Reference Magnetism: Can It Help Explain Non-Substantive Disputes?
Certain big philosophical terms seem fundamental, yet cause big problems. Existence, being, real, cause, freedom, good, and true are a few examples. These terms have acquired meanings, and then more meanings, and then yet more meanings, resulting in camps of philosophy who seem to say opposite things using the same words.
Are these disputes non-substantive? True, they often revolve around terminological disagreements, but they are not about terms, or at any rate we don’t want them to be. We want them to be about the things to which they refer: about existence, reality, causation, the good, and what grounds what. The disagreements begin to look terminological when the debaters realize that they are talking past each other, using those fundamental terms in different ways. But isn’t that a false impression, as long as each person is claiming truth for their position? Doing that is very substantive indeed; it’s not a mere acknowledgment that “We’re using the terms differently.”
Borrowing some concepts from Theodore Sider (all the references are from Writing the Book of the World), I want to sketch out a way of understanding what’s going on here.
One of the key concepts Sider has endorsed is “reference magnetism.” (He attributes the term to a 1984 paper by Harold Hodes, but it’s usually associated with David Lewis.) According to reference magnetism, we don’t simply assign words to things or concepts in such a way that our statements about them come out true. Truth on an interpretation isn’t enough. We also want the references of our words to have certain characteristics, certain external constraints on meaning. Here Sider’s preferred term is “joint-carving,” borrowed from Plato, by which he means “corresponding to actual ontological structure.” (I find the term disgusting, but it’s too central to Sider’s thought to be simply dropped.)
An example of joint-carving that Sider offers: Imagine two electrons, alike in every respect, plus a cow. We could find ways of grouping one of the electrons with the cow, forming the mereological item “electron-plus-cow,”and go on to say true things about it, and the remaining lone electron. Sider’s contention is that to do this is to carve reality very badly; it’s a “bizarre interpretation.” “The three objects should be divided into two groups, one containing the electrons, the other containing the cow. The electrons go together, and neither goes with the cow.” Sider also follows Lewis in calling this a “natural grouping,” which is problematic, but let it pass. It’s enough to understand the kind of thing that joint-carving is. (Though I can’t help pointing out that “natural” itself is one of those terms with more than one eligible reference magnet.)
So the idea is that we have a selection of words (exist, real, etc.) and a conceptual field which contains opportunities for those words to refer perspicuously – to carve at the joints. Sider is saying that the conceptual field has natural structural divisions, so when we try to match words with concepts we can be more or less perspicuous. A word like “exist” can be pulled toward one or more of these “reference magnets,” and made to refer to them. How does this happen? Through historical usage, primarily, which may evolve into ordinary language as well. So there may be a number of joint-carving candidates for what “exist” ought to refer to – but Sider’s point is that it’s a limited number, we can’t just say that “exist” will hereafter mean “go for a walk.” Indeed, for most non-philosophical terms (that are sufficiently precise), there will only be one reference, and it will be uncontroversial. Example: For a while, “leopard” was probably used to refer to several large cats. But now that we’ve agreed on what the leopard species is, the only reference magnet in the vicinity is Panthera pardus. Any other non-metaphorical use of the term is wrong.
The problem is, the “big” words are so encrusted with centuries of varying uses at the hands of varying philosophies, that they now get drawn to many different reference magnets. Sider (and I) would say that trying to argue for a single meaning for a word like “good” is a non-substantive debate. It really is a wrangle over terminology. But . . . the possible “magnets” are not themselves words, and the issue is not merely linguistic. It is as substantive as can be: ontology, what the world is like. Our problem is that we can’t settle on which of our big terms ought to be coupled with which magnet. This entire picture, as you can see, assumes that reference is to some degree external to theory, that we need to do more than make an internally consistent interpretation.
So this is very far from a skepticism or relativism about metaphysics. (It’s true that philosophers unsympathetic to metaphysics might stop right here and say, “See? There’s no ?there’ there. If you don’t even know what the words mean . . .”) Rather, it’s an acknowledgment that we don’t know which (potentially meaningful) words belong with which concepts. We don’t know, for instance, whether we ought to let “exist” be drawn toward the concept of number, and say that numbers exist. We don’t know whether “cause” should be drawn toward the concept of having reasons, and say that a reason is a cause. Etc.
Sider suggests a different approach: “Sometimes fundamental metaphysics can be conducted in ordinary language. But not always. Metaphysicians need a plan B.” Rather than continuing to try to work with ordinary language, we can “enter the metaphysics room” and coin new, improved terms that we all agree to use . . . and then disagree about those. At least we’ll know what they refer to.
Sider imagines a natural-language expression E, and a reference magnet m. (You can also just think of a reference magnet as a plausible candidate meaning, if you prefer.) Should E be paired with m? How would we know if E meant m, and only m? This question is non-substantive, because “its answer would turn on linguistic usage, not reality’s structure”:
Now I want to depart from Sider on one point. (And I should emphasize that much of the above is my own interpretation of Sider.) I’m not convinced that “reality’s fundamental structure” is the best way to talk about what Sider wants to talk about. I don’t know how fundamental the various reference magnets may be, or whether it’s necessary to drag in “reality” (one of those very terms whose ambiguity causes so much trouble). This is a version of the same question raised about “natural” groupings. I certainly don’t know whether “naturalness” or “fundamentality” are properties we can treat the same way we treat things like “yellow” or “square”. I’d rather say that words map imperfectly onto concepts, and that the structure of concepts – their relations, groundings, logics – is something we can discern regardless of the words we use. Plan B is an attempt to help everyone concerned to find a way to stop disagreeing about words and get on with doing metaphysics.
How might we come up with E*? Sider uses the example of C, a relation that is in many ways like our ordinary-language use of “cause” but, as it happens, applies only at the subatomic level.
In some ways, this approach is familiar, even truistic: Define your terms! And if that doesn’t work, coin a new one! But the way Sider lays it out, we have the advantage of a much clearer insight into why philosophers fall into non-substantive disputes.
Consider how a certain type of philosopher might respond to this proposal: “Sorry, can’t do it. You want me to agree that there is more than one of these so-called ?reference magnets’ in the vicinity of my term ?exist’. Well, yes, I agree that people have used ?exist’ incorrectly; they haven’t spotted the correct definition of what it means to exist, whereas I, along with [fill in favorite famous philosopher], have. But there’s no need to enter your metaphysics room and come up with fancy terminology. Instead, I’ll keep working to convince you that my use of ?exist’ has indeed trumped all the other reference magnets in the vicinity, just as ?leopard’ did.” And so the terminological/historical bickering goes on . . .
Another type of philosopher might respond, “I’m wary about this division between word and concept – between a term and its ?reference magnet’. Are we really able to perceive structure (?joint-carving’ or not) apart from the words we use to describe it? Does this depend on a special sort of intuition, and/or a multiplication of entities? Surely our challenge, if we’re going to do metaphysics at all, is to use the words we have in order to create the most plausible, parsimonious, and complete account we can. The words are the structure.”
Two things should be said about this latter response. First, you don’t need special powers to see the structure of the way concepts relate. And while it may require words to do so, you can notice these relations while at the same time realizing that the words you’re using to think about them are imprecise and conventional. The map is not the territory. Second, “using the words we have” does work well in some areas of philosophy, but we all appreciate the power of logical languages that can remove vagueness and allow us to clearly see what we’re talking about. The question is whether this (broadly) analytic approach is the right one to use for metaphysics, not whether it can be used at all. That said, we should expect difficulties in trying to translate familiar terms into Ontologese.
Both of these responses seem to me to invite a retreat into non-substantive disputes. The first philosopher wants to prevail in a debate about what a word ought to mean, based (I presume) on a story about what it has often meant in the past, and the successes that this meaning engendered. Of course, this individual wouldn’t put it that way. They would say that the word does mean X, not that they think it ought to. So from this position, “real,” for instance, would be like “leopard” -- there’s only one reference magnet in the vicinity.
The second philosopher doesn’t see daylight between word and reference; for them, to discuss reference can only be a discussion about how to use words, not about independent concepts or structures. But, as Sider puts it, reference is explanatory: It’s supposed to do more than pair word A with object B and show us what true things we can now say; that would be a kind of theory-internal version of reference. Rather, “one can explain certain facts by citing what words refer to.” This is why we regard “?theories’ based on bizarre classifications as being explanatorily useless.”
Sider adds a caveat:
This indicates that we still have a lot of work to do in cashing out “the right sort of basis.” The term “non-arbitrary” looks to be important. I’d be interested to know what others (who find Sider’s view appealing) might suggest here. I’m also interested in knowing whether the idea of reference magnetism sheds any light on what happens when “big” terms are employed in philosophy. I think it does. I think it explains something I’ve noticed for years about how certain words can be pulled by different meanings. But it’s a metaphor. We need more clarity about “natural,” “fundamental,” and “right sort” if we’re going to make it plausible.
Are these disputes non-substantive? True, they often revolve around terminological disagreements, but they are not about terms, or at any rate we don’t want them to be. We want them to be about the things to which they refer: about existence, reality, causation, the good, and what grounds what. The disagreements begin to look terminological when the debaters realize that they are talking past each other, using those fundamental terms in different ways. But isn’t that a false impression, as long as each person is claiming truth for their position? Doing that is very substantive indeed; it’s not a mere acknowledgment that “We’re using the terms differently.”
Borrowing some concepts from Theodore Sider (all the references are from Writing the Book of the World), I want to sketch out a way of understanding what’s going on here.
One of the key concepts Sider has endorsed is “reference magnetism.” (He attributes the term to a 1984 paper by Harold Hodes, but it’s usually associated with David Lewis.) According to reference magnetism, we don’t simply assign words to things or concepts in such a way that our statements about them come out true. Truth on an interpretation isn’t enough. We also want the references of our words to have certain characteristics, certain external constraints on meaning. Here Sider’s preferred term is “joint-carving,” borrowed from Plato, by which he means “corresponding to actual ontological structure.” (I find the term disgusting, but it’s too central to Sider’s thought to be simply dropped.)
An example of joint-carving that Sider offers: Imagine two electrons, alike in every respect, plus a cow. We could find ways of grouping one of the electrons with the cow, forming the mereological item “electron-plus-cow,”and go on to say true things about it, and the remaining lone electron. Sider’s contention is that to do this is to carve reality very badly; it’s a “bizarre interpretation.” “The three objects should be divided into two groups, one containing the electrons, the other containing the cow. The electrons go together, and neither goes with the cow.” Sider also follows Lewis in calling this a “natural grouping,” which is problematic, but let it pass. It’s enough to understand the kind of thing that joint-carving is. (Though I can’t help pointing out that “natural” itself is one of those terms with more than one eligible reference magnet.)
