to be the norm. Philosophy of language starts with Russell or Frege (and barely extends outside English language authors, if at all). Interestingly, the one title that bucked this trend was called something like "Philosophy for Linguists" instead.
Now, is this an unfair criticism? Afterall, the introduction to phenomenology also ignores earlier works that might qualify (e.g. Augustine's De Trinitate, Hegel's Phenomenology, etc.), although it does at least touch on its scholastic roots. Yet I don't think this is the same thing. Phenomenology, for better or worse, is recognized as a particular discipline that is sort of defined by a recent tradition. "Philosophy of language," is rather, presumably, all philosophy has to say about language.
And yes, the series I mentioned skew analytic and recent, but it's not like their epistemology texts don't mention Plato, Descartes, Kant, etc. So too for other topics like philosophy of mind or free will. Philosophy of language really struck me as an outlier, having checked out several titles.
Yet this isn't just an issue in the analytic space. "Post-modernism" is, broadly speaking, in many ways worse. This is the sort of charge David Bentley Hart lays at the feet of Derrida, Deleuze, Heidegger, Lyotard, Levinas, and Nietzsche, (and it certainly might apply to Adorno in some ways), that they are engaged in a rather aggressive and egregious version of what they criticize when attempting to boil down the history of thought to something that can then be swept aside (e.g. Derrida as very much a structuralist when taking in the history of "metaphysics," or Deleuze's claim to have recognized and set the limits of immanence paired with a conflation of Enlightenment philosophy's "transcendent" and the "transcendence" of theology, the latter of which exists in a world-historical dimension, as one plane).
I'm most familiar with Nietzsche, and the charge certainly fits there; first that I don't think anyone would want to use him as a historical authority or an authority of Plato (let alone Christian philosophy), but more damningly, that the tyranny of the same, the monochrome paintbrush, is relied upon heavily for the dismissal of vast tracts of thought. Kant was at least contentious enough to only call the bulk of prior thought "twaddle" in a private letter, not so for the Masters of Suspicion and Hume's library bonfire. There is certainly [I]something[/I] of the Reformarion-era iconoclasm here, as opposed to a [I]transcending[/I] of modernity.
This becomes particularly clear when one considers the vast difference between the Enlightenment attempt to have reason step outside history to grasp the eternal truths of being through a priori procedural reason and the idea that the Truth has broken into the world, [I]in history[/I] as a Jewish Rabbi who was humiliated, tortured, and killed by humanityand that Truth can be had because we have already been invited into it from without, not "always already" as a sort of (eternal) ontological co-constitution, but due to a distinct historical event during the reign of the Emperor Tiberius, at a distinct place, Golgotha outside Jerusalem. Even in the more mystical writings, e.g. Dionysius, the history of the cross is present, and his most famous commentators such as St. Maximus explicate him with the life of Moses and the Gospel, not a priori deductions.
The point here re method is that an absolutization of method leads towards the endless "restarting" of the entire philosophical project, which also lends itself to a cheaping and forgetfulness of history, even as historicism becomes absolutized (indeed, the two are related). I have pointed out how this tends to make philosophy chaotic, "highly sensitive to initial conditions" (i.e. the new methodology and its presuppositions). This is, of course, not really "post-modern," but in a way the definition of modernity, which begins with a similar move, the Reformer's attempt to sweep away the history of the Church, theology, philosophy, etc. and to recover that mythic, original, untainted outlookfirst the Church of the first century, later Western rational culture before the "Christian Dark Ages," or "philosophy before Platoprior to metaphysics and presence." In a way, it is philosophy trying to turn itself into one of the very many sciences it has birthed, with a clear starting point in history and structure. But I'd argue that philosophy still contains all that it has birthed, and hence can never shrink itself down properly to become one of its own parts, since wisdom itself always relates to the whole.
Yes, that's a good point.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Interesting.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Right, and that attitude comes across in a multitude of areas, as you imply.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Great points. I definitely agree. :up:
Note too that we are seeing the same thing with institutions, where everything must be rebuilt or re-envisioned from scratch.
I don't want to take the thread too far afield, but I do think this is something that every part of our society has to confront, namely the desire for absolute beginnings and the need to recognize our historical antecedents. Language itself is a deeply historical reality, and so there is great irony in limiting a linguistic scope or even a survey of philosophy of language to a recent epoch. Perhaps at the bottom of much of this is the stress on the individual, and the consequent desire not to "ride on the coattails" of those who have come before. There is this idea that we must "forge our own way."
Williamson says in effect that philosophy must be disciplined by something! We cannot "produce work that is not properly disciplined by anything." Again:
Quoting Leontiskos
On TPF we often find "philosophy" which is not disciplined by anything. There are three general candidates:
When such "philosophy" is not disciplined by anything, we end up with this: "My position is important and worthwhile." "Why?" "I have no answer to that question."
This happens a lot. Here is an example of (3):
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Quoting J
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
According to this lowest common denominator criterion that Williamson enunciates, one has ceased to do philosophy if they can say nothing more than, "I insist it's worth it." (Note that Kimhi is an interesting case, given that he was proposed as an alternative to Fregian/Analytic philosophy.)
This is related to the idea of "standards" from the previous thread. Note that we do not even have to talk about overarching standards. Any standard will do. As long as we are adhering to some standard(s), then we are being disciplined in some way, shape, or form. As Williamson notes, we don't even need to agree with one another on the importance of a standard, so long as we can see that it is being adhered to. Mere adherence achieves the minimum criterion, even if it is adherence to an absurd standard. [hide="*"](Incidentally, this was a huge part of the problem of the last thread, namely the opposing of so-called "monism" with the implicit position which says that standardless philosophy is legitimate.)[/hide]
Too often on TPF (1), (2), or (3) are asserted without any standard at all; without any discipline at all. The moral accusation of "authoritarianism" was but one example of this.
Note too that often enough there are accepted standards that are being fulfilled, such as the principle of non-contradiction (PNC). Usually in a dialogue the PNC is being accepted and adhered to as a standard, and therefore there is philosophical discipline. But usually (1), (2), and (3) are not related to the PNC. Most of the time, for example, both parties agree that Kimhi has not contradicted himself, and therefore this standard will not suffice as a standard to discipline the further discussion. This means that we could have a discussion about whether Kimhi fulfills the PNC, and that discussion would have philosophical discipline, but once that discussion comes to a conclusion the dialogue must find a new standard to discipline the discussion. If the dialogue continues with no discipline, then we become aimless wanderers. I will only add the caveat that, "A vague standard is still a standard."
-
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I think it is clear that he is intending to provide a standard for all philosophy, and not just Analytic philosophy. At least when it comes to these most basic standards.
My mention of aesthetics wasn't so much about style as about what we admire.
Quoting Janus
See this again:
Quoting Banno
Is it hot or cold? Or is it undecidable? Or is it just shit we made up?
None of these quite work.
:up: She feels cold, you feel hot. Not merely subjective, but a fact of the matter about how different bodies feel. So, not undecidable or "made up shit" either. But also not metaphysical speculation, which was what I was talking about with "undecidable".
My act of asserting can't be your act of asserting, but the proposition we're asserting is the same. No ontological implications there, it's just how we understand assertions.
Digging a little more deeply into that: Does this understanding of assertion commit you to including both "it is true that . . ." and "it seems quite possible that . . ." as assertions? If so, do they assert the same thing?
If I place two identical digits side by side (22) is this a difference which doesn't make a difference? In decimal notation the answer would be that it does make a difference: The first 2 represents 20 and the second 2 is just 2. I'm sure that someone could invent a grammar for formal logic with plenty of contextual effects. I don't think this is a good way of explaining Deleuze.
Thinking about this some more I was reminded of John Conway's surreal numbers. I can see from internet searches that others have drawn parallels between Deleuze's difference and surreal numbers. They all seem to focus on the way that surreal numbers enable you to extend the real numbers. I can't find anything relating Deleuze to the way in which surreal numbers are constructed, which is more relevant to the discussion here.
Suppose we put two identical nothings side by side and assert a difference between them. We could write it like [math]\{|\}[/math]. No jokers to the left, no clowns to the right, but here I am. Now we have something, we can put to the left of nothing [math]\{\{|\}\ |\ \}[/math] or the right of nothing [math]\{\ |\ \{|\}\}[/math]. And that's how you make 0, 1, and -1, as surreal numbers. Then you can reverberate to infinity and beyond.
I don't think It's true that and it's possible that have the same meaning.
Right. Can they both frame assertions? I would say so. Then is "the proposition we're asserting," in the blanket example, really the same? How would we state that proposition?
A. It's true that
B. It's possible that
Some philosophers would say that anytime a person asserts a proposition (P), whether by speech, writing, road sign, stern glare, blanket handing, etc, that "P" means the same thing as "It's true that P." This is redundancy theory, or just redundancy. There are those who deny this. They think there's some subtle difference between the two, although I can't remember what their point is. Scott Soames mentions this in Understanding Truth.
If I assert that it's possible that you're cold, the proposition is that it's possible that you're cold. By redundancy reasoning, this is the same as saying "It's true that it's possible that you're cold."
Are you pointing to the ambiguity that may be there with communication, especially nonverbal? If so, I was just thinking about that yesterday, and by way of meaning as use, this is one of the ways a person can shape a social situation. Let's say you issue an insult in my direction, but it's unclear if you're joking or serious. I can shape things by my reaction. If I laugh and say "That's so true." then the ball is back in your court for what you really meant. You may have been serious, but now you're willing to let it go, so you laugh as well, and it was officially a joke. Wittgenstein's Group Dynamics.
compared two peoplecall them Jane and Suewho both hand Joe a blanket, judging that Joe is cold. Jane and Sue are involved in the same judgment or assertion. You are asking about the difference between Jane's (or Sue's) judgment and Joe's judgment. Those judgments are different, insofar as the Jane's judgment is made indirectly via a sign (such as, for example, Joe's shivering), whereas Joe's judgment that he is cold is made directly.
Quoting Janus
It merely depends on what we mean by "subjective." If we mean by it "subject-relative," then such things are subjective. Note too that someone could distinguish between, "I am cold," and, "I feel cold." For example, someone may have a neurological disorder that makes them feel cold when their body is not cold, and if they are aware of the disorder they could easily say, "I feel cold but I am not cold." Note too that in this case it is simply false to deny the possibility of, "You feel cold but you are not cold."
Quoting sime
I would say it depends, given that "judgments about other minds" is an ambiguous phrase. Subject-relative claims should be made relative to the subject. Non-subject-relative claims should not.
So if we take "Joe is hot" to mean "Joe feels hot," then our judgment must take into account what Joe feels. But if we take "Joe is hot" to mean "Joe's body is hot," then we would use some kind of thermometer to measure Joe's body temperature, and we would not need to take into account what Joe feels. Usually the two senses are interrelated, and therefore we don't get precise about which one we mean.
Quoting frank
This is the example I raised the assertion problem about.
Let's allow that handing someone a blanket counts as some kind of assertion; perhaps phrased as "You look cold to me."
But sime wants their blanket-assertion to mean something different: "I judge you to be cold." They also want to say, it would seem, that there's no logical space between "You are cold" and "I judge you to be cold."
Now if you also hand the guy a blanket, we really don't know what you're asserting. Is it more like the general version I was suggesting?: "You look cold to me." Or might you be claiming something stronger, like sime?: "You are cold" or "I judge you to be cold." Or some third thing, perhaps, "If I were you, I'd be feeling cold"? (Let's not even bother with examples like "I thought you might like to have a look at this blanket," or its infinite cousins. We'll assume both of you can read the (cold) room!)
Hence my question: Are you two really asserting the same proposition? You may be. But the concept of assertion is just too elastic for us to know for certain.
That's all the question amounted to. Nothing tricky, I hope, I just wondered whether, in this case, you saw some way in which an assertion is automatically pegged to the same thing both are "saying".
Quoting frank
Sort of. I'm pointing not simply to ambiguity about communication, but ambiguity about how we understand assertion. As you say, many philosophers want to nail this down, but doubts have been raised, I think rightly. We could have you and sime speak very precisely to the cold guy and there would still be issues about 1st-person assertions.
Both are second level predications, perhaps.
Both have the form X(the cat is on the mat), or X(p) were p is a proposition.
But they are payed out in very different ways. "the cat is on the mat" will be true IFF the cat is on the mat, but "the cat is on the mat" will be possible if the cat is on the mat in at least one possible world.
"the cat is on the mat" is the same in each. That this is so is a stipulation that allows us to talk about possibility and truth sensibly. That's to stipulate that we are playing by Frege's rules, keeping "the cat is on the mat" constant in order to look at "it is true that..." and "it is possible that...". We might alternately stipulate Wittgenstein's approach from PI, and look tot he use of "the cat is on the mat" - a hedged assertion, or an expression of hope or fear, or a counter to someone's denial.
This is much the same point as I tried in your thread p and "I think p".
It's just not the case that one and only one of these ways of talking must be the correct one in all circumstances.
There's clearly a logical space between the two. If the first is true, the second may be true or false. If the second is true, the first may be true or false.
The odd bit is that I cannot logically assert "I judge that you are cold but you aren't". There's no logical space between the two conjuncts when I assert them. This is just Moore's paradox.
But that so-called paradox is also the reason why if you assert "That person is cold", I can infer that you believe that person is cold (normally).
Quoting J
There's ambiguity about assertion, but, IMO, there's a great deal more ambiguity about propositions. Philosophers talk about them all the time and apparently understand each other most of the time. But don't ask them for a definition.
's point perhaps stands, in that the judgement (belief, act of making an assertion) can be seen as an association between the speaker and the proposition.
There are those amongst us who apparently seem to see no distinction between the syntactic structure and the illocutionary act.
The syntax of "the cat is on the mat" is that of a statement, to be contrasted with "Is the cat on the mat?", which has the syntax of a question.
But each may be used to the same ends. One can use "The cat is in the mat" to ask if the cat is on the mat, and one can use "Is the cat on the mat?" to make an assertion.
We must take care not to equate sentences with beliefs without anchoring them in a speaker's use.
I was responding to sime's statement that he can't remove himself from his assertion. I read that as saying his assertion can't be treated as something hanging in space, separated from him. I agree with that, but I can logically separate him from the proposition he's asserting. This is coming from Soames' argument that shows why eliminating the concept of propositions carries the cost of also eliminating any agreement between people. If we agree, we aren't agreeing on an utterance. We aren't agreeing on a sentence. We're agreeing on a proposition. It's a pretty solid argument which I could dredge up if I had to. :smile:
Quoting J
That's true. Communication has these underlying presuppositions, like that we can know the content of someone's utterance. In a court room, the disposition of the defendant may depend on what a witness says, so we're very confident. But is this confidence based on observation? On reason? Or is it apriori? How would you answer that?
Quite so. Statements, not propositions.
He might write ""The speaker holds true the sentence 'The cat is on the mat.'" This makes clear that the speaker is doing something with a sentence.
Can someone relate it back to the theme?
Quoting Banno
Yes, good. My question was closer to Witt than Frege. As you've shown me, 1st-person assertion is a bit of an issue for Fregean logic. I was wondering how two individuals might separately use an assertion about the cat -- or the blanket.
Quoting Ludwig V
No, sorry if I wasn't clear. The issue is not that "You are cold" could be true, independent of whether I judge it to be the case -- I think that's the example you're describing. Rather, the issue is that if I assert "You are cold," I must also be asserting, "I judge that you are cold."
It's this idea that every assertion X(p) has to be a judgment. If I assert, in this special sense, "The cat is on the mat," I'm understood also to be asserting, "I judge that the cat is on the mat."
Quoting frank
Yes, hence the rather mysterious nature of a proposition. We want to imagine a proposition as independent of a context of assertion. That's why 1st- and 2nd-person assertions give so much trouble -- they can't have their indexicals paraphrased away (on some accounts).
Quoting frank
This sounds interesting but I don't quite follow. What is it we're confident about?
Quoting Banno
I feel a little foolish, but . . . does this construal allow for us also to say things like "The speaker suggests that 'The cat is on the mat' is likely to be true"? This, to me, isn't simply the same as saying "The speaker holds possible the sentence 'The cat is on the mat'." It's not just that the speaker is pointing out a possibility; they're also opining on a likelihood. I'm trying to work this back around to the ways we actually say things, which are so often in various grades of assertivity and certainty. The more I think about this, the more I appreciate the assertion-stroke!
Quoting Banno
We've gone off Williamson, sorry.
You are doing the exact same thing you did here:
Quoting J
The answer is the . Switching from "You are cold" to "You look cold" makes no difference, especially given that the second-person claim was already sign-based from the first (and therefore fallible). Every such second-person claim will be fallible, namely an inference from a fallible sign. Lowering one's certitude does not produce a qualitatively different judgment.
I don't follow. What's the problem with 1st and 2nd person assertions?
Quoting J
That the content of an assertion is knowable in principle. I thought you were leaning toward skepticism about determining what a speaker means.
Quoting J
Have you said more here than that to assert "the cat is on the mat" is to assert that "the cat is on the mat" is true? Not seeing it.
The judgment stroke serves to seperate out the interpretation from the use - here it might be best to thinking terms of the extension of the sentence. "the cat is on the mat" will be true exactly if the cat is one of those things that are a member of the things on the mat. And this is so whether you are asking, demanding, asserting, convincing or judging.
Between the string of letters and the judgement sits the interpretation...
Quoting J
We seperate the semantics from the pragmatics... and judging, holding the possibility, pointing out that possibility... these are all treated as part of the pragmatics. syntax - semantics - pragmatics; the letters or sounds, the interpretation, and what we are doing with them.
The Fregean account shows us how these bits fit together, the Wittgensteinian account reminds us that they are inseparable.
He wasn't that bad... :wink:
Since we got here from that paper, there must be a path from there to here.
Somethign to do with this, perhaps:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Or is this just an extension from @sime, and not relevant to the topic? Was Sime's post a response to this...
Quoting Banno
...which was in turn a response to Srap's differentiation between relative and absolute senses of "discipline". Back here:
At issue was the place of semantics as a discipline. The discussion since shows that there is a lot going on with semantics, and we might need include pragmatics.
This relates to our PM discussion of the difference between an argument as convincing someone that something is the case, and an argument as working out how best to say something that we agree is the case.
And I'll read Williamson as advocating the latter.
Why would I need to convince you of something you agree with me about? Why would you or I bother with arguments at all?
The most common usage of "subjective/ objective" means "matter of opinion/ not matter of opinion" and that was, of course the usage I had in mind. So whether one feels cold or not is not a matter of opinion, and hence there is an objective fact of the matter.
Perhaps when someone thinks you and I have the same instinct about this, that there's really one shared human perspective, but say the same thing in different ways? Working out if there is agreement, or not, and what any disagreement might amount to, seems a worthy pastime.
Further, that I judge that she feels cold is a seperate issue - not entirely unrelated, of course, but my judgement makes no difference to her feeling cold.
Interesting that such a simple example should require so much finessing. Again, showing the need for detail.
I'm just puzzled about where the word "argument" comes into it for you, and in what sense is an argument is
Quoting Banno
Suppose we do
Quoting Banno
Is the point of an argument to show that?
What if the disagreement is not just about how to say what we agree on? When I say "one human perspective", I mean something very fundamental; there's still a great deal of headroom for disagreement up toward the surface of our mental lives.
Sorry, I'm just puzzled now about whether you have some general view of disagreement (which, amusingly, I don't think I share), and about, given that, why you would reach for the word "argument" at all instead of, say, "explanation" or some other word. When someone is under the mistaken impression that you disagree, the usual thing to say would be something like, "I think we're saying the same thing ? let me explain ..." I don't know how the word "argument" got in here at all, if you're talking about agreement.
Might be.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Might be.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
An argument is variously a quarrel or a line of reasoning, and sometimes both. And sometimes the quarrel concerns a difference that may be sorted by a line of reasoning - an argument that dissolves an argument, as it were.
Williamson is advocating explicit and clear lines of reasoning. He's doing this in order to move past the discussion being a mere quarrel.
But when an argument settles a disagreement, one side agrees that the other was right. The disagreement isn't dissolved, but remedied.
Quoting Banno
I think there's something to that, yes. Williamson is bemoaning the lack of effort put into the realism/anti-realism debate, so it would be fair to characterize it as a kind of quarrel, and the worst kind ? the kind where people haven't developed their own positions enough for it to be clear to both sides exactly what the disagreement is and what might resolve it.
But clarity is not the end goal. One side should eventually have an argument that the other side accepts ? if not as entirely dispositive, then convincing enough that they consider their own position discredited and abandon the fight.
Clarity is a necessary condition for arguments to matter, but clarity can only resolve a disagreement if that disagreement was actually a misunderstanding.
One might think so, but this is not what happened in the realism/antirealism argument. No solution was found, no one side was shown to be discredited. So was the argument pointless? I don't think so.
It slowly sank in that there was not one, but many questions here - that what is real in mathematics is not the same as what is real in science or as what is real in ethics. Global discussion gave way to discussions about the kinds of objects particular discourses commit us to. Antirealism was seen to be dependent on internal accounts of reference that were difficult to explain. The turn was towards metametaphysics - and still is, I suspect. So the issues now concern metaphysical methodology.
So clarity may still be the end goal.
Metaphysics is not discovering the deep structure of the world per se, but proposing better ways to conceptualize and systematize our thought and language.
I think that's fair. Although, with Socratic dialectic, it's often that the sophist simply lapses into silence and refuses both to accept the argument nor to continue the discourse. Obviously, Plato's dialogues are contrived, but this is a real enough outcome. This isn't so much "acceptance" or "defeat" as it is often instead an interval leading up to "the pursuit of argument by other means," (to borrow from Clausewitz). After all, the story's arc is that those silenced by Socrates turn from discourse to power and simply have him killed, and there are undertones of violence throughout the dialogues, in the opening of the Republic for instance, with the idea being that reason is defenseless precisely because it points beyond itself (is ecstatic), and is ultimately grounded in what is sought for its own sake, as opposed to what is sought instrumentally (which points back to power and sophistry).
Whereas the ultimate conclusions of the "ontologies of violence," that follow Nietzsche is that those who killed Socrates ultimately understood the nature or discourse and politics better than Socrates did.
A comparison to the productive arts and their intersection with the natural sciences is useful here. There, techne, the ability of theory to lead towards the improvement of art, is the proof of theory. Yet this cannot be the case in the pursuit of what is sought for its own sake (and one sees this in attacks on "useless" scientific fields like quantum foundations, which are accused of being "too philosophical"). Nor does it really work that well in the social sciences, since the very desirability of what is produced is at issue in "politics," broadly speaking. So, while technology can play the role of objectifying theory (e.g. positive and negative charge are objectified in jumping your car, rewriting an outlet, etc.), this doesn't work for philosophy, leaving it more open to attack or the descent into poweri.e. "sophistry" for Plato. And this is consequential since philosophy continues to have a very large effect on the sciences and politics, albeit the academic discipline of "philosophy" has ceased to be the main source of this philosophy.
Just for an example, the empirical results of economics could be fit to many different anthropologies. That it is instead fit largely to the anthropology of man as the atomic rational utility maximizer/satisfier is in many ways accidental, a view whose origins were heavily influenced by a certain theology and theory of law. Yet this is hugely influential, since economics has come to play a huge role in political science, politics, psychology, and philosophy itself, and I'd argue that it even influenced which sort of metaphysics is judged to be [I] preferable[/I] and which [I]ought[/I] to be taught (I don't think it's any accident or by sheer inertia that the 19th century vision of the world as ensembles of "balls of stuff" has remained so dominant in education for instance).
If one wants to speak "truth to power,' one has to first demonstrate the desirability of truth over power. It's only then that "good argument' becomes "argument that leads towards truth," as opposed to "whatever argument convinces or silences." And I think it's tempting to rely on method to do this, and maybe it even works to some degree. An agreement on method is also an agreement on ends to some degree.
Which is just to say that the failure of arguments to terminate in agreement or synthesis is not always an indictment of argument.
"Better" in virtue of what? The question of ends shows up here too.
I sympathize with Davidson's project. But I can't see that "The speaker holds true..." is at all helpful. What's unclear about "X believes that the cat is on the mat"?
There was a time, long ago, when a proposition was defined as the meaning of a sentence. That was at least based on an actual practice. (You say "the cat is on the mat" and I can ask what you mean and you can explain,) But once we have lost interest in meaning-objects, thanks to Wittgenstein, we feel the need to give that definition up. Some people proposed to define a proposition as a sentence with its use. But that seems more like a definition of statements, which didn't provide the expected unity. It seems, Davidson was not able to give up the search. I think you put me on to his article "On saying that", in which he argues that "that the cat is on the mat" (a noun-phrase) is what I assert. Perfectly straightforward. I though it was a helpful analysis and did something to escape from the prison of the standard usage.
Quoting J
But the meaning of an assertion is often, if not always, determined to a greater or lesser extent by the context. For example, whether "the cat" refers to Felix or Tiger or... is determined by the context. So is the reference of "the mat". Then what does the unity independent of the context of assertion amount to?
Quoting J
The implication is that every time I assert P, I am also asserting every logical consequence of P. I don't think that works at all. When I assert that the cat is black, do I also assert that the cat is not white, not red, not blue, etc? No, they are different assertions, linked by a logical relationship.
Quoting J
There's no straight answer. If we both assert that the cat is on the mat (in the same context), we are both making the same assertion - . At the same time, because you asserted it and I asserted it, there are clearly two assertions. It just depends on what criteria of identity you choose to apply.
Not entirely "pointless" perhaps, but Williamson is holding up the realism/anti-realism debate as an example of a philosophical debate that wasn't good enough.
And he claims that there was no resolution, or even much progress, because the anti-realist side, in particular, did not develop their theories to a sufficient extent. That is, they were never clear enough for specific arguments to take hold and produce even local, partial answers.
(He suggests that debates about truth went somewhat better and that some progress has been made.)
But nowhere here are we talking about arguments showing that people actually agree, or argument as a means of clarifying, or any of the things you said and that I was asking about. Are we just moving on?
I'll try another question: do you think that clarity tends to dissolve disagreements because it shows most disagreements to have been merely verbal? ("Just semantics" as lay people say.)
Quoting Banno
I don't know the history here, but my memory of Dummett's paper was that he was identifying a pattern in debates across several domains in philosophy, so this would be a little odd.
Quoting Banno
I think Williamson considers the end goal knowledge. You might not be able to know everything you want right away, but you can claim progress if you know more than you used to. And that's exactly what he says ? for instance, "we know more about truth now".
Williamson's paper argues that if we don't do better (which would include your "clarity") we'll never learn anything.
Compare
1) The cat is on the mat.
2) I think that my cat is on the mat.
Would you agree that the two statements assert different things? If so, the problem is how to understand the context of 'The cat is on the mat', and its truth conditions, in some alleged independence of anyone's thought (or statement).
Quoting frank
OK, I see. No, my puzzlement is about how to understand what "assertion" refers to, not so much a skepticism about "meaning" in general.
So my answer to this question:
Quoting frank
would be, "Some combination of observation and reason. Not a priori. Perhaps especially not in a courtroom, where a hermeneutics of suspicion is appropriate."
Quoting Banno
I'm trying to bring in the 1st person judgment. We can stipulate that we will use "assert" so as to mean that "The cat is on the mat" and "It is true that the cat is on the mat" assert the same thing. Indeed, this is very often how we use "assert." But does this get us to "I judge that the cat is on the mat" or "I judge that it is true that the cat is on the mat"? Are these formulations also meant to say the same thing? How?
Quoting Ludwig V
Yes. I was using "we want to imagine" with a skeptical accent. Can we really imagine it? How much of formal logical structure depends on this imagining?
Quoting Ludwig V
This is another way of showing the issue. In one sense of "assertion" -- the "contextless" one -- any statement asserted as true would carry with it all the logical consequences. But if "assertion" is understood as a perspectival, 1st-person activity, then no, just as you say.
Quoting Ludwig V
And perhaps a good way to talk about that is to distinguish between assertion and utterance. You and I have made two utterances of a single assertion, not two assertions. More in line with Fregean "thoughts".
He is recommending that and also more than that.
[quote"Must Do Better p. 10"] But when philosophy is not disciplined by semantics, it must be disciplined by something else: syntax, logic, common sense, imaginary examples, the findings of other disciplines (mathematics, physics, biology, psychology, history, ) or the aesthetic evaluation of theories (elegance, simplicity, ). [/quote]
This is a remarkably heterogeneous list. He discusses two cases. "technical work by philosophical and mathematical logicians ..... on how close a predicate in a language can come to satisfying a full disquotational schema for that very language without incurring semantic paradoxes" (p. 4). and "the success of truth-conditional semantics, judged as a branch of empirical linguistics" (p.6). in the context of Dummett's programme for realism vs anti-realism. He bemoans the lack of interest in these developments without telling us exactly why we ought to find them of interest. I found that disappointing. Perhaps I'm missing something.
The vision of philosophy being supported by other disciplines is certainly very interesting and makes an excellent change from the more traditional (and markedly unpopular outside philosophy) view that the role of philosophy is to police the other disciplines. Inter-disciplinary work has developed well in recent decades, but is difficult and complicated. An approach that suggest that one academic department should discipline another is unlikely to go down well. I suspect that a lead department calling for help as required from other departments as required is much more common. In the end, each department needs to discipline itself.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
That's how I read him at first. But
It seems that the problem is that most participants decided to concentrate on Dummett's demand.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
It's not as bad as that.
That fits with the title of the paper, though it doesn't explain the force of the "must".
Well, Frege built his logic around the concept of a proposition, and I believe that Russell &co followed him. If that concept is a mess, answering your question is going to be difficult. I think it is a mess.
Quoting J
Ah, but I don't think that the contextless sense makes any sense. An assertion is an action, an event, and requires an agent.
