What's the use of discussing philosophy without definitions?
What's the use of discussing philosophy without definitions?
definitions that apply to words used in this question:
use : value to participants
discussing : exchanging ideas with the common goal to get a better understanding of each others position eventually leading to a better formulated unified position that all participants can agree upon.
philosophy : the rational investigation of the truths and principles of being, knowledge, or conduct.
definition : A statement of the exact meaning of a word.
Being relatively new on this forum, it surprised me that many discussions start with a well formulated question, but without defining the words used in the question even when it's not clear wich definition applies. Wich could (and in many cases does) result in confusion about what is being discussed.
(For instance in the topic "Animal Ethics - Is it wrong to eat animals?" the word animal doesn't get defined and further on in the discussion it's clear that the OP didn't intend the word animals in the general biological sense (wich would include single celled sessile animals), but was restricing the definition to a way narrower group. After 38 pages of comments it's still unclear what the OP means by the word 'animals' exactly, but it seems his definition is closer to the biological definition of vertebrates than the biological definition of animals. Wich if so, is an enterily different question in my opinion. )
I don't think we can have a sensible discussion, so definately not a sensible philosophical discussion, without firstly clearly defining the subject. Wich requires the OP to clearly define the words used in his opening statement/question of at least all the words that have more than one commonly used definition.
I can imagine various reasons an OP didn't define all words used, for instance the OP not knowing about other definitions of a word than the OP applies, but at least then words used should be defined by the OP when asked about what he meant with a certain word he/she used in the OP's first reaction to the comment asking for a definition.
(something that still hasn't been done in the example given even after 38 pages of comments.
Now please notice that by no means this is intended as a personal attack on the OP of given example, so please don't try to make it to be so. I may have my frustrations with the way he/she handles it, and others might as well, but this isn't about him/her. This is about the general importance of supplieng definitions of the words used in opening statements, and supplieng them further along in the discussion in case the OP forgot/neglected or didn't seem it to be nessesary to do so in the opening statement/question. )
I used to think this was the common vieuw among rational people discussing philosophy, but seeing several topics in this forum that don't seem to abide by this, I'm starting to doubt it. So I think that the answer to the question I posed ought to be 'none', but perhaps I'm wrong about this. So please let me know if you agree, and if not, please provide a well formulated argument (including definitions of newly introduced terms) why.
p.s.
It might be slightly disingenious to pose a question I already answered. But I consider it to be way less disingenious than posing a statement or question while remaining intentionally vague about the definitions applied. Of course I can't know about the intentions of other OP's, but I noticed the tendency to do so in several cases wether or not intentional.
This post is intended to create awareness about the importance of supplieing definitions in philosophical discussions among those who untill now seem to have acted as if it were rather irrelevant, while also providing an example on how one could provide said definitions.
Though of course, I wouldn't object to this resulting into a propor rational philosophical discussion, I just doubt it could.
definitions that apply to words used in this question:
use : value to participants
discussing : exchanging ideas with the common goal to get a better understanding of each others position eventually leading to a better formulated unified position that all participants can agree upon.
philosophy : the rational investigation of the truths and principles of being, knowledge, or conduct.
definition : A statement of the exact meaning of a word.
Being relatively new on this forum, it surprised me that many discussions start with a well formulated question, but without defining the words used in the question even when it's not clear wich definition applies. Wich could (and in many cases does) result in confusion about what is being discussed.
(For instance in the topic "Animal Ethics - Is it wrong to eat animals?" the word animal doesn't get defined and further on in the discussion it's clear that the OP didn't intend the word animals in the general biological sense (wich would include single celled sessile animals), but was restricing the definition to a way narrower group. After 38 pages of comments it's still unclear what the OP means by the word 'animals' exactly, but it seems his definition is closer to the biological definition of vertebrates than the biological definition of animals. Wich if so, is an enterily different question in my opinion. )
I don't think we can have a sensible discussion, so definately not a sensible philosophical discussion, without firstly clearly defining the subject. Wich requires the OP to clearly define the words used in his opening statement/question of at least all the words that have more than one commonly used definition.
I can imagine various reasons an OP didn't define all words used, for instance the OP not knowing about other definitions of a word than the OP applies, but at least then words used should be defined by the OP when asked about what he meant with a certain word he/she used in the OP's first reaction to the comment asking for a definition.
(something that still hasn't been done in the example given even after 38 pages of comments.
Now please notice that by no means this is intended as a personal attack on the OP of given example, so please don't try to make it to be so. I may have my frustrations with the way he/she handles it, and others might as well, but this isn't about him/her. This is about the general importance of supplieng definitions of the words used in opening statements, and supplieng them further along in the discussion in case the OP forgot/neglected or didn't seem it to be nessesary to do so in the opening statement/question. )
I used to think this was the common vieuw among rational people discussing philosophy, but seeing several topics in this forum that don't seem to abide by this, I'm starting to doubt it. So I think that the answer to the question I posed ought to be 'none', but perhaps I'm wrong about this. So please let me know if you agree, and if not, please provide a well formulated argument (including definitions of newly introduced terms) why.
p.s.
It might be slightly disingenious to pose a question I already answered. But I consider it to be way less disingenious than posing a statement or question while remaining intentionally vague about the definitions applied. Of course I can't know about the intentions of other OP's, but I noticed the tendency to do so in several cases wether or not intentional.
This post is intended to create awareness about the importance of supplieing definitions in philosophical discussions among those who untill now seem to have acted as if it were rather irrelevant, while also providing an example on how one could provide said definitions.
Though of course, I wouldn't object to this resulting into a propor rational philosophical discussion, I just doubt it could.
Comments (305)
Basically, the problem is, to use your example;
Quoting Tomseltje
Define 'value', define 'ideas', define 'goal', define 'understanding', define 'better formulated', define 'rational', define 'meaning'.
Then when you've done that, define all the words you used to define those.
Interestingly I've only just been having a discussion about Wittgenstein's private language argument on another thread...
Ah, to my surprise an honest attempt to actually make this into a philosophical discussion.
I agree we have a conundrum here. One that is clearly demonstrated by children at about 5 years old who keep asking 'why?' on any answer given to the previous question 'why?'.
But of course when considering adults, I assume the rational approach of only asking such questions if genuinly interested in the answer, rather than merely to frustrate the adult in order to find out where the limits of the patience of said adult is.
Now to adress your example
Quoting Pseudonym
I simply don't believe you actually are confused about all definitions you asked for here, since you seemed to have understood my post too well for that in order to be so. In a rational discussion one only asks for definitions one genuinly may suspect that could lead to confusion.
(Like in the example I gave about the eating animals discussion, where it's clear the OP was sloppy and could have prevented much confusion, by stating 'vertebrates' rather than 'animals'. Of wich alot could have been prevented by simply stating "oh I didn't mean animals, but i meant vertebrates" when I asked him for his definition on 'animals' rather than refraining from giving his definition for 38 pages of comments. I'm still not sure wether he means vertebrates.)
I could have been more explicit about this in my opening statement, so thanks for pointing it out.
Quoting Pseudonym
What is the title of said thread? or even better, got a link?
Well put Tom!
I have to raise my hands in the air and admit I am guilty of same and will apply more caution with vague terms.
As Voltaire famously stated. "If you wish to converse with me, define your terms!"
M
As all of us have been at some point in our life, and probably will be again. We can only try to do better, and as a result we usually will do better, but I don't think any of us will ever reach perfection, since if we did, we wouldn't have anything left to strive for and then our lives would be meaningless. (I better stop here before I start hijacking my own topic)
I simply don't believe you are confused about the definition of 'animal' in relation to a vegan diet. And if you are, then your contribution to a debate on the morality of diets is going to be rather limited, unless you can infer the meaning intended from the context of - for example - 'suffering', supplemented by a quick glance at some vegan recipes online.
In the end (and therefore why not in the beginning?), one has to assume that people know what words mean, and clear up ambiguities as they arise. Indeed, to insist on a definition is very often to close down the discussion before it begins. The abortion debate, for instance hangs on the definition of a 'person'. It is in just such boundary disputes that all the heavy lifting of philosophy takes place. Your definition of philosophy, for example, is highly contentious.
But the meaning of those terms has keep philosophers in heated debate for thousands of years. What is of value, how can value be measured, is value objective or subjective? Are ideas objects? Is what is rational anything other than a public language (like ethics and aesthetics)? The whole area of how a word can 'mean' anything objectively is, in some sense, what the whole of Wittgenstein's 'Philosophical Investigations' is about.
Anyway, the discussion I'm referring to is on the Math and Motive thread, though you'll have to get several pages in, it's really just a side-track.
Nonsense, you could have responded in the propor thread to me asking for a definition on this, and I made a reasonable argument for asking so. You , nor the OP did any of such kind, nor express any unbelief to the validity or honest intend of the question in that thread. The thread is not closed, you can still do so.. but seeing you waited over 30 pages of comments to do so, I doubt you will, in wich case you actually proove my suspicions that you are just attempting to poison the well.
Secondly I did provide an argument on why I disbelieved pseudonym in that specific case, and you seem to be merely parroting my words while taking them out of context, without providing a reasonable context to replace it. You are being disingenious at best.
In general each of those words could be a thread of it's own of course. But you seemed to have understood what I meant with them in this thread clearly enoug. I took your asking for a definition on all those words as an example to demonstrate the conundrum we can get into if we don't share enough common ground. Did I misunderstood and were you instead making an actual request for the definition on all of those words?
(thanks for mentioning the title of the thread, I'll look into it later, too busy slapping trolls now)
I could. But I chose to respond here, because you used it as an example, and I think it is an example that plays against you. Arguing about what a vegan diet is would be a derailment of that thread. There is a history of usage in the context, that you ignore in favour of dictionary rigidity. And now you get all huffy. Ok dude, have your well defied discussion without me.
Thanks for admitting your attempt at hijacking my topic and confirming your attempts at poisoning the well, rather than responding to me in the propor thread.
Sure you can think whatever you want, but if you are too cowardly or not articulate enough to provide the argument on why you think that, I rather not hear from you at all.
I'm interested in well formulated compelling arguments, not in people shouting out their thoughts without being able to substanciate them with a reasonable argument. Especially not if they do so while attempting to hijack a topic. So I'm glad to hear you will stay out of them in the future.
(don't be surprised other people might get huffy too if you accuse them without providing any evidence for your probably false accusation, like you did here)
It seems that most philosophical problems are the result of posing improper questions, or no clear definitions of the terms that are being used. Many "philosophers" on this forum like to throw around terms with an ambiguous nature that makes them sound smart, but when you question their understanding of those terms, they get defensive - like unenlightened.
It's funny how often we (forum denizens) end up having the same discussion spread across several different threads ...
What occurs to me is that in a given discussion, there's no immediate need to pursue definitions ad infinitum. You define until you reach agreement. If what you agreed on later raises issues, you define again.
A few different ways to look at this:
(a) there must be common ground to have a discussion at all;
(b) to explain your position to someone, you must put it in terms they understand;
(c) to convince someone of the
We all know this stuff, and it gets mentioned now & then, but (as should be clear from other posts, other threads) I'm not sure principles such as these get their due. What justifies such principles? Does their justification have philosophical import? Are they "innocent" -- transparent? inert? -- or do they actually affect the philosophy we do?
(Quine wrote pretty regularly about issues surrounding definition. Interesting stuff.)
Good principle, but if agreement is to mean anything at all (namely that the idea in my mind is close in form and effect to the one in yours), then I don't see how it doesn't suffer from the same problem. How would we identify that agreement? I might say (in a moment of self-loathing) "Philosophy is useless!", you say, "No it has many uses" - we disagree. Then I say (calming down a bit) "No, by 'useless' I meant, has no measurable objective utility, of course it has subjective utility", You say " Ah, OK then we agree by that definition of 'useless'". But we only agree because neither of us has disputed the definition of 'objective/subjective', and this is not because we know we agree on it (how could we, we never even discussed it?), it's only because we have not raised the issue. You go away thinking I mean one thing by it (which you agree with, and so no further discussion is needed), but actually I meant another thing by it entirely (which, had you enquired, you may well have disagreed with vehemently)
The key thing I'm trying to say here, is that this isn't just about 'known unknowns' vs. 'unknown unknowns', it's not that I can't ever know if there's some definition about which we disagree unless I ask, it's that I can't ever know if there's some definition about which we disagree even if I ask, because to explain it just requires further definitions about which I will not know if we agree.
This is not a particularly a problem in the language of normal discourse (nor in the sciences), I can point to a brick and say the word 'brick' in enough different contexts for you to grasp fairly certainly that by it I mean just to label the object and no other thing. As Quine points out, "neutrino" is not translated into other languages, it means only that thing to which it refers, not something which is defined using other words. But I don't see how one can ever hope to do this with philosophy in the way it is currently studied. How could we possibly achieve such a cross-context definition of 'value', or 'utility', defined accurately in enough circumstances to form even so much as a 'Family Resemblance' type of definition?
I read with interest, your other post on 'Losing Games'. This is what I hang around these places for. What interests me is generally not the philosophical arguments themselves (anyone who thinks they have and answer to the question of universals after 2000 years has either not read any philosophy or has massive delusions of grandeur), but the way in which the arguments are presented and play out. Your thread very much tried to explore that and was just getting interesting when it seemed no-one wanted to say anything more about it. I was tempted to respond myself but feared I would simply repeat what you'd said in different words. What I really wanted to hear was someone who opposed that general idea defend their position.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
This rather presumes a 'truth-seeking' purpose to philosophy which I'm not sure I can subscribe to any more. In order for me to clarify my own thoughts it is sometimes helpful to have an opposing view presented, but for this to happen it is entirely unnecessary that i 'correctly' understand what the presenter of the opposing view really means by what they say. It is sufficient for the purpose that I hold a meaning that needs to be countered in order to progress by own thoughts.
If this all seems a little self-serving and cold, then...well it is. But it does work the other way, so there's some reciprocation. If what I understand by your sentences has some utility to me, then you've done me a great favour in writing them. It doesn't matter if what I understand by them is not what you meant. The task here is not to simply transfer information faithfully from your head to mine. I only want to hear what you have to say because I think it might be interesting/useful. If you incidentally say something interesting/useful merely by my own misinterpretation, then the objective has no less been met.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yes, but, as above, this is a sisyphean task. How do we confirm that the terms we're using are understood. If the person repeats them back to us? Well that's no good because all that's doing is testing their memory of the right words in the right order. If they apply the concept as we would in a different context? Better but then we run into Wittgenstein's rule-following paradox, in that we can only know that they are following some rule which lead to the result we expected, not necessarily the rule we've tried to convey (they could be 'quusing' not plussing'). All we can ever hope for is some probability that the terms have been understood based on a number of samples that satisfies us. But then when was this about satisfying ourselves that the job has been done?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Here, I think, is where philosophy is most useful, and I agree with this sentiment entirely (though maybe not for the same reasons as you have, you seem far less coldly Machiavellian than me). What matters about a proposition is the effect it has, and if you want someone to hold a belief that has the effect on the world you desire, then it's your job to provide exactly the sort of reasoning that appeals to the person your trying to convince. It's not their job to try to understand what you 'mean' by everything (which seems to be the default position in many threads here), nor to approach problems the way you do. It's your job to present your solution in a way which fits the gap in the story they're trying to fill.
Bizarrely, I understood that question without the need of you providing any definitions. What does that tell you?
Sure, sometimes certain key words could do with being given a definition if they're likely to cause a problem. But there's no need to take it to extremes. I found it pretty funny that you provided a definition for "discussing" and "definition".
Also, I think you unfairly dismissed unenlightened, who had a few good points.
It tells me you were already familiar enough with the words to be able to understand it without me providing the definitions of the words used.
Of course you are right that I may have overdone it abit, Though the point is, that if definitions are not given, and you get a comment to an OP's start asking to define a certain word since the commenter claims it's not clear to him/her what the OP meant by it, I consider it quite compulsory to provide the definition when asked for it.
unenlightened might have had a few good points. The problem is he/she starts out with stating he/she doesn't believe me. If there is no basic trust, there is no point in discussing anything. Now had he/she given a reasonable motivation on why he/she didn't believe me, we could have discussed that, but it was merely an unsubstanciated accusation, wich to me just equals slander, usually used in an attempt to poison the well. A fallacy common in debates, but wich has no place in discussions.
Secondly he/she was hijacking the topic, as I told him/her, further discussions on the subject of the eating animals thread belong there, not in this thread.
So what do you think was unfair about me dismissing him/her? Just the fact that he/she, next to at least two disingenious tactics, might have something of value to bring into the discussion? Possibly i missed out on some valuable insights, but I consider others here who keep their arguments void of slander attempts to be more deserving of my time.
I agree that both parties should agree on the definition of certain words, wich is the main point for starting this thread. However, I dislike discussions derailing into debates.
agreed
Quoting Harry Hindu
Thanks for the compliment, though if it was really excellent, I ought to have included what Srap Tasmaner pointed out here.
Hmm. I thought those things were implied. For any discussion, participants need to agree on the definitions of the terms used. Philosophical discussions are different from other types of discussions in the terms that are used and how they are defined. Philosophy itself is about questioning what we take for granted, which could be the definitions we use.
Does this change anything with regard to your response?
So what is so magical about the words we'd use to define these terms that they themselves do not need defining?
I'm not sure what you are getting at here. There is nothing magical about words at all. In fact, words are arbitrary symbols used to refer to states-of-affairs. It is these states-of-affairs, which are not words, or word use, but what words, and their use, refer to. We could use any symbol to refer to some state-of-affairs, just as we use symbol, "2" and "two" to refer to the same thing - a quantity of some thing. The symbols are meaningless if they don't refer to something. Words are representations and representations are things that are defined as being about other things. The fundamental nature of the world isn't words and how they are used. There is the world and it's various states, and our representations of it in order to communicate the various states to those that are not there to experience it directly for themselves. Words, because they are representations, are indirect means of experiencing the various states of the world.
When abstract terms (words) need defining, then we can only use other abstract words (terms) to do that job. At no point can we simply indicate some existant thing as the referent object. So, why do these other words not need defining?
Nonsense. How did you learn what the word, "dog" means, if not establishing a connection between the string of symbols, "dog" and the image of a dog? I could show you the word, "dog", or a picture of a dog, and I would end up getting my message across all the same.
Like I have said, words refer to things, which can include other symbols, but not necessarily so. It ultimately comes down to every word refers to some other visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, etc. sensation. Words themselves are visuals and auditory sensations that we use to refer to all the other non-verbal sensations and experiences we have.
My entire comment referred to abstract terms. "dog" is not an abstract term. Can you point to 'value' or 'meaning'?
Rather than argue over the meaning of "animal", we can just argue over whether animals have rights -- just to use your example you opened with. And we can clarify exactly what we mean by said terms as we go along, just as we would have to even when setting out our terms from the start.