So the idea is that we have a selection of words (exist, real, etc.) and a conceptual field which contains opportunities for those words to refer perspicuously – to carve at the joints. Sider is saying that the conceptual field has natural structural divisions, so when we try to match words with concepts we can be more or less perspicuous. A word like “exist” can be pulled toward one or more of these “reference magnets,” and made to refer to them. How does this happen? Through historical usage, primarily, which may evolve into ordinary language as well. So there may be a number of joint-carving candidates for what “exist” ought to refer to – but Sider’s point is that it’s a limited number, we can’t just say that “exist” will hereafter mean “go for a walk.” Indeed, for most non-philosophical terms (that are sufficiently precise), there will only be one reference, and it will be uncontroversial. Example: For a while, “leopard” was probably used to refer to several large cats. But now that we’ve agreed on what the leopard species is, the only reference magnet in the vicinity is Panthera pardus. Any other non-metaphorical use of the term is wrong.
The problem is, the “big” words are so encrusted with centuries of varying uses at the hands of varying philosophies, that they now get drawn to many different reference magnets. Sider (and I) would say that trying to argue for a single meaning for a word like “good” is a non-substantive debate. It really is a wrangle over terminology. But . . . the possible “magnets” are not themselves words, and the issue is not merely linguistic. It is as substantive as can be: ontology, what the world is like. Our problem is that we can’t settle on which of our big terms ought to be coupled with which magnet. This entire picture, as you can see, assumes that reference is to some degree external to theory, that we need to do more than make an internally consistent interpretation.
So this is very far from a skepticism or relativism about metaphysics. (It’s true that philosophers unsympathetic to metaphysics might stop right here and say, “See? There’s no ?there’ there. If you don’t even know what the words mean . . .”) Rather, it’s an acknowledgment that we don’t know which (potentially meaningful) words belong with which concepts. We don’t know, for instance, whether we ought to let “exist” be drawn toward the concept of number, and say that numbers exist. We don’t know whether “cause” should be drawn toward the concept of having reasons, and say that a reason is a cause. Etc.
Sider suggests a different approach: “Sometimes fundamental metaphysics can be conducted in ordinary language. But not always. Metaphysicians need a plan B.” Rather than continuing to try to work with ordinary language, we can “enter the metaphysics room” and coin new, improved terms that we all agree to use . . . and then disagree about those. At least we’ll know what they refer to.
Sider imagines a natural-language expression E, and a reference magnet m. (You can also just think of a reference magnet as a plausible candidate meaning, if you prefer.) Should E be paired with m? How would we know if E meant m, and only m? This question is non-substantive, because “its answer would turn on linguistic usage, not reality’s structure”:
Sider, 74.:That is, the ordinary, natural language question, phrased in terms of the ordinary, natural language expression E, would be non-substantive. But we could discard E and enter the metaphysics room, so to speak. We could replace the ordinary expression E with an improved expression E* that we stipulate is to stand for the joint-carving meaning in the vicinity. The question we ask in the metaphysics room, cast in terms of E* rather than E, is substantive. Indeed, it is superior to the original question, for it concerns reality’s fundamental structure, rather than its merely conventional or projected aspects. This is plan B.
Now I want to depart from Sider on one point. (And I should emphasize that much of the above is my own interpretation of Sider.) I’m not convinced that “reality’s fundamental structure” is the best way to talk about what Sider wants to talk about. I don’t know how fundamental the various reference magnets may be, or whether it’s necessary to drag in “reality” (one of those very terms whose ambiguity causes so much trouble). This is a version of the same question raised about “natural” groupings. I certainly don’t know whether “naturalness” or “fundamentality” are properties we can treat the same way we treat things like “yellow” or “square”. I’d rather say that words map imperfectly onto concepts, and that the structure of concepts – their relations, groundings, logics – is something we can discern regardless of the words we use. Plan B is an attempt to help everyone concerned to find a way to stop disagreeing about words and get on with doing metaphysics.
How might we come up with E*? Sider uses the example of C, a relation that is in many ways like our ordinary-language use of “cause” but, as it happens, applies only at the subatomic level.
Sider, 75-76.:Now the ordinary English term ?cause’ may well not mean C. For i) C fits terribly with ordinary usage of ?cause’ [because we use ?cause’ to talk about macro-level events as well] . . . and ii) ?cause’ may well be a nontheoretical term in English. Rather than standing for C, ?cause’ may instead stand for the non-joint-carving relation that best fits our usage of ?cause’. A debate involving ?cause’ would then not be substantive. But we could enter the metaphysics room, and coin a new term, ?cause*’, for the joint-carving relation in the vicinity of causation. ?Cause*’ will stand for C – fundamental causation, we might call it – and our new debate about causation* will be substantive.
In some ways, this approach is familiar, even truistic: Define your terms! And if that doesn’t work, coin a new one! But the way Sider lays it out, we have the advantage of a much clearer insight into why philosophers fall into non-substantive disputes.
Consider how a certain type of philosopher might respond to this proposal: “Sorry, can’t do it. You want me to agree that there is more than one of these so-called ?reference magnets’ in the vicinity of my term ?exist’. Well, yes, I agree that people have used ?exist’ incorrectly; they haven’t spotted the correct definition of what it means to exist, whereas I, along with [fill in favorite famous philosopher], have. But there’s no need to enter your metaphysics room and come up with fancy terminology. Instead, I’ll keep working to convince you that my use of ?exist’ has indeed trumped all the other reference magnets in the vicinity, just as ?leopard’ did.” And so the terminological/historical bickering goes on . . .
Another type of philosopher might respond, “I’m wary about this division between word and concept – between a term and its ?reference magnet’. Are we really able to perceive structure (?joint-carving’ or not) apart from the words we use to describe it? Does this depend on a special sort of intuition, and/or a multiplication of entities? Surely our challenge, if we’re going to do metaphysics at all, is to use the words we have in order to create the most plausible, parsimonious, and complete account we can. The words are the structure.”
Two things should be said about this latter response. First, you don’t need special powers to see the structure of the way concepts relate. And while it may require words to do so, you can notice these relations while at the same time realizing that the words you’re using to think about them are imprecise and conventional. The map is not the territory. Second, “using the words we have” does work well in some areas of philosophy, but we all appreciate the power of logical languages that can remove vagueness and allow us to clearly see what we’re talking about. The question is whether this (broadly) analytic approach is the right one to use for metaphysics, not whether it can be used at all. That said, we should expect difficulties in trying to translate familiar terms into Ontologese.
Both of these responses seem to me to invite a retreat into non-substantive disputes. The first philosopher wants to prevail in a debate about what a word ought to mean, based (I presume) on a story about what it has often meant in the past, and the successes that this meaning engendered. Of course, this individual wouldn’t put it that way. They would say that the word does mean X, not that they think it ought to. So from this position, “real,” for instance, would be like “leopard” -- there’s only one reference magnet in the vicinity.
The second philosopher doesn’t see daylight between word and reference; for them, to discuss reference can only be a discussion about how to use words, not about independent concepts or structures. But, as Sider puts it, reference is explanatory: It’s supposed to do more than pair word A with object B and show us what true things we can now say; that would be a kind of theory-internal version of reference. Rather, “one can explain certain facts by citing what words refer to.” This is why we regard “?theories’ based on bizarre classifications as being explanatorily useless.”
Sider adds a caveat:
Sider, 29.:Reference must have the right sort of basis in the fundamental if it’s to be explanatory. It’s highly unclear what exactly the “right sort” of basis is [my itals]. . . but it’s quite clear that a relation connecting us to bizarre semantic values would have the wrong sort of basis – for the same reason that arbitrary [my itals] correlations between the motions of the planets and the stock market have the wrong sort of basis.
This indicates that we still have a lot of work to do in cashing out “the right sort of basis.” The term “non-arbitrary” looks to be important. I’d be interested to know what others (who find Sider’s view appealing) might suggest here. I’m also interested in knowing whether the idea of reference magnetism sheds any light on what happens when “big” terms are employed in philosophy. I think it does. I think it explains something I’ve noticed for years about how certain words can be pulled by different meanings. But it’s a metaphor. We need more clarity about “natural,” “fundamental,” and “right sort” if we’re going to make it plausible.
Comments (53)
Anyway, quite to the contrary, Plato still rules (the magnetic waves)? The cookies are ready-cut?
Seems to me that Sider is doing something different - he is trying to come up with a kind of meta-philosophical framework against which the incommensurability of divergent explanatory paradigms can be interpreted. It is, tongue-in-cheek, post Tower of Babel - a situation where the fragmentation of discourse has become all-pervading. We need a kind of Rosetta Stone to enable analytic philosophers to make sense of what existentialists are saying.
Do you think that’s what it is about?
You should try carving up a cow or a pig without any regard to the joints.
Quoting J
No, it's not. Concepts are conveyed and understood via words.
Quoting J
Any disagreement involves disagreements about words, including metaphysical disagreements.
The problem with Sider's proposal is this. Suppose we coin a new word, call it 'yik'. Yik has no meaning, and in order to give it meaning one must stipulate its meaning in terms of common words. Given that those common words were the subject of disagreement in the first place, coining a new word and defining it in terms of the controversial words won't help at all.
The way one overcomes disagreements is first by understanding what the other person is saying. If there is a term that is being used differently between two interlocutors, then it can be helpful to disambiguate that equivocation for the sake of clarity and mutual understanding, but there is no magic bullet where one overcomes metaphysical impasse by coining new words. :grin:
Quoting J
You are falling into an equivocation between concept and reality. Whether or not insight into reality requires words, an understanding of concepts does, especially in a dialogical context.
Quoting J
You always deal in these strange, artificial dichotomies. Words and word meaning are contextual, and it is folly to try to "solve" word meaning as an end in itself. We use words to convey meaning (among other things), and if the meaning is being conveyed then there is no problem.
So we should ask about the motive for disagreement (especially because so many on TPF are apt to disagree irrationally or emotively, even dreaming up fictional points of view in order to disagree). If John says something and Joe disagrees with what John is saying, then Joe has sufficient reason to disagree with John. This requires that Joe has an implicit theory about how John is using the words with which he disagrees. Interlocutors who are intellectually honest should never run into the problem where they are arguing over words themselves, as if they must insist on a word-use. True disputes about word-use belong to lexicography, not philosophy proper.
In making an argument one is using words that are fit to function within one's argument (and this is one way in which words serve a contextual role). It would make no sense to disagree with a word without at the same time disagreeing with the greater function that the word is serving within the argument. More simply, one primarily disagrees with an argument, not with words. If a disagreement about an idea or argument becomes a disagreement about a word, then intellectually honest interlocutors solve this quickly by disambiguating the word and avoiding it altogether if it cannot be used fruitfully (given the semantic difference).
What this means is that the "problem" of the OP is never a problem for the intellectually honest, and therefore is not a problem. Indeed, it is primarily a problem for propagandists who cannot dispense with the connotative sense of certain words and who wish to persuade not by argument or reason, but by emotion or association.
(Regarding "reference magnetism," the Analytic notion of stipulated reference is extremely artificial. If one understands philology and language development they understand that we are continually drawing on a rich but finite resource of historical meaning. We inherit the palette of linguistic meaning from those who have gone before us. This idea that meaning is somehow stipulated or that words can be coined willy-nilly is fundamentally confused. In a disagreement one is taking words and meanings that are known to both parties and have a philological pedigree, and then utilizing those words to argue for diverse positions. We never think or act in a purely stipulative or abstract manner.)
Quoting John Henry Newman, Oxford University Sermons, #10
And it's really interesting the way this intersects with your and @J's interest in "the view from nowhere," because Sider is presupposing it. He thinks there is a neutral conceptual space where interlocutors can communicate without misunderstanding, and the only question is how to arrive at this holy grail. Apparently in this iteration it is to be done by the coining of new terms.
Or course in one sense it is true that we overcome disagreement by being clear about what our words mean, and disambiguation can aid in this—including the disambiguation that occurs via the coining of new terms in order to distinguish the various senses of a contentious term. But this never leads to a Rosetta Stone. There is no master key to be had that will unlock all of the doors of meaning and mutual understanding—at least this side of heaven.
This is an interesting context to put it in. First off, I agree there's some similarity with what Williams is doing with "thick terms," in that Williams is pointing out the difficulty of using them merely descriptively, as if their meanings could be read off from some common lexicon. The difference I see is that the unclarity around what I'm calling "big terms" has to do with conflicting usages on the same linguistic level, so to speak. It's not that "real" is ontological in one construal and aesthetic in another (though I suppose that could happen), but rather that different philosophers, or philosophic traditions, will tend to reserve "real" to demarcate different conceptual territories.
So, is Sider offering a meta-philosophical replacement for the Tower of Babel? Yes, in part. As I read him, he's suggesting that it's often possible to sharpen up a contested term in a way that all the parties can agree to. But he's not saying we should do this by dubbing one use of "real", for example, to be the correct one, even for purposes of argument. He recognizes, I think wisely, that even if this could be made to stick, in the course of a single discussion, its usefulness would rapidly fall away as others join in, bringing their own preferred meanings, and the terminological clarification would have to begin all over again.
Instead, he thinks we can be upfront about needing a new (but related) term that "carves better at the joints." Whether one thinks there are metaphysical joints to carved, and whether one thinks those joints are perceptible apart from the language used to describe them, will greatly influence whether one thinks Sider's proposal has merit. But assuming one does, then we can look at possible uses of "Ontologese," as Sider calls it. I don't want to get too off-topic, but I'll just say that Sider approaches this in terms of quantification; the idea is that, in Ontologese, quantifiers are stipulated to carve at the joints. In other words, they are attracted by the correct, eligible reference magnets.
You ask whether this is also about "the incommensurability of divergent explanatory paradigms." I'm not sure about this. If the example of two such paradigms is analytic philosophy and existentialism, then it seems broader than what Sider intends. I haven't read everything he's written, by any means, but as best I can tell he's only interested in sorting out problems within analytic phil, especially as derived from logic and semantics. I don't know if he'd be happy with describing two uses of "real" or "good" as two explanatory paradigms. But that may not matter, since he'd agree they're incommensurate at whatever level you want to take them.
Leaving Sider aside, it does seem as if joint-carving terms for non-asterisked words like "real" or "good" could be part of an explanatory framework that potentially reaches across philosophical schools. An obvious obstacle would be to get some agreement about whether there are such things as joint-carving or ontologically privileged concepts. Some versions of post-modernism, for instance, would stop right here and ask for an account of this that makes sense in their tradition. Can we give one? Food for thought.
Quoting J
Yes, this happens a lot. I have made the case many times that it's important to agree on the definition of a term at the beginning of the thread unless the discussion's specific purpose is to figure out what it means. I get lots of pushback on that position. In my particular case, the most troublesome concept is "metaphysics." That idea is right at the heart of my interest in and understanding of philosophy. I have my own understanding of what it means. If you've paid attention to my posts, you've heard me spout out about it numerous times.
The problem for me is that, sometimes, I don't want to talk about what metaphysics is, I want to talk about what the implications and consequences of my specific understanding are. I've had knock down drag out fights trying to keep my own discussions on subject. The moderators are often unsympathetic and unwilling to intervene. In my experience, every discussion of metaphysics turns into an argument about what the term really means. It never goes any deeper than that. I think the same thing is sometimes true of terms you identified--existence, being, real, cause, freedom, good, and true--and others.
Quoting J
This is really interesting. For the record, I love the term "joint-carving." I think it gets right to the heart of the issue, although I'm not sure the idea there is some "actual ontological structure" makes any sense. This use of the term makes me think of a passage from Brook Ziporyn's translation of the Chuang Tzu. I'm going to hide it so it doesn't distract from the flow of my argument.
[hide="Reveal"][/hide]
Quoting J
The only reason electron-plus-cow seems like a bad way of carving reality is context--not any absolute ontological structure. I can think of not too goofy situations where two electrons and a cow belong together. An example--let's say I have one group containing two electrons and another containing sunlight, gravity, and gamma radiation. Which group does the cow belong in? To me, it's clear it belongs with the electrons--they're examples of matter while the other group includes only radiation. The so-called ontological structure in Sider's example is based on a narrow understanding of the context of human experience and thought. And that may be fine in a particular situation as long as it is recognized. It is not any kind of universal truth.
Quoting J
I think you're exactly right. Usage of the big words leads to situations where Sider's scheme doesn't work because we don't seem to be able to agree on an appropriate ontological structure.
Quoting J
Again--exactly right. When every discussion ends up an argument about definitions, we never get anywhere with any substance.
How is this different from just agreeing on the definition of the word in question at the beginning of the discussion? There's already vastly to many "improved expressions E*" out there.
Quoting J
I agree with this.
Yes.
Quoting J
Rather than trying to convince me, perhaps it makes more sense for you to say "You and I just see things too differently for this to be a fruitful discussion." Then you go find someone else to talk with. I end up doing that a lot. I just learned the meaning of the word "incommensurable" recently and I find myself using it often.
Quoting J
I like this, even though I'm not sure I know what it means. I'll have to think about it more.
Quoting J
This is true. I believe we can express most of what we want to say without having to use highfalutin philosophical language. At the same time, I think some technical terms, for example "metaphysics," are important and refer to things that aren't easy to express in everyday language.
If no definitive ontological structure exists, perhaps no bizarre semantic values do either. Or at least they're not likely to show up in a normal discussion.
Quoting J
I think using the term might be trying too hard. Of course words take on multiple meanings, sometimes only differing in subtle ways. Of course this is confusing and distracts from substantive discussion. Of course it makes sense to recognize this and try to avoid it. Having discussions about the meaning or meanings of important terms can be useful and interesting, but there comes a time when you have to put your money down if you want to get anywhere. By which I mean--agree on the meaning of the concepts you're going to discuss.
Again--good OP.
This is right, but what it leads to is that every discussion about a difficult or obscure concept ends up as an argument about the meaning of words, and we never get around to a substantive discussion of consequences.
Can you give an example of this?
Quoting J
As I understand it, at the most fundamental levels, joints are established based on biological and neurological characteristics. Visually, the world gets broken up initially in the eye before it ever gets to the central nervous system. Some animals are most sensitive to motion while others are to shadows. Some see color and some don’t. Some have much better visual resolution than others. Tactually, it would make sense if there were a joint between things that caused pain and things that didn’t.
How those various very primitive conceptualizations, if they can even be called that, lead to the complex conceptual reality humans live with every day is a question to be answered by biology, neurology, psychology, and cognitive science.
To respond to a couple of things:
Quoting T Clark
(My vegan sensibilities squirm. :wink: Leave those joints alone!)
Quoting T Clark
I think it both is and isn't the same. Sider is urging us to give up, or at least view with suspicion, the idea that we can agree on how to use "exist", for instance, for purposes of discussion, and then retreat back into our usual practices. Let's say you and I had quite different construals of how "exist" ought to be used. I'm sure that, being reasonable people, we could stipulate a meaning to employ in examining some given question. And we might learn quite a bit about this term -- call it E^. But neither of us really believes it means "exist"! We're clinging to the idea that there is some right way to use "exist", even as we agree to stipulate E^ for this discussion.
Sider's E* is different. With E*, we stipulate that it does refer to whatever joint-carving meaning is in the vicinity. Each of us gives up the idea that our respective "exist" terms do that. Another way of putting this: The move from E to E^ would be regarded by both disputants as a move away from metaphysical accuracy, again for the purposes of securing agreement on a given discussion. Whereas the move from E to E* is, as Sider says, to frame a superior question, not a less accurate one. The disputants agree that E* is what they really want to talk about, and drop their insistence that their respective Es are helpful in doing so.
Quoting T Clark
Yes, I'd far rather do that than keep wrangling. But as we know, a lot of philosophy consists of people insisting that Great Philosopher X was right about Big Term A, and they're sure they can come up with the persuasive argument somehow. That said, I enjoy talking with people who tone this down a bit, and want to show me how a particular philosopher's construal can be helpful, insightful, creative, et al., without necessarily settling the question for all time.
I also want to respond to your thoughts about fundamental ontological structure; whether it really must be context-dependent. But I've run out of time. I'll return to it.
This is pretty basic self-contradiction. "No one use of 'real' is more correct than another, even in the context of an argument, and yet we do need a substitute word for 'real' that 'carves better at the joints'."
Even the dogmatic pluralist must admit that something which "carves better at the joints" is something which is better, or more correct, particularly within the contextual fabric of an argument.
You likely had read Hacking's A Tradition of Natural Kinds:
'They are the kinds that we talk about in daily life, what Nelson Goodman calls "relevant kinds", kinds of garment or furniture or labourer. A student of kinds or classification or categories will want a theory of those, within which natural kinds (whatever they turn out to be) take their proper, rather limited place.
But most philosophers of kinds expect a discussion of kinds to be about natural kinds. Worse: theories of natural kinds seem to me to wreck much reflection on kinds by importing a good deal of obscure
philosophy. That is why students of kinds such as Goodman, George Lakoff or John Dupre say or imply that there are no natural kinds, or that the concept of a natural kind is not worth saving.'
The problem with that for me is, again sticking with metaphysics as the example, I need the idea as formulated in my understanding of philosophy. The way I’ve dealt with that in discussions that I started is to specify in the OP exactly the definition of metaphysics I want to use for the purposes of that particular thread. As I noted, it’s often a struggle to keep other posters on that path.
Quoting J
I enjoy those kinds of discussions to. As I mentioned, I’m happy to participate, but, as I see it, that limits how substantive the discussion can be. You never get any further than what the term does or doesn’t mean
I think there are natural kinds, but they are natural human kinds. They are manifestations of our human nature and, beyond that of our own specific personal natures.
But that’s kind of a pragmatic approach to the subject, which works well for me since I like to call myself a pragmatist. I don’t think the universe has a structure independent of us that allows it to be separated at the joints as @J discussed. I’ll bring a little Lao Tzu into the discussion. This is from the first verse of Steven Mitchell’s translation of the Tao Te Ching.
Naming is the process that divides, categorizes, the universe, the Tao, into the multiplicity that we experience. Naming is something humans do.
True, but there was definitely a paper with the more striking opening.
Quoting T Clark
Quoting J
Quoting T Clark
With all of these quotes, we're focusing on a key point for Sider and the idea of reference magnetism. I believe it's a somewhat open question. If we could adopt the ultra-objective "view from nowhere/anywhere," would the same reference magnets exert their influence? Is that what we require in order to talk about "reality's fundamental structure"? Sider declares himself to be an ontological realist; he thinks the answer is Yes. Yet, in his discussion of the electrons and the cow, he never claims that a cow-plus-electron grouping is impossible, or incoherent, or even wrong according to some principle. He calls it "bizarre," and says that "the three objects should be [my itals] divided into two groups" as custom would dictate.
When I ended the OP by saying that we needed to do a lot more work on concepts like "right sort of basis," this is the kind of situation I had in mind. In Sider's favor: There is surely such a thing as a non-bizarre interpretation, in which the two electrons do "go together"; he isn't making that up. Your suggestion is that bizarre vs. ordinary is a referendum on human uses and contexts. And that too seems plausible. The question, I think, is whether we can argue that our human uses are themselves not arbitrary, but reflect actual ontological structure of some kind. I was jibbing at "fundamental," but there may be other kinds of structure which are to some extent invariant, though depending upon the life-world of humans for their perceptibility. Arguably, that's enough to satisfy Sider; he could reply that these kinds of structure are all that logic and metaphysics means to deal with. Quantification isn't a statement about ultimate reality, or even an endorsement that there must be such a thing.
Quoting T Clark
First, a little more elaboration. This gives us the context:
Thus, Sider's E* is introduced as the quantifier that does carve at the joints -- on this example, it would refer to sub-atomic particles.
We're talking here about the "big" term "exist". Let's move to a less austere term: "happiness". Philosopher A maintains that happiness refers to a state that's measured in terms of pleasures and pains. Thus, it's possible, though unusual, for a person to fail to seek their own happiness, due to some defect of the psyche. Philosopher B maintains that happiness is best understood as that state which all people do in fact seek, since we are egoistic hedonists, and cannot fail to act in our own behalf.
This is a classic dispute about terms. A and B can go on (and on) to argue out their respective uses of "happiness" (perhaps joined by Philosopher C, who will maintain that happiness has nothing to do with pleasures and pains). Or . . . they can pose the Siderian question, "Is there something here that carves at the joints, ethically or psychologically? Is there a way of putting aside the divergent use of terms and discovering some actual structural item to which we can agree to refer?" With a term like "happiness," there are those who would claim that there is no such item. But I think there is. We can point out that there is such a thing as experiencing pleasure. Likewise, we might agree that there is such a thing as attempting to act in one's own best interests. These are reference magnets; they are "in the vicinity" of the term "happiness," and exert pressure on different philosophers to make the identification with "happiness." But we can resist that pressure, and instead decide to talk about the references, not the terms. Sider suggests this is best done not by stipulating one use of "happiness" for purposes of the discussion, but by coining or adapting a new term that is stipulated to carve at whatever joint may be available to be carved at.
Sider warns us, "Whether the introduction of Ontologese succeeds depends on the facts, on whether there is a joint-carving sort of quantification." He compares this with a proposal to introduce the term "dirt" as meaning "that element of the periodic table that allows trees to grow, etc." This isn't going to work, because there is no such element, and presumably no other reference magnet in the vicinity that is joint-carving.
Quoting T Clark
I sympathize, and I think Sider has this sort of thing in mind. Is there a way to bracket your use of "metaphysics," so to speak, and instead specify the (joint-carving) way in which you use that term? It could be set out not as a definition of 'metaphysics', but as an interesting conceptual or structural category you've noticed. I dunno . . . people might still want to argue terms.
To start, I'd like to put a frame on the discussion up to this point. All the issues we've put on the table so far--your existence, being, reality, causation, freedom, the good, truth, the ground of being--my metaphysics--are themselves metaphysical concepts. I recognize we are in danger of slipping down the slope and off the cliff we are currently discussing, but this idea is central to my understanding and my argument. R.G. Collingwood is my guru in these matters. He wrote:
The important aspect of this quote in the context of this discussion is that metaphysical, i.e. ontological, points of view don't, or at least don't have to, apply universally to all situations at all times. I can be a realist in the morning and an idealist in the afternoon. Digging a bit deeper, it is fundamental to my understanding that ontological perspectives are not inherent in the world out there--they are human cognitive artifacts.
Quoting J
What I like about your phrasing here is the use of the word "adapt." In this context it refers to a choice by a philosopher. Something obviously human. If I really believe that, does it make any sense to talk about "reality's fundamental structure?" How can something be fundamental if it only applies from a certain specific viewpoint?
Quoting J
Again--calling something "bizarre" is a human judgment. God or reality or the Tao don't think putting a cow in with electrons is bizarre. To be fair, I certainly know what Sider is talking about. I have made the case that it only really makes sense to talk about real or reality in the context of, or at least with a connection to, everyday human life. That's probably a good example of a "non-bizarre interpretation," or "right sort of basis."
Quoting J
My first response is "No!!! Of course there is no 'actual ontological structure' of some kind!!!" But now I'm just going in circles. I think this is a good example of a situation where our argument becomes pointless unless you are willing to accept my ideas about metaphysics or I am willing to abandon them.
I deal with this metaphysical knot by applying the metaphysical sword I mentioned just above--In most cases, it makes no sense (to me) to talk about existence, reality, unless there is a connection to the human world. Hypothesizing reality without tables is silly. Where the joints are located depends on the specific point of view. In this particular situation, it depends on scale. The fact that I want to make joints around subatomic particles doesn't keep me from also making joints around tables made up of subatomic particles, or, to carry it further, to make joints around furniture in general including tables.
Quoting J
I think "happiness" is a different, simpler, case than the other concepts we've been discussing. It's a human emotion, a psychological entity, not abstract at all. Not interesting ontologically any more than an apple is.
Quoting J
I've been thinking about something like this. Maybe I'll start a thread with lists of statements I consider metaphysical by my standard and ask people to describe how they fit into their own understanding of the term.
What do you think "thickness" or "depth" of meaning are, if not either polysemy or ambiguity? That said, are polysemy and ambiguity not related? I think we we have polysemy when the word is and/or has been used in multiple different contexts, and we have ambiguity when the relevant context of usage is not specified. And then we have inherent vagueness, which I think obtains when it is imagined that there is an absolute, context free sense of a term.
What about connotation? Two different words might be accurately called synonyms, but still have a different mood, tone, or implication associated with them.
I hadn't thought about connotation. Would that be a matter of meaning, or association of meaning? I'll have to think on that.
I'm trying to think of two synonymous words that have different moods, tones or implications associated with them. What about 'reality' and 'existence'? They would seem to be synonymous in some contexts but not in others.
What came to mind immediately for me were 'real' and 'to exist', as opposed to 'real' and 'fake'. Language appears to be a complex web of meanings and associations, which would seem to put paid to attempts to establish meaning in terms of 'essence'.
After I wrote that post, I was doing the same thing— trying to think of a good example. I figured someone would ask. An obvious example is the different ways of describing sexual activity.
On a level more appropriate for this particular discussion, I think you’re example of reality and existence is a good one. Here are some more that might be relevant.
I have used all of these terms at various times to describe everything that is, although I admit, I’d never use the last one until this discussion.
Polysemy is pretty close. I was thinking more in terms of the kinds of 'hinge words' which are central in various domains of discourse. Actually, given T Clark's examples above, one obvious instance is 'love', which has a huge range of meanings. I've been at more than one wedding reception where one of the speeches described the eight different Greek words for 'love', typically Eros (passionate/sexual), Philia (friendship/brotherly love), Storge (familial/natural affection), Agape (selfless/universal love), Ludus (playful/uncommitted), Mania (obsessive/mad love), Pragma (enduring/practical love), and Philautia (self-love) - which is an attempt to differentiate the many overlapping meanings in the one term.
Quoting Janus
I think (J will correct me if I'm wrong) one of the motivations for this post was a discussion whether 'reality' and 'existence' and be differentiated, citing C S Peirce, who makes that distinction. Whereas in common discourse, they are naturally regarded as synonyms - that what is real is what exists and vice versa.
They certainly feel different. "Reality" feels more objective, concrete, philosophical, external. "Existence" feels more abstract, subjective, personal, internal. The Tao Te Ching uses "existence" and "being" as more or less interchangeable depending on the verse and translator. This is the kind of thing I meant when I talked about connotation.
Right, we can certainly specify a sense or senses in which reality and existence may be distinguished, and other senses in which they are synonymous.
Quoting T Clark
:up: That all makes sense to me.
This is a good target statement for the viewpoint that "fundamental structure" can only be fundamental to a certain perspective. Your use of "everyday human life" is interesting. Is that what Sider has in mind when he counterposes it to a bizarre interpretation? Another possibility is that human life can extend beyond the everyday, into some highly abstruse areas such as logic and semantical analysis, and still be the touchstone for what we can say about fundamentality or "reality."
The pivotal question, as so often, is whether this extension beyond the everyday can ever take us completely out of ourselves, into some sort of "view from nowhere" that is deeply fundamental, so to speak. If we want Sider's opinion on this, we may have to settle for: "Ontological realism [is the view that] ontological questions are 'deep', 'about the world rather than language'." And he adds, "It is consistent with all positions on first-order ontology." So he's not saying that being "about the world" is necessarily being about something perspectiveless. The contrast he wants to highlight is with being about language, about terms. This leave open the possibility that "the world" doesn't have to be construed as something apart from how we experience it. I think his comment about first-order ontology lends support to this interpretation too. What Sider cares about is that metaphysics be substantive, in whatever way our ontology may allow it to be, and not merely a wrangle about language.
That said, I'm not sure we've really done justice to the electrons and the cow. I need to think more about it, but just to indicate where I'm going with it: The two electrons exhibit the property of "sameness" or "identicalness in every way but numerically". As you point out, the cow certainly shares properties with the electrons -- but not that property. So we have to ask, Is identicalness a property for us because it is a fundamental property of ontology? Does being identical ground the other ways we can understand similarity or communality of properties?
Quoting T Clark
But suppose we both agreed that there is a reference magnet in the vicinity which is joint-carving. You want to say that "metaphysics" is the best word to apply to one division of the resulting conceptual carving -- the division which includes Collingwood's "absolute presuppositions [that] have been made by this or that person or group of persons." Other divisions might, on your terms, be "derivative assumptions" and "meaningless non-human-world statements about an inaccessible 'fundamentality'," or words to that effect, yes? For my part, I'm not as clear about the right terms, but let's say I held a different set of labels, but was willing to bracket them while acknowledging that what you mean by "metaphysics" is indeed a reference magnet, and an important one. Might we not be able to continue the discussion on that basis?
Quoting T Clark
I understand what you mean, but happiness is such a crucial term in ethical theory that I would argue it's elevated itself out of the merely psychological and become one of those "big" theoretical terms. No matter.
Quoting T Clark
I'd like to see that, but be prepared not only for descriptions but for arguments about why their understandings are correct! :wink:
Quoting Wayfarer
The question that interests me is whether "reality" and "existence" refer, perspicuously, and if they do, whether it's possible to focus on what they refer to, rather than the intellectual (and ordinary-language) history of how the terms have been used. Peirce's distinction is an excellent one -- wouldn't it remain just as excellent if it used different terms? In Sider's language, Peirce identifies important reference magnets, and helps us understand how they relate. But if we start talking about whether he's using "reality" and "existence" correctly, the discussion immediately turns non-substantive.
Yes, I think that's right. As I noted in my last post, I understand what he means and agree with the general sentiment--after all, two electrons and a cow makes kind of a bizarre grouping. But the claim this represents some sort of "actual ontological structure" rather than a reflection of our common humanity raises my hackles.
Quoting J
My answer is "No."
Quoting J
Well, no... I mean yes... I guess we can call them "deep" if you want, but they are not just about the world. They are about us and the world as a single entity. And yes, they are also about language.
Quoting J
I don't know how open you are to Taoist thought. Lao Tzu wrote "The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao." We might say "The world as expressed in words is not the same as your experience of the world.” I think that's a good response to Sider, although I'm not sure he would disagree with me.
Quoting J
This seems a bit odd. I guess two examples of a particular subatomic particle really are identical, but few other pairs in the world are. Two apples from the same tree are not identical physically, only conceptually. Then again, I can make the case that an electron and a cow are conceptually identical. As a matter of fact I already did in a previous post when I pointed out they are both consist of matter rather than radiation.
Quoting J
My problem is that the way I use the idea of "metaphysics" is fundamental to how I understand how the world works--or more accurately, how I can talk and think about how the world works. There's no way around it. I need bricks shaped like "metaphysics" to help build the wall. If I use another shape, the wall will be less stable. I guess I can call the bricks something else, but 1) there are already smart, qualified, experienced people out there using the word the same way I do and 2) making up new words almost never makes things better.
Quoting J
This kind of question is what lead to think about the different approach to the question I mentioned in my last post when I wrote "Maybe I'll start a thread with lists of statements I consider metaphysical by my standard and ask people to describe how they fit into their own understanding of the term."
I'm happy with this way of putting it, as long as we remember that being "about language" is in a sense peripheral. I'm just highlighting Sider's point -- and I think yours too -- that when a philosophical debate switches from what a term refers to, to whether it is the correct term to use, we are likely moving to something non-substantive. Though see below, about "metaphysics" . . .
Quoting T Clark
I'm very comfortable with Taoist thought, and appreciate your bringing it in here. I've sometimes wondered whether the Tao is the same idea as a perfectly noumenal world, a world that by definition is beyond human experience, just as Kant said. But we'd have to add a layer to Kant's thought and say that nonetheless we have a kind of intuition, or constant awareness, of the noumenal -- that we can know it in a way that is not rational. Kant would hate that, I suppose. Maybe Sider too, though I take him seriously when he says he's open to any first-order ontology.
Quoting T Clark
Good point. The particles are peculiar, in that they aren't numerically identical -- they reside at two different points in space-time -- yet, as best we know, they are physically exactly the same. How about two triangles of the same dimensions? Are they identical in the way the particles are? Maybe "identicalness" is best considered from a mathematical perspective, which is not my specialty.
My point about grounding was definitely a conceptual one. We have a variety of terms we can use to describe the similarities and differences we observe in the world (and in our own conceptions). I think all of them may require the concept of "identity" in order to make sense. I'm not sure about this, but let's say it's true. That would mean that in an important sense "identity" is structurally more fundamental that, say "being green". This may be partly what Sider has in mind when he talks about "deep" structure. And, as discussed, one could make this case without requiring the deep structure to exist apart from our conscious experience of it.
Quoting T Clark
Yes, and this is why I don't really think philosophy will ever be reformed along Siderian lines, even if we all agreed it ought to be. In fact, I could challenge (2) and point to many cases where making up new words (and logical relations) has been extremely helpful, and I still don't think most philosophers are willing to burn down the house and erect a more precise terminology. It is, in a way, unreasonable for me to say to you, "Stop talking about metaphysics and talk about metaphysics*!" It may be more trouble than it's worth, to you and to the people you talk to. But at least we can take Sider to heart and remember that we have a diagnosis available, when a conversation becomes terminological rather than substantive.
("A brick shaped like metaphysics" is another good image for a reference magnet. It "pulls" us, in this metaphor, because we need it as a conceptual cornerstone.)
Quoting J
And this has been my point all along, we just differ on the solution. We don't even disagree much on that.
Quoting J
I've make the point quite often that Kant's idea of noumena reflects the same insight as Lao Tzu's Tao, although there are significant differences. The idea of a primordial undifferentiated Oneness is found in many philosophies and religions under the general heading "monism." I asked AI (Gemini) for some examples and got a long list. I won't reproduce it in keeping with the forum's AI policy.
Quoting J
This is something I've thought about--how can we interact with, experience, the Tao without being able to consciously, i.e. verbally, think about it? What is non-verbal consciousness? What is awareness without consciousness? I have a personal sense of what it feels like to do do it. It's nothing exotic. I think we all do it all the time without being aware of it. Or without being conscious of it. Or something.
Quoting J
I think this is right. Physical things can only be identical metaphorically.
Quoting J
Categorization is the concept we are talking about here. I'm in the middle of reading, by which I mean listening to, "Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking" by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander. The authors claim, to vastly oversimplify, Thought = Categorization = Analogy ? Identity. I won't go into any detail, since I'm just getting started and it is on a bit of a tangent.
Quoting J
Is identify a property? It seems more like a relationship to me. No need to take this any further unless you want to.
Quoting J
Yes, but there is a distinction between technical language and jargon.
Quoting J
I'm very proud of that metaphor.
My conclusion - Just agree on a damn definition before you get started. Even if there is a way to get around that, philosophers and pseudo-philosophers won't let you have a discussion that doesn't devolve into an argument about terminology. It's what we do. It's what people think philosophy is.
Nice OP.
I like the thinking here, I think it captures why much philosophical discourse is insubstantive. My concern is what is advocating for is a massive jargonization of philosophy. The amount of coinages required would be immense, and ever growing. I also share your skepticism of "joint-carving". At best it is an ideal, not something that will actually be achieved. Any ideal set of terms would more realistically carve joints at the conceptual level, not the metaphysical level. Which of these is actually metaphysically apt would be endlessly debatable (but at least, substantively debatable)..
But really, it seems a fantasy that a singular set of terms, with universally agreed definitions, could ever be achieved. More likely, a sprawling, fragmentary landscape of overlapping , incompatible terminologies would result. It is not obvious at all that this would be an improvement over the current state of affairs.
I don't really see an alternative to what is sometimes done already: for individual philosophers to rigorously define their terms from the outset, as best they are able.
But then what is the value of any idea if it’s so amorphous we can’t actually use it for anything? Words, ideas, are meant to be used.
Very good discussion!
Quoting T Clark
Especially because I see a lot of latitude in interpreting what Sider recommends. To say it again -- his main concern is to draw some kind of distinction (that matters) between a term and its reference. One way of doing that is to use some version of Ontologese, but a curious, flexible willingness to "try on" another's terminology might accomplish much the same thing.
Quoting T Clark
Yes, these are aspects of the consciousness question that are often ignored when Western philosophers talk. You'd think, reading the literature on consciousness, that no one had ever tried to meditate -- much less entire centuries-long traditions of it!
Quoting T Clark
Thanks, I'll check it out. I've read a bunch of Hofstadter with pleasure.
Quoting T Clark
Quoting hypericin
You're both pointing to the problem -- what's the difference between defining operators and domains in logic, versus a similar operation in ordinary language? Sider is a good writer, but his background is what I'd call technical. I agree, we don't want jargon, and we don't know how far we can push this idea before Ontologese becomes unintentionally comic. Heidegger is an interesting example. I think he was absolutely right to invent some new coinages to talk about his idea of Being, and amazingly enough, at least one (Dasein) has actually stuck. But his way of using those new terms . . . not easy, and often not clear, which was supposed to be the whole point. Sartre too, with pour-soi and en-soi.
Quoting hypericin
Yes, but . . . isn't that what happened, more or less, with several logical languages? So it can be done, and done usefully. The problem, once again, is whether ordinary language is flexible enough, and its users willing enough.
Quoting hypericin
I think that's fine, as long as everyone steers clear of arguing whether they're the right definitions. Maybe that could come later, after the participants have gotten a better look at what sort of structure you can build using those definitions. This presupposes that structure is to a significant degree independent of language, so I'm with Sider there.
Logical languages have basic concepts that are very well agreed upon. Ontologese would not. Everyone would have their options on what should and shouldn't be included. And everyone would have their own definitions. This would lead to either the wrangling we are trying to avoid, or an explosion of terms, designating multiple takes for each term.
Quoting J
Dasein is particularly opaque. But this is the general problem. The idea that all of these terms would be transparent, clear, and agreed upon seems highly optimistic.
I don't believe that this can end terminological debates. The best is that it can keep them mostly substantive.
I think there are interesting questions remaining about reference magnetism. @T Clark has articulated the issue with fundamentality very well. I find myself pulled both ways on it. I don't want reference magnetism (or joint-carving) to depend on a perception of ontological structure that is completely independent of human conceptualization. Rather, I want it to do what Sider (mainly) asks of it: to help us separate terms from what they refer to. Is there more? It's worth quoting Sider again:
That last phrase is silly rhetoric, but the rest is provocative. Sider brings in the idea that some languages and beliefs are epistemically better. He doesn't elaborate on what "betterness" is, but we could probably fill in the story using the successes of science, at the very least.
So maybe we should concentrate on epistemology rather than ontology. There is no knowing without a knower. If joint-carving terms are better for us in knowing the world, isn't that consistent with agnosticism about Fundamental-with-a-capital-F ontology? Turning the question around: Is "knowing better" a fundamental ontological category? I don't see how, and that's good.
The other question that Sider's thought highlights is the role of truth in epistemology. He's not the first to have noticed that "truth is not enough" -- that we don't want just any truths, but truths that carry a certain perspective or depth. Giving content to that additional "oomph" isn't easy. For Sider, it has to do with the references of the true statements -- whether they're reference magnets and carve at the joints. I think this is a promising line of inquiry. It's always going to be helpful to remind ourselves that what is true and what matters are different issues.
Not having read Sider, I have a different question.
Why is 'ontology' even the concern? This seems kind of naive, as if words really just picked out subsets of ontological reality. When in fact, words are as often dealing with relationships, concepts, relationships and categories of concepts, subjective relationships... It seems impossible to find indisputable, singular 'ontological' versions of such words.
Take the first problematic word you mentioned, 'existence'. Especially when you take concepts, relationships, and subjects into account, the number of 'existences' seems to explode.
Atomic existence: Does the thing have a mind independent, physical existence?
Presentist atomic existance: Does the thing have atomic existence, right now?
Eternalist atomic existance: Did the thing ever have an atomic existence?
"Block universe" atomic existence: Will the thing ever have an atomic existence?
Mind-dependent existence: Does the thing exist at all, even if only in a mind?
Recalled existence: Does the thing exist, if only in living memory?
Historical existence: Does the thing exist, if only in written record?
Local existence: Does the thing exist, and have any causal relationship with any subject?
Relative-local existence: Does the thing exist, and have any causal relationship with a particular subject?
And on and on...
Each of these is debatable. Take mind-dependent existence. Does this require for the mental object to be thought, right now, for it to exist? Or does an active potential to think something count as existence? If the thought was thought in the past, does it require a present impact to count? What if the impact is only marginal, say, it contributed slightly to another thought which contributed slightly to another, which became an enduring belief, does that marginal thought exist? Is this existence intrinsically relative, so that thoughts exist from one subjective frame of reference, and do not exist in another? Or is it the totality of human thought that counts?
Each question is a debate. "Ah, but these are not substantive", Sider might say. "There is no singular reference to this term, we have to clearly delineate what we are talking about!". But this means, for each question, we generate another term: one for the positive response, one for the negative. This exercise can be repeated for every of the variations of "existence" above. So ultimately, we wind up with 100s of "ontologese" terms just covering the natural language "existence". Is this progress?
I think the core problem is that language does not, and cannot, map to ontology in a straightforward way. Language doesn't directly deal in ontology. It deals in concepts. These can multiply endlessly, and they can all "carve to the joints". The joints of ontology, or the joints of other concepts.
Referring to my thread on existing vs non-existing things, if I think there can be non-existent things, then I am referring to some "way" (way of reality, way of things, way of being, etc.) which may be disagreeable with another "way", particularly where one would claim there can't be non-existent things. However, perhaps these ways only conflict in their use of the terms, not in the actual referents of the terms from each party. So once again, it is important to understand ideas from the other's perspective rather than trying to conform them to yours. It will yield better understanding overall anyway.
Yes. I would add that the "different concepts" may be seen as more or less perspicacious, more or less adequate in capturing ontological structure. This is Sider's view, at least. Hence the notion of reference magnets.
Quoting hypericin
I think it would be naive, if ontology was conceived as a 1-to-1 matching of terms with "objects" or items we metaphorically imagine as existing in a visual space. But your list of "relationships, concepts, categories" et al. seems just as much a part of first-order ontology. Also, nothing here is meant to limit what a word can do. We use words in so many different ways; Sider is focusing on a particular philosophical use, and how it can get murky and non-substantive.
Quoting hypericin
But leave aside the words. Is it possible to find indisputable, singular, ontological versions (or concepts) of the references of the words? Sider would call that a substantive question, as opposed to the one about words, which is not about metaphysics but about a particular language.
That said, I'm much less confident than he is that anything "indisputable" would come out of this.
Quoting hypericin
It's a good question. Even if "100s" is a exaggeration, there's still a problem with the limits of what natural language can do. I tend to think that logical languages often can better handle longstanding philosophical problems, precisely because terms are removed from their ordinary-language polysemy as much as possible. But, as you helpfully show, carrying out such a program with even a single "big" term is a headache.
One clarification, which relates to my first response. You ask:
Quoting hypericin
A "Siderian" rephrasing might look like this. We are aware of some reference magnets "in the vicinity" of: what our minds do when we think. Quite often, a mental image appears. And if we stop thinking about that idea, the image will disappear. Now we can be fairly comfortable that this really does describe something in "conceptual space." We know the difference between having the mental image, and no longer having it. (Or maybe not, if you're a hardcore Wittgensteinian . . .) We also know that some of the things we think about are in physical space, and some are not. So . . . rather than talk about what any of this has to do with existence, let's talk about the joint-carving concepts themselves. Maybe, if we get a good grasp on them, we'll go back and decide that "existence" is a good word to use for a present thought, but not for an absent one. Or the opposite. But starting now with a debate about what "existence" means is like looking through the wrong end of the telescope.
Quoting T Clark
I started to try to start on something like that when I remembered I had started a somewhat similar discussion four years ago. Here's the OP from that discussion--"The Metaphysics of Materialism." I've hidden it so it won't clutter up this post.
[hide="Reveal"]Quoting T Clark[/hide]
That discussion ended up being successful from my point of view, but I had to struggle to keep it from devolving into the usual arguments about what metaphysics is and isn't. As I was rereading this I had an epiphany. The primary subject of the thread was not metaphysics, it was the enumeration of the underlying assumptions of pre-quantum mechanics physics. I could have raised that question without ever mentioning metaphysics at all. I've edited my OP to take out stuff that wasn't strictly needed to allow discussing the issues I was interested in. I don't think it's exactly the same thing, but in a sense I've drawn the joints of the discussion in different places.
So... I guess you were right. I've gone back and looked at some of my other comments and discussions on similar subjects. In some cases, I could have made them simpler and less open to confusion by focusing on the specific issue at hand and ignoring the broader metaphysical context.
I don't think so. These are observer dependent, and limitless, while I would take "first order ontology" to be observer independent and finite. It is clear to me they don't exist on the same order of being.
Think of perspectives, relationships between subjects and objects. For instance, a man looks at a rock. There is one man, one rock, yet even geometrically there are infinite geometric perspectives the man can have of the rock. Then, perceptually :he man can see the rock one way sober, one way drunk, one way on LSD. There is no limit on the number of different psychedelic drugs that can be synthesized, each of which offers a unique perspective. There is no limit to the number of ways all the different sentient species, past, present, future, from earth or other planets, might perceive the rock. And all of this still doesn't begin to exhaust the space of every possible perspective that can be taken on the rock. Crucially, each and every of these perspectives is valid , none are garbage, none are privileged.
Concepts too are perspectives. They are the cognitive counterparts to perceptual perspectives. They are also limitless. There is no upper bound to the number of ways to think about, compare, categorize the rock. Even for the example of 'existence', if I were patient and creative enough I might be able to cover up with over a hundred variations. Creating concepts is a creative endeavor. Part of the artistry of it is to create concepts that are somehow aligned with the world, that "carve the joints". "Cow plus electron" doesn't cut it. But unlike butchering an animal there is no upper bound to the number of ways that this can be done.
I hope this demonstrates that concepts and perspectives are not ontologically primary, in the same way a heap of atoms is. And that coming up with a fixed, finite set of these everyone agrees on is hopeless endeavor.
Is this a fair criticism of sider? How might he respond?
Great insight.
Quoting T Clark
And the acid test would be: By drawing the joints this way, can you increase the substantivity of the discussion? Can you head off disputes about terminology? Seems so to me. Of course you never know what someone will find terminologically debatable.
Quoting T Clark
Yeah, but . . . "going Siderian" is not a panacea, as you and others have shown. I'd settle for the modest goal outlined above: Keep it substantive.
And speaking of acid tests . . .
Quoting hypericin
This is true.
Quoting hypericin
Not quite sure what you mean here. If we stipulate that each one legitimately occurred to the person concerned, then I guess they're all valid in that sense: You can be mistaken about what an illusion represents, but not about the fact that you're experiencing something.
Quoting hypericin
OK, interesting analogy.
Quoting hypericin
I agree with this, and here's where the analogy with perception is especially helpful. The myriad perceptions (or illusions of perception) that you mention may be valid in the sense I used, but not in the sense that they are "aligned with the world." A mirage is when you see something that isn't there. And Sider's "bred and rue" people are, according to him, thinking something that isn't there. More precisely, they can think an infinite number of true things about the concepts they've invoked but still be missing a crucial piece of ontological structure, a piece which -- and here it gets controversial -- is really there.
So back to the first-order ontology question:
Quoting hypericin
Quoting hypericin
I'll take a dose of my own medicine and withdraw the term "first-order ontology"! We're now hyper-alert to what could happen next, if I don't: We'd launch into a debate about how to use the term, or even worse, the term "ontology" itself.
Instead, I'll just say that you're right, concepts and perspectives look to be observer-dependent. In two senses: They differ depending on individual (or intersubjective) perspectives, and there wouldn't be any if there weren't any subjects to have them. Are there are also things that are observer-independent? You're using "a heap of atoms" in much the same way that Sider uses "sub-atomic particles" to represent a "thin ontology" of very basic physical items. I'm not sure what to say about that. Can we even have gluons without concepts, which we've agreed must be observer-dependent? Does "observer-dependent vs. independent" carve at the joints? That's a complicated issue, but at least we can try to keep it substantive by focusing on the different ways in which phenomena may or may not require constitutive construction by consciousness.
Quoting hypericin
Maybe so, in philosophy. But let's not forget the leopard I brought up a while back. Biological taxonomy is a good example of doing precisely this; we have a fixed set of concepts that everyone (who knows the science) agrees on. Where it's fuzzy at the edges, work needs to be done, but the overall shape of the project is accepted, I think.
Quoting hypericin
He might say, "Well, if we can't enter the metaphysics room and find more precise terms that correspond to the right reference magnets . . . so much the worse for ordinary-language philosophy." But I think he'd be pleased that you see his point about "aligning with the world." This is where I have the most questions, but Sider has sharpened the issue in a very helpful way. And he too admits that "it's highly unclear what exactly the 'right sort' of basis is" for making decisions about what is explanatorily fundamental, i.e., ontologically primary.
As for first-order ontology, if we want to go back to that term, Sider says, "Ontological realism [is the view that] ontological questions are 'deep', 'about the world rather than language'." And he adds, "It is consistent with all positions on first-order ontology." This is a pretty broad understanding. I think he means to include the position that there are no fundamental structures that are observer-independent, though he doesn't agree with it. But it is, after all, a standard position on first-order ontology.
You are missing something important here. Perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned LSD, but now that I did, the Hollywood trope that LSD induces hallucinations is wildly inaccurate. Pink elephants are very rare, if they ever truly occur, and would require truly heroic doses. Far more common are alterations in perception, and especially thinking. Not mere illusion. Leaving LSD aside (drugs and philosophy is a huge topic, very worthy of an op), it is clear that the way a bat sees the world is no illusion. It is a way of seeing, coequal with the way we see. And there are infinite valid ways of seeing, as there are infinite potential (and vast actual) neural architectures .
Quoting J
And so now I hope we can agree, while there are infinite ways of seeing that are misaligned with the world, there are also infinite ways of seeing that are in fact aligned. "One true way" is just naive realism. Once naivhe realism is discarded, one realizes that the way we see the world is a construction, one that is aligned with the world in the relevant ways. But there are boundless ways of building such a construction.
Quoting J
I think we can. It is fanciful to say that gluons sprang into existence when they were discovered. Of course, we cannot cognitively access gluons without the concept of gluons. And, the concept of gluons can certainly fail to "carve to the joints" of the reality.
I'm beginning to suspect that "thin ontology" is just science. The examples you've shown conform to this. Could Sider be mistaking philosophy for science? I'm thinking of a view where "First order ontology" (not to argue the term, just to suggest the idea) is science: that which can be said independently of any observer. "Second order ontology" is the world of subjectivity, the world we actually inhabit (as @Wayfarer loves to point out): the world of subjective perspectives. This is the world of of inexhaustibly many valid "ways of seeing". The "book of the world" is science. There might be one grand unified theory, one way of describing the objective world that perfectly carves to the joints of the objective world. Whereas, philosophy straddles first and second order ontologies. It is about the real world, but a world that includes subjectivity and perspectives, and itself constructs perspectives upon that subjective-inclusive world. As such, there can never be a single philosophical "book of the world".
Quoting J
I actually think this is a horrible example, biology is so messy. It completely defines easy categorization. The ones we have are as much convention as anything. They try to carve to the joints, but only as best as they can, the reality is just too complex. What is a species really? Is it a population that can interbreed? Then what about asexual species? Hybridization? Non-transitive breeding? (A <-> B, B <-> C, but not A <-> C). Horizonal gene transfer in bacteria? When you move up from species, it just gets worse and more arbitrary. Even the category of life itself is problematic, and more so than just viruses (prions, mitochondria, artificial life...)
:clap:
I think we basically agree, and you're right to make the distinction (which I did not) between illusion and simple difference, perhaps due to one's species. The LSD example does point to a problem, though: You've chosen to describe the typical psychedelic experience (or at least it was typical for me) as an "alteration in perception" -- very neutral language. If, while tripping, I see the usual fanfare of squigglies and trails and pulses, these are not actually "aligned with the world." The bat is doing a far better job at that than a person with chemically altered consciousness. Surely we should be honest and call the LSD experience a distortion of perception, not a mere alteration? Which brings us back again to the question of whether there is a "right sort" of ontology. If there isn't, then we need another way to explain why the wall isn't really breathing.
But you're right that, even among the possible "right sorts," there are infinite variations, depending on all the factors you named.
I'll reply to some of your other thoughts . . . but gotta run now. Appreciate the conversation!
You are right, I overstated. Still, it is important to keep the nature of these distortions in mind. They are not a Disney's Fantasia illusory animation of a correct, sober world. Rather they are let you peer through the wizard of Oz's curtains to see phenomenologic reality for what it is. A gnarled old man guessing, predicting, interpolating, desperately trying to hold everything together and keep the illusion good enough. Not a mathematical projection of orderly photon data.
For instance, breathing walls are not an illusory animation. They let you see the brain's guesswork of angle and depth. Normally the brain picks one guess and locks it down, both in space and time. Psychedelics loosen this constraint and lets you see multiple plausible guesses, both in one "frame" and evolving over time.
Back to Sider, perception "carves to the joints", but far from perfectly. Sure, drugs can amplify imperfections, but they reveal a process which is fundamentally imprecise. Optical illusions show just how far from reality perception truly is. Even if we know the illusion, we often still can't correct for it, we still think we are seeing reality, and the illusion is a lie. One example. Maybe some alien can see visual reality truly. But we can't. And so even if you don't accept that there are infinite "perfect" ways of seeing the world, there are surely infinite "good enough" ways.
The same is true of concepts. There might be a perfect concept of a gluon, waiting to be discovered. But species? Forget it. All you can to is try to fail better, or fail in different interesting ways. This is 100x more true of interpretive, subjective, perspectival philosophy.
This really gets to the tough problem. Let's agree that we'll use "naive realism" to mean the idea that 1) there is a description of the world that is not a construction, but instead mind-independent in a somewhat mysterious way we'll have to leave as a promissory note; and 2) there is only one of these. On that understanding, naive realism is a non-starter. Neither condition can be met. A description requires a describer, hence some relation to a mind. And even if we decide that we can construct a description that is "aligned in the relevant ways," there's no reason to believe that there could only be one of them -- maybe not even for humans, and certainly not for other consciousnesses. (And BTW, Sider never implies that his joint-carving candidates add up to a single true way of assessing ontology.)
So let's kick naive realism to the curb and consider our options. On the one hand, we want our descriptions and explanations to bear the imprint of a human mind -- to be, in some sense, co-creations between the world and us. On the other hand, we're hanging on to the concept of "being aligned with the world in the relevant ways," as I think we should. We want to be able say why the bred and rue people are getting something wrong -- it's not that they're saying false things, but that the things they're saying aren't aligned in the right ways. Less bizarrely, we want an account of error in general.
I think we can do this. Realism about structure, to use Sider's phrase, can be a realism about stuff that is both dependent on our interactions with the world and not the least bit arbitrary. The question to answer is: the structure of what? When we inquire into what grounds what, in logic or metaphysics, what's the object of our inquiry? Is it first-order ontology understood as naive realism? No, we've rejected that. Rather, we want to understand the structure of our world, the world we encounter as humans. With Kant, we hold out the possibility that the noumenal world also exists, but that's not what we're looking at when we look at structure.
This is just a sketch, but I hope it's pointing in the right direction. So . . .
Quoting Wayfarer
. . . I'll add my applause to @Wayfarer's. :clap: "[Philosophy] is about the real world, but a world that includes subjectivity and perspectives, and itself constructs perspectives . . ." -- I think that puts it very well, as long as we add that these perspectives can be more or less aligned, can carve better or worse at the joints.
Quoting hypericin
I didn't want to ignore this, because it may be true. Not exactly that he mistakes philosophy for science, but that he over-values the parsimony and predictive value of current scientific concepts of the physical world.
Quoting hypericin
That would be a critical reading of Sider's project, possibly justified. For what it's worth, he spends most of his time in Writing the Book of the World talking about structures that are clearly philosophical rather than scientific in nature. And I put a lot of weight on his liberality with regard to first-order ontologies. I think he prefers a scientific "thin ontology" when it comes to physical stuff, but he's trying to construct a way of understanding the world that doesn't require us to agree.
If we asked him, "Can a first-order ontology, as you use the term, include a refusal to separate objective from subjective components?" I believe he'd say yes. I don't think he'd insist that the objective/subjective polarity can only emerge in second-order ontology. In fact, in his (brief) discussion of subjectivity, he makes it clear that it's not a good reference magnet -- it doesn't carve at the joints. So he might be happy with dropping that old dichotomy entirely, except for what he calls "value" terms in morality and aesthetics.
Quoting hypericin
Sounds like you know more about biology than I do, so I need a better example! I thought "species" was fairly clear-cut, though sometimes fuzzy at the edges.
But, does he admit to a mere plurality of ways? If so, then he can still, in principle if not realistically, enumerate them in his hypothetical book. Or, a boundless number of ways? In which case, the project seems hopeless, even in principle.
Quoting J
The problem I've been graspng at is, the world we encounter as humans is not the world of stable, mind independent structures. It is the world of subjectivity, of perspectives, of concepts. You said our descriptions should be co-creations of us and the world. The problem is, the object of our description, lived human reality, is already such a co creation. We are describing that. It is a subjective perspective on something that is already intrinsically subjective. Science is a description of the world that subtracts the human, subjective element. Scientific description is the kind of co creation you and perhaps Sider might actually have in mind. Whereas philosophy is perspectives on something that is already intrinsically perspectival.
Quoting J
What I had in mind is more what I mentioned above. The project of finding the best, most ontologically aligned description of the world, is the scientific project, not philosophy. Science is inexhaustible because that best description is forever elusive. Philosophy is inexhaustible because, by its nature, it doesn't even admit to a best description.
Quoting J
I absolutely agree there is good and bad philosophy. Some simply misses what it thinks it is describing, losing itself in contradiction, incoherence, and irrelevance. But, at least in principle, science has an end, a perfect description of objective reality. While subjective reality may not allow for this.
Quoting J
Biology, being I think the most complicated science, illustrates a parallel problem. Terminology attempts to reduce an immensely complex phenomenon to terms a mind can grasp. But the reality exceeds the minds. And so we are left with compromises and conventions, that only do their best. Speciation does seem to be a pattern. But there doesn't seem to be a way to generalize it across the entire scope of biology. Even though, this is more of what we have been calling first order ontology.
I think it depends on how comprehensive the "book" must be. I think you're right that the ways are boundless, since humans are but one type of consciousness. Writing that book is indeed hopeless. But (and we shouldn't stretch the titular metaphor too far) the book Sider wants to write is a book about our world, which he believes can permit of objectively better and worse ways of being described. How many are there? What are the degrees of betterness and worseness? I file those questions under the category of "What is 'the right sort' of alignment with the world?", which Sider sensibly concedes is very difficult to answer.
Quoting hypericin
Would you be open to modifying that to say "already contains intrinsically subjective aspects"? I'd be fine with that, especially if we bear in mind Sider's idea that "objective/subjective" may not carve at the joints anyway.
Quoting hypericin
Yes, I see what you mean. Science is trying to eliminate one of the two subjective elements -- with what success, opinions would differ. And we could say that philosophy at any rate doesn't start with that goal or presupposition. To the extent that a philosopher wants to identify themselves with the scientific project -- and many do -- then they too will try to approach the "view from nowhere." But they needn't.
Quoting hypericin
When you put it this way, though, I don't think I agree. That would only be true if your ontology was one that comprised exactly what science can study. See above -- that's a premise of some philosophers, but probably not all that many. Or perhaps you only mean that any philosophy, no matter what its ontology comprises, which thinks in terms of "best" and "correct alignment", is a scientific project in spirit. That would put the roots of science back with the Greeks, and perhaps we should.
Sider wants to nail down the core concepts once and for all. My main argument here is that forming concepts is as much art as it is science. "Existence" is just one example.
This is not to say that anything goes. There are better and worse concepts, as there are better and worse paintings (as we had discussed not long ago!). But this ranking doesn't mean that:
1) There is any limit to the number of "good" paintings, or concepts. And
2) We can ever, even in theory, agree on what the good and bad paintings, or concepts, are and aren't.
Not only the creation, but the ranking of both, in part, is subjective.
Subjectivity implies perspective. And perspective is intrinsically creative. You cannot do what Sider wants with creative subjects. Doing so is obviously absurd for paintings, less obvious for concepts. but I think it is the same problem.
Quoting J
Yes, that is better statement. Not subjective all the way down, but a fusion of subjective and objective. I'm curious what Sider has in mind instead of the objective/subjective dichotomy. I suspect the subjective is ignored?
Quoting J
Yeah, I think this approach is very problematic. Not only because subjectivity is a part of life that is of great interest to us sentients, but that as soon as we use concepts (which we always do, inescapably), subjectivity re-enters the picture. Reality is aconceptual. I think biology is a great example, nature doesn't care about our concepts of species, life, etc. It is what it is. We apply concepts onto it, in order to try to make sense of it. But this, the conceptualized world, is no longer reality, but rather a perspective on reality. Reality always escapes our concepts. Reality doesn't live in neat, labeled buckets, the way we want it to. Reality isn't conceptual, our minds are. And so dealing with concepts is dealing, at least in part, in minds, whether acknowledged or not.
So to summarize (I hope I'm not getting too repetitive, I'm fleshing this out as I go):
The world isn't structured in concepts. Our minds structure the world as conceptual. This is perspective, a creative act. Because of the mismatch between world and concept, there is no perfect set of concepts. This is true of "objective reality", but doubly true of "subjective reality". Here, philosophy must construct concepts and perspectives on concepts and perspectives themselves.
The space of "good, aligned" concepts is endless, including the meta-concepts we are discussing now, and we will never stop arguing about them. :wink:
Quoting hypericin
If we knew how to give the details of this, we'd be far along. Can the comparison with art hold up? No doubt there is better and worse art, just as there are better and worse concepts. But we further say of a concept that it can be right or wrong, it can correctly or incorrectly align with the world. When we talk about bad or unsuccessful art, we're thinking about something else. One view is that bad art isn't internally consistent, its form doesn't work. Another is that bad art fails to mean. In contrast, when the bred and rue people draw their lines, aren't they consistent? (They always say true things about bred and rue.) Aren't they saying meaningful things? (We have no trouble understanding what they're getting at.) It seems there's a dimension missing from the art comparison, and it has something to do with "the right sort" of concepts.
Quoting hypericin
Here it might be useful to remember the two senses of "subjective". We agree they're subjective in that, without a subject to do the creating and ranking, there'd be nothing to talk about. But "subjective" can also mean "matter of personal opinion" or "relative to a particular viewpoint", and I don't think that sense applies here. An established scientific law is not subjective in that sense. You can't say to an exponent of the theory of entropy, "Well, that's just your opinion. I like my theory better." I'm not even sure you can do that with art, at least not completely. Someone who declared, for instance, that all European art (including music, literature, et al.) from 1700 to 2000 was bad art would be told something like, "You must not understand how 'art' is used."
Quoting hypericin
I'll write something about that in a subsequent post -- I want to reread his section on subjectivity.
Quoting hypericin
We can agree on all this, but remain troubled about where the idea of "mismatch" could even arise. This circles back once again to whether there's a "world" -- our world, not a perspectiveless world -- which exhibits privileged structure. If not, are we reduced to pragmatics? Is something a mismatch because it doesn't do what we want done?
Quoting hypericin
Yet two of my favorite philosophers, Peirce and Habermas, insist we should regard communication as in principle converging on truth. This may be a statement of faith, in the same way that ethical statements can be, but I do think that every good book or interesting conversation moves us just a little bit toward that convergence. As you point out, philosophy opens the door to meta-conversations, which are endless! But not everything deserves iteration.
The bred and rue concept is in one sense perfectly aligned with the world. They drew a line, a feature of the world. The concepts of bred and rue consistently sort the world according to this feature. Everything on one side is bred, everything on the other is rue. But we want to say that they chose the wrong feature. Wrong how? Some words we might use: Useless. Meaningless. Arbitrary.
But these words are subjective, meaning that their truth values are relative to subjects. They refer to properties of subjects (goals, meaning, intention), not of the objective world. What is useful, meaningful, and intentioned to one person, might be useless, meaningless, and arbitrary to another.
Tellingly, these same three complaints are the complaints one might make of bad art. Bad art is Useless, it doesn't do anything, it evokes no emotion or thought. It is Meaningless, it is all surface form, with no deeper message. It is Arbitrary, it does not cohere into a larger whole, rather its components were haphazardly plucked from the grab bag of genre-appropriate parts.
This suggests a significant parallel between the evaluation of art and concepts.
Quoting J
This is a notion of subjectivity that is empty of content. Lebowski's "Well that's like your opinion, man." Real subjective evaluation involves the sort of judgements l outlined above. If the theory of entropy is just the models expressed by the equations, then that might lack subjectivity. But, what is entropy exactly? Is it a feature of the universe? Is it a consequence of observers with limited information? Is it statistical? There are multiple coherent interpretations. How to choose? I think, in additional to looking a objective alignment (they all can align, in different ways) some subjective, aesthetic criteria must come into play.
Quoting J
This is the same conflation that was endemic in the art thread. I'm perfectly free to call all European art bad art. What I cannot easily do is call it all non-art. To do this, I must be using a bad concept of art, which draws the line between art and non-art using criteria that fail for reasons like arbitrariness, meaninglessness, and uselessness.
Quoting J
I think privileged structure exists. But concepts don't perfectly capture it.
Coloring books are a good analogy. The numbered regions are not arbitrarily chosen; they align with the structure of the drawing. Yet, they are not intrinsically a part of the line drawing, they are something added on top. They are a tool, helping the user digest a complex picture into discrete, easily managed parts. There is no limit to the choices that could have been made, someone else might have subdivided the line drawing in different ways, and choose different colors. And every set of choices involves compromises, obscuring important differences, grouping things together that shouldn't be. No set of choices are absolute, none capture all the features of the line drawing. That is because colored regions cannot map perfectly with line drawings, they are not the same sorts of things.
Quoting J
Even if this were true (our current hyper-communicative era suggests otherwise), there is not necessarily one truth to converge upon. "Which truth?" can as much a cause for disagreement as "which is true?" Especially since the two questions cannot easily be distinguished in practice.
But it might be instructive.
The common example is "Fish", and the joke among zoologists is "Either fish don't exist, or we're all fish."
If you had a shark, a trout, and a camel, what would you think are the joints to carve here? Phylogeny says: [trout, camel] vs. [shark], as the trout and the camel have a common ancestor before the shark and the trout, do. When sharks and trouts finally have a common ancestor, they share it with the camel.
Fish, then, is a paraphyletic grouping. So how do we define that. Morphology? Then what about, say, lampreys and sea horses?
The joints are part of the contexts we see, here, and what we find useful. There are facts, but they can turn out unintuitive. When we have two terms, E and E*, if I understand this thread correctly, Sider would assume that we can tell what is E and what is E*, because of how the terms are restricted by what's "out there". But the biological classification of fish says: "It's not that easy." When we have the facts, our classifications might break down. We're juggling contexts.
Yes, I like that. It shows that, if there is indeed something different about ontological structure, the difference must have a degree of non-subjectivity that we don't usually associate with artistic evaluations. We could let Sider off the hook by denying this, and just say that when he talks about "privileged structure" he means a structure that is not (for example) useless, meaningless, and arbitrary. But I think he means more than that. Sider is part of the "grounding revival" in metaphysics, and if I understand him, he's claiming that you need certain concepts in order to ground other concepts; those in turn will ground yet others; etc. A privileged ontological structure would be one that gets the grounding relations right -- crucially, these relations are not subjective or pragmatic in the way that useful, meaningful, or non-arbitrary relations in part are. ("Non-arbitrary" might be closest here.) Or if they are subjective, they are only so in the innocuous way that logical relations must be. That would be the claim, at any rate.
Quoting hypericin
I agree with you about the important difference between dubbing something art vs. going on to evaluate it as good or bad art. But I really did mean that a person who would make such an outlandish claim about European art does not even know what makes something "art". This person would, I suppose, have a different culture's or era's artworks in mind -- or maybe they believe there is no genuinely good art. But it's preposterous to suppose that the entirety of Western culture could be wrong about this. We could perhaps tease out this (I admit very unlikely) individual's views on what constitutes good art, and hopefully discover what it is they're misunderstanding about the nature of art.
Quoting hypericin
Actually, that's pretty much what I think too. Well, to give Sider his due . . . perhaps there are some concepts, broadly logical, that do capture privileged structure. I leave that determination to those better versed in philosophy of logic than I am.
Quoting hypericin
Good. The question, for any given inquiry, of whether there is a single culminating truth (or, indeed, anything that would bring the inquiry to an end) will always be itself a question; not necessarily an unanswerable question, but the answer can never be assumed. Not sure about Peirce, but I think Habermas would agree.
Quoting Dawnstorm
I would say (and probably Sider too) that there are a number of reference magnets available for that group. Remember, we can make all sorts of classifications and groupings without also claiming that they're ontologically important. Colors, for instance, even when we "get them right", are hardly examples of privileged structure.
I see the problem about species that you and @hypericin have raised. But it still seems like the "fuzzy edges" to me, for this reason: In practice, a person who says that a beaver is a fish has made a mistake. Our concept of "species" may be unclear, but that judgment is not. The zoologists' joke shows why; if we really were in doubt, we couldn't say the most basic things about taxonomy.
Quoting Dawnstorm
Yes. I'm not saying that withholding natural-language terminology will allow all joint-carving candidates to appear crystal-clear for us. "Species" may not carve at the joints. Sider does think E* will carve better than E because E* quantifies more perspicuously, but that doesn't commit him to claiming we can never make a mistake. "We can tell" should be understood as provisional in the majority of cases, I would imagine. Sider merely wants to insist that pre-fab terms (or disputes about them) will only make it harder to identify and analyze the reference magnets that are actually "out there." Of course, if you don't think "out there" applies at all, that's a whole other discussion . . .
Well, I haven't been talking about mistakes. We could be wrong about common ancestors, anyway. The question is: "What are the joints we're carving at?" and "Do we get to choose them?" and "Do we have to be consistent, or are we allowed to be situationally flexible [like using morphology for fish, but phylogeny for birds and mammals]?"
Quoting J
We can say things about taxonomy, and that's the problem here: E=fish is unproblematic, but E*=fish becomes problematic if the joints we carve at are phylogenetic. Because carving at the joint doesn't tell us whether fish exist at all or whether all vertebrates are fish. It's one or the other. The joke is that it doesn't matter and E ceases to be relevant as a distinguishing term.
This is interesting in respect to the question of whether beaver are fish: If you decide to carve over phylogeny there are two options: Either you're allowed to eat beaver (but also cows and pigs), or you're not even allowed to eat trout or carp or any other fish. Take your pick. The fun thing is, that both results lead to a nonsense-rule. Either you're allowed to eat anything anyway, or you're allowed to eat fish - except it's impossible to find anything that counts. So the prohibition to eat non-fish meat should not carve over phylogeny, as that leads to nonsense.
So is pronouncing beaver a fish a mistake? Depends. What joints are carving at to figure this out? Is there an E* that yields better results than E? One might say that pronouncing beaver fish is a form of E*. If it's semi-acquatic, we can eat it. Duck? Otter? If we say yes to all these we have a plausible E*, even if the pronouncement sounds like a rationalisation. And the fun thing is that it's a better set of joints than phylogeny, as it doesn't lead the rule ad absurdum.
Do you understand my problem? Part of it may be that I'm unfamiliar with Sider. I'd like to know how the joints relate to the magnets (I really wish he'd found metaphors that work better together).
Totally agree about the metaphors! He inherited "reference magnetism" from David Lewis and others, and "carving at the joints" is Plato, but still . . . both are awkward and, together, comic.
I think I do understand your problem, and I'm not helping much because most of what you're saying about taxonomy is new to me, so I'm not really sure, on the fly, what to say. Probably I should shut up and think it over for a while. For what it's worth, I think the confusion has got something to do with whether there is a joint-carving taxonomy available. In ignorance of the issues you've raised, I assumed there was, more or less. But if there isn't, then perhaps we really can take our pick, depending on context and usefulness. Again, Sider is not suggesting that all problems of this variety will resolve themselves, because not every group of related concepts will contain ones that do carve at the joints. But he is suggesting that some of them will.
So "species" may just be poorly chosen as an example, whereas "provable in L" or "electron" may succeed.
Also, Sider means E and E* to be quite different kinds of terms. E is supposed to be a "common" term like "causation" or "leopard" that refers in a commonly accepted (or contested) way. E* is supposed to express whatever E actually refers to, if there is indeed a reference magnet that carves at the joints. (Sider doesn't think that there's a "causation*", interestingly enough. He doesn't believe the concept of causation is fundamental.). I imagined originally that "leopard" once referred to several big cats, whereas "leopard*" now refers to Panthera pardus. But you've helped me see that, if "species" is indeed non-joint-carving, as I now suspect, then there's no reason to expect "Panthera pardus" to be any more help with fundamentality than "leopard." For many or most purposes the binomial nomenclature does the job . . . but not always.