Quoting J
Your difficulty is that the more you align with Frege, the closer you will get to propositions, and the less you will do anything to remedy the mess. (I'm a bit heterodox here. Frege deserves great reverence for his achievements, but in the end, he is just another philosopher.)
That said, I do think the "utterance/assertion" distinction is useful, as a place to start talking. After all, we need some way to acknowledge that something said by me at time T1, and something said by you at time T2, can assert the same thing, on one reasonable understanding of "assertion." As long as it's 3rd personal.
Quoting Banno
This is a very good exchange. It shows that a protracted disagreement isn't simply left to rot, with a shrug of the shoulders, nor is it (we hope) dismissed by one side or the other as merely showing that their opponents aren't smart enough or whatever. Rather, it forces questions and new understandings at a different level. It produces insight, not resolution. This is peculiarly characteristic of philosophical inquiry -- that a lack of knowledge and consensus about some point can lead to what turns out to be a more interesting knowledge about another "frame-level" point.
Given Williamson's critique of (the lack of) anti-realist semantics, another title for the paper might have been "Put Up or Shut Up."
I think Williamson finds anti-realism deeply suspect, but is frustrated because its opponents are denied the opportunity to land a solid punch, if not quite a knock-out blow.
To switch to another sports metaphor, anti-realists won't step up to the plate, but hang around off to the side claiming they could easily get a hit if they wanted to.
If there were ideas definite enough to be discredited (or not) put forward, Williamson wouldn't have written this paper. Since they refuse to get in the game, as he sees it, they have discredited not their ideas but themselves.
I don't think it makes sense to say that a statement makes an assertion. People make assertions. What we're doing is analyzing human communication, "analyzing" in the sense of taking it apart, making flowcharts. For instance:
The professor points to the whiteboard, which has the numeral "2" written on it, and she says, "That's a prime number."
The utterance is the sounds made by the professor. The sentence uttered is: "That is a prime number."
What is the proposition being expressed by the utterance of the sentence? This is something we would discern by observing the whole scene. All sorts of questions would have to be answered, let's say that having answered these questions, we're fairly certain that the professor is expressing the proposition that 2 is a prime number.
This example is straight from Scott Soames' book on truth. It's an explanation that is in line with the way the word "proposition" is used in contemporary AP.
I want to emphasize that the above is in no way controversial. Whether one likes this kind of analysis or not, there's nothing fishy or woo about it. It carries no ontological implications. The folks who are likely to be allergic to the word are usually referring to the same thing but some other wording, it they may be behaviorists.
Quoting J
I'm talking about the confidence that a person's intention is knowable in principle. I think that's probably a priori. I don't of any observation or reason that would serve as justification for that confidence.
IDK, it seems to me that the opposite is generally the issue, at least in analytic "scientific" philosophy, where the "scientists" are absolute authorities within their discipline. This is equally problematic in that many disciplines are heavily effected by their own philosophical commitments, which are sometimes historically accidental or political, and yet they are far less likely to question these because they become transparent due to the focus on the particular subject matter. Economics is a fine example, the texts I've taught are filled with properly philosophical presuppositions about politics and philosophical anthropology. And smaller fields have more of a risk of becoming idea logical echo chambers.
This has a lot of consequences when scientists tend to be publishing many of the more philosophical best sellers. For instance, neurosciences' tendency towards reductionism (as opposed to say chemistry or physics) shows up when a number of neuroscientists are publishing popular philosophical works, and vice versa.
This makes sense, to me, because we have remained people the whole time too.
But we keep discussing:
- our language, as it
- comes from a speaker, and as it
- references a thing in the world.
I mean every word in that last sentence.
Many OPs start from laws in the universe or ways to philosophize or what is belief or so many others, and we are back to grappling over language, speakers, and the world.
The same moving parts of all inter-personal relationships, at all times.
Is it only these three? Its always these three, but am I missing more than these? Everything else we say seems to involve one or more of these three.
I should admit this is off topic, but the reason I post it is to notice it seems to be one of our only topics.
So if you say "I feel cold" is not a subjective statement, then what is an example of a subjective statement?
In any case, I don't think the common usage of "subjective" means "matter of opinion." If someone gives their opinion they are not necessarily making a subjective claim. "In my opinion the U.S. should stay out of foreign wars," would not be seen as a subjective statement, for example. Usually, "In my opinion...," just means, "I assert this to be true, but with diminished certitude..."
OK. Let me rephrase:
Compare
1) I assert, "The cat is on the mat."
2) I assert, "I think that my cat is on the mat."
Would you agree that these two assertions by me assert different things?
Quoting frank
Ah, sorry, I was off track. Interesting. I guess I'd respond that we have the same confidence about this re some other person as we have re ourselves. So that leaves a couple of questions: How confident is that? and, Do you mean a priori to the given circumstances, or a priori in some more deeply metaphysical way? I doubt the latter; I think we learn to be confident just as we learn anything else.
Good posts all around. I sympathize with Williamson. :up:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Another way to phrase this would be to say that anti-realists claim to be playing a different gamethey claim to be at a kind of intentional cross-purpose with the realistbut they won't lay out the game that they are playing. If they laid out their own game, then perhaps the realist could play that game for a stretch, or else compare the two different games. If they showed that they are engaged in a disciplined activity, then they would fulfill Williamson's most fundamental criterion.
Yes, and this comes too close for my liking to "flaw-based" resolution of a difficult issue. The anti-realists "refuse to get in the game" -- hmmm. What do they say about that? Would they accept that characterization?
My memory is that that's how this whole things started: Dummett pointed out that some philosophers seemed to be playing a game that they did not realize was rigged against them, so they tended to flounder.
The solution he proposed was to recognize when you were inclined to deny that a specific type of statement within a given domain was bivalent.
(Dummett also had no truck with more than two truth values, so for him (and I believe Williamson agrees with him about this) intuitionistic logic becomes especially attractive: the sentential operator "not" is understood as "it has not been demonstrated that ..." Hence the double negative is merely "it has not been demonstrated that it has not been demonstrated that ..." )
So, side R made the rules for the first version of the game (universal bivalence); the other side AR made a new set of rules that gave them a fair chance, but those rules were never accepted by side R (because you lose LEM).
One way to read the paper is that Williamson proposes an alternative to "my theory versus your theory", namely results, success, new knowledge. Proof is in the pudding.
(For instance, skeptics of intuitionistic logic have to admit it has proved very useful for proof theory, and thus for creating automated proof checkers. That's a success.)
Then he has to come up with a plausible story about a kind of result all parties of good faith could recognize.
And you do all this so that the choice between theories or approaches is not "merely aesthetic". (@Moliere)
Quoting GrahamJ
Notice that you start with the assumption that 2 entities are identical on some qualitative basis, even if that basis is merely imagined. Then you place them side by side, which allows you to count each of them as instances of the quality they share ( they comprise 2 nothings). Deleuze is saying that when we think we are generating a qualitative identity, or two instances of that identity, we are actually transforming the qualitative sense of the first as we arrive at the second. So there are in fact no two instances of a single qualitative meaning, whether we call it nothing or something. Nothing is not a neutral placeholder, because there is no such thing. Mathematical was developed to apply to self-identical objects, and so presupposes the existence of these qualitatively self-identical objects. Deleuze argues that extensive calculations of self-identical quality is an illusory surface effect of what he calls intensive quantity, or just intensity.
Interesting.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
That sounds fine to me, though I don't see "undemonstrated" or "unjustified" as a truth value. I was trying to explain something similar <recently>, to little avail.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Right, and "disciplined" seems like a plausible way to do that. Or else @Count Timothy von Icarus' "determinate," specifically in the teleological sense.
This is why I think Aquinas' approach provides the universal condition:
Quoting Aquinas, ST I-II.1.2.c - Whether it is proper to the rational nature to act for an end?
If a philosopher who is thinking about something is acting for a (determinate) end, then the discipline is already implicitly to hand. Those who claim not to be acting for any end when doing philosophy are just confused or lacking in self-knowledge. Williamson's "discipline" is one kind of end, and it is a rather foundational kind of end. So instead of asking, "What disciplines your thoughts/claims?," Aquinas might ask, "What end(s) are you acting for when you philosophize in this way?"
---
This also solves things such as this:
Quoting Banno
All "language games" involve acting for ends.
Intuitionistic logic is a whole thing, which we probably don't want to get into here, and to which I would not count as a reliable guide. It's part of the gossipy backstory of this paper, is all.
Maybe. The quoted part looks like an uttered sentence. Strictly speaking, I have to have knowledge of the context of utterance to help me understand what you're saying. In other words, I'd need to make sure you didn't do any nonverbal stuff that signals sarcasm or something like that. I can't just use the sentence. Even Davidson wasn't just using the sentence as a truth bearer, and that's related to his theory of meaning.
If on the other hand, the quoted part is supposed to represent a proposition, then yes, it's definitely two different things. The proposition has all the context of utterance, truth conditions, etc. worked out.
I think human speech might be similar to bird flight. The potential for it is hardwired, and it becomes actual when circumstances trigger the development. I mean, a gene has been identified that's related to speech, so there's some reason to suspect that it's not something a person learns. It's something that's triggered in the right environment.
Sometimes a grandmaster discussing a game will say something like this: "I looked at sacrificing the pawn, but I didn't see anything concrete." "Concrete" here is a magic word; it means actual variations leading to a specific advantage, not just "I'll have more piece activity," or something vague like that.
A lot of discussion of chess in the pre-engine era turns out to have been mere handwaving if not outright bullshit. Once you have a machine that cares a lot more about the concrete than vague evaluations, chess starts to look different.
I think Williamson's minimum requirement is theories that produce something concrete. Rather than "I think white stands better" versus "I think black", show me some actual variations.
That's right. In the previous thread I even focused a bit on the concept of goodness. "Why did you act in that way?" "Because it was a good way to act." Or, "Why did you act in that way rather than the other way?" "Because it was the better way to act." In philosophy one needs to actually explain why some course is good or better. The chess analogy would be, "It was the best move available," but then in order to substantiate that claim one would have to canvass the other possibilities, along with their inferiority.
So I definitely agree that "theories that produce something concrete" is a good metaphor. But @J is going to say, "But what about the guy who thinks it is better to produce something that isn't concrete? What about the possibility that someone might not prefer concreteness?" At this point I think Aquinas is helpful insofar as he moves us out of the metaphorical space. It is much harder to respond to Aquinas with, "But what about the guy who wants to aim at something he is not aiming at?" Or, "But what about the guy who wants to do philosophy purposelessly?"
And to be fair, "actual variations leading to a specific advantage," is not metaphorical, so we already have a non-metaphorical standard for the chess game.
I think we have to let the quoted part represent a proposition; that was my intention, anyway. Though it may not matter, in this sense: If the quoted part is merely a speech act, an utterance, by prefacing it with "I assert" I have arguably turned it into a proposition.
But OK, you agree that the two assertions mean two different things. Now we go back to the question, "What's the problem with 1st- and 2nd-person assertions?"
1) I assert, "The cat is on the mat." - call the quoted material P.
2) I assert, "I think that my cat is on the mat." - call the quoted material Q.
1), "I assert P", is an assertion about a state of affairs that is independent of me, the speaker.
2), "I assert Q", is, or can be taken as, an assertion about me, the speaker -- specifically, about a thought I have concerning my cat.
But this seems to claim that the truth of 2) isn't dependent on the truth of P. The truth of P -- whether or not the cat is on the mat -- will have no bearing on whether the same speaker had a particular thought. This is a very uncomfortable position to defend.
What has gone wrong, if anything has, will be the result of how "think" is being interpreted in Q. We all know that a statement of the form "I think that . . . " can be used to describe a mental event, though we would more commonly say something like, "I have the thought that . . . " or "It's just occurred to me that . . . " In philosophy, though, "I think that . . . " is more often supposed to be transparent. It doesn't refer to some particular mental occurrence at all, but instead to a belief or a position about whatever is being thought: "Do you think so?" "Yes, I do." So "X" and "I think that X" are both taken as 3rd person propositions. Can this be right?
I won't get any deeper into this, because you only asked me where I saw the problem, and this should be a good enough explanation, I hope.
Here's a quick example (from Wittgenstein) of everything, I hope.
The question assumes a bivalence that turns out to be troublesome. "Obviously" and "obviously not" both spring to mind and are both defensible.
Some will be inclined to shrug off the question and say it is "by convention". But Quine argued (repeatedly and at length) that "true by convention" is actually incoherent.
So then David Lewis comes along and writes a book (cleverly titled "Convention") that gives a rigorous definition of convention in terms of game theory (complete with lemmas and theorems), and applying it to semantics, and Quine writes a preface saying Lewis has done more than any other philosopher to mount a defense of "truth by convention".
I think Williamson here says, this is how it's done. You put in the work, develop the theory as far as you can, and you'll at least have some evidence for or against, insofar as some obstacles are overcome or roadblocks to progress appear.
I'm sorry if I over-reacted. I'm a bit obsessed about the need to kill the idea of a meaning-object. It's called a proposition in standard philosophese, but the name doesn't matter. It's the role that's the problem.
Quoting J
The vocabulary around this is incredibly rich and therefore compicated and difficult to organize. I don't think that there are answers waiting in natural language - anything we do would be a specialized use of the terms. Utterance/assertion for the distinction you have in mind might well work; the same is true of sentence/statement or a version of the type/token distinction. There was an idea around at one time that a proposition should be defined as a sentence with its use, which would be better. I don't have any answers. We could try to agree a list of issues, like this one and then try working down it. Perhaps others might join in.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Oh, yes, indeed. It can be very frustrating. But scientists have established first claim on knowledge and, for some reason, on wisdom as well. I have the impression that philosophers, since around the sixties, are confined to niche labelled "oddball". When I had a job in philosophy, from time to time people would ask me what I did. "Philosophy" was a real conversation-stopper.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Economics has managed to establish itself as the most like "proper" science of the social sciences. It's all illusion. Fortunately, there are some cracks where economics is recognized as the result of human behaviour.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yes, but how do they see it? You can't have an argument or negotiation, decide on a winner or anything else unless the other side is in the game. If they won't play your game, you can just play by yourself or go and get involved in the other guy's game.
But in fairness to him, his actual complaint is that neither side takes seriously what he takes seriously - or is the following quotation not clear?
I read this as saying that Williamson's problem is that most participants on both sides are ignoring what he thinks is important. It needs an argument to show how and why it is important, which is missing here. The other half of the problem is that most participants are concentrating on Dummett's demand. On the face of it, and without an argument, that does seem reasonable. The beef here is in the arguments, which Williamson does not discuss.
I am not particularly hostile to what Williamson wants to do and I'm not sufficiently well read to comment on it. But I don't think this is likely to resonate with anyone who does not already share his presuppositions.
Yeah that's fair. My memory of the paper is probably colored a bit by knowing which side Williamson is on.
Yes, that is a good example.
I'm going to let the thread simmer a bit before adding anything. You and I seem to agree with large portions of Williamson. I want to give those who disagree a chance to speak, given that many of us have been trying to argue this point for months and the naysayers always get quiet whenever the subject is broached directly.
Why would the truth of 2 be dependent on the truth of P?
Quoting J
Think, know, and believe are called intensional operators. They signify what's going on between a person and a proposition. You're adding another layer to this.
I'm not really sure what you're saying though.
I would at least say, perhaps incorrectly, that I think I get where he's coming from, and I do have considerable sympathy with the view expressed, but I also have reservations.
There honestly isn't much point in "taking his side" here or not because the paper itself, as he acknowledges, is pretty handwavy. As philosophy, it's pretty weak tea, but it might be strong medicine for philosophers.
If P is not true, then the cat is not on the mat. So if I assert Q -- "I think that the cat is on the mat" -- some would allege that I am mistaken. But what am I mistaken about? Not my own thought, presumably. I must be wrong about the cat. This seems to show that the cat needs to be on the mat in order for me to speak truly when I say 2.
But I think all of this is wrong. The truth of 2 has nothing to do with whether P is true.
Quoting frank
Precisely, following some of Rodl's concerns especially, about how to handle 1st-personal assertions.
Quoting frank
That the use of intentional operators is conventional, and admits of different interpretations, especially around "I think". Or, more interestingly, our entire understanding of what a proposition is supposed to be -- as @Ludwig V suggests above -- is in need of revisiting.
I'd still like to explore the natural-language usages a bit more, because some of them are fairly common and intuitive, and might teach us something. I bet @Banno knows who's already done this?
For instance, the idea "We're both saying the same thing" is easily grasped by a bright child. So what does that mean, when it comes up in typical contexts? How might it need to be modified in order to serve more rigorous philosophical purposes? Wonder if anyone's ever thought of that before! :lol:
Very true. Still, we can find things to agree or disagree with, and @J has disagreed with a few things:
Quoting J
Quoting J
I think that even if we can attribute to Williamson the simple claim that
@J's disagreement could be phrased in different ways, but this would be one of them:
This theme underlies @J's thinking from his very first threads, and perhaps you can see how from that form of exclusion or disqualification we get the label, "authoritarian." It's the very same issue, and it comes up every time someone proscribes a philosophical move or approach. It is the position which says that philosophical proscription is per se inadmissible, and the natural effect is 's "Anything goes."
I wouldn't say that. I reckon that Williamson makes it pretty clear which side he's on right through th meat of the article (say pp. 4 - 9). It's a bit of a giveaway that he presents developments in logic which seem to him to give a lot of support (though empirical linguistics may be a bit of a stretch for philosophy) to one side and goes into great detail about the weakness of assertibility-conditions in relation to sentences not known to be true and not known to be false.
What I can't discern is whether he thinks his audience is open to conversion - in which case, I would have expected much more detailed argument - or he is frustrated no-one is paying him enough attention and he's declaring a plague on both houses, without expecting much change. Do you have any impression what's happened since 2004?
Quoting J
If you want an overview, try Propositions - Stanford E. P.
The emoji indicates that you know the answer is "everyone", right?
In the context of the paper, where the principal example is semantics, we could note that Williamson is going to insist that people actually try doing this analysis formally, and he has very little patience for claiming, before the work begins, that it's unnecessary or impossible.
P is the proposition that the cat is on the mat.
You asserted that you think P.
If P is false, then you are mistaken about what you thought. You aren't wrong about having thought it.
The cat definitely doesn't have to be on the mat in order for you to truly express what you think about it, either way.
Quoting J
It's "intensional" with an "s." This is Hesperus/Phosphorus territory. Skim through that article. We've thought a lot about thinking, believing, and knowing. The article on extensional definitions is also interesting.
Quoting J
How would you revisit it?
I really don't. That's right in SEP's wheelhouse though. I think of it primarily as a "review of recent literature" for grad students.
As someone who was away from philosophy for fifteen years or so before I joined TPF, it is also very handy for me.
I'm going to have to work out how to present my case here. This stuff is an excellent starting-point. There's another article devoted to the thesis that propositions are structured objects. Another complicated confusion.
Yeah, I was kind of burlesquing the response some novices have -- "Oh, that's a great idea, let's look into it!" not realizing it has, to put it gently, occurred to others before.
Good, that's how I see it as well.
Quoting frank
Have you read "Thinking and Being" by Irad Kimhi? Or "Self-Consciousness and Objectivity" by Sebastain Rodl? I'd revisit it along their lines, difficult thought that is.
I haven't. They look very much like my cup of tea, though. :up:
If you have trouble deciding, I'll do it for you.
Well, there's the issues of substitution. If the cat's name is "Jack", does the speaker also believe that Jack is on the mat? It seems not. And yet Jack = the cat.
Hence the analysis "The cat is on the mat" and "The speaker holds that true", where that indicates the previous sentence. This has the benefit of separating the belief from the fact.
Quoting Ludwig V
I missed something.
Yes, the argument did indeed move on. Disenchantment with the global framing of the debate led to the rise of localism, Phil os science moved away from examination of method and towards examining scientific language and culture, and modal theories of causation. Philosophers moved to metemetaphysics, after the book by that title, a sideline of neo-Aristotelian approaches as a reaction against Quine, another sideline on the construction of social reality, and so on. Pholsophers got board with the lack of progress and moved on.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Sometimes, not always. It also can bring out differences in aesthetic, in what the proponents are seeking.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Ok, lets' settle on clear knowledge... :wink:
I'm lost here. We have it that "the cat is on the mat" can have a particular interpretation, understood whether it is true or not; and we have it that "I judge that sentence to be true" is a distinct, albeit not seperate, item.
Is that not so?
Why do I feel like I just walked into the Meno?
Do you think that "learning" in philosophy amounts to becoming clear about what you already know? Or can philosophy provide us with knowledge we did not have before?
A result of philosophers being forced to pay their way, perhaps - of economics, rather than largess on the part of philosophers.
What about "aesthetic" as opposed to "merely aesthetic"? -- the desire for results, success, [s]k[/s]new knowledge -- how is that not aesthetic?
Isn't the attraction to results, success, and so forth very much an itch of the modern scholar?
Alternately, after Davidson: aren't "the cat is on the mat" spoken by J and "the cat is on the mat" spoken by @frank both true under the very same circumstances? That is, they are extensional equivalent - so what's the issue?
:razz:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Isn't becoming clearer about what you already know a way to improve your knowledge? At the least, I'm not convinced that they are mutually exclusive...
I've in mind Midgley's plumbing model of philosophy. We get the plumbing right, and then are we still doing philosophy? I'm suspicious about that. I do think philosophy can to some extent provide a service to other disciplines, fixing the leaks and bad smells.
Back to the demarcation criteria I suggested: philosophy happens when we stop doing things with words and start looking instead at how we do things with words; how those words work. Doing philosophy involves going back and looking again at what we have said, and checking how it hangs together. Dissection.
Now, a corollary of that: it remains undecided if what is left over when we get the plumbing right is still philosophy, or has become something else.
So "learning" in philosophy is at least becoming clear about what you already know, but maybe philosophy might provide us with knowledge we did not have before, after it gets through fixing the pipes. I remain unconvinced.
What it doesnt assume is the law of excluded middle or double negation elimination. Thats the point.
Dummett made use of it in his workespecially in his arguments against classical realism about meaning.
If we are tempted to agree with Dummett might give consideration to what it is we are agreeing.
If we are tempted to disagree with Dummett we might do well to understand the solidity of the foundation on which he stands.
I don't think there's any fact of the matter regarding shared nor individual intentionality. It's all Wittgenstein's Group Dynamics.
Then how do you explain a football game?
I don't.
Yes. My question is whether "I judge that sentence to be true" ever follows from "That sentence is true"? If I assert the latter, have I also committed myself to asserting the former?
Quoting Banno
Right, this is tricky. The question is about "I judge that the cat is on the mat," spoken by each of us in turn. These are different assertions, you'll agree? The "I" in each case is different -- the person who is judging. They aren't extensionally equivalent, despite being phrased identically.
I don't think any other discipline has asked for philosophy's help or wants it.
That's not to say that some kind of interdisciplinary business isn't possible and sometimes interesting, but no astronomer (or even social psychologist) has ever said, "Whoa, have you seen the new data? We're gonna need a philosopher."
Quoting Banno
This is the same issue that bedeviled the other thread, that you need something to dissect. There are a lot of candidates for that; is one of them the kind of theory that Williamson thinks it is the business of philosophy to produce?
"Why not?" you'll say. "Have scalpel; will travel."
But there's a genuine question of intention here: Williamson would absolutely agree to carefully examining theories, with the goal of improving them or producing better ones, not with the expectation they'll all be left dead on the dissecting table.
Philosophers don't wait to be asked...
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
There's no shortage, is there? starting with how many legs does a spider have, and working on from there...
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I suspect that the philosophers now working on metametaphyscis and so on see themselves as working on the same issue, but re-cast as a result of the considerations from, amongst others, Williamson, Chalmers, Dummett and so on.
It's not an autopsy.
Because it isn't?
I'm genuinely puzzled why you'd stretch the word "aesthetics" to cover, well, everything. Now if you wanted to talk about value or utility or something, you'd have an argument. But an engineer who designs a beautiful bridge has to make sure, first and separately, that what he designs will function as a bridge and it'll probably have to meet a host of other requirements before considerations of beauty come into it.
The answer is straightforward. From "That sentence is true" it does not follow that "I judge that sentence to be true". Neither does it follow from "I judge that sentence to be true" that "That sentence is true. The context is not extensional.
If you assert "That sentence is true" you have also committed to "I judge that sentence to be true" on the grounds that to assert a sentence counts as to judge it to be true. This is not an entailment but a performance.
I'll give it a shot to make a case of some kind here.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
How is that different, exactly?
Utility -- it's not something we ought pursue in a ethical sense. It's not strictly true, either, because it's relative to one's desire. We have to want to build a bridge for some reason or other, and it's not an ethical value, at least not on its face. I wouldn't say someone is morally good for building a useful tool. I'd say it's useful.
Since it's not true, and it's not good -- well, maybe it's not beautiful in the old sense of the aesthetic, but there is this broader sense of "beautiful" which is that which is judged worthy, but not on moral grounds.
Basically the judgment of values which are not-moral falls into the aesthetic. Sometimes we like to say these are "epistemic values", or some such, but even there there are are choices between which epistemic values one makes appeals to.
At least, insofar that these judgments are held for more than one person. We say we like vanilla ice cream, but we don't hold that others should like that -- it's something I like.
But these other value judgments tend to be binding for practitioners -- the elegance of a mathematical theory persuades, and so forth.
EDIT: Perhaps another way: I think it makes sense to try and make appeals to what is attractive to a body of people. So here, with Williamson, in order to respond I'd have to do better than I really can, at the moment -- but the way I'll figure it out along the way is to see what it is Williamson cares about, what he finds persuasive, what arguments he allows, and so forth. I'll be looking for his taste in judgment: which arguments does he deploy? Surely they're all valid, but there's many arguments one can make. What topics are worthy? That sort of thing.
I'll try too:
We decide to build a bridge because we believe it would make our lives better, and the sense of "better" there is colorably an aesthetic judgement. Life with the bridge would be preferable, simply in terms of what we want our lives to be like.
That's persuasive, but we still have the problem that the bridge's capacity to improve our lives is instrumental; it has to succeed as a bridge, and can be judged to succeed or fail as a bridge, without any consideration of our motive for building it, and without considering whether we were right that the bridge would improve our lives in the way we wanted.
(Oh! Spectacular movie reference for this: Stanley Tucci's speech about his bridge in Margin Call, 2011.)
You can always take a step up like this, and examine anything by placing it in a wider context, but while you will gain new terms for evaluating the thing, you'll lose the ones you had before.
Quoting Moliere
Here for instance you didn't have to take the word "good" to have an exclusively moral sense, and I feel quite certain than @Count Timothy von Icarus would not. I think your use of "aesthetic" (or maybe "beautiful" in the mooted non-traditional sense) has noticeable overlap with his use of "good".
I think Williamson is only demanding that philosophical theories succeed as theories, to some recognizable degree. Whether they make our lives better or worse or give us a warm fuzzy, he's presumably going to consider a separate question.
Well, I do see this as a puzzle. I'm inclined to say that if the speaker knows that the cat's name is Jack, then they do also believe that Jack is on the mat; if they do not know, they do not also believe that Jack is on the mat. Implicit in this is the question of the identity of individual propositions. Are "the cat is on the mat" and "Jack is on the mat" two propositions or one? If the former, they do also believe .... However, if the latter, they do not also believe.
The classical definition of intentionality, in my view, is not incorrect, but could, and should go further. If we consider the speech-situation, we find that these contexts are not rigidly separate, but are often mixed. Suppose I'm telling a story about my cat. Yesterday, I was with a group of people who do not know that my cat is called Jack. Last week, Jack, who is fond of chasing his tail, accidentally caught it, and bit it. You should have seen his reaction; he was furious with the tail, but couldn't work out what to do about it. Obviously, I will tell the story, not about "Jack", but about "my cat". This morning, I was with a group of people who know my cat's name. I told the same story, but not about "my cat", but about "Jack". Choosing the appropriate one of inter-substitutable references depends on one's audience. This works for "believes" and a number of other concepts classified as intentional.
Quoting Banno
You didn't miss anything. The problem is that I failed to delete that sentence from a draft.
Quoting Banno
Quite likely. It's quite a common phenomenon - and not irrational. Perhaps people concerned with lack of progress should take not.
Quoting J
Those two statements do not assert the same thing, in my book. The link between them only holds in a very special situation.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I think Wittgenstein, for one, would say that philosophy amounts to becoming clear about what you already know, or perhaps learning to find one's way about in circumstances that are confusing. But perhaps becoming clear about what you already know (or don't know) is, in a sense, acquiring new knowledge.
Quoting J
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
To be fair, I don't think that scientists ever say "hold on, this is a philosophical issue. We need to call an expert."
I should have been clearer - my apologies. It's if the speaker does not know that jack is the cat's name. So we have
And by substitution,
Which is not the case. I'm just pointing to the opacity of propositional attitudes.
All language games involve ends, but of course which ends aren't always obvious. I've had many a person tell me that "good arguments" are just those arguments that lead to people seeing things your way, or which convince them to do what you want. I find it curious when people who embrace such a view fault arguments for being merely rhetorical or aesthetic. Presumably, arguments can be as vacuous or invalid as we please, so long as they work, so long as they are "useful" (to [I]us[/I]).
You're welcome to advance your own at least. If metaphysics is not a science of being qua being, or any of its other various definitions, but instead a debate about languageabout "proposing better ways to conceptualize and systematize our thought and language," surely there has to be some notion of the end this language is "better for." It certainly cannot be "better" at doing metaphysics in its traditional sense, and it hardly seems that it can be based on a "metaphysics of goodness," because switching the terms of the debate to philosophy of language (itself a move supported by metaphysical presuppositions no doubt) seems to have put that out of reach.
However, if the very issues at hand are various forms of anti-realism, e.g. anti-realism re values (i.e. the very idea of anything being better or worse at all), anti-realism re truth (i.e. the very idea of anything ever being truly better or worse), anti-realism re linguistic meaning, etc. it seems to me that it will be impossible to appeal to "better or worse language," without begging the question re anti-realism. That is, anti-realism is itself not unrelated to the ends of philosophy, e.g., the post-modern "ontologies of violence," grow out of a certain sort of anti-realism and philosophy of language.