In a sense it doesn't matter what the definition of a word is as long as it is understood. The only point in providing or asking for meaning is to clarify usage, and once that is understood then the other possible uses a word can be put to are not relevant.
Or, perhaps, if your style of communication is somewhat more mathematical -- as if you were providing a proof, maybe. But said proofs can be just as arbitrary as vague word usage, too, where it appears we have proven something we haven't just because of a queer way of using a word, rather than talking about the issue at hand. So, for example, we could use the word "vertebrates", as you say, and get long just as well as if we used the word "animal" as long as we understand what we're talking about. But in the end it's not the biological characteristics of certain beasties at play there, but the capacity of suffering that some beasties have. And even here "beasties", made up as it is, serves just as well because you understand what I mean by the term.
Let's call this the Skeptical Argument. (See what I did there?)
The Skeptical Argument appears to demonstrate that agreement in definitions is impossible. (It might not be; the SA might only show that such agreement cannot be achieved in this way.) Or, rather, that whether we agree cannot be known, or cannot be reliably known.
Then if agreement in definitions is necessary for communication of the sort contemplated, we cannot reliably know that we are communicating. (Or whatever formula goes there, again with the proviso that there may be some other way of reliably knowing this, not pictured here.) Call this the Extended Skeptical Argument.
Suppose this is true. Then there's this question:
(1) Why would we think we're communicating when we're not?
This question has a mate. Suppose the ESA is wrong, that we do communicate and the SA shows that agreement in definitions is not necessary to communicate.
(2) Why would we think we need agreement in definitions to communicate?
That's the first round of preliminaries.
Second round is a little historical context. Folks who've run into this before:
The issue here (Grice says this in so many words) is the role of the ideal. Some versions of pragmatism find a place here, in the endlessly approached but never quite reached truth. How do we come to think there's an ideal, if it's something we never reach, never experience? How and why do we use it to regulate our non-ideal communication and reasoning? I'll throw in here Dummett eventually defining assertion as saying something that aims at the truth. It's aspirational. (Going to leave aside any reference to Davidson for now.)
Preliminaries out of the way, there are a few things we can note.
The "deeming" Grice mentions is not "declare victory and depart the field", but must be more like this: declare victory but remain on the field, and if there are signs we haven't actually won, make renewed efforts to win. Rinse and repeat.
Lewis thinks we get as far as figuring out that a member of some equivalence class of possible languages is being spoken, and that this might be good enough. There's a process of narrowing down the range of possibilities.
Now look at our contemplated method of discussion: work out a tentative agreement on terms, and if trouble arises, work out a new tentative agreement. We can deem ourselves to be in agreement, but we remember that this was "only" a matter of deeming, so there's no tragedy if it turns out we weren't. It seems to me that the process of deeming is itself governed by rules and norms, while functioning as the source of the rules and norms that govern communication.
How this works out, I don't know, but this is how I see the issues here. There seems to be a pattern of relying on an ideal in a particular way; when an argument shows us the ideal and shows us we can't reach it, or can't reliably know we've reached it, we're prone to some variety of skepticism. But the ideal is here as an element of the systems (of communication, of reasoning, of knowledge acquisition) we use. It's something we use, and thus at once what we hold up as the external goal to aim for and a tool we made and use ourselves.
Seems to me that one could just ask for a definition of a key term if one feels that the authors' usage is questionable for whatever reason be it ambiguity or otherwise.
I'm going to take a tangent here as I think the answers to your questions have more to do with psychology than language use. The slightly misanthropic answer is - we don't. We engage in this activity because we're trying to assert power and rhetoric is a safe way of doing that, especially over the internet. We also have a powerful need to justify our actions (or more specifically the barrage of conflicting desire which motivate our actions), which can at times seem really chaotic. Knowing there are others who see the world differently is an offence to the conceit of the 'truth' of these stories we tell ourselves, and so we engage in whatever tactics make our story seem the more real one when faced with another. At no point does 'communicating' by the definition we've arrived at enter into it.
I know this seems really harsh, but take a look at the debates going on at the moment;
"The New Dualism" - Some guy who 'just knows' he's right because he's really thought about it rearranging term to prop up his messiah complex.
"Shouldn't Religion be 'Left'" - people re-arranging history to try and make such a completely messy and un-focussed thing as 'Religion' actually be something singular and directed, just to placate their fears about the fact the science is progressing in ways they don't understand.
The 'debate' I'm engaged in with MU about Wittgenstein's rule-following, despite a promising beginning has recently collapsed into "one can follow a private rule...because you can".
I'm not trying to say that my psychological analyses of these debates is the 'true' reason, I'm just presenting possibilities. What I do claim is that the evidence both from experience and from psychology seem to weigh quite heavily in favour of a conclusion that most forms of abstract language use have absolutely nothing to do with understanding one another.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
As above, I'm afraid my honest feeling is again that we think this out of a deluded sense that if someone disputes the story we tell ourselves to explain the world, our safest way to understand that is to presume that some error of communication has taken place. We like to feel that if only 'they' understood the meaning of the terms I'm using, 'they' would accept my propositions. But we avoid actually going down that rabbit hole because we fear what might be at the bottom - the realisation that none of it really means anything at all.
I think there are exceptions to all this. There seem to be people who's way of getting through life is to get as close as possible to 'what is the case', people who are constantly adjusting their story to make it more and more resilient. To these people, challenges are a boon because they provide opportunities to shore up weak points in the story, but as I mentioned earlier, actually understanding the other person is not necessary for this, only that some story reveals a weakness in one's world-view. It does not matter whether it's actually their story or not.
I think the issues the Grice et al raise about language are fascinating and I don't want to just ride roughshod over them, perhaps we can get into them another time, but the issue here with defining terms in order to debate I think is so much more psychological than linguistic that to go down that road now would be to get distracted.
The whole issue of clearing up confusions over definitions relies on the proposition that the disputed complex abstract terms are somehow all reducible to a set of non-disputed simple terms. But if this really is the case, then the 'ideal' that you mention would be to have everything expressed in terms of these non-disputed words, but I can see this running into problems already. Take something like the question of the existence of abstract objects. An argument might get hung up on the meaning of the term 'existence' (as it actually has here). we might reduce that something that is outside of our minds (as again, has happened here), but of course that just makes matters worse ('what is a 'mind'), so we go the other way and reduce it to 'that which is the case', or the way things are' as Van Inwagen has done. But look at the words in that expression 'that', 'which', 'is', 'the', and 'case'. Could you think of five more commonly used terms in everyday language? Yet this definition, reduced to un-disputed terms has not progressed us at all in understanding what each person actually means by 'existence'
This is what leads, I think inevitably, to Quietism. Philosophical discussions might be a fun game, they certainly can be therapeutic, if conducted properly, they can help us make stories which avoid crippling us with uncertainty over the unknowable, to paraphrase Russell, but I'm fairly confident they can't actually progress us to any kind of 'truth' at all, not even a pragmatic one, I'm afraid.
They were implied as you thought, however, in order to excell I should have been more explicit about them in my opening statement, since it wasn't that obvious to everyone. Apart from that we are in agreement.
Yes, as these two are formulated, the discussion doesn't seem to change into a debate. To me there is a great difference between the two, Discussion means people are talking to each other, debate means people don't talk to each other but rather to their shared audience in order to get the more of the audience on their hands.
Logical fallacies are very common in debates (see election debates for this if you don't believe me) but have no place in discussions. resulting in that discussions are about truth finding, where debates are about popularity. I hate logica fallacies being made in debates in order to become more popular to a crowd. And the worst thing is, many in the crowd accept such arguments as a valid logical argument while they are obviously fallacious. Resulting in those people having more problems participating in actual discussions.
"Dog" is abstract. I doubt you and I were thinking of the same kind of dog when I used the term. "Dog" is a term used to refer to ALL breeds of dog, not necessarily a specific one.
If you want me to point to "value" and "meaning", I can do that as well, for any word to mean anything useful it must refer to something in the world.
"Meaning" is the same thing as information and I defined information as the relationship between cause and effect. So when using the term, "meaning", you are referring to some causal relationship. The words on this screen mean what the authors intended when they wrote them. The meaning of seeing words on the screen (the effect) is some author's intent (the cause).
"Value" is how organisms behave in ways that show that something is important to them. Creating passwords, backing up digital pictures, saving money, are all behaviors that can be referred to when using the term, "value". It is what we mean when we say that someone values something. "Value" in this sense is a verb. It can also be a noun. The fact that we refer to words as, nouns, verbs and adjectives indicates that words refer to places, people and things, actions, and descriptors of nouns - meaning that all words refer to non-verbal experiences.
[As a brand-new member here, please forgive me if I'm trampling on customs I'm not yet aware of. Thanks.]
When you refer to "the world", do you mean to include human socio-cultural stuff, or do you refer to the physical space-time world that science describes so ably?
I ask because "meaning"*, the term that lead to the words I quoted above, is an ill-defined, human-created concept that all humans understand, but few (myself included!) can define in precise and unambiguous English. It has no existence outside of human socio-culture, which is why I ask what you mean to refer to...?
Edited to add:
* - Here, I refer to meaning in the sense of 'the meaning of life', not the more literal 'the meaning of a word can be found in a dictionary'.
I was using the term abstract in its philosophical sense with regards to language. This is, afterall, a philosophy forum and this is a thread about language, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abstract-objects/ gives a good account, or a more accessible definition https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_and_concrete
You see the problem? We can't even agree what abstract means.
Quoting Harry Hindu
And what does "useful" mean?
Quoting Harry Hindu
I'm not sure your definition tells us anything here. If meaning is the same thing as information, then what does Macbeth 'mean' when he says
“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
Surely "shadow" in that verse means more than just the absence of light cast by an object. I don't see the cause and effect capturing the meaning there.
Quoting Harry Hindu
But this can't be the case otherwise mistakes in language would not be possible. If I write the word "Dog" but by it mean to refer to the King of France, 'dog' does not now mean the King of France, I've clearly made a mistake. Or, if everything does mean what the authors intend, then how are we to ever determine the meaning of any words at all?
Quoting Harry Hindu
You've just replaced value with important. What does important mean in this context?
I have no doubt that we could come up with synonyms all day, but at no point does claiming one word is equivalent to some others actually dictate what the word means.
1. Cooperation is baked into language -- that much you should have learned from Wittgenstein. Vervet monkeys don't do their "predator" calls if there's no monkey near enough to hear them.
2. Thus if you want a purely competitive encounter with another human being, words are not the best tool for the job. You cite evidence of people straining against that limitation. That's interesting. Truly. It's a question how far you can get and what techniques you'll use to impose your will on others by imposing your will on words. As you say, that's rhetoric. But Humpty-Dumpty always falls.
3. From competitive use of language comes argument; from argument comes logic. Logic gives us both new ways to compete and new ways to cooperate, and it cannot do otherwise.
4. That's how philosophy becomes the incubator of science. Compete how you will and you are still also cooperating. (As you acknowledge -- you can gain something from my attempts to master you.) The war of all against all is, here, in this context, only a myth.
((Pardon the style -- in a weird mood today.))
Absolutely. I too was in a weird mood, particularly misanthropic, too many encounters of clashing egos, rather than clashing ideas at the moment. Still, it's good to vent every now and then! Language evolves as a cooperative game and that's how it should be played. What we do with it these days though often falls short of that ideal, even if not quite so ubiquitously as my prior mood may have painted it. As an excersice I've tried, try applying Grice's maxims to any of the threads on this forum, particularly once you get a bit of disagreement. Hardly any meet all four, most fail every single one.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I'm with you up to the last bit, Humpty-Dumpty admitted that his words have their meanings peculiar to him. Rhetoric requires that one pretend the words are expressed semantically whilst knowing they are not.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Interesting link, I've not thought about that connection. Have you read any Frank Ramsey? He might well say it's the other way round.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Hmm, not sure about this one. I can see where you might be going, but you might have to join the dots for me. Is that the only way do you think, or just something that emerges from such confrontations sometimes?
"Truth and Probability" changed my life, but I'm no Ramsey scholar. What did you have in mind? What should I reread?
Quoting Pseudonym
Here's the idea: science is part of philosophy in just the way I was talking about earlier, as an ideal to strive toward and as a tool we actually use. As a goal and a norm. (One of the many excellencies of Lewis's game theory scaffolding is that it clarifies how there can be a norm that is in some sense external to you, something you are beholden to, but at the same time you're responsible for it, helped make it.) There's a natural, even evolutionary process here of local competition enabling global cooperation. That's a bit of a fairy tale, sure, but that fairy tale is part of the system, as norm and goal.
((Going to bring this "speaking freely" to end soon.))
Fallacies of definition.
Ramsey is probably the closest thing to a favourite philosopher that I have. In the short years of his life he produced better answers to a huge number of philosophical questions that most philosopher manage given three times the life-span. I'm amazed to find another enthusiast, I've never found him to be that popular. Anyway, I'm thinking particularly in this instance on his paper 'Theories' (from 1929, posthumously published in 1931) It's in Philosophical Papers, D. H. Mellor (ed.), 1990. Particulaly apt here is the quote "The adherents of two such theories [theories with different terms] could quite well dispute, although neither affirmed anything the other denied". One of my favourite quotes.
I'm also slightly referring to his address the apostles 'On there being no discussable subject' and in 'Facts and Propositions' - "there is no separate problem of truth but a problem about judgment".
Ramsey was very much heading the direction of unifying axiology with logic, not to derogate the latter, nor by raising the former to objectivity, but by meeting in the middle.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Nothing wrong with fairy tales. Here's Richard Braithwaite describing Ramsey Sentences
From your own link:
Did I not explain that I used the term, "dog" as a class for all types of dogs?
I see the problem. You are lazy in your research and want to argue for the sake of arguing.
Quoting Pseudonym
"Useful" refers to the relationship between a tool and some goal. Knowledge is a tool as much as a screwdriver. There are certain screwdrivers that are useful for certain tasks as well as certain knowledge that is useful for certain goals.
Quoting Pseudonym
Macbeth is a fictional character. Shakespeare's Macbeth bears little resemblance to the real 11th century Scottish king. "Macbeth" means what the author intended. Ambiguous language use one of the story-teller's favorite tools. The artist may have simply intended for their work to be open to subjective interpretation (which is basically the definition of art).
Shakespeare could have intended (meant) something specific when he wrote that, but did he leave any indication of what that was? If not, then (like the Bible) it is open to interpretation by others, which basically means that people will relate what they think Shakespeare intended with their own experiences. This is what we try to do when we try to understand what something means. We try to get at the cause, or the intent, and if we can't then we come up with our own explanation based upon our own experiences.
Quoting Pseudonym
So artists are making mistakes with language? I thought that they were being "artful". Is that not what you would be doing in your language use? Sure, "dog" typically refers to an kind of animal, but it also refers to most men, if you ask any woman. Words can mean whatever we want them to mean. If we intend to get our message across, then we try to use words that we believe the listener understands.
Quoting Pseudonym
How else are we suppose to communicate the sensations and experiences (that are made up of visual, audio, gustatory, olfactory and tactile representations) that aren't words? How else do you communicate the actual color red, a sour taste, the feeling of anxiety, etc. that you experience? The color red isn't a word. "Red" refers to that color experience you have and you use that string of symbols to refer to that experience for the purpose of communicating it. I could draw examples of these terms, but that would be time-consuming.
You said - "How did you learn what the word, "dog" means, if not establishing a connection between the string of symbols, "dog" and the image of a dog? I could show you the word, "dog", or a picture of a dog, and I would end up getting my message across all the same.". You were referring to the thing "dog", that's what you could show me a picture of. You could not show me a picture of the class 'dogs'.
If you want to just be insulting, I've no interest in discussing with you. You used the word 'dog', a concrete term (like 'human being, in the very definition you're citing). If in fact you meant 'dogs' the class, then that's fine, just say so and we can move on. There's no need to start alleging laziness and belligerence just because I took you to mean one thing when you meant another.
Quoting Harry Hindu
You said "for any word to mean anything useful it must refer to something in the world.". I was asking what 'useful' meant in that context. So, by substitution - "for any word to mean anything (like the relationship between a tool and some goal) it must refer to something in the world" [I added the 'like' to help it make grammatical sense]. Is this what you're claiming is necessary for a word to mean anything?
Quoting Harry Hindu
I have no issue with this except that you'd said meaning was equated with information, which cannot be the case if the reader is imbuing the word with experience [information] that they already have? Surely the word must then be doing something other than imparting information in this case?
Quoting Harry Hindu
Exactly, but you'd said "It ultimately comes down to every word refers to some other visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, etc. sensation." I'm having trouble marrying the two concepts. Surely the word either refers one-to-one to some 'thing' in the world, or it means whatever we want it to. I don't see how it can do both.
Quoting Harry Hindu
You can't.
Let me first say that I like that you made this thread. Here's how I think about it:
On issues where the philosophical disputes are sharp, it can certainly help to provide definitions, if for no other reason than to get people to think critically about what ideas they actually hold. A good example of what I'm talking about is the hard problem of consciousness. Everyone and their mother has an "intuition" about what consciousness is, but when people are pressed to define what they mean by consciousness, they recoil into their dungeons and familiar lairs. Another example is with the very concept of philosophy. A lot of people criticize or ignore philosophy because they believe it's a useless endeavor. They rarely think critically about what they actually mean when they talk about philosophy. I define philosophy as a general method of analyzing the nature of the world through logical arguments and empirical observations. I know others might disagree with that definition and that doesn't bother me. At least I have a fairly concrete sense for what I mean when I say philosophy. I think I do philosophy every moment of my life when I am required to think hard about something: whenever I play chess or write a piece of code or critique something I just read.
I think you can still do good philosophy without providing a definition for literally everything, but when controversial terms and issues come up, then yes everyone could benefit from trying to clarify their thoughts by coming up with definitions. Then you can begin to demarcate your particular problem from other issues in the world, and maybe stand a chance of providing a satisfactory solution.
My point is that you can't argue sensibly over wether animals have rights, as long as it's not clear what the word animals refers to. In said example I wasn't arguing over the meaning of the word 'animal', I was asking what the OP meant by it, and even after 30 pages of comments he still hasn't answered me.
Quoting Moliere
Agree, but if I don't know what the speakers definition is, and I ask for it, he/she should provide it, rather than talk over it. I merely argued that the way he used the word 'animal' was indicative enoug for me to conclude that he was applieng a different definition on the word, than the definition I'm familiar with, hence I asked for his definition, wich to my frustration he/she refuses to provide. Wich is why i started this thread, since that wasn't the only occasion where someone refused to provide a definition for a word he/she used in a statement when I asked for one since I didn't know what definition was intended.
So should it be compulsory for an OP to provide his/her definition of a word used in his/her opening statements when requested? And if so, would it be benificial to add such a rule to the site guidelines?
Exactly, the image of a dog that crops up in your mind is not a dog. It is your class for "dog". Dogs live out in the world as animals, not in your mind as images. The dog class exists only in minds, not out in the world. There's a clear distinction if you just think a little.
A picture of a dog is a concrete thing with an abstract meaning. The dog is abstract, the picture is concrete. Do you see the difference? The dog isn't a real dog, nor a representation of a real dog if I so intended. In that case it would be similar to the dog class. If I drew a picture of my pet dog, then that would be a concrete image, just as your experience of my pet dog would be if you were there to meet him, as opposed to your image of him before seeing a picture or meeting him.
Quoting Pseudonym
Okay, I would rephrase my first sentence into, "to be useful, a word must refer to something in the world." What "useful" means in that context is the relationship between the word (the tool) and the intent to communicate non-verbal experiences (the goal).
Quoting Pseudonym
I don't understand what you're saying here.
A writer or speaker has the intent to communicate their non-verbal experiences to others. The only way to do that would be to put it in a format that others can experience themselves - the written and spoken word. When a writer writes a word, or speaker speaks a word (the cause), the receivers experience seeing a visual scribble or hearing a sound (the effect). Their experience enables them to interpret those particular scribbles or sounds as references to other non-verbal things, events and processes, either imaginary or real (the context is usually implied in the words used, except when lying). What we try to do in interpreting anything we see or hear (effect) is we try to get at the cause, and in the case of word use, we try to get at the intent of the user of the words.
Quoting Pseudonym
What I meant was that words can mean whatever we want them to mean, but if you want them to mean something useful, then they need to refer to non-verbal experiences and your intent to communicate a particular non-verbal experience. In the case of lying, your intent is to mislead others. In this case, you know how others will interpret the words you will use. Your intent is to create a mental image of what isn't the case, but in order to do that you have to have a mental image of what is the case. You then use words to help create that false image. In this sense your words refer to your intent to mislead. Words refer to the intent as well as their commonly used referent in that particular context. There are typically more than one cause to any effect. Effects carry information about all of their causes. Meaning is the relationship between some effect and it's subsequent causes.
I think sometimes it's useful and other times leads one off topic, because then you get into arguments about the "correct" definition instead of just going along with the OP's meaning for the sake of the argument.
Fwiw, the principle of philosophical charity also says that you should interpret words in such a way that they make the most sense for the argument you are adressing. That's been a guideline for a long time precisely to avoid people either derailing the argument into long talks about the proper definition, or claim that the whole argument is invalid on the basis of what amounts to semantics.
But I've noticed on here that people are unwilling to even go along with stipulated definitions by the OP. There was a recent thread that wanted to say for the sake of argument that abortion is immoral, and commenters refused to stick to that.
Isn't that a very particular definition of "meaning"? One which violates the Principle of Least Surprise, I would say? :chin: Merriam-Webster says this (but I'm not sure it's very helpful):
[i]Definition of meaning
1 a : the thing one intends to convey especially by language : purport
Do not mistake my meaning.
b : the thing that is conveyed especially by language : import
Many words have more than one meaning.
2 : something meant or intended : aim
a mischievous meaning was apparent
3 : significant quality; especially : implication of a hidden or special significance
a glance full of meaning
4 a : the logical connotation of a word or phrase
b : the logical denotation or extension of a word or phrase[/i]
And now that I think about it: what is the relationship between an effect and its cause(s)? It seems little more than that the effect is related to the cause that caused it, which hardly seems worth saying. Saying that the cause is related to the effects it has is similarly uninformative. [I assume that "subsequent" is a typo.]
Quoting Harry Hindu
Where "world" refers to the physical spacetime universe plus the ill-defined and sprawling mass of human culture, in all its wonder, and all its guises? For the latter is where 99% of humans live out 99% of their lives. And some words, those that are often applied and used to describe human culture, or some smaller part of it, are equally ill-defined. I think "meaning" --- in the sense of 'the meaning of life', not 'Many words have more than one meaning' --- is one of these. Human concepts like wisdom, value, and quality are similar in this regard. We all know what they mean, but writing it down in words is next-to-impossible. :brow:
Odd, then, if these ideas are understood, that one should think definitions necessary.
There is a logical conundrum in the idea that the meaning of a word is given by other words - by its definition. Words form a self-referential sphere.
So how could we learn the meaning of words, if that meaning is given by more words? How do we break into the sphere of language?
The answer is of course that there is a way of understanding what words mean that is not given by more words, but found in the way words are used.
Any philosophical analysis that commences with giving definitions can be dismissed by dismissing those definitions.
Hence the need to understand what we are doing with words.
Don't look to meaning, look to use.
If that happens it's just silly. The OP is the only one who can provide the correct definition of the words used in his/her opening statement. There is no reasonable disagreeing about that. Wich doesn't mean that its unreasonable to respond by mentioning an alternative word to use for given definition. In general, the definition should be given by the one introducing the word. Even in dictionaries we have lots of words that each have several different meanings, in a statement, not all meanings may apply, wich apply and wich don't is determined by the one making the statement. And it's even possible the person making the statement applies a definition that's not even in the dictionary. In wich case it usually is even more important to provide the definition of the word used, especially when requested by participants in the discussion.
The ones familiar enough with the meaning of the words used and their relation can understand without further defining, the ones who are not familiar enough don't. In wich case one can become familiar, definitions can help with that.
Though of course the conundrum still exists when there are not enough references in common among the participants of the discussion to explain.
Learning the meaning of words, by providing more words, is merely the result of the assumption that the meaning of the other words is known better. If it is, it can work, if it's not it's futile.
Sure one answer is that we familiarize with words by observing how they are used. However, that's not very helpfull if a word gets used in a way that is new to the observer, especially when it's not even clear that it is used in a different way.
You can't reasonably dismiss definitions given with a statement/philosophical analysis. It's like dismissing the legend given with a map. If you dismiss the legend the map becomes useless. If you dismiss the given definitions, the statement becomes meaningless. If the maker of the statement was sloppy in his/her definitions, one could help improve them though.
You can't separate the meaning of words from the use of words, Words used have a meaning. If you change the use, you might change the meaning. If you change the meaning, you change the use. Better look at both.
Quoting Tomseltje
If this is the case, what sort of thing is the "meaning"? Is it the definition? Is it a thing-in-the-head of the speaker? What is the meaning, apart from the use?
Before anyone uses the word 'meaning', they should have to read and at least summarise the above and stipulate which of the 16 or so philosophical meanings of meaning they mean.
Or possibly we can manage without such stipulations.
:lol:
There came a point in my present studies where I genuinely needed to take out of the library the 1923 book of this title by Ogden and Richards. I felt I'd arrived in Philosophy proper. Of course, I actually wanted the appendix by Malinowski about language, but there you go :)
The meaning can be represented by a definition. The meaning is what the speaker/writer of the words intended to communicate. In other words, that what the speaker/writer meant with it.
OK; then the meaning is not given by the definition.
So, going back to the OP, there is a point in discussing more than the definition when doing philosophy.
No?
Quoting Pattern-chaser
Isn't what someone intends, the cause of their actions?
Isn't the thing that is conveyed by language the idea, and intent to convey it, that causes it?
What tree rings mean are the age of the tree. They mean the age of the tree because of how the tree grows throughout the year.
What words refer to are the ideas in your head. You must have the intent to communicate an idea and then go through the process of converting those non-verbal ideas into verbal representations in order to communicate. This is a causal process.
Quoting Pattern-chaser
I'm not sure what you are asking here. Change (or time) within the same space is the relationship between cause and effect?
Quoting Pattern-chaser
Here you are engaging in anthropomorphism. The world contains many different environments. Science can explain the reason why humans choose to live in any particular environment as the result of their adaptations. That would be like saying that elephants are specially adapted to their "world", not to their environment, and then make a distinction that their representations only refer to their "world" and not to the rest of it. It's nonsensical.
And then I go and blow Wittgenstein apart.
Defining meaning is simple.
Meaning is the relationship between cause and effect.
Yah, that works - cause and effect is so much easier to understand than meaning... :roll:
You mix the dog-image with the dog-class. What is that image? A dachshund? A wolf? some weird combination of all? Does it include prairie dogs? Fire dogs? Hot dogs?
What is the causal connection that links all these dogs together? Or do you vacillate between "dog" meaning your mind image and "dog" as relating cause and effect?
Quoting Harry Hindu
SO what does "and" refer to? What of "jump"? What about "hello"? Not all words are nouns. Why pretend that they are?
So you have a non-verbal experience that you put into words. And you don;t see that as problematic?
Why pretend that all talk is of experiences? We do far more with words than just give descriptions, so why take mere describing as the epitome? That's why PI starts with a bunch of examples that are not descriptions, but activities.
I'd even say the actual discussion about the subject doesn't start untill the definitions are clear.
...hence excluding philosophical conversation about the definition...
Quoting Tomseltje
...this is different to "The meaning is the definition". The implication is that the definition does not give the meaning; the definition does not present the meaning, it represents the meaning; the definition stands in for the meaning.
Hence you are saying that the definition does not give the meaning.
So should philosophers concern themselves with mere definitions, or should they look to meaning?
Nope, I'm saying that the definition does not nessesarily give the meaning. But it could
The definition can only transfer the meaning when understood correctly.
Quoting Banno
Philosophers should look in the same direction when discussing what is seen, irrelevant of what they are looking for.
Meaning is something that is transferred?
The point of that would be to sound fashionable and win arguments by being the loudest and rudest.
You're right. I've noticed, and experienced, a blatant lack of definitions in arguments. ...for example in my thread "A few metaphyscal replies".
For instance, someone (he knows who he is) criticized me for not making the necessary distinction between logical facts and "substantive" facts. So I asked what he meant by "substantive".
...No answer. But just an angry, rancorous departure from the discussion. "When you ask me what I mean, and I don't have an answer about what I mean, then it's pointless to even try to talk to you!."
Something like that. In other words, declare yourself the winner and depart the conversation, when asked for a definition of a term you used but can't define. ...when asked what it is that you're trying to say.
It's happened again and again here. Different forms, different versions, different people, but the same thing.
Long on rancor, but short on being clear about what we mean, or defining our terms.
So what do some people here do instead of defining their terms when they talk?
Well, hemming, hawing, speculating, and dancing around the subject (whatever it may be).
Philosophical discussion and investigation it isn't. What is it? Some kind of one-upmanship game,
seemingly scored according to who can be rudest and most rancorous.
Michael Ossipoff
As in science, metaphysical discussion needs explicit, precise and consistent definitions, avoidance of brute-facts, assumptions, and unverifiable, unfalsifiable propositions.
Good luck finding that here.
Michael Ossipoff
It's concept, sure.
In either case, does that help? Is the notion of concept clearer that that of meaning?
all we can talk about are concepts. Words are references to concepts, same goes for the word meaning.
I guess we agree that this kind of behaviour is about the opposite of having a philosophical discussion. The thing is, they don't actually win the argument, they merely succeeded into getting everyone to refrain from even attempting to discuss anything with them. If one wins an argument in a discussion both parties have won, quite different from the end result in debates. Too bad so many here don't seem to understand the difference yet.
Yes, I posted here because I wanted to find out what answers and objections can be made to the metaphysics that I propose.
It "seemed like a good idea at the time."
Well, I did find out what objections people come up with, and sincerely-felt objections deserve answers. As you suggested, it could be, and was supposed to be, a co-operative non-inimical effort. If I'm mistaken about something--if there's an objection or consideration that I've missed or under-rated-- then I want to hear about it. That's the (potential) value of a philosophical forum.
But, when one finds out what discussion here consists of--people angrily defending their doctrines and superstitions, using the worst Internet tactics--one realizes that participation doesn't really serve a purpose.
Usually people don't visit here and approach the topics as I've been doing, and now, of course, it's evident why that is--as you suggested. People here are doing something else, and really it's best to just leave them to it.
Well, I visited here to find out, and I did.
That doesn't necessarily mean that I won't finish a few replies in "A few metaphysical replies", or a few other threads. Why? Just to properly finish the questionable Quixotic project that I started when I started posting here.
Michael Ossipoff
If we don't understand cause and effect then how is it that you make so many predictions that come true, all of which are based on previous experiences? Think of all the trivial predictions you make throughout the day and engage in activities to bring those goals to their fruition (getting up in the morning, getting dressed, going to work, getting your work done, going home, eating a hot meal, going to bed, etc.). How could you do any of that without some understanding of cause and effect? :roll:
Quoting Banno
Tell me what form the dog-class takes in your mind? Is it not an image of some dog that might even vary each time your bring "dog" to mind?
Quoting Banno
Well, your mental image of a dog was caused by previous experiences with dogs. The image on the paper is the effect of your mental image of a dog. This is a chain of causation. The image on the paper that I see contains information about your previous experiences with dogs. There is meaning in the image on the paper that refers to your mental image and your experience with dogs. Meaning is the same thing as information.
Quoting Banno
"and" is typically used to refer to an connection between two or more things.
"jump" is typically used to refer to some organism's ability to move vertically into the air by it's own power.
"hello" is typically used as a sound while greeting someone. It's a cultural behavior.
I never said that everything was a noun. I said that every word refers to something in the world. "Something" could be nouns and their behaviors (verbs) or descriptors (adjectives). "Something" also refers to your mental images and experiences as I have explained. "God" refers to a propagated idea in our heads that has been skewed for our own purposes.
Quoting Banno
Uh.. no. What is your problem with it? Think about it. Words are just sounds and visual scribbles - the same as your non-verbal experiences. Words are only different in that their meaning is the causal connection with other minds, not some other mindless cause.
Quoting Banno
Then you must be an internet bot because how does any word come to your mind without some experience to go along with it? How did you learn what words mean?
A transcendental argument. We get on with our lives; the only way we could get on with our lives is if we understand cause and effect; therefore we understand cause and effect.
I do not find it at all convincing.
It doesn't. There's just the use of the word "dog".
I don't think so. Rather, the way I use the word "dog" is the way that it is used in my community. As I explained, there is nothing that all these uses have in common apart from that use - no mental image of a dog that includes dachshunds, wolves, prairie dogs, fire dogs and hot dogs. It seems clear to me that your account cannot explain the vastness of our use of language.
Hm.
Perhaps we can agree that your desire for definitions has its roots in a certain theory of meaning, one more or less in line with the ideas that Harry espouses and that I have discussed elsewhere. That theory of meaning was closely critiqued during the middle of last century, by philosophers from diverse backgrounds.
I don't see this as a detriment to my argument for it seems to me that you could say that for any philosophical argument. So I guess you don't find any philosophical argument convincing? Isn't the fact that we get on with our lives the result of our understanding? Could we get on with our lives without a proper understanding of anything? It seems like you wouldn't be alive long enough to get on with your life without an understanding of cause and effect.
Quoting Banno
So all you do when you see or hear the word, "dog" is see or hear the word, "dog"? You MUST be an internet bot without an internal mind and without any non-verbal experiences.
Quoting BannoExactly, you use the word to refer to a particular species of animal that includes all it's breeds. Which breed does "dog" refer to? Which species? To say that a word is "used in your community is to say that it is used to communicate some non-verbal idea.
Anthropomorphism? I don't understand your intended meaning. Did you intend anthropocentric, to which I happily admit? I prefer philosophy that is useful and meaningful to humans, and I prefer to consider matters relevant to humans, from a human perspective. But maybe this isn't what you're objecting to?
Although the age of a tree can be measured by tree rings, this isn't what they mean. I submit that they have no meaning at all. Clouds have no meaning either. Nor do black holes. They just are.
Not all philosophical arguments are transcendental.
Edit: I'm referring to the logical structure of the argument: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/transcendental-arguments/
No, Harry. When we use the word "dog", we use the word "Dog".
DO you have a serious argument to present?
Edit: the "You MUST" looks to again be transcendental.
All right Harry. If you are not going to read what I write. there's not much point in my writing it. Have a good day.
Do you? Because all you are doing is making these half-ass attempts at doing philosophy. I have produced far more meat to chew on than you and you want to ask if I'm serious? It was obvious from the get-go that your only intent was to be facetious.
What does it mean to use a word? What do you mean by the word "use"?
What is it that we are translating when we translate one word in another language to another? What enables us to translate words at all if both words from different languages don't refer to the same thing?
Its you that isn't reading my post. As I have already said words come in the form of visual scribbles and sounds. Hearing a word spoken is no different than hearing the wind blow or a wave crash. It provides information about what is happening in the outside world. In fact hearing the wind blow and hearing me say, "the wind is blowing" is redundant - obvious.
I don't know, I'm not sure what you are referring to. My point about providing definitions, especially on an international accessable forum, is that I think it's rather relevant to know when someone sais the word 'mile' wether its a landmile or a seamile since they are not the same , and preferably just translates the quantity to si standard, So i can just substitute the given definition for the word that may have several different meanings, or in case the word used is new to me.
No, I'm saying that I need to know the definition the OP apllies in his/her statements in order to understand his/her statement, wich is required to determine whether or not his/her statements make sense to me.
Especially if the OP is using a different definition of the word than the definition(s) I am familiar with.
The discussion wether it's the 'right' definition is a complete seperate one. I even don't mind if the OP made up a word used in his/her statements, as long as he/she can define it to me using more familiar, less ambiguous words, so I become able to understand his/her statement.
On this we seem to be in agreement. My frustration that caused me to start this OP, was that I didn't get the definitions when I asked for them on several occasions. Or got a two word definition that was equally non informative.
Nonsense, if as you stated
Quoting Pattern-chaser
following it's logical conclusion, you'd have to admitt that to humans for who the age of a tree is relevant and know about how trees grow, the three rings indicating the age of the tree have that meaning.
Perhaps you meant that it has no meaning to the tree, but why would you with your preferance to consider matters relevant to humans?
I disagree. Data is the same as information. Meaning is essentially derived from the context of the available data/information.
My main point wasn't even we should get them in advance, though I agree in this medium it can be usefull, especially for disambiguous words used. My point was mainly about that the definitions at least should be provided when asked for, rather than ignoring or refusing the request in the following response.
it is anti-philosophical to not respond to a request for definitions.
I meant that it has no meaning. Not to a tree, and not to a human. As I said, the age of a tree can be determined by examining its rings. But this is not their meaning. They have no meaning. They are a physical attribute of a tree, but you assign meaning to them. Why, and on what basis?
I would agree that we have no concept of meaning that would attribute to the tree any meaning regarding the number of rings a tree has. But from that it does not follow that there are no beings for whom the rings have no meaning. In addition, I would also suggest the possibility that beings for whom the rings might have meaning may be deriving meaning from the rings rather than assigning meaning to the rings.
Perhaps you would be better named "Harry Homunculus"?
Note that the Socratic Dialogues themselves are discussions about the meaning of various terms; working out what we mean is pivotal to philosophy. If we begin by simply stipulating meaning, then arguably we are not actually doing any philosophy.
It seems from the discussion above that @Harry Hindu thinks meaning is something one has in one's head, that is then translated into "visual scribbles and sounds", transmitted and them decoded by someone else. It's a tempting view of language, but it's wrong. Meaning is constructed in the interaction of people using those "visual scribbles and sounds"; it does not exist only in individual minds, but in their interaction. Settling on shared definitions, shared understandings, is part of that process.
DOn't look to meaning, look to use: tree rings can be used to dermin the age of a tree.
The context is the causal relationship. What something means is what caused it. What tree rings mean are what caused them, which is how the tree grows throughout the year. Even alien visitors would understand what tree rings mean. The causal relationship is objective in the sense that there is only one correct interpretation of tree rings. Any other interpretation would be subjective and therefore useless to others - that is unless you find arbitrary and anthropomorphic interpretations useful.
Thanks to how the tree grows throughout the year.
Perhaps you would be better named, "Banal"?
OK, I'll phrase more carefully: Tree-rings have no intrinsic meaning. Meaning is assigned arbitrarily to them by humans. Even using tree rings to determine the age of a tree is a human thing: we kill the tree to see how old it was. The rings simply reflect the way the tree grew. They have no intrinsic meaning, and they were not put there for the use of humans.
Better, surely, not to assign meaning or use, but simply to observe and enjoy? :chin: :up:
I'm glad we agree on this. I wished all on this forum would. Perhaps it could be included in the site guidelines.
once meaning has been assigned, it has meaning I'd argue.
It's the kind of meaning I was referring to. I'd say that we can't sensibly start going into a philosophical discussion without those being clear. Whether the defining is part of the philosophical discussion or preceeds it, I don't really care, as long as it happens.
You seem to be non specific regarding build-in meaning and assigned meaning. In case of the tree rings, they may not have a build-in meaning, but they may have an assigned meaning. If you don't differenciate but just say meaning in general we won't be able to tell wich kind you are reffing to, and we will just keep disagreeing.
Glad you demonstrated to be able to make the differenciation needed here, I tried to point out to Banno. Thank you for substanciating my position.
"and they were not put there for the use of humans"
I'm just not sure about this last part, I don't know why they were put there, do you? I can't logically exclude the possibility that they were put there for the use of humans just yet.
Having cleared up this conundrum, I'd like to point out that I started this topic about the definition of words. Definitions of words used in a statement clearly are not about intrinsic meaning but about assigned meaning.
ps.
No offence intended, but seeing your statement
Quoting Pattern-chaser
I would have expected you would opt for assigned meaning rather than intrinsic meaning, yet you chose differently. I wonder why, got any thoughts on that?
(note, I realize this is a rather personal question, so I'm not expecting you to express the thoughts you may have on this, just whether you gave it some thought yet or not)
Well said by the both of you.
They are called dialogues for a reason.
In my experience, people unwilling to define their terms when asked do not know what they are talking about and when the discussion gets tough, they will be the first to call you a name while they are running for the exit.
Tree rings DO have intrinsic meaning. Humans could never have "assigned" the meaning of the tree rings as the age of the tree if the tree didn't grow that particular way throughout the year.
The tree rings are the result of how the tree grows throughout the year, so not only do the tree rings mean the age of the tree, but also how the tree grows throughout its lifetime.
Words mean that someone wrote them, just as finding a watch means that someone made it. But the words also mean something else, which is some idea that the writer intended to convey. The pattern on the face of a watch means the time of day, which is what the watchmaker designed it to do. So any effect, whether it be tree rings, words or watches, carries information, or meaning, from all of its subsequent causes.
Yes, but the meaning is in your head (mind) and mine. It has no existence in the scientific space-time universe (outside of our heads), and it has no association with the trees (outside of our heads).
That was me broadening the context considerably, and commenting on the ravage and plunder that humans have perpetrated on the world we live in, which seems to stem from the understanding that the entire world (universe?) is there for humans to use as they see fit. Not quite on-topic. :wink:
Oh, and I like the way you allow for a possibility you can't yet rule out. Not many people practice mental hygiene that thoroughly. :up: :smile: And no, I don't know why God put them there. I'd ask Her, but I suspect She wouldn't answer. :wink: She must be very busy. :grin:
Quoting Tomseltje
Offence? Personal? No, I'm fine with that. I was confused, briefly when I saw these comments. In the Other Forum where I used to live, before I came here to TPF, courtesy was rare, and usually reserved for sciencists. So thank you for your courtesy. A refreshing change. :smile:
As for the question you ask, I was confused there too for a while, but I think I've got it now. Yes, I prefer a human-centric philosophy, and perspective on life, the universe and everything. But I want an honest view, so I would avoid projecting the meaning I see onto the world. Meaning is in the eye of the beholder, it is not part of the thing we assign or ascribe it to. That kind of projection seems to be very easy for us to slip into, as we do it a lot. I try to avoid it whenever I can, or comment if it seems someone else is doing so.
Does that answer your question? :chin:
Wrong. If meaning only existed in our heads and not outside of our heads, then how does the meaning in words get from the writer or speaker's head to the listeners' heads?
When someone writes something, those scribbles mean something independent of anyone looking at them. The meaning is what the writer intended to convey. The reader simply tries to get at what the writer intended to convey. If the reader wanted to impose his/her own meaning on the scribbles, then they wouldn't be getting at the meaning of the words. Instead they would be interpreting them incorrectly.
We often find that we have identified the wrong meaning in some thing that we perceive. How can we ever be wrong in our meanings if they only existed in our heads? The "meaning" in your head is just an idea (a representation) of the meaning out there, just like everything else in your head. You're confusing the picture with the real thing.
You could say that your experience itself carries meaning about all the causes leading up to it. This is why doctors can diagnose the conditions of your eyes based on the description of your visual experiences. Your body's state is as much a cause, if not more so, of your experiences as the things you are perceiving.
Every effect points back to a string of causes, with each effect carrying information/meaning about every cause leading up to it. Meaning/Information is the relationship between cause and effect.
This is misdirective trivia. Sound exists outside of our heads. Written words exist outside of our heads. You are surely aware that sound and words can carry language, which can transport meaning from one human to another. But meaning only has meaning to a human. Spoken or written words are not in themselves meaningful. The meaning emerges when a human understands those words, within their minds.
N.B. I do not intend to refer to trivial meaning, as in "the meaning of a word is described in a dictionary", but something more abstract and human, like "the meaning of life".
Very true. My experience is that people often focus so much on deductive reasoning - logical inferences - that they forget about inductive reasoning - definitions and principles. Definition of terms is possibly the hardest and yet most critical part of an argument.
Now there are two types of definitions. (1) The author's meaning, and (2) the real definition of things, also called essence or nature of things in themselves. (1) is easy enough to produce and the readers just need to adjust to the terms as intended by the author for that specific discussion. (2) is much harder, and answers the question "what is x", as meant by everyone in the common language. In this case, the Socratic Dialogue is a good method, which is testing a hypothesis definition against particular examples used in the common language. It is a lot of work, but once obtained, it does not need to be found again, and makes the rest of the discussion much easier.
The sentiment is right.
Meaning is always assigned by people.
But it's not arbitrary. We use tree rings to fathom age; we don't use some other characteristic - taste, for example.
And one can take a bore of a tree to determine its age without killing it.
The rings are the way the tree grew.
And finally, we have no choice but to assign meaning. The world is always, already, interpreted.
So at the root, i don't think we disagree too much.
The relevance of all this for the thread is that the act of setting out definitions (meaning, use) is part of philosophical enquiry; hence it dose not make sense to set out definitions before the discussion begins, unless perhaps the aim is to critique those definitions.
Yeah, well, I suppose in a sense this thread seeks a definition of "definition".
In that context, my poiint is that a set of synonyms does not set out what we might call the meaning of some term.
Take care not to fall into the idealist hole of thinking that words are not part of the world. We do talk about trees, and we do things to trees with our words. Some of them we decide to cut down; some of them we decide to plant; some of them we place in reserves; and so on.
And notice that it is we, not I. The meaning is not in my head, nor in yours. It's very much shared.
Seriously?
Quoting Harry Hindu
Doesn't this imply that what the writer intended to convey is the relationship between cause and effect?
The notion of essence is quite problematic. The notion that it is certain identifiable properties that can be used to individuate some individual apart from others has been quite thoroughly critiqued.
For me, it's more trouble than it is worth.
Wrong again. Vibrating air molecules exist outside of our heads. Our brains interpret those vibrations as sounds, which only exist in our heads.
In effect, the sounds you hear are the effect, while the vibrations are part of the cause. The vibrations were caused by a person speaking, which was in turn caused by some idea in their head and their intent to convey that idea. I don't see how this is so difficult to see as a causal process - where the effect (sounds in your head) mean what caused them - the idea in someone else's head.
This is a philosophy forum where we convey our ideas and our own positions and expect others to read our words and understand what we meant. It's strange to see you behave as if you don't understand what I'm saying, yet go about doing exactly what I'm saying - using cause and effect to relay a message to readers.
The meaning does not emerge from understanding. Understanding is the state of actually interpreting the meaning correctly. There is the possibility of you misinterpreting the meaning of words. This can only be explained by putting meaning outside of your head that you attempt to get at by representing the meaning (the causal relationship between hearing sounds and what caused them) in your head. Have you ever misinterpreted the meaning of sounds? How can you do that if meaning is only in your head?
Yes. Do you have point to make?
Quoting Banno
No. Meaning is the relationship between the effect of seeing words on a screen and what caused those words to be on the screen. What caused the words in your posts, Banno? How is it that I can read your posts? Am I suppose impose my own meaning on your words, or am I suppose to get at what you intended to convey when you typed those words?
That it is troublesome and challenging, I have no doubt. But that essences exist is easy to prove. Virtually everyone can correctly identify a 'duck' among a pile of 'rocks', or understand that whatever the concept of 'knowledge' is, it is closer to the concept of 'understanding' than it is to the concept of a 'cow'. This would not be the case if beings did not have distinct essences, natures, or identities.
Now it is not necessary to find the perfect definition of concrete things like 'duck' or 'rock' in order to have a coherent discussion about these, but it is better to find it for abstract concepts like 'knowledge' and 'understanding' to avoid ambiguity, and it is necessary to find it if we wish to obtain necessary truths on these beings.
Example: Is free will necessary for 'Christian Love'? Yes, because the essence of 'Christian Love' is "willing the good" to the object loved; and there is no will without free will. Therefore if Christian Love exists, then free will necessarily exists.
The meaning is what the writer intended to convey. — Harry Hindu
Meaning/Information is the relationship between cause and effect. — Harry Hindu
and
Meaning is the relationship between the effect of seeing words on a screen and what caused those words to be on the screen. — Harry Hindu
Another transcendental argument.
Are you proposing that when one learns the difference between a duck and a rock that one is learning duck-essence as opposed to rock-essence?
I can usually tell a duck from a rock, but I have no idea what a duck-essence might be, nor a rock-essence.
Relating this to the OP, are you suggesting that providing a definition, a set of synonyms, is what is involved in setting out an essence?
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
So you can't provide a definition of duck or rock, and yet you want to use definitions for freedom and understanding? If you cannot set out an essence of duck why should we think you can set out an essence of freedom?
And remember, all this odd exegesis is to be compared with looking to the use to which we put the words "duck" and "freedom" - a thing we plainly can do.
Put into your terms, the cause is (as you say) an idea in someone else's head, and the effect is an idea in yours. The spoken words are merely transport.
In its place one might look to how words are actually used.
Not even if you're a tree? :wink:
Assignment of meaning (to tree rings) by humans is pretty arbitrary from a tree's point of view. :grin:
The use to which we put tree rings - measuring the age of a tree - isn't arbitrary, from our point of view. But that implies the point, the one that you make, and I agree with:
Quoting Banno
But the meaning of tree rings is far more problematical (than their use), in my mind.
Is not tree not a temporal being?
Performative contradiction?
So we know what is essential when we know what is not accidental.
And language use in turn relies on us using words in ways that emphasise the essential. When we employ a term like "duck" or "rock", we don't want folk to get hung up on their various possible inessential or accidental interpretations.
So if I say "duck", you can already take it for granted that something essential is being asserted. And being sufficiently like-minded ensures you understand what that is well enough.
Quoting Banno
...until I came along and showed that the meaning of a word doesn't necessarily have to refer to another set of words, but refers to other visuals, sounds, smells, tastes and feelings, and those are the actual things that those words refer to. Words are just other visuals and scribbles, whose creation and use were specifically designed to refer to our other sensory impressions in order to communicate the non-verbal contents of our minds. Until humans learn to use telepathy we have to use words to communicate.
Quoting Banno
Used: as in used to refer to the non-verbal contents of our minds.
Yes. Cause and effect. I think you might be getting it.
You don't find the essences from this, but you find that if we know that a rock is evidently not a duck, then a rock is missing some essential properties that makes a duck a duck, and vice versa. And this implies that these beings have essential properties.
Quoting Banno
Not synonyms, but essential properties; that is, properties such that, if they were lost, then the being would lose its identity. E.g., the essential properties of a triangle are "flat surface" + "3 sides". Lose one of these, and the being is no longer a triangle.
Quoting Banno
Who said we can't define a duck or a rock? I said it is not necessary, because the terms are rather unambiguous. Although we would have to if we wanted to find necessary truths about these beings.
Quoting Banno
Why not? Socratic Method: come up with a hypothesis definition of 'freedom'; test it against examples in the common language that use the term; repeat until it cannot be falsified; Bob's your uncle.
So this leads to what I consider to be the most interesting question raised by your approach. What's wrong with all the people who disagree about the meaning of a word? Take a look at the torturous 61 page discussion on the meaning of the word 'Belief'. What do you think has happened here? Is it that despite the Socratic method being around for more than 2000years, no-one (except you) has thought to apply it to the meanings of words, or is it that they have but the process simply takes more than 2000 years to resolve (in which case I don't have much hope for the technique helping much on this forum), or is it, just possibly, that it doesn't work?
So how do you differentiate brain effects to decide which one is the 'meaning'? If you say the word 'tree' to me all sorts of things happen in my brain, audial signalling, random noise filtering, associations, conciousness flickering. I might be reminded of my coat which I left hanging on that tree over there, or my first garden with the big oak tree in it. If you said 'tree' very loudly to me when I was sleeping, I would actually be woken up by the word and all the chain of conciousness would be started by it. Which one of these 'effects' is the meaning?
no; used as in what we do with it.
I think you're confusing hearing or seeing the word, "tree" spoken or written and thinking about categories of trees.
As I have said, meaning is the relationship between cause and effect. Effects carry meaning about their causes. This means that spoken or written words that you hear or see mean what the speaker or writer intended to convey - which is some idea in their head. Yelling "tree" when you are asleep means whatever I intended when I yelled it. You will wake up and wonder why I said "tree" very loudly. In other words, you will try to get at the meaning of my use of the word - my idea that I intended to convey. It could be that I was just being rude, and that would be the meaning of the word you heard. Thinking about all those other non-verbal things that "tree" can refer to would simply be you trying to get at what it was that I meant, not what you mean when you say the word, "tree". In order to get at what someone means when they speak or write we often roll over in our minds all the possible meanings that the word could refer to. Our goal is to always get at speaker/writer's intent, not to impose our own meaning on someone else's words, or else we never actually communicate.
Thinking of the word "tree" without anyone having spoken or written it is exactly what speakers and writers do BEFORE using the word. Before using words, you have to think of what it is you want to say, and it doesn't always come in the form of other words, rather it comes in non-verbal sensory impressions that we translate to words in order to communicate those ideas to another person. Think about the tree in your garden. Is your tree made of words, or bark and leaves? Isn't the bark and leaves and the size and shape of the tree, all non-verbal sensory impressions that you convert in to verbal symbols in order to communicate the properties of the tree in your garden? So when, you say "tree" and you intend for it to refer to the one in your garden, would it be okay for me to project my own meaning on your words, and could we still call the interaction between us "communicating"?
Exactly. What you do with words is use them to refer to (communicate) the non-verbal contents of your mind.
You seem to be missing out an entire, crucially important stage and that's what I'm trying to ask you about (and I think that's what Banno's trying to get at too).
Your process seems to go like this;
1. You have a sensation/thought in your mind which you convert to a sign (word) which somehow represents that sensation/thought.
2. You say that word or write it and I hear it or read it.
3. I then try to convert that word into a sensation or thought hopefully close to the one you had.
This seems to me to encapsulate entirely what you're saying about communication, and I don't think anyone's disagreeing with you. But none of that is what the philosophical discussion of meaning is about. Philosophical discussions of meaning are about how you know what words are good ones to use to represent your sensation/thought. You don't just pick some random word, so how do you know which one to pick? That is the meaning of the word, its the reason you chose it to represent the sensation/thought you wanted to communicate. Why choose 'tree'? Because it somehow is already the sound that is most likely to get the same image into my mind that you have in yours (that of a tree). So if meaning is whatever you intend, then what is that thing which is clearly a property of the word 'tree' which led you to choose it to do that job?
So we use words to "refer to (communicate)" the non-words in our minds? :chin:
Quoting Harry Hindu
Perhaps. But I think you're not. I commented because you claimed the words were the effect. Now you agree that they aren't (?), so I'm not sure what your argument or point is. Let's see if we can drill to the core of this sub-topic.
You appear to assert that meaning is the relationship between cause and effect.
Quoting Pattern-chaser
Indeed. There is something quite amiss in Harry's account.
Let's look at one of his claims directly: Harry says that when I talk of "Harry Hindu", what I am refering to is the Harry Hindu in my mind.
But that's not right. The notion of Harry Hindu in my mind does not write posts in the philosophy forum. It's some sort of mental object, and so does not have hands with which to write.
Now, Harry Hindu, being a person, can write posts on PF. It follows that what I refer to when I use the name "Harry Hindu" is Harry Hindu, and not My-mental-image-of-Harry-Hindu.
Harry will claim that this is some how an unfair account; he is in the thrall of a false picture of how language works, as something that exists in his head instead of something that is constructed by all of us together as we use it.
Somehow I think it not quite accurate.
But if the meaning of "Harry Hindu" is my mental image, and not the actual Harry, then I can't be wrong.
Really? That is Harry?
Quoting Banno
Between the picture theory of language and linguistic behaviourism there is a middle ground position.
Mental imagery or non-verbal content is the brain doing its thing of anticipating its perceptual future. To act in the world according to a model of the world is to act on the basis of a running forward prediction. So mental imagery is the development of constrained states of expectation. And that constraint can range from vague inklings all the way up to vividly exact sensori-motor states. Language then becomes a way to achieve those kinds of anticipatory mental states in the minds of others, and even - though self talk - yourself.
So when we think "tree", we set up a state of constrained expectation in ourself that could be quite vague and permissive - a generalised sense of tree-ness. Or if we make the attentive effort to flesh out some particular predictive image, which takes about half a second to generate, we may have some strongly developed and vivid picture of a particular oak in a forest clearing in mind.
And likewise, when we say "tree", we can rely on fellow language users to respond with more or less accuracy in line with our own learnt habits of thought. Their mental imagery or states of expectancy will be well enough constrained to achieve the same intents.
The point is that no word needs to have completely defined meaning - if meaning is understood as some kind of exhaustive veridical content. That is merely importing naive realism into the story.
Words only have to constrain states of expectation to the degree that it is useful. And sometimes being vague is more useful, given the future is often not all that exactly predictable. So arguing over whether words have some exact correspondence with reality is rather missing the point. The goal is the modelling one of words having some useful kind of correspondence with the certainties and uncertainties of the near future.
So a constraints-based approach says meanings are open-ended. Any expression is unlimited in its potential interpretations by any reasonably competent speaker. There will always be a way to misunderstand ... a way to avoid agreement.
But well co-ordinated speech will put one speaker in mind of the same thoughts, the same states of mental expectancy, as another, to the degree it is useful. And that will reflect both the certainties and uncertainties that are inherent in the pragmatics of predicting the future in meaningful fashion.
To then try to map propositional notions of truth on to the psychology of forward modelling or perceptual anticipation is of course then the importing of naive realism. Propositional truth likes to ignore the issue of vagueness for a start. It wants to deal in crisp yes or no only.
Is that an image of Harry I see before me? Answer one way or the other. Let's pretend that ambiguity or uncertainty are not inherent in the business of making psychological predictions about the future of our experiences.
I would not exclude the fourth possibility that you all just suck at it :joke: .
But instead of trying to persuade that it doesn't work by the mere fact that no one could find the essence of 'belief', can you locate an inherent flaw in the method in general?
How is the fact that it evidently doesn't work, despite 2000 years of trial, not an inherent flaw. If someone gave me a new phone and it didn't function, I wouldn't expect to have to find the exact diode that had failed before being entitled to conclude that the phone didn't work.
If you want an account of those flaws, you could read Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, even Heidegger(if you must), or any of the many ordinary language philosophers, existentialists, quietists, pragmatists, all of whom in various ways have found flaws in the process. But that's not the point. The point is that you personally would not find their arguments compelling. What they see as flaws, you would not, and how do you resolve that problem? You can't keep discussing it until one of you agrees with the other, that's the very method that's being examined so to continue already begs the question. You can't simply presume they're mistaken, they're at least as intelligent as you are and possessed of the same empirical and a priori knowledge. So you can only conclude that the truth of the matter is unobtainable, or you're some kind of unique genius. It's up to you which.
Why make a distinction between meaning an philosophical meaning? What I'm doing is defining meaning in a way that makes sense in all manners that we use the word, "meaning". There shouldn't be any inconsistencies - just integration.
Your important stage was covered in step 1. We choose certain words because those are the strings of symbols that we learned to refer to anything. Were you taught the word, "tree" without any reference to actual trees, or even pictures of trees?
But we could have learned ANY string of symbols to refer to a tree. If you were born and raised in China, you'd use a different symbol and different sound to refer to trees. So the symbols we assign are arbitrary. This is why language is flexible. This is why new uses arise and are either accepted or rejected by the society you find yourself in. You could use any symbol you want, but in order to communicate with people of the same language, you need to learn the symbols of that language.
The meaning of any spoken or written word is what the author intended. I have asked both you and Banno how it is that we don't impose our own meanings on the words that others post. Instead, we always try to get at the intent of the user of those words. You both ignore this point yet I think it shows that meaning isn't projected. It is predicted. This also accounts for how we can misinterpret meanings.If we could project our meanings, then how do we get anything wrong? You, Banno, and Pattern-Chaser are ignoring these key points that are a detriment to your positions.
I don't see what is so difficult about that. Did you learn what "tree" refers to when you were very young when your parents pointed to a tree and said, "tree"? Do you not associate the non-verbal imagery of trees, their smell, the feel of their bark and leaves, the sound of the wind blowing through the leaves, etc? - all of which are composed of sensory impressions that are not words?
Quoting Pattern-chaser
It is the definition of meaning.
I never rejected that words are an effect. How can you deny that they are. How did your words get on this screen, if not by cause and effect? How is it that I can read your words if you didn't have an idea that you wanted to convey to me? Are you saying that your words are not a reflection of your ideas? If so, then what are you talking about?
If your mental representation of me doesn't include hands and arms, then how do you explain the existence of my posts? While I don't have a mental picture of you as I don't know what you look like, I do believe you have hands and are capable of typing. My only mental image of you is an internet avatar, and the same for you in representing me.
Being that we live in a shared world, using shared symbols to refer to those things in the world, and equipped with an understanding that our minds are just representations themselves (effects of prior causes (which is the outside world)), then it is understood within the context of language use that we are referring to the world, not our representations of it, unless we make it clear that we are taking about the contents of our minds instead of the world. We do this when a doctor asks you to describe your visual experiences, or the pain you are having because that helps the doctor get at what is happening in the world with your eyes or body.
Quoting Banno
Exactly, which is what you are implying, not me. Your mental image can be wrong, BECAUSE it is a predicted representation. You are wrong, and your language use represents that (your inaccurate mental representation of me). In other words, you are using words to refer to your representation of me, which can be wrong or right. So, your word use isn't wrong, just your representation of me is, which is an effect itself - an effect of your limited interactions with me and your own biases, and therefore has an effect on the words you use to describe me.
Right, so the word already had a meaning before the author writes it. It has to, otherwise the author would have no reason to select it. If the word had a meaning before the author writes it, then it's meaning cannot just be whatever the author intends. There is some property of the word 'tree' which already exists prior the the author's selecting it, which make it good choice for him to convey the idea of the tall plant in the woods.
The question of meaning is not about how a word comes to mean what it does within the language community, its about what it means already within that community, and we've just established, it must mean something already before the author uses it, in order for him to make a non-arbitrary selection. So your contention that the meaning of a word is whatever the speaker has in mind when they employ it, is simply wrong.
Quoting Harry Hindu
No, we don't. If an author uses the word 'tree', I assume he means either the tall plant, or maybe some multi-branching diagram. I make absolutely no investigation of what the author intended beyond selecting from the established uses of the word in context. I don't ask them to elaborate unless I'm confused, I don't look to some published glossary of their personal meanings. I expect it to mean one of the things it already means within the language game I'm playing. So again, the meaning of the word already exists and the author must necessarily adhere to the rules of the language game or else he will not be understood.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I've never suggested that we get to project our meanings any more than the author gets to project theirs. The meaning of a word is its use in the language game. It's determined by the interaction of both players and the millions of language speakers who have gone before them, and the nature of the language game being played.
It can't be difficult to agree that this is a two-way street. Linguistic communities create the general game. And individual players make creative use of the resulting space of free actions. Eventually new linguistic habits can emerge from those creative uses because they seem generally useful at the communal level (rather than just tentatively useful at the personal creative level on some occasion or other).
So any argument that tries to establish that only one side of the deal is in control - the community or the author - is a waste of breath. The interesting question is about characterising the dynamic in play. (Which is where a systems style constraints approach makes the most sense.)
Quoting Pseudonym
Yep. So you are forcing the synchronic, history-flattening, view on the issue when the diachronic, or developmental, view is the one that is going to see the whole deal.
Actual human experience of society and culture tells us that games evolve their rules all the time. They are always fiddling with the rules of rugby, Wall St, or the highway code.
Quoting Pseudonym
This goes to something else. It backs up @Harry Hindu on the strangely contested idea that words do refer to essences in some fashion. We can see the common "treeness" connecting these two examples of acceptable language use. A general hierarchical branching structure.
So whatever the author means in either case, it is essentially that. Trees - the plant kind - are indeed a particular expression of a more general, and strikingly simple, rule for growth-based symmetry breaking.
And in being a mathematically general fact of that kind, it undermines the view that it is all "just a language game". Talk of trees, and their treeness, isn't arbitrary. It is talk about some deep fact of the world - a fact about how the world plays its "games" of structuring form. The universe has actual "rules" - or rather, its universal forms, its simplest possible and so most widely observed constraints on random variety.
Quoting Pseudonym
It is more complicated than that as the language game is also being played with "the world". It interacts in pragmatic fashion with that.
The language game is in addition being played from the foundation of the perception game. That too is a semiotic interaction in which developmental neurology is a genetically constrained game of making pragmatic sense of "the world". We can see its "colours", we can smell its "odours". We can experience the full variety of "its" sensory qualities.
So calling language a game does get something right about language. The puzzle is how this small point then gets turned into a general stance of saying "it is only a game".
Sure, humans are different in living linguistically structured lives and so having a very socially- constructed relationship with the world. But there is a world out there. And even perceptual level semiotics is seeking to understand it in terms of its essences, generalities or global habits.
Exactly. This is what I was trying to convey. The author selects from meanings which already exist (or are implied by existing uses) that will communicate the message. We keep using the word 'tree', but it's actually a terrible example considering the point of the OP which is to imply that some progress could be made in philosophical discourse if words were defined first. I opposed that by claiming that at no point in time would we become any clearer as to what vague philosophical terms actually mean by describing them in other terms. In this sense, the fact that meaning is use is the most pertinent aspect of the whole field of language. It makes the point that people will make use of the terms in an argument vaguely, even rhetorically, as place-holders for concepts that don't exist, as place-holders for concepts that might exist but with know idea how...etc. All sorts of uses, none of which are connected to some referential definition. I don't deny that the language user has a part to play in evolving definitions, but it's their part in the game that matters to me here.
Quoting apokrisis
So, as above, the intention behind my ignoring the historical aspect was not to deny it a place in understanding meaning, but to suggest that it was unimportant in this particular argument. I'm trying to say that the mechanics of how a word comes to mean what it does in a particular language game does not help us understand why further definitions are of no use in philosophical discourse to clarify vague terms. I'm not suggesting it's of no use at all. The entire history of the use and evolution of the word 'rational' within the language game played by philosophers, for example, has been part of the rhetoric of philosophy. We couldn't go back over it's evolution to help us understand how it's being used in an argument that, say, belief in God is not rational. It's use in that proposition is entirely rhetorical, it's meaning here is determined by the game being played now, it's not been guided by some external essence, like the word 'tree', it's been guided entirely by it's function within the same sort of language game within which it evolved.
Quoting apokrisis
I think I've covered this above, in that what I'm saying applies more to words used within philosophical discussion that words sunsu lato. Even here though, it would be worth tempering your appeal to universal essences. The word 'tree' actually seems to derives from the root 'deru' which means strong and steadfast. So It was originally trying to get at the tree's firm and unyielding nature, not it's multi-branching form. The word has also been used (particularly in Middle English) to describe a number of things simply made of wood, regardless of their form. The use of the word tree to describe many things of a multi-branching form is very recent. So, I buy into the idea that authors use their creativity to come up with new uses of a word which are accepted on their merits, I also buy into the idea that the recognition of patterns guides people in that creative endeavour, but I don't see how the imposition by the world of these constraints tells us anything useful because we cannot see them in advance. All we can say is that all future uses of the word 'tree' will be somehow constrained by our preference for pattern over randomness. It is unlikely that a new use will arise which is not in some way connected to past uses, but we cannot possibly say in what way, so I'm not sure what use such an approach is.
OK ... for a start, the relationship between a cause and its consequent effect is known as, and defined as, a cause-effect relationship. Of course, cause-effect relationships appear everywhere, so if I point to a different way of defining meaning, you will easily be able to point in the same direction, and find a cause-effect relationship. But I don't think this supports your thesis. It's more coincidental, and relies on the almost universal presence of causes and effects.
This thread is about defining terms, and meaning is one of the more difficult ones. Not least because we will often end up referring to the meaning of meaning, and such like, and the phraseology can easily become confused. More generally, words are ambiguous. A brief look at a dictionary will confirm that most words have multiple meanings, in English and (I think) in most other languages too. Lawyers have laboured for centuries to find unambiguous language in which to phrase contracts, without significant success.
Some users of language celebrate its ambiguity. The choice that English often provides, of near-synonyms derived from Viking, Anglo-Saxon, Norman French, Latin or Greek, mean that we can choose the one with the required shades of meaning. Poetry is the most obvious, and most advanced, form of this kind of language usage. Meanings are stretched and distorted, quite deliberately, to transmit impressions that simple, literal, language cannot convey.
In these terms, it is difficult to appreciate a definition of meaning that is so analytical, and so unexpected, compared with the way that the term meaning is more commonly used. Most dictionaries offer a number of definitions for meaning, none of which mention cause and effect. This means little, as dictionaries are only a starting-point when it comes to defining words, and the way they are used. But your definition is so different, it is hard to know where to begin examining it.
Your definition makes it clear you see meaning as being intrinsic to the thing being discussed or described. And so I feel obliged to trot out the standard refutation for this: if meaning exists out there in the real world, please point to it. And please describe the measuring equipment used to confirm its existence. Where is your meaning-meter? :wink:
I am guessing that you are generally of the Objectivist persuasion (?), so am I correct to assume that you intend a simple and literal definition of meaning? Something comparable with 'the meaning of a word can be found in a dictionary'? In fact, I wonder if you see "meaning" as meaning little more than "definition"?
Despite all this, I cannot forget that many uses of the term meaning revolve around significance or import (to human beings). To use the term in a way that precludes this existing and long-standing usage can only lead to confusion, can it not? You do seem to be using the term in a unique way.
Oh I agree heartily that starting with definitions is the last thing we would do. You are absolutely correct that meaning can't be analysed by interrogating the terms we use themselves.
Quoting Pseudonym
I'd be surprised if there weren't terms even back then to distinguish trees - as tall plants branching off from a single trunk - from shrubs. Maybe every tree was an "oak" or whatever. Certainly we would expect the concrete noun to precede its metaphoric use. So deru would not have started out as steadfast and then trees be called that by analogy.
But whatever. My point was that nature does indeed have ontic structure. So words can speak rather directly to universal essences in that sense. The meanings of language can be constrained by reality in that fashion. The social construction of reality has its actual limits, as well as its actual creative freedoms.
This matters for philosophical language where the ability to pick out the universal in language use is a contentious issue. But that is a step beyond the original argument you were making, I see that.
Quoting Pseudonym
Again, it comes back to my greater interest in language as a form of semiosis. So I want to go the step beyond the pragmatics of "meaning is use" to the story of the actual general mechanism by which that is true. Thus a speech act becomes a state of interpretive constraint which is "understood" in terms of a suitable sign, a suitable act of measurement.
The meaning of "the cat is on the mat" is some kind of agreement to that being a perceived fact. And the agreement hinges on being able to ignore a whole bunch of potential differences as to that being understood as the case. The cat could be a squirrel - a remote possibility, but we could be mistaken. Or the mat could be really a rug, in someone else's eyes.
So this strengthens the psychological aspect of semantics. We can only agree a meaning to the extent we agree to ignore the endless possible differences of nature, of the real world. Word use corresponds not to things in themselves but to where we agree to stop debating the open-ended differences that will always remain.
So word definitions are doubly useless. Word use is by design open-ended. A word only constrains a space of interpretive possibilities. We could use "tree" to mean a whole bunch of things in creative fashion. Then even worse, where "tree" ceases to apply is also a product of pragmatic agreement. We simply decide that despite the endless possible ongoing differences, we will draw our boundary here, for the moment. For the duration of this speech act.
But then, in having this generalised character, words are pretty good at capturing the abstract. Words are intrinsically philosophical in that they generalise so easily. They don't sweat the detail. They are quite happy having a loose or universal fit.
That is how constraints work. And so - the even bigger picture - language is like nature in that regard. It is a structure that can be tightened as much as necessary to achieve a result. But that openness is closed by reaching some shared point of unconcern, or equilibrium, or diminished returns. Eventually differences no longer make a difference so far as the meaning goes.
Or the other way to put it is that nature is like language - semiotic. Which is another metaphysical story of course.
Absolutely. My main point here is to question the use this constraints-based approach is being put to (not is usefulness, which I don't doubt, just its use here). So what I'm getting at is that whilst we can be fairly sure, it seems to me, that the creative re-use of words is definatly constrained by needing to conform to some pattern dictated by the world, I'm not so sure that we can 'see' what those boundaries might be. Essentially, those boundaries themselves are limited only by the creativity of the language user and new uses of words may surprise us not only by a connection to the world which we can 'see' but had not made use of ourselves, but also by a connection to the world that we had not even 'seen' until the language user presents it to us.
Its like, to stick with our example, we might be unsurprised by anyone describing a new 'branchy' thing as a 'tree', we're prepared for any branch-like thing to be referred to as a 'tree' even though we might not currently be using the word that way. But then there's calling a steadfast and sturdy-like thing a 'tree'. Not only would that be a way we hadn't personally used 'tree', but it would also be a connection we weren't even expecting.
Quoting apokrisis
This is a really interesting way of putting it. It's not too far from Wittgenstein's family resemblance, but I prefer this exposition. What's interesting about this for the OP, is that there is some act of definition which could be discussed prior to a debate, but that that act itself would most likely render the entire debate pointless. An honest agreement about what we had excluded by our use of a term would, I think, dissolve the majority of metaphysical debates.
and
Quoting Pseudonym
If words had meaning prior to any author using them, then where did words come from if they existed prior to humans? Who, or what assigned each word it's meaning in every language that ever existed or will exist? The fact that there are different languages itself is proof that language use is arbitrary. The symbols (sounds and scribbles) we use are arbitrary but the things that they refer to aren't. Your native language is just the system you've adopted as your means of communicating your non-verbal ideas. Using that system with a user of a different system causes problems. Both users have non-verbal ideas but can't share them externally without using a shared system - a protocol as the term is used in computer science.
And if words have meaning prior to their use, then how do you account for artistic and metaphorical uses of words and how they come to be commonly used within any language system? "You can't see the forest from the trees." is a metaphor that doesn't refer to any real forest or trees, but to a mental state - a lack of objectivity. How did that metaphor arise and become popular to use when referring to someone's lack of objectivity?
Words have no meaning in themselves until they are used to refer to something. There are just various systems of symbol use that vary in flexibility - where certain trends in re-using existing symbols (or inventing new symbols) to refer to other (or new) ideas within different contexts, exists. Sometimes another language's words are adopted into another language as a trend, and this is how a mixed language can develop - like Spanglish. Pig-Latin is a humorous play on the English language. Is there a Pig-Latin for Mandarin or Russian? Why not? Why would one use Pig-Latin instead of proper English? Doesn't that refer to their intent? Your native language is the effect of your development within a certain culture.
Quoting Pseudonym
This is forgetting that "established uses" of words are very different across the human species and change frequently within a language system (new words arise and existing words are re-vamped).
Quoting Pseudonym
What I've been saying is your explanation leaves no room for artistic and metaphorical variety and inventiveness that exists and needs to be addressed in any good explanation of language and meaning.
Let me give another example:
Say that you are at home and are sitting downstairs reading a book in your favorite chair when you hear a loud "Boom!" from upstairs. Instinctively, you mentally try to get at the cause of the noise. You instinctively try to get at the meaning of the sound. You will attempt to predict the cause, or the meaning of noise. Is it a burglar? Did something fall? Is it a ghost? Eventually, you make your way upstairs and find that your brother fell out of bed while he was sleeping. That was the meaning/cause of the noise.
After breakfast, your brother goes back upstairs while you continue to read downstairs. After about 20 minutes, you hear your brother shout, "Boom!" Again, you attempt to get at the meaning of his word use. Why did he say, "Boom!" What did he mean? What what his intent? Is he teasing you and trying to be funny? You go upstairs again to investigate. You find your brother sitting at his computer desk playing a video game and he yelled, "Boom!" as the result of his excitement in blowing up an online opponent.
In each case, it was the cause of the sound that entailed the meaning of the sound (the effect), not some anthropomorphic rule for interpreting a certain system of symbols.
One more time.
Your theory of meaning is that the name "Harry Hindu" refers to my mental image of you.
But you agree, from what you said above, that my mental image of you is not you.
That is, you distinguish between my mental image of Harry Hindu and Harry Hindu.
And it follows, quite directly, that my mental image of Harry Hindu, and Harry Hindu, are not the very same thing.
And hence, The referent of Harry Hindu is not my mental image of Harry Hindu.
And again: In order to formulate the expression "Your mental image of Harry Hindu can be wrong, BECAUSE it is a predicted representation of Harry Hindu", you must differentiate between my mental image of Harry and Harry himself.
And in so doing, you show that "Harry" refers to Harry, and not to a mental image.
You missed some vital punctuation. It should be: The name "Harry Hindu" refers to my mental image of “you”.
And really, even your “my” should be in quotes. Or is there some you that is separate from the sum of “your” willing actions? How do you hope to escape representationalism concerning pictures in the head while still talking about the kind of conscious self that could have that type of detached observing, rather than embodied and enactive, relation with anything?
All you have to do is go back an re-read my post to see that your reply is pointless. As I stated before, your words do refer to your mental image because your words are an inaccurate description of the actual "Harry Hindu" (I put Harry Hindu in quotes because Harry Hindu is a fictitious entity - an avatar on an internet forum and not the actual me - so it adds an extra layer of causation/meaning that you have to get through to get to the real me). If your words were more accurate, then I could still say that you words refer to your mental image of me. It's just that your mental image of me is more accurate and your words would reflect that.
While your mental image of me and the actual me are not the same thing, they are related through causation - similar to how the image in the mirror is not you, but a reflection of you in a causal relationship.
What shall "actual Harry Hindu" mean? The actual mental image?
If someone shows a picture and says "This is
If someone says "Harry is floating in front of his computer while writing his posts" it is again clear that he is joking - just because of that.
Quoting Pseudonym
You mean to say "the fact that no one could find the essence of 'belief' in this forum". That it doesn't work is precisely what we are disputing here. At worst, even if the perfect definitions are not always found, the method allows to get very close to it; thereby making it worthwhile to use.
Quoting Pseudonym
Claiming that others have an argument is not a substitute to come up with an argument of your own. Maybe they do have compelling arguments, but you would not know it if you cannot say what it is. If you and I are going to have a long term discussion, I expect you to philosophize, and not merely point to other philosophers.
Quoting Pseudonym
Why not? In our previous discussion here, my position was the exact opposite, that, unlikely you, I believe we can come to an agreement.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Indeed. Which of them is Harry Hindu?
So it could just as easily be you who is "Harry Hindu" here.
Sounds legit.
Propper names don't refer? Or is distinguishing sense and reference not something you do?
But as a Peircean, I do indeed find Fregeanism the over-simplified version.
Eg: https://revistas.pucsp.br/index.php/cognitiofilosofia/article/viewFile/13383/9918
I suppose Harry might have some variation of Kripke's causal chains of reference in mind; but it would be a long and odd stretch to say that causal chains of reference referred to mental images.
Always a devastating answer. Shows you take the big questions seriously.
You can be wrong in statements about Harry because I understand such statements making a claim about something that is not inside your head. But reality is of negative nature.
Did I not already explain that your mental image is an effect (a representation) of the the real thing? Mental images are real, just as a mirror image is real and part of the world. This is why we can use words to refer to either, and it is typically understood which one is being referred to within the context of the conversation. It's just that your mental image is the only access you have to the real world, so what else could you refer to other than your mental representations of the world? It allows for us to be wrong or inaccurate, which happens often, when describing things outside of our minds. How do you explain the possibility of being inaccurate with your descriptions if you are always referring to something in the world?
The problem with these arguments against my position is that they don't take into account all the attributes of communication and how we use words. No one elses' explanations have been able to account for how non-established uses of words arise within a language system or how we can be wrong in our descriptions of the world. Any description of language and meaning has to take these things into account to be of any value.
Quoting Banno
The one that is absent of your biased and skewed mental representations of me.
Quoting Heiko
Nonsense.
1) The mind is part of the world.
2) We can talk about the contents of other people's minds. i.e "Banno is delusional and believes that he is a chicken."
To both of course as the Kantian thing encompasses both: The real thing and it's mental image.
This is already clear if I was to ask whereof the mental image is. This is an intrinsic reference.
If I make a statement about Harry I make a claim about you, not any mental image. I would need to explicitely distinguish that I only meant my imagination if I did not make such a claim.
Here we have the reason for the debunked theory of meaning Harry exposes: Stove's worst argument. Harry never eats eggs, only images-of-eggs.
That'll do.
Right, so your claims are always accurate, and you know that they are always accurate.
All the claims on these forums are referring to actual states-of-affairs that truly exist outside of everyone's heads - even though most of the claims on these forums contradict other claims, they are all referring to actual states-of-affairs that exist outside of everyone's mental representations of those states-of-affairs. When people make claims about the existence of their god, they are all correct, and every god that has ever been claimed to exist actually does exist because people always refer to things outside of their heads, and are always aware of the difference.
That is just patently ridiculous. We make claims. Not everyone can be right, but we can all be wrong.
So Banno is always right. All of his claims are objective in the sense that they always refer to actual states of affairs outside his own head. Banno is omniscient and we never knew.
Here you are merely using a language shortcut to refer to the person. You are actually saying, "This is a picture of
The other problem is that that picture is just a representation of that person at one moment in time. That person has aged, is in a different mood, etc. and is not the same person as in the picture. The picture only shows one side of the person as it is two-dimensional. So the picture, just as your mental representations, do not exhaust everything there is of that person. So the picture gives me an idea of what the person looks like, but doesn't give me any other information about the person other than that.
Quoting Heiko
And here you have your words referring to your intent to be funny - not to any actual state-of-affairs that exists outside of your mind, just as a lie refers to my intent to mislead - to plant false ideas in your head so that you will act accordingly.
I do not see how the dialectic of form and content will save you here. The very existence of the shortcut should tell you something. You know the Kantian thing is in and of itself. When trying to communicate with others we strive to talk about the same piece of reality. We have to do so, because we want to talk about the same thing.
You will not get out of the affair when we talk about "Harry". Nor will the person shown on the picture.
I think you're misunderstanding the point I'm trying to argue. The point I'm trying to make is that discovering 'truth' or even approaching any kind of agreement via the Socratic method does not work. The fact that many philosophers have developed critiques of it is my argument (or at least the evidence for it). I'm not substituting their arguments for one of my own, I'm using the existence of their arguments as evidence in its support. The very fact that 2000 years after the project was first started (in written form at least) there exists in published form almost every conceivable opinion on the matter, still held by intelligent, well-educated people, demonstrates that rational debate has not even narrowed the field, let alone produced any meaningful consensus.
Exactly. It tells me that you mean something other than what you literally said.
Quoting Heiko
Whatever, bro. You think that you can talk about things without having any mental representations of those things - as if your mental representations of those things don't (causally) influence your word use about those things. That is absurd.
Sometimes, people may start a discussion about something that they don't know what it is, *because* it's exactly what they started a discussion for - to ask others to help them define and understand better what is this thing they're asking about - in someone else's eye.
Generally, yes, any other discussion that is being started without defining itself well from the start, is pointless, I suppose. They'll be infinite red herring fallacies in such a discussion.
But when starting a discussion about an extremely abstract concept such as "freedom", which can mean millions of different things, depending on the word's "context". Sometimes explaining what can be known about something can be complex enough that it can be worth starting a discussion on.
It's not like we're like scientists, who define words via materialistic things they observe and find, in which case, it is probably always pointless to discuss how to understand a certain word.
Of what? Words aren't things either. So "mental representation" does not mean all that much - if anything when I start thinking about it. It is m, e, n, ...
Do you know Eliza?
As I have already said numerous times, words are things as much as bumps in the night and tree rings are things, and they are all effects of prior causes and therefore carry information/meaning about their prior causes.
Whenever someone talks about the world your statement is "Ah, you are referring to your thoughts". Cheap enough, everone knows there is a particular noumenon whose only content is to be no noumenon. Harry: "Ah, that's a noumenon." Okay. Right. But then Harry, who just pointed out that if ppl talk about things they are talking about their mental images, goes on and tries to explain something talking of "actual things". Wait! Didn't he just make up the identity of thing and mind. You did not mean to talk about your actual mental representation there, right? As benevolent readers we can slip over this. No problem at all. A noumenon saying "I'm not a noumenon". - Hahaha. How funny. You are pretty inconsistent there, Harry.
Go on! I'm done.
Not really, its more about the neccesity of providing a definition on the words used when their meaning is not clear to the receptor.
Of course a set of synonyms usually isn't precise enough when someone requires a definition of a word used. Hence a description, possibly accompanied with a synonym is a better way to provide a definition. Of course neither of those is the meaning, it merely is a different representation of the meaning that might be better understood than the single word that was used.
I don't think humans can really avoid projecting, though it can be quite usefull to be aware of doing so and realize that meaning is in the eye of the beholder and all of us are beholders. For an honest vieuw though one can't exlude the meaning and values we appoint to things in our world. When practicing science we should try avoid it, but when it comes to the other neccesities of life, I'm not so sure we should exlude it from the equasion in every instance.
So your argument is an appeal to authority. Your point is valid but weak; and an equally weak and valid argument cancels it out: The fact is a lot of philosophers have used the method in their philosophy: Aristotle, Aquinas, C.S. Lewis, Peter Kreeft.
But now, let's philosophize instead of talking about philosophers. Do you disagree that concepts have essential properties? Do you disagree that the essential properties of the concept 'triangle' are 'flat surface' + '3 straight sides'? Do you disagree we know this because we cannot falsify the hypothesis by coming up with an example of the concept which does not contain these properties? That last one describes the Socratic Method.
No, the exact opposite, it's an appeal to the fact that multiple 'authorities' continue to exist despite 2000 years of Socratic dialect.
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
Yes, but they have clearly achieved absolutely nothing by it, otherwise there would not continue to be a lot of equally intelligent philosophers who disagree with them. I've yet to hear your account of that fact. If Socratic dialogue actually clarifies definitions, then what is the cause of its utter failure to do so for any metaphysical term in ordinary language despite 2000 years of trying?
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
Yes. Clearly the concept of 'meaning' does not have essential properties, if it did we could have elucidated them by now and the vast range of propositions about mean which continue to be held by perfectly intelligent people is testament to the fact that we have not.
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
What is a three-sided shape on a non-euclidean surface then?
Easy. Your intelligent philosophers can be wrong. Proof: Either the Socratic Method to find essences works or it doesn't. If it doesn't, then those intelligent philosophers I named were wrong in their reasoning, thus showing that even intelligent philosophers can be wrong. If it does, then those intelligent philosophers you named were wrong, thus showing the same thing. Either way, some intelligent philosophers must be wrong.
Your insistence on talking about philosophers instead of philosophizing about the topic at hand begs the question: Is the topic so hard for you that it is pointless to explore it for yourself without appealing to other's opinion? What's more, you seem to know their opinion, but not know their reasoning behind it. Thus even if they were right, we would be no closer to acquiring a better understanding of the topic.
Quoting Pseudonym
I can prove the essential properties exist without spending the time to find them. We can use the concept 'meaning' in a coherent sentence; and we can use the concept 'duck' in a coherent sentence. And those two concepts are not interchangeable in a sentence without changing the message. Thus whatever the concept 'meaning' is, it does not coincide with the concept 'duck'. This is sufficient to prove that 'duck' is missing some essential properties that makes a meaning a 'meaning', and 'meaning' is missing some essential properties that makes a duck a 'duck'. And this implies that these beings have essential properties.
Quoting Pseudonym
The answer to your direct question is: not a triangle; for a rounded three-sided shape when flattened no longer looks like a triangle. But this is besides the point. The point is that, right or wrong, you are attempting to falsify my hypothesis, that is to say, using the Socratic Method.
I think you may be missing the point of what I'm trying to say in this thread, so I will try again. My argument is this (note the absence of any appeal to any philosopher, this is my argument, though many others have made it before me);
P1. The words we are struggling to define have been in use for thousands of years.
P2. The method of Socratic dialect has been around, and been used to determine the meaning of these words for thousands of years.
P3. There is little or no agreement on the meaning of these words.
P4. (By inference) A method which has been practiced for thousands of years but has failed to work probably doesn't work.
C1. The Socratic dialect method does not work for establishing the meaning of disputable terms.
The fact that philosopher dispute meaning is evidence for that proposition, it is not necessary for the proposition to determine what they say or analyse their ideas, it is sufficient to say that they have been involved in the Socratic method collectively for thousands of years and yet still disagree with each other as much as they ever did.
I accept your clarification. Now to find a flaw in the argument.
I have an issue about the very subject of the argument: "words we are struggling to define". We judge those words as being "hard to define" precisely because they are challenging through the Socratic Method. But focusing only on those words is cherry picking, and does not account for the words we judge as being "easy to define" through the Socratic Method.
I would also challenge P3. Most words judged as hard to define have resulted in more agreements than disagreements. E.g. The definition of 'knowing' as: 'justify' + 'true' + 'belief', is mostly agreed upon; and those who dispute this definition nevertheless agree that it is close to the mark, as the exceptions found were rare.
I do not dispute that some words are challenging to define; but I claim that:
(1) As far as I know, it is the best method we have.
(2) Even if we do not reach a perfect definition, the method gets us closer to it.
(3) When we do not reach a perfect definition, it is still that very method that allows us to know that.
No, I'm quite happy to admit that there are words we find easy to define, but I doubt many of them find their definition through the Socratic method. Most find their definition through a combination of factors, but mainly common usage.
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
Knowledge as justified true belief has been in doubt since Gettier but the point of my argument is not about consensus, it's about how we justify the process. So what if lot's of people agree, how does that make the one who doesn't more wrong, and if it doesn't automatically make him more wrong, then what method are you going to put forward to convince him otherwise. He's already heard the arguments and still does not agree, what then?
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
I don't dispute this - it doesn't make the method meaningful or pointed though.
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
I simply don't agree, just look at the Phil Papers survey on philosophical positions, most are split almost 50/50, we are no closer to agreement now than when the Socratic method was first proposed.
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
Again, I don't agree, we can use simple empiricism to see that we don't agree, read the words of two philosophers on the subject and infer from your understanding of their different meanings that they don't agree.
But common usage IS the test used in the Socratic Method to verify or falsify a hypothesis definition. Thus we are not really in disagreement here.
Quoting Pseudonym
Their opinion alone is not valuable without the reason to back it up. And that reason is finding counter-examples that falsify the definition, in other words, the Socratic Method.
Quoting Pseudonym
My point was not about the number of people who agree vs disagree. It was the fact that even those who don't agree are not in full disagreement, and simply find the accepted definition to be insufficient.
Take 'knowledge' again. The essential properties of 'justified' + 'true' + 'belief' were found by Plato using the Socratic Method, and the definition was accepted until Gettier in the 20th century. This means the original definition must have been mostly right if it held up for that long. And even assuming that Gettier has successfully demonstrated that some property is missing, this did not demonstrate the three properties as inessential, only insufficient. And finally, it was still the Socratic Method which allowed him to discover that some property was missing, by falsifying the definition with counter-examples.
I just don't understand your position. After all, the Socratic Method is nothing but the scientific method [observation, hypothesis, testing through verification and falsification, repeat] applied to definition of terms as used in the common language. To dispute the Socratic Method is also to dispute the scientific method, is it not?
Because we can prove that all meaningful words have essential properties. Then the fact that we are able to use all words in a meaningful sentence shows that we have some knowledge of their meanings. We just need to uncover the definition by separating the essential properties from the non-essential ones; which is done through the Socratic Method.
I rather think that we sift the intended meaning from the words of another by context, as we have always done. It isn't a detective story, and the Socratic method doesn't apply because it isn't used. If you think it should apply, that's a different matter. But it is not normally used by humans in the way you describe. I wonder if you are talking about ought instead of is? :chin:
No, if it were then philosophers would have to be linguists and definitions could easily be resolved by the dictionary. The staff of the various dictionaries put a tremendous amount of effort into working out the most common way a term is used, but many philosophies deliberately question the common use.
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
I wasn't commenting on the value, only that, contrary to your assertion, it is not the Socratic method which allows me to know when two philosophers disagree, a simple empirical study of their words does that. The expression "I disagree", for example, would do the job.
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
No. Consider the earth-centred solar system, the flat-earth, humours as a cause of disease, phlogiston, creationism. An idea's persistence has no bearing on its rightness.
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
He didn't "discover" some property was missing. He claimed some property was missing, others disagreed, and still do. That's the point, he simply made a claim it was grammatically possible to make and no one had any means of determining if he was right or not.
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
Again, if that was the case then the work has already been done. The staff at the various dictionaries have already invested far more time than you or I ever could in determine exactly what the common usage of words is in the real world. So what more work needs to be done?
The assumption here is that there is a something that is the meaning of a word; and further, if this meaning-of-a-word were identified, we would all agree on it.
But there isn't, of course.
Both. I think it is applied because even your description of sifting the meaning from a proposition by context is still using the Socratic Method on a particular test. I also think it ought to be applied, because it is the scientific method applied to definition of terms as used in the common language. If the scientific method works, then this should work too.
Quoting Pseudonym
The dictionary is a good start, but you will notice that some definitions are not perfect for they do not state the essential properties; they only give a vague description of the term, which is sufficient for most readers to understand the meaning, but not capture the essence. Look up the dictionary definition of 'knowledge' for example.
It is important in philosophy to find the essence of things in order to find essential truths about them. E.g., is x always y?
Quoting Pseudonym
You misunderstood my original point. My point was not to determine how we know others disagree, but what makes them disagree.
Quoting Pseudonym
You are right regarding your examples; but regarding the definition of knowledge, Gettier did not attempt to disprove the original definition, but only to show it was incomplete. And the fact that the original definition held up for so long shows that it must have been close to completeness, otherwise people would have found exceptions earlier.
Quoting Pseudonym
Claims are made valid or not depending on if the reason that backs it up is valid or not. Gettier backed up his claim by finding counter-examples that aim to falsify the original definition. Whether he was successful or not is besides the point; the point being that even he used the Socratic Method.
Does it follow that your comment, made of nothing but words, is meaningless? :joke:
Quoting Banno
Agreed. This is why it is so important to identify that real meaning or concept.
Well, yes, apart from it's use. Which might be to have you think in terms of use rather than meaning.
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
So we should do philosophy by vote?
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
Is it really so inconceivable that words not have a "real meaning"?
IS it the scientific method? I don't agree. Science proceeds by looking and generalising rather than repeated questioning. A scientific approach might be more about stoping to observer the way words are actually used rather than making guesses at a boozy party.
I don't think the argument requires that assumption. Concluding that because a method has attempted to do something for thousands of years but failed to do that thing, it is probably not possible to do that thing by that method, does not imply that it is possible to do that thing by some other method.
The fact that there is no meaning of a word, and that even if there were, we might not all agree, does not invalidate the argument that attempts to find such meaning and engender agreement on it via some particular method have failed.
Or have I misunderstood the point you were trying to make?
How do you know that there are essential properties for such words to be found?
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
Is it?
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
This just repeats the same error; that people would have found some flaw if there was one to find. My examples surely must cause you to question that assumption?
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
No, whether he was successful or not is exactly the point. If he used the Socratic method, but was unsuccessful in sufficiently backing up his claim, and if every other person using the Socratic method to make such claims was also unsuccessful in backing up their claim (empirically true, since no such claims have been taken to be unquestionably 'right'), then at least by inference that pushes us to conclude that the Socratic method does not work as a means of backing up a claim.
The problem with this view is, if words don't point to real things (concepts), then no proposition ever spoken can be objectively true, for truth means 'reflective of reality'. Example: The proposition "The Earth is round" cannot be objectively true if the words 'Earth', 'is', and 'round' don't point to anything in reality.
Quoting Banno
Of course not. I was merely stating I find no flaw in your logic for that quoted sentence; though the conclusion that words don't have meanings doesn't follow from this.
Quoting Banno
That is indeed part of science, but a topic is truly scientific only if it is testable, verifiable, falsifiable. Thus the hypothesis definition is tested and falsified by finding examples and counter-examples in the common language that uses the defined term. This is essentially the Socratic Method.
Real things are all concepts? That's not right.
Same demonstration as given here (middle section).
Quoting Pseudonym
Sure is. It is one of the best ways to arrive at principles. E.g. "Knowledge implies justification", by definition.
Quoting Pseudonym
You gave examples of hypotheses that have been debunked. The original definition of knowledge has never been debunked, but at most, added on to. The fact that it has never been debunked and there was a long time lapse in adding more properties is indeed not a proof, but makes it reasonable to suppose that the original definition is close to the truth.
This is nothing but the scientific method at work: a hypothesis becomes accepted if it is the simplest one that people have not been able to falsify.
Quoting Pseudonym
This statement seems to contradict your previous claim, namely, the fact that people did not find a flaw is not a proof that there is not one to find. Using the same rationale here, the fact the people merely disagree on the result of a method is not a proof that the method is bad. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, merely stating others' opinions without the justification for their opinion is not productive.
Back to the original definition: Justified true belief. Does anyone dispute any of these properties as being essential? If no, then it is reasonable to infer these are truly essential; and credit goes to the socratic method. While it may not have found the perfect definition (yet), it did get us close to the truth by finding these first properties. Personally, I'll take a method that, while possibly imperfect, leads closer to the truth, over the alternative which is nothing.
Yes. None of them is necessarily essential. As ever, it depends on context. For lightweight everyday social chit-chat, none of them need intrude. In a philosophy forum, a little more rigour might be expected. :wink:
I agree, it's important in philosophical conversation to clear up our terms.
There are many ways to go about this, however. One need not provide a glossary at the outset, or at any point in the exchange.
The very process of earnest philosophical discourse tends to provide definition for relevant terms as conversation proceeds. There's no reason to suppose that, in general, there is a beginning and an end to this process of definition, or that the tidy little definitions we may provide from time to time are sufficient for all purposes and immune to revision.
I make it a practice to sort out my own habits of speech, to listen closely to the way my interlocutors speak, to question them about their linguistic intentions when it seems relevant to do so, and to point out differences in my own habits of speech when it seems relevant to do so, in pursuit of mutual understanding and good common sense.
Almost; but rather, the concepts in our mind reflect intelligible beings in reality. What else does it mean to call a statement "true"? A statement is called true because it reflects reality. So the statement must be connected to reality in some way. Since statements are made of concepts (represented by words), then the concepts themselves must be connected to reality. If there is connection between concepts and real beings, then no proposition ever spoken can be called "true"; which is absurd.
Could you give a case example where a person rightfully "knows" something, but that knowledge is either unjustified, untrue, or unbelieved?
Granted, when we say "I know this person", we are here using the word ambiguously. We do not mean here that we believe any truth about this person, but merely that we have met them. Now we are not talking about this type of knowledge, but the type that is about a statement, like "I know x is y".
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
Are they? I don't see any good reason to suppose that this is the case. Indeed, while I have a clear idea of what sort of thing a word is, I have no clear idea of what sort of thing a concept is.
Further, I would have thought that "Samuel Lacrampe" refers to you, and not to my-concept-of-you.
Words are made of letters. The word 'apple' is made of the letters A, P, P, L, E. Words are symbols or signs that point to concepts. A Concept is the intelligible meaning intended by the word. E.g., the words ‘apple’ in english and ‘pomme’ in french are two words that point to the same concept (the fruit thing). On the other hand, the same word ‘bank’ can point to one concept as found in ‘river bank’, or another concept as found in ‘bank account’. This is sufficient to demonstrate that words and concepts are separate things.
Quoting Banno
Words point to concepts, and my point is that concepts coincide with real beings. That's what I mean when I say concepts must be connected to reality. To use your example, the words "Samuel Lacrampe" indeed refer to the real being which is me.
But now I am confused about your position, because I thought you believed the meaning of a word is not a real thing.
Quoting Banno
That depends on the argument Kripke or yourself have to back up that claim. Now admittedly, I am not familiar with the notion of descriptivism. Is it what we are discussing here?
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
Sort of. And hence, concepts are not all that clear either.
A first problem, to get us started. Where are concepts located? Do I have an apple-concept in my head, while you have an apple-concept in your head?
If so, when I present you with an apple and say "Here is an apple", "Apple" refers to the concept-of-apple in my mind; but for you it refers to the concept-of-apple in your own mind. The implication is that, despite the apple being there before us both, we are not referring to the very same thing.
Now I want to be clear that this is not a question that could be answered by some sort of triangulation, where your apple-concept and my apple-concept are found to have something in common; because that thing that they have in common is precisely the apple, not the apple-concept.
ANd if you have to introduce the apple in order to show how our concepts allow us to communicate, you may as well have not introduced concepts in the first place.
What I would like you to see here is how counter-intuitive it is to suppose that a name refers to something other than what is named; to suppose that the word "apple" does not refer to the apple here before us; or that "Sydney" does not refer to that city.
A person who "rightfully knows something", in your terms, is someone who has factual, maybe even Objective, knowledge of something, I think. So no, I cannot offer an example of an Objective truth being incorrect, because that isn't possible. But that doesn't detract from the point I made, which had nothing at all to do with challenging Objective Truth (a stupid and impossible thing to do). Here is what I said.
Quoting Pattern-chaser
In everyday use, we all (appear to) claim justified knowledge when we are actually just exaggerating for effect, to bolster the apparent authority of what we're saying. It's just something people do. Having made that observation, there's little more to say or do. This isn't something that will gain us much if we dissect it thoroughly. It's just something humans do, even if they are wrong to do so. :up:
For simplicity, it is true that we might as well say that concepts are the real beings; or at least their intelligible part. The subtle difference between a concept and a real being is that the real being can exist without the concept existing in my mind if I have not apprehended that being. E.g., a baby has no concept of apples despite apples existing in the world.
To get technical, a 'concept' is a term in epistemology and requires a subject. It is the intelligible meaning our words refer to. A 'form' is a term in metaphysics and does not require a subject; only an object. It is what gives matter its intelligibility, organization, or identity. Once the subject has apprehended the object, then the concept in the subject coincides with the form of the object. We call that 'knowledge'.
Quoting Banno
Indeed, my concept of apple, your concept of apple, and the form of apple from the real being must be one and the same. The problem of location is solved by inferring the immateriality of concepts (the universal kind), forms, and by extension, minds. Thus universal concepts don't have a physical location. The argument goes as follows:
P1: All physical beings are particulars. They all have particular spacial-temporal properties.
P2: Universal concepts are not particulars. Our concept of apple refers to many particular apples.
C: Concepts are not physical beings.
This unity of concepts and form is what connects subjects together, eg, you and I can have a meaningful coherent communication; and connects subjects with objects, eg, we can know something about the outside world.
Pascal summarizes it this way:
Instead, suppose that we just use words to talk about things, including apples, without the intermediary of concepts.
What is lost? What is gained by adding concepts to the mix?
Understood. The point of your comment was therefore to be descriptive, a pure observation of what people do; rather than to be prescriptive, a judgement of what people should do. I accept your point as such.
If science has taught us anything, is that reality is damn complicated. :wink:
As described in my last post, there is a difference between a concept and the real being, but that difference is so minor on a non-technical level that, for simplicity, I can side with you and say that words refer to real beings directly. This removes the need to talk about concepts, and preserves the ability of propositions to be true.
Back to the original dispute. My objection was not directly about concepts, but about your claim that the meaning of a word is not a real thing; that is to say, words don't refer to real things. As per your last post, it seems your new position is that words do refer to real things; thereby moving away from your original position. Am I interpreting all this right?
Well, perhaps it was your understanding of my position that changed. I've long been an advocate of the view that we understand language better if we leave meaning aside and instead look to what we do with words. Been that way for forty years, since I first read Austin.
So to be sure, Nouns refer to things, real or otherwise. Lots of other words do not.
Which is obviously not correct. If that was the case I would not bother to look at the thing. An "Apple" is not in the mind but a real thing that is in the world. In being-in-the-world there is always being involved but that is not reason to talk nonsense. Everyone knows that you think you have an apple there if you say so, but you do not refer to something inside your head - it is in the world.
One could say being in your mind would disqualify that thing from being an apple.
I accept the clarification on your position.
Quoting Banno
Remember that if some words do not refer to beings, that is, are meaningless, then propositions that use those words are also meaningless and thus cannot be true. What would be an example of such words?
That's just wrong. Not all words are nouns.
I wrote extensively about this in a previous incarnation. On thinking about Austin's criticism of universals and Wittgenstein' s meaning as use, it's just not clear what a concept might be, beyond a vague notion of abstraction.
And ...? Propositions are never made of only nouns; and my previous point stands.
Quoting Banno
SO, what being does "No" refer to above?
What being does "and...?" refer to?
What being does "stands" refer to?
My turn. According to you, "Only words that are nouns are meaningful". In that statement, the bolded words are not nouns, and therefore meaningless. The statement is therefore meaningless, and therefore cannot be true. The statement is a self-contradiction.
Now I'm confused. I don't think only nouns are meaningful. Far from it.
So that last post leaves me non plussed. I've no idea at the moment what your position is, or what in my position you object to, if anything.
So I'll just set out my position again. Looking for an entity called "the meaning of a word" is an unproductive process. It is better by far to look at what we do with those words and the sentences we use them to construct. For this reason it is also often unproductive to set out the definitions of an enquiry at its beginning, as suggested in the OP, and much more satisfactory to allow the way words are being used to progress with the discussion.
Now, where are we?
I said no such thing.
I think you two are talking past each other in that you have different understandings of what counts as being. One of you two seems to slide in and out of equivocating "being" and "thing", while the other understands being in a broader sense. Quite ironic considering the OP :wink:
I just read back, looking for this quote, or words that reflect it, and found nothing. Did Banno really say this, or did you make it up? :chin:
Thanks for you clarification on your position. Now do you believe that not all words refer to beings, or do you simply believe that, although they may exist, it is unproductive to look for these beings?
If the latter only, then you are free to believe this. I personally disagree, because it is important to clarify what each person means with their terms at the beginning of the discussion so as to avoid misunderstandings. As points out, we better make sure we mean the same thing when I use the term 'being' and you use the term 'thing'. But this disagreement is not major, and so we can leave it here.
If the former, then this is an error.
P1: To say that words have meanings is the same as to say that words point to beings. Words are created to express the being that is perceived, and not the opposite way around. Men first had to observe a tree before coming up with the word 'tree' to express what they observed. It makes no sense to suppose men first created the word 'tree' to express nothing, and only later on used that word to refer to tree they observed.
P2: All words have meanings. Otherwise propositions that contain those words would effectively be meaningless.
C: Therefore all words point to beings.
Now, those beings that words point to are either real or imaginary. E.g. a 'horse' points to a real being, and a 'unicorn' points to an imaginary being. I think you and I agree on this point. But they all point to a being nonetheless.
This could be. I'll redeem myself by giving my meaning of 'being'.
The term 'being' in philosophy is the same as 'thing'. Because that which is not being is nothing. Beings are categorized primarily as either real or imaginary, where real beings exist outside of a mind, and imaginary beings exist only in a mind. Although an imaginary being is not real, it is nonetheless not nothing.
You have made this claim several times. Each time I have denied it, and several times I have provided counterexamples of words that do not just refer to 'beings'.
Quoting Pattern-chaser
This was my understanding of the position up to that point, as per the quotes below. If my above statement does not reflect that position, then no worries. A minor misunderstanding.
Quoting Banno
Quoting Banno
Quoting Banno
Cheers. Not an issue.
The confusion was that I had taken you to be claiming something very similar; since nouns are words that refer ('point') to things (beings?) I had taken you to be claiming that all words are nouns. And again, that's how I understand you in Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
To take one example, I asked what the word "No" points to in the sentence "No".You replied:
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
Which is not an answer, unless you think "No" points to a state of mind; but that would seem pretty hard to defend.
I suppose one might think that "no" points to a concept - perhaps the concept of negation. But that would simply be creating unnecessary entities - concepts - in order to support the theory that all words refer to something...
It seems to me to be much simpler to point out that "No" has several uses, including denying what has been previously claimed, and expressing surprise or disagreement.
It doesn't point to any being.
There is not one thing that is the meaning of a word, since the meaning will change from one use to another.
Further, there is not one thing that is the meaning of a word, since meanings are not things.
Perhaps it should have been: Is it really so inconceivable that words not have a "real meaning"?
After all, who is to say that one meaning is real, another fake, misleading, erroneous? Mr Webster?
The Oxford does not set out the "real" meaning; it sets out various uses in terms of synonyms.
Adverbs, verbs, adjectives, conjuncts...
Quoting Banno
Perhaps, as Mr Ninja suggested, we should clarify what we mean by 'being' and 'thing'. A being is a thing, in the sense that that-which-is-not-a-being is nothing. As such, a being needs not be a concrete object like a horse or a ball, but may also be a more abstract thing like an action, feeling, state of mind, relation between objects, property, etc. because even these abstract things are not nothing.
Under such a definition, words such as verbs, adverbs, adjectives, and conjuncts still point to beings.
Quoting Banno
I agree; but I also claim that the act of denying, the state of being surprised, and state of disagreement are all beings. E.g. I would never know what the word 'surprise' means if I had never observed a person in that state before. What I observed could not have been nothing.
I agree with this. Many words have the same meaning (synonyms); and many meanings have the same word (homonyms).
Quoting Banno
But there is a thing, a being, as defined in my previous post. To side with philosophers like Aristotle and Hume, we apprehend meanings by observation. And to observe is to observe something.
A blind man born blind would not know the meaning of the words 'colour' or 'blue' or 'bright'.
Really? :chin: A being is a living thing; a thing may be living or not. As you say, "thing" is the most general term, while being is more constrained (to living things). Of course, I only observe how these terms are conventionally used. There is no absolute authority on word definitions, and this is probably a Good Thing. But it is equally true to observe that, if we all just change the meaning if the terms we use, to suit our current needs, communication suffers.
Few people would agree that an action is a being; most people would agree that an action is a thing. :chin:
Ask a blind man. He knows the meaning, but cannot appreciate that meaning as you (a sighted person) can. I know the meaning of X-ray, although I will never sense one directly, as I don't have that ability.
I am using the term as used by Aristotle, Aquinas, and the rest of the scholastic crew. Admittedly, you are right that the meaning is mostly associated with the term 'thing' in common language. I just think using the term 'being' makes you sound like a boss. :cheer:
Quoting Pattern-chaser
Correct. And this is the main point of the OP; that words that have the potential to be ambiguous should be defined at the start of the discussion. And once established, the definitions should stay the same for the remainder of the discussion.
Quoting Pattern-chaser
The meaning of the word 'blue' in common language is literally this. How could he know this meaning? How would you describe it to him? Note that talking about its light wavelength would not cut it; because that is not its meaning in the common language. Even before people knew about wavelengths, they knew the meaning of the word 'blue'.
Also, to use Aristotelian terminology, the wavelength description of 'blue' is merely its material cause, not its formal cause (meaning). :nerd:
Quoting Pattern-chaser
In this case, the meaning of 'X-ray' in the common language is the same for you as it is for everyone else: an electromagnetic wave of certain wavelength or something. But this is different than the meaning of 'blue' for a blind man versus a sighted man.
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
I think this might be too restrictive. For a start, almost all English words have more than one meaning: they are (nearly) all ambiguous. It is impractical to define every word that is scheduled for use in a given discussion. There are just too many of them, and too many different meanings. In some discussions, some words will be used to carry several different meanings. It is pointless to moan about this. It's just a fact of life, and we need to accept it as it is, and deal with it (also as it is). English words are ambiguous. Fact. This is how human language works, right or wrong. I think you are preoccupied with "ought" instead of "is"? :chin:
All we can, and should, do is to attempt to communicate as clearly as we can, and that will sometimes require that we define some of the terms we are going to use, as a courtesy to our fellow debaters. I think that's as close as we can approach your preferred course.
Actually I agree with you. Instead of saying "at the start of the discussion", I should have said "as they come in the discussion". And then, only the key words are important, like 'being' in our previous discussion.
To add to this, I claim that to obtain general truths, like "x is always y", then it is important to find the essence of x, that is, its essential properties.
That's fine, but does not go far enough. What I'm saying I that the meaning changes from one use to another. "Peter likes vanilla" does not have one, fixed meaning; and it's not just because there are multiple Peters. And while it might be tempting to think of this as just context, it's more than that. The sky is blue, but not all of it, and not the same shade f blue, and for the Greeks it was bronze.
No theory that fixes meaning will work.
Meaning is not fixed.
All you've done is claimed that words all refer to beings, and then defined the "being" as the thing that a word refers to.
So what?
Take salty: an adjective which points to a flavour. I had a porterhouse yesterday that had been salted on one side before cooking. It had little in common with the salty smoked bacon I had for breakfast, nor with the Pad Thai; indeed, that saltiness is complimented with umami, a taste I could not name apart from "salty" when I was a child.
What is the being these have in common? You might pretend that they all have the same taste, but that, in the end, is bullshit.
Why not just admit that we use one word to talk about lots of different things?
See how that sentence did not talk about meaning?
That is, stop talking in terms of meaning and instead look to the way we actually use words.
...and yet they do indeed use these words. How can that be, if your account is right?
So this example works in my favour more than in yours.
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
I'm not sure. But you could ask Helen Keller (if she was still alive), who managed to teach deaf, dumb and blind subjects to communicate and interact with other humans in the real world. This is an astonishing achievement, in my view, which just shows how very good humans are at understanding stuff (at least in this particular way). :smile:
Yes, the sky need not be completely blue, and there may be multiple shades, all referred by the word 'blue'. But both cases have some portion of blue, which makes the statements true. If the sky for a particular day was completely orange, then the statement would be false. If meanings did not have some essential properties, then how could we differentiate true from false statements?
Quoting Banno
I am not sure I understand the point you are trying to make. It is either true or false that you perceive the porterhouse, smoked bacon, and pad thai as 'salty', used as one common meaning. If true, then indeed the flavours must have one thing in common, even if the flavours are not exactly the same, inasmuch as there are different shades of blue. It may be true that the porterhouse, bacon, and pad thai are more salty than avocados; inasmuch as the colours turquoise, aqua, and azure are more blue than the colour orange.
I believe that fact is wrong, but for the sake of argument, let's say it is right. Would this not suggest that we have Innate Ideas, as per Plato and against Aristotle and Hume? That without the need of experience, every man, blind or sighted, already knows the idea of colours a priori? Well this still would not change my point that words point to things, in this case, to ideas that we know a priori; am I wrong?
I read up on this a bit. This is indeed astonishing. "She was able to enjoy music by feeling the beat and she was able to have a strong connection with animals through touch".
But I am not sure if she would have been able to perceive the animals' colours; although she may have been able to somewhat perceive the tone of the sounds from the vibration frequencies.
Notice that Mr Edison is quite able to use colour words correctly. Of course, there are some things he cannot do, as he acknowledges; and lots that he has trouble making sense of.
But does he know the meaning of our colour words? He uses them correctly in most cases, so I think we have to say yes.
You could finesse this all you like, but it would come down to showing the basic distinction between you and I in our attitude to meaning; I say it is use, you say... it is something mystical in your head?
And notice that your argument above, for some sort of innate ideas, simply falls apart when you talk to a blind person. Edison's use of colour is not innate; nor is it complete. But it is there for you to see.
And this post should be read in a tone of voice that is somewhat contemptuous of the able bodied telling the disabled what they can and cannot do.
Yes. What is pointed to by Edison's use of "red"?
:up: The autistic community gets impatient with ablism too. Thanks for your words. :smile:
That's just not true.
A red sports car and a red sunset need not be the same colour.
Yet they are both red.
Therefore there is nothing that both uses of "red" point to.
He literally says "What is [color]? I don't know. [...] I don't have any concept of what it is. There is this whole part of vocabulary, of language, that doesn't mean anything to me. Over the years people have tried and tried to explain color to me and I just don't understand it."
If I had know about this video before, I would have showed it to you to prove my point; that we get meanings from experience, and to experience is to experience something.
Quoting Banno
I am starting to think your position is merely that people can use words in a sentence that is grammatically correct, even if they don't understand the meaning of the words. If that is all you are trying to say, then no dispute here.
Quoting Banno
Banno, please try to understand your opponents' position prior to arguing against them. Right now, you are attacking a straw man, because I said that it was your fact, which I disagreed with, that suggested the existence of Innate Ideas. This is not my position. I side with Aristotle and Hume who claim that we obtain our ideas and meanings from experience, and this video proves my point.
Quoting Banno
'Red' points to this, which he has not apprehend. That is his whole point. He said "When somebody says 'something is red' to me, I don't quite get it. [...] Stuff I picked up from hearing about it". He says he does not understand, but can repeat what others told him.
Quoting Banno
Red comes in many shades. They both have some shade of red.
If this is about my statements about blinds, these should be taken as statements of facts, not statements of judgement. Anyways, if I have offended you, then I apologize for that, for my intent is not to offend.
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
I understood you to be claiming that any and every word points to something - which you call a "being"; and further that this "being" is in some way individual, giving the meaning of the word.
It would follow that if there were someone who could not understand what some given word pointed to, then that person could not understand the meaning of the word; and that therefore, they would not be able to use the word.
So I present you with a video of a man using colour words, correctly, despite his inability to see what the word might point to.
Now to my eye this falsifies your theory of meaning.
You now have the choice of finessing your theory using ad hoc material; or you can accept the falsification.
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
Quite so; and yet he uses colour words
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
So one move open to you is to suggest that Edison can only use colour words syntactically, but without the semantics that can only come from knowing what the words point to. Of course, that would be to negate the evidence of his correct use of the words; an ablist insult that I'm sure you would not commit.
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
You misunderstood; the notion of innate ideas was yours, I was just pointing out that Edison obviously learned to use colour words, and was not born with an understanding of them.
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe (lost link in the quote)
So "red" points to a web page? You don't mean that. Nor do you mean that "red" points only to that shade of red, which will be different on your computer than on my laptop, and even on my laptop varies as I move from room to room.
There is no being to which the word "red" points, and in virtue of which it gains a mythical thing called a meaning... All there is, is the different and changing ways in which the word is used.
Yes, you are copying Aristotle and Hume. I'm copying Wittgenstein and Austin.
You are correct about my position.
They would not be able to use the word meaningfully. They can say the word (from hearing other people use it), but not understand it; which is precisely what Mr Edison says. The key distinction is between saying vs understanding. Before I learned to speak english, for it is not my first language, I could sing along to a few english songs, though I would not understand what I was saying at the time.
Quoting Banno
I continue to choose finesse. :wink:
Quoting Banno
If this means roughly the same as being able to use words in a sentence that is grammatically correct but not understanding it, then yes, that is what I am saying. But don't take offence. Mr Edison said it himself:
"There is this whole part of vocabulary, of language, that doesn't mean anything to me. Over the years people have tried and tried to explain color to me and I just don't understand it. [...] Stuff I picked up from hearing about it." You seem to be bluntly ignoring the testimony from Mr Edison himself, and I don't understand why.
Quoting Banno
You are misquoting me. Here is the full quote:
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
From the full quote, you should be able to pick up that this is not my position, and that I am deducing it from a fact that you brought up. Moreover, I already clarified this in my last post. Shall we move on?
Quoting Banno
No, I don't mean that. And thanks for giving me the benefit of the doubt. Gotta celebrate those small steps towards progress.
There is a being which is pure red, close to this, and then there are different shades of red which are composed of pure red and other colours. Pink=red+white. Brown=red+black. Orange=red+yellow. Purple=red+blue. Finally, green has no red in it. The fact that some things are red (to a more or lesser degree) and some things are not red is sufficient to demonstrate that 'red' points to a being with essential properties.
Do you really take Mr Edison's use to be nothing but syntactic?
To what does the word "purple" point, for Tommy?
It can't point to a archetypal purple swatch, as you suggest with red and blue.
This is your theory in a nut shell? An essence of red, a Platonic Form of red, something like these examples, but not actually these examples; and while these examples exist in the world, the true form exists... where? in your mind? In my mind? Somehow, shared between minds? Think of the ontological and epistemic complexity here.
And you offer this as somehow simpler that the claim that we just use the word to talk about different colours.
That's not right. Not by a long shot. Not even close to cogent.
But the fact that we use the word "red" to talk about a range of different colours might be sufficient to convince a reasonable person that there is no one thing to which the word "red" points.
Yes. Not only is it possible, it is asserted by Mr Edison himself: "In this video, I have no idea what I am talking about." He says purple is his favourite colour by association with Prince, which he likes. Whatever purple is, it must be good because Prince is good.
Quoting Banno
Nothing. The word is to him meaningless. That is the point. As he stated in the previous video, he knows a colour is a physical property of objects which we perceive with our eyes (and later our memory), but cannot go any further than that. Thus the blind can know the material cause but not the formal cause of colours.
Again, these videos prove my point, and appear to disprove yours, namely that words need not to point to beings we experience, in order to be meaningful. If you are correct, then how do you explain Mr Edison's statement: "There is this whole part of vocabulary [colours], of language, that doesn't mean anything to me"?
Quoting Banno
As purple is not a basic colour, it has more than one essential property: red and blue. But purple still has an archetype or form. We know this because, again, we observe some colours to be more purple than others. And for a thing which degree does not go to infinity, a more and less implies a most. Like an arrow aimed closer to the target until it hits the bullseye.
"In the mind" insofar that the subject has apprehended the object. Otherwise, only in reality. Where? In no physical location because forms are not physical, but that is a great discussion for another time. :wink:
Quoting Banno
As per Occam's Razor or Law of Parsimony, we should side on the theory that is the simplest AND can explain all the data. My theory is not simpler than yours, but explains all the data, which, correct me if I am wrong, is not the case with yours. How does your theory explain the fact that some statements are true and some are false?
A statement is said to be true if its meaning or message is reflective of reality. In order to do that, the meaning of the words, which the statement is made of, must point to things in reality too. E.g. the statement "This apple is red" is true only if the thing I am referring to is truly an apple and is truly red.
Side note: how do you upload images and videos directly to the post?
Not so. That range of colours must have that form of red to a more or lesser degree, in order to truly call that range red. "This has red" is true. "This has red" is false. Therefore the former range must have a thing which the latter range does not have; and this thing must be defined, that is, must have limits, because it does not appear in the latter range.
SO the only possible conclusion is that one does not need the meaning of a word in order to be able to use it correctly.
That's right. Correct in the sense of grammar or syntax; not in the sense of knowledge, understanding, or truth. Have we reached an agreement on that point?
Indeed, one could simply quote someone else without knowing anything about what is quoted means. Children tend to do so quite a lot. Education tends to start with reproduction before it can get to understanding. Human beings start with attempting to reproduce the language of their parents way before they actually understand what the words used in the language mean.
I have also been puzzled by some poster's aversion to defining terms. But I gradually came to suspect that it's due to a recent (20th century) split in the philosophical community that has been labelled as Analytic vs Literary, or Modern vs Postmodern. It may also be viewed as Reductive vs Holistic. I try to integrate analytical objective methods with holistic subjective intuition in my own personal worldview. But to see them as implacable enemies seems to require a desperate Win-Lose Good vs Evil attitude toward the world.
Postmodernism was just beginning to become a "thing" in my part of the world as I graduated from college. At the time, and in my field of Architecture, I found the PM approach incomprehensible. So I went out into the real world, and treated it as a passing fad. Until, 40 years later, I began to see PM terminology and attitudes popping-up on this forum. So, I'm assuming that some posters were influenced in college by the holistic Literary doctrines of PM. Am I wrong in attributing the ambiguity of some forum "arguments" to Postmodern influences?
In the last few weeks, I've made an attempt to understand where these PM posters are coming from. But they don't seem to be able to explain their avoidance of defining terms, except to imply that to "carve reality at its joints" is an arrogant or hubristic assumption that the continuum of reality can be broken down into reductive parts by those who are embedded in the system. As I noted, if that is so, then Science is impossible and Philosophy is fictional. Instead, the PM attitude seems to be more Political, in the sense that "truth" is whatever the powers-that-be say it is. Hence, PM philosophers seem to be trying to tear-down (deconstruct) the bastions of Modernist oppression, including Science and Capitalism.
After some extended dialogues with what I'm calling "PM philosophers" I got the feeling of ennui that I associate with the play Waiting For Godot. It's a sense of Nihilism, meaninglessness and pointlessness of life. That may not be the way they feel, but it's my frustrated impression of a vague undefined disorganized worldview. Yesterday, I watched a Netflix movie, Everything Beautiful is Far Away, that gave me the same Godot feeling. There was no plot to speak of, just aimless people wandering in the desert for no apparent reason, except they didn't like to live in the polyglot multicultural confusion of the city. What little dialogue that passed between them was focused on pragmatic issues like food & water, or a hypothetical (mythical) lake of water in the desert as a possible destination.
Is this undefined worldview just a minority trend in philosophy, or is it the wave of the future? Am I a dinosaur who believes in a rational world where motley people can communicate and coexist? Should I try to read Wittgenstein and Foucault? Or is it too late for me? :worry:
Who is being identified as a "PM poster" here?
How so? Why?
The answer to your OP question seems to hinge on the definition of "philosophy". And that is the implicit topic of my previous post. Some hold to Aristotle's definition of "First Philosophy" as Metaphysics (being, wisdom, theology). Which, ironically, leaves Physics as "Second Philosophy". But since the enlightenment era, Science has split-off pragmatic Physics as its own domain, and left mushy Metaphysics to feckless theoreticians and theologians.
But then the 20th century notion of what's-what was turned upside-down by Relativity, Quantum Theory, and Big Bang Cosmology. And, 21st century polarized politics has taken Relativity to an extreme, undermining the ground under most of our traditional definitions. So, if all things are relative to some individual perspective, there is no firm foundation for our opinions. In which case, we merely form political interest groups to compete with others that don't share our commitments. Whereas God was long assumed to be the arbiter of objective Truth, in a multi-cultural god-less world, it's everyman a "law unto themselves"
So, what did you mean by "philosophy" : empirical science, or religious theology, or Postmodern politics, or merely general curiosity about reality? I have only skimmed the prior posts, but they seem to fall into the usual narrow attitudes toward what qualifies as a philosophical definition and as acceptable facts. Hence the discussion quickly veers off into separate chat rooms of those holding compatible views, versus those "idiots who don't know what they're talking about". Is this philosophy, or merely political debate? :chin: :roll: :confused:
First Philosophy : http://serious-science.org/what-is-first-philosophy-9029
Before I suggest it, what do you think of the idea of the ability to view a thread sorted by "best posts" independent of any sort of rating system that does anything toward the poster.
Example. This thread under such a system. You can sort by "highest rated posts" and naturally some of the best posts are results of former posts, so you can "pivot" or "traverse" rather the argument or idea both backwards and forwards.
Again this proposed system has absolutely no effect on the poster or any posters independent of the discussion.
Any serious attempt to answer the existential questions.
How do you suppose to determine what is 'best' without any sort of rating system?
As soon as some system proclaims one comment better than the other, it has it effects on its posters.
You may be right. I've spoken someone rejecting any form of rationality claiming that only strictly empirical science is valid. As if any of the empirical sciences could exist without the rational approach of logic as in math.
When definitions change at a certain point in time, there will by definition be multiple definitions in use as some people have picked up the new definition and others haven't (yet), hence I'd consider it to be even more important to provide the definition intended in such times. As long as there are multiple definitions possible, providing the intended definition strikes me as the only way to prevent mistaking what was intended by applying another definition when reading/listening than the writer/speaker intended in his/her statement.
Empirical science is indeed validated by its pragmatic results in the real world. But Theoretical Science (philosophy) can only be validated if & when it produces practical specific real-world results. Unfortunately, that may be a long time coming. But in the meantime, the theory may be useful as a component of our general understanding of the world. Newton's solar system cosmology was our best theory, until Einstein came along and generalized it --- via math, not experiment --- to the whole universe. :smile:
Theoretical Science : The data serve to suggest the theory, to confirm the theory, to disconfirm the theory, to prove the theory wrong. But these are the tools we use. What interests us is the content of the theory. What interests us is what the theory says about the world.
https://newrepublic.com/article/118655/theoretical-phyisicist-explains-why-science-not-about-certainty
Some people think Wittgenstein invalidated the concept of definitions, by noting how definitions vary depending on context. But that's all the more reason to specify your meaning in the current context, and not to just leave the meaning open to all interpretations. :smile:
Quoting Gnomon
You mean like when I happen to use the word 'literally' I also have to explain that the way I use the word is not intended as 'figuratively' since the dictionary added the opposite meaning of the old word to it's definition?
Apparently I have to, but I really hate that I have to do it as it takes a lot of time. I used to be able to use the single word 'literally' to refer to what I mean, now I have to add a whole sentence to exclude the opposite meaning of the word.
That is not progress, that is regression. And why? because too many people started to use it as a form of emphasis rather than learning the meaning of the word and using it as such. Just like how the abbreviation of desoxyribonucleinicacid got into the hands of those making commercials who now use it to mean something like the word 'characteristic' while it obviously doesn't have anything to do with the chemical compound it actually refers to since they even go as far as to claim that a certain model of cars "clearly have the DNA of Spyker", unless they chopped op Spyker and put a piece of him in every car produced in that line, it's obviously not a proper usage of the word. But alas we in the west exchanged our visiting church once a week to watching commercials throughout the day every day of the week.
So I partly agree with you. I agree one should be clear on ones intend, and if asked for elaboration it should be provided, but I cannot account for all possible other interpretations of my words that are based on peoples ignorance on how the dictionary of the language they claim to use defines the word. They can ask me for clarification or look it up in the dictionary, or both.
What if among the many people who read my comments there is someone who hasn't learned to count properly and when I mention the number 3 I have to mention that I don't mean any of the other natural numbers, and since the person doesn't know what natural numbers are, I have to list all of them? That would mean I would never get to the end of my sentence.
Unfortunately, relying on standard dictionary definitions ignores the distinction between Semantics (literal meaning) and Semiotics (emotional or contextual meaning). The science & philosophy of Semiotics became necessary in the 20th century, in part due to the proliferation of communication channels, and to the complex layering of subcultures. More recently, Kahneman & Tversky labeled a variety of ways that otherwise obvious meanings can be misinterpreted (e.g. availability heuristic), due to common errors in reasoning. That's especially true for Characterizing Labels.
In the Reductionism and Holism thread, my usage of "holism" as a scientific term was challenged. I was told that I didn't know what I was talking about. And it turned-out that the challenger was working with a vague Scientific definition, but his objection mostly involved a Semiotic meaning of the word, due to its negative association with New Agers & Hippies. For some people, the word "holism" -- like long-hair for males in the 60s -- still symbolizes counter-cultural lifestyles, and an anti-science attitude.
That lingering antagonism toward an appropriate scientific & philosophical term, forced scientists using holistic methods to label their work as Systems Theory, in order to avoid the biased baggage. However, to be more specific, the full name of the theory would be "Theory of Whole Systems". That's contrasted with Reductionism, which is a theory of fragmented systems.
So, if your intended meaning is misunderstood on this forum, it may not be due to ignorance of the dictionary definition, but to a prejudiced attitude toward what the term signifies or symbolizes. That shouldn't happen on a philosophical forum, but even philosophically-inclined people are subject to emotional & prejudicial errors in reasoning. Which is why some of the most contentious threads go-on-&-on, without reaching an agreeable interpretation of the topic. :smile: