The ineffable
Quoting jgill
Perhaps it's the denizens of philosophy forums, as opposed to philosophers, who perform such wonders.
The problem with claiming that something is ineffable is, of course, the liar-paradox-like consequence that one has thereby said something about it.
There are a few possible responses. The one apparently advocated by Wittgenstein was to simply remain silent about the ineffable. Folk are not very good at doing this. A second possibility is simply to say that ascribing ineffability to something is to say that it has no referent. Another is to treat "ineffable" as a second-order predicate, somewhat like existence, such that ascribing ineffability is not ascribing a property but saying something (what, exactly?) about those properties. A fourth possibility is that to say that something is ineffable is to say that it can only be understood by listing the attributes that do not apply to it. Or it might be that the ineffable cannot be said, only experienced. Or perhaps it can only understood by metaphors. Or it might be an honorific, just a way of marking certain language as sacrosanct, or certain subjects as not available for further comment.
Or it might demark where nonsense and irrationality begins.
Or each of the above.
How long is a thread about what cannot be said?
It's not easy to talk about something that can't be expressed in words. Good luck.
Perhaps it's the denizens of philosophy forums, as opposed to philosophers, who perform such wonders.
The problem with claiming that something is ineffable is, of course, the liar-paradox-like consequence that one has thereby said something about it.
There are a few possible responses. The one apparently advocated by Wittgenstein was to simply remain silent about the ineffable. Folk are not very good at doing this. A second possibility is simply to say that ascribing ineffability to something is to say that it has no referent. Another is to treat "ineffable" as a second-order predicate, somewhat like existence, such that ascribing ineffability is not ascribing a property but saying something (what, exactly?) about those properties. A fourth possibility is that to say that something is ineffable is to say that it can only be understood by listing the attributes that do not apply to it. Or it might be that the ineffable cannot be said, only experienced. Or perhaps it can only understood by metaphors. Or it might be an honorific, just a way of marking certain language as sacrosanct, or certain subjects as not available for further comment.
Or it might demark where nonsense and irrationality begins.
Or each of the above.
How long is a thread about what cannot be said?
Comments (1315)
I waited until we hit the 1k mark, out of an attempt at respect to @jgill -- but now we going to really figure out this ineffable thang at 2k posts. heeeelllll yeah. :D
Quoting Banno
Must be. . . incommensurable?
I think I'm still on the naturalist side. I'm on team disappointment, at least, however that leads us ;)
OK, that's weird; I don't know why that would be.
Quoting Banno
I don't see the relevance. If there is a family resemblance then there must be some resemblance, i.e. similarity, however small.
I'm not familiar with Austin's example of grey, you'll need to give some more detail.
There's a long reply half-written at the back of my mind that rants on about how phenomenology is supposed to provide a firm foundation for philosophical speculation but instead gets itself tied into a knot by presuming to talk about what it itself supposes to be ineffable. Something along those lines is implicit in the OP here.
I feel differently about the other phenomenologists, though. And Sartre kind of qualifies, I think, in the Cartesian sense, though his focus isn't that, and he is creative enough to be read on his own. But really I think it's Merleau-Ponty and Levinas which have won me over, making me realize I need to dig into Husserl for realzies.
Take your time. I'm slow, but I do come back around to things eventually.
Can you provide a quote from any phenomenologist to support your strange contention that they suppose what they are talking about to be ineffable.
Apparently.
But you are familiar with the arguments in PI, I assume? See the section in WIkipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_resemblance#Formal_models, which derives from something I wrote many years ago. The bit that is missing is that a family resemblance can grow, so there can be no definite statement of what that similarity is.
Edit: Seems to be what @Constance has in mind, and I suspect @Moliere would at least like it to be correct. @Joshs view is harder to grasp, but generally works, homunculus-like, from subjective stuff to infer an "outside" word.
The smell of coffee is nothing but a sensation that belongs to a certain thing, experienced as the thing it is conceived to be. This thing being sipped will always be the same coffee experience iff the sensation of the thing being piped sufficiently replicates the sensation by which coffee became known.
Coffee with sugar will always be experienced as coffee with sugar, coffee with just milk will be experienced as coffee with just milk. Same for old coffee, burnt coffee, cat-shit coffee, Folger’s freeze dried coffee, and on and on an on. It’s how we are informed of differences in fundamental conceptions, by adding to or taking from, those basics. And the coffee we sip, is of course, merely water of different qualities, which are determined by the sensations given from them.
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Quoting Isaac
The evidence is quite apparent. It manifests in how a thing elicits a feeling. It manifests as “this just doesn’t feel right”; “I don’t feel good about doing this”. “Je-SUS, that’s the ugliest freakin’ thing I’ve ever seen”. This kind of sensation addresses the quality of our subjective condition, and is most often understood as mere opinion.
As to where it is….ehhhh, consciousness is as good a location as any. It isn’t an existence per se. Doesn’t matter much, in that every otherwise acceptably rational human makes aesthetic judgements. Or, to be fair, does something in the form that could be called aesthetic judgements.
I can perceive a sports car that appears blood-red in color. What’s the point again?
Quoting Banno
A transcendental argument is merely an illegitimate logical construction, insofar as the premises are derived from conditions the conclusion cannot meet, or vice versa, the truth or falsity of it thus being irrelevant.
Don't like nothing buts, for the same sort of reason that I don't like transcendental arguments. That it's the smell of coffee is down to the place of coffee in one's day to day antics. The "nothing but" hides that.
Sure, something can change and become more like something else, but I don't see how that fact rules out stating what parts of the things have become more similar to each other. In any case "no definite statement of what that similarity is" sounds like ineffability.
Love that. Explains a lot, having an argument for which the truth or falsity is irrelevant.
Quoting Mww
I ask myself that, often.
Time to go do other things. Have you noticed how good it feels when you stop banging your head against the wall?
Later. Take care.
No, I never said any such thing, and I can't see how this is relevant.
Quoting Banno
The point was that Isaac implied that they are not the same thing, by explicitly confirming that there is not a one-to-one correspondence relation between what the specified "neural activity" refers to, and what "I smell coffee" refers to. Clearly, we do not have two different names of the same thing then.
In the case where two distinct names refer to the same thing (like your example), there is a one to one correspondence in what the names refer to.
Further, if "neural activity", and " I smell coffee" are both descriptions, rather than names, then there is no identified, or named thing which these are supposed to describe. If you don't identify the thing which is being described, then there is no reason to believe that they describe the same thing. You have two separate descriptive phrases "neural activity", and "the smell of coffee", and no entity identified as the thing which these both describe.
If, as Isaac seemed to want to say, one is the named thing, and the other a description of the thing, then what "neural activity" and what "the smell of coffee" each refer to are of separate categories, like one being the subject, and the other the predicate. So in this case it would be a category mistake to say they both refer to the same thing, as "red" does not refer to the thing which is describe as being red, unless we are identifying the particular red of that thing.
Another possibility would be that there is an assumed thing, which the specified "neural activity", and "smell of coffee", as descriptive phrases, are both describing. But what could this third thing possibly be? And why assume a third thing which we have no indication of its existence, just because that's what's required to support such a piss-poor ontology?
So no matter how you look at it, what Isaac was saying did not make any sense.
Quoting Banno
The point was that it cannot function for the task at hand, as that would be made impossible by the prescribed circumstances.
No, no, no. You cannot make blanket generalizations like this. A small coffee with triple sugar is much different from a large with single sugar. And the experience of a coffee with milk and just a couple grains of sugar is much more similar to the experience of a coffee with just milk, than it is to the experience of a coffee with sugar, despite the fact that it is a coffee with sugar. That is why it is commonly said by philosophers that the senses deceive us.
Quoting Mww
It was with reference to
Quoting Mww
The sports car is a different tone in the shade, under a street light and in the full sun, yet red in all three cases. We use the same word for a range of different things. The drink tastes different when made in slightly different ways, yet we use the same word.
There need be nothing in common between various cases for which we use the same word. Hence the discussion of family resemblance. And hence the rejection of the essentialism that requires some one thing to be the same in order to justify the use of that word.
It's just not what we do.
Oh, but I can, and I’m justified in doing so, if the point to make was the valid notion of differences in experiences relative to differences in the objects senses.
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Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
….and said by the critical philosophers that they don’t. Deception is merely error in judgement, and judgement is not what the senses do, so…..
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Quoting Banno
Of course. And what do you suppose it is that tells you that? Perhaps the same as what tells you…so what? The car is this color, even if it appears not to be this color at this time under these conditions. Coffee is still coffee with sugar or without, hot, cold, burnt or otherwise. Sorta like ol’ Bertie, back in 1912….threw a tablecloth over the table, then asked if the table was still there despite being unseen as such. (Sigh)
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Quoting Banno
Need is irrelevant, in the face of universal necessity. I mean….the commonality is cloaked in the very assertion claiming there isn’t one.
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Quoting Banno
Good onya; and those who actually know what one is, wouldn’t be caught using one.
And I made a mistake, for which I should have known better. Paralogisms are arguments of illegitimate form, content be what it may, whereas transcendental arguments are false with respect to their content, hence immediately invalid. In short, transcendental arguments are those in which the categories are contained in the predicates of pure a priori cognitions, where they don’t belong.
Still…as in all philosophical doctrines, just depends on how one defines the term, which in turn depends on the doctrine in play. You say you don’t like them, but leave it to the reader to figure out for himself what it is you don’t like. You imagine one should be able to figure out what you mean by the term by associating it to its antecedents, but if one doesn’t understand the antecedents, or disagrees with them, he’s no better off then he ever was.
And you really should relinquish your love affair with David Stove. To say any propositional content with a hyphen is a bad argument is itself a bad argument.
OK, you can do what you want, it's a free world, but I don't buy your justification because you are making a very similar category mistake to the others. You were saying that "the smell of coffee" is experienced as a "thing", rather than saying what it really is, a generalization. It is this fact, that "the smell of coffee" represents a generalization, which allows for the vast variance within how "the smell of coffee" is described, that is demonstrated by Banno's flavour wheel. This intrinsic variance, along with the possibility of contradiction, indicates that what "the smell of coffee" refers to is not a thing.
Quoting Mww
Again, you are misrepresenting. Error in judgement can have many causes. Deception is a cause of error in judgement. It is not itself the error in judgement. You ought to separate the means from the end. That the error in judgement occurs, as the end, is evidence that the deception has been successful. But the act of deceiving is not necessarily successful. When we recognize that deception is a valid possibility as a cause of error in judgement, we can take measures to prevent it, and that includes not relying on that which might deceive (the senses in this case).
Quoting Mww:up:
Is precisely what I’m NOT doing. The smell of coffee is that by which an experience OF a thing is concluded, in the case of first instance of it, or, the smell of coffee is that by which knowledge of a thing is given, in all cases subsequent to, and under the same conditions as, the first. The first is a learning by synthesis, all others are then merely sufficient correspondences to it.
Smell is not a thing, therefore cannot in itself be an experience at all. But the smell of, henceforth subsumed under a conception, is of a particular thing, in this case coffee, therefore not a generalization. Now, coffee itself may be a generalization, but it is still the case that each particular coffee subsumed under the general conception, will exhibit its own sensation. Otherwise, how else to ground the distinction one from the other?
I shouldn’t have to tell you that the more conceptions subsumed under a general, and relating to it without contradiction, the better understood the thing will be. And if it is irrational to assign conceptions arbitrarily, then it must be that the assignment of conceptions must follow a rule, such that irrationality is circumvented. Because coffee is an empirical object, the rule must follow from that which is the case for any empirical object, and that which is the case for any empirical object which makes the rule and thereby the circumvention of irrational reasoning possible, is the sensation by which objects are presented to us in order for there to be anything to even assign non-contradictory conceptions to in the first place.
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Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Judgement is not an end, it is an intermediary result. It still must be allowed how the error in a judgement manifests, by its comparison to that which follows from it. That an error in judgement occurs must be proven.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, which presupposes that from which judgements occur.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Am I to understand by this, that the act of deceiving is the presupposition for the cause of errors in judgement? All we need to justify that, is posit what the act of deceiving is. If judgement is part of the cognitive process, the act of deceiving as cause must be antecedent to the error contained in the judgement as effect, thus also contained in the cognitive process. So what part of the cognitive process deceives? What’s worse, apparently, is whatever part that is, it may not deceive, thus may not be the cause of errors in judgement, which is to say there isn’t one. So some part of the cognitive process both deceives and doesn’t deceive, and the only way to tell which, is by whether or not there are errors in judgement. But determining whether or not there are errors in judgement can only arise from a judgement made on whether or not there has been a deception.
What a incredibly foolish….errr, irrational…..way to do things, wouldn’t you say? Let’s just remain with the idea there isn’t a deception, there is only a subsumption of conceptions in a synthesis of them that doesn’t relate to that which the conceptions represent. That this doesn’t belong to that isn’t a deception, it’s merely a misunderstanding, which manifests as a error in judgment, proven by a different understanding that does relate different conceptions properly. Simple, sufficient, logically non-contradictory. What more do we need?
I agree. Talk of 'true and 'false' can very often be imported into discourse in which they don't belong. I've argued elsewhere at length against the use of '...is true' as a cudgel. But this isn't addressing the issue.
The issue here is simply one of theorising and the incorporation of data into those theories (whether one uses true/false, or harmonious/disharmonius, or intelligible/unintelligible scales). None of this answers the critique. No matter the scale used, the question is one of what constitutes a move in the direction of greater valuation as opposed to the lesser (more true, more harmonious, more intelligible...) from where one started. If one starts with "this is how things seem to me" and then conducts any kind of 'investigation', one is implicitly affirming that the way things seem to one is lesser, by whatever measure, than the potential result of that investigation. Less true, less harmonious, less intelligible - whatever.
So the very nature of an investigation has, at it's core, an acceptance that the way things currently seem to one is flawed in some way - in whatever measure you're using to judge the model you have.
Once one has accepted that the ways things seem to one is potentially flawed, one cannot rationally, at the same time, use "but that's the way it seems to me" as a counter to any alternative model put forward. we've just accepted that the whole reason we're undertaking an 'investigation' in the first place is because of a lack of certainty about the way things currently seem to us.
Sufficiently?
Quoting Mww
I don't think even this is the case. On a nice day it will taste better than on a bad day.
Quoting Mww
But surely how a thing does something is the result of an investigation, it's not just given to us. We don't get to see how the engine works unless we look under the bonnet.
Quoting Isaac
Yes indeed. It would be impossible to have a world at all if we could not distinguish grouping and categories, if we could not talk about events that were more or less consistent with one group rather than another, that belonged or failed to belong to a category, system, pattern, scheme.
The battle-lines, if you want to call them that, between realists and relativists, modernists and postmodernists, is not over whether what I described above is possible, but what is the irreducible basis of the singular elements that particulate in gatherings and dispersions, integrations and differentiations? How do we understand the nature of causation and motivation most primordially?
Quoting Isaac
To the extent that one can say there is an ethical direction to postmodern thinking, it involves a preference for the coherent over the incoherent, the integrated over the fragmented, the intelligible
over the unintelligible. But this preference isn't over and above experiences of relative organization or disorganization. The two concepts , preference and integration, are synonymous. So saying that we investigate or aim toward or intend or desire is using a volunteeristic language to describe the fact that we find ourselves already thrown into situations, and our awareness of our ‘preferring’ is an after the fact observation. We find ourselves sense-making, and we talk about ourselves in terms of having a preference and an aim with respect to the way the contexts we are thrown into seem to us, and the way we would like them to seem to us.
Yes, the quality used when necessity doesn’t have the authority. Metaphysically speaking, the cognition of this sip cannot be understood as coffee unless there is enough in this sensation relatable to that sensation by which the conception “coffee” first became a valid conception. It became a valid conception when it could be said of it….I know what this is.
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Quoting Isaac
What sense does it make to suggest the type of day the coffee is consumed, determines what my sensation of it will be?
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Quoting Isaac
Investigation…yes, agreed. Still, what’s being investigated determines the kind of investigation it will be. Popping the skull to figure out how thinking works is very far from popping the hood on a car to see how an engine works. We think, thinking is a given. As a general rule, there are no humans that don’t think, even if there are vanishingly small exceptions to the rule. Thinking is given to us as just something else to investigate.
Transcendental arguments are those with roughly the following form:
1) A is true
2) The only way in which A could be so is if B
3) Hence, B is so.
The merit of the second premise is their Achille's heel. It is unfortunate that your friend Kant made such prominent use of them, but that's only of historical interest.
[quote="Mww;762500"...transcendental arguments are false with respect to their content, hence immediately invalid. In short, transcendental arguments are those in which the categories are contained in the predicates of pure a priori cognitions, where they don’t belong.[/quote]
An archaic phrasing. It would be preferable to point out that the argument posits some supposedly obvious state of affairs A such that B as a necessary condition for A in attempt to have folk agree that B is the case. They are not invalid, which is as well for Kant.
This came from:
Quoting Banno
The problem here is the truncated "nothing but" pretends that our sensations are prior to our "being in the world". It assumes the perspective of an homunculus. That's pretty much the assumption of @Joshs and @Constance, too.
We are however social creatures such that our sensations are not prior to but partially constitutive of a mind embedded in a world. You are not just sitting in your head with a bunch of Kant's a priori scripts, looking out at a world to which you have no direct access.
(@Moliere, by way of this being a part of the previously discussed rant. More or less the same criticism by the homunculus applies to phenomenology.)
Three phenomenologists offer three readings of sensation. You mentioned Heidegger’s subordination of sense to being-in-the -world:
(“Initially" we never hear noises and complexes of sound, but the creaking wagon, the motorcycle. We hear the column on the march, the north wind, the woodpecker tapping, the crackling fire. It requires a very artificial and complicated attitude in order to "hear" a "pure noise." The fact that we initialy hear motorcycles and wagons is, however, the phenomenal proof that Da-sein, as being-in-the-world, always already maintains itself together with innerworldly things at hand and initially not at all with "sensations" whose chaos would first have to be formed to provide the springboard from which the subject jumps off finally to land in a "world."(Being and Time).
Then there’s Merleau-Ponty, who was critical
of what he interpreted as Husserl’s reliance on a ‘hyle’ of sensation, a primitive content.
It appeared to Merleau-Ponty that Husserl treated
the elements of a flowing multiplicity of hyletic data as positive essences, as objects separable from what conditions them via subjective history. Instead, he argued, “ There is no hylé, no sensation which is not in communication with other sensations or the sensations of other people. “(P. Of Perception, p.471). Perceptual essence “is not a positive element, not a quiddity; it is rather a divergence within the corporeal field of things. The unity of the thing is of a piece with the unity of the entire field; and this field is grasped not as a unity of parts but as a living ensemble. The living ensemble cannot be recomposed of essences in the sense of eide, since these are positives – significatory atoms or constants. Hence, [Husserl’s] eidetic method is in reality an idealistic variant of the constancy hypothesis [a point-by-point correspondence between a stimulus and the perception of it].”(Phenomenological Method in Merleau-Ponty's Critique of Gurwitsch, Ted Toadvine, p.200).
That leaves Husserl, the intended target of your critique of phenomenology. I happen not to believe that Husserl
started from qualia-like primitives of sensation. For him , as for Isaac, sensations are constructed out of contextual elements.
Of course there is something in common with experiences we could say are of red: they more closely resemble one another than they do experiences we could say are of green or any other colour. This is a similar counter-point to your argument I made earlier regarding the essential role of similarity (and difference), and which you did not address.
Sure. So we've flicked from saying what reds have in common to saying how they differ from other colours, trying to achieve an essence by negation - setting out what it isn't. It's still essentialism. Is yellow a red or a green? What of orange? Brown?
GO back to the point of talk of family resemblance again: there need not be something held in common for all the members of a family. Hence we cannot expect to proceed to examine classes or predicates by finding the feature that they supposedly have in common. There might be no such feature.
The way things seem can only be "flawed" in relation to some other way things seem; with the presumption that the latter somehow gets us closer to "the way things really are", or is more serviceable or...
Can you give an example of an investigation that is based on "a lack of certainty about the way things currently seem to us"? Are you saying we are uncertain that things really seem that way, or that they "really are" that way?
Is essentialism some kind of bogeyman for you? Do you see that there might be differences kinds or degrees of essentialism? Yellow is not a red or a green, it is a yellow, or else we fall into incoherence. A yellow may be more reddish or more greenish. The colour wheel although divided into six colours is really a more or less infinite continuum. It is said by some that the human eye can distinguish around ten million different colours, so the division to 'red' 'green' 'yellow' etc., is really a gross generalization.
Quoting Banno
Can you give an example of two things that should be thought of as belonging to the same family, but which have nothing in common with each other?
Wittgenstein talked about this in P.I.
67.” I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than "family resemblances"; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way.— And I shall say: 'games' form a family. And for instance the kinds of number form a family in the same way. Why do we call something a "number"? Well, perhaps because it has a—direct—relationship with several things that have hitherto been called number; and this can be said to give it an indirect relationship to other things we call the same name. And we extend our concept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres. But if someone wished to say: "There is something common to all these constructions—namely the disjunction of all their common properties"—I should reply: Now you are only playing with words. One might as well say: "Something runs through the whole thread— namely the continuous overlapping of those fibres.”
Yeah, me and my brother-in-law. He's a bloody insurance salesman. Parasite.
We find the idea of family in the larger taxonomic context in relation to plants and animals, and there are morphological criteria which serve as reasons for including particular kinds of plants or animals in a family.
I would still like to see an example of two things that are considered to belong to a family that yet have nothing in common. I can't think of any.
Quoting Banno
But you do have something in common; you are both in relationship with your sister..
Psychologising the argument. No.
The topic was introduced by way of elucidating the lack of a one-to-one relation between intentional explanations and neurological explanations.
Here's where it came in:
Quoting Banno
Seems that's you, bro. :wink:
I recall a long discussion with a Kantian professor who insisted that family resemblance could be accounted for with a concatenation of disjunctions... A or B or C or D. My counter was that for a family, such a list is never complete. Given any such list we might add a new entity E, distinct from A or B or C or D.
One of the points of this is methodological. It's It's contrary to the near ubiquitous supposition that "we call all these things red, therefore there is a thing, redness, that all these have in common" - another transcendental argument, for . It misled Plato into proposing his forms, and has haunted philosophy ever since.
I commend Austin's paper Are There A Priori Concepts? to anyone interested in following up the topic. Quoting Janus
But of course you can find something common between any two things. What this shows is that you've missed the point. Oh well.
There's plenty of attempts at definitions of "game" to be found. The further point to be made is that if one stipulates such a definition, someone can either stipulate otherwise or invent a counter instance. A point related to Davidson's derangement of epitaphs, and Wittgenstein's argument for what we might call the inscrutability of rules; given any such definition one can purposefully undermine it.
Quoting Banno
There is no "thing" redness, if by that you mean an object. But there is a quality of redness that things that qualify as red things display. The quality of course is not some particular shade of red, but a general quality of redness.
Quoting Banno
It seems it is you, not I, who has missed the point. Of course you can find something in common between any two things, so what? I was asking for an example of two things which could be said to belong to the same family that do not resemble each other in any way that is criterial for counting as being included in the family.
This current series of exchanges between us came about on account of my response to this;
Quoting Banno
Now if you say there is a set of things belonging to a family, then it seems to follow that all members of that family must possess some salient resemblance or similarity to the other members that justifies including it in that family.
Now, I ask you again if you can provide any examples of things which could be said to belong to the same family that possess nothing in common that would qualify them for being included in that family. Don't try to move the goalposts this time, but just attempt to give an honest answer. If you can give a satisfactory answer then I will concede the point, not otherwise, no matter how much you protest that I have missed the point.
You introduce the word "quality" like it was clear what it means. What's a quality, then?
I submit that it's just a way of using a word. "Using" is the pertinent term. Red things need have nothing in common beyond our saying that they are red.
Quoting Janus
Again, I've already replied to this. Given any rule for inclusion in a family, we can chose a new member which does not satisfy the rule.
And its undermining is the further spinning of new fibers of a thread, correct?
So, you are going to play that game? What's a quality? It's an attribute. What's an attribute? It's a trait. What's a trait?....
Why do we (mostly) agree that some things are red, as opposed to any other colour? It's because we perceive those things to be coloured such that they seem to qualify as being red. To qualify means "to have the appropriate quality".
Quoting Banno
Again you are presenting irrelevancies. I haven't said there needs to be a single rule for inclusion in a family. Given the whole set of characteristics, the possession of a sufficient number of which would qualify for inclusion in a family, can you find a new member who satisfies none of them? That is the salient point.
As I mentioned, depends on one’s definition which depends on one’s doctrine in play. Mine in play doesn’t consider “attempts to get folks to agree”.
Quoting Banno
What makes that transcendental? What do you think transcendental means?
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Quoting Banno
Who’s the nutjob that came up with that? If our sensations are necessarily of that which is in the world, how is it possible our sensations can be prior to that which the sensation is of?
The “nothing but” merely indicates sensation is always related to objects in the world, insofar as there is nothing else to which a sensation could relate. The raisin d’etre for our sensory apparatus is to deliver sensations.
Homunculus: how to argue a conception by using it. (Sigh)
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Quoting Banno
Footnote at B79 shows the attribution of red, among other examples, as a thing, to objects, is illusory.
Can I get an “Amen”!
Quoting Joshs
Presumably. Interesting.
Quoting Janus
Just responding to your strategy. ...there is a quality of redness that things that qualify as red things display" It's the transcendental argument,
The argument names a nothing. Why shouldn't we just use a word for a variety of different things, without those things having something in common?
Quoting Mww
It's the name for arguments with that sort of logical structure...
Quoting Mww
Presumably except when they are dreams or hallucinations...
The rope gets longer, the pressure builds....
Because the uses of words that denote perceived qualities are not arbitrary; the perceptions are not without commonality. If they were we could agree on nothing. And the argument is not transcendental but immanent; immanent to what we can commonly recognize. Is the apple red or green?
The agreement does not come about because we consistently use the appropriate words in different cases, but we consistently use the appropriate words because we see perceive the same phenomena. It's not likely that we will disagree about whether an apple is red or green ( leaving aside cases where colour-blindness comes into it).
Yes, it's not arbitrary. So long as you get the red apple and not the green one, if that's what you ask for, that's what counts. The agreement, so far as there is one, is that you get the red apple. The mooted "quality" redness does bugger all. It doesn't enter into it.
Dogs can see blue and yellow apparently; which means they can distinguish between those colours, but the rest appear yellow or blue or perhaps grey. They don't require language to do this.Our ability to distinguish colours, as opposed of course to naming them, does not rely on language.
Again, it's not arbitrary, because of what we do with the apples. The cart and the horse are the same thing - it's an automobile.
Quoting Janus
...and we know this not as a result of the quality of blue and yellow, but because of what dogs do. QED.
The ability to distinguish colours is not dependent on what we do, some of what what we do is dependent on the ability to distinguish colours. The cart and horse are not the same; the horse pulls the cart, the cart does not pull the horse
Quoting Banno
Of course, yet what they do, their observable actions, is not their ability to distinguish blue and yellow, but what that ability enables.
We distinguish colours only because it makes a difference to what we can do.
Quoting Janus
That's rather my point.
An over-generalization, I think: we may distinguish colours simply because we like the way they look. In any case distinguishing colours and being able to distinguish them are not the same thing.
That right there is a Gem if ever there was one. Like…what makes this a block of wood? Why, because it’s a block and it’s made of wood. DUH!!!
Quoting Banno
Opps. There’s an even worse Gem. Or would that be, a better Gem. My sentence has sensation as its subject, and the only possible way your sentence makes any sense at all, is if yours has objects as its subject. There’s a name for that, and it ain’t pretty.
Hell, now that I think about it….how can either a sensation or an object be a dream, re: “when they are dreams”? Sensation or object in a dream, dreams of sensations or objects, yeah, sure, but being a dream? Nahhhh, not so much.
————
Quoting Banno
You had a lengthy discussion with a Kantian professor, and still think this has any legitimacy? If you really think we have no direct access to the world…try walking through a doorway without opening the door that blocks it. Artemis 1 is on its way back from the moon, in case you haven’t heard. Hope you don’t think I mean “moon in itself”. PleasepleasePLEASE don’t say that.
————
Euphemistic and metaphorical implications aside for the moment, as soon as you think it true you’re not just sitting in your head with a bunch of Kant’s a priori scripts, you’ve contradicted yourself, insofar there is at least that one Kantian a priori script in your head, immediately upon thinking a truth. And if it isn’t really that you’re thinking a truth, you shouldn’t have said it as if you were. And if you said it the way you did because there isn’t any other way to do what you meant to do…subsume a set of particular representations under a general….there’s another a priori “script”.
Can you say….flood gates?
Oh. Afterthought: don’t bring rope to a game of chains.
All I can say here, is that you use "experience" in an unusual way, which makes it difficult for me to understand your perspective. I think you are saying that an experience is necessarily of a thing. But I would think of an experience as being of an event, and an event is categorically distinct from a thing, as the activity which things are involved in. So I would understand the essential aspect of experience as activity rather than as things.
We might as you say, conclude the presence of things from experience, with a premise such as 'if there is activity then there is things which are active', but the soundness of this premise needs to be investigated, and i think that's what process philosophy does.
So I do not believe that we can get to the assumption of a particular thing in the way that you say. The "smell of coffee" is a generalization. And each time someone says "I smell coffee" this is a general statement which does not in itself give credence to the conclusion that there is in existence, a particular thing called "coffee" which is being smelled at that time.
And of course science supports what I am saying here because the experience of smelling is known to consist of an interaction of molecules inside the nose. So in this more scientific understanding there is the assumption of a multitude of things, molecules, with many differences, hence the wheel with a wide range of descriptive terms.
The assumption of "a thing" (coffee) being smelled, or "things" (molecules) really depends on the purpose of your communication. In some cases we would say there is a thing (coffee) giving off the specified odour, and that thing is smelled, but in other cases we would refer directly to the odour, assuming that there is something wafting in the air (molecules), which is what is being smelled.
Notice that the type of "thing", or "things". assumed to be involved in the activity of providing you with the experience of smell can vary greatly. This is because the existence of things is just an assumption made by us, to facilitate communication. We sense activity, and to talk about the activity we assume things which we say are doing the activity. But the type of things which we assume are doing the activity varies depending on our purpose. And so for example "things" in high energy physics is fundamental particle, and there becomes some question as to whether these things actually exist. And of course there is such questioning because "things" at any level of communication are simply assumed to facilitate the conversation.
Quoting Mww
This describes the basic premise you hold, which I don't agree with. You say "objects are presented to us" through sensation, and from this premise you conclude that "coffee is an empirical object". But I think that all sensation consists only of activity (consider the example given by others, neurological activity). What I think is that the mind creates the objects, as a type of conception, to facilitate understanding and communication. That the objects are created by the mind, rather than given by the senses is evident from the fact that the same sensation (smell in the example) can be explained through reference to different types of objects. In one description, coffee is the objects sensed. In another description, molecules are what are sensed. And in the neurological description there is some electrons or some vague type of object. This is very clear evidence that the objects are not presented to us by sensation, they are created, and assumed by the mind, in its attempt to understand its own experience of sensation.
Quoting Mww
I don't think you are properly representing "judgement" here. Judgement necessarily applies to something external to itself, there is something judged. Even if the judger wants to judge one's own judgement, that's a second judgement which places the first as outside the second. So "judgement" necessarily implies something external, as it is always of something external or outside the act of judgement. This implies that the evidence employed in the judging, what is mulled in the mind, must say something about something other than itself, and this is what we know as inferring. So the error in judgement is principally a wrongful inference concerning the external to the mind judging.
The act of deceiving is to mislead the judge in the presentation of evidence, so as to create an erroneous inference. Notice that the concept of deception employs a separation between the judger, and the presenter of evidence. We assume such separations all the time, and this is the same principle whereby we assume "objects", through an assumed separation between a thing and its environment. The assumption is done for the sake of understanding. So for the sake of understanding, we assume a separation between senses and mind, and this allows that the senses deceive the mind. The senses present to the mind, evidence in such a way as to mislead the mind and create erroneous judgement.
The issue, or outcome of all this is that separation is very real and results in erroneous judgement. Separation is also the principle by which we assume "objects". However, our assumption of "objects" has a strong degree of arbitrariness, depending on purpose. This means that our understanding of separation has a strong degree of arbitrariness as well. But since separation is real, and is responsible for erroneous judgement, there ought to be real principles which we can produce for an understanding of separation, which would allow us to understand real objects.
Quoting Mww
I strongly disagree with this. I think that to deny the reality of deception is what is incredibly foolish.
Quoting Janus
Sensorimotor theories of perception indicate that action is essential to perception in general. Seeing or hearing is the interacting with an object, a form of active, anticipatory doing rather than merely a passive taking in. As far as perception of color is concerned, preliminary studies show that saccadic eye movements may be involved in color discrimination.
More generally, how do sensorimotor analyses of perceptual ‘doing’ relate to public linguistic interaction? Certainly, the empirical concepts employed in the description of perceiving are shaped via a public doing. But can one also tease out a performativity associated with immediate perception that is not completely subsumed under the rubric of public language practices? Is sensorimotor perceptual ‘doing’ a kind of proto-linguistic activity, a kind of normatively oriented discourse subject to its own rules of error and correction, outside of public language?
Anachronistic might be the word you’re looking for. I get that a lot. I don’t mind.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So here we are, two mutually indestructible foolish dialecticians. I don’t mind that either.
I don't disagree with that, but I was referring specifically to what we do with our colour perceptions, to what the ability to perceive colour enables us to do. The point was that, however we might have gotten there, we can distinguish colours (as can some other animals), and we don't necessarily have to do anything, at any given time, with that, beyond just noticing different colours, This was contra Banno's assertion that distinguishing colour consists entirely in what we do with it. .
Quoting Mww
What an odd reply.
Here, again, is the logical structure of transcendental arguments:
Quoting Banno
Nothing to do with wood.
Quoting Mww
So obtuse. And yet hallucinations are sensations that do not relate to objects in the world. You said:Quoting Mww
Clearly, not.
Quoting Mww
One can see here a way of thinking that closes itself off from critique. If you are sitting in your head thinking you are not siting in your head then you are sitting in your head...
But what if you are not just sitting in your head.
Quoting Mww
Sage advice. I hope you enjoy your incarceration. I'll leave you to it. I was after all only ever your fleeting sensation anyway.
I'm good with it.
I must be slipping.
“Banno” the singular linguistic object, was a sensation; the manifold of linguistic objects related to “Banno” the singular object, were sensations. One and all merely phenomenal representations, just as are comets and cats, one and all absolutely useless without a judgement or a series of judgements made on them, by the subject affected by those objects.
Nothing whatsoever related to “Banno” the subject from which the linguistic objects arise, was ever a sensation of mine, nor anyone else’s. “You” were never a sensation, hence to say “I was your sensation” is exactly the paralogism, the transcendental argument of your reason formed into a proclamation of your language, you profess to dislike.
There is no difference in kind or relation between thinking objects sensed as red possess redness, and thinking linguistic objects sensed as words possess I-ness. Or, simplified, red does not belong to objects just as “I” does not belong to sensation.
“…. They are sophisms, not of men, but of pure reason herself, from which the wisest cannot free himself. After long labour he may be able to guard against the error, but he can never be thoroughly rid of the illusion which continually mocks and misleads him.…”
Here, lemme fix it for ya: my words were after all only ever your fleeting sensations.