I'm not sure this monomania is necessary. It takes a particular sort of philosophy of language to make all philosophy into philosophy of language. Such a philosophy is not without its own assumptions about ends and metaphysics either.
I think that's right. "Succeed" how though? I'm not sure how one smuggles in ends by which to measure success without foreclosing on at least some claims of anti-realism (e.g. re the desirability of any ends). If one claims that success leads to knowledge and truth, and the point in question is anti-realism re knowledge and truth (either tout court, or within "science" or "metaphysics"), this just seems to beg the question (see my response to @Banno above).
My point would be that some forms of anti-realism remove any grounds for considering their own position choiceworthy. Of course, some are forthright about this. Philosophy is ultimately sophistry, a contest of power, the will placed above the intellect. And the charge here is that, aside from begging the question, Williamson is simply engaged in the same dynamics, his standards a power play, although he lacks full self-awareness of this fact.
I don't think the purveyors of the metaphysics are violence are wrong here, [I]given[/I] some of their assumptions, and the tricky thing for contemporary philosophy, including in the analytic space, particularly within the linguistic turn, is that it has already given them those assumptions.
Edit: if you want a concrete example, just consider deflationary theories of truth, where truth is just the use of that token ("true") within a system/game. Williamson's claim that advances in formalism represent "knowledge of truth" might point in that direction, maybe not. I think full deflationism is far more popular here than in mainstream analytic thought. But if one accepts deflationism, particularly when paired with logical nihilism or a liberal logical pluralism (something some analytics are led towards, particularly through the elevation of philosophy of language), I think one will find the more "post-modern" theorists who descend from Nietzsche to be quite irrefutable, which will then cast doubt on the whole project.
This is true. A behaviorist, for instance, can't complain much about wording, because no language use is supposed to actually refer, or convey meaning, do ontology, etc.
Just be aware that some anti-realisms exist because of apparently insurmountable problems with the corresponding realism (no pun intended.) If one persists in being a hard ontological realist, for instance, it appears the basis is pure whim... or a kind of faith. There's no power to persuade.
I'm claiming that all three statements have different truth conditions. J and Banno may be "saying the same thing," but the statements are not.
Quoting Banno
OK, this was my question. I agree, and the fact that you make a distinction between asserting the sentence and simply stating the proposition bears out my/our view. "That sentence is true," put forward abstractly in the semi-mysterious manner that propositions are supposed to be statable, doesn't commit anyone to judging it to be true. You need the further statement, "J asserts 'That sentence is true'" in order to do that.
By calling the connection between asserting and judging a "performance" rather than an entailment, some interesting questions surface. I agree that this is not an entailment relation. If we say it's a "counts as" relation, do we mean that it's in some sense arbitrary or stipulative? I think we should. I think we're saying that, among the many ways of using "assert" and "judge," we want to privilege this usage because it captures a relation that's important, and needs to be talked about precisely.
We're not saying that "to assert a sentence is / must be / means to judge it to be true." To say that would required consulting some reference work that lays out logical uses and/or definitions, and we've already said that this is not an entailment relation. All that's going on here is an attempt to capture a typical or standard usage: If I say "The cat is on the mat" and you ask me, do you think that's true, and I reply, "Yes, I do," then we agree that two things have happened. I've judged that the cat is on the mat, and I have asserted this in my statement about it. Could there be nuances and exceptions? Sure. Might other terms be substituted? Sure. But -- bringing in "counts as" again -- this is what generally applies in this sort of discourse.
This seems a bit much for me. Consider the most popular variety of ontological realism, physicalism. Is this based wholly on whim and faith? I should hardly think so. It might be, in many of its more popular forms, a deeply flawed ontology, but it's not because it is a brute assertion.
Second, it's not as if anti-realists are free of their own epistemic and metaphysical presuppositions. It's just that they tend to take them from the tradition that birthed physicalism and scientistsm so their primary targets tend to share them. However, if it's these starting points that lead to anti-realism being so strong, then arguably that's just an indictment of those starting points.
See my reply to @Banno, above. Yes, the link is situational, but perhaps not so very special.
This is a misunderstanding. Physicalism is not a variety of ontological realism. Ontological realism just says we have the ability to declare what the world is made of, whether physicalism, idealism, or whatever. An ontological antirealist (from soft to hard approaches), says we don't have this ability, for various reasons.
An example of a justification for ontological realism would be that God told us in some book that the world is his mind, so it's idealism. So though we don't have the means to verify that, we believe it because we believe everything in the sacred book by faith.
Physicalism, for obvious reasons, isn't likely to have that kind of justification, but whatever justification a physicalist comes up with, it will come down to faith.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
No, they are free. A hard ontological antirealist (like me), doesn't believe ontology is anymore than a sort of philosophical game. It has nothing to do with what it purports to be.
IDK, it's normally offered up as the paradigmatic example. At least in most forms, it makes ontological claims that are independent of human experience, language, etc., i.e. realism. "Ontological realism is the view that there are objective facts about what exists and what the nature and categories of being are." By this definition at least, most forms of physicalism/materialism would qualify. I'm not sure what you have in mind though.
Sure, and "it's physical," or "its matter," are popular answers here. Whether these can escape Hemple's Dilemma is another question, but they make the claim.
Ok, well you initially said:
But now you're saying physicalism and materialism's ontological claims don't count as realism because they don't justify themselves by making an appeal to faith? So, physicalism isn't ontological realism because it isn't based on that sort of brute claim?
If ontological realism is defined by such appeals, then sure, your point stands. But that's because it appears to be tautological.
Free of all presuppositions? Like a sort of Hegelian project? This does not seem true in terms of the advocates of anti-realism I am familiar with. What is an example?
Yes. None of that is in question. Though you are assuming/presupposing that the speaker does not know that the cat = jack.
Question - suppose that the speaker does know that the cat=jack. Then, by substitution, the speaker believes that Jack is on the mat. Is that not the case?
Im starting to think it is.
If we stick to all of the physical sciences, we can stick to talking about things in the world.
If we stick to logic and math, we can stick to language.
But if we want to understand speakers, namely, ourselves, if we want to know thyself, we, inevitably it seems, need to integrate language, speakers and the spoken about world.
I'm increasingly unconvinced that @Banno is willing to provide his ends at all. He doesn't seem to even know what he is doing when he does "philosophy." Even his "dissection" requires ends and standards if it is to be at all disciplined.
So before we address the so-called "monism" question, we have to know whether there must be any ends at all; whether there must be any discipline at all.
Quoting Leontiskos
So the part I'd focus in on is "...can be judged to succeed or fail as a bridge", because this utility is what I'd say are the sorts of we'll call them interests that the engineer and builder have to keep in mind. It can be judged to succeed or fail insofar that we have some standards of utility to judge it as successful or a failure.
But since we can't see the bridge as true we have to have some standards of judgment by which it is successful. One of those standards will include things like "the builder used the best knowledge we have today in justifying the techniques employed in the building of the bridge", and that in turn is where truth comes in, I think. That is, it sort of takes care of itself in a manner of speaking about judgment. We all want truth, but we have to make inferences to get there -- and when participating on a collective project like building a bridge those standards of inference will change not just between bridge builders and philosophers, where we'd expect a difference, but between bridge builders -- or even between sites of the same bridge builder.
This will be due to various details thus far seen as worthy of consideration when building a bridge.
Important to my mind, at least, is that this will hold for any profession. Though scientists are participating in a collective project, there are also specific standards of any given lab or study or what-have-you. Much effort has been put into making these uniform, and there's just a point where choices have to be made (the standards of medicinal research are different between the United States and Europe, though there's a good deal of crossover in purpose and resemblance of the kinds of rules). These can be at random, or they can be by a trained sort of judgment -- and generally insofar that we're not dealing with some new creative effort it seems to me that it's this trained judgment of a given profession which fits within this kind of non-moral, value-based judgment.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
True. Though that's because I am trying to figure out a way to explain this other "kind" of judgment, or capacity of thought. There's the concept of truth and knowledge and being, and there's the concept of ethical goodness (today generally thought to apply to rules-following, consequences, or character) -- and somehow these judgments differ from both of those.
So, sure, "good" does not need to be so strictly defined -- it's only because I'm trying to highlight non-moral judgment as something more than particular whim, and that this is how the practical affair of making knowledge gets done. Truth doesn't get defined by aesthetics, but truth sort of takes care of itself in the process of judgment.
OK, I think that's a fair ask. I'd go further and note how "succeed as theories" requires specification, though, and continue the same line of thought as above -- but then I may not be countering Williamson at all. I like standards, I just think they change, and so need specification and agreement and collective understanding and such.
****
So how does that sit? Do I manage to capture truth in the process sufficiently well to your satisfaction, or does it still seem like a stretch not worth making?
I think there's room to distinguish function from utility (or interest or value or aesthetic or ...).
A bridge (I'm just going to make this up) is a structure that enables conveyance of people or goods or vehicles across an obstacle under their own power, whether that's something you value or not. A structure can fail to enable such conveyance, whether you want it to or not, and so is not (or is no longer) a bridge.
I think it's a distinction worth calling attention to because this is exactly what people hate about analytic philosophy, and why they'd rather read Nietzsche or the Stoics or Camus.
Analytic philosophy keeps values in quarantine. When we talk about "epistemic values," or some such, that's understood to be heuristic, just shorthand for "fit to purpose," more or less. We're still not taking about "why we value knowledge" or anything like that.
And this is seen as a good thing to do by the analytic community because you ward off this sort of thing: "Your analysis is correct (or incorrect) because you share (or don't share) my values." That's a hellscape analytic philosophers want no part of, but it is embraced elsewhere, with suitable obfuscations.
That's why there is a sort of "shut up and calculate" attitude in analytic philosophy, and why Williamson is demanding that people work harder. It's why his model for a successful theoretical discipline is mathematics, which he imagines sitting in the armchair next to philosophy's.
(I can put it even more colorfully. The analytic attitude is this: Philosophy doesn't need a hero; it needs a professional.)
So naturally what I'd say is "within the tradition of analytic philosophy values are quarantined. In its place is some non-value term called "function" "
But this is seen as a good thing so that people with different values can communicate. That's perfectly acceptable when it's not the values which are the reason people are miscommunicating, though. :D
Though I also don't think it's as much of a hellscape as perhaps the analytic philosophers imagine.
Still, I say this from outside the tower. How the professionals conduct their business is certainly less of my affair than Williamsons. If anything I'd have to be consistent in saying "the professionals say it is such and such, and so...."
But then it seems we have to agree, ahead of time, to this analytic norm in order for it to function -- we'd either have to want to escape the hellscape, or at least acknowledge that there are other ways to make appeals within analytic philosophy which more or less attempts to circumnavigate the norms of reason such that there's no choice, there's just what a professional would do.
So I did. I called them identical, and immediately contradicted myself by asserting a difference between them! I did not intend to call them identical. Sorry for the confusion.
Quoting Joshs
That seems a substantial and interesting point. Mathematics was developed like that but category theory seems to be transforming it into something else. There's a SEP article on category theory and one which links it to structuralism. I haven't read them, but I'm happy that philosophers are thinking about this. I shall just repeat a couple of things that I heard from category theorists. They have a maxim that a mathematical object is completely determined by its relationships to other objects. They state an aim to convert every equality into an isomorphism.
Yes and no. An analytic philosopher can talk *about* values, the roles they play in discourse, all that sort of thing, but by and large is determined not to offer a "wisdom literature." So it might be able to "clarify" (hey @Banno) that it's the values at stake in a dispute, rather than something else, but it's not, as a rule, espousing a set of values.
Quoting Moliere
Yes. And that might be down to your values. You might hope (as Tarski did, on the eve of World War II) that promoting logic and clarity would help people talk out their differences rather than kill each other. But the norm itself is just fit to purpose, like showing your work, making your arguments. It's what the community needs to do what they've set out to do, even if that thing turns out to be a huge mistake.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Quoting Moliere
I'm enough of an analytic that I do.
And so that'd be another case I'd have to make.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
True, it's not as wide as what "wisdom literature" captures -- especially with respect to the axiological.
In a way I can't help but see that commitment to clarity as something cared about, though. It's something I care about too. And I think that the value of clarity operates at a different "level" than the values under discussion so that it's not necessarily in question when employing non-moral values.
But, then, for myself it's not such a big deal to acknowledge "in this conversation I shall adhere to the rules of analytic philosophy where this, that, and the other "move" are unpersuasive for x y z reason" -- it's almost like saying the obvious to me to the point that I begin to wonder why it was ever controversial to say.
It's like asking "Which language game are we playing then?"
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Right. I think that these are two different values -- there's what's fit to purpose (Clarity is fit to the purpose of logic), and then there's a reason beyond this purpose which justifies the selection of the purpose, or at least explains (since I don't think we need some overall Reason to justify any particular investigation -- investigations into clarity and logic for their own sake are perfectly acceptable)
Somehow that collective norm doesn't cease to be a value just because we call it "function" to my mind -- but then I ought say I'm not a professional, again, and I could easily accept that I'm simply wrong about what Williamson is getting at and it's my own little itch that's not going away, but it's not relevant.
I get that, and maybe there's no harm in noting that there are these norms, and maybe they're in a special subcategory but maybe not, and you get the advantage of applying what you know about norms to them. Sure.
On the other hand -- and I'd have to take a few minutes to work out an example -- I worry slightly that you could choose to define analytic philosophy in terms of this set of norms it enforces, instead of the thing that required them. That could have odd results like classifying something as analytic philosophy because it follows all those norms, even though it's something quite different.
It's not that these boundaries are all that important, but if what we're doing at the moment is trying to understand what Williamson is up to, we want to know what analytic philosophy is, rather than what it looks like.
I have no problem with that. I'd hand it to the analytic philosopher to provide this knowledge, too. And I'd accept their rejection of odd counter-examples to take care of the worry. (I tend to think that all research programmes end up finding odd counter-examples that are besides the point -- we're just overgeneralizing)
It's important enough to know for understanding what he's doing and what we're up to.
Thinking about how various "analytic philosophy" is, I should also say that my last few posts might be very wrong-headed. Maybe it is a loose set of norms that binds it altogether. Maybe it's a "family resemblance" situation.
Sometimes I've been inclined to think that, and put a lot of emphasis on those norms (as @Banno does with "clarity"). But not at the moment.
I'll follow along with the not-family-resemblance interpretation.
In the last thread @J kept appealing to the community of "serious people" or "professional philosophers," and I kept pointing out that if one restricts the domain of participants to those who agree with you, then of course no one will disagree with you.
I think something similar is happening here. It's not that Analytic Philosophy is not value-laden. It's that the things we (arbitrarily?) tend to label "values" are not things that Analytic Philosophers disagree about. If you want to play the game of Analytic Philosophy before you begin you have to sign a contract that says things like, "I promise to value logical consequence." Then when you neglect to value logical consequence, rather than arguing over values the Analytic Philosopher will just point you back to your contract (or else claim that you have ceased to do Analytic Philosophy). But it looks like the violation is at one and the same time a contractual violation and a value-based violation.
Or is this mistaken, and do you think that the standards and norms of Analytic Philosophy are not correctly called values?
(I of course agree that it is mistaken to make "aesthetic" mean anything at all. An engineer has values, and they are not primarily aesthetic. Part of the problem here is that "value" is a rather ambiguous word. Values are taken to be debatable, and Analytic Philosophers take themselves to be doing non-debatable things. This is all why I prefer a clearer term, such as "end.")
Sure. Does any one suggest otherwise? Quoting J
The "that" in both "J judges that to be true" and "Banno judges that to be true" both have as referent "The cat is on the mat". That is why they are "saying the same thing".
I'm puzzled that this is an issue.
Quoting J
That's what I had in mind. I don't see how you could assert a sentence without thereby stipulating that you judge it to be true. Asserting the sentence counts as judging it to be true.
Again, is there something here that is problematic?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
"Surely" is a word to watch out for in an argument. It indicates that the conclusion doesn't follow as tightly as he proposing the argument would like.
Adding teleology here is making presumptions of Aristotelian metaphysics. It's already loaded.
Sure. Frege's judgement stroke is a way of showing this, by clarifying the scope of the judgement:
?(the cat is on the mat, the cat is jack, therefore Jack is on the mat)
but not
?(the cat is on the mat)
?(the cat is jack)
?(therefore Jack is on the mat)
The substitution between seperate judgements is not countenanced.
"Ends" are a figment of Aristotelian framing. So, no.
Seems to me that we can posit clarity as an aesthetic value. As something that we might preference not becasue of what it leads to, but for it's own sake.
Seems @Moliere agrees, but perhaps you do not. That's fine. Perhaps at the least we might agree that some folk value clarity, and not just as a means to an end. Then we might wonder if Williamson is one of them.
This might seem like nit-picking, but I think I could assert a sentence without also judging it to be true. I could merely mean, "Yes, I'm saying this, and it's most likely true -- close enough that I'm willing to assert it." That's why it's a further stipulation that, in some discourse, "to assert" is going to mean "judge to be true." Or, as you say, "counts as judging it to be true."
I realize you want us both to accept the perfectly reasonable definition of what it means to assert something. But that definition is somewhat stipulative, somewhat technical. In particular, it hinges on a particular force of "true" that I maintain is not always intended in everyday assertions, as in the example above. No doubt we should mean this, if we want to have good tight philosophical discussion, but that's a different story,
Does any of this matter? Not as long as we know what counts as judging to be true, in our talk.
I have more to say about your other questions about why there'd be any question about my other sample sentences, but that's for later.
Can you do this without therewith judging that it's most likely true -- close enough that you are willing to assert it?
Here is something I have noticed in my time on TPF. You referenced the Meno and the question of whether knowledge is possible. It is, and in every kind of argument or explanation one travels towards knowledge. During the travel there is a stride length, and this stride length maps to the inferential distance one is willing to travel in any given step. Given that every inference requires a kind of jump, lets call people with larger stride lengths leapers, and people with smaller stride lengths hoppers. Depending on the kind and quality of knowledge desired, one will require a different stride length.
Continentals tend to be leapers and Analytics tend to be hoppers. This doesnt mean that Continentals are bad logicians. The well-known Continentals are not bad logicians; they simply have a larger stride length (although the students of Continentals do tend to diminish as logicians much more quickly than the students of Analytics). Yet the hoppiness of Analytics is more reactionary than principled. Instead of choosing a small stride length based on the object of knowledge in question, they choose a small stride length because they see errors in the work of the leapers. At the limit the Analytic becomes so hoppy that they decide that there are only zero-distance hops (tautologies) and impermissible hops (non sequitur), and they despair of the possibility of knowledge, as represented in the Meno. There is a fair bit of this on TPF, where the dissectors have no restraint and can therefore destroy any and every argument for so-called knowledge.
Aristotle is interesting because he studied so many different forms of knowledge, and he also studied the logic which allows one to arrive at the different forms. This means that Aristotle was deeply conscious of how to adjust his stride length for different situations. He knew that if one was going to build a house then they would have to take the lumber suppliers word that the planks are eight feet long. The dissecting Analytic would come along with their micrometer and criticize the house-builder because his planks werent exactly eight feet, but Aristotle consistently criticized that move, where one measures or criticizes without having any clear sense of the purpose of the measurement. Taken by itself, stride length is infinitely divisible, much like the infinite divisibility of a line. The Analytic brags that he has a small stride length, but in fact stride length is always relative, and the proper stride length depends primarily on the object of knowledge or artifice, as well as on the constraints of the knower.
Seen from this vantage point, Analytic philosophy is a very specialized discipline. It is the group of hammer-wielders who only ever see nails, except instead of a hammer they have a micrometer (or else a scalpel). So I want to return to this:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
No house-builder ever says, Were going to need an Analytic Philosopher with his micrometer. But that doesnt mean that no one ever wants philosophers. They do, its just that they dont tend to import or consult external philosophers. Everyone is constantly doing philosophy, just like my nephew with his spider.
I guess the point here is that the smaller stride length of Analytic Philosophy is not a qualitative difference. If there is a qualitative difference to be had, it might have to do with the strong focus on methodology, but even then the methodology is not restricted to Analytic Philosophy. The Analytic Philosopher tends to see himself as the professional logician. I would say hes not, at least if by logic we mean the art of reasoning well in order to attain new knowledge. He is the professional hopper and perhaps the professional dissector, but most people need logic with a larger stride length. They need something fit to a larger scale than the micrometer can achieve, and they need something that is synthetic and constructive rather than something that is only analytic or only capable of dissection. They need a logic like Aristotles, which was developed with a very large multitude of disciplines and knowledge-objects in mind. They need something that was built for real life and not for mere abstraction and meta-logic. I want to say that Aristotelianism and Scholasticism provide the rigor that Analytic Philosophy is looking for, but in a more balanced and historically adaptable way. Perhaps this is why we have seen so much recent growth in these areas.
I've heard of the judgement stroke, but no-one has ever explained to me what it does before. Thank you for that.
I can see that this allows one to express what happens when we form a number of sentences into a valid argument. It gets round the uncertainty about whether P and Q are two propositions or one when there is a logical implication between them. Is that the point of the notation?
All this talk of assertions is making me think about speech acts. There are two ways of referring to the cat. What rules or habits might there be in choosing to say "Jack is on the mat" or "The cat is on the mat"? It's not a question of logic, really, but of pragmatics or perhaps semantics.
It seems reasonable to suppose that one consideration is which way of referring to this animal the person I am talking to will understand best. One might also suppose that referring to Jack or the car expresses something about the relationship I have with the animal.
Quoting J
I don't see any problem about that. We have some words for that. "Suppose that...", "Imagine that...", "Consider whether..." and possible "entertain the idea that..." - and so forth. Given that, I think that in natural language "assert" is normally taken to imply "assert to be true". Asserting to be false is usually called denying.
Quoting Banno
Could we not say that clarity has more than one value? It seems to me that clarity has moral value because there is a duty to tell the truth without obfuscation or evasion. It is also has pragmatic value, because clear communicaton is more likely to succeed. And, yes, there is an aesthetic dimension as well.
I think by and large I don't see clarity itself as a goal, as I believe you do.
I don't know whether Williamson is closer to my view or yours.
If you think about mathematics, there can be a sense in which a mathematical theorem or a construction or whatever can be clear, because nothing is hidden, the rules are known, everything can be made explicit on demand, and yet be complex enough or counter-intuitive enough that it remains difficult to understand, despite having industry-standard clarity.
The other natural point to make here is that what is clear to one mathematician may not be clear to another, so it's a little uncomfortable making the "psychological" clarity of the producer or consumer of the work a measure of anything.
Right, that was more or less my point. It's not a logical entailment or something that's true by definition. We have to agree on it.
Cheers. See A challenge to Frege on assertion for a bit more, if you are interested. Frege set the force of an utterance aside so that we could look to other aspects of it's structure. As I said there, the "a" in
is the same in both occurrences. This is how Frege might represent ?A?B(A?(B?A)), reading from bottom to top, something like "we judge that in all cases "a" gives us that "b" gives "a"". Notice that the whole expression sits within the scope of one judgement stroke, the "?" on the first line - that's the force of the utterance, the judgement or belief or what have you. The "?" is nowadays reduced to "it's true that..."
Quoting Ludwig V
Yes, good point. The issue seems to be what Searle called the "sincerity condition", which requires that the speaker genuinely possesses the mental state expressed by the speech act. In this case making an assertion involves the speaker in committing themselves to the mental state of holding what is asserted to be true.
Quoting Ludwig V
I'll go along with that. We could fill in the details of how an aesthetic value relates to an obligation, and I'd also agree that we have an obligation to each other to be clear enough to be understood. Taht was part of what is behind @Moliere's thread on aesthetics, I believe.
Added: This might be a better account: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/931997
Neither do I.
But yours is a provocative post. I think maybe we might look back to the difference between an absolute and a relative measure - to being hot or cold. Do we need an absolute criteria for clarity? Perhaps not. Perhaps we might do with a sufficiency, enough to be getting on with.
A mathematical proof is never completely clear - there is always more to be said, more for the mathematician to clarify. There is still work being done on ZFC. But there is enough clarity for mathematicians to get on with other questions in the mean time.
And while what is clear to one mathematician may not be clear to another, it may be clear enough for them to agree and move on.
There's more here, that could be related back again to PI §201. We reach a point in our explanations at which we stop asking questions and just act.
I'm not sure what "without you and I stipulating what an assertion is going to mean" is doing here.
But I do think that if you make an assertion, we are entitled to conclude both that you think what you assert is indeed true, and that you have judged it to be so.
This does not mean you cannot assert something tentatively, or for the sake of argument - but again, the issue is one of the scope of the assertion.
Call it a performative entailment, rather than a logical entailment, if you like. If you assert something that you think is false, or judge to be false, your assertion misfires - it is insincere.
Good old Austin.
In a general sense if you ? and we don't know what it is to ? then we don't know what you have done. In fact if someone doesn't know what it means to ? then it makes no sense for them to claim that someone has ?'ed.
None of this business about absolute or relative clarity was at issue.
Here we are again, where the question is: Is making things clear, to whatever degree, the goal of mathematics? Your description here of what's always left for mathematicians to work on ? it sounds like that's what you want to say.
Now, I'm always talking about good proofs and bad proofs, but that's all about communication and especially pedagogy. The real work of mathematics is producing the proof in the first place, because that's how you produce mathematical knowledge.
Quoting Banno
Great. They have enough clarity to get on with what exactly? Making other parts of mathematics clear? And in the meantime of what? Of making set theory even clearer?
Odd. Seems to me the very point of contention.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
A goal, at least.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yep.
Given two proofs, the clearer is preferred. On that we agree?
Perhaps it might help if I went back to this, regarding the philosophy conference in Presocratic Greece
Quoting Banno
The trouble is, "What are all things made of?" is not as clear as "What is bread made of?". I'd suggest that progress came from iterating clear questions: "What is ? made of?" - "what is bread made of?"; "What is water made of?"; "what is Hydrogen made of?"; What are protons made of?" And that this has proved more agreeable than just-so-stories about water and fire.
I have no idea why you think that. @Moliere and I were talking about the norms of analytic philosophy, and I don't think either one of us ever mentioned it.
Quoting Banno
I don't know where you're headed with any of this.
I don't think there's a standard measure of how clear a proof is.
If there were ? contrary to fact ? what would come next? That a clearer proof is more mathematical? Maybe "better mathematics" where "better" means more aesthetically pleasing, but that's not a measure of truth in mathematics, or a criterion of knowledge. It wouldn't make one proof truer than another.
A good proof aids in concept formation, as I've said more than once. An interesting proof might show connections between theorems, or even between branches of mathematics, that you didn't expect. Might be more worth knowing such a proof because it's an aid to your work, to understand that.
All of this is lovely.
But none of it amounts to the goal of mathematics being clarity of anything. I don't even understand what that would mean.
***
Quoting Banno
I think Williamson is drawn to the ambition of the bigger question. It provides motivation for the smaller questions. (Much as he suggests a theory should be able to handle toy examples.) We can talk more about that.
My point right here will be that, once again, clarity is a means, not the goal. "What is everything made of?" unanswerable because it's not clear how to proceed? Fine, we'll do it by cases, and keep breaking bigger questions into smaller ones until we have one we can finally answer. (This used to be called "analysis".)
But the point is answering the questions. Gaining knowledge. Putting all the knowledge you acquire together into a theory.
As you say, clear enough to get on with it is clear enough. And what we want to get on with is acquiring knowledge, not making things clear. Means, not end.
The claim would be that philosophy does not aim at knowledge, as science does, but at understanding. I don't know whether you would say this, @Banno, but some might describe Wittgenstein's famous "quietism" this way, and I suppose that's plausible.
I think it's clear this is not Williamson's view at all.
But this assumes what I'm calling into question. Why are the only alternatives "true" or "false"? I'm pointing out that ordinary speech doesn't work this way. I don't have to be insincere to assert something that I think is merely quite likely to be true, or quite unlikely to be false -- we do that all the time.
What I'm pressing here is the idea that "to assert", limited to true and false things, is technical, it's talk in the Philosophy Room. We don't have a warrant from ordinary language to say that anyone who asserts something they believe may conceivably be false -- though it's highly likely it isn't -- is either misfiring or insincere. "May be false" covers a huge amount of territory. Why must we insist that the only sincere use of "to assert" is in a case when we believe there is no possibility whatsoever that the sentence is false? Or if that's too strong, where should we cut it off? "Very very very likely"? "Analytically true"? It all goes back to your point about "counts as" -- we have to agree on the usage.
where the verb is "understand" not "know".
It seems to me that you are advocating absolute norms while @Moliere (and I) advocate relative or comparative norms. I may be mistaken.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yep. There need be no absolute measure. But if you and I agree that this proof is clearer than that, then we might proceed. A comparative measure.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
For you, sure. But why shouldn't clarity also be a goal, if not for you, then perhaps for others? And so an aesthetic.
What I hope my example shows is that working with small, clear questions may lead to progress on big, vague questions.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
And hence analytic philosophy... dissection over discourse.
Mary Midgley, perhaps?
This is where my view is at odds with that of Williamson. I am on the side of the doubters at the philosophy conference in Presocratic Greece, rejecting the discourse of Thales and Anaximander in favour of dissecting the bread.
Good stuff. I hope you are enjoying this, too.
They're not. The point is that the scope of the "?" takes in all the propositions, so as to maintain extensionality - and this is so whether we understand "?" as "It is true..." or as "I judge..." or as "perhaps..." or even "quite likely...".
Quoting J
But this is not what is being pointed out. Someone might go ahead and assert that the cat is on the mat despite it being blatantly obvious that the cat is not on the mat. What we are entitled to conclude from their assertion is not that the cat is on the mat, but that they hold it to be the case that the cat is on the mat, provided we take them as sincere.
I'm really not seeing the problem.
Teleology.
We need not assume that meaningful discourse requires a teleological structure. - that we must have an aim. I don't grant that assumptionit's a relic of an Aristotelian metaphysics that I'm not committed to.
Teleology is metaphysically extravagant and misleading. Galileo, Descartes, and Newton sought mechanical rather than final causes. Hume warned against inferring purposes from observed regularities. Darwin replaced natural teleology with natural selection. Wittgenstein urged philosophers to describe how things are used in practice, not to seek hidden purposes or essences. So today, to speak of ends in the Aristotelian sense is to reinvigorate a discredited metaphysical picture. Best left alone, unless one explicitly defends that framework. As, indeed, some do.
I mean, sure, it's an aesthetic value, of course.
And of course it can be a goal, alongside others, or sometimes the goal, in specific cases ? we're not making progress, so let's rethink this.
But see there again, I'm going to tend to think you need to clarify a problem to stand a better chance of solving it. And I think this is certainly Williamson's view.
Quoting Banno
Yeah, this is a funny thing, because the question "What is bread made of?" isn't obviously clearer than the question "What is everything made of?" They're both pretty simple questions, in form anyway, and pretty easy to understand.
What's quite different is how you'd go about answering them. For one thing, bread is artificial, so we already know what it's made of because we make it.
What isn't clear is (a) how you'd go about figuring out what everything is made of, and (b) that everything is made of the same "ingredients". The question might not have the same kind of answer that the bread question does, and it's very hard to see how you could figure out it has that type of answer.
What Williamson says, is that it's not clear what the various proposed answers even mean. Another way to put that might be to say that it's not clear in what sense they are answers to the question.
So there's all sorts of clarity we might want. First, we'll want to be able to tell when we have an answer, and it should be clear. Second, we want to know how to proceed toward finding an answer. For some sorts of problems, this is clear ? maybe you just need to do a calculation. But for a whole lot of questions, and I think the ones Williamson is valorizing here, we absolutely are not clear how to proceed, what procedure will, if carried out, produce an answer.
And here, not only must we begin without clarity, but we cannot really expect to have clarity about the effectiveness of our procedure until we see some positive or negative results. Even then, the results may not be enough to tell us whether we're on the right or the wrong track. Clarity will come only at the end, when you reach your destination or a dead end.
So what's the advantage with bread? That we already know? What about the ingredients of your bread? What's water made of? Or wheat? Is it clear how you'd answer those questions? Were the Greeks capable of answering them?
Bonus anecdote on one sort of clarity.
My father drew building plans for a living, for much of his career. I loved his drawings. They showed his experience, the way he would work in notes on exactly the tricky things the men at the job site might struggle with. (And I loved watching him work. He'd step back from the drafting table, still looking at the drawing in progress, pull a cigarette from his breast pocket without looking, light it, take just a few puffs while he was thinking, then rest it in an ashtray and back to it. I looked in his office once and there were three cigarettes still burning in three different ashtrays, and he was hard at work on the drawing.)
The thing that made his drawings beautiful to me was that he knew what would make them most useful, and you could see that he knew, and he made sure it was there, right where it needed to be.
Sure, it was pretty common to see the highest goal of philosophy as intelligentia (understanding), as above scientia (knowledge), wisdom (sophia) being a higher sort of virtue than science.
At first glance, this notion might seem to be quite a bit different from what moderns of an analytic persuasion have in mind. I don't think it's completely dissimilar though. In both cases it suggests the superiority of the intuitive and holistic over the discursive and demonstrative. In pre-modern thought, the former is normally seen as being in service to the latter. In modern thought, a focus on discursive justification and method tends to crowd out the latter (not that it isn't there, but it's role in epistemology becomes decidedly muted).
In the tradition that comes out of the Egyptian desert, there are three stages of progress. The first is praxis, largely defined by ascetic labors, study, and meditation. The next is theoria, the knowledge of the uncreated through created things (the third is "theology" which is irrelevant here). But theoria is precisely not instrumental knowledge. It's quite the opposite of the Baconian mastery of nature. The whole idea is that the holistic ordering of the cosmos is revelatory, and it is beings' relation to whole that is grasped (a theme of some great naturalists as well). A "linear," diabolical (in the original sense of the term) thought process that is focused on the ends of the appetites and passions is contrasted with a spiral, and then circular movement of the nous, which is contemplative and tends towards unity in both the movement of the mind and its object.
Obviously, ancient and medieval Christianity might recall Hindu thought or Taoism more than modern Western thought in this respect. Yet in the modern move from "knowledge" to "understanding" I think there is still normally something of the intuitive and even aesthetic that hangs on, or even the notion that to understand, to contemplate, is an end in itself ("all men by nature desire to know.")
Consider Wittgenstein in On Certainty on Moore attempting to win over the person who has been raised thinking that the world has only existed since they have been born:
But, as I see it, the difficulty in later contexts is that the focus on justification and method make explaining such a focus, let alone that it is choice-worthy, next to impossible. One can only be silent about it or attempt a sort of breakout from discursive justification, at least of the highly demonstrative sort.
That quote fits nicely.
I don't think it presupposes any robust sense of final causality to ask: "what is the purpose of philosophy?" or more specifically "what is the purpose of this particular area of philosophy?" How could we ever agree on methods if we do not consider what we want to accomplish (i.e. our end)?
Imagine you are giving an introductory lecture on metaphysics. You tell your class: "Metaphysics is not discovering the deep structure of the world per se, but proposing better ways to conceptualize and systematize our thought and language.
And then a hand shoots up, and you decide to take a question and it's:
"Professor Banno, can you please explain [I]what[/I] makes some conceptualizations and systemizations of our language better than others?"
It hardly seems adequate to say simply: "if you can't choose I'll decide" without offering an explanation. And if the next question is: "but what is the aim of even doing this?" I am not sure if it's fair to dismiss that question as "loaded" or somehow commiting us to "Aristotlianism."
To say: "'[some]thing speaks for [or] against it...' presupposes a principle of speaking for and against. That is, [we] must be able to say what would speak for it." That's Wittgenstein, On Certainty 117, not Ol' Slick Ari.
Likewise, I hardly think one can invoke Darwin as eliminating the explanatory function of aims within the context of intentional human practices. Darwin didn't think he had shown that human science is without aims. A denial of final causality, misguided as I might find it, is still a flying leap away from the denial that human practices possess proper aims. This seems to be conflating final causality related to forms, and the entire notion of aims and goal-directedness. Now arguably, you do need the former to adequately explain the latter, but plenty of thinkers don't think you do.
It would be problematic, for instance, if we had to say that medicine is just whatever it is that doctors just so happen do, without respect to any "aim of medicine." For example, it would make identifying quacks difficult. More to the point, we'd face the difficulty that doctors themselves certainly [I]do[/I] think their field has an aim. But so too for philosophers (this article being one example).
The advantage of the question What is bread made of?" is that there is a pathway to answering the question, that we might well answer the question. You have the answer when you can make bread.
Seems pretty direct.
My classes did not begin with broad statements of what metaphysics is, but proceeded by doing metaphysics, self consciously, examining what we did as we proceeded.
Becasue we do not start with a definitionwe start in the middle. We do not start with a definition becasue we are not only teaching a body of beliefs, but also providing a set of tools.
Nice rhetorical move on your part.
So the moral of the story is: don't ask questions you don't already know how to answer, or don't just already have the answer to.
Exciting stuff.
Yes. There are two points that one can make to articulate the difference. The first is that the relationship is what is called "defeasible". That means that sometimes, in particular cases, there is that evidence that the speaker is lying, or joking, or intends the statement ironically or sarcastically. In those cases, the link is broken. The second is that it helps to think of an assertion as what is called a speech act, and the link with "X judged that..." or "X believes that..." is part of what is done when one asserts - one gives the audience a basis for recognizing that I have judged, or that I believe. That would be, I believe, an example of illocutionary force.
Defeasibility, speech acts and illocutionary force are ideas that are quite well established in philosophy. But you may not. So if you have come across them, please forgive me if I seem to be teaching my grandmother to suck eggs.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Quoting Banno
Well, there is the possibility of working out how to answer a question, if you don't know. But it will help to answer the questions you do know how to answer, and approach the big question through them.
But it's also worth setting aside the possibility that the big question will ever have a final answer. There's a sense in which the big question here - What is everything made of? - has still not been answered. It would seem that each version of the answer generates a new version of the old question.
This is a bit vague, but I take it that it is obvious that I'm writing in the context of the question that Williamson describes as "one of the best questions ever asked".
BTW, Williamson doesn't mention the fact that an atomic theory was developed in the 5th century BCE, and there are, apparently, even earlier precursors. The modern theory is, of course, a very different thing, but these earlier theories could count as precursors. He paints a picture which is not exactly wrong, but which suits his purpose. But then, it's only an introduction.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
It may help here to steal an idea from the study of the arts. There, you don't get an answer to the question what makes some novels or pictures, etc. better than others. What you do get is a collection of examples which have been widely accepted as good examples. The expectation is that you will not be limited to imitating them (although that might be a useful exercise). The expectation is that students will be enabled to create new work by developing a critical judgement from those examples. The examples are collectively known as the canon.
True, there are various theories about what makes one work better than another, and students are taught these, or some of them. But they are taught as theories, subject to criticism. Again, the expectation is not that those theories will dictate what students will do. It is that those theories will be the basis of developing new ones.
Quoting Banno
I'm inclined to think that some concept rather like that of the proposition, as usually understood in philosophy, may be useful or even necessary. But I'm also inclinded to think that a definition along the lines of "a proposition is a sentence with its use" has potential. So maybe it will help if I try to disentangle what I think it wrong with the usual understanding.
Two quotations from Stanford EP - Structured propositions:-
The grammar here slips. One can't say a non-linguistic thing. It is true that there is a collection of sentences that say that the cat is on the mat in diffferent ways. I deliberately do not say the same thing, because actual synonymy is very rare in natural languages, so "the same thing" is not appropriate. Compare the argument that because there are many shades of red, there must be something in common - the universal. But the universal is a metaphysical object and so nominalism is born. I repeat - all we need is a collection of sentences that say that the cat is on the mat in different ways.
I really don't see why one should not say that a declarative sentence is true or false. Natural language has a commonplace variation of this - "It is true that the cat whose name is Jack is on the mat". I think we can manage with that and the variant of nominalism I outlined above.
Quoting Banno
I'm afraid I think there is a lot to be said for Aristotle's hierarchy of purposes and actions done for their own sake. But not for his idea that there is only one such hierarchy, topped off by The Good. Ryle makes use of the former idea quite unself-consciously. Peters famously builds the latter idea into his philosophy of education.
This looks like slipping grammar to me. How does a sentence say something? A sentence is just a series of words that form a unit.
Quite right.
How about "collection of sentences that enable us to say that the cat is on the mat in different ways"
or "collection of ways to say that the cat is on the mat".
Suggestions welcome.
:up: If you note the part I bolded, that's what we call a proposition.
Um - forgive me. But that's what I call a sentence; I would say that when it is used - to tell someone where the cat is, for example, - it becomes a statement in that context. However, I've learnt the philosophical dialect and so I know what you mean, in one sense. However, the SEP article seems to want to say that a proposition is what is in common between a number of sentences or statements. That's what I don't get.
Moliere,
Classic battle between a what thinker and a how thinker I am getting at on your Matter of Taste thread here (https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/999316).
Quoting Banno
I post this point here because, Banno said two things here and left the one thing Count was asking overlooked. Banno said no broad statements and no start[ing] with a definition. Bannos reply to Count pointed out proceeded by doing and examining as we proceeded. And we start in the middle. All of these are solid methods for the how first thinker.
But as I said we all need to ask all of the questions, Banno mentioned in passing he proceeded by doing metaphysics, and admitted that while doing other things he was teaching a body of beliefs. These are the objects of the question what.
So Banno basically classified Counts line of thinking as a rhetorical move toward an aesthetic of what by making a rhetorical move towards an aesthetic of how.
They should be more open to fully addressing the issue along both lines. Banno is ignoring what he is doing, and saying Count is ignoring how he is doing it.
We identify propositions using sentences. For instance, maybe you said "That's on the mat" while you were pointing to the cat. The proposition you expressed by uttering that sentence was that the cat is on the mat.
Quoting Ludwig V
You say, "That's on the mat."
I say, "Yes, Ludwig, the cat is on the mat."
We're expressing the same proposition by way of two utterances and two sentences. If you look back at your own analysis:
Quoting Ludwig V
That's exactly the standard analysis. The bolded part that follows the word, "that" is a proposition. Maybe an incentive for understanding it would be this: if you want to be a realist and avoid propositions, your best best is Davidson. It's 10 times more complicated, and will leave you with a different set of mysteries. Take your pick.
That's an idea I'm amenable to; I mentioned it in the current thread on aesthetics. However, I don't think it's what @Banno or the original article has in mind.
Consider:
This is not the sort of claim one finds in the arts. To even call a metaphysical claim "misleading" instead of simply "ugly' is to suppose to there is something to be properly "lead to." One wouldn't be likely to find claims that Virgil or Statius' verse is "misleading" in the sense of what makes for good poetry for instance. Perhaps a theory of what makes Virgil or Horace good poets could be misleading, but that's because it's already moved halfway back to aesthetics and so to philosophy. Whereas, it wouldn't make sense to say that Milton or Keats has rendered Chaucer and Dante ugly, much less exposed them as "incoherent" or "meaningless," (claims that are quite common in the context of metaphysics). Nor do I think this difference is unwarranted. We might very well criticize "two worlds Platonism" or corpuscular mechanism as incoherent, misleading, or counterproductive (counterproductive because it occludes the progress of the sciences, for instance).
Nor would one dismiss Michaelangelo as extravagent and misleading because Rembrandt, Degas, and van Gogh have suggested something different to us. Nor would we expect to find an indictment of meter as "discredited" in virtue of the fact that some later famous poets have eschewed meter.
Which is to say, I think the two are quite a bit different, art and philosophy. Yet if they aren't, then I would expect philosophical criticism to look more like art criticism (that is, from anyone advancing such a similarity).
However, this is a tricky topic because the dominant theory vis-á-vis art today is that its quality is a matter of wholly subjective "taste." Yet plenty of thinkers argue quite the opposite, that a good education involves being [I]properly[/I] oriented towards what is truly beautiful. Indeed, the nature of beauty itself is central to some metaphysics (mentioned in the post I referenced for instance). Hence, the difficulty in using artistic criticism as a lens for metaphysics or philosophy more generally is that these often tend to assume things about metaphysics and philosophy more generally. For instance, it will do us no good to try to put to bed concerns over anti-realism in the original article by simply appealing to a field where anti-realism is dominant (although hardly a consensus).
I think the notion of progress in the original article cuts against this comparison to some degree, as does the idea of metaphysics as centering around the improvement/betterment of language. Obviously, it cuts against the classical notion of metaphysics as a sort of knowledge, a science, as well (although classical theories tend to acknowledge a large role for beauty).
Tricky stuff. I do agree that the separation might not be as broad as suggested. I'm currently reading Homer and the Tradition of Political Philosophy: Encounters with Plato, Machiavelli, and Nietzsche by Peter J. Ahrensdorf, and he makes a strong case for the confluence of art and philosophy. But in the end I cannot agree with the suggestion that our study is will be like the art students, primarily about a doing and producing. I do think there is a real and meaningful distinction between the productive arts (including the "fine arts') and science and wisdom, and philosophy is heavier on the other side of this division.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Quoting Banno
So if we use the word "aim" then we're Aristotelians? How utterly strange. You even contradict yourself:
Quoting Banno
If "clarity" is a goal, then it is an aim. You must be an Aristotelian! Arg! :wink:
As I said:
Quoting Leontiskos
Apparently @Banno's answer is, "I want to do philosophy purposelessly. I want to do philosophy aimlessly!" This is deeply confused.
[hide="Reveal"]Quoting Leontiskos[/hide]
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
What's the difference?
(Aquinas will contrast wisdom with knowledge, but it's not a hard-and-fast division.)
Not at all, better than assuming I already understand! I am fairly familiar with those ideas but am trying to suggest that, though established, they may not take us as far as we want to go. @Banno quite reasonably keeps asking what is in doubt here. If I had to put it into a sentence, it would be: We are so used to working with the nailed-down logical uses of natural language that we forget that those uses are agreements, often hard won. I think "assert" and "judge" are cases in point, but clearly I need to make a stronger argument for why they seem problematic to me. So I'll work on that.
Quoting Banno
I mean that we have to agree on what an assertion is, what counts as an assertion, for Philosophy Room purposes. In real life, we don't, and as a consequence people conceive of themselves to be asserting a variety of things, at various levels of connection to truth, and they're not wrong to do so, because this kind of "wrongness" can only happen in the Philosophy Room.
Let's say I call an assertion "a statement I make about some state of affairs that I think is quite likely to be true." And let's say you call an assertion "a statement I make about some state of affairs that I know to be true." If we never compared our working definition of "assertion," we would sooner or later misunderstand each other, leading to words like "misfire" or "insincere."
I don't mind there being a question about whether this matters much, but is it at least clear? :smile:
Hermeneutics. Dilthey, Gadamer. They might not say that all philosophy is interpretation, but I think they would say that most of the important questions in philosophy are driven by a desire to understand, not a desire to know. Habermas is somewhat in that tradition too.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yes, and arguably any philosopher who focuses on structure -- "hanging together" -- is going to use this verb. It's not just what's going on, but why. And this is a big issue within hermeneutics, whether the interpretation controls the "what." Do we have something to interpret if the knowledge claims are in question?
Quoting Ludwig V
Yes. It's so hard to detach from our reliance on "proposition." @frank calls the bolded bit a proposition; you call it a sentence; I say -- and I mean it -- that I don't know what to call it because I don't know how to analyze the context in which I'm seeing it, here in a post on TPF. And I say further that the problem is much bigger than just assigning the right terms. We have a problem about subjectivity and objectivity, about how language is in the world.
Quoting frank
And exactly the problem. The standard analysis insists that we read "the cat is on the mat" in this context in the way you did: a sentence that somebody uttered -- Ludwig? -- that asserts a proposition. But what's the warrant for that? Is that really what Ludwig did? You say he "expressed" a proposition by "uttering" a sentence? Where did that happen? How did I miss it? Please don't mind that I'm teasing a little, because I have a serious point to make: All this is indeed the standard analysis, but how is it supposed to be clearly correct?
"The cat is on the mat."
Did I just utter that? Seems to me that I wrote it in a context so bizarre that it calls the whole thing into question. Besides, perhaps I only mentioned it.
Right. Means and ends are being confused. :up:
When we clean a dirty window we do it to make the window clear, but this is not an end in itself. The end/goal is to see. To allow light to pass through. The blind man has no need to clean his windows.
Even aesthetically, clarity is not an end in itself (except when it is used as a synonym for beauty). What is beautiful has a certain clarity, but it is beauty that is desired, not clarity per se. If there were nothing beautiful or interesting to look at, one also would have no need to clean their windows.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
The uses of "clarity" in this paragraph seem highly metaphorical. I'm not really sure what the concept is supposed to mean in a substantive sense. For instance, we could say
Even so, let's run with it. The irony here is that @Banno is being consistently unclear each time he answers the question, "What are you seeking?," with the answer, "Clarity and nothing else." Does Banno know what he means by "clarity"? Is he able to tell when he has it and when he doesn't?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
:grin:
The reason "dissection based on clarity" is problematic is because it is aimless or purposeless, insofar as it confuses a means for an end. Such a person is like someone who goes around tightening things with a wrench and screwdriver. He wanders around randomly finding screws, nuts, and bolts to tighten. "What are you doing?" "Tightening." "Why?" "Because tight is good."
Who are we to argue with him? After all, isn't it true that, "Tight is good?" The only difficulty is that it is ridiculous to set an end of tightening simpliciter. The question, "Why?," cannot be reasonably answered, "Because it is good in itself. It is an end in itself." Or in this case, it cannot be reasonably answered, "Because it is an end of [mathematics] in itself. It is not a means qua [mathematics]."
Quoting J
The difficulty is that you seem to be the only person in the room who doesn't understand what an assertion is. Not all speech acts are assertions, but all assertions have to do with judgment and truth-claims.
P1: "X is quite likely to be true"
Is P1 an assertion? In natural language it need not be. In a natural context it could mean nothing more than, "Go your way. I am not going to contest your point." But if you know what you mean when you utter those words, and you also know what an assertion is, then you will know whether P1 is an assertion when you utter it.
Interested in the term of art distinction here between understand and know.
Do you mean important questions in philosophy are driven by a desire to understand what others are saying, not a desire to know the things in the world they are talking about.
So understanding is of language.
Knowledge is of the world.
Is that something like it?
I disagree with where you apply important between the two, but that is only because I dont think anyone can interpret anything without both a language and a world about which the language speaks. When interpreting a language, one uses the world as the measuring stick and arbiter of meaning of the language; when interpreting the world, one must use language as the measuring stick and arbiter of the world.
So I would say it is as important to know as it is to understand because you cant have one without the other, (or you cant have the objects of one without the objects of the other).
Quoting Banno
Ok. If meaning is use, then use must have an end. Otherwise, there cannot be any use in replying.
Or I can just say meaning is use and that is enough; that "ends" bring baggage unnecessary to make use of language. But then, when language has been used, would we notice if the use actually occurred, would we notice it was language at all, if we did not notice some purpose or some end connected to that usage, or some effect by using the language?
Or in other words, what is the use of speaking becomes the same question as what is the purpose of speaking?
What is the use "Aristotelian framing" makes of Leon's idea, if not to relegate it and flesh out how "ends" are "figments"? "Aristotelian framing" does not merely have a use, but serves a purpose, an end, of clarifying a specific "figment".
If meaning is informed by use, then use is informed by purpose.
Yes, I agree.
The part that makes me wonder is -- while "knowledge" might mean different things to different philosophers, I'm not sure there's a philosophy which aims at understanding as opposed to knowledge. But then I'd accept 's example if it's important down the line.
No, it needn't be an opposition, as my example suggested. In a too-simple sense, we could think of it as hierarchical: Knowledge can lead to understanding. And understanding is something philosophy can provide, that no other inquiry can, on this view.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Great question. "Understanding" can encompass both, I think. As above to Moliere, no opposition is implied. What's especially interesting is that, for someone like Habermas, in order to understand a subject, or a problem, you do have to reach an understanding with others about it. For him, philosophical is dialogical. You can't stand up from your armchair and declare to others that you have discovered the arguments that will solve some particular problem, or even result in understanding it, if the others haven't participated in formulating the questions which the arguments and understanding address. "Framing" vs. what's inside the frame.
I also like your question because it reminds us not to let what you rightly call a "term of art distinction" become too mesmerizing. These are just words, and vague ones at that. There seems to me to be an interesting difference between, say, knowing how grammar works, and understanding how language works. A child, or a computer, can be taught the rules of grammar. Understanding language -- although arguably a kind of knowledge, if you like -- is different. So, even if we want to think of them both as types of knowledge, calling one "understanding" helps us focus on this interesting difference. That's about as far as I'd go in defending some technical use of the terms. Within hermeneutics, others go much farther, and there are cases where interpretative understanding clearly can't be the same as knowledge.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Let's take the interpretation of a text. In a sense, yes, we can say that there is an "object" that exists pre-interpretation, or pre-understanding. And yes, without being able to interact in some way with that object, and not some different object, we can't talk about what we want to understand. But to try to bring in "knowledge" at the pre-interpretive level starts to warp the whole description. If there's indeed an "object of knowledge" here, as opposed to a vehicle of meaning, can it be pointed to in the same way that we point to, say, the book in which it is inscribed? (I don't mean point literally, of course). To me, what we're trying to describe is a structure in which knowledge and understanding don't play equal roles, however much both may be necessary.
Quoting frank
Heaven forbid! :grin: But thanks for the thought. No, my doubts aren't a good fit for anti-realism. And I don't have any stake in convincing you, or anyone else, that the "standard analysis" of truth-makers, truth-bearers, propositions, etc. can perhaps be challenged while still keeping a robust sense of non-language-game truth. I may not be advocating well for my own doubts, and I'm very far from having a worked-out theory of any of this. If you do have a look at either the Kimhi or the Rodl books, you might get a better sense. Though you have me wondering now . . . Rodl styles himself as an "absolute idealist" in the Hegelian tradition. I wonder if he would agree that that makes him an anti-realist. I don't think so -- the opposition here is not the old one between idealism and realism -- but it's an interesting question.
Think I agree with this rough-and-ready take.
In the context of the OP, anti-realism is just the attitude that speech doesn't conform or correspond to states of affairs. Language is first and foremost a mechanism of social dynamics.
By way of Davidson, you can ditch propositions, but at the cost of buying into the notion of identifying truth-conditions. Plus with Davidson, realism is just an add-on. Davidson is compatible with either realism or anti-realism.
I dig Hegel, but I feel a little more resonance with the Neo-platonism that he was working with.
I agree, mostly. I'm rereading "Actions, Reasons, and Causes" right now, on a different issue also prompted by @Banno.
This is very much how I look at training in philosophy.
I think people misunderstand how much training and discipline goes into the arts when they react against this comparison.
Fair point. So how would that work? I'd suggest Cartesian method, breaking the question down into sub-questions, answering each, and putting together an overall solution, as one possible path.
That is, one might work out how to answer a question by asking answerable questions.
Quoting Ludwig V
This works for me. The reason for reading the cannon is to improve on it. But in order to "improve" on it, one does not need already to have an idea of the perfect or ultimate item.
I quite agree with what you have to say about propositions. Best set aside. Did you suppose I thought otherwise? If so, where?
Quoting Ludwig V
I am a bit down on Aristotle at present, mostly becasue his ideas are being used broadly and badly in the forum. But on this, at least, we might agree.
Anyway, the usual mischaracterisation is occurring here (not by you), so I'll go back and re-trace some of what I've said. What I am suggesting is that there need be no explicit overall goal for ontology - or any other study - prior to or in virtue of which that study proceeds. No "essence" of ontology. This is a pretty commonplace point, since Wittgenstein. It's misrepresented by others here as my asserting that there can be no overall goal, no essence of ontology, but that's not what I suggested. Of course folk can stipulate a goal, if they so desire. There's just no need to do so, in order to get on with the work.
Well, no. And this seems to me to suffer the same error as your argument in the Two ways to Philosophise thread. To call a metaphysical claim misleading doesnt require that there is something to be properly led toit only requires that the claim presents itself as if there were. Misleading is a pragmatic evaluation of the function or effect of the claim, not necessarily a commitment to metaphysical realism or a teleology of inquiry.
One can say that a metaphysical claim is misleading because it invites a way of thinking or framing that leads us into confusion, pseudo-questions, or circular debateseven if one doesnt think there is any final truth about Being or substance or whatever at the end of the metaphysical road.
And deeply misrepresentative. Your standard practice, when you don't like an argument, is to misreport it.
Quoting Fire Ologist
The phrase "If meaning is use, then use must have an end" equivocates on end. It reads end as telosas if every use must aim at a final goal or fixed purpose. But that misrepresents the point of saying meaning is use (as in Wittgenstein). Use in this context refers to the way expressions function in language-games: in asking, asserting, commanding, joking, praying, etc. To say meaning is use is to locate meaning in those practical, varied, rule-governed activitiesnot to suggest that every instance of use must point toward a singular purpose or culminate in some definable outcome. So no, use neednt have an end in the teleological sense. It need only have a rolea place in a practice, a regularity, a way it makes sense to respond. Saying that meaning is use does not bind us to the idea that use must be goal-directed in some ultimate or final way. Instead, it resists that very assumption by inviting us to look at the variety of languages functionshow words are used in actual human life.
The quote imports a metaphysical constraint (an end to use) that Wittgensteins insight was meant to avoid.
There's an obvious equivocation between understanding and knowledge, but natural language philosophy does pretty much seek understanding before knowledge. Understanding in this context often refers to a kind of clarityseeing how language functions, how confusion arises, and how philosophical problems dissolve when we attend closely to our forms of life and linguistic practices. Its not about accumulating true propositions (knowledge in the epistemological sense), but about achieving perspicuous representation.
Given the ubiquity of the methods of natural language philosophy, in practice if not in name, seeking understanding is found throughout.
Perhaps the divide, isnt between traditions that aim at knowledge vs. those that aim at understanding, but between those who recognise this methodological humility and those who think philosophy can deliver substantive, positive theories in the mode of science. The accusation of scientism runs both ways.
Quoting Banno
And this:
Quoting Banno
Contradict each other?
Arent you just disagreeing with the substance of where you are being led, (somewhere specific vs. confusion). not disagreeing with the fact that you are being led (acting with a goal)?
True, but Williamson is holding Davidson up as an example of realist semantics, and he is compatible with both.
The core difference is that for Dummett truth concerns verification, but for Davidson truth is a primitive notion. For Davidson, world, belief and interpretation are inseparable. Davidson collapses the distinction between scheme and content on which Dummett depends.
Yes. In the arts, "improve" might better be thought of as "develop" or "enrich" or, of course, "react wildly against"! And then we have the question of self-expression. There's a curious sense in which an artist does reach for a perfect or ultimate item, but that would be their very self, as expressed in the art. And no one "has that idea" at the start, if ever.
Much the same in philosophy. It questions the framework (aim) rather than submits to it.
, pay attention.
The difference between realism and anti-realism comes down to this: how we handle the unknowable. If you think the unknowable is still truth-apt, you're a realist. If you think language doesn't conform to some mind-independent world, but rather aids group dynamics, then you're likely to agree with Dummett, truth is a social fixture.
Davidson, a champion of truth-conditional semantics, is a hero to the realist, because he offers a way to be a realist without propositions. Whether he actually was a realist is another matter. :grin:
But look at "A nice derangement of epitaphs", were conventions are rejected in favour of interpretation - an active process! And so closer to Dummett's group dynamics, but keeping the primacy of truth.
Ok. So you could tell Williamson not to hold his breath waiting for more work to be done on the issue because the two sides crashed in the middle.
Hence this:
Quoting Banno
Things moved on.
I see. Thanks.
I am. I find that inconsistent.
What framework clarifies anathema?
Quoting frank
You're offering an ostensive definition, and your problem is that when you point to a proposition "the bolded part", I see a sentence. If you think about it, it isn't possible to "bold" a proposition - it's like trying to italicize an apple. Wrong category.
Not sure whether mine is the standard analysis, but it may be. It's a work in progress, anyway.
Quoting frank
Yes, but to the extent that the two sentences are different, you give me grounds for wondering whether it is the same proposition. I would prefer to stop talking about propositions, but it's too well embedded in philosophical discourse for that to be realistic - it's tilting at windmills. The formula I've offered does avoid some of the worst problems.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Very tricky. I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "productive arts", but I didn't mean to suggest that philosophy should be counted alongside painting and music and literature. I would say that philosophy is centrally interested in truth, but, arguably, in some ways, so is painting and literature. Many people want to classify it with science, but that misrepresents it, IMO. I was just suggesting that something that works well in painting and music and literature, also works well in philosophy.
In science, do students learn a definition of a theory or an experiment and apply that, or do they learn to do science by getting into the lab and reading up on various theories?
Most disciplines are practices and, as a result have things in common, and, at the same time, each discipline is a distinctive collection of sub-practices or "games".
Quoting Banno
That's one reason. But the concept of progress in the arts is very tricky, particularly because, for me at least, the idea of the perfect novel or picture or song is meaningless. Perfection does have some application in the arts, but only in a way that does not imply finality. However, I don't see finality (whether perfection or truth) in philosophy or, indeed, in science.
Quoting Banno
That's definitely my page. I do worry, though, about the unselfconscious use of "clarity" to identify some sort of objective property (as in "perspicuous representation") and a psychological state. What is clear to one person is not necessarily clear to another. Sometimes it is just a question of learning how to interpret, but not, I think, always.
Quoting Banno
Light bulb! That's how progress in philosophy happens. The debate makes no progress, gets boring, so people move on. Group dynamics, I suppose.
Quoting Banno
It seems that one cannot point out too often that Aristotle distinguishes between actions that have a purpose external to themselves and others are done for "their own sake". This is logically necessary to avoid an infinite hierarchy of purposes. So one needs, hastily, to go on and say that this does not necessitate one supreme good at which everything aims.
A philosopher of art whom I respect, Susanne Langer, has pointed out that we can often learn more about an art by noticing what it does not have in common with other arts, rather than trying to find similarities and possible shared properties.
So with philosophy, perhaps. We can discover many commonalities between phil and literature, phil and science, phil and logic, phil and rhetoric, ad infinitum. But what we should be noticing is what makes philosophy different, unique.
And what is that? The candidate answer I like best is that philosophy inevitably questions itself, without leaving the frame of its own discipline.
Quoting Ludwig V
Yes, this is the type of "understanding" we want to highlight, over against knowledge. And to me, it's a feature, not a bug, that "perspicuous representation" requires some sort of consensus. When we discover that Phil X finds something brilliantly illuminating, while Phil Y finds it clear as mud, we are being invited into a critical moment in philosophical dialectic. What separates them? What discussion is needed to bring them together? Is it a framing problem? Just a misunderstanding? A confusion about evidence? A logical flaw? etc. etc.
That's good advice. I find it particularly important when I'm confronted with sweeping statements beginning "Art is...." (or whatever).
Quoting J
I don't disagree. But I do find that most philosophers are very much inclined to focus on what makes philosophy unique anyway. It's a balance - mapping similarities and differences (in an informal and pragmatic way).
Quoting J
Yes. It may be unique in not leaving the frame of its own discipline. Psychology, perhaps is also self-reflexive, in a way.
Quoting J
Whether the two senses are a problem or not depends on the context. If you are talking to an individual, you will probably want to focus on what helps that individual. There are times when that runs out. One of my favourite articles is C.L. Dodgson's Dialogue between Achilles and the Tortoise after their race. Achilles claims the victory on the grounds that he crossed the line first. The tortoise refuses to concede. I won't spoil the story which shows Achilles trying to get to the end of another infinite regress. The moral is that if Achilles crossed the line first, he won the race. There's nothing subjective about it. Consensus? It matters. But I'm not sure how much. I notice that one can contradict it, if one has a very clear argument. If there was a consensus against Achilles, then the question will be who misunderstood the rules - Achilles or the rest of us.
That's true. A proposition is along the lines of content.
Quoting Ludwig V
I don't think you have to talk about propositions. It's not a bad idea to know what it is, though.
I agree with that. It's part of the jargon, so you will miss out if you have no idea what it's all about.
Quoting frank
Yes. I know roughly what you mean. But making it clear is another question, and not an easy one.
Yes, that's just the sort of further dialectic I was picturing. It doesn't have to follow that "consensus wins" will always be the final decision -- even when that decision is itself made by consensus.
I appreciate all your thoughtful replies.
Quoting frank
In Self-Consciousness and Objectivity, Rodl says:
"If only we understood the letter p, the whole world would open up to us."
My comment on this from an earlier thread was:
"Hes being a little sarcastic, in my reading, but his meaning is clear: If we continue to allow p to float somewhere in the [Popperian] World 3 of abstracta, without acknowledging its dependence on [the 1st-person act of thinking], we are going to get a lot of things wrong."
Rodl is asking something that's right in front of our nose, so plain that we rarely question it: How do we describe or explain the being, the presence in the world, of a proposition? Where does it come from? How have we allowed it to become so central to this way of doing philosophy?
He also writes:
"My thought of judging that things are so is a different act of the mind from my judging that they are so. The former is about my judgment, a psychic act, a mental state; the latter, in the usual case, is not; it is about something that does not involve my judgment, my mind, my psyche. It is about a mind-independent reality."
This clarification is well worth keeping in mind, I think.
I'm glad I hit that nail fair and square...
Quoting J
That sounds very much like my cup or tea. It's time there was a backlash. Sadly, at that price, it will be Christmas before I get my hands on it.
Quoting J
It's funny how one can lose sight of things that are actually quite obvious, if only one could see them. On the other hand, one wants to say that there must be something going on between them - a relationship of some sort.
Quoting J
Thanks. It takes two, so I thank you also.
Now that's a can of eels! Do you think the psychologist can ask questions about psychology that are, at the same time, bracketed by psychological explanations of how questions come to be asked? What does that say about the psych's conception of psychology's explanatory powers?
Same boat here with academic presses, but do you have interlibrary loan? My public library got me the Rodl book and let me keep it for months. The only drawback is that, being a respectful reader, I had to make my notes separately from the text.
Quoting J
A proposition is a product of analysis. Hegel would object to hanging propositions in a netherworld, per his mechanism argument, which says we end up with component parts by way of describing the world. It's a mistake to take our understanding from that dismantled world, though. Put the clock back together and watch it functioning in time: that's where the truth lies.
Remember when I presented Scott Soames' explanation of propositions, he started with the whole scene of a person pointing and speaking. From there, he leads through an analysis. I think Hegel would approve. Soames' starting point is life in motion.
Quoting J
If I'm understanding this, it's similar to what Russell would have said: a true proposition is a state of affairs.
Good response, thanks. I'd like to find a perspective on this that Soames, Hegel, and Rodl could all accept. Do you think Soames would say that a proposition is a product of 1st-person judgment?
I don't think so, but that sounds a little like an ontological question.
As I understand Rodl, he's setting it out like this:
A) I think: "I judge that the cat is on the mat."
B) I think: "The cat is on the mat."
As he says, A is about my judgment, something I do or think, while B is about the cat. I would say that both A and B are true propositions about states of affairs, or at least truth-apt. Do you think Russell would agree?
Quoting frank
I agree, but no more so than "a proposition is a product of analysis"! At the level of "What is a proposition?" how would we avoid ontology?
Yes.
Quoting J
We used to have an AP expert who would stop by the forum from time to time. His name was Nagase, and I learned a lot from him. I asked him once what he thought about the ontology of propositions, and he said he didn't feel the need to address it. I think the point is that we're mapping out the way we think about communication. Ontology is a background issue.
I lean toward ontological anti-realism, in other words, I don't think ontological questions are answerable, so the question of the what X is ultimately made of, is one I'm able to drop. If you find that you aren't able to drop it, you can at least look at what you're giving up if you eliminate propositions as a component of language use. It has to do with that illusive goal of communication: the meeting of the minds.
When it's put in terms of "what X is ultimately made of," I almost always agree. If the question is more about "What are we committing ourselves to when we talk about 'existence'?" then I think Quine's motto about bound variables will do fine.
It's unclear to me where talk of propositions fits in here -- what kind of ontology-talk it needs. I was only pointing out that I found "product of analysis" to be no more anti-metaphysical, or common-sensical, or whatever, than "product of a 1st-person judgment". In both cases, we're trying to use a neutral place-holder, "product," to stand in for we know not what. And that's fine, as long as the two cases have parity.
More evasion from the person who cannot provide a clear answer.
@Srap Tasmaner spoke of the aim of philosophy [hide="*"](here and here)[/hide]. You claimed that to speak of "aims" is Aristotelian, and you resorted to your flat-footed anti-Aristotelian polemic. I pointed out, again, that you apparently prefer aimlessness. And then you tried for the ad hominem, as usual.
Clarity is the last thing in the world you are interested in. You refuse to answer the simplest questions. Here is another one: If you reject the notion that philosophy has aims, then how do you avoid the implication that philosophy is aimless?
Well said. :up:
I don't see any coherence in fleeing from aims and purposes, as if one is acting with no aim when they use language.
I see what you're saying. Somewhere along the line I started wondering if propositions might come from a time when people thought that the world was speaking to them (when it may have been their own motor cortex talking).
That would explain why propositions seem to have a God's eye view, or the way I would put it: the world is talking. This might show up in activities like I'm looking for a can of paint. I'm asking the world where it is. The world eventually tells me that it's under the work table. That it's under the table happens to be a proposition. Who asserted it? It's like the world did.
I realize my homemade origin story may make eyes glaze over, but it's an interesting possibility to me.
Yes, it is. My eyes got wider, not glazed! And we need to acknowledge that any story we wind up telling about the origin of propositions, or reasons, or rationality itself -- anything that we say occupies the Space of Reasons -- must also have a biological/evolutionary/cultural story to go along with it. The fact that we need both stories is itself the gateway to one of the biggest philosophical problems, right?: How to reconcile physical and rational accounts, which seem to begin from incompatible premises.
Yep. :up:
Quoting Banno
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
More than that, Darwin's theory is itself teleological, as he himself acknowledged (see recent thread).
Anti-Aristotelian and anti-religious prejudice is in fact not philosophy, and it places one into an irrational straightjacket of their own making. Can the so-called "dissector" allow his own claims to be dissected, or not?
Cool. :grin:
Quoting J
Well, yes, but it could still be that consciousness is related to something undreamt of in our philosophy. We'll know if we ever know.
Quoting J
Yep.
I have no idea. Perhaps someone will pop up with an answer.
To make this more than a slogan, you'd need some sort of theory (hermeneutics would be an example), and I think what that theory would try to account for is, first of all, the "as opposed to science" part.
Williamson begins by claiming (uncontroversially) a shared lineage for science and philosophy, and he mentions the relation of science to philosophy at several points. (The other disciplines that can discipline philosophy; whether a theory can be used in empirical linguistics; etc.)
And this is as it should be, because Williamson wants to talk about rigor, and throughout the 20th century, at least, that discussion took this form: (1) Can philosophy be a science? (2) Should philosophy be a science?
(Williamson doesn't quite approach the issue this way, so his answer seems to be that philosophy can and should be science-ish.)
So we need to talk about science, and what the comparison to science might reveal about philosophy.
Here's where I thought to start, with the self-image of a toy version of science: in order to study and theorize the laws of nature, science breaks itself into one part that is by design subject to those laws, and another that is not. (There's a problem with this we'll get to, but it's not where you start.)
What I mean by that is simply that the data a scientist wants is generated by the operation of the laws of nature in action. You can observe events where those laws are operative; you can also conduct experiments to try to isolate specific effects, which you then observe. But the whole point of an experiment is to submit some apparatus or material to the forces of nature so that you can see what happens. This part of the work of science deliberately submits itself to nature at work.
But the two further steps, observing and theorizing, are intended to be separate, and not subject to the forces and constraints and whatnot under investigation. The weights fall from the tower and I observe the action of gravity upon them, but my watching them does not require that I too fall from the tower. I need not submit my process of observation to gravity to observe the effect of gravity on bodies.
Then I collect my observations and I work out a mathematical description. My mathematics describes the action of gravity, but is not subject to it, and need not be to describe it. My mathematics is not a theory of gravity, but provides constraints on the theories I produce. (By showing what it does to what, and how much it does it, and what it doesn't do because it's not part of that equation, and so on.) My theories of gravity are also not subjected to the work of gravity as the bodies I observed were.
Before getting to philosophy, I'll note that this self-division of science worked right up until it didn't, but also that when it stopped working, it didn't entirely stop working. It seems when you observe nature at very small scales the process of observation itself has effects on the observed big enough that they must be taken into account. We might wonder whether something similar happens in philosophy, but for now I'll just observe that we know more or less exactly why this happens at quantum scale, and could have predicted it would. (But we don't end up with the equations I write on a whiteboard changing the outcome of an experiment, for instance.)
The practice of science doesn't make a universal claim about not being subject to the laws it studies. The paper upon which my equations describing gravity are written is itself subject to the force of gravity, but not in a theoretically important way. The self-division of science is not absolute. (It is even plausible to claim that the division itself is not a posit of theory, but is itself found in nature -- right up until you hit the exception at quantum scale.)
Now what about philosophy?
Can it achieve this sort of self-division? Must it do so to achieve the same rigor as science? (Or can it be just as rigorous without doing so?)
--- I spent a few pages trying to answer these questions, but it was a mess, so here's just a couple obvious points:
1. If you think philosophy (or logic) studies the laws of thought or of reason, you're unlikely to think any of your work needs to separate itself from those laws
2. If you think philosophy studies norms of thought and behavior, neither making your work subject to the specific norms you're studying nor making it subject to different norms seems obviously satisfactory. Both present problems.
I think Williamson wishes to describe something like an experimental approach to philosophy, and that's what his whole competition between theories business is meant to be. Is it really similar to how science does this? If it's not, does it still make sense?
True. My comment reveals which ticket I hold in the Consciousness Lottery: I think it'll turn out to be biological. But we don't have a clue at the moment.
You're positing that science goes about its business by splitting off its own rational warrants, so as to avoid making science itself a totalizing critique of those warrants. In other words, a thoroughgoing scientism would seem to leave no room for parts 2 and 3 of your description of how science works. It would have to admit that "observing" and "theorizing" are subject to laws that are ultimately physical, just like anything else. So we're left with the familiar problem of how to give reason the last word -- how to exempt the truths we're claiming to discover from the obvious point that we would presumably be saying them anyway, true or not, if scientistic law-like explanations prevailed.
And I think you're right that quantum weirdness doesn't change this picture -- at least not yet.
You write:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
The example you give is the piece of paper on which the equations are written, but as you say, that's theoretically unimportant. I'd rather take your claim to be stronger: Scientists have to either ignore the question of how their own pronouncements may or may not be the result of law-like processes, or simply declare what you have declared: "We don't really know, but we make that assumption and it doesn't matter for our practice."
Now what about philosophy?
Is philosophy in danger of also being a totalizing critique of itself? Is there such a thing as "philosophism," which would cast into doubt the very conclusions that philosophy tries to deliver, on the grounds that there are "philosophical explanations" that explain them away?
By putting it this way, I think we can see what's wrong with that picture. A "philosophical explanation" can't call into question the entire practice of philosophical explanation in the same way that a "scientific explanation" can call into question the practice of scientific explanation, or at least make us scratch our heads and wonder how to justify the "breaking into parts." We don't have to break anything into parts when we apply philosophy to other philosophy. Philosophy's framing is unique among the inquiries.
So if that's right, I guess that puts me in camp 1.
Why might someone argue for camp 2? As you say, either fork you take there is problematic. But one might say: "Well, that's just how it is. We don't know whether 'applying norms' to our theories about norms is necessarily viciously circular. Some of us think so, some don't. Nor do we know whether the possibility of 'different norms' is enough to make the whole camp-2 approach wrong, and move us over to the camp that believes we need laws, not norms. This unresolved question requires . . . more philosophy."
Writing that, I've almost persuaded myself! At any rate, I'm not so clearly in camp 1.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yes, I picture him invoking a kind of ideal community of practitioners, converging Peircean-ly (sorry, that's an adverb) on the truth, much as we would hope exists in a scientific discipline. I'm not sure how close this is to actual scientific practice. How close do you think it is, or could be, to philosophical practice? I think you've been saying, Not very.
I think mostly science can and must say that their own practice is subject to natural law, but what you can deny is that it is theoretically relevant. (Except when it is.)
Now maybe totalizing critique is lurking here, as you suggest. Maybe we can sidestep that with a distinction like Ryle makes between being governed by laws and determined by them -- the rules of chess don't determine how a chess game goes, but they still constrain how it might. That's kind of a cultural argument. (Roughly it's "determinism was never a real threat, but a misunderstanding.")
What I want to say is something like this: we know perception is physical, in the sense that there is at least a transfer of energy and this facilitates a transfer of information, etc. But there is still a recognizable difference between physical interaction between an organism and an object that we would call "perceiving" and an interaction we would call "eating" or "breaking" or something else. And so with thinking. There may be a longish causal chain between the object of my thought (or its elements) and my thought of that object, and that chain is governed by physical law, as is the functioning of my brain, but my thought, like my perception, need have no physical impact on its object.
Science relies on this distinction, which it finds in nature, and then deliberately submits itself to being acted upon, either through the act of dropping weights from a tower, or by watching those weights fall. The scientist is not acted upon by the weights as they fall, and is acted upon by gravity but not in a way that matters. If he looks, then he is acted upon by the weights, but only as perception. If he then theorizes about gravity, there's no longer even that, even though he continues to be subject to gravity and would generally prefer being able to see the paper and ink he writes with.
None of this is news, but what interested me is that science doesn't really begin by saying subject over here, object over there; it begins by deliberately submitting to being acted upon, in a controlled way, and separating its work into being-acted-upon and not-being-acted-upon. That separation is just making more salient and more definite distinctions found in nature, although I think that to clearly define it you have to have theory as an element (to be able to identify when something is relevant).
I never actually provided an argument that this separation is the source of science's rigor. Maybe it's not, or maybe it's important because it enables something else that is.
I'm still not happy with any thoughts about philosophy on this score, so this whole post is just repetition. I could add that I am almost totally unconcerned about science undermining itself through totalizing, and I think the reason is somewhere in here, but untheorized.
Quoting Ludwig V
And
Quoting Ludwig V
Earlier I used this example:
Quoting Banno
This is a triangulation, between her, the thermometer and myself. We reach an agreement, a level of mutual comfort.
Consider it along side Quine's gavagai and the indeterminacy of translation. The lack of agreement does not prevent ongoing interaction.
We might do something similar with progress and clarity. If we agree that there has been progress, then what more do we need? If we agree that there is clarity, what more do we need? And if we disagree, then at the least we can agree that we disagree - we might agree that you think some idea clear while i disagree, That I think progress is being made while you do not.
Again, while there is no fact of the matter that we can use to decide the issue, and no overarching aim, we have reached an agreement that might allow us to move on.
What we have here is not an agreed doctrine, but a method, a heuristic. Quoting Ludwig V
...and requires nothing more. That consensus might be all we have.
Could that be simply because it works? We can point to progress in science by using what we learn, so that, who cares that it totalizes and undermines itself - it works.
Philosophy has a harder time doing that, a harder time yielding results we can point to working and that change how we live regardless of how they may also lead to self-defeating, paradoxical, unspeakable conundrums.
I would say philosophy is more immediately self-aware than physical sciences. You have to take an extra step to make science self-aware (which is why they can ignore their assumptions and just run with the experiment).
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Philosophy is the act of separating from the forces in order to observe and theorize. When a biologist observes and theorizes they dont call it doing philosophy because we have placed the biologist so firmly in a box of organic material. But when the bill fist bumps up against chemistry, or bumps up against the physics of gravity, they become a meta-biologist, or more simply, a philosopher. Because doing philosophy is stepping outside of in order to observe and theorize. Being human, desiring to know/understand, taken to an expert level.
I always thought of philosophy as a science first. Maybe like politics can be a science and history can be a science, so not like physics and chemistry, but more like physics and chemistry than arts like painting or literature or music. There was always a reason philosophy led to schools and the sciences, and a reason so much math was developed by philosophers (Pythagoras, Descartes, Leibniz, Russell).
Philosophy is the science of science (which looks obvious to me in the quote just above), or the science of language (as all sciences must speak), or the science of being human in the world (we speakers of scientia), thereby making the subject of philosophical inquiry everything all at once and each thing taken apart, simultaneously. But a science.
We call it an art because it involves so much ice sculpture (invisible shapes that are easily broken apart if they dont melt first, always restating water, something like that :wink:), always hoping something we say wont just melt. Like scientists try to say something as law or at least repeatedly working, over and over.
It definitely makes sense and I think it's close enough to say yes, that's how science does it -- but I must note the caveat that "science" is a huge category. So saying "yes, that's science" might not imply enough.
I like the idea of an experimental philosophy, though.
And your seperation, though I'm still untangling it, I feel kinship there. Somehow there's the thing we're questioning, the thing we're measuring, and the way we judge these things, or something along those lines. And one part of the science determines the other -- in a way this is Popper's division between observation statements and theoretical statements (as I remember it at least)
Quoting Banno
Hey, at least it's something. Solipsism is avoided.
I can't get past this as a misframing.
Quoting J
There's so much ambiguity in this!
Quoting J
B is not about the cat - it is plainly about a thought. It will be true not if and only if the cat is on the mat, but if and only if I think the cat is on the mat.
Oh, Leon. That's so far from what was actually said.
But do you at least see why he said that?
I know you are arent meaning to say it, or meaning to mean that, but you actively avoiding aims, telos-speak.
I think its worth addressing.
You're right, sloppy phrasing on my part. Both A and B are about a thought, since each begins identically: "I think . . " What I should have gone on to say -- and this is what Rodl means -- is that what is being thought, in A, is something about a judgment, whereas what is being thought, in B, is something about a cat. You don't actually even need B to get where Rodl is going: "My thought of judging that things are so is a different act of the mind from my judging that they are so." This is apparent merely from the way A is formulated.
I can't see a problem with the idea that propositions are the conceptual content of assertive statements or sentences, or in other words propositions are what is being asserted (proposed). Sentences and statements obviously may take many different forms, even in the one language, not to mention different languages, while conveying the same ideas. So the propositional content is simply the idea or ideas which are conveyed. Where's the problem?
is different to
Sure. What's the issue? Isn't this exactly what is recognised by the use of the judgement stroke to mark the scope of the extensionality of each?
That there is no one aim that is the goal of all metaphysics does not imply that no meta physical activity has an aim.
Quoting Banno
This seems to be the very same error you and Leon made in the other thread. It's as if, were I to say that not all cars are driven on the road, you were to argue that if that were so, no cars would be driven on the road.
Hmmm. My first thought was to wonder whether this is true, but on second thought the weirdness of this is that the LHS of the turnstile is empty. From what set of premises can you derive "the cat is on the mat"? My grasp of this is weak, but is the following sensical?
Is it conceivably false if sensical?
I think that when you have
then you can say
And if that sort of thing holds for the turnstile, then you'd have ? ? ? on the LHS, which is just ?, so they'd be the same.
I guess I could just look it up...
One other thing we might say is that the reason you know some of your work needn't concern itself with the effects of what you're observing and theorizing about, is if your theorizing is overwhelmingly dependent on something that is not part of the observed.
That's gonna end up a bit Kantian, but the point right here would be to claim that there is no mathematics involved in the bodies falling from the tower. They do not consult my equations to see how fast they need to accelerate. The mathematics is something I add to the total situation (object of study, my observation and theorizing, etc.) so I needn't worry about it being compromised in any way.
And so with philosophy, one might argue that reason ? or simply logic, whatever ? is something not found in what philosophy studies, but added by the philosopher. That looks a bit dodgy because often people want to say that reason is part of human nature, but I think anyone really committed to such a view could argue, with a clear conscience, that the reason found in the wild is quite imperfect, unlike the reason I am employing, blah blah blah.
Or you could claim some sort of structural insulation ? that in reasoning about a bit of reasoning, I am perforce reasoning on a different level or at least concerning a different object from whatever you were reasoning about. (This looks like it will be headed for problems about reflexivity reminiscent of issues in set theory, but who knows. I sometimes think that natural language is not as a matter of fact its own meta-language, but it supports the generation of temporary meta-languages on the fly, as needed. Maybe.)
Anyway, someone might be inclined to describe philosophy as special in a way similar to this, with the added benefit of a comparison to mathematics, which is the paradigmatic armchair science, for everyone from Plato to Williamson.
I see.
I haven't yet read Rödl's Self-Consciousness and Objectivity (2018). So, my understanding derives from my reading of his earlier book Self-Consciousness (2007). What I gathered from this reading is that the thought contents, or propositions, one might express with the sentences A "I think the cat is on the mat" (where one could also use "believe" or "judge" instead of "think") and B "The cat is on the mat" indeed are different. The former one predicates a judgement to oneself while the later one predicates being-on-the-mat to the cat. The act of the intellect involved in making the second claim might be an act of receptivity (being governed by the thing in the world that one perceives) while the first one always is an act of spontaneity, whereby one takes oneself to be making (or, when the claim is being made out loud in a public setting, to commit oneself to) a specific move in the space of reasons, as it were, and thereby drawing on determinate (and also, arguably, shared) conceptual abilities.
However, and this is the important point, if I understand Rödl correctly, the specific act of spontaneity involved in making the explicit claim "I think P" always also is involved in the making of the claim "P". It is the Kantian "...I think [that] must be able to accompany all my representations..."
Here is now the point that brings us back a little closer to the OP's topic (or rather the OP of the other thread this one branched out of) about the aim of philosophy. Human rational judgement, including, paradigmatically, empirical judgement, may have truth as its formal aim. This formal aim is being acknowledged in the explicit claim "I think P" whereby one locates one's act in the space of reasons (i.e. within the public game of giving and asking for reasons). It doesn't mean that all the specific truths (true judgements) that one might express on particular occasions, including true philosophical pronouncements, all aim at expressing a maximally general Truth that they all are specifications of. What it rather means is that they all fall under a general metaphysical form, whereby (to simplify) acts of receptivity (intuitions) and acts of spontaneity (concepts) always must be involved together in contentful acts of judgement. ("Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.")
In order to stress how the "I think" always is implicitly involved in all acts of judgement, Rödl usefully stresses the fact that one expressing what it is that one believes regarding any proposition P isn't a separate act from the one involved in making up one's mind regarding the truth of P. This may mesh well with the core intuition motivating disquotationalist or redundancy theories of truth (regardless of their possible shortcomings in other regards).
Correct! Thanks, I'll correct my post.
Yes, there it is. That is what I take him to mean, and he himself ties it back to that Kantian motto. Highly controversial, but I think he's onto something important. It shakes up the whole framework about assertions.
I'll say more about this soon . . . . getting late in my world.
Around about there-ish?
Notice the circularity - of course my representations must be accompanied by "I think..."
What if we were to ask what we think?
I can't help but regard this playing with private judgements with great suspicion.
I'm not sure if it's a contradiction per se, but I would suggest that it's going to prove impossible to justify any standards while denying philosophy any purpose or ends. Consider:
Intend:
1. Have (a course of action) as one's purpose or objective; plan.
2. Design or destine (someone or something) for a particular purpose or end.
I don't think one can discuss "better or worse" while denying ends completely.
I suppose though that in following sentence @Banno is setting up some sort of dichotomy between "how the practice normally works" and some notion of a "metaphysical end-point?" Is this a real dichotomy though? It seems to me that we can deny or remain skeptical about a "metaphysical end-point," and still elucidate our own goals, and what our goals/ends ought to be.
Further, I'm not sure if "how a practice normally works," allows us to speak of "better or worse." It merely tells us about what current practice is, and if we are deviating from it. Hume's Guillotine seems relevant here. Presumably, current practice could be deficient. Indeed, if we accept "deviation from current practice" as our standard re "good and bad" or "misleading", that would seem to perhaps suggest a sort of intellectual straitjacket, an inability to deviate from current practice, since our standard is just whatever practice just so happens to currently be. Likewise, a focus on current, consensus "internal aims" would seem to rule out radical critique a priori. Is "the goal of metaphysics" the sort of thing that [I]ought[/I] to be democratized?
Here, we might also consider that metaphysics very much was thought to have a sort of telos, maybe even in something like the sense Banno means to indicate here. So, to think of metaphysics in this way was (and still often is) "how the practice normally works." And yet Banno earlier sang the praises of Hume, Wittgenstein, etc. for challenging what then was "current practice." Yet for these efforts to have been improvements ("better"), the standard for their being "better" cannot be "whatever metaphysics just so happened to tend towards in that epoch" or "what its practitioners took to be its end." If that was the standard, they would be deviant, and so "bad metaphysics." Or, we end up with a sort of relativism where Neoplatonist metaphysics is good for Neoplatonists, Hegelian metaphysics good for Hegelians, anti-metaphysics good for anti-metaphysicians, etc., because each of these is "current practice" and aligns with "internal aims" within the context of those specific "games."
Nor is the dominant "current practice" in metaphysics today something like the assumption that: "metaphysics is not discovering the deep structure of the world per se, but proposing better ways to conceptualize and systematize our thought and language." This isn't even the dominant view in analytic metaphysics. Introductory texts do not introduce the field as being primarily about language, but instead still tend to refer to "ontology, mereology, causality," etc., and not as linguistic terms, but as facets of the being. Yet it hardly seems like one can argue for a revisionist agenda in metaphysics while appealing to "current practice," or "current internal aims."
@Banno I would just add that:
...would itself be a metaphysical truth claim if stated as a belief that is used to define how the discipline of metaphysics ought to proceed. It's not the sort of thing that can be assumed a priori in attempting to define metaphysics at least, or so it would seem, since it would beg the question against the bulk of the history of metaphysics, both Eastern and Western. Which is just to say, it's not the sort of thing that could be worked into the standards by which metaphysics is judged from the outset, but is itself related to the questions of metaphysics.
Hence, why I would say the goal is truth, and not merely what is currently believed to be true, or what one gains honors by claiming to be true.
Also:
Again, I don't think it's useful to have a binary dichotomy between "pragmatic evaluation" and some sort of "Aristotelian telos." "Pragmatism" itself requires some sort of end/goal to be pragmatic about. We'd have to unpack what you even mean by the latter, because I was only speaking of ends/goals in a very general sense; as a principle for judgement, which is to say, in the same sense that to say: "'[some]thing speaks for [or] against it...' presupposes a principle of speaking for and against. That is, [we] must be able to say what would speak for it."
But it also seems that it must be a false dichotomy, since plenty of thinkers who deny Aristotle's notions of final causality nonetheless speak to a purpose of philosophy, such that "better or worse" is determined in terms of some sort of end. Indeed, with no end, it's hard for me to see how any outcome (i.e. end) for philosophy or discourse could be considered "better or worse."
There's a difference between a standard and an end.
My objection is to setting up what metaphysics is in terms of where metaphysics ends.
That framing imports a teleological structure into the practice, as if its value or identity depended on a fixed aim or destination. But metaphysics, as I understand and teach it, is not defined by its conclusionits revealed in the doing. We start in the middle: with questions, distinctions, and confusionsnot with a final cause or overarching purpose.
So would I but the individualistic reading of Kant is tricky.
This an issue that is only tangentially related to the topic regarding the aim of the activity of philosophising, or the aim of seeking truth in judgement, but I do know that neo-Kantians like Sellars, McDowell or Rödl have well absorbed the situated/socially scaffolded Wittgensteinian ideas about mind and language, and therefore don't conceive the transcendental requirements of empirical judgement to incorporate a need for mental representations to be "internal" in the individualistic sense that Wittgensteinian considerations on private languages tell against. The "internalism" at issue in Kant's quoted passage can be more charitably interpreted as the need for acts of representation to be internal to the sphere of the conceptual, while public discourse also is internal to that sphere and must hence also be answerable to what it is that "we" think.
I asked Claude 4 Opus whether it thought there was anything in Kant's own thinking (as opposed to more recent neo-Kantian reinterpretations) that might warrant your worry.
[hide="Here is its response (which I know you'll take with a suitable grain of salt):"]
Claude 4 Opus:
I think you're right that neo-Kantians like Sellars, McDowell, and Rödl have indeed absorbed the Wittgensteinian lesson about the essentially public nature of conceptual capacities. The key move they make is to distinguish between two senses of "internal":
1. **Problematic internalism**: Mental states as private, individually possessed items inaccessible to others (the Cartesian picture Wittgenstein attacks)
2. **Conceptual internalism**: The requirement that empirical content be taken up into the space of reasons/concepts, which is inherently intersubjective
Your charitable reading seems correct - when Kant speaks of representations belonging to "my" self-consciousness, this needn't mean they're private possessions. Rather, it means they must be capable of being taken up into the unity of judgment, which itself depends on shared conceptual capacities.
However, Banno's worry does have some textual basis in Kant. Consider:
- Kant's emphasis on the "I" rather than "we" throughout the first Critique
- His focus on individual faculties of cognition
- The methodological solipsism implicit in transcendental arguments starting from individual consciousness
That said, I think Kant himself provides resources for a more social reading:
1. The categories must be universal and necessary - not idiosyncratic to individuals
2. The "I think" is the *same* in all consciousness (B132)
3. Judgment inherently aims at objective validity, which implies intersubjective agreement
The real philosophical question is whether the transcendental "I" can do its work without being understood as essentially capable of saying "we." McDowell's solution is elegant: the "I think" marks one's ability to take responsibility for judgments within a shared space of reasons. It's not about private mental acts but about one's standing in the game of giving and asking for reasons.
So while Banno's worry points to a genuine tension in Kant's presentation, I think the neo-Kantian strategy of understanding the transcendental subject as always already situated in shared conceptual practices is philosophically sound, even if it requires some reconstruction beyond Kant's explicit formulations.
[/hide]
By what you just said above, you dont mean to say merely that:
Quoting Banno
but you had to say it anyway to say what you said.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Exactly.
Banno, you seem to be rejecting the best and the worst, while seeking to retain the better than and the worse than.
But to do this, you are saying one thing is better which means, between the two things, one is best and the other isnt.
I dont think any of us would necessarily be disagreeing regarding the quality of some thing, just because Banno might call it better than the others and Count might call it the best, but I still dont think one can use better or worse without invoking best and worst, and without saying things with as much finality as Banno saying one thing is better.
Its like better only happens after best has happened. Best is tied up with the standard and measurement and theory; and with that in mind, or in hand, while operating in the middle somewhere far away from the best, we can then identify what is better and what is worse in hand because we have best in mind to judge.
Quoting Banno
I agree with that. That, full stop, is worth pondering itself. We have to stake a claim to make a start because we are already in the middle.
However, in addition, I dont think we could tell we are in the middle without also seeing a Quoting Banno
We see middle only when we simultaneously see ends. We cannot speak, think or point to any one thing without referencing start, middle, end, or worst, better, best no matter where in the middle of these scales the thing actually falls.
This is all right in the crosshairs of everything - good discussion. I dont think anyone has made our points clear enough yet.
Yeah, I agree with that, there should be an answer here.
But if we take "I think..." as a formal unity of judgement, it's just taking the place of Frege's judgement stroke.
And that would be at odds with Rödl, so far as I can see. The contrast with Rödl hinges on whether the I think (Kant) or the judgment stroke (Frege) is best understood as a mere formal marker within a shared, impersonal space of reasons, or as something more fundamentally self-involving, reflexive, or identity-constituting.
The latter, not so much.
Why not?
I was thinking that the "I think" marks oneself as being able to make moves in the game of giving and asking for reasons, with everything such an ability entails (the intersubjectivity of judgement, shared practices, common objects of perception, the ability to track one's own deontic scores in rational discourse, etc.). John Haugeland, for instance, in his essay Truth and Rule Following, has highlighted the existential commitments to objects that motivate our insistence on the constitutive rules of the empirical domains within which those objects are constituted.
So, as Opus suggested while bringing up McDowell's elegant solution, the "I think" is tied up with our standing in the game of giving and asking for reasons. But the resilient constitutive rules that we must therefore insist on (or agree to revise when circumstances rationally warrant doing so) in order to satisfy our existential commitments include the transcendental requirements for the unity of judgement.
What makes the expression of those commitments warrant the use of the first-personal pronoun in "I think" just is the fact that we each are individually responsible for our own moves. But the "we" sometimes expressed in declarations like "We the people..." or "(We) the authors of this article..." or "We worshipers of the Great Spaghetti Monster" accomplishes the same integrative function for pragmatic/epistemic joint enterprises, where "we" share existential commitments (and we therefore wish to foreground areas of agreement rather than loci of rational dispute between members of the "we").
I could only surmise that this is a reaction the admitted absurdity of "infinitely better" or the absence of the concept 'optimal' in place of best, given it would need to be about outcomes and optimizing outcomes seems reasonably plausible.
Still, I don't see any real issue with an open-ended, primitive spectrum of value or best-fit. Sort like metaphysics :P
So we have a transcendental argument in Kant, something like: The only way we could make judgements is if we have a unified objective experience; we make judgements; therefor our objective experience must be unified; hence the "I" in "I judge...". (An outline of the argument only; we might spare ourselves detailed exegesis if we mutually accept that there will be variations and things to finesse, rathe than go in to detail?)
And that might well bypass my reservations concerning private language. I'll give it some more thought.
The other thread hanging loose here is Davidson. he might be more problematic. Kant's argument assumes a separation between world and thought that Davidson might well have rejected. For Davidson the world is not the manifold of intuition against which we have experiences - that would both be too individual, and involve a separation of world and word, a notion of an uninterpreted world of which we can make no sense. Rather than "I Think..." as the only option in the transcendental argument, Davidson would reject a transcendental subject, having instead a triangulation between belief, world and meaning.
My apologies if that is not so clear. Kant is not my area. I'm suggesting in effect that Davidson might deny the first leg of the transcendental argument, that the only way we could make judgements is if we have a unified objective experience, and say instead that our judgements arise from the interplay of our experiences and beliefs, together with our place in a community of language practice.
Anyway, that'll do for now.
If you look at his chosen example, the answer must be yes. But his list of things that might/do discipline philosophy is varied, so I don't think he wants empirical data as a universal constraint. Empirical philosophy has been around for a while now, I think. I've seen some interesting work. Not sure.
Quoting J
The short answer is No. Inter-library loand is available in the universities and similar institutions. I don't have access to them any longer. It was available in public libraries some years ago. But, alas, no longer.
Quoting Banno
There is much to be said for this.
On clarity, I agree that clarity that no-one perceives as clarity seems something of a self-contradiction. However, Dodgson's article on Achilles and the tortoise seems to show that there are limits to the explanations that can be given to clarify an argument - and some of Wittgenstein's remarks point to the same conclusion. Something needs to be said about that. I'm also impressed by the fact that people can think that something is perfectly clear and yet be persuaded by argument that that is not the case. Perhaps Euclid's parallel postulate is an example.
Well, yes, it does seem that progress that doesn't look like progress to people is again, self-contradicting. But see next comment.
Quoting Banno
I agree with you on two counts. First, it seems to me obvious that most academic disciplines do not have a fixed aim or destination. Each new development immediately becomes the ground from which the next new development will come and the criteria of success are changed so that progress can be claimed. The history of physics shows this in operation. There is no necessary end or conclusion that would enable people to say that the job is now done.
But if the next step is revealed in the doing, what are the criteria that enable us to classify the next step as progress? In the case of physics, there are some criteria that enable us to make that judgement. In the case of the arts, not so much - though of course each new step is accompanied with exactly that claim. For example, each new fashion seems better than the last, but can we really identify progress here? (The abolition of high heels would be progress, but more in public health than fashion as such.)
However, there is one criterion that might work. What counts as good and appropriate in one set of circumstances may become a burden and a hindrance when things change. Adaptation to new circumstances may be the kind of criterion one looks for. But that is not improvement that accumulates, so only provides a local criterion for progress, not a global one.
Because you keep saying best. We all do.
If one is better than the other, then one is best.
You dont see better until you see best.
You know a light switch with a dimmer on it. When the dimmer is all the way down the light is off and when the dimmer is all of the way up the light is brightest; and in between the light is dim. You seem to be saying that the light is always dim to one degree or another. I agree with that in one sense, because when the light is off we dont have absolute darkness and when the light is brightest the whole world is not full of light. But in another sense, when the light is dim, it is still on. So if you compare a dimmer to a simple on/off switch, a dim light is on. You dont have dim absent on versus off.
You dont have better absent best. It doesnt mean we have the ontological best in our hands. Like when the dimmer switch is brightest we dont have a world full of light. But we would never know there was more and that we were somewhere in the middle if we did not have the concept of the superlative metaphysically. Which highlights that better than is also a metaphysical theory not an ontological thing in hand.
We could throw away all use for better than if you want (doubt we could get through a day of speaking with others without it), but if we want to use better we are using best.
I don't think this can be right, at least not across the board.
I assert that the Beatles were a better band than Gerry and the Pacemakers.
I can make my case, we can discuss, and no one will be in any serious doubt what we're talking about -- whether one was better than the other, musically.
Does this mean we know what "the best band" means? Hardly. It doesn't mean anything, as far as I can tell.
There's an equivocation here between "best" as a conceptual or metaphysical endpoint -- this is what I'm claiming we don't know, or even understand, in the musical example -- and "best" as "out of X number of choices, the top choice." Sure, we can call that "best" if we want to, but it's tangential to what we're interested in, here in this thread, I think. Here, we're surely asking into "best" as a kind of telos, optimum, or endpoint.
Good, and likewise your subsequent formulation in terms of shared mental representations, rather than a strictly individual/psychological construal.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Yes. Though we can always raise the question, concerning Kant, of whether a thought without content is even possible. (An intuition without a concept is possible -- though, as the motto says, we can see nothing with it.) This doubt might have interesting implications for Rödl's version as well.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Would you agree that Rödl also wants to call to our attention that "making up one's mind" is necessarily 1st personal? That there is no objective form of this?
Quoting Pierre-Normand
We could say: The act of representation brings 1st personal experience into the Space of Reasons. We could even continue the Kantian parallel and say that our subjective life is "heteronomous," while the Space of Reasons allows us to enter as "autonomous" individuals, under the law of reasons rather than causes, just as Kant claimed in the moral sphere. The place to keep pressing, here, is how to fill out "subjective life" -- to what extent must this refer to intersubjectivity? And how far would Rödl buy in? His "absolute idealism" could be taken as strictly, individually determined, could it not? He might not desire this reading, but what prevents it?
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Well, yeah, but Rödl is "continental" enough to be saying something in addition. I think he wants a phenomenological reading as well. He's reminding us that "I think" is something that happens. It's not merely a formal term. The Space of Reasons, the "moves in a game" -- none of this can occur without me, without us. And we don't just posit this stuff, we actually experience it. In order for me to say, "I think 'The cat is on the mat'", I am first saying something about an event that occurred at time T1. There was a previous time during which I did not have this thought -- or, if you prefer verbs, that I did not think that the cat was on the mat -- then came a time when I did. Now, as result, I can offer "I think 'The cat is on the mat'" in an entirely different way. It's no longer merely a report of a psychological event at time T1; I can now, if I like, assert it. Rödl is rightly bothered by the idea that there could be assertion without this background story.
Quoting Banno
Yes, good. And I can imagine Rödl being frustrated with this, because of how thoroughly it leaves out the 1st person, whether construed as singular or plural.
Now we should pursue @Pierre-Normand's attempt to link this back to the "what is the aim of philosophy" question.
I think I agree there is an equivocation, but it is between ontological (like physical/actual) objects, and their grouping (language-ifying/metaphysical-izing) as choices and comparing them against the best-worst measuring stick. Calling Beatles the best in a Battle of the Bands with Gerry and the Pacemakers, or calling them better than both equally understand best as better than and so both equally use best when speaking about the two bands as a grouping.
I am starting to see Banno is right to avoid references to the ontological best out there somewhere, but I am right to avoid agreeing we can compare or speak about objects without an understanding of ideals and superlatives.
Banno said one thing is better. One ultimate thing among some group? That is an absolute best - same thing. Better than means best of - same thing - so the best is metaphysically there when we speak about comparisons of what is ontologically there.
Ah, and this can be given a good, sensible construal. Let me paraphrase and see if you agree:
We can't compare items in terms of qualities they may share unequally without 1) understanding that there indeed may be an ideal amount/kind/degree of said qualities, even if we don't know what it is; and 2) understanding how to use superlatives.
I think I am saying for 1 that we show an understanding that there indeed IS an ideal.
So this sounds ontological - like some platonic form of the ideal is out there for us to grab and make a measuring stick. I think I am tabling the ontological question. How an ideal exists, I dont know. But as soon as I say this thing is better than that thing, I am admitting into the world the presence of an ideal I am talking about. So maybe the ontological reality of the best thing is me saying best - my mind IS Platos universe of the forms.
But regardless of all that speculation, I dont get past the better than starting line without simultaneously getting past the best starting line. Better than doesnt work, has no use, means nothing, without the baggage (or bonus) of best.
Well, but tie that back to the Battle of the Bands. Aren't you saying that we can't compare the two bands meaningfully without a commitment to there being an ideal "best band"? I'm not worried about the ontological or Platonic aspects here; I just don't know how to make sense of it. Can you sketch a use of "best" here that captures your meaning? Doesn't it just collapse back to that other sense of "best" which simply references "top choice out of X choices"?
Quoting Fire Ologist
Yes, that's the question under discussion. Don't draw a line under it yet! We're just getting started. :smile:
I agree. What I am saying isnt crystal clear to me.
I need to think on the Battle of the Bands analogy to directly address it and will get back. I think Im saying the sense of best that is collapsed into the better of choices is the same and only best there ever is. We dont have to reify anything discreet between better than and best once we set a limit (meaning we limit the world to two bands, and the one that is better becomes the one that is best); if there were 4 bands, one would be worst, another better, another better still, and one would be best, but none of that analysis happens without some standard (ideal) measuring stick that must have worst and best on it at the very least.
Or go back to my light switch analogy. On/off represent the superlative ideals. Dim represents where we live in the middle. If we call everything in the middle some level of dim, the light has to be on at all before it is dim. The on-ness of the light, is the best-ness of the better-than.
Excellent comparisons, all around.
A question popped to my mind on this just now: How would Davidson distinguish "belief" from "I think..." ?
Something that comes to mind for me is that we could reconcile their epistemologies, at least, by noting how language and world are always-already interpreted, much like the categories shape our experiences. Furthermore for Kant these are supposed to be universally applicable "rules" such that all thinkers will share the categories. That'd be meaning. "The world" would just be what we refer to in speaking to one another, or the intuition for Kant.
But I gather there really is supposed to be one world, at the end of the day. "The noumenal" could just as well be read as the "nonsensical", perhaps.
Also @Srap Tasmaner -- Kant might be more of an ally to Williamson than I had first thought. His whole thing is trying to discover the scientific basis of metaphysics, but only to conclude agnostically on the subject. It seems Williamson is open to the possibility of a science of philosophy, at least, if not metaphysics so the idea which Kant presents -- that a philosopher can state the boundaries of reason in a clear enough manner so as to be able to distinguish when reason has gone too far, and it's only a matter of doing philosophy to state these limits -- that seems to get along with the idea of trying to do better.
The difference would be in style -- rather than the Magnum Opus from a genius it seems like Williamson would adopt the more modern scientific approach of distributed cognition through shared practices.
Good posts. :up:
Part of the difficulty here is that "science" is poorly defined, as was shown in <this thread>. I think what you mean by "science" here is something like, "studying how something works."
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Does science want to see what happens? Or does it want to understand laws (or principles)? I would say that the scientist is only doing the experiment in order to understand the laws or principles at work. That's the endgame (and that is one way of cashing out the knowledge vs. wisdom distinction).
So let's come back to this:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Part of what you are saying is, "Science separates its work into being-acted-upon and not-being-acted-upon." I would say that such a claim requires clarification, given that you are sneaking in two entirely different subjects. What is being-acted-upon (i.e. what is the patient)? It is the thing being studied, such as the falling weight or else the law of gravity (i.e. the falling weight is being acted upon by gravity, and gravity is being acted upon by the mind of the scientist). What is not-being-acted-upon? It is the scientist. So here there is an equivocation of subject, which is precisely why your claim is not yet plausible, "science doesn't really begin by saying subject over here, object over there." Everything you say seems to presuppose, "subject over here, object over there."
The real kicker is that the nature of the rational subject is always a difficult subject (and we should think here about Frege's judgment stroke, Medieval debates over universals and whether intellect is universal or individual, the "view from nowhere," etc.). "Science" wishes to treat the rational subject in a precritical way, but that turns out to be impossible.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I would agree in saying that science divides itself into two parts. This all has to do with act and potency. In one way the scientist views the falling weight as (patient) being acted upon by a law which he will eventually give the name "gravity." In another way the philosopher-scientist views the whole sequence as (patient) being acted upon by his own mind, which through the operation of abstraction recognizes the law of gravity. So the law of gravity "moves" the falling weight, and these "two" things "move" the scientist's mind to the formulation of the theory. But what is crucial for Aristotle is that the scientist's mind is not unmoved or unsubjected, as you claim. His mind is affected by the the experiment, but that is incidental given that he constructed the experiment and willingly subjected his mind to it. What is more interesting is that his mind, rather than being unmoved or unsubjected, is self-moving. The scientist is able to direct and move himself, and particularly his mind.
Of course you are correct that if we merely consider gravity as the agent, then within the imaginary of the experiment the scientist takes the weight to be moved by gravity, but not his own mind. This is closely related to Bob Ross' recent thread on the immateriality of the intellect, and specifically the idea that there is a sense in which the intellect moves all corporeal things without being moved itself in the same manner. More simply, the scientist's presumption is that gravity affects the weight but it does not affect his own mind, and therefore his mind can act upon and understand the law of gravity without being self-recursively entangled in the explanation.
Finally onto logic:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Aristotle would argue that nothing can be both agent and patient simultaneously and in the same way (i.e. both mover and moved - acting-upon and being-acted-upon). For example, this would mean that (1) is incoherent insofar as it takes itself to be studying what at the same time it takes for granted. To study the laws of logic with the laws of logic looks to be a form of petitio principii.
Rather than belabor this post, I will just nod to @Count Timothy von Icarus who has written recently on intellection and ratiocination. I would take all of this in the direction of Plato's divided line. In a univocal sense, logic cannot study logic. What is needed is nested hierarchy. Logic cannot study logic, but intellectus can study ratiocination. Other thinkers will posit higher levels within the hierarchy, and say, for example, that nous can study intellection (although the word "study" is at this point becoming strained, given that it connotes ratiocination). This is why Platonism unifies in a sort of static fullness, which many of us have experienced in deep states of recollection, and from which flows a remarkable amount of intellectual fecundity. This is also why Aristotle places contemplation at the highest place.
(More simply, what Banno can only take as an axiom, others believe can be grasped as true. This is also why Frege eludes Banno with his syncategorematic judgment stroke. The univocal logician cannot even recognize Frege's motive for such a thing, much less the thing itself.)
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
That seems unlikely to me. The recent discussions on quantum foam are on point.
A double judgment-stroke would make no sense for Frege. It is precisely a syncategorematic expression, and therefore cannot be nested in that way.
There is a difference between a standard and an end, and between a goal and an end, but all standards and all goals are ends. Therefore your eschewal of ends is entirely incoherent. This is yet another example of someone who tries to rebut something without understanding it, and another example of someone doing that with Aristotle.
- :up:
Do you see how you evade? Over and over you say, "That's not what I said," but you simultaneously refuse to say what you did say. (Of course it is precisely what you implied <here>, hence my "if" which you simply ignored. spoke of "aims" and you objected, even though he said nothing about Aristotle.)
From my bio, "And don't just say why [he is wrong]; say what you think is right." This is precisely why your "dissection" is so often in bad faith. You want to criticize without giving any positive account yourself. You do this even when after objecting to aims, you deny that you opt for aimlessness, and all the while you refuse to explain how that is remotely possible. This is directly parallel to the way you gaslit @Count Timothy von Icarus with his simple (p v ~p), objecting to it while refusing to give a coherent reason for over 20 pages.
Quoting Banno
Quoting Fire Ologist
Count is right, but there is no need to talk about "best." There is an interesting argument to be had about whether better presupposes best, but that argument is not needed to show that @Banno and @J's position is wrong.
"Better" implies a standard, and a standard is an end. Banno says:
Quoting Banno
This is another example of what I pointed out in the previous thread:
Quoting Leontiskos
"Absolute" (whatever that means) has nothing to do with it. The question is whether there is a standard. Then we come to this:
Quoting Banno
Yes, much like there is a difference between a cat and a mammal, but every cat is a mammal, and every standard is an end. So if you eschew ends you eschew standards, just as if you eschew mammals you eschew cats.
Banno uses the word "better" and this requires standards. Given that all standards are ends, this also requires ends. So @Count Timothy von Icarus is right when he says, "I don't think one can discuss 'better or worse' while denying ends completely."
(This is closely related to .)
---
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Perhaps at bottom is the simple question of whether philosophy has ends. I would say that @Srap Tasmaner's talk about the aim of philosophy is innocuous and self-evident. All human activities have ends, and philosophy is a human activity. Denying that philosophy has any ends looks to be a desperate escape route for the thoroughgoing pluralist. Again, whether or not we ever come to agree on the precise ends of philosophy, we all believe that philosophy has ends.
We could also think about this whole question historically, and through the lens of the agent-patient dichotomy.
In ancient times knowledge was seen as especially experiential, and often epitomized in sexual intercourse (i.e. "Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore..." - Genesis 4:1). Sexual intercourse is a characteristically synergistic or inter-causal act, where the two are mutually moving and being moved in a way that breaks down the agent-patient dichotomy.
Even in Greek thought (and the Platonic-Aristotelian thought that extends throughout the ages) we see that the known moves the knower, such that the modern agent-patient schema is in some ways reversed. This retains a similarity to the synergistic account, insofar as known and knower are mutually moving each other. Analogies between love and knowledge are common, along with the magnetism of the beloved.
It is only in the modern period that we get a strict knower-as-agent vs. known-as-patient dichotomy, where the interaction or intercourse between the two is minimized, with both being viewed as highly inert and unmoved.* My sense is that this has everything to do with the Baconian quest for mastery over nature.
Presumably when modern science runs up against quantum mechanics, it is running up against the limitations of the modern understanding of knowledge. Perhaps it is only by moving into deeper and more synergistic modes of knowing that one can overcome the inherent limitations of the modern dichotomies.
* See especially Simpson's comparison of Schopenhauer to Wittgenstein on this point.
Glad to meet someone else who appreciates What the tortoise said to Achilles.
Quoting Banno
This relates to Wittgenstein's answer to the problem he raises of what it is to follow a rule.
Separately, the Tortoise here is a precursor to Kripke's scepticism.
The answer to Dodgson is that while we might not fully state the rule, there is a way of understanding the rule that is not found in such an interpretation, but but which is exhibited in what we call "obeying the rule" and "going against it" in actual cases (PI§201)
And again, "If 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." (PI§217).
Quoting Ludwig V
That's a very interesting point. Clarity is not final - but if things are sufficiently clear for us to move on, that'll do? Seems to be so.
The example of fashion reveals a sort of 'churning" that is worth paying attention to. Fashion no longer serves it's own purpose, but instead the need for an industry to sell more product. Each "new" fashion contradicts the last - novelty, not consistency, driving the process, no rule being followed except the imperative to create difference for profit. The point of the practice - expressing belonging and individuality? - has been lost, the purpose and rules being followed now sit elsewhere.
Same for pop music and Spotify.
Do you see that this restates your position, but does not answer the question? I hope so.
Quoting Fire Ologist
This outlines an argument. Better.
This would be so provided that we are dealing with a closed and complete set. If you consider the cardinals up to ten, then there is a biggest cardinal - ten. But if you consider all the cardinals, there is no biggest.
It's not just infinite sets that have this characteristic. Any set that is not closed - to which we can always add another item - may behave in the same away. That this painting is better than that one does not make this painting the best, nor does it imply that there is, somewhere out there, a best painting.
Your reasoning trades on a slide from relative to absolute. But comparative judgments dont always entail global rankings. Just because some things are better than others doesn't mean there's a best. Better only implies best under artificially limited conditions. Otherwise, the concept of best isnt required.
Yep.
Again, misses what is being claimed, and argues against something other. :grimace:
Should we go along with him here?
First, seperate out what is being done here. There's the trite logical point that "my making up my mind" is about me, so trivially in the first person. But there is also "our making up our mind", first person plural; "you making up your mind", second person singular; "they made up their mind" second person plural and Fred Blogs making up his mind - third person. We might share a collective deliberation.
But also there is the proof of the pudding - how is it shown that one's mind is made up? That's seen in what one does, and so is public.
Following Wittgenstein, we
Supose you made up your mind then changed it but didn't notice. The evidence of you having made up your mind is in what you do.
Rödl doesn't get to where he thinks he does.
Quoting J
Yep. So much the worse for his account. :wink:
So he does. So I think that Dodgson's focus is on the force (!) of the logical "must", which we all take for granted. One might perhaps think that this scenario suggests that it is not what settles disputes but a paper tiger.
Quoting Banno
Yes, indeed. Though I think that Dodgson is suggesting that the tortoise knows perfectly well what it would be to follow the rule and is deliberately misbehaving - which is quite different from misunderstanding the rule. Again - it's about what it is to be forced to do something in this context. The best that we can do is to say that if you don't follow the rule, you aren't playing the game.
Quoting Banno
One is inclined to say that the tortoise needs training in a drill, rather than explanations. Once the tortoise has mastered the drill, it will be possible to explain things to him.
Quoting Banno
Perhaps it is. But I think this creates room for doubt about the meaning of, for example, "perspicuous representation", which is somehow meant to be final. Contrast the ways in which a teacher might try to clarify or explain something to a student; it's entirely a pragmatic practice, with no pretence that what works for one will work for all.
Quoting Banno
I've read stuff that claims that the modern practice of introducing new designs to stimulate the market rather than anything else was actually invented and first practiced by Wedgwood in the market for china. That was the real basis for his success. But fashion worked in much the same way before modern industrial practices came along. Naturally. the practice flourished more or less exclusively among the rich and in social contexts like the royal court.
Don't you find that quite distasteful?
Davidson undermines this again, by denying one leg of the transcendental argument that leads to it. In this case, he'd say that it's not categories that are held constant, but truths. We interpret the utterances of others so as to maximise their truth. We don't need shared categories.
So it's not that we must think alike, but that we can try to understand others as if they were saying the same things we would. Thats a much more humane model of reason.
I suspect Kripke was again doing much the same as the tortoise.
Quoting Ludwig V
Not final, so much as enough...?
Fashion's main anthropological purpose might be to distinguish us from them.
Syncategorematic means it has no meaning in isolation, only in context (like logical connectives), but that doesn't automatically rule out meta-level use i.e., a second-order application about a judgment. Your argument again does not arrive at your conclusion.
"~" is also syncategorematic; yet we can write ~(~(A)). Necessity is syncategorematic; yet we can write ?(?(A)).
In Grundgesetze, Frege does not propose nesting judgment-strokes, but he does engage in meta-logical reflection talking about what is asserted, and about the act of asserting.
A nested judgment-stroke would not violate Freges logical vision; it simply belongs to a different level a meta-logical one where judgments themselves become the objects of analysis.
:rofl:
I already said what I did say...
And yes, I am evading you. There are better things to do, even here in this thread.
Im saying better always relies on a best.
Better exists on a scale of worst to best. You dont see the better thing without knowing the best as ideal. Best and worst are the standard. The ideal, to which you hold up things and find them always somewhere in the middle.
Is best conceptually required for comparison?
Yes, but as I've often averted to in past discussions, there's one exception to this -- namely, when the audience who is "shown" is myself. It simply isn't credible that I don't know whether I've made up my mind on some subject unless I do something in public about it. Do I need to construct some obvious examples, or would you allow this?
I hadn't thought about it like that until now. I was mostly looking for points of comparison.
The "must" in think alike is descriptive, I believe, rather than proscriptive though. The categories organized experience -- truths organize the world maybe? And given Kant's whole shtick about freedom and creativity I'd be hesitant to say his isn't humane: from a secular point of view Kant's is something of a humanistic rationalism.
But, then, I'm inclined to agree with you about how there's no need for shared categories, and even if Kant thought there was this one structure that structures all minds I'd be more inclined to ground these things in social practices that are shared with others -- a sort of intersubjectivity of practice.
What do you think about calling or treating or striving towards philosophy as a science, if we take Davidson's stance? At least, in the manner that Williamson seems to be indicating to go towards or achieve.
Prima facie, yep.
But consider: what is it to have made up your mind? Your choice remains open to reconsideration until you act.
You might change your mind. Right up until you make it so.
So sans action, have you actually made up your mind? Or is there still the possibility of your deciding otherwise?
Quoting Banno
This was my "battle of the bands" example too. I think it even goes beyond a question of practical usage. For many types of comparison, "the best" makes no sense -- apples and bands, for instance.
But not for all. @Fire Ologist, I think you can make a case that knowing an ideal type or goal is important in some kinds of inquiry. Why don't you try to construct such a specific case? -- it'd be worth doing, I think.
I'm surprised to see you use a phrase like "actually made up your mind"! :wink: What can I say? I don't know how actual it is, but when I make up my mind about X, I generally know it, and if I change my mind, I know that too, but it doesn't retroactively show that my mind wasn't in fact made up.
Unless you want to fine-tune what "making up one's mind" amounts to? I was using it to refer something pro-tem. I can make up my mind to go to the store tomorrow, then decide not to. Was my mind actually made up? Yes, on my usage. And then it wasn't. But I'm open to other terminology.
So you say... but as Wittgenstein points out, what if it constantly changes, but that you do not notice the change because your memory constantly deceives you?
:wink:
It's a bugger of an argument.
Quoting J
That's what Wittgenstein would do - look at how we use "making up one's mind". Was my mind actually made up? It was. And then it wasn't. So was it ever? The only way to decide this is if you get up and go to the shop... the act.
A bugger of an argument.
Gotta love it.
Perhaps Kant's categories might be seen as a precursor to charity.
For my part, I just don't much like Kant's transcendental arguments. Fraught.
Genreral structure:
And that first premise is very hard to substantiate, very easy to break.
I'll grant the remote possibility; I don't know it for certain. But this is on a par with Descartes's evil demon, isn't it? A chance so unlikely that it's not worth worrying about.
Quoting Banno
That's one way. Another method is to fine-tune what "making up one's mind" means. Having done that, I'll know what to say, no matter if I go to the shop or not. With this method, the arrow goes the other way: I don't find out from going to the shop whether I'd made up my mind. I find out from a certain construal of "make up my mind" what not going to the shop means, in that regard.
TBC . . . my eyes are closing.
'cause you are still not sure... not until you act.
I can see you are being patient with me and I appreciate it.
If I sound like I am repeating myself, it is because 1) I dont think you are seeing what Im saying and therefore 2) your replies arent hitting the mark for me.
We are in the middle of so many philosophical works right now so I think it is worth the pain.
Quoting Banno
You said thing. As to a thing, in hand, even if no best thing exists, Incan still find one thing is better.
I agree with that.
I then ask what do I really mean when I say this thing is better than another?
Now I can put the thing down and conceptualize the measuring stick in my mind and then, post hoc, affix better to that thing.
Quoting Banno
My answer is yes. I have to know the concept (absent any exemplar thing) of best when I use a measuring that identifies any thing as better - the measuring stick, my concept, is worst-better-best. There is where best lives, in my concepts, as the measurement itself.
Better is a measure of bestness.
Quoting Banno
That sounds like something I would say. I have some areas I would want to clarify, but, this is basically it.
Quoting Banno
But here we fall back to earth (or focus not on the conceptual but instead on the concrete) and lose sight of the measuring stick where best most perfectly stands. Here I would fall back and say who cares about the rest of the world - there are two apples, give me the best one.
Quoting Banno
The scale is definitely post hoc. The two apples sitting there with no minds applied to them each think they are perfect, and they are. We build the scale. We apply it to the apples. But the scale isnt lesser greater greater still. The scale, like the apples, is finite and simple and identifiable as one scale, with a start at worst going all the way to an end at best.
Im not trying to play volley ball or tennis with you. I am honestly trying to work this out.
I think the crux of the contention here is you are holding a thing, an apple, and dont need or care about worst or best. If you would skip using better and just say each apple is incomparable, Id have no issue. But if you want to group two things and compare them, you have entered the metaphysical world of the ideal, and appleness becomes one of our questions, and with better among apples best becomes a measurement of one of our standards.
I'm unconvinced.
Quoting Fire Ologist
I think if we weaken their universality it's something of a common theme amongst philosophers: instead of the form we often say things more loosely like "This presupposes that" -- it may not be the case, but insofar that we agree upon the presupposition then the argument tracks well enough. Rather than structuring thought I'd say this structures dialogue: Less ostentatiously we could say that the first premise, if agreed upon, is to acknowledge the importance of the priority between two concepts.
I've seen it cast as a kind of "inference to the best explanation" as well -- where the transcendental part is the tentative "Well... this is the best guess I can think of for now, so until you have a better one..."
Though, really, it is just my idiosyncratic way of thinking through a philosopher -- I look for relations and analogies and such. It may not be relevant after all. It's something of a stretch, except for when I was reading Adorno talking about Kant as a kind of philosophical positivist, and that gave me some food for thought. (not in the analytic/continental sense, but the older sense of philosophy being able to establish positive knowledge -- at the very least of the sort that can state "and this is where you can go no further")
You know how when you walk down the street you cant bump into 13 - its a concept only existing in the mind. Numbers painted are shapes and colors, but 13 is a concept.
Best is like that.
So is better.
All Im saying is that if you invoke better about any thing or as any concept, you have invoked best and worst as well.
Does that help?
Why is better so damn useful? Because the people who use it know how to use best and worst. And when really known, I think, you see that best highlights worst and these both generate what is between them namely, the better or worse.
Poor mans' induction.
Bleh.
:D
You're not wrong.
But, descriptively, don't people sometimes reason in this manner? Or is it a philosopher's fiction?
I would say yes, sort of. We could imagine gradations of betterment that go on forever. It just keeps going. I don't know of any reason to deny this scenario.
But there's an obscure problem with this having to do with the fact that parts are always understood relative to a whole. If the whole is infinite, then it's undefined. For practical purposes of the intellect, there is no whole to give meaning to the parts. That means there's no way to say how much better x is than y.
On the other hand, if we set a limit, we now have a best, a whole, and a way to give the increments of betterment meaning. But how can bestness be other than arbitrary? Why can't we exceed our best?
Briefly and dogmatically, we can be pretty sure about our deductions; induction is deductively invalid; calling induction "abduction" doesn't make it valid. (There goes most of the philosophy of science, especially for the pragmatists, especially especially Peirces logic of science.)
But Ramsey's solution gives us something to work with. Instead of seeking justification for induction, he explains how we act as if inductive reasoning were valid. Wanna bet? If you say you believe the sun will rise tomorrow, wanna bet? How much? At what odds? Your willingness to stake something reveals your degree of belief, not some abstract epistemic warrant. Rationality, for Ramsey, isnt about justifying beliefs from first principles, but about maintaining consistency between your beliefs and actions.
Davidson makes use of this in his latter work.
Mohism.
Might push this. Both Davidson and the Mohists offer a vision of explanation and rationality that is causal but not mechanical, normative but not law-bound, and grounded in use and interpretation rather than metaphysical speculation.
Agreed on both counts.
I'm prone to thinking of induction as a kind of myth. Not the bad kind, but the good kind -- that is still a myth.
Quoting Banno
Let's take this model up with the idea Williamson seems to be presenting here -- suppose philosophers formed a sort of betting ring on their particular philosophical ideas.
Does this make for a rational activity? Or is it not the betting, but the conclusion that's important? I.e. no the story you started with, but rather the "Rationality...[is] about maintaining consistency between your beliefs and actions"
My thought is that rationality is a collective practice whereby we check one another's beliefs through some agreed upon rough notions. Would that even be contrary to Ramsey, or could it be framed in terms of maintaining consistency between beliefs and actions?
It looks interesting, from the wikipedia page.
No, sorry. You seem to be simply restating your position.
I suggested an example -- the battle of the bands -- in which we don't appear to need a constitutive idea of "best" in order to choose a winner. (Remember, we're both agreeing to reject that other reading of "best" which simply defines it as "top choice." That's not constitutive. That would be like saying that piety is what the gods love. It provides no content.)
I said that I thought there were probably some cases in which having an articulated, constitutive version of an "ideal" or a "best" would be helpful in inquiry. I suggested you might want to construct such an example, so we could compare it to the band example.
Was the "13" example meant to be this? If so, you'll need to say more. How does an abstract number analogize to "the best"?
You simply do not know what you are talking about. For Frege the notation is unified and continuous. The horizontal represents the content and the vertical represents the judging or asserting of that content. There is no such thing as a double vertical or a nested judgment-stroke. Here is Kimhi:
In Js threads on Frege you were too busy projecting your own preconceived beliefs on everyone, instead of learning from Kimhi, Rombout, and Frege himself about Freges logic. Thats why you still dont know what you are talking about now.
And here is Plato:
Here it is again. Can you answer a simple question?
Quoting Leontiskos
That made me laugh.
Quoting Leontiskos
Again, I don't
You are a long way from the topic of this thread.
Yes. There doesn't seem to be much point in going over this again.
Sure.
Quoting Moliere
Very much so. Ramsey can be seen as providing a way to compare partial beliefs. If we treat beliefs as things that come in degrees, then betting behaviour provides a way to compare and measure those degrees. The degree of a belief is measured by the degree to which we are prepared to act on it.
Here I'd go to the facts of betting behavior. There are those who show up for fun and behave in the manner Ramsey says.
But betting behavior isn't about the truth as much as it's about the thrill of winning.
I doubt philosophers would fare better here. As soon as money is involved we're speaking about an extrinsic motivation -- something done for the sake of whatever -- rather than an intrinsic motivation -- such as, what I take you and I to agree upon, the desire for clarity for its own sake.
While this sounds like a toy, I'm thinking there's an analogy to science here -- how the desire to be The Scientist actually interferes with the process of science. So it'd go with the gambler who believes they can outsmart others on their bets.
If I could persuade people to sign a contract that somehow, through a series of deductions, proved to a judge that they all really agreed to the consequences of "The sun will not rise tomorrow", then it doesn't matter much what the truth of people's beliefs are. What matters is winning.
Truth And Probability (1926)
Anyway, here we are moving into the whole area of Bayesian epistemology, not a small step.
That sometimes folk sometimes bet poorly is as relevant as that folk sometimes will argue invalidly.
I'm likely in error -- but when I think of Bayesian epistemology I think that it's the attempted "cure" to induction. So rather than a truth it's part of the myth.
Fair.
I suppose it's the notion of competition of winning that I thought I saw, but it could be wrong to say of Ramsey -- I'll certainly take your word on what he says.
It bypasses induction - it doesn't make use of induction.
Induction tries to show that, given some beliefs f(a), f(b), and so on, we can induce Ux(fx) for some domain. This is invalid.
Ramsey instead says[s]given f(a) and f(b),[/s]* how much would you bet that f(c)? and develops a logic around this.
There's no claim that U(x)f(x) is true - no induction.
It replaces belief in a general law with a degree of belief, as used for an action.
This parallels the other discussion in this thread, again showing that we need not work with the general law, but can instead work with the local belief, contra Tim's apparent suggestion.
*There's no need for this, so struck through... Ramsey is just asking, apart from or including other evidence, how much would you bet that f(c)?
Ok. Then I'm not understanding it well enough.
Your explanation of induction is clear. I'm hesitant about the literal betting expression -- is it a metaphor or a mechanism?
Quoting Banno
Here I believe we agree -- we can work with local belief.
Transcendentally, since there is no other way to work.... :D
Quite literal.
It's just a game. A good inference involves conversation and dialogue and time -- a bet thrives on forcing someone to make a choice with what they have.
Can it be used to model some of the things we do? Can it show us how we can act more coherently?
Well, yes. It shows us how a Dutch Book reveals an inconsistency, for example.
You are right that there is a lot going on here, and plenty more to be said. People do not act rationally. Leaving aside the question of whether they ought act rationally, Ramsey has given us a part of the way to understanding what it is to act rationally. Not a theory of how people actually think, not a theory of what beliefs are true, but a framework for what it would be to act coherently, given ones own beliefs and preferences.
I suppose I'm a still skeptical of the framework, but I have little else to say as to why.
I'm fine with going along with the framework.
Is it possible to tie it into Williamson's concerns?
I'll admit I didn't expect that answer.
I don't understand your enthusiasm for Ramsey. (Not that I've actually read him!). But the idea that induction is really just about probability is not that uncommon.
For two reasons
First, if you would bet more on f(e) given f(a), f(b), f(c), f(d) than you would on (f)c given f(a), f(b), then aren't you just betting on induction?
Second, if we need to find some sort of account of how we behave, what's wrong with Hume's custom or habit, based on our general heuristic of association? Or Wittgenstein's "This is what I do."
Or we could just stop treating induction as a poor man's deduction. We've given deduction this hugely special status as the only form of rationality. Given how limited deduction really is, it seems a bit irrational.
In practice, induction is more complicated than "the future will resemble the past". We know darn well that it won't - what we're trying to do here is to get a grip on how things will change as well as how they won't. I'm sure you know about J.S. Mill's much more complicated, and realistic, account of the methods of induction.
It's not what I expected. He's not claiming that "induction is really just about probability" so much as dropping induction as a justification and instead considering degrees of belief. So while we might not know what is true and what isn't, we can have degrees of belief, and deal with them in a rational fashion.
Quoting Ludwig V
...isn't the sort of thing that Ramsey is claiming, from what I can work out. He's not necessarily basing the bet on some series of accepted truths but on degree of belief, measured through betting behaviour, and arguing in favour of follow the axioms of probability to avoid incoherence.
Quoting Ludwig V
It's more that this is an implementation of "what we do" that is coherent; or perhaps better, shows is what coherence might look like.
Quoting Ludwig V
I think that's pretty close to what Ramsey is doing - moving past the problem of induction, getting to the point of how it is we behave.
He presents us with a tool that allows us to navigate uncertainty.
_____________
Added: Yeah, I said Quoting Banno
but that's not quite right. He's not saying that f(a) and f(b) implies f(e) is a better bet than just f(a). He;s not saying anything about f(a)'s truth or falsity at all. He's instead talking about the degree to which you and I believe f(a).
Thanks for the question - working out the answers is a great help in working out what Ramsey was doing.
Ramsey doesnt start with an absolute scale of belief or value. Instead, he begins with cases of indifference where outcomes or propositions are treated as equally preferable or equally likely and uses these as anchor points to infer a system of degrees of belief and utility that is coherent, even if it is partial, subjective, and shifting.
Now a point of indifference in a philosophical debate is a point of agreement.
An alternative method might be, rather than demanding an absolute resolution, begin with points of indifference or agreement shared constraints, overlapping commitments, common ground. From these, construct a framework of reasoning that remains coherent, though incomplete or evolving.
Ramsey shows the formal consistency of such a method, given the axioms of his system.
Some fairly vague thoughts, prompted by
Quoting Moliere
There's an intricate relationship between degrees of belief and belief in probabilities, which I find confusing. It looks to me as if "S has a x degree of belief in p and S believes that p has a probability x. Are they equivalent? If there's a difference, what is it?
What makes you say that Bayes is rational? If you are prepared to call Bayesian epistemology rational, how is induction any less rational?
You've probably seen customer satisfaction surveys that ask people to assign a number to their degree of satisfaction with a service or product. Once you have a number, you can do all sorts of interesting things with the statistics. But if the number is little better than arbitrary, what is the significance of the statistics? Well, there's an empirical test. If predictions based on those statistics are accurate, then the methdology does have at least some validity (meaning). But what outcome confirms or refutes a Bayesian prediction about a single case?
I'm torn about Bayes. Intuitively, there's at least some justification for assigning a probability to a single case. We do it all the time. So Bayesian epistemology seems to me to work on the same sort of basis that one can assign a number to my degree of satisfaction. But it is very hard to know how to factor any probability in to decisions about individual cases. If there's a 10% chance of some side-effect from a medical treatment, 1 in 10 patients will suffer that side-effect. How do I rationally factor that in to my decision about whether I accept the treatment, bearing in mind that accepting the treatment is all or nothing? Making a bet is one thing, because if one loses a bet, one can just make another bet. But getting ill from a medication is not necessarily like that. (yes, that's from the heart and live experience).
Quoting Banno
Do you mean "He's not claiming that "induction is really just about probability" so much as dropping induction as a justification and instead considering degrees of belief as a justification." or "induction is really just about probability" so much as dropping induction as a justification and instead considering degrees of belief as a datum even though it is arbitrary from a rational point of view".
Quoting Banno
Shouldn't that sentence end with f(e)?
But he might find that people do in fact bet more on propositions that are backed by inductive evidence. (And, yes, he might not.)
I'm sorry but who wrote that - I can't work it out.
My response is to point out that betting £1000 on the truth of a given proposition is a very different matter if your annual income is £10,000 or £100,000. It is also a different matter if you are single or have a family to support. And so on.
I am willing to bet a very large amount of money indeed (everything that I own or can beg, borrow or steal). that the sun will rise tomorrow morning. Who will take my bet, and at what odds? Should I be prepared to trust anyone who did take it?
. Thus we find in purely theoretical judgements an analogon of practical judgements, to which the word belief may properly be applied, and which we may term doctrinal belief. I should not hesitate to stake my all on the truth of the propositionif there were any possibility of bringing it to the test of experiencethat, at least, some one of the planets, which we see, is inhabited. Hence I say that I have not merely the opinion, but the strong belief, on the correctness of which I would stake even many of the advantages of life, that there are inhabitants in other worlds . (ibid)
The nature of and how much the bet, and by whom the validity of the ground of the bet is judged, is irrelevant, with respect to its occurrence. Hence the implied correspondence to induction, which serves a subject as sufficient rational justification a priori for the construction of his empirical beliefs, while not being sufficient for their proofs.
The point being, of course, all of this has been done before, in which case should be found, if not the congruent thesis, then at least a conceptually similar initial condition, merely clothed in new words.
I would very much like to know who wrote the passage you are quoting. Just curious.
Quoting Mww
Yes. But those details are what give you the evidence of the degree of belief, or confidence.
Quoting Mww
Yes, I can see that - roughly. But Ramsey, apparently is not doing that. Ramsey is by-passing induction
altogether. Quoting Mww
Well, given that it was written in 1787 and Ramsey was writing in the 1920's, it would seem to follow. Which would be interesting, but I don't think it would change any of the arguments.
Also, your general description here:
Quoting Banno
I get along with. The social reality of betting is what caused doubt in me, which is why I asked how literal you meant.
Any thoughts on this @Srap Tasmaner?
I'm mostly relying on you to get an understanding of Williamson, while attempting to put in enough work to make sure I'm not just missing something obvious.
A bet was intended to represent the subjective validity of a belief, for which the quality of the evidence just is the degree, both of which are presupposed in the construction of it.
That which evidences my degree of belief, and that by which I am confident of its truth .and indeed whether or not Im inclined to bet on it at all ..is determined by the possibility of my experience of its object.
Those conditions incorporated in a bet I make, what kind and how much, or even the one I wouldnt, give YOU the evidence of the degree of my belief, and the confidence in it. This becomes quite apparent, when I admit you are more justified in betting greater on the sun rising tomorrow, than I am betting there is life on other planets we can see.
But enough of this, yes? I was only pointing out the peripheral notion of bets in historical metaphysical investigations.
As you wish.
Do you have more? Didnt mean to shut you off.
I am wondering too. ?
Ehhhhh .dialectical precedent has it that responses to a quote are subjectively more honest without the influence of the authors name, which is often detrimental to the message on the one hand, or tautologically affirms it on the other.
That, and my clandestine supposition that 1787 would be a sufficient clue.
Easy enough guess in the case of Mww, but one can also quote and Google "The usual test, whether that which any one maintains is merely his persuasion, or his subjective conviction at least, that is, his firm belief, is a bet."
(Tho I did the google, and wouldn't mind a A/B reference)
Funny animal it may seem, yet still be nonetheless relevant to the topic at hand. Or, I guess, now, the sub-topic.
Kant is not measuring degrees of belief but critiquing overconfidence and metaphysical presumption. It's not to do with explaining belief so much as measuring it. The belief remains for Kant a piece of mental furniture.
Ramsey is closer to saying that the belief just is the disposition to act. The disposition to act is the degree of the belief. His axioms are then used to build a model of rational action.
You might see the difference between Kant and Ramsey if you consider this:
Quoting SEP Article on Belief
Gilbert Ryle might have more in common with Ramsey than with Kant.
It seems that for Ramsey the degree that one is willing to bet constitutes the partial belief. A belief is not "private" or "subjective", but measurable, and comparable with other beliefs.
The relationship, then, is not between "degrees of belief and belief in probabilities", but between degree of belief and willingness to act. Consider willingness to act as an extensional substitute for degree of belief.
There need be no inner fact about belief that can diverge from ones consistent actions.
There's a difference between understanding what it would take for "the cat is on the mat" to be true, and asserting that the cat is on the mat.
Between "p" and ?p".
One might, somewhat redundantly, further assert that one asserts that the cat is on the mat. If the need arose.
moved his post.
Thank you. But it is better not to bore on about something to someone who is not interested. But since you've opened the door.... Even if you are not interested, there may be others who are.
Quoting Mww
I don't have a problem with the general idea. But I do have a problem with the skimpy version of the idea that we have here. It is a fragment of the practice of betting - a gesture towards something that could be much more illuminating if it were taken out of the arm-chair and into real life.
1. The measure is not a measure of confidence alone. A bet is a combination of risk and reward and a decision to bet is the result of balancing, one might say, the disutility of one outcome against the utility of the other outcome in the context of the likelihood of each outcome. Confidence in the outcome is only one factor. The one virtue of this idea is that it takes a step to articulating what it means to act rationally in the context of probabilities.
2. Utility and disutility are the result of a wider context. For example, if you have 20 units of currency, the utility of 1 unit is one thing, but if you have 100 units, it is quite different. That can work in artificial situations, such as a laboratory experiment (or an armchair or seminar room), but in real life the context is much more complicated.
3. It is one thing to explore probability or confidence in the context of a decision about a single specific action, but there are subtler effects on rational action that also deserve to be taken into account. If the probability of rain is 80%, you may well decide to go to the gym rather than your walk/run/bike ride. If it is 50%, you may well decide to go out, but take an umbrella or wet weather gear in your back-pack. The most prominent example of this is the practice of insurance. Here, one bets on an outcome that is unlikely, but has high disutility, not because one wants to win, but to provide for that eventuality.
Quoting Mww
I can see that. On the other hand, it can help to know the context....
Quoting Mww
Not enough for me. But I can manage without that information.
Quoting Banno
Believe me, there is no chance that I am going to knowingly posit anything "inner" or "private" in the sense that Wittgenstein was talking about.
Quoting Banno
In one way, that's fair enough. But if you think it through, you find a world of complication and illumination. At least, I do, because I keep returning to the puzzle what probability actually means. (I'm particularly interested in what probability actually means in a single case.) The betting issue brings that out. Hower, Ramsey is only taking a first step. See above.
Quoting Banno
Yes. I was talking about something else. I think I can be a little clearer.
It seems crystal clear to me that we know, for sure, that a toss of a coin has a 50% chance of coming down heads. It's not even empirical knowledge, but an "analytic" result of the rules. We also know that the empirical probability will be only roughly, and not exactly, the same. I think that we also know that various empirical probabilities (I think the mathematicians call them estimates) based on past experience. The proportion of smokers who get lung cancer is higher than the proportion of non-smokers, etc. etc.
All this is quite different from my confidence in, for example, that I have 6 cans of beer in my fridge. It is a binary question, and perhaps I remember that I bought a pack on my way home. But I also know, perhaps, that my memory is not what it used to be, so my confidence is less than 100%.
Of course, there is a relationship between the two. Insofar as I am rational, I will adjust my confidence to conform with objective probabilities and also to conform with my evidence for my beliefs. All I'm saying is that the two are not necessarily co-ordinated and are, let me say, different states of affairs. Ramsey is presupposing a perfectly rational being with access to all relevant information.
I agree it is a skimpy version of the idea, and it is a fragment of the practice itself. I was thinking to highlight the history, the origin and purpose the idea represents, rather than its manifestation as a practice.
When push comes to shove, it seems to me elaboration of the idea into a practice degrades the dialectic regarding it, to a psychologically-bounded exhibition, when it started as a metaphysical idea. In other words, were at the ends of a thing without the means by which the thing occurs, from which arises the legitimate right to ask, not about what or how much the bet, which presupposes no more than the belief related to it, but rather, the composition of the belief itself such that a bet relative to it represents defense of that composition. So we have what looks like belief in a belief, which is absurd.
-
The usual test, whether that which any one maintains is ( ) his firm belief, is a bet.
From a subjective point of view, isnt it possible for one to bet on his firm belief, shown subsequently some conditions by which his construction of it is flawed, yet still firmly maintains it? Furthermore, in Kant, there are those beliefs in the purely empirical domain of which maintaining the firmness of them is irrational in which case some tests are failed, but there are others in the purely moral domain, the firm maintenance of them is necessary, in which case every test is passed.
And this is what happens when skimpy versions are filled out. Or .bloated, as some might say (grin)
So we are not really in conflict - just talking about different things. Fair enough. As it happens, I regard the history, origin and purpose of ideas as of interest, even importance, in understanding their meaning. However, if your quotation is indeed from Kant, I'm not equipped to do more than try to follow the conversation. For the record, I think I'm talking about what it is to act rationally in the context of probability, an issue that puzzles me greatly.
Quoting Mww
It is indeed a test that is often proposed in real life. So it is relevant to say, not that a bet is no test of confidence, but that interpretation of a given decison is complicated by the fact that a bet is the result of weighing risk (disutility) against reward (utility) in the context of one's confidence. Confidence alone does not determine a (rational) decision.
Quoting Mww
I sort of understand this and don't disagree with it.
Quoting Mww
I'm not sure I quite get this. Mind you, my grasp of what people mean by metaphysics is, let us say, weak. I don't quite see why what I am saying about betting degrades anything that you are doing. After all, you know it all already and don't seem to have any problem putting it aside for the purposes of your conversation.
Quoting Mww
Well, your reaction is not unhelpful to me, so thank you for that. I won't bore you any further on the subject.
You may be groping your way towards Bayesian statistical decision theory. As I have said before, there are 4 components: model, data, prior, utility. That is enough to make a 'rational' decision. I'd prefer to say it provides a principled or formalized decision-making process. It doesn't stop you having an unreasonable model, prior or utility.
That our deliberations rarely fit propositional or predicate logic clearly and unambiguously does not undermine the use of propositional or predicate logic. It may still provide a model for our reasoning. That same goes for the various examples of the use of probability here. You don't need a confidence of 100% in order to go to your fridge with the expectation of retrieving a beer. Indeed, it makes little difference if there are six or five, if what you are after is one. Your confidence that there is more than one beer is what is at issue. Your confidence in that is shown through action.
Ramsey's contribution is to show the interaction of belief, preference and action, and what must apply if these are to remain consistent despite being partial, fallible, and changing - his axioms.
Ramsey doesn't guarantee that we will always bet rationally. He sets out (or better, begins to set out) how we can understand being rational in circumstances of partial belief. He shifts the question from Is this belief true? to Is this belief coherent with my other beliefs and actions?
So will you go to the fridge or keep watching the game? Your choice shows your preferences and what you think is so.
I'm not sure what the model is, but the other components are pretty obvious. Perhaps the Bayesian theory works - I wouldn't know how to assess it. Can we run the process in a lab and assess whether it gets the answer right - or what?
The thing is, it runs decision to action. The question here is whether you can run it backwards to read from action to decision. The difficulty is that most readings will be underdetermined, I suppose.
Quoting Banno
I didn't know I was challenging it - though one might have thought that a two-valued logic would have a problem - not with the probability of a coin toss, but with degrees of confidence.
I don't quite understand the concept of a model for our reasoning.
Quoting Banno
I see. Do we care whether the two are the same thing?
Quoting Banno
Only if you can read it correctly.
What could it be to "read it correctly"? The presumption here seems to be that there is a seperate and "correct" belief, perhaps a piece of mental furniture, apart from the choice to go to the fridge or not.
But neither of us want to say that.
Perhaps "correctly" is over-stating it. But it is also possible to revise my interpretation in the light of more and better information or even to actually misinterpret my action
One can go to the fridge for many reasons apart from taking out a beer. One can take a beer out of the fridge for many reasons apart from feeling thirsty.
I'm not saying that there is not a range of equally acceptable answers, though my report is helpful in narrowing down the field. But there are also answers that may look right and turn out to be wrong.
I assure you, my mind is completely unfurnished.
As is mine.
Quoting Ludwig V
Yes, indeed. But if we are to do so consistently, we might do well to presume a few things. Ramsey doesn't tell us how to be certain. He tells us what it means to be coherently uncertain to reason, act, and believe in a way that fits together, even when the world is incomplete, and we are fallible.
Your preferences reveal what matters to you, that your beliefs are not binary but admit of degree, that you would do well to choose those acts that maximise expected utility, given your beliefs, and that you can update your beliefs, given new information. And perhaps most originally, that you would do well to value your beliefs so as to be internally consistent; so as to avoid a dutch book.
That this is not the whole explanation for your possible actions does not retract from the usefulness of these suggestions.
I have a replica of Versailles in mine. You're missing out.
I got a ton of unreal stuff in mine, bordering on a chaotic rhapsody if Im being honest, all of which Im somehow persuaded I cant do without.
Language games. Put unreal stuff in an unreal place, then call it by real names. Sure. Why not.
Well, I can see that a Dutch book would be a bad idea. On the other hand, there is the possibility of a "Czech book", in which the probabilities add up to less than 1. Wikipedia, which is never wrong, tells me that always pays out to the gambler.
Quoting Banno
That sounds wonderful, and better than the sceptical bewailing of our failure to match the traditional expectations.
I can see that conforming to the requirements will avoid some nasty traps, so that's good. But I can't see that it will do more than that.
You have talked quite a bit about making decisions under uncertainty - about medical treatments, weather forecasts, coin-tossing, and beer in fridges. I was replying to all of that and I may have confused things by quoting a particular paragraph. I wasn't trying to 'run it backwards' to interpret a decision.
The model is your idea of how some aspect of the world works. It provides the probabilities of various outcomes.
OK. That makes sense.
Quoting GrahamJ
I'm trying to keep the enthusiasm for Bayes in proportion by anchoring our conversation in how we do things, or how we think we do things, when we aren't relying on Bayes. I'm trying to work out whether we can rely on Bayes or not. At present, the assumption is that we can. My mind is not made up.
As for running the Bayesian process backwards, I didn't think you were trying to. The idea came from me alone. It may seem a bit crazy, but we have two questions to ask about these situations. There are two question. One is forward-looking - what shall I do? The other is backward-looking - why did that person do that? So far as I can see, Bayes helps with forward-looking. My question is whether it can help with backward-looking. I don't see why we couldn't use Bayes to reconstruct a decision after the event. That would be an analytic process that could clarify what was going on.
I want to go back to this:Quoting Banno
I hope it's clear that I am not advocating doing induction using probability. Better to drop induction all together and instead look at how a bit of maths can help show us if our beliefs - held for whatever reason, or no reason at all - are consistent.
Help with consistency is always a good idea. Dropping induction, I fear, may be more difficult. Pavlovian conditioning works at levels beyond the reach of voluntary control.
Quoting Banno
I prefer this Humean explanation. But I thought that since the fifties and sixties, we had all given up worrying about the deductive invalidity of induction. Why are we revisiting the past? I'm sure the Bayes process has its place, but I don't really see why induction needs to be replaced or even can be replaced. There is one thing the Bayes process can do that cannot be done any other way - it can give us some help in dealing with one-off probabilities. (Not even induction can do that!)
I gather we agree that induction - the conclusion that a general rule is true, on the basis of specific instances - is problematic.
We have it from Hume, Wittgenstein et al. the despite this, it is not unreasonable to believe in some general rule, given specific instances.
We have it from Ramsey and others that there are solid statistical methods for comparing and revising various beliefs, and we agree that these are A Good Thing.
Do we have a disagreement?
I think I may be a bit more sceptical than you. But I agree that you have outlined the context in which we need to think about this technique.
The distinctive feature of Bayes is that it enables us to articulate a single case. So it will always be an good place to start.
I keep recalling a slogan I remember from the days when computers were new. Maybe you also remember GIGO - garbage in, garbage out. I don't see how that doesn't apply to this process as well. This is why an algorithm cannot improve on the data it start from. What it can do is to articulate intuitions suspicions and prejudices and reveal where they are wrong and where they are right. That's not nothing.
Quoting Banno
The key word there is "revising".
Repeated applications of the Bayesian process, in which the first run uses whatever starting-points we have and subsequent runs feed back the outcomes from that. Perhaps in the context of an scientific investigation of some problem or project - which I understand was the context that Bayes had in mind. Wouldn't that develop more accurate predictions - not necessarily to the point of developing a universal law, as simple induction does, but it could develop a more complex collection of laws and it could certainly develop more accurate probabilities?
It's a more formalized and accurate process of trial and error.
That's just a sketch on the back of an envelope.
Bayesian analysis takes a prior and updates it given further information. Ramsey is different, more fundamental. His stuff is setting out what rationality looks like in a situation in which we have only partial belief - no certainty. The betting structure shows gives us a way of understanding what a belief and preference amount to, using just behaviour.
I wasn't thinking of Bayesian analysis in my comments, until that was raised by your good self.
So not so much about laws.
This needs a good example. I'll work on it.
Well, gambling was important in the development of probability theory from the beginning. So it's no surprise that it crops up here. More than that, it's true that people do sometimes challenge a claim that they disagree with by suggesting the proposer puts their money where their mouth is. But I'm irritated that, in this context, people talk as if the size of the bet is somehow an index of the strength of the belief. Outside of artificial situations in labs, that's just not the case. A bet is a balance between risk and reward assessed in the context of the degree of confidence and in the wider context of the bet.
Of course, if you use a bet as a model for all behaviour under uncertainty, the scope of the theory is extended. But it seems at least possible that there are limits to that scope. Insurance is like a bet in some ways, but quite different in other ways. Is it helpful to think of a decision to buy a particular car or house as a bet? And so on.
Quoting Banno
I'll look forward to that.
You have a plant. You water it every day. This is not a symptom of a hidden, private belief, on Ramsey's account - it is your belief. Notice the similarity to Ryle.
A Bayesian account presumes some level of belief and modifies it, without saying what that belief is. You think 150ml is enough for the plant, it starts to wither, so you adjust the watering up to 200ml, and so on, adjusting your belief according to the outcome.
Ramsey offers a minimal account of the nature of belief, while the Bayesian account assigns a value to a belief without specifying what that belief might be. Ramsey gives an account of beliefs nature; Bayesianism gives a rule for beliefs revision.
So your criticism that Bayesianism assigns a value to belief without saying what belief is, is quite fair. But does not apply to Ramsey.
A few paragraphs into that section.
To be fair I didn't know the passage I just guessed it was Kant, and had some help.
I'll bet the same against you, on the odds that it doesn't -- given I have nothing and I could win on the bluff I might as well.
That's what I meant to imply by the 1 million dollar buy in before. Maybe it's stupid. I ought read Ramsey that @Banno linked to judge either way.
I distrust betting on the whole. It's a test of who is right and who is wrong -- so I can persuade a person to bet against that the LNC* is false in at least one circumstance, and then provide the argument from the liar's sentence (which will certainly not persuade), and we'd be right back doing philosophy again rather than betting.
*EDIT: I think going for the LEM is much easier but that'd undermine my point: that at a certain spot we'd stop betting and start talking philosophy
OK, fair.
So, bets, promises, posts on one hand and paying up, following through, and reading on the other.
You put the difference very neatly. Only, I didn't intend it as a criticism, but as an analysis.
BTW, yes, I had thought of Ryle when Ramsey first came up. I shall take the opportunity to say, because it needs to be said as often as possible, that Ryle is not a behaviourists the sense that Watson and Skinner are. (I can't say whether that's true for Ramsey, since I haven't read the texts). He has a "thick" conception of what action is, whereas Watson and Skinner have a "thin" conception. To put it another way, where Watson and Skinner think of the brain as a telepone exchange - a switching mechanism - Ryle and (I guess) Ramsey think of the mind as what enables us to act rationally.
Quoting Moliere
Well done! I found a copy of the chapter on some obscure web-site, but couldn't find any attribution - which was a little frustrating.
You notice, I hope, that Kant's account of the incident is entirely true to life. But he considers his "victim" as a person like him. He doesn't consider how much a peasant would stake, given that they have virtually no money.
Quoting Moliere
Yes. You see how your thinking is conditioned by risk and reward in relation to your resources. Yes, of course, it is a non-standard, even contrarian, decision, but nonetheless, the amount you will bet is not an index of your belief, but the result of several interacting factors. To fnd the strength of belief, you have to work through all those factors.
Quoting Moliere
I like the twist that events will take you back to philosophy, because there has to be agreement on the outcome.
Quoting Moliere
I'm sorry. I don't remember what the buy-in was.
Quoting Banno
I'm sorry. I don't see what you are getting at.
Quoting Moliere
I can see the link between the two. But I don't see how that fits with what @Banno says.
On the left hand side I have three examples of representing belief, and on the right hand side I have each corresponding constituting actions of belief. At least, that's what I was thinking in offering the examples: Also to get a better idea of this wider sense than the bet, to see what other species of representing/constituting belief there may be.
I know you have moved to some interesting discussion here, but the issues below still seem live to me, and related to where you are now.
And related to post on the Bernard Williams thread.
Quoting Banno
So your last word internally seems to frame the whole position. Because phrases like somewhere we didnt intend or somewhere that doesnt fulfill the function we took ourselves to be engaging in or how the practice normally works or what it aims at.. seem to confuse the issue of whether there is a metaphysical end-point or not (since they all sound like euphemisms for metaphysical end-points or causes).
You appear to be saying that a philosophers best (or better) use of skills is to take models and language games and rigorously determine their consistencies and inconsistencies, confirm coherence, and root out incoherence. Philosophic language ought to be aiming at coherent and consistent models, internally, and can side-step judgments regarding correspondence type analyses that endeavor only to point externally to the world or metaphysical end-points we ought to be led to.
Are philosophers to frame their questions tightly focused on internal consistency, and build standards that are most uniquely philosophic when those standards are based on coherence, not correspondence?
You seem to be saying that all correspondence usages of truth or facts about the world should be left to physics models and agreed upon stipulated languages like biology, or mythology, or good literature. But philosophy remains best (or better I should say to avoid reference to some metaphysical end-point) when it aims to weed out inconsistencies and incoherence from any language, from any logic.
To frame this another way, the better philosophical discussions are about whether a belief may be true because it is consistent internally with what it purports to say and actually does say as a model. Less rigorous philosophy unwittingly or carelessly falls back into discussing what is actually true, in the world, regardless of how things may have been worded (and regardless of the well-established epistemic and metaphysical problems correspondence entails).
Is that what you think, and somewhat what Williamson was getting at? Doing better means clarifying the coherent, not discovering the correspondent?
Quoting J
I do agree that one does not need already to have an idea of the perfect or ultimate item. I agree because the subject of this sentence is an item. There is no ultimate item. At least not necessarily.
But then, how are we to ever mean ultimate - how is the word ever a valid part of a useful model? How, for instance, did I know there is no such thing as the ultimate item? How can we measure improve or better and apply them?
The point I was trying to make that for some reason seems to only interest me was that you in fact DO have the ultimate or best in mind whenever you say enrich or progress or improve - ultimate is your metaphysical measuring stick, or metaphysical end, or cause. Its not an item, but a clear enough concept to tell you that item over there aint the ultimate item.
Quoting J
Ill get back to a constitutive example, but, I dont think I rejected top choice as best - an idea like top will always be found near the idea of best. My point is that an idea like best will always be found near an idea like better.
You raise a good example of what Im trying to point out. You said, piety is what the gods love provides no content.
So while I see that piety is what the gods love is a good example of circular reasoning or possible tautology between piety and gods love, which provides no content to piety internally and adds no measure of consistency to using pious; however, I also see that, for some other reason, you arent talking about say brown or honey.
What is piety? Piety is a sweet flavor, like honey. Or wait, piety is a brownish color, like mud. Or wait, piety is what the gods love.
So what gods love actually does provide some content, because Im sure you know that, at the very least, piety is not like honey and brown. Piety is about the gods - that gets some work done. An idea like piety will only be found near an idea like god. This doesnt ultimately define either, but the idea of brown honey is useless, that is for certain (somehow).
I think what I am trying to point to is indirectly reflected in this: just like it is hard to give a good constitutive example of a superlative ideal such as best, it is hard to give a good example of something wholly non-constitutive such piety is what gods like is not wholly non-consitutive. Speaking at all requires coherence AND a corresponding world for us communicate at all, for us to agree and disagree through language. (I think this needs to be developed, and its development would make distinctions between speaking and communicating where communicating requires a mind independent world in between two communicants, but I think I digress )
But to finish my more general (but I think necessary for rigor) point. You and Banno seem to want to be able to develop content using words like better and enrich while avoiding inherent references to the best and the richest. That to me is using words like piety without any orientation or end in site, in which case maybe piety is really green and smells funny. There needs to exist something upon which we both can agree, apart from us both, external to our language, about which we are speaking and possibly agreeing; not simply language. To use better, we need to see: 1) two things 2) being compared by some standard, to then form 3) agreement on which makes sense to call the better or not.
Analyzing 2) only, the standard, we are talking about a shoe-horning into the picture of a metaphysical measuring stick of worst-better-best. That is what better means in itself; it means that which is in between the worst and the best, but leaning towards the best (or something like that). Better entails worst and best, in itself, by definition, in every appropriate use. We need that to be the case, to use better at all.
But applying/using/testing this ideal laden measuring stick also requires items in the world, appraised by some standard (ie music that is able to be danced to - which is better, x or y style of music). Marry the measuring stick of some specific standard, apply it to two or more items and you can debate and communicate which is better.
If we remove the metaphysical, we cant have this debate.
And if we are always only looking for coherence and consistency, the content can always remain hypothetical and progress always means yes, thats coherent or no, thats incoherent. (Better becomes a weak judgement of something more plainly good or not good.)
Consider this: it is coherent and internally consistent to say this: when comparing only two items, the one that is better is also the one this is best. This is a coherent understanding of worst-better-best in a context of two items, without any need to actually consider two actual objects in the world. I believe you are saying analyzing statements like this is philosophys best use, correct? So objects in the world are hypothetical, if needed at all, to do philosophy.
So now I ask you, must the best philosophy relegate itself to identifying and clarifying consistent/inconsistent and coherent/incoherent relations internal to systems/models? Or is there more to it that can still be rigorous and ought to be the work of philosophers?
Yes. Though it needn't.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Yes.
I almost left the word "internally" off that paragraph, yet you see it as pivotal. So something is adrift.
The simple point is that we can deal with our present situation without positing some absolute.
I don't have much more to say on the issue.
It seems to me that you do not have an argument, so much as an intuition - something like that we can only have consistency if there is a "metaphysical endpoint", whatever that might be.
But that's not right. It's as if you were to notice that (locally) every number has a higher number, and conclude that therefore there must be a highest number. It ain't so.
Ok. Did you argue that somewhere without positing some absolute?
I juxtaposed "relative" and "absolute" measurements, in the example of hot and cold - I hope that is clear.
We can instead play with "local", as in the example of cardinal numbers. Locally, given any cardinal, we can add one, producing another cardinal. That doesn't lead to the "absolutist" conclusion that there must be a highest cardinal.
So can we set out an argument that making any comparison requires some sort of "absolute"? I don't think so.
So good philosophy can completely forego the devotion to identifying and clarifying consistent/inconsistent and coherent/incoherent relations internal to systems/models?
Quoting J
Can you give an example?
Quoting Banno
I'll help. I think your intuition is along these lines:
1. Making any comparison requires a standard.
2. That standard must be fixed
3. That fixed standard must be independent on the things being compared
4. to be both fixed and independent is to be absolute
5. hence any comparison requires an absolute standard
Something like that?
Can you see why this is incorrect?
This reminds me of the Aristotle's practical syllogism, which is supposed to give a structure that applies to all actions whatever. In a way, it does, in the sense that you can shoe-horn actions into the formula. The same applies to Aristotle's syllogism, which was thought, for a long time, to give the structure of all arguments. What in fact happened was that arguments were shoe-horned into that structure, which was not particularly helpful. What tells you that the betting structure applies to all actions? The fact that you can shoe-horn things into the structure is not enough.
Quoting Fire Ologist
I'm interested in the limitation. Can you give me an example of an inappropriate use? Do you mean that in the inappropriate uses, better does not entail worst and best?
My problem is that although what you say applies, in a sense, to many cases, whether it applies to all cases is not clear to me, so your inappropriate uses might be rather interesting.
Quoting Fire Ologist
"Consistent" and "Coherent" only apply to a number of elements that relate to each other - that is, to a system. "Inconsistent" and "incoherent" mean "not systematic".
Sure. We learn where to use the syllogism, and where not to. We might do much the same with Ramsey's idea. We are not obligated to shoe-horn.
Again, I'm not seeing a substantive point if disagreement.
Or for a broader example, Thomas Nagel's work is my ideal of how philosophy can be remain rigorous and also ask questions that go beyond clarifying what is consistent or coherent within a given model. There are certainly others.
One thing to notice: The requirement to "completely forego the devotion to . . . " is surely too rigid, and also tendentious. By putting it in terms of "devotion," you're already building a rhetorical case against it, aren't you? Couldn't we just talk about "a type of philosophy that doesn't primarily concern itself with . . ." ?
Everyone seems to be comfortable using the word better and understanding what it is intended to add to a conversation. I am saying, by saying and using better appropriately, one not only must understand what better means and how to use better, one must also know what best means and how to use it as well. Better is defined by best. The better tends towards the best, while the worse tends towards the worst. You dont know one of these, you dont use one of these appropriately, without knowing the others.
Mere assertion.
"Longer" is defined by "longest'.
Nuh.
That is the intuition. I think I see that it is not valid. Something about 2 and 4 seems tautological so nothing new can be concluded.
But
Quoting Banno
How is ANY use of better anything more than mere assertion?
I AM merely making an assertion.
Im basically asserting that language doesnt work unless it refers to absolutes.
Quoting Banno
That looks full of absolutes to me.
Absolute misleading.
Absolute function we took ourselves to be engaging in.
An absolute normally
Etc.
These are your assertions. Im okay with assertions, depending on what follows from them. I think what follows from the assertion we dont need absolutes is we cannot communicate.
I think the way you intuitively talk demonstrates my intuition about the reliance on absolutes essential to meaningful, useful language in the world of rational speakers.
The argument I could use help with is that two rational agents cannot communicate absent a medium separate from the both that lies between them and is fixed with absolutes; language is that medium, full of references to items named, relations rationalized, and absolute concepts binding these to the two rational agents at once.
Something must be fixed in this mix, or nothing like a communication would ever occur. And it already has occurred. I agree, its not much of an argument, but I think it is more than an adequate demonstration. We both need help with our assertions.
Ok, what you assert is true.
Then there's not much point in continuing this conversation, is there.
I agree with that. Williamson himself didnt think his essay got any significant philosophic work done and lacked rigor, but I agree - its a work for philosophers exclusively and gets some work done.
Nagel keeps the questions alive.
Quoting J
You said though it need not and so I asked if you were saying completely forego since it need not.
You changed relegated to devoted.
I am not building the case as much as confirming your case.
You ask, Couldn't we just talk about "a type of philosophy that doesn't primarily concern itself with . . ." ?
Well yes, but two points in the context of this thread. Isnt this thread about more precision, so doesnt primarily concern doesnt seem rigorous and begs further details about what is the primary concern and how secondary or tertiary is the less concerning.
Also, I think this contradicts you saying though it need not. (Which is why you sensed a case against it.)
Bottom line to me, philosophy must concern itself with consistency and coherence of language and argument - that is logical validity. But philosophy must also concern itself with the world and the persons in it and their existential/metaphysical questions - that is where soundness of arguments is measured.
If you seek validity with no concern for soundness, you live in a hypothetical world at best, and further, like math, we all must think the exact same thing about what is valid. If you seek soundness but no concern for validity, no one will ever be able to follow your reasoning and logic and understand you, and we all may think totally different things. But if you can communicate both validity AND soundness, well maybe there is something truly interesting to talk about.
This isnt an argument. Its just why I bother to seek something valuable by talking with other people.
The sound experience conveyed validly.
I could be wrong.
What a mess? You seem to have more to say
You're absolutely right, I did, as in "devote itself to" -- a slightly different meaning, but my apologies for not remembering.
So thats it then.
None of which implies absolutes, whatever they might be.
Nah, just had to return to real life for a while. But I wanted to be sure to acknowledge my mistake first.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Precision is a focus here, for sure. But not at the cost of accuracy. I'm suggesting that it's more accurate to talk about a type of philosophy -- Nagel's, perhaps -- which avails itself when necessary of all the rigorous, analytic tools, but is aiming to discuss topics that lie beyond analysis as such. To try to carve this up into primary, secondary, and tertiary seems hopeless, but maybe you can give an example of what that might look like? I may not be picturing what you mean.
Quoting Fire Ologist
I don't see it. Can you elaborate?
Quoting Fire Ologist
Fair enough. As long as you agree it isn't an argument. There are about a bazillion arguments out there about how soundness and validity connect, if you want to chase them down. Maybe start with correspondence theories of truth?
Maybe none?
But you have yet to be clear as to what an "absolute" is.
I hope I've helped you see that your intuition is difficult, perhaps impossible, to clearly articulate.
You might reconsider.
The relevance here is to whether we must start doing philosophy at some firm foundation, or whether we find ourselves already doing philosophy, and must start instead from where we are.
Hence the relevance of Ramsey, who shows us a way to start from indifference.
And Wittgenstein, who asks us to look at what we do, not what we theorise.
I love it. Thats philosophy to me. Analysis, but not just analysis of analysis, but also analysis of living in the world or topics that lie beyond analysis as such. Im good with that.
I started a post titled Being in the Middle.
Why do you think what we are doing should be called philosophy. Are the ends so remote here in the middle that we may as well call this making cookies?
No. We call it philosophy whatever philosophy absolutely turns out to be, whether we ever get there, however it may ever be known, but still, we dont call it automotive engineering. We call it philosophy.
How is that?
There is something absolute involved, though I havent and maybe cant define it.
But if we dont aim for it, your next reply might be anything at all and neither could know of it was or wasnt doing more philosophy.
That's what we are doing.
Did it just click?
Yes. Id rather call the two anspects 1) analysis of analyzing (logic, language), and 2) analysis of the world (what language is about, why we speak, agreement itself).
So nothing need be outside of analysis.
Well, no. Im still trying to figure out why you disagree with me.
I can't really "disagree" with something that is so unclear.
Where we are, is already in the middle - neither starting nor at an end. But instead, already using language and reasoning and willing and wondering
We can stay here.
Or we can do philosophy - which, inevitably remains already in the middle, but ALSO adds a new start. We construct it. And to do so, introduce the fixed start. We identify an absolute and stand on it or aim for it.
Quoting Banno
How is that universe youve just thrown me into any clearer a picture than what I am trying to acknowledge and talk about.
If you want to further clarify finding ourselves already doing philosophy, in my experience, at least one of not many absolutes will appear (also vaguely, but not with me in the middle but with me conceptually so I can call something a start).
There is no way to be perfectly clear about that which lies outside of analysis.
But if there was nothing to it, we would never build any agreement whatsoever. And we build agreement all of the time.
Quoting Banno
First, I bet you could.
But more to the point, I bet you can agree to something unclear. I think agreeing on the unclear is part of your point about indifference. Careful, rigorous, moves, but ultimately in the middle with unknown beginnings and ends.
You presume these are the same. Are you simply stipulating an absolute?
The conversation is now too suppositional to be useful.
What kind of line would separate being in the middle with being anywhere else (like a start)? There is an absolute difference between middle and start.
Starts make a line.
Middles need no lines or distinctions.
A stipulation, then?
"Here is a hand".
Not as asn observation, but as a stipulation - "this counts as a hand"
Something to hang the door from.
And off we go.
Stipulations are functional, temporary versions of absolutes.
But if we never seek to convert one of these stipulations into something that just is, then you are right - this conversation is too suppositional to be useful.
What is a stipulation but a form of supposition?
Stipulations work really well when hanging doors. But nothing is forever, and all stipulations can be undercut, dissected, or shown to have been il-constructed and so serving no purpose at all.
Absolutes are suppositions. But suppositions we expect to remain as if fixed and permanent despite our desire to say we doubt they are absolute.
The LNC is an absolute. Maybe someday well find we can use reason while contradicting reason, but probably not, so I see no need to say the LNC is merely stipulated and temporary and provisional awaiting its revision. Its absolute - I cant think otherwise and be thinking.
I exist is true absolutely. Again, I cant think otherwise and be thinking.
Therefore, absolutes exist is absolute. I cant think otherwise and know I exist and know that while I exist I cannot simultaneously not exist.
I wouldnt continue doing philosophy if I concluded absolutely that all we say is based solely on temporary stipulation. If there was no truth despite any and all stipulations, why would I care what anyone else think. Im willing to stipulate that none of you are any better at life than me, so why should I stipulate things with you. Id rather focus on less profound problems of there was nothing profound but a profound stipulation.
These are still assertions, but ones I cant deny meaningfully, or without guile and misrepresentation. I cant tell you what I see, but I just showed you how I see it, so maybe you can find it yourself. Such is the nature of the absolute - there whether we are looking or not, and not known until we see for ourselves.
Im waiting for something to click in you, because I am sure you would be better equipped to argue it.
Another mere assertion.
Why not "absolutes are arbitrary invalid inductions from particle instances"?
Quoting Fire Ologist
Is it? Then whence paraconsistent logic, Dialetheism, Many-Valued Logics, Intuitionistic Logic, Non-Reflexive Logics...
The pattern, were you agree with the critique of your position, only to snap back of a sudden to were you started, is repeating.
I see what you are saying. Thats where we agree.
But I see more than that. And I dont see it as contradictory. This is what I cant get you to see.
What is odd to me is not that you dont agree with me, but that you see your own position as coherent.
You cant say better in any meaningful way. I agree we could all agree something is better, but who really gives a shit what we think? Certainly nobody in 100 years.
Im trying to say something, anything, one thing, that someone might give a shit about in 1,000 years, or if they were an alien race of persons 10,000 years advanced, or a god.
I think they would all agree the LNC will always help clarify reasoning.
I am going for it, anyway, despite stepping out too far over the precipice.
And I see you doing the same but you wont admit it.
Can and do.
This thread has been better. Others will agree. That'll do.
Sure. I agree. I wont speak for you, but I tried and failed. That makes me one of the others I guess, who agree with your application of better to something other than this part of the thread.
But do you think there are still others who could reasonably argue against us? Showing how this was the best part of the whole thread? Is that reasonably possible? (You know you cant answer no and be consistent.) And if so, dont you see how that just wont do? How is that a rigorous use of better, one that is reasonably disagreeing with you and me about how this part of the thread stinks in comparison to other parts?
Maybe the best part of this thread is yet to come, making those other better roasts pale. Maybe if we shoot for the absolute best, meaning full agreement from all parties about undeniable validity and soundness, clear and concise truth about the world, captured for all time, maybe we might actually make a little progress, actually say something better, that is worth saying.
Naaa. Lets just be content to cut our losses. As usual. (At least this time we arent cursing each other - thats something better maybe? :hearts: )
OK.
Quoting Banno
I agree it's not going to change the world.
Why?
Personally I know that what I say is in the face of an absurd world -- so it will only matter locally.
However, that's what matters. Our responding to you demonstrates that "who gives a shit?" is us, here, talking.
You think that, but the only reason you think it is because you can't imagine things otherwise, yes? :
Quoting Fire Ologist
"I can't think otherwise" is usually a hint at a kind of transcendental argument going on, if it be articulated.
If it's absolute, then it's not absolutely absolute -- it's only absolute relative to your ability to imagine or think.
Nice.
How locally? Just for you, in your own head so to speak, or how wide can the local go, and why do you think that? (Arent all humans on earth throughout all of human history just a local blip? - where do you found your local boundaries if they extend beyond your own head at all?)
I dont agree that it is necessary that what matters locally couldnt matter universally. I know you didnt say that expressly, but you said it will only matter locally. It will have to matter locally for sure, but only? Are you certain about that? I know you said personally but is that part of the substance of the rest of your assertion?
Quoting Moliere
Is that a red flag or something? Banno liked it, so I must have stepped into some forlorn corner. (You are focusing on how I am making my arguments, not what the arguments are saying. I usually try to let the how emerge from a focus on the what.)
Before characterizing the argument or doing the work to articulate it, can you think you are not thinking? Or can you think you both exist and do not exist in the same sense of you and exist at the same time in the same manner?
Im more interested in what those experiences might be, or conducting one of those exercises, described in whatever ugly terms you could muster. I mean, maybe you can show me how not to think Im thinking when Im thinking. I cant do it. Thats what I described as an example of something absolutely all who speak can always say. If you can undo that, I might find more credence on only locally in the notion that I know that what I say is in the face of an absurd world -- so it will only matter locally.
I'd say "just for us", rather than just for me. It's not like I invented logic, philosophy, language, etc. I'm connected to others and through that connection -- which included a great deal of care on the part of others before I was able to care in turn -- I am enabled to participate in the game of giving and taking reasons along with everyone else so enabled. Part of that game is in modifying the rules of giving and taking reasons -- a reason for a reason. I think that's the part where we can collectively build the rules of inference in a sort of sui generis manner for every endeavor.
Now, maybe the cosmic universe cares in some sense about that, but from my perspective it only matters locally. I don't even care if there is a universal perspective that says it all. My finitude ensures that I'll never attain that.