Perfect. No need to thank me; I’m here to help.
But we still have hardly addressed the other pressing question - what's the proper plural of barista?
Quoting Banno
You wish.
He's always had my admiration for his military heroics. Now his "silence" speaks volumes.
You shouldn't raise questions about things you don't really have an interest in.
“We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.” From Mill, On Liberty
What?
In response to "What?" I wonder how you feel about Rorty's question, one of my favorites: How is it that anything out there gets in here? Out there, of course, is my cat, and in here is my brain. It is the kind of thing that leads very quickly to the issue of ineffability.
No need for a thesis, just jot me a sentence or two, if you would.
Suggesting that something is fair game even if it cannot be conceived clearly or as a genuine interest at the outset. Quite right. But then, there is the matter of being dismissive of that which is taken up and not being stifled. Is one not being disingenuous if the determination that something is false when set up for analysis, is dismissive of that which gave rise to the inquiry in the first place? In other words, why bother opening a discussion about ineffability, if philosophical occasions of this are rejected out of hand? Or are not reviewed at all?
That, of course, is the wrong question.
It's the wrong question because it is based on the presumption of an "in here" and an "out there".
Quoting Constance
The cat would have difficulty getting onto your brain because your brain is enclosed in a skull.
Yes, I understand that you want the question to be understood figuratively. But then, what is it that you are asking? How it is that you are aware of the cat? How it is that you divide the world up in such a way that there are cats and non-cats? How it is that your cat-sensations lead you to infer that there is a cat-in-itself? Which of these is supposedly represented by "How is it that anything out there gets in here?"
What is it that you actualy want an answer for?
It can go several ways, but here I am asking a simple question, which is how epistemic connections work between knowledge claims and objects in the world. I certainly don't defend anything like, heh heh, cat-in-itself. But that is in another world of thought
If you think your philosophy is too complicated and nuanced to give a simple response, I understand. For the same holds for me. But then, if the question were put to me, I would have a succinct reply, one that subsumes the details.
It really shouldn't be so difficult, really. If I asked Rorty or Quine or Dewey, e.g.s, a reply would be readily forthcoming, though they would have a lot of explaining ready to hand.
First response: What does this have to do with the ineffable?
Second response: What are you asking? How we talk about stuff "in the world"? How we refer using words? Or what truth is, or what knowledge is? Quoting Constance
What's difficult here is sorting out what it is you expect me to provide.
But I underlined this:how epistemic connections work between knowledge claims and objects in the world.
There is no question as to the embeddedness of the response. Just make the response.
Adorable. And predictable.
:roll:
Ok. So the next question is
The cup has one handle IFF _____?
Because, Banno, it is a banality, one that simply begs the question about the world and language. You need to return to earth.
, in your first post on this thread you gave us:
Quoting Constance
My reply, to you and to various others, was summed up in what you quoted above,
Quoting Banno
Your response was Quoting Constance
To which I asked
Quoting Banno
eliciting in turn your enigmatic response. If you think that T-sentences do not answer your question, then have a go at explaining what it is you are asking. "(H)ow epistemic connections work between knowledge claims and objects in the world" is an ambiguous question.
It's not enough just to read a bunch of philosophers and pick the bits you like. We are not doing philosophy until we engage with and critique those views. I think you agree with this.
That is what this thread involves. It sets out various ways of understanding the notion of ineffability, and seeks comment on them. It gives folk enough rope, a place to set out a part of their thinking or the thinking of their betrothed, with the aim of identifying problems and inconsistencies therein.
The problem is that you have still to set out what it is you are asking.
That's an easy one: IFF it is topologically equivalent to a doughnut.
That's amazing! :up:
Can you explain why you think that question is ambiguous?
Which knowledge claims? What objects in which world?
If the supposition that there is one way in which we can tell if a proposition is true, then the answer I gave, the T-sentence, is the only candidate.
Nice.
I was somewhat disappointed that your wasn't the last post here. It seems we are not yet done talking about the ineffable.
To keep it simple start thinking about empirical claims concerning things in this world. '"Snow is white " is true iff snow is white' tells us nothing beyond the fact that the account it exemplifies, the correspondence account, is the only account that makes any sense.
Then take that example: we know "snow is white" is true if we know snow is white: but how do we know snow is white? We know it appears white, and we know we say it is white; is that the same thing? So, do we know anything about snow?
It's been 11 days so I guess no response to my last post is forthcoming. You appear to consider Wittgenstein a supporter of your position, yet you provide no argument or evidence to refute my claim that he denies only the privacy of language, not the privacy of the feeling of sensations.
At §243 Wittgenstein says of the putative private language that it is supposed "to refer to what only the speaker can know — to his immediate private sensations".
He appears to acknowledge here, at least, that one's immediate sensations are private.
Quoting Banno
What perspective does it assume to pretend that our language is prior to "being in the world"? Or, that there exist true statements independent of anyone's expressing them?
Quoting Banno
Your argument appears to be that if there are ineffable parts of the world then these parts can be expressed by true statements. This assumes that those parts of the world cannot be ineffable. As @Constance notes, this begs the question.
You were dismissive of the references in the Tractatus to the mysticism and transcendence; you ignored Quine's admission that he could not reconcile his naturalism with experiential phenomena; and you don't seem to grasp the essentials of phenomenology that you reject out of hand, given that you consistently misrepresent it in your statements.
And you cannot handle basic questions. Asking you about the epistemic relation between brains and couches is elementary. Causality? Is this a carrier of what is essential for knowledge? I mean, you have to deliver yourself from arguments that encompass the question and have something that comes to mind when you step away from these and into an actual world encounter. Otherwise you are lost as a philosopher.
So there you are, brain facing a couch. Obviously a knowledge relation is in place, some nexus of intimation. Do tell in a couple of sentences. It doesn't matter if there is more to say. Just say IT. No need to be slippery.
Since you mention Rorty in relation to epistemology , would you agree with the following? Rorty rejects epistemology in favor of a hermeneutic approach. In doing so , he is avoiding the problem of skepticism that arises out of epistemological thinking , the presumption of a grounding for knowledge claims and the attendant problem of figuring out how our beliefs ‘hook onto’ the world.
Quoting Luke
Wittgenstein does not deny that we have feelings or sensations.
Elsewhere I have been quite specific about that, back on page one. What Witti points out is that, that you cannot have my sensation is a direct result of it's being my sensation. If you had it, too, it would by that very fact no longer be just my sensation...
Here's the issue that plagues any attempt to claim ineffability: Quoting Banno
Can you escape this paradox?
Good point.
There is a difference between contradicting yourself by claiming that "something" (some specific thing) is ineffable, and claiming that much of human experience (generally speaking) is ineffable.
The other point is that whatever is ineffable in human experience, propositonally considered, "drops out of the conversation", but may be the subject of poetry and the other arts. The ineffable, as such, may drop out of the philosophical conversation, but the fact that there is the ineffable need not: it may, on the contrary, be considered to be of the greatest philosophical significance (but obviously not on a conception of philosophy as narrow as AP or OLP).
If I was dismissive it was of the idea that the discussion ended there for Wittgenstein.Elucidating the difference between saying and showing would appear to be one of the primary motivations fro his continuation of this investigation in the PI.
Quoting Constance
I don't recall this discussion, although doubtless it occurred. My response was probably Davidsonian.
Quoting Constance
On that we agree. It appears incoherent, for reasons given.
Quoting Constance
I've argued elsewhere at considerable length that there is no general account to be given of truth beyond that found in T-sentences. Your demand for such an account asks the wrong question.
Are we done?
What do you think of the idea that the ineffable used to be thought of in terms of a hidden substance , a thing -in-itself, the noumenon that stands on the other side of a divide between our representations and the essences buried within external nature as well as in the interiority of our own subjectivity? And more recently the ineffable , rather than pointing to a hidden substance, is associated with the unconscious of thought , the fact that the origins of our values are not transparent to us, and neither is language transparent to itself. In other words, the ineffable is irreducible difference , displacement and becoming rather than interiority, essence, ipseity, pure self-reflexivity.
Rorty would say, if I read him right, that one can only be skeptical if there is something to be skeptical about. And there isn't. Truth is made, not discovered, for there is nothing to discover outside of the dynamics of meaning making. One can never step into some impossible world that is there which cannot be second guessed, and then point to proposition X and say, see how this deviates.
I think this right, actually. I also think what we call absolutes are really, to use his jargon, concepts among others in a certain vocabulary of contingencies. But then, IN this vocabulary, we discover something wholly other. This is, for lack of a better term, the metaphysics of presence, which is revealed in our aesthetics and ethics.
I would add that he didn't think the very concept of truth was particularly useful, even as warranted assertion, and on this point he differed from Dewey and James , as well as Davidson and Putnam.
Quoting Constance
He liked the fact that Derrida critiqued the metaphysics
of presence, substituting playful irony.
I have been thinking of the ineffable more in terms of human experience. The Kantian notion of the noumenon places it beyond human experience. which would make it not merely ineffable, but from the perspective of experience, non-existent.
I agree that noumena might be thought to "have" essences, if by that is meant an absolute nature; in that conception they would be thought to 'be some way' even though we could never have any idea of what that way of being could be. This seems perilously close to being incoherent, at least from a logical propositional perspective. When asked about such things Gautama refused to answer or resorted to answering in terms of polyvalent logic.
I think your second sentence there points to this difference if you accept that what is "unconscious in thought" is nonetheless, non-dually, experienced or perceived. The very non-duality of the experience or perception guarantees that it cannot be expressed in our dualistic language, or in terms of bivalent logic.
Non-dual experience cannot be thought of in terms of "interiority", essence, ipseity or pure reflexivity" since those are all concepts, and non-dual perception is understood to be non-conceptual.
One does play patience by oneself, so what do you consider to be the point of this remark? Presumably, that sensations are private.
Quoting Banno
Claiming that something is ineffable thereby makes it effable? But this implies that we could never use the word "ineffable" (to mean that nothing can be said about something). That's absurd.
Okay then, nothing else can be said about something except that it's ineffable.
There. Crisis averted.
Unless logical pedantry was intended to be the substance of this discussion? In that case, I must have missed the joke.
Yep.
Quoting Luke
So folk ought restrict themselves to not saying anything more about the ineffable than that it is ineffable.
Certainly not 37 pages more.
But that's saying something about it, according to you.
Now you're getting it.
Which one is it? That "folk ought restrict themselves to not saying anything more about the ineffable than that it is ineffable" or that folk cannot claim that something is ineffable due to the liar-like paradox that one has then said something about it?
If it's the former, then we can discuss what things - if any - are ineffable, which is what I thought this discussion was about.
Well, as Kierkegaard would put it, you seem to have forgotten that we exist, and Kierkegaard was a great inspiration to Wittgenstein. If curiosity ever enables you to do so, read his Concept of Anxiety. Here he explores the threshold of human depth and understanding as it is beheld in the withdrawal of categorical systems. Yes, such a thing is possible.
No one is asking that language take up meanings that are not there. In the infinite malleability of a language, there are constraints that limit contextual plausibility, and among these restraints there are these "threshold" issues that emerge, in t he margins of meanings, but also, somehow (hence the term 'ineffible'), embedded in meanings, since this is the matrix in which all meaning is made. So my ability to speak about what objects are may have propositional limitations, and these limitations may be imposed by an existing body of default contextual possibilities (exclusively socially defined according to Rorty) of a language, but it is a foolish supposition that there is nothing else, or that anything else that may be doxastically coercive or imposing in some way is unqualifiedly possessed by standard meanings. In other words, while to talk about THE threshold of the meaning making resources is awkward and assailable, it is not the case that there is nothing at all "there". It is rather that what is there is inchoate and nascent, awaiting a new language category, a new philosophical conversation.
Ineffability is what is there on the horizon of the openness of language possibilities as inquiry stands in the midst of a world. As I see it, it literally takes practice to understand this, and as long as analytic philosophy persists in philosophy, this will remain hidden to philosophers. Ineffability is there as a real imposition. Language games, it should be argued, are not closed games, nor are they restrained by logic to be settled within some arbitrary finitude, and reason, it should be added, does not constrain content.
You actually believe "'snow is white' iff snow is white" is a fitting response to the most problematic philosophical questions. It is a partial response, a useful, localized response. But it is reductive to the point of a vacuous absurdity in the matter discussed here.
As this thread lurches vehemently towards aporia, it might be interesting to see what agreement might be salvaged.
If I have it right, you have a barrier beyond which language cannot go, but beyond which a phenomenological method of introspection supposedly can see. Hence you find the term "ineffable" appropriate.
In the place of that barrier I see a continuity from what we say to what we do and what is not said but shown. It's the place where stating the rule is replaced by enacting it, and where saying what the picture is of is replaced by showing it. That continuity means that we can always say more, but enough is said when the task is done. Hence the term "ineffable" is inappropriate.
@Moliere, you've been very quite - I don't blame you. But you claim one foot in each camp. Does the above summary have any validity? Are you still following?
Do you have a definition of ineffable - or do you think you can steel man one?
Are you comfortable with - 'too great or extreme to be expressed or described in words.'
It sounds like an emotional state.
I think there is contextual ineffability. For instance, I can say nothing about string theory. Others can. I don't accept that the ineffable is a kind of transcendent category, just a context dependent one. Am I being silly?
You have it all wrong, mate. You're like a man who refuses to open his eyes and then complains that he can't see what everyone around him is talking about. It's all around you; it's just a non-dual way of seeing that cannot be captured by language. Perhaps the best thing for you would be to drop some acid, and then see if you can communicate what you've experienced. That should open your mind at least a little. As Dylan says "Don't criticize what you can't understand".
I'm thinking that you're close, but also that @Constance here :
Quoting Constance
Lays out how she'd like to talk about ineffability, which isn't really the same thing as I was indicating with "the ineffable" either, and I think is different from what you've intimated at least, given that we cannot say such things without falling into the liar's paradox. Especially thinking this contrasts with your focus on activity as the mechanism of elucidation.
Going along with -- I'm thinking something along the lines of where your focus is on tasks that elucidate meaning (even if unsayable), but if I'm understanding @Constance at least, then the unsayable is something which is always beyond language but perceptible to all of us -- something I've been calling not quite ineffable, but the phenomenologist, I think, could claim that "the ineffable" is a feature of our construction of experience -- the unfolding of experience is the ineffable becoming, but at the vagaries of thought or language it will always remain. (or, something like that -- just to put some sense to the notion, not arguing for it)
Something more along the lines of we don't know what tomorrow will bring. And, tomorrow is always tomorrow, and never today.
Maybe. But maybe I've got it all wrong and I'm going to draw ire from both sides, as I usually do. :D
Quoting Banno
A bit different emphasis from Gendlin’s phenomenological dictum that:
“We think more than we can say, we feel more than we can think, we live more than we can feel, and there is much else besides.”
But I don’t see these as incompatible.
Quoting Tom Storm
You might recall hat I am not keen on definitions, preferring to list uses than stipulate meanings. But we might profitably go back to the list in the OP.
One suggestion was "...ascribing ineffability to something is to say that it has no referent". This looks to be a non-starter, since it posits a thing to which we cannot refer, which looks to be at least a performative contradiction, and probably a logical one, too.
The case is similar with "to treat "ineffable" as a second-order predicate", since if it is a predicate at all, we ought be able to predicate... that is to say something about it.
And so for "it can only be understood by listing the attributes that do not apply to it", since in listing those attributes we are saying something about it.
There's certainly a use for "ineffable" as an honorific, a way to mark the sacred. More could be said here. It would involve a language game in which certain subjects as not available for further comment.
Much of the thread concerned to view that the ineffable cannot be said, only experienced. @Moliere's early reply seemed to cover that. It seems to be a point of grammar rather than an ontology. But I don't suppose that discussion will ever be resolved to the satisfaction of all parties.
"The one apparently advocated by Wittgenstein was to simply remain silent about the ineffable". This is perhaps the approach of the Tractatus, but it now seems to me that in the Investigations Wittgenstein sort to say more about this by discussing what it is to follow a rule, what it is to recognise or be shown, and these together, what it is to participate in language, in language games and in a form of life.
Or it might mark where nonsense and irrationality begins.
Quoting Tom Storm
Sure. That's roughly what was called the "honorific" use. It's not so much that more cannot be said, as that saying more becomes inappropriate.
Quoting Tom Storm
Sire, but that does not mean nothing can be said about string theory. String theory is therefore not ineffable.
But much of the thread was unhelpful stuff such as . It's been a long time since I did drugs, and to be sure, it's a fine way to be shown the arbitrariness of the world. However there's plenty of folk who have tried to walk through a tree after eating those mushrooms from around Dorrigo. The result is not supernatural abilities, but a bloody nose. Reality doesn't care what drugs you take.
Quoting Joshs
The narcissism of small differences comes into play.
@Constance, what can we agree on?
:rofl: I've seen plenty of people on mushrooms and LSD and I've never seen anyone try to walk through a tree, a wall or anything else of a solid nature. Nor have I seen or heard of anyone jumping off a building or out of a tree, imagining that they can fly.
You completely missed the point, which was not about the nature of empirical reality, but that the propositional character of empirical reality is a dualistic collective representation, which may dissolve when one is in an altered state of consciousness. And no, such altered states are not states of confusion, but of utmost clarity, but I guess you would have had to experience it to understand. Perhaps try meditation if hallucinogens are too daunting.
Of course it is. That's obvious to the point of being trite. But you still only get the bloody nose.
Try this: You are roughly right, Janus; so what goes next?
Not being able to answer this question is why the sequels to The Martix were so philosophically inept. Having pointed out that our world could all be a simulation, the Wachowskis found that they were just dealing with a slightly different reality within which that simulation took place... that despite the pretence, no great revelation about the nature of reality had actually occurred; it had all just moved one step back.
You only get the bloody nose if you are stupid, and as I say I've never seen or heard of anyone so stupid.
"What goes next?"...I have no idea what you are asking. I'm not denying empircal reality, if that is what you're getting at. The mayahanists recognized that samsara is nirvana; It is not a matter of positing two realities, it is a matter of altering the way you see reality, not of altering reality itself.
Or perhaps it shows that perception’s role is to adaptively guide behavior rather than to veridically recover ‘reality’.
So how you see stuff isn't significant - the internal world doesn't matter. It's what you do that counts.
Gonna do my thing here and say these aren't at odds, and in fact, are favorable to one another.
Perception's role is not truth or a veridical recovery of reality.
What you do certainly counts. More and most. Given my existentialist bent.
But, throwing a wrench in all the thoughts, philosophy is that which disrupts perception, or language-use, such that our behavior becomes interested in the veridical.
And, then, bringing up an end to all that -- the ineffable -- if you've been bitten by the bug, that's a big disappointment.
(EDIT: Thinking here “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” )
Just going to note that "what come's next?" is a question for after the trip, when you have to... well, do the things. work, or whatever it is.
What comes next after realizing the world is not dualistic, and propositions are a collective representation?
How does it go? Before enlightenment, carry water, chop firewood... :razz:
After enlightenment, carry water, chop firewood
Mine is after philosophy, park the car, shop for groceries, let the cat in...
OK, yeh, so maybe (and only maybe) "carry water" was metaphoric.
It's not as though people cannot function in a dualistic world even at the height of their non-dual awareness; it is possible to hold both views "in tandem" so to speak.
[i]D?gen:
“Before one studies Zen, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after a first glimpse into the truth of Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are no longer waters; after enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and waters once again waters.”[/i]
Quoting Janus
Yes!
Ok, it wan't a tree - I fell off the bed and bumped my forehead. Point is, regardless of your state of mind in deep mediation or enlightenment or Psilocybe subaeruginosa, you remain embedded in the world.
That what you have to say can be said in another way does not imply that what you have to say is wrong.
So back to
Quoting Janus
Perhaps I've been there, procured the T-shirt, taken the selfie and am back to seeing the mountains as mountains and waters as waters.
:up: Yep, there's no denying that!
What exacty do you mean by "the coffe cup has a handle" is true IFF the coffee cup has a handle?
It feels that this is a general philosophy thread at this point with no particular topic. No offense @Banno
That's just avoiding the question.
I think he's pointing to the obviousness of when something is the case. If we can't determine whether a cup has a handle, then we can't determine anything, right?
There's already a long thread on the topic somewhere.
sort off. The left side is about a proposition, the right side is about how things are. So together it's about the relation between a proposition and how things are. One of the important things about the T-sentence is that it is true even of the cup does not have a handle. Consider: "the sky is green" is true IFF the sky is green.
"2+2=4" is true IFF 2+2=4
"2+7=4" is true IFF 2+7=4
The T-sentence, the IFF in it feels wrong.
The question was Quoting Constance
with conditions that they wanted an answer in twenty words of less, back-of-envelope style. Now the question might be understood as asking how we knowledge claims are justified, but it is doubtful that any such general account could be given - there are as many different justifications as there are knowledge claims. They may have been asking how reference works, another topic not amenable to brief answers. Or they may have been asking about truth, which when pressed is the answer I gave. oN the left of the truth sentence is a sentence being talked about, on the right is a sentence being used, and the truth sentence shows the connection to be truth-functional.
I was amused, but the joke fell flat, since I'm now explaining it. :sad:
Quoting Banno
Quoting Tom Storm
Quoting Banno
This is about correspondence, even if it consists of correspondence within a discursive community rather than between that community and things-in-themselves. In order for it to be correspondence, the referents that are being compared have to ‘sit still’ long enough to be compared. We have to be able to trust that what we are referring back to in a comparison has a sense that continues to remain what it was for the sake of the comparison. Entities to be shuffled, arranged and rearranged are required to have persisting identity during all this calculative coordinating .
I bring this up because I want to contrast it with what may appear to you as a strange way of thinking, what Andrew4Handel might call ‘extreme philosophy’. This strange way of thinking is common to poststructuralism, phenomenology and the later Wittgenstein, and it consists of the following analysis of propositional statements such as ‘snow is white Iff snow is white’, or, more generally, ‘on the left of the truth sentence is a sentence being talked about, on the right is a sentence being used’
According to this analysis, to be talked about is already to be used. S is P is usage.In stating S is P, we are seeing S as P. What that means is that the ‘is' connecting S with P is not a neutral relational copula between two pre-existing things, it is a transformative action altering in one gesture both the S and the P. The ‘as' enacts a crossing of past and present such that both are already affected and changed by the other in this context of dealing with something. When we take something as something, we have already projected out from a prior context of relevance such as to render what is presenting itself to us as familiar and recognizable in some fashion. But in this act of disclosure, we only have this context of relevance by modifying it, that is , by USING it in a new way.
This is how we understand ‘snow is white’. And it is also how we understand the move from ‘snow is white’ to the conditional IFF. This conditional, like the ‘is’ in S is P, is not a neutral , external relational connector specifying conditions of truth between two pre-existing sentences. It transforms the sense of meaning of the first sentence (snow is white) as it is used in the context of the second sentence, while the second sentence, in being used in the context of the first, constructs a fresh sense of meaning for itself .
So what one has in this logical construction is not an external combining, comparing , shuffling and coordinating of extant symbolic meanings , but a continually self-transforming construction of sense. Every step of the process involves producing new sense and relevance rather than taking extant persisting symbolic forms and shuffling them around to discover truth or falsity of their relations. Propositional statements aim to stay a step ahead of ineffability by capturing anything sayable within a formal logic of use. But the very formality of the logic, with its presuppositions of extant, persisting symbolic meanings ,neutral , external connectors (is , iff) and activities of shuffling and coordination achieves its triumph over ineffability at the expense of meaninglessness.
Quoting Joshs
Wow.. This is probably confronting for those of us who think that some stable meaning can be arrived at using language. I hadn't considered the 'transformative' power held by words like 'is' and 'as'.
Hardly so obscure. If the Dialogues of Plato are still readable today in English language, then meaning persists over time irrespective of what you seem to be advocating some kind of coherentist theory of meaning.
"functioning", though, isn't the question being asked. I'm wondering about "after enlightenment".
"in tandem" suggests to me the dualism you're denying, but I suspect you'd say more on that upon questioning since you've expressed anti-dualist sentiments.
This seems to me to be the thought that began this thread:
Quoting Janus
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that @Banno and I agree with that. Or, from what I'm reading in the exchanges, that seems to be something we agree upon, in a rough sense. We'll all get particular down the line in our own ways, but roughly this is right.
So, upon recognition that empirical reality is a dualistic collective representation -- what now? Not in a grand sense, just philosophically.
What happens to words?
I wonder if he is also referencing a Derridarian critique of logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence? I have doubts that the precise meaning of Plato today is the same as it was then. But something does seem to survive, right?
If it's a dualism, it's a dualism of views, not of substance. My experience has been that when in a non-dual state of awareness, dualistic views are still comprehensible, but their relativivty, their illusionistic nature, is understood.
I don't claim to have attained non-dual consciousness as a permanent state, but I don't deny the possibility. The permanent state of non-dual awareness would be what Eastern philosophers, Advaita Vedantists and Buddhists refer to as "enlightenment".
Quoting Moliere
I guess it depends on what you mean by "philosophically". From the point of view of AP and OLP non-dual awareness and the realization that empirical reality is a dualistic collective representation would presumably not be of much use, because analyses and descriptions are always going to be dualistic in character. From the perspective of, for example, Pierre Hadot's 'philosophy as a way of life', practices aimed at realizing non-dual awareness, since it is an incomparably richer form of life, might be advocated.
Quoting Joshs
What does this say?
Surely that's a feature not of language, no?
Cool.
Quoting Janus
I don't think I meant any particular philosophy.
Actually, I'd say one of the things I've been pushing against in this thread is the notion that AP and OLP are necessarily opposed to these notions. I believe that's a false belief. I can see, on the surface, how they seem opposed, but I'd say the "seeming" only covers many cases -- but not all.
You mean a feature of time and change?
Yes, and who decides to burn your books and vilify them...
:up: Not all, I agree. For example, I understand Wittgenstein to have been very much in the ineffable, mystic camp on this question.
But, just generically speaking, OLP includes Sense and Sensibilia -- a book I read some time ago on @Banno's mention, and that seems to be a book about a non-dual awareness that isn't mystical, is non-dualistic, and is both analytic philosophy and OLP.
I just wanted to add this:
So snow is white. Why do I care? In what context of concerns and goals does this become a topic of interest to me? Wittgenstein tried to show how we end up in confusion by trying to pretend that ‘S is P’ makes any sense outside of a specific context of wider motivated engagement with others. This wider relevance is not peripheral to , or separable from, S is P, but inextricable to its very sense. It is what, on any occasion, we are really on about when we say ‘snow is white’. What the logical proposition does is equivalent to the way an empirical statement of fact in a natural science seems to make our affective involvement with the meaning that is being presented either non-existent, or utterly inconsequential to and separable from the apprehension of the facts.
Quoting Joshs
That's very pretty writing. Again something to sit with and mull over.
I quite agree, and it is simply fascinating: As I see this, generally speaking, propositional differences are not analyzable in terms of parts and rules. Rather, each propositional construction a sui generis singularity. And consider that a proposition, while never conceived outside of the historical possibilities that constitute the foundational base of knowing something is the case, is never conceived in some neutral space of interconnectivity. It is always, for lack of a better word, subjective. Dogs, cats and traffic noise are always MY dogs, etc.; this "my" is more than simply a term on the logical grid of a language. It is always an embedded "my" in an existence that imposes powerfully from "outside" the totality of what language brings to heel. This is where one encounters ineffability: where questions like, why are we born to suffer and die? address, not this totality, but an entirely OTHER than this, which must go nameless, and nameless not because it belongs to another order of thinking, but because the question drives thought beneath or outside itself. We face this OTHER, and frankly, by my lights, this should be a profound struggle, because questions go to the depth of meaning, simply because we are creatures of depth, evidenced in the aesthetic/ethical/value of our affairs.
And isn't this where philosophy must bring inquiry, finally, when the deflationary tendencies of the presumption of knowing yield to the extraordinary actualities of our existence?
This is, to me, as Tom put it, "Wow." If I understand this, empirical science, and the naturalism usually associated with it, abstracts from "the wider relevance" in order to make sense of things. S is P is, if you will, the tip of an iceberg, and the "iceberg" is not something that can be made subject to the reductive, deflationary powers of logical placement, the "categories" of a totality (Levinas lifts this term from Heidegger, I am reading, and Levinas seems a bit aligned with your statement here) that in part determine meaning.
Best my thoughts can take me thus far.
Interesting to me is the way this matches up with divisions between religion and science. The latter has always left the intractable dimensions of our existence to religion; and gladly, because it had no clue as to how to deal with it. But now, religion's institutions are failing, and I see it as philosophy's mission to step up.
Quoting Joshs
Constance has had a go at restating this idea below. Better than I could do, but I want to understand it better.
Quoting Constance
If philosophy involves this level of complexity - how can the average person be involved?
This seems to be an important for you. How would it look if it could be done? It's difficult for people to see past Biblical literalism or scientism or naïve realism for the most part, just how would such nuanced philosophical thinking enter people's lives?
By the way, I question whether religion ever satisfactorily provided solace or explanatory power. Religion was a compulsory, even totalitarian backdrop to human life for centuries and made many people unhappy. It was feared and obeyed, and although it dealt with tragedy and loss and meaning - the ostensibly ineffable - it generally did so in the most brutish of ways (obey God's will; have faith, etc) and seemed to make demands rather than provide consolation or integration.
Language consists of units - words and phrases and phonemes and letters- that are re-usable and can be put into novel structures that are nevertheless meaningful.
Language is constructed by recursively applying a finite number of rules to a finite vocabulary.
It is because of this that language is learnable. As Davidson points out, it is because of this that "language, though it consists in an indefinitely large number of sentences, can be comprehended by a creature with finite powers" (On Saying That).
I see no way of reconciling this fact with
Quoting Constance
I have only skimmed that book quite a few years ago, so I don't remember much about it. Searching reviews online yielded one predominant theme: that Sense and Sensibilia is concerned with critiquing the "sense-datum" theory of positivists and phenomenalists, notably that of A J Ayer.
What I'm not seeing is what this has to do with nonduality. In seeing something as something, it would seem the whole dualistic conditioning of subjects seeing objects, of self and other, is involved.
Seems to me that Frege sorted out the various uses of ...is... that were ambiguous in Aristotelian - or better - pre-modern - logic, but that this was missed by certain authors of the phenomenalist persuasion, and Wittgenstein did much the same for ...as...
That's not to say that ll such problems are solved, but that we now have more formal approaches that set out ways of using such terms that do not result in contradiction or ambiguity.
But again, I'm not at all sure what the topic is here.
Quoting Joshs
I think I need these ideas restated in plain language.
Before studying Zen, mountains are thought to be mountains and waters are thought to be waters. this is the state of mind that thinks of mountains and waters as everyday determinate entities or phenomena.
After some study mountains are no longer thought to be mountains and waters no longer thought to be waters. This is the state of mind that thinks something more "absolute" can be seen and said about mountains and waters than that they are simply mountains and waters.
After enlightenment mountains and waters are again understood to be just mountains and waters. This is the state of mind that realizes all phenomena are empty of any determinate nature, and that nothing propositional can be said about them at all beyond the conventional "mountains are mountains and waters are waters", even though the seeing is infinitely enhanced.
It's the infinite enhancement which cannot be adequately spoken. Relating this to aesthetics; it's the impossibility of saying what beauty is.
You winding me up? :wink:
SO, flame on. I can't make sense of the quote. By way of example, I don't recognise "Wittgenstein tried to show how we end up in confusion by trying to pretend that ‘S is P’ makes any sense outside of a specific context of wider motivated engagement with others" from anything in Witi; I'm not even able to say if it is from the earlier or the latter...
And that's because here, and elsewhere over the last few pages, folk have been using cognates of "S is F" without explaining what they are talking about. Is it that S=F (they are equal)? Or S ? F (they are materially equivalent)? Or just F(S) (predicating F to S)? or S?F (S is an element of the set or class S), or none of these, or some combination, or something else?
This is the stuff I said above was clarified in more recent logic. When, as happened earlier in this thread, folk who use such ambiguity complain that logic is somehow useless, I glaze over. It looks like an apology for their failure to learn a bit of basic logic.
Of course, I might be wrong, and there might be something profound and useful being said here, but until it is clarified, frankly, to my eye the last few pages are rambling diatribe rather than philosophy.
You asked.
(Edit: and this is why analytic philosophy is more useful than... other stuff. )
I guess it is a post-modern position with an anti-foundational basis.
I think that's a point under contention :D
As @Banno put it, the subject is a Cartesian hangover which is better gotten rid of. (or, metaphysically, between mental-stuff and physical-stuff) (EDIT: At least, ala this notion that analytic philosophy is anti-dualistic. I still think on it because I think the subject has a way of creeping back up even if dissolved)
The sense-datum theory, as I understand it, is one which is still structured around the subject. A subject doesn't see mountains as mountains (except naively), rather a subject interprets the basics of experience (the sense-datum) which it has learned to call a mountain.
Dissolve the subject, though, and there's not really a place for sense-datum. Or, vice versa, dissolve sense-datum (or the raw experience, or experience as it is, or a film of subjectivity), then what is left of a subject with respect to perception? (since that was the focus of the book)
I mean, it's been a minute since I've read that too, it was just an example that comes to mind of analytic philosophers eschewing dualism, especially of the subject-object variety.
There might be our difference.
How language is constructed is unknown. The rules come after the fact as explanations for our usage, but even those rules are broken over time -- and whether it's a diversion or an invention I'd posit is more a historical story than a scientific one. Just meaning I'm uncertain that there's a strict functional relationship between some finite set of rules and a vocabulary. Not that we don't follow such rules, we do -- but we also invent things too. Even on the spot. Most vocabulary that's recorded "drifts up" from vernacular, where people invent terms on the spot on the regular.
Yet:
Quoting Banno
That's true.
Quoting Banno
Let’s start with Husserl’s characterization of the syllogism. He spends most of Experience and Judgement and Formal and Transcendental Logic unfolding the intentional strata that constitutively lead up to the understanding of the most elementary basis of formal logic, the predicative synthesis S is P.
“…what has been established from the beginning, from the founding of our logical tradition with Aristotle, is this: the most general characteristic of the predicative judgment is that it has two members: a “substrate” (hypokeimenon), about which something is affirmed, and that which is affirmed of it (kategoroumenon); from another point of view, according to grammatical form, we can distinguish onoma and rhema. Every declarative statement must be made up from these two members. Every judging presupposes that an object is on hand, that it is already given to us, and is that about which the statement is made.
(… a unitary proposition can be more or less highly articulated. For instance, the hypothetical judgment, / / A is b, then C is d. It is sharply articulated as having two parts; it too has a "caesura": / / A is b II then C is d. Each of these members is, in turn, articulated.)
Thus tradition provides us, so to speak, with an original model of the judgment which, qua judgment, we must interrogate as to its origin. We must leave entirely open here whether with this we are really dealing with the most primordial logical structure.
Only the elucidation of the origin of this structure, traditionally defined as judgment, can provide the answer to this question and to all further questions associated with it: to what extent is the predicative judgment the privileged and central theme of logic, so that, in its core, logic is necessarily apophantic logic, a theory of judgment? Furthermore, what is the mode of connection of these two members which are always to be distinguished in judgment? To what extent is the judgment synthesis and diaeresis (analysis) in one? This is a problem which has always created an embarrassment for the logician and for which there is no satisfactory solution to this day. What is it that is “bound together” and “separated” in the judgment? Further: which among the multiple judgment-forms which tradition distinguishes is the most primitive, i.e., that one which, as being the undermost, and founding all others, must be presupposed, and by an essential necessity conceived as underlying, in order that other forms of a “higher level” can be founded on it? Is there a single primal form, or are there several, enjoying equal rights, standing beside one another? “
“Since Aristotle, it has been held as certain that the basic schema of judgment is the copulative judgment, which is reducible to the basic form S is P. Every judgment having another composition, e.g., the form of a verbal proposition, can, according to this interpretation, be transformed without alteration of its logical sense into the form of the copulative bond; for example, “The man walks” is logically equivalent to “The man is walking.” The “is” is part of the rhema in which always “time is cosignified,” and in this it is like the verb. Thus, we require an exact understanding of what is involved in this copulative bond, of the nature and origin of the copulative predicative judgment, before we can take a position regarding the question of whether in fact this convertibility is justified and whether the difference between the judgments is merely one of a difference of linguistic form, which does not refer to a difference of the logical achievement of sense.
However, should the latter be the case, the problem would arise of knowing how both forms, the copulative proposition on the one hand, and the verbal on the other, relate to each other. Are they equally primitive logical achievements of sense, or is one (and which one?) the more primitive? Does the copulative form S is p, as tradition holds, really represent the basic schema of the judgment? Further, the question about the primordiality of this schema would in that case also have to be raised with regard to the fact that in it, as a matter of course, the subject is set in the form of the third person. In this, it is presupposed that, in the first and second persons, the judgment in the form “I am . . . ,” “You are . . . expresses no logical achievement of sense which deviates from that expressed in the privileged fundamental schema “It is . . . This presupposition requires testing and would again put the question of the primordiality of the traditional basic schema S is p in a new light.“
Husserl’s thesis is this:”Logic needs a theory of experience, in order to be able to give scientific information about the legitimating bases, and the legitimate limits, of its Apriori, and consequently about its own legitimate sense. Tthe ideal "existence" of the judgment-content is a presupposition for, and enters into, the ideal "existence" of the judgment (in the widest sense, that of a supposed categorial objectivity as supposed).
“The possibility of properly effectuating the possibility of a judgment (as a meaning) is rooted not only in the syntactical forms but also in the syntactical stuffs.
“This fact is easily over-looked by the formal logician, with his interest directed one-sidedly to the syntactical — the manifold forms of which are all that enters into logical theory — and with his algebraizing of the cores as theoretical irrelevancies, as empty somethings that need only be kept identical.”
Perhaps, although I don't think so. I agree with much of what you are saying here. We agree that there are rules for language use, and that these rules are regularly broken.
There are two ways of expressing a rule. One way is to set it out explicitly in words. The other is to enact it. Both "stop at the red light" and stopping at the red light express a rule.
Quoting Moliere
Well, stating the rule might come after the fact, but it might also come before it, when teaching someone to follow the rule, or when stipulating a new rule - consider the Académie Française. Neither is logically prior to the other.
I had supposed your agreement on this back here: . @Lukes error was to suppose that expressing a rule had to be either stating it, and hence effable, or enacting it, and hence ineffable, but you were pointing out that we can follow a rule that can also be stated, and hence the doing is not ineffable.
This is also what I was pointing to here:
Quoting Banno
Where or when did I make this error? Do you have a quote?
I think your memory is failing you, @Banno, This was your error, not mine. You were the one who said:
Quoting Banno
I was the one who spent almost 30 pages trying to correct you.
Otherwise, go ahead and state it now: what knowledge is missing from the exhaustive list of instructions such that we do not know how to ride a bike?
First, it's worth noting that predication applies more broadly than to "judgements of experience". 2 is a number. That's not generally something one experiences as a phenomena... unless perhaps one has synethesia.
The approach taken in first order predication is most often extensional. To see if two is a number, one looks at the list of numbers to see if it included two. Pretty direct, pretty powerful. To see if "the cup has a handle" is true, just check to see if the cup is on the list of things with handles. To see if "the cup is red" is false, check to see if it is not on the list of red things. Notice that extensionally speaking, being a thing with handles just is being on that list.
Put thusly it looks pretty ordinary. It works beautifully in proving that your system is consistent, but of course we want to dig further, and work out how things get on the list. Philosophical questions persist, like what makes two a number, what counts as a handle and is it really red?
Well, for numbers we can use any of several explications. For handles, we might use @jgill's suggestion - a thing topologically equivalent to a doughnut...
But phenomenologist like to use colour*, so let's look at how we tell if the cup is a member of the group of red things. On a side note, to my eye phenomenology looks like an example of reaching philosophical conclusions based on too limited a set of examples; by considering colours rather than handles and numbers and other sorts of predication.
So, we see the cup is on the list of red things - but we ask if this is correct. Now the phenomenological answer is, from what I can work out, that one looks at the experience on has on viewing the cup and... sort of ineffably intuits that the cup s red or some such. Now I'm told that this is somehow a mistaken view, and it is so absurd that I hope it is, but I haven't had an alternative account of how phenomenology is supposed to help here, explained to me in a way I found comprehensible. Anyway, the key is something like that one makes a judgement based on some introspection of the phenomena one has before one...
I want to offer an alternative, one that does not rely on such introspection. It comes form re-framing the question. That re-framing is to see that what is being asked here, as in so many philosophical problems, is an issue of language use. Instead of asking if "The cup is red" is true, one asks if it is appropriate to use the word "red" in respect to that particular cup.
This is again, of course, the great reimagining of philosophical issues that comes form Wittgenstein's admonition to look at use rather than meaning.
So instead if "is it true that the cup is red" we ask if it is useful to talk of the cup as being red. And several things become immediately apparent.
It's clear that it is appropriate to call the cup redif it is helpful in the task at hand - "pass me the red cup" works if you are handed that cup and not the green one. And we can seek clarification: "Do you mean crimson one or the vermilion one?" and so on. There's an interaction between the participants here that can serve to specify the cup to whatever level one desires.
It's also clear that whether the cup counts as red or not is a function of the activity in which we are involved, which includes other folk. The cup's being red is dependent on the public activity in which we are involved. One's introspection on one's perceptions of redness are as irrelevant here as one's introspections on the number "two". What counts is not some agreement on our introspections, but our agreement on which cups count as red and which do not. Boxed beetles and all that.
Anyway, that'll do for now. At the least I hope it is clear why it is a bit silly to berate logicians for not starting with experiences.
We don't experience numbers per se, but we do experience number; that is we experience numbers of things,
Quoting Banno
How do we know whether it is appropriate to use the word 'red'? Is it not simply appropriate when speaking of something that appears red?
It is an issue of language use, obviously, since that is what the very question is about: appropriate use of language, but it is not nothing but an issue of language use; what is experienced or perceived is what provides the criteria for deciding appropriate use.
Heh. Mostly just looking for something that might differentiate us.
Cool. I agree so far.
Quoting Banno
Good point. I agree neither is logically prior to the other.
I guess the counter-example would have to be -- a usage that is not state-able in a rule.
That doesn't seem to be possible, to me. We can always append more clauses -- there is no rule limiting how many clauses fit into a sentence, and rules can consist of many sentences on top of that. And even if there was a rule, I would break it :D
We can even invent meanings ex nihilo, so gavagai might fit, or phi, or F of x.
I guess that's the conflict I'm thinking of -- between invented meanings and rules. Is novelty a rule being expressed non-verbally? Is there a difference between meaning and rules at all? I think I was thinking of them as different... but if language is purely a system of grunts for getting things done, then the meaning could "float away".
It just seems a bit too much to me because it seems like words do mean things.
Of course, I might have this all wrong too :D -- but this is where my thoughts are taking me at the moment.
You GOT to be kidding me. If a guy doesn’t know whether or not 2 is a number, how would he know what the list of numbers looks like? So, what….he knows…like…3 is a number, but doesn’t know 2 is a number? The list of numbers is infinite. How does one look at an infinite list?
But maybe you meant, to see if this object perceived is a number 2 or not. To understand the object as being a 2, representing a specific quantity. Of course he would not, if he had no experience of the series of numbers having that particular member in the series. But he would still have an understanding of successive quantitative magnitudes, regardless of the form of its representations.
————-
Quoting Banno
(GASP) How long is the list of things with handles? The handle on a hammer looks nothing like the handle on a cup, but the hammer must be on the list of things with handles. To see if it is true the cup has a handle, why not just look at the farging cup???? It never was a question whether the cup has horns, or wings, or is in the shape of a basketball; it is only asked if it is true the cup has a handle, which immediately presupposes it’s supposed to, insofar as handles are a necessary conceptual schema for that which are cognized as cups. Things which perform similar functions as cups but do not have handles, are cognized as goblets, or whatever.
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Quoting Banno
Oh dear.
2 is nothing but phenomenon. 2 is an object to be perceived by sight. That which 2 the empirical object thus phenomenon represents, on the other hand, is something not generally experienced. Actually, it isn’t at all; it is merely thought, and thought a priori in descension as quantity, and as schemata of a series of successive quantities, finally as specific schema representing a particular quantity.
“…. Philosophical cognition, accordingly, regards the particular only in the general; mathematical the general in the particular, nay, in the individual. This is done, however, entirely à priori and by means of pure reason, so that, as this individual figure is determined under certain universal conditions of construction, the object of the conception, to which this individual figure corresponds as its schema, must be cogitated as universally determined.…”
Number the conception as opposed to number the word, is not a phenomenon; a number, constructed to represent a quantity, is. Mathematics is impossible without phenomenal representation of quantity. Just as one can think a triangle but can never think the properties belonging to any triangle without the construction of one, so too can one think number but never count a total series of them, or determine possible relations between them without construction of objects representing them.
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Quoting Banno
So if I’m all by myself, I won’t count the cup as red? If I’m all by myself, the activity in which I am involved is all my own, so I can only count the cup as red if I think it does. As for the community, we all can count the cup as red iff each of us thinks it does.
But you’re probably coming at this from the fact that when you were a little tyke, you were told the cup was red, hence the “other folk”, and ever since, you’ve never had to think about the properties of that particular thing. Which is tantamount to saying…..you stopped thinking.
Somebody says to you, hand me the red cup……why did you NOT hand him the green one? If other folk are involved in the activity of what is the case, how do other folk get involved with that which is not the case? Can you imagine….all those folk saying, not that one, not that one, not…there ya go, that one. Shheeeesh, how would anyone have invented the Slinky, under those conditions?
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Quoting Banno
Agreed. Logicians shouldn’t start from experience, but from principles.
Meh. What I'm offering is a bowdlerised version of the logical notion of interpretation and satisfaction. of course their definitions are explicit, what I wrote was only a poor parsing in English.
Take it up with the logicians.
That's pretty much it.
Language allows us to construct institutional facts; see the thread on Searle I presented earlier. These institutional facts are manifestations of collective intentionality; yet they can appear quite tangible - things such as property or incorporation... or word "meaning".
Perhaps "meaning" doesn't "float away" - much - because it is held in place by such collective intent. As in Davidson's derangement of epitaphs, the unconventional use is grounded in the convention. But if I say that, folk will think that I mean that meaning is given by intent, and that's not right.
Presumably Joshs is bracketing the next part of the conversation... epoché.
But perhaps we ought suspend such judgements...
Somewhat circular.
If you are asking how you tell if something is red, the answer is that it simply doesn't matter. It's your beetle, use whatever method you like. What counts is the public use.
It's not circular; if something looks red then it is appropriate to use the word 'red' when referring to its colour, just as if something looks like a tree, it is appropriate to use the word 'tree'.
If people see it differently, they'll soon let you know. "It's not red, it's orange". "it's not a tree, it's a shrub". "Public use" is meaningless; there are only individual usages.
The beetle may actually be public due to quantum entanglement.
I'm not sure what that could mean, but if it is so, we don't know about it anyway.
There's a theory. Don't you read pop sci?
I was going to respond to your comment on the expression of a rule, and then realized I didn’t actually disagree with it.
Quoting Banno
From a Husserlian vantage, there is nothing to be said about anything outside of experience. The number 2 is an intentional experience in a particular mode of givenness.
Quoting Banno
Logicians do start with experience. More specifically, they start with an implicit theory of experience. Their theories of experience pay lip service to the sorts of preliminary processes that are necessary in order to establish logical subjects and predicates as recognizable, unitary objects that can be compared and distinguished , bound together or separated. Usually , this consists of acknowledging what they consider to be psychological developmental capacities like object permanence (it’s hard to manipulate abstract objects without seeing objects as persistingly self-identical) .
But these preliminary, or pre-predicative, capacities tend to be seen as peripheral to what the logicians you support see as the ‘ground floor’ of logic, ‘public use’.
You have said you are not a conceptual relativist, so use for you ultimately is tied to the way things really are, even if in an indirect way ala Davidson, or maybe Anscombe. There is no endless hermeneutic circle of use defined by family resemblance. This chain of ‘in order to’s’ must come to an end somewhere, and that end is presaged by the formal components of predicative logic.
Husserl is also concerned with what works, but for him use applies not only to interactions between people involving objects but also to one’s pre-predicative perceptual involvement with objects. Every aspect of our experience of our world in terms of recognizable features, colors , shapes , the objectivizing constitution of whole objects from a changing flow of perceptual perspectives, distinctions between these constructed whole objects and their components parts , distinctions and similarities between one whole object and another, all of these involve a progressive emergence of more and more complex differentiations and syntheses based on perceived similarities(not a Humean causal concatenation but an intentional synthesis that draws from prior established correlations to produce more complex new syntheses.”.. each everyday experience involves an analogizing transfer of an originally instituted objective sense to a new case, with its anticipative apprehension of the object as having a similar sense.”) There are no qualia to be referred back to here. Everything about perceptual judgement is relative, circular and contingent , just as Isaac would have it.
Predicative judgements have their origin in these pre-predicative judgements of identity, similarity and differentiation. Being able to recognize a ceaselessly changing flow of visual perspectival variations, accompanied by independent auditory and tactile sensations, as ‘this persisting spatial object’ is more useful than experiencing a random flow of meaningless
phenomena. And abstracting further from such particular objects to a general object ‘S’ can be useful too. But we need to recognize the sort of synthetic constructive activity that is required to create the sense of ‘general category’. And the same is true of the further constituting activity involved in the relating of the general category ‘S’ to a ‘P’. For Husserl, every the the most seemingly transparent, obvious and irreducible steps of a logical construction involve the constituting of new senses of meaning(For instance, when I introduce an ‘S’ , that is one sense of meaning, and when I introduce a ‘P’ this changes the sense of the original ‘S’. When I add a conditional IFF this further changes the sense of the ‘S’, as well as the ‘P’.
But you know that people have been thinking about a possible link between consciousness and quantum mechanics at least since Penrose.
Far as I know it goes back to the very foundations of QM - Niels Bohr was a kind of idealist and often seen as a mystic (certainly by Einstein) and often quoted here by @wayfarer. A Bohr quote that launched a thousand Deepak Chopras.
Yes, but I don't have an opinion about such speculations as I know too little.
I'm not talking about the measurement problem. Penrose speculated that we should look to quantum mechanics for a theory of how consciousness works. Those speculations continue.
Penrose is a Mathematical Platonist, isn’t he? Does this make him an idealist more generally?
Probably, but I wasn't talking about idealism or the measurement problem. I was talking about using quantum theory to explain how the brain works. That's what Penrose was doing.
Quoting Tom Storm
Mathematical platonism is the default among mathematicians. It doesn't mean he's an idealist. It's just a stance about whether math reduces to particular instances of calculation or if it's a field we discover.
...and so on. "There's a meaning there, but the meaning there doesn't really mean a thing". Russel Morris. When I try to make sense of what you have attempted to say here, it seems to fall apart. So:
Quoting Joshs
Identity, similarity and differentiation are predictions. Presumably you wish to say something like that while they are predications, the judgement isn't; but how could one make a judgement involving a predicate without using that predicate?
And so on. Each step meets with a discontinuity.
Here's a link to the Open Logic Project. It's pretty much the whole of logic. Do a search for "experience". Nothing comes up.
But extensionality is the first topic.
So I am left to think that whatever you are doing in that post, it's got precious little to do wit logic as usually conceived.
Much as I disliked Sokal's approach, There seems to be something in his pointing out that some writers delight in their obscurity.
I suspect there is little difference between our actual positions, but since I'm unable to form a coherent account of what you are saying, I might be wrong.
Quoting frank
Oh ok - never heard of this before.
P.S. - I just watched several interviews with him about the matter. Not sure what it gives us but it's interesting.
Perhaps the distinction Husserl makes between the pre-predicative and the predicative stratum of constitution (and his notion of pre-predicative judgment) implies a different use of the word predication than the one you are familiar with. What is a prediction for you? Is it the relation between an S and a P? If so, when you say all identity, similarity and differentiation involves predication, are you making the relation between a subject and a predicate the irreducible ground of sense as use? Are you claiming that predication is involved in the most basic forms of perceptual discrimination and construction?
If so , it isn’t surprising that Husserl’s writings on the pre-predicative genesis of predication doesn’t make sense to you. This realm of intentional constitution of sense simply doesn’t exist for you. Put differently, it will likely appear to you as a misguided attempt to anchor predicational use in some stratum that eludes language.
Still crickets to my latest reply? I guess you couldn't find any quotes to support your memory failure.
Quoting Banno
The list of instructions either gives us the required knowledge of how to ride a bike or it does not. If we don't know how to ride after reading the exhaustive list of instructions - as you claimed - then some knowledge is necessarily missing from the instructions. The only reason why some knowledge could be missing from the instructions is because that knowledge is ineffable. Otherwise, the list of instructions is not exhaustive.
However, we know that the list of instructions is exhaustive, because you said that it could be "to whatever detail we desire" and yet we still wouldn't know how to ride. Furthermore, you implied that the act of riding the bike is some sort of extra knowledge that is additional to, and missing from, the list of instructions (even though the instructions are supposedly exhaustive and instruct one how to ride a bike). Once more, in your own words:
Quoting Banno
Therefore, it was your error that "the doing is ineffable", not mine. Unless you have any evidence to indicate otherwise, this error is all yours.
Cool.
I think the meaning encoded institutionally is always after the fact. But that doesn't mean the words we use right now don't have meaning.
Language enables, and language is social -- but not institutional. Not even as a status-function derived from we-intentions.
Much of my interest in Searle is his clear case of the social being reducible to the mental, and my desire to make the case that the social is independent of the mental.
I'd say the Marxist account of the social treats the social as a distinct entity that is not reducible to the mental, nor does it arise out of a collective will. A monopoly on violence is closer -- only it'd include liberal democracies within that scope. Rather than collectively enacted rules, the social organism behaves in accord with its own patterns which, in turn, shape individuals to follow rules. A proletarian knows the consequences of falling out of line. This creates the status of alienation which goes directly against we-intentions. The worker has a two-fold identity: the world of rules from the boss that he must dance to, and the knowledge that the rules are just excuses for violence if he doesn't behave.
Knowing the rules like this is simply not a deontic relationship. One follows the rules, in deontology, for the value of the rule itself, because it is what is worthy, and you respect that rule -- and as a freely acting person you choose to obey its strictures.
But workers are not free, in the bosses' language, complete with its deontic promises.
And having a need to be able to express that condition, from time to time -- they don't just break rules, rules aren't even useful. Rules are for bosses and lawyers and people who make a living by parsing written things. Workers aren't trained in that, and so it is to their disadvantage to give into the world of reasons and procedures. Power is at the point of production, and if you can stop that it doesn't matter how you say it. (but note how the very world is different now -- a rule without deontic commitments)
And after the strike, win or lose, the boss won't understand it.
That certain noises or marks count as utterances, while others do not, shows that language is institutional.
Far as Searle's account is from Marx, they do agree in that the social is not reducible to the mental. In Searle's analysis we-intent is not reducible to I-intent.
And I think he is correct here.
You are asking what is the "...is..." in S is P?
It isn't anything; certainly not a relation.
Let's not reify syntax.
It has to be something. It carries a meaning, and the meaning changes with the structure of the logical relation.
Logic doesn’t consist of S’s and P’s basking in solipsism. It tells us how to bind or separate them. Actually, in my question concerning the nature of a predication, I’m more interested in the S and the P than in the copula , which , btw, I suggest gives us the structure of ‘use’.
I recognize that the forms of logic that you are most interested in represent innovations over older forms of logic in which the copula has no connection to use but instead simply connects independent symbols. In modern pragmatic logics, from my understanding, the objects that S and P stand for are always themselves the effects of use relations. Thus, no object senses escape the structure of public use.
It seems, though, that , even given that the ‘S’ in a predication is never independent of a use-context , these logics must be able to keep the sense of the ‘S’ stable. That is , its use points to a category that can be symbolized. A use belongs to a use category , and this is what the symbols in a logic stand for. I think this where interpersonal of the later Wittgenstein split off from each other. Those Wittgensteinians who endorse the value of formal logic see him as making symbolizable use categories irreducible ( Hacker and Baker) , while others argue that uses aren’t symbolizable categories but contingent, situational contexts.
Why?
Quoting Joshs
It has a use? What does it do? It doesn't even occur in certain other languages, where the concatenation of a predicate and a noun will suffice. It does Fa in standard logical parlance.
Quoting Joshs
"...how to..."? It's a set of instructions?
Quoting Joshs
Better, use is creating a category.
Bradley’s regress lurks here.
Interesting
‘Snow is white’: In this case , the ‘is’ tells us that white is a dependent attribute of snow. ‘Snow is snow’: In this case, the ‘is’ tells us that snow is identical to itself. ‘Snow’ is whiter than rain’: In this case the ‘is’ tells us that two independent objects are being compared. Of course, the ‘is’ isn’t doing this all by itself. The sentence that it occurs in defines its sense. And this must be true for the sense of the S and the P also. And I take it your point is that the ‘use’ of all of these components of a propositional statement involves not just the role of each symbol in the context of the sentence , but the use of the sentence in the context of public communication.
Quoting Banno
Now we’re getting somewhere. This is what I was trying to get at. So if the components of a syllogism get their sense from their role in the sentence, and the sentence gets its sense from its use by a community, is this community use the creation of the category that defines the sense of a particular syllogism? And if so, do we do things with categories other than create them?
Are there instances or aspects of the actual engagement with a syllogism that don’t involve the fresh creation of a category? And if we are not always creating a category when we converse , how should we describe what we are doing with the category as we employ it in a syllogism? Tell me more about the difference between the creation and the employment of a category.
So you've used the predicating "is" in two cases and the equals is in the other. They are not the same.
And again, if the predicating "is" had any semantic power, you would also have to deal with Bradley’s regress.
I'm not sure.
Just looking at linguistic institutions, it seems to me that all linguistic institutions do the opposite of making certain marks count as utterances. They categorize what happened to work before, but it wasn't the institution that made the utterance, but the other way around. Language pre-dates institutions, after all.
We don't know why certain noises or marks count as utterances.
I agree that I-intent does not reduce to we-intent, but I'm not sure I'm following how Searle escapes the charge of reducing the social to the mental. We-intentions are mental, yeah? And status-functions arise out of we-intentions. So maybe not reducible, but still arises out of -- unless I'm completely misunderstanding.
Quoting Banno
If it is in a sentence, it plays a semantic role in that sentence, albeit one that can vary widely in importance depending on the context. Components of a sentence are like notes in a song. Every note has a meaning in the context of the piece. There are no notes which ‘do nothing’. I say ‘ All snow is white’. You say, ‘No, it IS NOT!’ I say , yes, all snow IS white.’ Or I say ‘this snow was white’. You correct me by saying, ‘No, this snow IS white’. It seems to me the ‘is’ carries the central semantic message via the emphasis in these sentences, but via slightly different senses of meaning. Hebrew doesnt use the word ‘is’, because other elements of a sentence take over the function of identifying tense, personal pronoun, etc. But this doesn’t mean that there is no semantic effect of this difference in grammatical structure between English and Hebrew, or between English and any other language. These differences are among the reasons that there cannot be a perfect translation from one language to another.
No response to the rest of my post?
Perhaps in English its role is to distinguish Snow White from that snow is white.
Again, there are languages in which it doesn't occur; it is not needed in first order logic; and supposing that it is a relation leads immediately to Bradley's regress...
That is, you are suggesting that "fa" is an incomplete analysis of predication, that we must represent as well the relation between f and a... and that the "is" is needed to explicate something in addition to "fa". So instead of analysing the first-order predicate as "fa" you say we must write "a is f". But now you have two more relations, that between "a" and "is f" and that between "a is" and "f"... and off you go.
So we can stop at "fa", which works, or chase Bradley down the rabbit hole. Say "Hello" to Alice.
Quoting Joshs
Nope.
Hmmm. I read Searle as claiming that the difference between a grunt and an utterance is exactly that the utterance makes use of an institution... it counts as a warning or an admonition or some such. It has a normative role.
Seems a slightly different application of "institution" to Marx.
Quoting Moliere
Well, I'm not sure what "mental" entails. Do we agree that social intent is not private? "mental" stuff tends to be regarded as private. I would like to avoid seeing, say, buying a pizza as a mental activity.
Language itself is an institution (at least in sociology). I'm not sure I remember how Marx used the word, but I doubt modern Marxist sociologist would find the idea that language is an institution surprising. There are many different theories, but as a rule of thumb, sociology considers any suriving regular social behaviour an institution. When you speak of linguistic institutions above do you mean stuff like dictionaries, linguistics, crossword puzzles...? Or the organisations that make them?
Yeah, the utterance makes the institution: without the utterance, no language. But, generally, people draw on their expectations of the institution to make those utterances. Chicken-egg situation, at that point.
I didn’t mean to suggest that the ‘is’ is necessary in order
for predication to do its job. My point was that whenever the ‘is’ makes its appearance in a sentence it does so for a reason. It does something. Rather than calling it a relation, I would say that it modifies the sentence in some way. It acts as a verb, or perhaps an adverb, but then modern philology recognized that the roots on which languages are based act more as verbs than as nouns. The ‘S’ is already a doing, a performance, even before it is linked to a ‘P’, which is a further performance.
Quoting Joshs
As I explained, it's to stop "Snow White" from being confused with "snow is white".
You might have caught my subtle hint that you seem to be running up against Bradley's regress. I gather you don't agree.
So far so good on this phrasing. I went through the thread on Searle you linked so I'm sort of responding to all the ideas that were in it at once.
If "institution" is just what counts as according to any group then I'm picking on Searle's account of institution more than I am the notion that language is enacted by a group which counts certain marks as meanings. Separately I also doubt that counting-as must be rule-bound (and, further, I wouldn't say that makes language ineffable, regardless of the status of its rule-boundedness). To that end I was trying to use Marx's notion of alienation as a contrast to Searle's notion of institution as status-functions which arise from we-intentions to show how his notion of we-intentions wouldn't be able to handle alienation, which should count as an institution by this rule of thumb:
Quoting Dawnstorm
So if language is an institution which arises from we-intentions of a group counting marks as meaningful then it seems to me alienation isn't really possible.
That is, there are different positions within a group, and how counting-as works.
Quoting Banno
Social intent is not private. And if we're talking the private language argument, mental is not private either.
"buying a pizza" is a social activity. I bet, however we count mental, the mental will be involved in some sense, but not in the sense of the ineffable or anything.
Much of my thoughts on the ineffable is how I think people prefer to think of the social in mental terms, and then claim that it is somehow private (and, therefore, cannot be criticized). So there's some of my interest in these distinctions.
I think some of what I replied to @Banno makes this clearer. I'm on board with language being an institution in this very broad rule of thumb you put here. I'm quibbling with Searle's notion, which relates to language because that's how it's situated in the thread.
Quoting Dawnstorm
Yeah. But there is no "the" institution, at that point, right? The groups are so many...
Quoting Banno
I don’t think you mean to say that this is the only function of the word ‘is’, because it can do many things in a sentence. I assume you’re trying to tell me what is NOT a necessary function of the ‘is’ , namely , telling us that two other terms are related in some way.
Quoting Banno
All components of language are doings, changes, transformations. They relate a prior sense with a new sense by modifying the old sense. The simplest way to convey this is with a sentence that consists of a single word or gesture. All higher structures of language build on this by elaboration and enrichment. Since a single word in itself already can convey a relation in the sense of a doing, I don’t think Bradley’s regress has any relevance to my argument. From my perspective, every addition to the relation conveyed by a one-word sentence would have to be considered a new and different relation rather than a regressive defining of the original relation. The ‘is’, when it is employed , contributes a new kind of transforming relation ( a doing) on top of that constituted by a pair of terms , rather than originally creating the relation between those terms.
Quite the opposite; the uses of "is" are many and diverse.
But it does nothing in "a is f"; here's the proof: fa.
Quoting Joshs
Quoting Banno
If this does not address your argument, then again I've not been able to follow what you have been claiming.
My argument, drawing from Husserl, is that fa is not an analysis of predication so much as a naive restatement of the idealization that predication represents, and that there is a ‘pre-predicative’ stratum of cognition that predication and all its symbols are built on top of. Trying to use these symbols, like fa, to describe this pre-predicative stratum is putting the cart before the horse.
This pre-predicative level of cognition has been misunderstood as a psychological realm, as if one were using neuroscience to explain the basis of the recognition of symbols , identities and propositions. But a neuroscientific approach that is founded on mathematical methods which in turn are founded on propositional logic is also putting the cart before the horse.
Regarding the treatment of the ‘is’ as an ‘added’ relation between S and P, let’s go back to Bradley. According to Wiki,
“Bradley seems to conclude that the regress should lead us to abandon the idea that relations are "independently real". One way to take this suggestion is as recommending that in the case of a respecting b, we are dealing with a state of affairs that has only two constituents: a and b. It does not, in addition, involve a third item…”
Not sure if you agree with this, but assuming you do, help me understand in what way there are only two constituents in the case of ‘Snow is white’. Certainly we can remove the ‘is’ and end up with the two symbols fa.
But when I hear the words snow is white, how am I able to understand what this means? Let’s begin with the first word of the syllogism. Snow in this context doesn’t refer to the memory of a particular instance of my encounter with snow , it refers to any and all possible instances, that is, snow in general. Would you say, then, that what I am understanding here is the general category of snow? And what about the predicate ‘white’? Am I not treating this word in the context of the syllogism as the general category of the color white? And how am I supposed to understand what this genera category of white is doing in the same syllogism with the general category of snow?
Of all the ways I can think about snow, only one way directs me toward a property or attribute of it, something that describes only own aspect of what snow is, in addition to its being wet, crystalline, sparkly, and so on.
So if, according to Bradley the only constituents of ‘snow is white’ are the two general categories ‘snow’ and ‘white’, what do we call our being directed toward an attribute of snow? If this is not a relation, and not a constituent, do we say that it simply belongs equally and inseparably to the two constituents? This could work if the meaning of ‘snow’ and ‘ white’ have been modified such that , in their participation in the syllogism , they no longer have separable identities apart from their role in the syllogism. Is this what you would say? Because if one can still tease out from the predication a general category of meaning called ‘snow’ and one called ‘white’ then one clearly has a third category, or at least sense, here in the form of ‘is a part of’. Then in order to understand the syllogism as a whole , one must go back and forth between ‘snow’ , ‘white’, and ‘is a part of’. I believe the first option rather than the second. How about you?
All that seems overly complicated. Putting it more directly, seem to me that "snow is white" is about two things, snow and white; but you insist that it is about three things: snow, white and being.
Cool.
I was saying alienation couldn't be represented in Searle's language of institutions but... more specific to the thread on Searle you pointed out I'm realizing, and therefore absolutely necessary to cover in figuring out ineffabillity ;)
The broader notion I agree with, here:
Quoting Dawnstorm
and here:
Quoting Banno
I think I was getting stuck on the nitty gritty within the Searle thread.
Heh, even in seeking disagreement... :D
Though one thing that occurs to me that might still be an object of disagreement is group size.
To me, I'd be inclined to say two people who use a joke twice, or who have noticed whose "spot" it is on the bus, have created an institution, by our understandings provided. It may not be a long lasting or massively significant one, but I'd say it fits.
And I think the Searle thread got me thinking.... there's no way that fits. Plus the part I already mentioned about trying to distinguish the mental from the social in a particular way.
It is about intentionality, that is , aboutness, which is an act of doing. To intend is to be about something in a certain way, and there cannot be a sense of meaning without aboutness. To think the word ‘snow’ is to think about snow in some manner of givenness ( recollection, imagination, perception). One cannot intend more than one meaning at a time , so the syllogism should be seen as a temporal succession, a movement from one aboutness to another which progressively constructs a higher level concept. One can also think of an act of aboutness as a shift of attention.
Let’s put this in visual terms. I am told to imagine that snow is white. My attention is initially directed , even before I process the meaning of the word ‘snow’ , toward the context of the request, which could be seeing the syllogism as part of a discussion in the philosophy forum. From that attentive context, my attention is now directed toward the image of snow, an image which belongs in my mind to this larger context of an example within a philosophy discussion. From this image of snow my attention is then directed to the word ‘is’ ( if that happens to be part of the syllogism’s construction). Before I hear the word ‘white’ , the word ‘is’ initially directs my attention( primes me) in an open-ended way to prepare for some new event of understanding involving snow( many possibilities are prepared for at once, such as snow is nice , snow is snow, snow is falling, snow is colder than fire).
Hearing the word ‘white’ after the ‘is’ directs my attention in a focused way onto one of these many possibilities, not simply white as a free standing category, but white in its role as a modifier of snow. More specifically, the ‘white’ here modifies the meaning of ‘snow’ by representing a component or dependent part of snow , as something which is contained by or included within snow. This is a spatial aspect of snow , like saying that something is to the left of , on top of , underneath, alongside , outside of or encircling snow. Notice that the word ‘is’ is not necessary to convey these spatial meanings. The important point is that these directional concepts are real. People with damage to spatial areas of the cortex cannot comprehend the meaning of certain kinds of spatial relationships between objects.
In order to understand spatial positioning or containment relationships ( P is a part of S) , one must hold the substrate ( snow) in memory all the while manipulating the contained item (white) , such that one can then experience both the containing ( snow) and the contained ( white) ina single experience. This requires more memory effort than such patients are capable of. The substrate is lost sight of when they move on to the attribute, so it is never seen in its role as attribute, but only as a free-floating concept. The concept ‘inside of ‘ simply doesn’t exist for them.
If you present ‘snow is white’ to someone with this kind of injury, they’ll respond ‘Fine, I know what snow is , and I know what white is , and I even understand that you are claiming some kind of connection between the two, but I don’t understand what kind of connection this is supposed to be.’ On the other hand , they may have no trouble parsing ‘snow is pretty’ , a non-spatial relationship.
My point isnt that one needs a healthy psychological system in order to understand syllogisms , it is that relational elements of syllogisms are real concepts that involve cognitive achievements. There is no more danger of a regress with these sorts of ‘connector’ concepts than there is with the nouns that populate logical propositions.
Assuming one doesn’t have these neurological abnormalities, my attention to the belongingness of white to snow changes my initial understanding of snow, when it was the only word of the syllogism I was exposed to, from a general idea of snow to ‘this snow that is white’.
In sum, the final result of the temporal succession of attentional , and intentional, shifts that marks my moving through the words of the proposition is not three components( ‘snow’ , ‘white’ and ‘a dependent part of’) or two components( snow and white), but only one component, ‘the white snow’, which has embedded within its meaning all of the attentional shifts of sense that mark the history of its construction in the very short period of time it takes to read or hear the syllogism.
a record for a thread
about
what cannot be said.
A Guinness World Record?
Well done, ! :starstruck:
Why, thank you. The thread has gone far beyond even my expectations.
I suspect it has more to do with obdurance.
Only way to find out is at 800 more posts.
I am a strict phenomenologist. (at least I like to joke that way)
Quoting Joshs
This paragraph starts out fine, but quickly becomes... problematic.
For example, I don't understand "To think the word ‘snow’ is to think about snow in some manner of givenness"
The other day, characters in a spy thriller we were watching repeatedly used the word "sneg". It caught Wife's attention because it is the pet name for Daughter's snake. Turns out it is the Russian word for snow. Seems we were thinking of the Russian word for snow without thinking of snow at all, at least until we Googled it.
And "One cannot intend more than one meaning at a time". It's not obvious that this is so. We do have double entendre, after all, which seems to do exactly that.
And so one, throughout the paragraph and on to the next and the next.
Whatever you are getting at remains opaque.
Quoting Banno
Quoting Moliere
We know how. Correlations drawn between(amongst other things) those particular noises or marks and the term/word "utterance" by a plurality of people capable of doing so.
Correlations I think I'd say is Relations. Except maybe with a phenomenological twist. A relation from a certain point of view. At least right now I remember you noting how correlations are central, I think that's how I'd interpret that now. Some actor/thinker has a belief about a relation between two names is equal to an association.
But that doesn't tell me why all these marks we're making mean anything. Meaning feels both ephemeral and shared. You and I count these characters made through our keyboards as English, and are able to communicate because of that. In some way this goes towards @Banno and @Dawnstorm 's points about language being an institution. And I think that the internet makes these features easier to observe. How else could we relate to one another? I still believe I've had the face-to-face encounter on this forum, yet they are both right in noting that we couldn't have that encounter without the institution of English. Well, with my quibble, I might say that we couldn't have that encounter without the institution of philosophy.
Hrm. I'll wait to see, but that might be a good point of difference to jump from.
Google helped you two draw the correlation between the name and the thing being named.
There are many correlations shared between worldviews as well as each person having their own unique total set of meaningful correlations(personal worldview). Knowing what someone else means requires drawing the same sorts of correlations between the same sorts of things.
The notions of privacy and ineffability are fraught. Dennett's intuition pumps were remarkably effective at allowing me to realize how.
Language users' experience includes language use and all sorts of things that are themselves existentially dependent upon language. Not all experience does. Language less creatures have experience. All experience is meaningful to the creature having the experience.
Bridging the gap between language less creatures' experience and language users' experience requires a notion/conception of meaning that is amenable to terms of evolutionary progression. Correlations are the only candidate I'm aware of that are capable of sensibly being attributed to language less creatures as well as language users. The framework is capable of explaining the evolution of complexity regarding beliefs over time.
Not here though.
Banno's thread. I've no time.
Happy Holidays!
Why does it seem to do exactly that? Because logical analysis uses at its ground-floor starting point the product of a genesis of sense, the point after one has lumped together two temporally distinct acts into a single meaning. Double entendre is a category that includes two members. How do we learn that those two members form a category?
Let’s use a visual analogy. Double entendre is like those optical illusions where one has to perform a shift of attention, or gestalt shift, to see an image as one form vs another. For instance , one either sees the image as a vase or as two faces facing each other, but one cannot see both figures at the same time. But we learn to create one categorical concept out of this series of experiences, which includes both images as well as the shift between them , and this concept is called the Rubin Vase illusion.
The moments of attentional sense making up the genesis of this concept begin with our experience of one imagine, then the other, followed by a synthesizing act of sense in which we form the concept of a two-sides gestalt shift. Similarly , in learning the meaning of double entendre, we understand first one meaning of a word, then a second meaning of the same word, followed by a synthesizing conceptualization encompassing both meanings as mutually exclusive but paired together, and we call this concept ‘double entendre’. Its meaning includes within it its genesis from these separate acts of meaning.
Double entendre means the grouping together in one word mutually incompatible meanings. Put differently, it is a single concept expressing the impossibility understanding two distinct meanings at the same time.
Here's where we are at: I say the "is" of predications such as "the cat is on the mat" have no great semantic role, and evidence this by the fact that there are languages that do not have any such arrangement - first order logic and sign language and so on.
You contend that the "is" has some thing to do with being, and is indispensable.
Let's see if we can address this without needing to account for the metaphysics of humour.
Quoting Banno
I’m sorry I haven’t made myself very clear.
Predicational logic assumes already defined and separable units or parts.The fact that these parts are already defined means that their ‘being’ is treated as a frozen ‘is’ for the purposes of the proposition. But we do not learn, know, or use language by knowing separate, defined, unitized 'variables' of circumstances. Using language is a creative activity in which some new event of meaning crosses with a substrate such as to redefine the sense of the substrate in the act of creating the new sense. It is irrelevant whether we use the copula ‘is’ or not in a sentence. What matter is that we realize that the being of all of the components of a proposition does. ot amount to a static ‘is’ ( even if we dub them categories of use). None of the members of a proposition have any existence outside of the unique context of their actual use.
Quoting Banno
“The metaphysics of humour is somewhat of a mystery, as it is not a science that has been heavily studied in the metaphysical context. Generally speaking, jokes and humorous scenarios can be thought of as moments of understanding outside of the conventional sense. This understanding often comes from a sense of familiarity, as the joke addresses a relatable issue. As such, the understanding gained from humor can be thought of as a type of insight into the world and our relation to it. Humor also serves as a way of helping to decrease stress, foster communion with others, or gain awareness and perspective. Therefore, it can be seen as a type of metaphysical experience, as it helps people to form a tangible connection and deeper understanding with reality. The laughter and joy elicited by humor can be a sort of spiritual release, that can bring a sense of affirmation or peaceful reconciliation to such metaphysical understanding.“(Chat GPT :nerd: )
Well, yeah, they do. The cat is on the mat, regardless of the unique context of the actual use of "the cat is on the mat"...
Of course, that we use "cat" to talk of the cat and "mat" to talk of the mat is somewhat arbitrary, as is that we decide to divide things up into cats and mats.
So it seems again that I agree with what you are saying, but disagree with how you say it.
Quoting Joshs
Seems our AI friend has a scientistic bias: "it is not a science that has been heavily studied in the metaphysical context".
Chat GPT's use of "science" derives from the more primordial signification obtained in the German "wissenschaft", which signifies a systematic as well as practical attitude toward what it concerns. It thus refers to an analysis of humour in a systematic fashion; as a discipline; in a metaphysical context rather than an analysis of humour construed as a science.
Shitposting aside.
Quoting Banno
I think this is rule following. @Joshs. There is a way of showing what a rule is in the doing, which includes thinking or intending toward snow. What is shown is snow, and that would not occur without the following of a rule+the rule's connection to practical activity. Those two together are a "given-ness" of snow, the intelligibility which allows sense to prosper in the world. Considered insofar as it relates to snow.
Quoting Banno
IMO a charitable more analytic gloss on what @Joshs said might be: "every expressed intention can be stated in a propositional form". Emphasis on the "a", meaning there's one of them. If there's lots of ways of saying the same thing, then they still express the same intention. A double meaning then isn't expressing two things at once, it's expressing something which can be interpreted in at least two related ways. The difference there being the first has expression (as an operator) working on articulated aspects of a speech, whereas the second restricts expression to the totality of what was expressed in the speech act.
EG: "I want sausage and egg" might be parsed (Express(I want a sausage) and Express(I want an egg)), or you could parse it as Express(I want a sausage and an egg)". In the "double meaning" context it might be: "That's a brave idea" could be parsed: "Express(You are proposing something courageous) and Express(It is a stupid idea)" vs "Express(You are proposing something courageous and it is stupid)". [hide=*](not that I'm convinced expression distributes over conjunction...)[/hide]. The latter is a better parsing since there's eg the speech act "John said you are proposing something courageous and also said it is a stupid idea" satisfies the first (two speech events)" vs the second "John said it was a brave idea", which is a single speech act that displays the internal tension in the double en-tendre.
IMO you both agree on almost everything substantial about given-ness, just one of you says it can't be said and one of you says it must be.
Quoting Banno
This isn't too persuasive. The word "sneg" considered outside of the speech act it arose in doesn't guarantee expressing the same sense. Sneg in your context of evaluation meant the snake, it meant snow in Russian. The two contexts are sufficiently different that, as you know, the resemblance is a coincidence and says nothing about either.
The relevance of the above point is that intention is expressed as part of a speech act by an agent (daughter, sneg), not toward one of its constitutive words by no one (Russian language, common usage). I believe pursuing that issue further would derail the productive discussion you're having.
It strikes me there's a lot of possible wrangling about "propositional as structures" vs "hermeneutical as structures" from Josh's side, but I've chosen to ignore it because that's a non-starter.
Perhaps. I've no clear idea what "giveness" might be.
The thing about a lifeworld which allows someone in it to cotton onto a rule in one of its discursive practices.
Then generalise that to an arbitrary judgement, perception or practical activity. What it is about (the relationship between us, the world, and what we make of it) that lets us cotton onto it and renders it cotton-on-able.
And keep that it's "shown in the doing". Showing is the giving that makes given-ness.
Philosophy giveth, and philosophy taketh away, and you are saying that philosophy is so taxing to understand it could never be the social institution religion has been. I recall reading that Wittgenstein once recommended going to church, participating in the rituals and so on, simply because this dimension of our existence was too important to reduce to utterances and argument. He also drew from Tolstoy's depth of conviction, and note the way his protagonists like Levin from Anna Karenina realize what is profoundly important in life in living a kind of holy life working on the farm, rather than talking about it. And you can hear Kierkegaard behind this in the praise of the Knight of Faith, a simply lived life, but lived so completely in, if you will, the light of God, in everything done. The doing, and not the thinking, theorizing: this thinking and theorizing UNDOES the, call it non-natural (not part of "states of affairs") and mystical bond with divinity. And, of course, to even say this in an explanatory context, is nonsense, because we have left the extraordinary intimations of myth and moved into propositional truths in doing so, and this does harm to the most important part of the Tractatus: that which should be passed over in silence.
The reason Witt's Tractatus is so important, as I see it, is this: when he draws the line between the sayable and the unsayable, THEN calls the whole affair nonsense because such lines are impossible, and this is because a line implies something on both sides to make sense, and this contradicts the matter of something not being sayable as one has essentially just said it in talking about lines drawn. But what does this come down to? Extraordinary, and completely right, I say: lines cannot be drawn not because there is nothing THERE, but because the thereness is IN the world; the world IS metaphysics that comes to us when language is "bracketed", and this is, obviously, a term from Husserl and his reduction.
And so I ignored your direct question, I know. Something like this: how can something--if you are on Witt's side, so deeply important that must remain silently possessed, or as to your thoughts that the saying it can be, in my thinking, spoken about and will one day replace religion-- put institutionalized in a society?
The process of religion as we know it perishing has been fairly gradual, but I couldn't help but notice last night watching the New Year come in on CNN, that the song chosen to announce this occasion was John Lennon's Imagine. Now, I try not to read too much into things like this because culture is so entangled and impossible to read, but CNN is a major player in American culture, and Lennon's song is an explicit repudiation of religion. I get the impression things are going to move fairly quickly away from religion as the older generation disappears.
The way such a difficult philosophy will become the new religion I think is found in the way the 60's attempted a kind of interfaith movement, bringing Hinduism, Buddhism, paganism, and so on into the fold. Buddhism, for example, is very close to the kind of alignment I try to conceive between Husserl's epoche and Wittgenstein's Tractatus' insistence on silence. Meditation IS silence; silence that keeps at bay (brackets) interposing thoughts that would steal attention away from the "pure" phenomenal encounter.
See the above
This makes as much sense forwards as backwards.
And your father smelt of elderberries!
:razz:
Given-ness is a communal supposition that the world works in a certain way. The supposition is generated through collective engagement with the world. The world collaborates in generating that supposition by presenting articulable structures, which are then engaged and modified, and incorporated back into given-ness. Given-ness is the name of that ongoing process of negotiating the intelligible structures in the world which are pragmatically supposed in our activities.
The connection between the world's capacity to be articulated and the communal suppositions which form in it is that the world presents itself intelligibly in practical, perceptual and cognitive engagement with it. Patterns in that intelligible form can be articulated discursively, but are not necessarily of a discursive nature. An ongoing disagreement between @Bannoand @Joshs is twofold.
Firstly there is an issue regarding the role propositional form plays in the articulation of the world's intelligible structures, to my knowledge Banno construes propositional form as simultaneously the primary mediator and sine qua non of articulable collective engagement with the world's intelligible structures, Josh construes propositional form as a means of discursively articulating the world which is rooted in our (embodied) capacities of practical and conceptual engagement with the world. The major constrast there is that Banno construes what may be articulated as necessarily discursive; indeed admitting of propositional form; whereas Josh construes engagement as involving but not reducible to any parsing of the world in terms of propositional form despite involving discursive practices and concepts. That renders the dispute between them about the ineffable difficult to reconcile, as I believe Banno finds it mindbending to sever articulation of intelligible structures from propositional forms - unless they are "silent" or "passed over", whereas Josh construes articulability as a broader category which uses but is not primarily constrained by grasping the world discursively as or through propositional forms. This means what Josh finds perfectly articulable with a broader conception of intelligibility Banno finds ineffable as intelligibility is confined to discourse and intelligibility in discourse is confined to propositional form.
Secondly there is an issue regarding the role broader rule governed discursive behaviours; language and/or what enables language practices to be intelligible. Banno construes articulating these objects as senseless, with the intention of connoting because they are generative of propositional forms, they are not thereby propositionally formed and thus are not (discursively) articulable. Josh instead construes such practices as articulable due to their broader construal of the intelligibility and its relationship to sense.
The issue regarding intentionality is derivative of this distinction, as the aboutness of a mental state targets that which can be put in a propositional form (and for Banno, that which can be stated), whereas for Josh intentionality again is a broader category which can be directed to any intelligible structure. They both seem to agree that articulating X connotes an intentionality regarding X, in other words speech acts about X, they do not agree about the target of that intelligibility. With Banno construing discursive expressions of semantic content which involve mental states as part of their expression ultimately being irrelevant to the semantic content of what is expressed, and Josh construing it as relevant with a different concept of what is mental. Ultimately they disagree about interiority of mental states, neither of them think mental states or their relationship to semantic content are interior, but because they have different conceptions of what it means for a mental state or agent-level/dispositional property to implicate itself in an expression. Josh has mental states being "external" in some regards because aboutness is semantically communal (like the patterns in snow which intention is directed toward and congeal into articulable structures), whereas Banno has (propositional) semantic content being the sine qua non of what is publically expressible (read, expressible) and intentions simply target those propositions/events/states of affairs without informing the semantic content, but definitely informing the act of expression.
Banno thus ends up believing that Josh construes sense "externally" but relies on "internal" (privative, insufficiently relational) drivers for it (like intention), which parses as gobbledeygook. Whereas Josh believes that Banno artificially constrains what an intentional state regards, and since intentional states are "already public" they can, do, and must inform what is expressed in speech acts, which parses as an intellectual straitjacket.
It's the same argument with the same interpersonal confusions the two have had several times over the years. Banno can't read Josh charitably due to Josh's resistance to translating his observations out of the vocabulary of his tradition, and Josh can't read Banno charitably because Banno will tend not to engage with Josh in an exploratory fashion. Broadly speaking these tendencies are exacerbated because they both find it difficult to get outside of their intellectual backgrounds. I think they would would be more able to recognise how similar their perspectives are if they got over those hurdles. Or at least have a more productive disagreement about how important the distinction is between the pre-predicative and the predicative... Which is a discussion that has occurred many many times on this forum and the last, and I miss @photographer's and that guy with the Hulk Hogan avatar's contributions to the discussion. Some things change, some things stay the same eh.
As rejoinder, Josh when reading this response may protest at my use of "mental" and "discursive" for being reductive and not grasped appropriately as a mediating category, and Banno may protest by asking for an example of a statement which doesn't rely (entirely) upon a propositional form for its semantic content.
Yes.
Thing is, reducing the discussion to a personal disagreement doesn't do much to resolve it.
I plan a thread on Danièle Moyal-Sharrock's Understanding Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, which apparently addresses the pre-predicative and the predicative distinction in an interesting way. I think she's muddled, but the devil will be in the detail.
Eh, I think having the discussion about the pre-predicative I highlighted, in an exploratory fashion, would. But maybe you disagree.
At least in part it's the doing; but it seems Janus (and ?) suppose there is something else, something ineffable, found by phenomenological introspection or some such. I think it's a beetle.
So I'm trapped; the picture holds me prisoner. :wink:
Banno may or may not be emotionally attached to naive realism and uses his intellect to find ways to ignore challenges to it and deny others the right to entertain those challenges. His strategy is to somehow use language as a foundation while simultaneously denying that foundationalism of any kind is appropriate. Thus he can't really allow any ineffable components because that screws with his foundation.
Josh's foundation is some sort of ever evolving change. Where Banno abhors privacy in a sort of neurotic way, Josh abhors stasis. And this is the central conflict. Josh needs part of the world to always be slightly out of reach, unknown, unexplained, etc. He needs an open window for his foundation of Becoming, so he's fond of the ineffable.
The rest is really kind of ad hoc.
Guess there's no point going into it then. To be fair to myself, I did predict the response:
Checkmate atheists.
And I am happy to oblige.
In one sense it is a beetle. It is our pre-dualistic experience. But since we all have such experience it can be talked about in general, even if specifics are impossible, and hence we say it is ineffable.
Not to be found via introspection, but via meditation, contemplation, reflection in a certain way of thinking more akin to poetry than logic.
Experience has a non-dual aspect that cannot be expressed in dualistic language. We can talk about what might be thought to be the implications of non-dual experience, even if we cannot talk directly about, but can only allude to, it.
The process of religion as we know it perishing has been fairly gradual, but I couldn't help but notice last night watching the New Year come in on CNN, that the song chosen to announce this occasion was John Lennon's Imagine. Now, I try not to read too much into things like this because culture is so entangled and impossible to read, but CNN is a major player in American culture, and Lennon's song is an explicit repudiation of religion. I get the impression things are going to move fairly quickly away from religion as the older generation disappears.[/quote]
I have always hated Imagine - its been used as a secular hymn for decades here in Australia and its mawkish tone suits this era where sentimentality dominates. Religion hasn't had much of a role in public life here since the 1960's, but it had a small revival of sorts a few years ago with a stunted, evangelical, Trump-lite Prime Minister (2018-22). He turned out to be one of this country's most ethically compromised and unpopular leaders. I think many people today more correctly associate religion with coercion, poor moral choices and shifty politics.
You might like this version:
Better, though, than that ode to aggression, The Star Spangled Banner: the music was lifted from a once a popular drinking song To Anacreon in Heaven. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydAIdVKv84g
But on the matter of religion, not to forget that religion, beneath the robes of pomp and pretense, is metaphysics, and metaphysics is not nothing.
One has to actually climb Wittgenstein's ladder out, and this takes a working through the Tractatus, and implicitly attending there are Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Schopenhauer....and not to forget, a suicidal drive to understand the world. To see things with genuine clarity, one simply has to be a bit insane, for the world is NOT, as the world, something that conforms the ready-mades of our understanding.
I think I like this characterization of my position. But as regards Banno, I would ask you if you think that his thinking is significantly removed from the vicinity of Davidson and Anscombe, who he admires, and who are certainly not naive realists.
I have a few more things to say about the ineffable.
I entered into this conversation with a critique of formal logic that focuses on its inability to indicate in its terms what you call the becoming of sense. I’d like to expand on that a bit. In the early 1960’s Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published. In it he characterized the participants in competing scientific paradigmatic communities as living in different , incommensurable worlds. He believed that this incommensurability was bridgeable, though, due to the fact that there was enough commonality in the larger experience of various empirical communities to allow for a basis of translation of empirical concepts. Paul Feyerabend had a more radical view of incommensurability, arguing that it isn’t just scientific paradigms narrowly construed that separates members of empirical communities , but larger cultural worldviews.
Furthermore, the shifting foundation of the meaning of scientific ( and cultural) concepts doesn’t only take place during scientific revolutions , but also during periods of what Kuhn called normal science. We can find even more powerful ways of thinking about the role of transformation of sense in everyday discourse in writers such as Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Deleuze, Foucault and Rorty.
It is no coincidence that central to the work of all these thinkers is a critique of propositional logic.
The assumption they all share is that the transformation
in the meaning of language concepts that Kuhn associated with scientific revolutions is already at work in the most basic uses of everyday language.
Thus, even predicational logic must in some way be expressing more than what it is commonly assumed to be expressing (the novel arrangement of extant concepts).
Put differently, there is no such thing as an extant concept, only concepts that, in their incorporation into a syllogism as subject, predicate or related element, arrive as already changed in their sense by the situational context of the structure of the syllogism. As Wittgenstein said, a word only exists in its actual use. That does not mean that a situational use of a word links up to an extant category stored in individual or social memory. It means that the category doesn’t have an existence outside of the situational use of the word, that there are in fact no extant categories.
In sum, word use is creation, pure and simple, and no component of a logical proposition involves the recycling of an extant meaning. My understanding of ineffability has to do with this impossibility of recycling, the fact that we can’t return to a prior sense of a meaning, there is no repetition of an identity. So what is slightly out of reach isnt the future of language but its past. Language is itself ineffable in the sense that to repeat, represent and recognize is to transform. Notice that this idea of ineffability makes it intrinsic to recognition, comprehension, intelligibility, relevance and meaning rather than something opposed to it or outside of it. Ineffability is the condition of possibility of understanding.
I
This may well be accurate. But there's an assumption that seeing the world with clarity matters. What's the goal? You've already hinted that madness could await.
Well, isn't that why they call the whole affair ineffable? Ineffability is entirely in the abstract until it is realized that it literally saturates our knowledge claims and therefore living itself.
Oh, I hope so.
Quoting Joshs
Without checking, I have a recollection of his backing away a little bit from incommensurability, in Science in a free society, in response to folk pointing out that we do still understand Aristotle and Newton. After Davidson in On the very idea..., any completely incommensurable worldview could not be recognised as a world view.
I also mentioned earlier, also after Davidson, the recursive aspect of language, that it builds an unlimited number of sentences from a finite vocabulary. That this is what makes it learnable and useable.
If every new use of a word is an original creation, language would be neither usable nor learnable. It would be mere babble, a different word each time.
Rather, as Davidson suggests in derangement of epitaphs, novel use is built on convention.
Put differently, there is no such thing as an extant concept, and we would do well to drop the notion of concept - a hangover from considerations of private language - and instead look to use.
Is it also a hangover from Platonism?
Noted with interest your chat with , who seems to not have noticed that Wittgenstein wrote stuff after 1920.
Elsewhere he says different things. I'm not interested in these when the OP is "The ineffable".
Am I right in thinking that you're drawing really heavily from Derrida for this account?
I don't know. Probably doesn't matter.
Quoting Joshs
If I read right you're using scientific paradigms and their broader cultural conditions as examples of relatively demarcated systems of interpreting the world. They had fundamentally different ways of doing things in them, of making sense of the world.
That's analogised to those thinkers, who all had a criticism about the given-ness of the world in propositional form.
( 1 ) later Wittgenstein in rejecting "the picture of the world" contained in the logical form of propositions
( 2 ) Heidegger's criticism of propositional logic as derivative of more fundamental capacity of interpreting the world which already operates within the use of propositional logic and extensional understandings of meaning
( 3 ) Deleuze highlighting propositions can only be expressed in other propositions and thus can't explain the genesis of sense
( 4 ) Rorty's criticisms of representation - showing that we shouldn't think of expression as a representational mirror of the world.
And I don't know anything about the Foucault one!
The theme those accounts seem to have in common is that in order to give a good account of sense, you need to give an account of the genesis of sense. Requiring that sense be articulated in terms of propositional forms stop that question being asked despite needing the question to be answered in one way. This is circular, we can't speak about that which cannot be rendered in propositional form, because propositional form is all that can be stated.
Employing the concept of the pre-predicative; meanings, interpretations and concepts which arise in tandem with but not coextensively with that which can be put in propositional form is used to break out of the circle. The pre-predicative also forms (at least) part of the conditions of possibility of propositional form using expressions.
The use of propositional form as the vehicle of sense makes use of the given-ness of the interpretations which parse the world into propositional form; which is the interpretive structure of the predicative. That which we do to interpret the world into familiar objects and relations to parse it into statements of the form "x is P" are the interpretive activities which generate the predicative; the pre-predicative. All of that work is treated as completed and presently available, a given, when fleshing out sense in terms of articulated propositions. You thus need to look at the prepredicative to get at the genesis of sense, and away from givenness.
An account of the genesis of sense fills the hole created by successfully breaking the circle with a criticism of the given (insofar as it's propositional).
Then the account of ineffability you've given locates the ineffable precisely in the genesis of sense. Why?
Quoting Joshs
In order for an expression to work, what is expressed must be sufficiently stable. But that stability has to come from the coordination of interpretive acts - which may later coalesce into articulable propositions. Thus there is necessary instability in what is expressed, otherwise nothing could be stably expressed at all. Coordination of speech acts over time aligns itself with repetition - iterability and the necessary publicisability of sense. For something to be senseful it has to be repeatable in a communal fashion (beetle in a box comes in here too).
Per the emphasis on the prepredicative genesis of sense, what is unstable isn't just the idiosyncrasies in the expression of propositions, like "I like eggs the most foodwise" vs "eggs are my favourite food", they're rooted in the interpretive practices which generate sense to begin with. Furthermore, instead of imagining language as a flat field in which statements linger, focussing on the generation of sense and its relationship to repetition means you have to think of statements dynamically - expression is unstable in time. Today's "Good morning" is not yesterday's "good morning". What's stable in them is a coordination of speech acts, but that leaves unsaid the contextual factors of each speech act that render it utterly singular - expressions always in a unique context.
The Derrida I saw in this was taking the singular and showing that it was required in establishing the iterable. That a wish of good morning is the same as no other, always, provides the contextualised acts (history) which is used in solidifying sense through repetition, and it could be no other way. It looked like the Derrida trick of taking a dyad where one term was suppressed, then showing it was actually at the centre of the dominant one as ground/condition of possibility. In this case expression/ineffability as dominant/suppressed. It reads as a gesture toward a deconstructive argument.
An account of the genesis of sense cannot be given, precisely because it assumes what it purports to explain. In other words no account can get outside of sense in order to explain it, and gaining a perspective form outside in order to gain a comprehensive view is just what is expected of giving an account of the genesis of sense.
Sense is dualistic, and experience is non-dualistic. Sense finds its genesis in experience, but any account of that can only be in dualistic terms; trying to give an account of that is like chasing a mirage.
Hence we are faced with ineffability.
I don't buy that argument.
( 1 ) In order to give an account of X, we need to obtain a perspective outside of X.
( 2 ) Gaining a perspective outside of X presumes presupposing a perspective within X.
If it's taken literally, it applies to any concept which behaves like articulation or one of its conditions of possibility.
In order to give an account of language, we need to get outside of language.
In order to give an account of space, we need to get outside of space.
In order to give an account of time, we need to get outside of time.
Same with history, culture... All those things.
Yet it seems there are accounts of those things which are successful, and even methodological discussions in each type of study. So there's a salient distinction somewhere which renders those discussions meaningful. I believe it goes as follows.
Yes, being embroiled and otherwise interacting with X has some conditions of possibility of involvement with X, but there's no guarantee that those render the articulation of X and its conditions of possibility from within that involvement impossible. You can't get outside of the involvement, but you don't need to to articulate within the involvement. In fact, you'd need to interact with X someone to give an account of it - that also holds for the mechanisms by which accounts are given in general and their presuppositions. Like space, time, history, culture, language, perception...
It reads close to one of those "we have eyes therefore we cannot see" arguments!
Yes, but I didn't say no account of things can be given. Remember you were asking about an account, not just of sense, but of the genesis of sense.
There's the constant tendency to talk about the mooted pre-predicative, and as soon as one does one has left it and moved to the predicative.
If what is meant by "pre-predicative" is showing and doing, then what you say might work. But showing and doing are not ineffable; they are as much part of our speech acts, our language games, our form of life, or whatever other term one prefers, as are sentences and texts.
(, this is the continuation after the Tractatus)
Yes, you can articulate the involvement, but only within the involvement. Outside the involvement, there is no X. This is why familiar models fail to grasp the issue.
What is meant by pre-predicative is very simple: There is in the world, that which is not language. Just this. You can say language is joined at the hip with perceived objects, and I think this is right; however, it is clear as a bell that, say, a spear to the kidney is not a language experience. I know the pain, and afterward I can tell you about it, and this telling will be an illustration of the way experiences are inherently understood in language. But this possession of the language counterpart of the speared kidney does not preclude the understanding of the pain "as pain", rather than pain as accounting, describing, explanation. Knowledge may be propositional, and if the world really were "just the facts" as is found in Wittgenstein's grand book in his Lecture on Ethics, then the matter would end here. But we all know that the most salient feature of pain is the pain itself, "prior" propositional assignment.
And "pain' is just a term, granted. But in the language that announces it, there is the mysterious and impossible "more" and "other".
Point needs arguing rather than asserting!
It is the ineffability in question. You say showing and doing are not ineffable, but is what is shown and done exhaustively effable? This was the point: no.
Quoting fdrake
Was a summary of your point, rather than an argument for it. The premise and the conclusion are actually the same thing!
...the very definition of a valid argument! :wink:
Read what I wrote, with underlining:
What is meant by pre-predicative is very simple: There is in the world, that which is not language. Just this. You can say language is joined at the hip with perceived objects, and I think this is right; however, it is clear as a bell that, say, a spear to the kidney is not a language experience. I know the pain, and afterward I can tell you about it, and this telling will be an illustration of the way experiences are inherently understood in language. But this possession of the language counterpart of the speared kidney does not preclude the understanding of the pain "as pain", rather than pain as accounting, describing, explanation. Knowledge may be propositional, and if the world really were "just the facts" as is found in Wittgenstein's grand book in his Lecture on Ethics, then the matter would end here. But we all know that the most salient feature of pain is the pain itself, "prior" propositional assignment.
And "pain' is just a term, granted. But in the language that announces it, there is the mysterious and impossible "more" and "other".
I can't make sense of that.
What do you suppose Witt had in mind when he said this?:
It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental
Exactly that ethics is in the doing.
Davidson thinks he is dismissing the very notion of a conceptual scheme, when in fact he is only dismissing the Quinean model and its underlying Kantian scheme-content dualism( Davidson’s third dogma of empiricism) , which involves the identification of conceptual schemes with sentential languages and the thesis of redistribution of truth-values across different conceptual schemes. Two schemes/languages differ when some substantial sentences of one language are not held to be true in the other in a systematic manner.
Conceptual relativism does not involve “confrontations between two conceptual schemes with different distributions of truth-values over their assertions, but rather confrontations between two languages with different distributions of truth-value status over their sentences due to incompatible metaphysical presuppositions. They do not lie in the sphere of disagreement or conflict of the sort arising when one theory holds something to be true that the other holds to be false. The difference lies in the fact that one side has nothing to say about what is claimed by the other side. It is not that they say the same thing differently, but rather that they say totally different things. The key contrast here is between saying something (asserting or denying) and saying nothing.”(On Davidson’s Refutation of Conceptual Schemes and Conceptual Relativism)
Quoting Banno
There is a way of continuing to be the same differently. Novelty built on convention doesn’t have to mean that the convention is ‘extant’ and then utilized to build the novel use, or , put differently, that a word belongs to a ‘type of use’, as Hacker and Baker argue. It can mean that what the convention ‘was’ is just as much determined by how it is used freshly as the novel speech is governed by the past convention which it employs. That way we don’t end up talking as though words ‘refer to’ types of use or conventions or are accountable to an independently specifiable rule or norm.
You have have just missed the proverbial barn door, I think intentionally. Your issue is not with me. It is with Witt.
Can you explain what you mean - an example of this perhaps?
We get lost in each other's minds. But a chair is not best defined by the word "chair" for instance. A chair is really just an abstract extant "thing."
Would anyone disagree that all things define themselves better than humans ever could?
It's often argued that the definition game is circular but I don't know if what you say is accurate. Things are not always recognizable or understandable. Do things 'define' themselves or is it rather the case that definitions may be unnecessary if you have the thing before you?
So plumbing is incommensurable with origami. They say, as you say, totally different things. Sure, I've used the same argument, taking it from Mary Midgley.
Quoting Joshs
Again, yep.
Can you give a reference for this please? Really want to read the paper.
Thanks!
Interesting point about conflict/mismatch as a commensuration relation. Would love to see it worked out in more detail. Think it's a similar discussion to the one @Joshs highlighted here:
Quoting Joshs
I'm too much of a libra to pick a side though. Have thoughts but I couldn't back them up well.
If the aim is at what all predication is existentially dependent on, there is much room for growth in all the right directions within this discussion.
I do not think it makes the right kind of sense to invoke things like getting stabbed with a spear as something that counts as being pre-predicative. It's also not the right kind of sense to invoke some feelings someone has just prior to speaking about them, or one's sitting in silence. That's the wrong kind of privacy, ineffability, and pre-predicative things to be taking into consideration. The notion of "pre-predicative" that makes the most sense to discuss involves what predication itself is existentially dependent upon.
Language less experience is pre-predicative. It is ineffable one the one hand(the language less creature cannot express it via language), but if we - as language users - get meaningful experience(meaningful thought/belief) right... we can talk about what is otherwise ineffable to the believing creature in much the same way that we can talk in great detail about another's false belief despite their inability to do the same while holding it.
The distinction between what pre-predicative belief/experience consists of and what our report of that consists of needs to be drawn and maintained. Some linguistic frameworks are incapable of doing so.
I'm not sure where to go with that.
There are certainly issues here. On the one side I've got Davidson's argument in On the Very Idea... and on the other Midgley's not so well articulated distinction between intentional conversations and extensional conversations... not between intensional and extensional; I borrow willy-nilly from both, throwing in a bit of Searle's social intentionality an Davidson's anominalism of the mental, and while it all takes on a sort of sense, It's certainly not tight.
But talk of conceptual relativism strikes me as fence-sitting and unhelpful, and talk of the pre=predicative strikes me asn nonsense.
Not always. And I think there's definitely the temptation to become Buridan's ass in the wrong circumstances.
Only sometimes. So, if that applies to conceptual relativism at least, then it can be useful. (say, if your nethers are at risk in hopping one way or the other)
Can you give me more references for these please?
Hmm.
Just the usual stuff.
Davidson, on the very idea of a conceptual scheme, A nice derangement of epitaphs and The Anomalism of the Mental
Midgley, various, but perhaps in What is philosophy for? and The Myths we live by
Searle, various, but The Construction of Social Reality
@jgill, just over 1300 posts, apparently.
:roll:
It was on its way to the grave, but noooooo . . . :groan: