The Ontology of Linguistic Meaning
First, a bit of background:
But that's just the background. What I want to discuss, or at least try to figure out, is the related ontology of that. I only know so much in this regard, yet other people seem to think that they know more than I do.
So, how about some more background?
So, what kind of things are involved here? Are abstractions involved? If so, what things are an abstraction, and what [i]even is[/I] an abstraction?
Is this ontology thing even the right way to think about this, or is there a better way? Perhaps making it more about language or categories? Is this just what is called a language game, or is there something more substantial to it?
And have we clever philosophy-types figured out what an apple is, yet? What's going on there? Is that related?
I have my own theory about meaning. I say that it is rule-based and objective. With English, in a nutshell, it seems to me that people invented the language, made up the rules, agreed on them, started speaking it, started using it as a tool for communication. "Let's use the symbol 'dog' to mean those furry things with four legs that bark". Once the meaning in the language has been set, then that's that. That's what it means. The rule applies, unless and until there's a reason that it stops applying. One such reason could be if the rule was changed, which I think is easier to grasp on a smaller scale: a created language of just two people, for instance. The two people could have used English for the template of their language, but then later on decided that "dog" no longer means those furry things with four legs that bark, but instead means what the word "sink" means in English: a fixed basin with a water supply and outflow pipe. In their language, it makes sense to say, "Put your dinner plate in the dog for now, and I'll wash it up shortly".
But that's just the background. What I want to discuss, or at least try to figure out, is the related ontology of that. I only know so much in this regard, yet other people seem to think that they know more than I do.
So, how about some more background?
I am not an idealist, or a subjectivist here, although I acknowledge some related things like empiricism and subjectivity where they seem appropriate. But I probably won't find these positions agreeable enough to reach the same conclusions, so these positions probably won't help much.
I am not a physicalist, although I can acknowledge much that is physical. But the mindset of assuming that there must be a physical explanation for everything seems problematic to me. I've encountered what strike me as category errors here.
I am not a dualist, although perhaps I could become one. I've heard there's some sort of problem of interaction here, and it seems to have hung around since Descartes. Or is there a solution I'm not aware of?
I am perhaps best described as a sceptic here.
So, what kind of things are involved here? Are abstractions involved? If so, what things are an abstraction, and what [i]even is[/I] an abstraction?
Is this ontology thing even the right way to think about this, or is there a better way? Perhaps making it more about language or categories? Is this just what is called a language game, or is there something more substantial to it?
And have we clever philosophy-types figured out what an apple is, yet? What's going on there? Is that related?
Comments (735)
I'd describe you as not sceptical enough, I'm surprised you're still talking about this.
We don't agree on this topic but I don't think to resume our discussion in this thread would lead to anything constructive.
So let's set that idea aside so that I can try to help.
There's another thread I saw, "Do all Chess games exist in some form" which I thought paralleled the question here in some regard. The rules of chess make the game, they exist as a rule-set which has meaning transcendent of interpretation (as far as you're concerned) and so all the possibilities for language use within the rules of language could also be conceivable possibilities. This kind of logic, I believe it bolsters your argument. As all the inadequacy for dealing with specificity in definitions and rulesets which your previous understanding ignored or couldn't articulate is now resolved by the concept of possibilities within a ruleset.
Meaning proving humans interpret words and rulesets differently and changing them to some degree and proving the inadequacy of rules in the meaning of language would no longer be a relevant critique. Since the rules of the language incorporate the possibilities of variations in interpretations and superficial rules or rule implementation.
I don't think you ever admitted that this was a weakness in your argument but I did and so I thought this counterargument I created to some of my criticism might help you in some way.
For example, you allege an "inadequacy for dealing with specificity in definitions and rulesets" which you further allege that my understanding "ignored or couldn't articulate".
This part is the most important bit to start thinking about. Imagine that we had to write an account covering in detail exactly how this part works. It must work some way, or, well, it wouldn't work.
So leading up to it, as a bit of a caricatured/oversimplified description, since there's no dispute about this part, we've got Joe and Betty and Pete and Jane and so on all suggesting words for the language, just what the words are going to refer to in terms of other words, in terms of pointing at things and so on (this aspect we might have to get back to and detail a bit with respect to meaning, but we'll just skim over that for the moment), and they reach agreements about all of this and so on. One of the terms they reach an agreement on is "dog."
Then along comes Frank, say. Maybe he's Joe and Betty's kid, maybe he's an immigrant--whatever. He's new to our milieu. So Frank needs to learn the language. Let's first detail how he learns "dog"/what "dog" means. (And I'll have some questions as we detail this, but let's just start with how the process proceeds.)
He learns the rule, which he could do through witnessing how the word is used in conversation, or by looking up the definition in a dictionary of the language.
Okay, and one question here (this is kind of the easiest question, so I'll start with it), is that the way the word is used in conversation or the definition given in a dictionary isn't just the way the word is used in those particular conversations or the way it's defined in that particular dictionary (so that it's a fact that it was used that way in the conversation in question or that it was defined that way in the dictionary in question), but somehow it becomes the right/correct meaning, correct?
An "apple" refers to a category of things which are different in some ways but similar in others, the word is used literally, figuratively and could be expanded and contracted to include particular differences but not others - for instance the introduction of a genetically modified orange "apple" could still called an "apple". It can be used to refer to an actual apple or an image of an apple which may allow for further departure from the actual qualities of an apple such as being different in size or proportions to what is found in the real world yet it's still called an apple.
Languages as they do not offer rules which encompass the variety of interpretations for what an apple could be or even is in so far as the word is used. Expressions like "the apple of my eye" make no sense when using the definitions offered by dictionaries. The context of the usage of the word can change the meaning but again, you won't find rules for this.
Your argument that language operates on rules which are not dependent upon intelligent species doesn't hold up to scrutiny in that there are no rules as you suggest. You mean it figuratively at best but there's no need for such ambiguity provided you acknowledge the parameters that hold all of these interpretations and contexts for the word that do exist or could exist in the future together. As the emergence of these interpretations and contexts did not constitute a departure from the English language but rather added to it in a way which did not change the language fundamentally.
This idea of a "fundamental English" which serves as parameters for interpretations that don't break the rules is useful to you. You don't have to define "dog" because provided there are rules for establishing what a "dog" is and correcting unworkable deviations from those definitions then you have an English which accommodates figurative use, metaphorical use, alternative interpretations (particularly with regards to specificity) and so on.
I think the notion that English incorporates a range of definitions but also excludes definitions based on rules is a better argument than your current one which is relying on rules which you can't actually articulate but maybe you don't see the merit.
Doesn't matter to me because I think both arguments are wrong (as arguments for objective meaning), my version just seems less wrong in a technical sense.
Only for that usage, yes. If you take a meaning, as per usage or dictionary definition, then it is only correct per that usage or dictionary definition, not per any other.
So if Frank uses or defines the term differently, then the the meaning changes on those occasions?
He can't change the language on his own, because it is not his language. It already has established rules. If he wants to create his own language, based on the original language, with his own meanings and rules, then he can do so.
So once a definition is set forth, it can't be changed, at least not by just one person. How does that work?
No, these are all just rules. There's a rule that this new variation is to be called an "apple", there's a rule that "apple" in this instance isn't to be taken literally. Show me something where I can't give you the rule.
Quoting Judaka
It does hold up to scrutiny. You're just implicitly switching between languages when you say that some variation or interpretation isn't covered and suggesting that that's a problem. If it isn't covered by a rule in the language, then it doesn't apply to begin with, and there's no issue to even address. And if it is covered in a different language, then that rule applies. So if you take an x and it isn't an "apple" in the language, then what's the problem? There's no meaning there in the language, no suitable rule which applies. And if you say, "Oh, but according to this language, x is an 'apple'", then yes, according to [i]that[/I] language, x is an 'apple'. There's either no meaning to begin with, or it applies as per the language rule, and whether or not we all die a minute later remains completely irrelevant.
Quoting Judaka
I don't see the merit in contrast to my current position, because you characterise my current position as based on a falsehood, namely that I can't actually articulate rules I'm relying on, when I demonstrably can. You don't seem to understand my argument.
And you type too much. Type less. Simplify.
It works as per what we said at the start. A language rule was established. They all agreed on the meaning. A new person can't just waltz right in and begin changing the rules of the language without a process of establishing these rule changes in the language. He couldn't even if he tried, he'd just end up creating a different language with different rules.
Are we saying something different than, "The people who agree to think of x in y way will probably not change their mind just because one person does something different"?
Indeed, that's not what I said. That's just a related statement. What of it?
In other words, is that equivalent to what you're saying?
You able to "create rules" but you are unable to articulate the rules that currently exist or point anyone towards where they are written. It is poor for someone to suggest there are rules which lead to objective meaning but then they are not able to articulate what rules they're talking about. I struggled to understand how someone can think that's a reasonable position, the argument is incomplete. So I gave some thought to making your argument comprehensible.
The "rules" you have tried to create in the past don't even account for context, figurative use, metaphorical use, specific boundaries for usage, they don't generate the specificity required for objective meaning and they don't even make sense as rules for how the word is currently and correctly used.
That's why using a ruleset which accounted for a range of possibilities in interpretation and usage is more realistic. You could argue this ruleset has formulated ranges of possibilities which when put together (much like the chess game) are independently coherent.
I don't mind dealing with arguments which I believe are wrong but I don't think yours even makes sense. I realise we hit an impasse at this before and I don't believe I'm better equipped to overcome it now than I was back then so if you think there's no merit in how I've recommended the "rules" of a language be referred to then I'll just move on.
Isn't he just saying that he considers definitions, grammar stipulations, etc.rules? Those are written in dictionaries, grammar texts, etc.
No, he is saying that the rules of language can be understood without the use of interpretation. He argues that language can have rules which result in that language functioning using those rules to generate objective meaning (i.e meaning which doesn't have to be interpreted).
No. It's just related to it.
Well, thank you. I really appreciate you going to effort of creating a new argument which fixes the problems I never had with my argument which you clearly do not understand, as evidenced by the above.
I didn't think you would appreciate it but the senselessness of your argument bothered me so I did it all the same.
I will for the sake of curiosity, humour you and ask you to tell me where I am wrong? I think I can give quotes from you to substantiate my recounting of your argumentation.
That and more. They don't even have to be written. They just have to be evident from something or other, whether implicitly or otherwise, and I have no problem - contrary to what Judaka asserts - with articulating a rule upon request. Language makes no sense whatsoever without rules. Rules are fundamental.
No, I'm not saying that. It's unwise to try to explain to someone else my position when you don't even understand it yourself, or at least you word it wrong. Obviously understanding requires interpretation. Nothing can be understood without it.
Quoting Judaka
It doesn't have to be understood at the time for there to be meaning. But obviously it has to be understood for it to be understood.
Let's not repeat the errors on display in the other discussion here. That's not what this discussion is for. I explained that I already have my theory, and that idealist logic is unhelpful.
That whole quote, more or less. You say that I'm unable to articulate the rules, when I am. You say that that I'm unable to point towards where they're written, when I am in some cases, although that's not even necessary anyway.
It's coming back to me a little now. From what I recall, you just make some trivial semantic point and refuse to recognise the rules as rules when I provide them. And based on that wrongheaded starting point, you reach your irrelevant conclusions.
Okay, so how does what the group of people do, re their agreed-upon definition, their usage, etc. become the meaning contra what Frank might do later?
For one, you're probably using "rule" different than I'd use it. I wouldn't use "rule" for something that's not both explicit in some manner and that doesn't have specific consequences if it's broken.
There are rules everywhere you look. There are rules for establishing the rules of the language. So long as he follows the rules, there isn't a problem. If he doesn't follow the rules, then he can't get what he wants - that is, if he wants to change the language.
Well, I just use the word understanding in the sense that the meaning synthesises to a point where it is complete without interpretation, I understand you think people always interpret, which I agree with.
Quoting S
Let me further refresh your memory.
Quoting S
Quoting S
I understand your argument as well as anyone who can understand an argument that doesn't make sense can. The rules you are talking about could very well not even be in existence yet, certainly, they are unknown to you when someone else is speaking, why would you promise you can articulate rules you don't even have access to?
As for the first quote I provided, it doesn't appear that you can actually refer to any kind of legitimate source for rules, it's just a free for all - how can you provide rules for English? Or my usage of words? You can speak for yourself and hypothetical people at BEST and I don't think you could even do that without a lot of effort, repeated tries and you'd probably need help.
I do not wish to reignite the same argument that I gave up on when I don't have a plan on how to handle it differently, see your position in a new light or indeed see you in a new light. I am just curious as to how it appears as though your positions have changed. Are you perhaps just making it up as you go?
Okay, well we simply disagree on the first point. Rules don't have to be explicit. They can, however, be made explicit.
As for the second point, there are specific consequences if it's broken, so your point doesn't apply. If you give me an example, I can give you the specific consequences if it's broken. The obvious thing that comes to mind straight away is miscommunication, and automatic expulsion or disqualification from the language game.
So are we saying that "in order to get what one wants from others, one must do such and such"?
I mean a specific, concrete or practical, non-metaphorical consequence. The consequence is a specific punitive action taken by other persons.
I have no idea what "expulsion or disqualification from the language game" would even refer to.
For example, if a store has a "No shirt, no shoes, no service" rule, then breaking that rule will get you kicked out of the store.
Funny. You say that I'm not making sense, then you talk of rules which could very well not exist, which is obviously not what I'm talking about at all. I'm only talking about rules that do exist. And rules that are merely unknown to me are merely rules that are unknown to me. Likewise with access. I reject the bad idealist logic which ties existence and knowledge together, and this is no place to regurgitate that bad logic.
I accept that I can't articulate a rule that I don't know. How could I? That's obvious. It's also not a problem. It would mean whatever it means in the language. Why wouldn't it?
Quoting Judaka
That's either ludicrous, or, as I assessed, boils down to your trivial refusal to recognise whatever I refer you to as rules for English. And I'm almost certain that the issue is the latter. So, if it's the latter, then why should I waste my time doing that?
Quoting Judaka
:roll:
I already have a theory, and an argument in support of it, and I'm looking to develop it and explore other angles.
But if you're just going to repeat the same problems from the other discussion instead of a more productive approach, then I would rather you did not respond at all.
No, once again, you can't simplify it like that without misrepresenting it. I won't accept a rough simplification which could end up being weaker and more susceptible to any potential attack you might be considering. What's wrong with [i]my[/I] wording?
I mentioned miscommunication. You don't consider that impractical? When Frank says "dog", he means something completely different, which causes initial confusion, which is a problem, and which would need to be resolved in order for successful communication between Frank and the others to take place.
I'm trying to figure out just what we're claiming in terms of "medium-size dry goods"--that is in terms of what's literally going on, from a practical perspective, of people and things "doing things"--actions and events.
With rules, the consequence is a specific punitive action taken by other persons. I should also add with some consistency of punitive action, by various people, whenever that rule is broken by various others. It can be a range of possible punitive actions, but they'll be actions we can specify (for example, various possible sentences for breaking a law, with laws being one type of formalized rules . . . another example would be the range of fines, suspensions or outright expulsion of an athlete re a particular pro sports organization)
Naturally, if the speaker can make a rule then he can make more rules (in the future).
You are now talking about English as if everyone has their own personal English which was not the case before, again, I can substantiate this if needed.
In this case, I actually agree that you don't need my argument, that was intended for the idea that there is one English.
Quoting S
What are you talking about? Mind-independent knowledge or "does a tree make a sound in a forest does anybody hear it?" type stuff? I don't think you ever understood what I was saying despite your enthusiasm to tell me I'm wrong because this has nothing to do with it. I don't know if I want to explain it again either.
Okay, then we'd need to break down what I was talking about, and try to account for each "thing" and their relations. That's my wording we'd have to do that with, not yours.
So, going back, we have rules, language, following or not following, a person, what he wants, and changing the language.
What next? You want to name or categorise each thing? Seems to me that there are abstractions, actions, a person, a desire, relations. Fundamental laws of logic and facts also seem necessary to make sense of the situation, as does science to some extent.
Is that any help?
This just seems like you're making up your own rules about rules. Rules about rules which have some truth to them, but which I don't agree with because they purposefully rule out the rules that I'm taking about if the rules that I'm talking about break your rules for rules.
Blimey, that was a bit of a mouthful. See what I mean when I said that rules are everywhere you look?
Re the post above this, I need to take more time with it, so I'll answer it when I get back from the running around I need to do.
Re this one, I was just stressing that we must be using "rule" differently. No problem with that. I'm just pointing it out.
Yes, and that's still irrelevant. I'm not talking about potential or future rules which do not presently exist. I never was.
Quoting Judaka
Isn't it funny that it's always my fault when someone misunderstands my argument? It's never theirs.
There is English, which is a public, shared language with established rules. Then there is our usage of that language, which it sometimes makes better sense to call a separate language of its own, based on English. If I use a well known English word, like "dog", and I create a new rule for it, then I've deviated from English in a subtle way. Subtle, that is, except when I use that word in my way (or by my language) amongst proper English speakers, and the incongruence becomes apparent.
This is not the first time that I've gone over this subtle difference, but I get it: it's all my fault, and you're entirely blameless. Right?
Quoting Judaka
If you're not hinting at idealist assumptions about the supposed connection between existence and knowledge, then you should stop bringing them up together in the same context when the existence part was completely irrelevant. I'm not talking about nonexistent rules! That's absurd. Then you followed that by talking about unknown rules. That seemed odd and unnecessary, and I was just trying to make some semblance of sense out of what you were doing, and why you were doing it.
If your point was just that I can't articulate a rule that I don't know, then sure, I've agreed, and I've pointed out the irrelevance. Your point about nonexistent rules was also irrelevant. Do you have a [I]relevant[/I] point to make?
Errands got postponed a bit, so I can answer this now.
What I want to stick with for a minute is meaning on your view (although I suppose that necessarily is about rules on your view, too, so we're kind of doing both). (Also, I'm avoiding that we use "meaning" differently.)
The issue at the moment (remember there are other questions I haven't gotten to yet about this) is how we get from a group of people specifying that x will be defined as y to that somehow "transcending" (or whatever we'd want to call it--I can't think of a better word at the moment) it simply being a contingent fact that those individuals define x as y, that they'll probably not agree to define x as z instead just because someone wants to, that they contingently may not understand someone who defines x as z, etc
On your view, if S defines x as z, and S is the only one, S is wrong about the definition/meaning of x, right?
So I want to figure out how that becomes the case. That we're not just reporting contingent facts about what some group of people are doing, but making true/false normative claims that are somehow independent of what the group of people who defined x as y happen to do.
One place that we're probably going to have a major bone of contention on this is that you believe that "there are abstractions," presumably in some sense where we're not simply talking about an individual thinking about something in a way that we call an abstraction. The latter is what I think. If you think that abstractions are something more than this, I'm going to be curious just what you think they are, just how they come to be and persist, etc..
When did I ever talk about existence or knowledge? You mean the existence of rules? If you were talking about English then I'd be correct but since you started talking about an individual's rules / unstated rules then I'm not sure, I have not personally ever articulated or understood my "rules" for language use. You called me an idealist on the basis that I didn't accept English had particular rules, a claim which for you substantiated the existence of objective meaning, you said you demonstrated a paradox merely by showing that we could communicate with each other. I can substantiate all claims I've made with quotes as necessary.
Your argument has completely changed, most of what I said was relevant only to English as a shared language.
As far as your own personal rules go, in so far as they are independently coherent, this is all interpretation. Meaning doesn't exist without interpretation, that's my position.
The meaning of your rules to plants, rocks and gas and whatever else is left without intelligent life - it's not even a question of whether it exists or not, the idea of meaning doesn't even exist anymore.
Objective meaning doesn't even make sense as a concept - it means what to whom? How does it mean something to nobody? You take a concept like meaning which is necessarily possessed by one and play with the notion of it existing independently and call those who disagree with you idealists. Absurd! You have never witnessed meaning held by no one in your life but you've taken your thought experiment too far and you've lost sight of what meaning actually is.
That's just an explanation in terms of social relations. What about the language itself? What about what the words mean in the language, according to the established rules of the language?
I am drawing closer to thinking that monistic and reductionist explanations almost inevitably encounter problems. Are you not thinking to yourself something like, "I need to get rid of that terminology", or, "I need to make that all about something else, like people, thoughts, actions, etc."?
Quoting Terrapin Station
Wrong according to the established rules of the language, if the established rules of the language contradict or preclude what S is doing with his own rule.
Quoting Terrapin Station
We have to be careful that we're talking about the right sense of independence here. Rules don't establish themselves, after all. But once they're established, I simply ask: wherefore art thou, necessary dependency?
I go by the realist logic, which seems very reasonable to me, that if x means y, then x means y.
I don't go by any logic which I think Russell would call psychologism. That is, something like: x means y if x means y & if and only if x is understood by S & y is understood by S &...
Quoting Terrapin Station
I'm curious too. And I'm not necessarily going to be able to answer your questions and solve the mystery.
But a mystery is better than a bad explanation, right?
So the point here is precisely this: you believe that what's going on is something other than those social relations. I want to get at just what is going on, just how things work aside from those social relations in your view.
(I don't personally think something else is going on. I'm definitely a reductionist, as long as we're including relations in our reductions. I don't buy that anything is more than the sum of its parts, as long as the parts include relations, too.)
Quoting S
Sure. So I want to get at how the established rules are the established rules where we're not just talking about social relations (in your terms--my analysis would have a lot to do with how individuals are thinking about things, too). How does that work?
Quoting S
Right. So, the group of people define x as y, and then from that point on, x is y, whether anyone in the future thinks so or not, because . . . well, I haven't the faintest idea why that would be the case. So that's what I'm hoping we can dissect somehow. How does that act of christening ("x shall be defined as y") obtain a "life of its own" so to speak?
I also buy psychologism and I think that one of philosophy's biggest blunders has been its attempts to reject psychologism.
Do you have amnesia? I was referring to the following:
Quoting Judaka
Quoting Judaka
Yes, that's what we're talking about: rules. And you yourself brought up existence in relation to rules. You said that they could very well not be in existence, even though they can't, because I was only ever talking about existent rules, and it couldn't "very well" be the case that existent rules don't exist. But it probably wasn't a contradiction, just a fallacy of irrelevance, because you were talking about something else.
Quoting Judaka
Look, I've said before that if you're just going to deny that what I'm calling rules of English are rules of English because your own semantics - your own rules! - don't allow that, then I don't find that very interesting. Let's just agree to disagree and leave it there if that's the case, which it seems to be.
I've given plenty examples of what I'm calling rules. You can call them whatever you want. I don't care.
Quoting Judaka
No, it's your comprehension which I think has changed, not my argument. You pick up some parts, but not others; you misunderstand something, but then you adjust your understanding. I know it's a cliché, but it's not me, it's you.
Quoting Judaka
Good for you. Obviously I reject that position, and this is absolutely not the place to go over it again. Hence me ignoring the rest of your post which shamelessly attempts to do just that, in spite of my clearly stated wishes. The bad idealist logic belongs in the discussion I created to discuss bad idealist logic. Take it there, if you want. That discussion is still open.
I wonder if anyone here can help me out. And no, by that I don't mean a rejection of what I've been constructing to be replaced by something else entirely. Especially not idealism.
I don't even hold the position of speakers creating rules... I think that the whole thing is nonsense.
I entered this thread with the intention of sharing a perspective which I thought would improve your position, not argue further.
I only stayed in this thread because you continue with your dishonesty but you keep going and it's no longer worth the effort. The notion that you only assert rules exist for individuals is untenable with the assertion that by demonstrating I understand your words (through the rules of English) you've demonstrated objective meaning.
It is as expected, difficult to communicate with people who judge and condescend immediately.
What rules? Show us one of these rules.
All the rules which I know of are expressed with language, so it takes language to make a rule, as far as I understand "rule". If this is the case, then the existence of language cannot rely on rules, because language is required to make rules.
I just did. It's there in what you quoted.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Look at how you begin: the expression of a rule, you say? No way! It's expressed in... language?! Get outta town! I thought it was expressed in watermelon.
Yes, Metaphysician Undercover. A rule expressed in language is indeed a rule expressed in language.
Yes, Metaphysician Undercover. I believe you when you say that you don't know any better. This isn't much help to me, I'm afraid.
Where's the rule? I don't get it. I don't see it.
Quoting S
Right, so I'll repeat the point. If rules only exist as expressed in language, then rules are created by language. Therefore language is prior to rules, as a cause of existence of rules, and rules are not required for language.
I'm not getting you. What's "a rule" other than the statement, do this under these circumstances, or do that under those circumstances? To understand what the words mean is one thing, but it's not the rule. The rule is the statement itself.
Rules need not be explicit. For example, the so-called rules of grammar were operative long before anyone analyzed actual language usage and explicitly formulated them. So a rule is certainly not merely the statement of it.
I don't believe this, I think you're fabricating again. How could there be a rule which was not formulated? There's no such thing as an unformulated rule, it couldn't exist as a rule if it wasn't formulated. What form would the rule have, if it were unformulated? It could have no form because that form would be a formulation of the rule. And if it didn't have any form, how could it exist? Saying that a rule exists before it is formulated is like saying that a thing exists before it exists. It's pure nonsense.
Rules of grammar are stated. If they're not stated, they do not exist as rules of grammar. You need to distinguish habits of language use from rules. Just because a person is in the habit of doing something in a particular way, (e.g. I am in the habit of calling this thing a "laptop"), this does not mean that the person is following a rule. Furthermore, people learn habits from each other, through observation and experience, without referring to rules. Rules are created to curb habits. So the habits exist before the rules relating to those habits, are produced. You ought not confuse these two, thinking that people acting in a similar habitual way, are following a rule.
It's expressed in the quote. It's unreasonable for you to expect me to do anything else here. How can I show you without expressing it? You're basically asking me to express it without expressing it, which is obviously an unreasonable request.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The antecedent in your conditional is false.
Spot on, as ever. :up:
I wouldn't understand how you're using the term "rule," in the vein of my comments above re how I use that term.
I agree that a rule isn't merely the statement of it (people need to apply meaning to the statement, for example), but I don't get what you'd be referring to re an inexplicit rule. What definition of "rule" would you be using?
Right, that's my point. A rule can only exist as expressed by language. The rule requires language for it's existence, it is dependent on language. Therefore language is prior to rules, as required for the existence of rules, and it is impossible that language depends on rules.
Quoting S
If you think that it is false that a rule can only exist as expressed in language, then the onus is on your to give evidence of this. You said above, that this is an unreasonable request. It is not, an unreasonable request. You are claiming X is false, and the request is for evidence to back up your claim that X is false. If you cannot show me a rule which is not expressed in language, then it is your claim, that X is false, which is unreasonable.
Your point is that you're being unreasonable? We agree for once!
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Each of us have a burden, with respect to what each of us have claimed, unless I retract my stronger claim and revert to scepticism. Then it would just be on you.
Anyway, I'll think about and address your argument at a later time, as I'm just about to go out. :victory:
Wow, your (dim) wit never ceases to amaze me. It would be unreasonable for me to expect you to do anything else. But that something else is what is required of you to support your claims. So it would be unreasonable for me to expect that you could support your claims. You seemed to recognize this as well, in which case we would have agreement.
[quote=quoted in the OP, unattributed]With English, in a nutshell, it seems to me that people invented the language, made up the rules, agreed on them, started speaking it, started using it as a tool for communication.[/quote]
The same way apes invented humans, agreed on their traits, and then started being them?
Why does the genesis of english seem this way to you? Most (all?) historical linguists would profoundly disagree (unless you're playing extremely fast and loose with 'invent', 'agree' etc.) Your account sounds a little bit like Rousseau's idea that the original humans must've been running around, on their own, until they got together and decided to have a society.
It seems counterproductive to try to come up with an ontology of meaning beginning with a speculative reconstruction that is disconnected from- and seemingly unconcerned with - research on what actually happened.
Odd. Who said that? MU? Anyhow, rules are retroactively inferred from language in use. The extent to which (generalized) linguistic rules are genetically inbuilt is a hot topic, but no-one thinks that humans "invented" language and then had a debate how to use it before employing it as a tool for communication because that's extreme cart-before-horseness.
Edit: Oh, tho I guess the OP itself quoted it, unattributed. So maybe I've incorrectly attributed it.
Just saw that, thanks. Sorry, @Metaphysician Undercover :scream:
What would you say the alternatives are to humans inventing languages and agreeing with each other on how to use them?
And so the alternatives would be?
Here's a common definition of "invent," by the way: "create or design (something that has not existed before); be the originator of."
So if we didn't invent language--and specifically a language like English, then we didn't create it, we're not the originators of it. Who or what is?
Were you just getting at the notion that some homo sapiens ancestor species invented language?
It's trivially true that language originated in humans, but it was not "invented" as if there was some conscious effort at design involved. Language develops organically. The world's most recently developed language, Nicaraguan Sign Language, is a case in point. The route from creole to full language occurred through the children of parents who used the creole and added grammatical complexity spontaneously.
So the process there is something like rudimentary tools of communication being automatically transformed into a language, which allows for more advanced communication and from which rules are retroactively inferred and codification occurrs. The communication comes first then becomes more complex. And only at that point can you start to talk about a set of rules which defines how the language functions.
So, the quote
is senseless from a linguistic point of view (and really from any point of view to the extent it implies people invented and debated rules with each other before using language as a tool for communication).
It's true we don't know for sure how quickly or gradually language developed (there are competing theories), but there does seem to be an in-built capacity that kicks in with children to the extent that they can unconsciously create complex linguistic form. It's important though to stress the lack of purposeful design / agreement.
Okay. Again, a common definition of "invent" is "create or design (something that has not existed before); be the originator of." The term doesn't necessary imply that there were board meetings about it. (So to speak.)
I already gave an example. The "so-called" rules of grammar. People can and do learn language and use it according to the rules (conventional syntactical practices) without ever being able to formulate them. They do this by imitation. You could learn to play chess by observant imitation; you would then be playing by the rules without having had to explicitly formulate them. If someone then asks you what the rules of chess are, you might be able to reflectively analyze the practice of chess and then explicate them.
Something I continually notice with you is that when you get into difficulty coming up with a cogent response, you then try to shift the argument and plead that your interlocutor's usage of some term or terms is not in accordance with your 'special' usage, This doesn't seem at all honest (at least to me) and is very annoying for your partners in conversation. I think it also limits your ability to develop your understanding, rather than repeating the same tired patterns of thought over and over, and focusing on justifying those at all costs rather than trying to learn anew. So, you might want to take a critical look at this tendency you have, because I can tell you it's no fun trying to carry on a discussion with someone who doesn't seem to be arguing with charity and in good faith in an honest search for clarity.
So you use "rule" to just refer to a conventional practice?
You could have simply said that if so, no?
No idea what that would indicate.
It indicates that you have Asperger's? Why would you be telling me that all of a sudden instead of just answering the simple question I asked?
Right, especially when it was in lieu of answering a simple question. I was looking for an answer, not a deflection.
Sorry to be harsh,Terrapin, but it wasn't a deflection it was a rejection. I don't have the patience for persistently intellectually dishonest interlocutors.
It was a rejection of a question?
That's a lot to read into two simple questions.
OK. I'll give it another go then.
Quoting Janus
This is simply false. It may be the case, that people were using language in identifiable ways or patterns, prior to the formulation of "rules of grammar", but this in no way means that the rules of grammar were operative at this time. Language use is an habitual behaviour, and habits are not based in rules. That people can come along and formulate rules which reflect those habits, does not mean that the rules were operative as the cause of those habits. A habit is not necessarily formed by someone obeying a rule, so it is an invalid conclusion to say that habitual behaviour such as linguistic habits are cases of rules being operative. And your claim that the rules of grammar were operative before anyone formulated the rules of grammar is false.
Language is not merely an individual habit, but a collectively evolved and utilized system. Of course there are patterns of usage, but without those there would be no language. Those patterns are equivalent to rules; they reflect the communally shared ways of doing things with language which have become established by convention.
These communally shared ways of doing things with language are effectively rules, whether or not they are explicitly recognized as such. The 'chess' example I gave, where someone could learn to play chess, that is to follow its rules, by imitation, without actually explicitly formulating those rules shows the same thing. Rules of etiquette are another example of rules that can be acquired just by imitation without needing any explication.
If you want to pedantically say these examples are not 'really' rules; what could that "really" mean, when what I have outlined is in accordance with common usage of the term 'rule'? Rule-following, even when it is not made explicit, is ubiquitous in human communal life, and obviously necessary for that life, and that is really the point, whether this social phenomenon is called "rule-following" or not. Even animals do it.
A Monolith. Haven't you seen the prelude to 2001: A Space Odyssey?
But seriously, csalisbury has a point. Why build a philosophical theory of language without consulting history to see whether there is evidence humans actually acquired language that way?
Is your argument in the OP that ontology is confused because we need to be looking at language games instead to see what is going on when we categorize things?
If so, my response would that ontology remains relevant because there's lots of evidence in favor of reductive explanations and related patterns among various phenomenon. And that's why physics theorizes that four forces are all that's required for everything in the universe, and that ordinary matter is made up of particles that form atoms and molecules.
So there's good reason to think there is a basic stuff the universe consists of. Maybe it's fields, maybe it's particles and spacetime, maybes it's superstrings. Or maybe it's something we can only approximate. If you go back far enough, everything in the universe was part of tiny volume of space that inflated. It's not like rocks, stars and animals eternally populated the cosmos.
Is physics itself a language game? There is certainly agreed upon jargon. But the experiments themselves aren't linguistic. And those have forced scientists to revise their jargon and even replace it over time.
Atoms weren't a thing and then they were, and then they were composed of subatomic particles and light had particle properties, and all the odd QM and GR results. Also that it's heavily mathematical.
Is math a language game?
As I said in my post that you rejected as "empty tendentious assertions", we can learn habits from others. This is not an empty assertion, it has been proven by observation. We copy the actions of others, it is one way of learning how to do things.
Also, a pattern is not equivalent to a rule. Patterns are described by rules, and there is a reason for a pattern. For instance, meteorologists study weather patterns, and assume reasons for the patterns, and describe the patterns with rules. But a pattern is not a rule, because a pattern is an observable arrangement of order, and a rule is the principle which the order conforms to. Do you apprehend this difference?
Quoting Janus
Your example does not prove your point. That a person could imitate another who is following a rule, and therefore act as if following the same rule, does not prove that when a person imitates another, that person is following a rule. Imitation is just a matter of repeating what has been observed, it is not a matter of following a rule.
Quoting Janus
I do not think that what you have said actually is in accordance with common usage of "rule". A rule is a principle, so to learn a rule is to learn a principle. When one person imitates another, that person is copying. To copy another is not to learn the rule, we learn this in grade school. That's why copying is not allowed. We must each learn the rules, the principles involved in what we are being taught, and copying from another does not qualify as learning the rule.
Quoting Janus
What are you trying to say here? Are you saying that there is an activity which most people would not call "rule-following" because they do not consider it to actually be rule-following, but it really is rule-following according to your superior knowledge of what rule-following really is? I think you're wrong, imitating and copying each other is not "rule-following". So I'll repeat my tendentious assertion. You need to learn that there is a distinction to be made between activities which are habitual, and activities which are instances of following a rule.
According to normal usage conventionally established patterns of behavior are rules. Think of the road rule: drive on the left hand side of the road (in Australia). If one consistently drives on the left hand side of the road merely on account of following what everyone else does; that is following a rule. Standing in queues is another example.
I have shown that rules are prior to, are not dependent on, and also underpin language. The point of your claim that an unformulated rule is not a rule is apparently to support a further claim that "rules are created by language". This is nonsense, since rules are created by people not by language, and even animals have rules and hierarchies that determine customary behaviors. Language itself is a customary behavior. Whether you call these pre-linguistic customary behaviors "rules" or not doesn't change the fact that they exist and determine linguistic, as well as moral, behavior.
Well, it seems pretty obvious. As Baden noted, "It's trivially true that language originated in humans."
I'm not saying you can't use "rule" however you want to use it, but I can't recall anyone using it simply for conventions. Everyone I've encountered uses "rule" with a stronger connotation than that. Driving on a particular side of the road is indeed a rule, because it's a law, and if you break it, you'll be ticketed, etc. If simply being a convention is enough to be a rule, then it's a "rule" that during slow songs at a concert, you engage and hold high your lighter (or now your phone). I just never knew anyone who would call that a rule.
That's a good point in that there's a lot of conventional behavior that people do not condone. For example, it's a convention to acquire alcohol and drink in excess at parties organized by high schoolers. Is that thus a rule? It has to be if being conventional is sufficient to be a rule.
It's conventional if a girl gets pregnant in high school to have an abortion. Is it a rule, then, that if you get pregnant in high school that you're to have an abortion?
This is what you have a burden to demonstrate without begging the question (as you are wont to do).
I have some questions for you. What do you think an abstraction is? And do you think that an abstraction is composed of language?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Consider that claim retracted, at least temporarily. :roll:
Now, the burden is on you, and only you. And arguments from ignorance don't count. You can't argue that it's not true because I haven't shown that it's false. That would be an invalid argument.
That's not true. There are many conventionally established patterns of behaviour which are not rules. Are you familiar with "customs", and "mores"? "Rules" can be used to refer to some patterns of behaviour, but not all, depending on whether or not we have apprehended a principle which the behaviour conforms to.
Quoting Janus
That's a stated rule though.
Quoting Janus
in some cases standing in the queue is a rule, in other cases it is not, and people just do it as their pattern of behaviour.
Quoting Janus
I never said anything yet about how a rule is "created". I said that language is necessary for the existence of a rule, so it doesn't make any sense to talk about rules existing prior to language. You clearly have a completely different idea of what a rule is than I do, and I think that your idea is counterproductive to understanding the reality of rules.
Quoting Janus
This is exactly why your notion of "rule" is counterproductive. When you characterize these customary behaviours as instances of obeying rules, instead of as instances of habitual behaviour, you produce an inaccurate description. Under your description you have "the fact that they [the rules] exist". because you assume as a fact, that these rules exist. Therefore, to understand these customary behaviours you will proceed to seek those rules. Under my description there are no such rules, and customary behaviours are habits of free willing human beings. Therefore to understand these customary behaviours I will seek to understand the habits of free willing human beings. From my perspective, your approach could be nothing more than a waste of time and resources, seeking non-existent rules.
Quoting Terrapin Station
One reason why I think it is a very good idea to distinguish habits from rules is to see that each of these two actually have a very different nature. The nature of a habit is that it arises from the choices of a freely choosing being. The nature of a rule is that it is designed to curb those choices, those habits which have been determined as bad. Consider that a lot of what the freely choosing being learns, is learnt through trial and error. By the time that the freely choosing being learns that a particular type of choice is an error, that choosing pattern may already be habitual. Then rules are needed to restrict that choosing pattern.
Quoting S
I can give you countless examples of rules which exist in the form of language, and could not exist without language to express them. In order to disprove my inductive conclusion, that rules require language to express them, you need to present some rules which do not require language to express them, or demonstrate how the rules which we express in language could exist without language. Otherwise you might reject my inductive conclusion, but your rejection is rather meaningless. And, an inductive conclusion is based in observation and reason, it is not a matter of "begging the question" as you are wont to say.
Quoting S
An abstraction requires language, because a symbol is required to represent the thing abstracted. Otherwise the thing abstracted has no presence, and there is no such thing as the abstraction. You are using "abstraction" as a noun, not a verb.
So you'd agree that being a convention isn't sufficient to be a rule?
Alright, enlighten me then, smarty-pants. Gimmie the lowdown.
:grin:
Whoops. It's all me. I'm quoting myself, unattributed. I just liked the formatting. I thought it looked neater like that. Clearer.
Right, "convention" is a rather broad term. In one sense "convention" may refer to a rule, but in another sense it might refer to a custom which is not a rule. So not every convention qualifies to be a rule.
Fine, whatever. I was just trying to set the scene. You seem to be taking it a bit too literally. Maybe it's not perfect. So language evolved or magically sprang out of nowhere...
We don't really need a full blown lecture on the origins and development of language for the purpose of this discussion, do we?
However it got here, there are rules. Rules like what the word "dog" means. That's my take on the basics of how language works. Take it from there if need be.
I think I will agree with most of this.
If I were to add anything, I might say a rule presupposes a principle, whereas a habit presupposes an interest.
Another way to look at it is, a rule is reducible to a principle from which a corresponding behavior is obliged to follow, but a habit is not reducible to any principle, which permits habit to be merely a matter of convenience with arbitrary benefit.
In short, a law derived from a principle gives sanctity, or power, to a rule, but experience alone is the ground of habit.
Also, a rule presupposes a language for its expression. That which the rule expresses by means of language must already be given before the rule or the language, otherwise the expression has no content, therefore cannot stand as a rule.
That was a question, not an argument. I wanted to explore that avenue of thought.
Quoting Marchesk
I don't doubt much of what you say there. Like I said in my other discussion, I don't doubt the science or the maths. But I do doubt what some philosophy-types draw from all of this.
My concern is over how much or to what extent our disagreement in this area - this area of ontological categories, and perhaps other areas or even generally - is genuine or merely semantic. Are we really disagreeing as much as we think we are, or is it more of an illusion: a bewitchment of language? How much of it, under proper analysis, amounts to game playing? Different games? Different rules? Perhaps the same game, but people play it differently or go by their own rules?
I like this. I think that a principle is something particular, we might say that it's an object, but an interest is more general, directing one's attention in a more general way rather than in a specific or definite way like a rule.
Quoting Mww
Right, I think this is the important point here. And to relate this to what I say above, it is this expression in language which gives the principle, or rule its particularity and this is its existence as a thing. That's what I told S, in the question about abstraction. An abstraction only exists as a thing, if there is a symbol. The symbol is what allows the abstraction to have actual existence as a thing. One might try to separate the principle or rule, from the language which expresses it, like one might try to separate the abstraction from the symbol which represents it, but there is no sense to this unless we allow that the symbol is prior to the principle represented, and then what is the symbol at that time before it represents something? It can't be said to be a symbol.
So this is a dilemma which leaves us with no choice but to say that the rule or principle cannot exist independently of the symbol which is said to represent it. Then the rule cannot exist independently of its symbolization. But this allows that language might exist prior to principles or rules, but this language would have to consist of something other than symbols, the words could not be called symbols. That is because it would not be proper to say that the language symbolizes, or represents anything, because if it did it would be rules or principles, being symbolized or represented, and we've already denied that possibility.
Janus is right. Behavioural patterns can be evidence of rule following. His examples are plausible and make sense. The explanation works.
All good.
As to having no choice, it is a matter of preventing endless regression, that we have to make an assumption somewhere along the line of methodological reduction. The principle is assumed, e.g., our perceptions, of themselves, don’t lie, etc., and the system to which the principle is applied is examined by means of it. We continue along with the examination until met with contradiction, in which case the principle is discarded and we start over, or until we are met with conformity to observation, in which case the principle holds. In between those two extremes reside laws, rules and habits. And language.
It's like an unwritten rule. You hold your lighter up during slow songs at a concert. You either play along or you don't. You don't [I]have[/I] to play chess.
In what sense are their rules of chess, though, if there's no penalty (as I described before) for not following the rules?
The penalties that matter are disqualification from a tournament, etc.
But in order to play Chess, you have to follow the rules. Otherwise, you're playing a different game.
Wait, you don't seriously deny that there are rules of chess, do you? If the analogy is apt, then there are rules.
Quoting Terrapin Station
There are consequences for not following the rules, whether we're talking about chess or language games. If the consequences in the latter case don't fit your personal criteria for counting, then so be it. Besides, I mentioned disqualification earlier, and you dismissed it, yet now you're using it in your own explanation regarding chess.
Yes. And? You weren't meaning to disagree with me there, were you?
I asked you to explain what it would amount to and you didn't answer.
Your response is trivial, because it amounts to: "well, by my rules, that still doesn't count, so it's not a rule". It would be more efficient for you to just copy and paste that each time.
I don't understand how that would amount to a disqualification. Re rules, I explained earlier that I take them to be things for which there is I mean a specific, concrete or practical, non-metaphorical consequence. The consequence is a specific punitive action taken by other persons.
Re a chess disqualification, I'm not just talking about something like "I'm not going to play with you (any more)." I mean a formal organizational decision that someone is taken out of the running to win some tournament, say.
I was referring to this:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
There are two disagreements about rules I have with you. One is your assertion that rules are created in being formulated, and since it takes language to formulate a rule, then it follows that rules are created by means of language.
The other disagreement I have with both you and @Terrapin Station, is that the way I am using 'rule' does not conform with common usage, and the pedantic and overly strict way you are both using the term does.
Two common kinds of expressions refute that: "As a rule he has eggs for breakfast" and "It is an unwritten rule that people should respect others and wait their turn". You see the latter operating without the need for any explicit expression of it, for example, where two lanes merge, and most people give way to every second car.
Even animals do it; social predator species commonly have unwritten (obviously!) and unspoken (presumably!) rules about who gets to feast on the carcass first.
Again, I wouldn't say that you can't use "rule" to simply refer to conventions, but that's just not the way I use the term. There's nothing wrong with people using a term in different ways. We simply make explicit the different ways we're using the term so that we can understand each other.
If you begin a game of proper chess and you start moving the pieces in whichever ways you like, then you'll be disqualified. You aren't playing the game properly.
If you begin a game of proper English and you start using the words in whichever ways you like, then you'll be disqualified. You aren't playing the language game properly.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Remember, you can just say: "well, by my rules, that still doesn't count, so it's not a rule". You're like me, aren't you? As in, generally, if you can say it in less words, do so?
Makes sense to me. Why don't they just go with what makes sense and resolve the problem? I think I'm noticing a general link between problems and overly strict adherence to rules at the expense of resolving the problems linked to them. Some people basically create their own problems and refuse to resolve them.
Sure, I agreed with Janus on this point. But not all cases of behavioural patterns are cases of rule following. So the premise "if there is behavioural patterns, there is rule following" is not a true premise.
Quoting Janus
Yes, we disagree on what "rule" means.
Quoting Janus
I don't see your argument here. Both, "he has eggs for breakfast", and, "people should respect others and wait their turns", are written in words. The fact that you say "it is an unwritten rule" does not negate the fact that it is actually written in words.
Try this. Take away the words "he has eggs for breakfast", Now, the person gets up every morning and has eggs for breakfast, nice pattern. How does this pattern become a rule, unless it is stated as such? Or do you think the person gets up and thinks there is a rule that I must have eggs every morning for breakfast therefore I must have eggs, and so decides to have eggs? And try the other, so-called unwritten rule, "people should respect others and wait there turn". Take away those words, and what are you left with? It's certainly not "a rule".
Quoting Janus
If it is true, that when people are merging in their cars, they are following the rule "people should respect others and wait their turn", then they must be following that rule, as it is written, meaning that they have been exposed to that expressed rule, and are obeying it. Otherwise they might be following some other rule, or more likely, doing it for some other reason, and you are simply making the false statement that they are following that specific rule when they really are not..
Quoting Janus
See, this is the problem with your perspective, which I've already explained to you. You assume that there are rules here, where there are none. Then, instead of looking for the real reason why these animals behave in the way that they do, you'll be totally distracted by the false premise that they are following rules, and maybe even go off on some wild goose chase, looking for some rules which don't even exist.
Quoting S
This is a problem isn't it? To follow a rule means strict adherence. You argue that using language is a matter of following rules, but now you complain that we cannot resolve these problems because people are too busy following rules. See the hypocrisy? Problem solving requires that we ditch the rules, and be innovative. That's what language is really all about.
I mean, I haven't read the thread, but the OP asks about the origens of linguistic meaning. By my lights, that would require a very particular method of exploration.
What is each and every example of linguistic meaning existentially dependent upon?
That seems a relevant question.
What does each and every example of linguistic meaning consist in/of?
Do these questions share the same answers?
That seems to me to be a good place to start.
Meaning expressed via language use, I presume.
Using language requires following the rules of language. Linguistic meaning requires following the rules of language.
There is no rule against coining new terms or using existing terms in novel ways. So, I would think that so long as enough people use the term in the same way, then eventually it would be - by definition - an accepted use.
That is, all linguistic meaning is existentially dependent upon following the rules of language... new and novel uses notwithstanding. There are no examples to the contrary. There is no stronger justificatory ground . Rules are clearly necessary.
What are rules themselves existentially dependent upon?
What do the rules themselves consist in/of?
Are these two answers the same?
rule: one of a set of explicit or understood regulations or principles governing conduct within a particular activity or sphere.
Looks like @Janus wins!
@Terrapin Station and @Metaphysician Undercover: Which part of that seems to disagree with anything Janus and @S have been saying? I see no requirement of consequences and it is explicitly stated that it does NOT have to be explicitly stated (notice "or understood").
I think I agree with @S that all of us are really just whining about semantics (someone said that in this thread anyway, sorry if it was not S).
These are interesting questions quite apart from any specific definition of the term "rule".
The rules would have to depend on some kind of communication. Otherwise they cannot be shared. That communication is not yet language, but it allows connections to be made on the part of observers.
The rules then consist of a bunch of connections of symbols (in any form) to observations, and connections of symbols to other connections and other symbols.
Baden beat me to it.
I'm gonna quote in it full, only because I don't know how to link to a post:
That more or less covers what I was gonna say.
But I will award you and Baden a point each if that's what you're after from me.
I'm only human? Sorry I'm not perfect. You do know I'm only playing around when I say otherwise, right?
No, I think that I could have left out the talk about the origins of language, and in hindsight, maybe I should have. What I'm trying to get at is deeper than that. Even if the origins were or are a mystery, surely I can still enquire about what it is, ontologically, and how it works, and things like that. The clue is in the title. It says "Ontology", not "Origins".
Am I dense for focusing on the text of the OP rather than the title? All the 'ontology' here is bound up with 'origins.' There's no mystery here. That's how the OP was structured. It's a poisoned well.
You shouldn't begin questions like that with me. Are you trying to get me in trouble?
Quoting csalisbury
And what [I]is[/I] that ontology? How does that quote even [i]begin[/I] to address that?
It talks about origin and development, and then it ends by saying that "only at that point can you start to talk about a set of rules which defines how the language functions". It also says a little bit more, after quoting what I said, in that same vein about development and suchlike, and about how language functions.
So, what the heck is a set of rules, ontologically? What's what? How do the ontological relations work?
Alright, so, bracketing genesis, and given that a language exists --- a set of rules is a set of rules. Ontologically? I guess the being of a set of rules is the being of a set of rules?
Are you asking if rules have heft?
How does a convention or something merely understood but not explicit govern conduct? You don't have to follow any convention. There's no punitive action for not doing so. What sort of government is it if there's no punitive action for not following any of its rules? Under that government, I can do absolutely anything I like. Other folks may not like it, and they might bitch and moan, but so what? I can do whatever I want, including murder, rape, etc. I'd not be controlled in any way. I'm only controlled if there is specific punitive action for breaking rules. Otherwise I'm not really governed, am I?
And yeah, obviously it's semantics. Semantics is philosophy of meaning. And we're talking about different ways that we use a word.
Tautologies like that aren't helpful, and I don't even understand your last question about what I'm asking.
I'm asking what kind of thing a set of rules is, fundamentally. What kind of thing is a set, fundamentally? What kind of a thing is a rule, fundamentally? What kind of thing is language? What kind of thing is meaning? What do they consist of, on a fundamental level? Physical? Mental? Abstract? Concrete? Objective? Subjective? Location? No location? Is location a category error? How does interaction work? How does it all tie together to result in language use?
A set of rules, ontologically, requires meaning assignments, and that only happens via people thinking about the utterances, the text, etc. in specific ways--which is their brain functioning in particular ways.
It requires meaning assignments for what, though? This was the reoccurring problem before, in the other discussion, if I recall correctly.
Because it's also a statement, a definition, and it means something. The difference is that you think that this requires a subject there at the time to understand it, and I do not. I don't think that you ever justified that in a logical manner. Maybe this amounts to just another fairly trivial semantic disagreement. You use those words differently.
That's your claim. The question is how it does any of that when we just have a set of ink marks on paper and no people exist. The justification for my position is the complete absence of any account or explanation how it amounts to anything aside from a set of ink marks on paper.
You know my argument, though. Or you should do. So we shouldn't just start from scratch.
About @S: You can lead a horse to the trough, but it’s illegal to hold its head down and drown it. :P
I don't remember you ever trying to explain just how it would be/become something other than a set of ink marks on paper. It always seemed that you just avoided confronting that problem
My argument set out what it was beforehand and rejected that it would magically change. The only possible reason for it to change without magic is if your hidden premise is true, but if you haven't justified your hidden premise and I can find no justification by my own assessment, then I have no reasonable basis for believing your hidden premise to be true.
What you call your inductive conclusion is an irrelevant conclusion. It is both true and beside the point that rules require language to express them. I'm not going to keep repeating that. And I certainly don't need to meet your unreasonable criterion of expressing rules without expressing them.
What you need to validly demonstrate is not that rules require language to express them, but that rules do not exist independently of their expression in language, which is to deny that there can be a rule at a given moment in time, and at that time it is not being expressed in language.
Please be careful not to misunderstand the relevant sense of independence here. It is either the sense described above, or it is your own sense, and your own sense is not relevant to my argument, and if you go by it, then you'll just be talking past me, as you are wont to do.
You providing countless examples of rules expressed in language - which I can do myself - doesn't meet your burden of proof, just as showing me lots of white swans doesn't meet the burden of proof that there are no black swans.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The existence of a symbol doesn't require that it be expressed in language, which is sufficient reason to believe that if abstractions are symbols, and rules are abstractions, then rules don't require to be expressed in language in order to exist. Even though that conclusion is obvious and a matter of common sense to begin with, so it shouldn't really need a logical argument behind it.
How are some people going so spectacularly wrong here in terms of logical relevancy? No one here should be talking about language being necessary for a rule to be expressed.
You seem to be muddling up representation and expression. That a symbol represents a thing is obviously a representation. Whereas if I say, "This symbol represents that thing", that's obviously an expression. I'm not saying that a rule doesn't need to represent or correspond to anything. I'm saying that it doesn't need to be expressed. The rule and the expression of a rule are two different things, obviously. Why else would we have different words at our disposal for distinguishing between the two? How are you going to explain that one away? Do you really interpret me to be saying that the rule and the rule are two different things? I don't think so. I think that that would require a conscious effort on your part. It seems very disingenuous.
Sure, but it makes sense to call the behavioural patterns in question rule following, as Janus plausibly argued. If you don't want to call them that, then you're free to do so, but if you were to say that it doesn't [i]make sense[/I] to call them that, then that would ring hollow.
Again, this amounts to nothing other than a) expressed rules are expressed rules, and b) I assume that rules must be expressed, therefore they are. That's a tautology which misses the point, followed by begging the question.
That you claim that you can't comprehend a rule that isn't expressed is not a logically valid basis for concluding that rules must be expressed, just as you claiming that you couldn't comprehend a potato that isn't mashed would not be a valid basis for concluding that potatoes must be mashed. The fallacy this time around is known as an argument from incredulity.
It's not very productive to engage with that, except as a game of spot the fallacy to keep us on our toes. But if you want to move beyond that, then you would have to up your game. [I]A lot.[/I]
For their [i]existence[/I]? So for there to be rules, there must be communication? They must be able to be shared? Which obviously necessitates subjects to do the communication. To do the sharing.
That was after all what the question was explicitly asking about: existence. If so, then that's a controversial assumption which would require justification.
Quoting Echarmion
But when you say that, it becomes boring, because you're forcing idealism through defining rules in terms of observations.
If there are rules, then by definition there are observations, and if there are observations, then there must be observers. :yawn:
Is this [i]really[/I] all that idealism has to offer? One can define virtually anything into being true. But that's trivial.
How about this? Rules are supposed to be followed, and following has a connection with our Creator. So, since there are rules, our Creator exists. There can't be the one without the other.
It's just like with rocks. I take a normal dictionary definition. You then add the interpretation that it's about observations. I could just as well take the additional interpretation that it's about our Creator, so that where there are rocks, there is our Creator. Or, alternatively, we could be sensible and cut that out with Ockham's razor.
So first, we're going to assume that it doesn't "magically change" when there are no people around.
If it doesn't magically change, and meaning exists independently of people once it's created, then once people are absent, there should still be meaning. So, the question becomes this: in a world with no people, how exactly does a dictionary, for example, amount to meaning, when all we're talking about is a set of ink marks on some paper?
Well, you still seem to have your physicalist cap on. I am not a physicalist like you, so I don't share the same set of beliefs which you do. You might well be talking about a set of ink marks and nothing else. I, however, am talking about a set of ink marks which are also pages and pages of definitions written in the English language. The ink marks would say things like, "planet - a celestial body moving in an elliptical orbit round a star". Why wouldn't that be what the word meant in English, as per the definition? I've asked this question so many times, but I never get back a properly justified answer, because it always goes back to some fundamental unjustified premise or way of speaking.
Again, this is what it was before, and it doesn't magically change, and there is no alternative for concluding such a change which has been properly justified.
If your argument goes something like, "Given physicalism...", or, "Given subjective meaning...", then it won't work on me. You would first need to convince me of that before going any further.
....unless they are of the mind that such expression contains the rule, the expression *is* the rule. Anything beforehand is nothing but synthetic a priori relations.
The alternative is contradictory, insofar as, if the rule is thought to be antecedent to its expression, hence antecedent to the language that expresses it, it can only be presented as such by speaking about it by means of the language it was supposed to be antecedent to. Whatever it was that was supposed to be a rule can’t be said to be a rule unless it is expressed as being one. If such were not the case, it would be impossible to distinguish rule from accident.
On the other hand, there are rules theoretically employed in the human thought system that are not generally expressed, hence are language independent, but still must be explicated and understood before being presented in a formal elucidation of how they are used. Analytic or synthetic propositions are such because of a rule to which they adhere but the rule is not contained in the proposition itself. In the same way, concepts relate to phenomena according to rules, such that we do not confuse the objects of our perceptions, but there is nothing in a concept or a perception that illuminates the rule.
As far as the OP is concerned, the ontology of meaning in language is contained in the language used in tandem with the rationality using it. Whether we create a new word or learn an extant word, all we’re doing is relating it to a concept in our heads. Nothing more, nothing less.
Idealist logic reigns supreme. Again. YEA!!!!!!
The mashed is the potato? :brow:
You mash a potato. You express a...?
A rule!
There's the potato.
And there's the mashing of it.
There's the rule.
And there's the expression of it.
A potato is a potato, and mashed potato is mashed potato. A potato is not mashed potato. When I say that I'm going to mash this potato, I'm not saying that I'm going to mash this mashed potato.
A rule is a rule, and an expressed rule is an expressed rule. A rule is not an expressed rule. When I say that I'm going to express this rule, I'm not saying that I'm going to express this expressed rule.
Admit it, your language is completely whack, as this logical demonstration shows.
I'm not saying it can't be what the word means in English. I'm querying how that works. It works in some nonphysical way in your view?
We write down "planet . . . " and then that causes some nonphysical thing to happen?
No, I'm more sceptical than that. If it [i]is[/I] physical, then I am not in possession of an explanation in that regard of which I'm convinced. It [i]could be[/I] nonphysical, as far as my knowledge goes. I also still haven't even ruled out the physical-nonphysical being a category error.
It works if the logic works, it seems to me. You go by your unnecessary phychologism logic which creates problems for you. I only go by what is necessary and cut out the extra with Ockham's razor.
Quoting Terrapin Station
It's logic, whatever that counts as. And we don't even need to write it down. You just need to provide a justified basis for the logic to suddenly stop applying.
I'm more confused than ever. What would it have to do with logic?
Remember this?
Quoting S
So, beforehand, x means y. And, absent any contradiction, afterwards, x still means y. You create your own contradiction because of your additional premises. But I don't have that problem. Neither do you, internally, but then you have logical consequences I find weird and implausible. For you, x just wouldn't mean y anymore. But that is not at all convincing to me.
Thank you. I thought them necessary given the OP and the direction of the thread at the time.
This presupposes that all rules governing language use are existentially dependent upon being shared. I don't think that's right. Some. Not all.
Rough and incomplete... but sure. Some. Not all.
Doesn't a rule exist prior to it's being shared?
"Set" is a name used to pick out a group of different particular things. All these particulars have something in common. The commonality is what makes them part of the set.
A set of rules is a group of rules. A more interesting and probing question remains...
Are the things in the set existentially dependent upon our taking account of them?
That's debatable... obviously.
Is the rule existentially dependent upon being taken account of?
Perhaps a better question is this...
Does everything that governs the behaviour of thing count as being a rule, even when and if we have not yet taken it into account?
Gravity(space-time) governs behaviour. The Second Law of Thermodynamics governs behaviour. Shrodinger's Equation describes/predicts it. F=ma describes/predicts it. Does that difference between governing and describing matter here?
I would think it mattered to what counts as a rule, if all rules govern.
Another thing...
Some rules can be broken. Others cannot. Both govern behaviour. Not sure if talking about rules lends itself to substantive philosophical thought about the ontology of linguistic meaning.
Shared meaning being used to influence the world and/or ourselves. The use is important here, as a result of the fact that two creatures can share meaning and no know that one another exist. Shared meaning... alone... is necessary but insufficient for language. All language is existentially dependent upon shared meaning, but not the other way around.
Meaning is existentially dependent upon a creature capable of drawing correlations between different things. The drawing of the correlation is the attribution of meaning. Convention has it that there are two basic kinds of theories of meaning. Both presuppose symbolism. So... all meaning is existentially dependent upon something to become sign/symbol, something to become significant/symbolized, and a creature capable of making a connection between the two... drawing a correlation.
There are no examples to the contrary.
Linguistic meaning has this same 'core', so to speak.
I find that none of those notions can take proper account of meaning.
I've nothing much to argue with in that post, except for the above...
What you're calling "overthought", I would call not thought about in the right sorts of ways... closer to underthought.
How does it all tie together to result in language use?
It begins simply and grows in it's complexity. By the time one gets to where you are... asking these sorts of questions... one's understanding is steeped in complexity.
Imagine a family of ducks...
Newborn ducklings will quickly learn to avoid getting too close to the drakes, for they often observe an other ending up dead from being grabbed up by the head and violently shaken. The drakes exhibit other aggressive behaviours in such situations as well. The young-uns quickly learn to avoid the drakes and be on guard when they witness these aggressive behaviours.
During feeding times, sometimes the dominant ducks will behave in such a way as to acquire the most food for themselves(and the ducklings if we're talking about a mama).
Are these behaviours rightly called "rules"?
They certain govern/influence the behaviour of others. Are the dominant ones 'laying down the rules', so to speak? They certainly have/hold expectations involving these behaviours, perhaps as a result of them. They behave aggressively and then expect the other to retreat.
It's funny at times when the adolescents start fighting back! They can become quite surprised.
I can certainly see the above as an interpretation of "govern". But I don't think it is the only thing "govern" can mean.
definition of govern: conduct the policy, actions, and affairs of (a state, organization, or people).
That wasn't enough for me so...
definition of conduct (the "conduct" used in definition of "govern" not the conduct used in definition of "rule") : the action or manner of managing an activity or organization.
So in relation to "rule" (one of a set of explicit or understood regulations or principles governing conduct within a particular activity or sphere.)
So it seems like we can clarify the definition of rule in relation to the word govern:
so a rule is: one set of explicit or understood regulations or principles managing conduct in a particular activity or sphere.
So if we replace "govern" with "manage" (based on all applicable definitions that show govern has very little to do with government in this case) does that leave us a bit more room?
In your mind I am guessing the phrases "general rule" or "rule of thumb" (I apologize for sexist undertones in that second one) mean "not a rule"? Because both of those expressions refer to basic guidelines, not "do it or else."
Does gravity require assigning meaning? Does spacetime not govern the behaviour of all mass?
Are there no rules involved?
I was thinking in terms of how language rules could be established, and for that communication seems necessary. One can of course make up new rules in their heads. I thought up the tern "Quixpel" just now. It has a definition, so it's a kind of rule concerning language. But is it a rule governing language use?
What I am getting at here is that I can certainly make up new rules without communicating them. I can make up an entire language. But in order for these thoughts to become rules governing language use, they kinda need to be used, no? You can repeat the term "Quixpel" to me, but that's not talking about a Quixpel unless we somehow communicate the definition between us. And what language is "Quixpel" even part of before it's shared? It's in my head, but I speak two languages, and know some vocabulary from a couple more. Do I have a personal language including all the languages and vocabulary I know?
Quoting creativesoul
Certainly rough and incomplete. I have no idea if what I wrote can account for grammar, for example. But since @S has specifically criticized that part, I think there is no way around language referencing observations. I just cannot think of any other way I know what things are other than to reference things I have seen, heard, felt etc.
No, that talks about a word. My question was about a thing. [I]De re[/I], not [I]de dicto[/I].
Quoting creativesoul
I'm not looking for the kind of answers you're giving. I could have given these kind of answers myself. You're doing it wrong.
I'm asking what kind of thing is a group, [i]fundamentally[/I].
Quoting creativesoul
Yes, I'm not looking for obvious and unhelpful comments like that.
Quoting creativesoul
Please stop doing that. I'm asking the questions here. It's my discussion, not yours. I'm the chairperson, not you.
Quoting creativesoul
If you include "being used" in your definition, then there will be no language when it's not being used. Are you okay with that? Because I'm not.
Quoting creativesoul
Just to clarify, I'm exclusively talking about linguistic meaning in this discussion. I don't care about, "Oh gosh, that means a lot to me".
The setting of linguistic meaning seems dependent on that. Why would linguistic meaning be dependent on that?
There is only one creature in existence. A creature draws a correlation between this and that: "In this language, this means that". He writes it down. The creature dies a minute later. Why would the linguistic meaning he set die with him? Why wouldn't this mean that in the language? These are the questions that no one properly answers. Properly means giving a fully justified answer instead of just asserting a necessary dependence.
Quoting creativesoul
Real helpful. It's ontology or nothing. If you refuse to do ontology, then you're just not cooperating. You must think on that level, and begin to categorise in that way.
So you've seen, heard, and felt rocks on Mars?
No, but I have seen, felt and heard rocks. And I've seen pictures of Mars (and also of rocks on Mars, but we can ignore that). So I have things to reference when you talk about rocks on Mars.
That might seem okay. That might seem like it works. But then we all die, and the very moment the last person in existence dies, those rocks on Mars immediately cease to exist. And you find this logical consequence plausible?
In fact, it's worse than that. You've not been generalising. You've been talking about yourself. So it's solipsism, then?
You already know what my position is, I am not going to discuss this with you again.
I still don't know how I am supposed to know what words mean without referencing things I have experienced.
Fine, no one is forcing you to do anything you don't want to. But the problems remain. And this is not meant as an insult, but I genuinely don't believe you when you say that you don't know this meaning. I think that you think that you have to say that in order to maintain your position. I think that it's like the photocopier guy from the video when he asks what a photocopier is. Did you watch the video I'm referring to?
I did watch parts of it. I am not sure how exactly it's relevant. I know what you mean, or what you want to establish. I just don't think it works that way.
If we go by ordinary language, the term "meaning" can be used as "I mean X" as well as "X means Y". So what is the proper, ordinary language use of meaning? I can make sense of "X means Y" as a short form of saying "When I (people) say X, I (they) mean (usually mean) Y". That seems like ordinary language use to me.
It means: in this language, x means y. That's also ordinary language use, and it doesn't have the problems of idealism.
And down the rabbit hole you go again. Sorry, as long as I have the impression that you're not honestly engaging with my posts, I won't continue putting effort into a discussion with you.
So, "If 'flirt' means 'give someone a sharp blow' or 'sneer at,' then 'flirt' means 'give someone a sharp blow' or 'sneer at'"?
Wouldn't that also go for "If Herbert Hoover is president, then Herbert Hoover is president," "If the Azure Window is in Malta, then the Azure Window is in Malta," "If Hershey's makes Reese's Elvis Peanut Butter and Banana Creme Cups, then Hershey's makes Reese's Elvis Peanut Butter and Banana Creme Cups," and so on?
If the same wouldn't apply in those cases, why not?
On S's view, your account can't be the case, because in his view meaning obtains just the same even when no people exist.
Oh my god, what a joke. It's just a way of wording it which is relative or conditional, and yet maintains objectivity. Meaning is relative to the language rule. It's also a very common way of speaking: "What does 'chein' mean in English?", "It means 'dog' in English", "Sorry, I'm unfamiliar with that word in English, what does it mean?", "The word 'dog' in English means a furry creature with four legs and a tail which barks".
It would be very silly to expect me to involve a subject or subjectivity, like you do, so I hope that that wasn't what you were expecting from me. I consider language and meaning to be objective in the sense that I've been using throughout this discussion and the other one. In accordance with the language, x means y. How else can I even put that? That's about as fundamental as it gets.
I'd say that those expressions do not use the term "rule" literally. Not all language is literal. When we're doing philosophy, though, ideally we're trying to use terms as literally and precisely as we can.
I'm not a realist on physical law, but we weren't talking about physical laws anyway. We were talking about rules that people construct, whether intentionally or not.
If there are physical laws, it's literally impossible to "disobey them" (at least in the possible world wherein the physical law obtains). That's not at all the case for rules as we're talking about them.
That's a tautology, so it's obviously true.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Yes, these are more tautologies. It would be the epitome of unreasonableness to doubt them.
Sure, so is Herbert Hoover president now?
It seems like a tautology isn't sufficient to make ontological claims about what obtains at a particular time, no?
What's your point? That wasn't what I intended. I was contrasting my logic with psychologism logic to show you why it wouldn't change from beforehand to afterwards. There is nothing in my logic to imply that it would change. If it obtains beforehand, and the same conditions for it obtaining remain in place, then obviously it will obtain afterwards. That was my point.
And it obtains in correspondence to the language rule. I don't think that the language rule would magically disappear or magically cease to apply. You draw different conclusions because you go by different premises. How many times are we going to have to go over this? It always comes back to you, but you always turn it back on me, so it ends up being a pretty pointless back and forth.
So what about the other very common way of speaking that I pointed out? Is that not relevant? And if it isn't, why not?
Likewise, there's nothing in "If Herbert Hoover is president, then Herbert Hoover is president" to imply that that will change, is there?
Quoting S
The conditions for it obtaining are exactly the point, though. What are they? Simply stating the tautology doesn't tell us anything about that. SImply stating the tautology is just the same as stating "If Herbert Hoover is president, then Herbert Hoover is president." Yep--that's a tautology alright. But it doesn't imply that Herbert Hoover is president for all time, because there are certain things that need to be the case for Herbert Hoover to be president, and those things don't remain unchanged for all time, they wouldn't obtain if no people existed, etc.
Quoting S
And how does the language rule obtain? If it does via something written, for example, then we're right back to asking how something written amounts to anything other than, say, ink marks on paper. Hence why I asked that question. Just repeating some tautology doesn't help. It doesn't tell us anything. No more than repeating the Herbert Hoover tautology.
There's also a rule that Herbert Hoover is president when he is, by the way.
And there was a rule (per your analysis) that "flirt" meant what I noted above. It no longer does. But there was a rule about that.
It's only relevant in a particular context, and it isn't relevant in the context I have set up. The subjective interpretation is useful in a subjective context, such as "What do you mean?", but it is obviously inappropriate in the context I'm talking about. I'm obviously talking about the objective angle, which you might well reject, but your rejection doesn't effect me. The objective context is as I set out, for example "What does it mean?". Again, it would be very silly to apply the subjective angle in a necessarily objective context, such as the post-subject scenario, but that doesn't stop idealists from frequently doing so. Metaphysician Undercover is a perfect example of that: "But who would be there to understand it?", "But how would it sound?", etc. These are frankly stupid questions to ask an objectivist, or anyone really, given that there's explicitly no subjects there.
How very “Xenophan-ic” of you!!
Can you spell “categorical error”?
The mashed potato thing is nothing but a form of “I know you are but what am I”
Try harder.
Isn't accepting an objective context for meaning already the conclusion you want to draw? Your conclusion that meaning is objective is inherent in your premise that there is an objective context in which to discuss meaning.
I will try harder to ignore you when you reply like that.
I didn't mean to suggest that the context necessarily is[/I] objective. But it at least makes sense to call it that, because it makes sense [i]as an objective context, even if you disagree and decide to read subjectivity into it. If you read subjectivity into it, then of course it won't make sense to you as anything other than that, but that'd be a result of what you yourself are doing. It would be a problem of your own creation.
That's different from what I called a subjective context, where we both agree that a subject is necessarily implied. If you ask, "What do [i]you[/I] mean?", then obviously that assumes a subject there who is being asked a question.
If you were to ask, "What does [i]it[/I] mean?", then that removes the subject from the equation. I can give an answer to that in objective terms.
The former is about me and what I mean, whereas the latter is about it and what it means. That's an important difference.
If you don't assume a subjective interpretation of what I'm calling an objective context, then how else would you interpret this context? If you say that it's either subjectivism or it's not possible, then you'd be demonstrably wrong, because myself and others can make sense of it in objective terms. It would just be an argument from incredulity on your part. Likewise with the post-human rock scenario. And it would be disingenuous, too. We all know that you can imagine the hypothetical scenario. You're just as capable as the rest of us in that regard.
Ok.
So you're agreeing with me?
Quoting Terrapin Station
Herbert Hoover is president if he's president. But he's obviously not. Someone else is.
The word "dog" in English means those furry things which bark, if that's what it means in English. And that [i]is[/I] what it means in English.
You obviously agree with me on both of these points, so your criticism seems superficial. If you know the language, then you know what it means. You're just dancing around the real issue of your complete lack of justification for your supposed necessary dependence.
I've already given the conditions for it obtaining. And they're obvious anyway. Is there such a thing as the English language? Yes. Is there such a word in the English language as "dog"? Yes. Is it such that this word has a meaning? Yes. How do you know this? Because I know the language. What is the meaning of the word? It means those furry things which bark.
Quit acting like you're an extraterrestrial who has just landed on planet Earth.
None of this is at issue. The only thing at issue here is your unjustified premise, so stop deflecting and start attempting to support it.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Why does it matter [I]how[/I] it obtains when we can know that it does and would? I know this. I don't need to explain how it is that I can ride a bike. The fact is that I can ride one, and I know it.
You need to show that your doubt is reasonable, and you haven't done that. What are you waiting for?
And old rules don't do anything to my argument. There's either a particular meaning relative to a corresponding rule or there isn't. It doesn't matter if you pick an old one that's barely used or a current one that's frequently used. You can even make up your own rules and language. It doesn't make a difference.
Let's see if we agree on a couple things so we don't have to go back over them:
We agree that "If x is/means/etc. y, then x is/means/etc. y" is tautological.
And we agree that the tautology in question doesn't imply that any x is/means/etc. y for all time, right? We agree that there is more required for an x being/meaning/etc. y to obtain for all time than just that tautology.
Yes, and the problem is still nothing on my end, but rather your irrational belief that the change of circumstances results in a cessation of meaning.
Things don't magically change without reason. If there were no justified reason for us to believe that Herbert Hoover had ceased to be president, then it would be rational to believe that he is still president.
Your belief is irrational because it is founded on an unjustified premise.
All of your questions, and all of your criticisms, and all of your challenges, stem back to this.
If you disagree that it's irrational, which you probably do, then you need to try to justify this premise, which you probably won't. Hence I am considering whether I should just give up trying.
It remains the case that if something obtains beforehand, and the same conditions for it obtaining remain in place, then obviously it will obtain afterwards.
By my logic, and by my reasoning, the same conditions for it obtaining would remain in place. Therefore, it would obtain.
Your logic contains an unjustified premise that there's a necessary dependence relating to meaning and the circumstances. And because of this unjustified premise, you reach a different conclusion. You really don't want to focus on this, because you'll be exposed as irrational. So you constantly deflect attention away from this and back on to some aspect of my position.
Again, my analysis from before is apt: Beforehand, x means y. And, absent any contradiction, afterwards, x still means y. You create your own contradiction because of your additional premises. But I don't have that problem. You keep trying to make your problem my problem: this actually seems to be what a lot of problems in philosophy boil down to.
Indeed. :up:
He seems to erroneously believe that simply calling it "a set of ink marks on some paper", and/or simply assuming his beliefs about physicalism in relation to meaning, is a reasonable way to go about making his case.
His argument here is basically:
"Given all of my controversial assumptions, you're wrong".
And that's what his other argument seems to have boiled down to also. Something along the lines of:
"Given that when I assess your argument, I run into contradiction in light of my own unjustified premise, your argument is unsound".
These are the very same problems that Metaphysician Undercover got stuck on in the other discussion, and they sent us around in circles for page after page after page.
The big problem for them is [i]not realising[/I] that their problems are their problems, and not my problems. Ironically, my reasoning in my argument with Terrapin applies here as well. If the conditions for this being the case haven't changed, which they haven't, then it will continue to be the case; and, lo and behold, it is!
Another irony is that I actually agree with what they are effectively saying. Yes, given all of your controversial assumptions, I'm wrong. Yes, given that when you assess my argument, you run into contradiction in light of your own unjustified premise, you do indeed believe that my argument is consequently unsound.
But do I grant these controversial assumptions and unjustified hidden premises? No, certainly not.
What I'm going by is empirical evidence. There's no empirical evidence of meaning obtaining outside of people thinking in particular ways. There's no evidence of meaning obtaining in any closed environment devoid of people, and there's thus no reason to believe that meaning would obtain in a world absent people.
That could very well be wrong. What would support that it's wrong would be empirical evidence of meaning obtaining outside of thought.
The empirical evidence there is of us doing something. There's zero evidence of meaning obtaining outside of that.
We obviously do not think of the marks as being meaningless. The question is whether they have meaning outside of that. There's no evidence that they do.
And going by empirical evidence where it's inappropriate is what I call extreme empiricism. I reject extreme empiricism because it's unreasonable.
The idea that it would ever be inappropriate, especially when we're talking about ontology, is ridiculous.
No, it's ridiculous that people in our contemporary stage of philosophy still go by these outdated views with similarities with logical positivism which has long since been refuted.
No one is saying anything about "verification" or anything like that.
If you're not suggesting something along the lines that we'd need to experience it in some way to verify whether or not there's meaning, then what are you suggesting? Just vaguely mentioning empirical evidence isn't very helpful, and you sure sound like a logical positivist from what you've said.
What happened to what I just typed? There's zero evidence of meaning outside of thought. That has nothing to do with logical positivism.
You specified empirical evidence. Don't backtrack.
I made a reasonable argument. Consider that your evidence. And get your wording right: the argument is that it [i]would[/I] obtain.
Yes -- evidence, empirical evidence. Why do I have to spell that out completely every time? You can't remember what I said?
Wow. If you only meant empirical evidence, then we're back to square one in three seconds flat. That was a very fast lap.
Quoting S
Otherwise, consider my reasonable argument evidence.
Wtf? I just said that it's ridiculous in my opinion to think that empirical evidence is ever inappropriate, especially when we're doing ontology. That has nothing to do with logical positivism.
Why should I care? I think it's ridiculous that you think it's ridiculous. Elaborate or we won't get anywhere.
That's how conversations work, dude.
Elaborate or we won't get anywhere. Go on then. What are you waiting for?
Elaborate --because you don't understand what I'm saying?
No, because you merely dismissed what I said as ridiculous. I in turn am dismissing your dismissal as ridiculous.
Why am I even having to explain this? You should know how this works by now.
So, why do you think that what I said is ridiculous?
Right, we don't agree. What is elaboration going to do?
Look, you either want to explore this or you don't. If you don't, just say so. You just said that this is how conversations work. If you don't care, don't converse.
If phenomena exist, there's going to be some empirical evidence of it.
Either what I'm talking about is not "phenomena" or it's not true that "phenomena" necessitate empirical evidence.
An existent non-phenomenon? Are you just randomly combining words?
Define "phenomena".
A phenomenon is any event, occurrence, etc.
Then it's the latter, it seems. Either the hypothetical event wouldn't necessitate empirical evidence, or it would, but we'd just be unaware of it because we wouldn't be there.
Big deal. Do you have a real challenge for me? This is child's play.
So something could exist, have properties, etc. but there could be no evidence of it?
Quoting S
If one is false, then it must be the other. Basic logic.
Do you have a [i]real[/I] challenge?
First, the idea re whether empirical evidence is appropriate or not isn't saying anything dependent on our awareness.
Lolwut?
Look, my argument is my evidence. Its primary tools are logic and reason, not observation or experiment. This is metaphysics, not science. I'm not sure what you have in mind, but it seems inappropriate to me.
So we're saying that there would be empirical evidence, but we'd just be unaware of it because we wouldn't be there. What of it? There'd still be rocks. There'd still be meaning.
How is this not a red herring from you?
Our awareness is about epistemology.
Ontologically, empirical evidence is appropriate if we're talking about things that have properties, that interact with other things. If they do--and everything does, then there will be empirical evidence available of those things whether we're aware of it or not.
For example, empirical evidence was available of Saturn's rings in 10,000 BCE. That we weren't aware of it at that time is irrelevant to whether empirical evidence was appropriate to whether Saturn has/had rings.
Our awareness is pertinent to whether we have reason to believe something or not.
So what's your problem? How is this not just a red herring from you? Get back on track.
There'd be empirical evidence. We wouldn't be aware of it, which we agree is beside the point.
Quoting Terrapin Station
We're aware now about circumstances of the possible future event. There'd be rocks. There'd be meaning. We don't have to be aware at the time or afterwards. If you believe the contrary of the latter, then present your argument, and don't just assume the same old unjustified premise. For once, try to actually support it.
Alright, I've vented my weekly spleen, and I'll admit that it is an interesting and worthwhile topic. I wouldn't know where to begin though. It seems irreducible to all of those categories.
Hence, empirical evidence isn't inappropriate.
I just said that whether we're aware of it is pertinent to whether there's any reason to believe it.
No, it's inappropriate [I]in the relevant context[/i].
Quoting Terrapin Station
We're aware now about circumstances of the possible future event. There'd be rocks. There'd be meaning. We don't have to be aware at the time or afterwards. If you believe the contrary of the latter, then present your argument, and don't just assume the same old unjustified premise. For once, try to actually support it.
Anything extant has empirical evidence available --it has properties, for example. The relevant context here is whether there's empirical evidence.
Quoting S
What? I was saying whether we're aware of empirical evidence. What empirical evidence are you saying we're aware of here? Circumstances of the possible future event? It's not clear what that's saying, especially in terms of empirical evidence.
Tricky, ain't it? This is what I managed earlier:
Quoting S
This was supposed to be the main focus, but the discussion has gone a number different and interesting ways.
Lol, no. The relevant response to that is to ask why that supposedly matters. The question is not whether anything extant has empirical evidence available, nor whether there's empirical evidence, it's whether there's sufficient reason to conclude that there would be a rock or that there would be meaning, and there is. See my argument.
This appears to be a red herring from you. One of a number of red herrings, in fact.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Jesus Christ. We're back at square one again! My argument is all the evidence I need. You might think that we'd need to perform an experiment or something. I think that that's so inappropriate as to be ridiculous.
Square one was me asking you what empirical evidence you're referring to re the unclear-to-me phrase "circumstances of the possible future event"?
What are you talking about? You're missing the point. My argument is all the evidence I need, and it doesn't have to be evidence of the kind that you have stuck in your mind. It doesn't have to be empirical. It doesn't have to be an experience or an observation or an experiment or anything of that sort. My argument employed a reduction to the absurd. I am not an extreme empiricist. I don't play by their rules.
And if you're talking about empirical evidence in the scenario, then how is that even relevant? I don't care whether there would be some kind of empirical evidence, and if so what kind, and what it consists of, or whether there's no empirical evidence at all in the scenario, because that's a completely different subject with no relevance to my argument that there would be rocks and that there would be meaning. Or, if you think that it's somehow relevant to that, then present a valid argument, and present one which I haven't already dealt with, unless you get a kick out of going around in circles.
Your analysis is flawed. I've told you before that I consider definitions to be expressions of meaning in language. Expressions of meaning in language are not the same as meaning. But don't be unreasonable and expect me to somehow present to you the meaning without expressing it in language, because that's the only way.
That yourself and others have failed to understand this says more about you lot than it does about me. You guys obviously need to scratch up on your Wittgenstein. This is a limit of language. He is relevant here. "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent".
I cannot [I]say[/I] it, without expressing it in language. I can only try to [I]show[/I] you what I mean. Dogs. You know them. That is what I mean. Go and take a long hard look at one if need be.
"The second thing in which the value of this work consists is that it shows how little is achieved when these problems are solved". How right you were, Wittgenstein. I have gained an insight, but look at this ongoing mess that is philosophy. I look back at this chaos, and I see philosophy-types gleefully cavorting about in it hither and thither as though there's no tomorrow. Drinking it up. The nectar of self-important fools. The aim is to find your way out of the forest, not wander deeper in.
Are you disagreeing with me here?
Are you saying that my assertion is false?
Let me get this straight. You don't even understand that I was saying that you don't understand?
I'm asking you a direct question. Simple.
Do you have an answer?
I'm thinking that there are unspoken rules at work, especially early on during the development of the language. I'm also thinking that some language rules are constructs of language; written instructions.
Rules of grammar. Syntax. Understanding. Truth. Meaning. Logical rules. The rules of correct inference. All of these things are conceptions.
Do any of them point to a referent that exists in it's entirety prior to being named?
Elaborate upon the difference between the two in as precise terms as your worldview allows. Please.
Only one...
Let's stick to arguments based upon a bit more than logical possibility alone...
The last speaker of a native tongue carries the meaning of use along with them at the moment of death.
My original answer was good enough.
Quoting creativesoul
That would be a conclusion, not an argument.
You didn't do as I asked, which was to give a proper answer, where that means giving a fully justified answer instead of just asserting a necessary dependence. You deliberately left that part out of what you quoted.
Come on, don't be obtuse; the empirical evidence is that we can and do decipher ancient texts. What do you think would happen of we tried to decipher naturally occurring marks in stones? Do you want to argue that there is no difference between human-produced and naturally produced marks on rocks, and that we could never decipher an ancient text to discover (at least something of if not the whole of) the meaning that was originally inscribed there?
I don't agree with Wittgenstein, though. (And in my opinion the "Wittgenstein cult" is one of the worst things to happen to philosophy in the last 100 years.) I was detailing that in the PI thread. I'm behind in that thread and need to catchy back up, but I started detailing disagreements with him.
Keep reading. One distinction was the sentence that followed in the post you quoted: "If there are physical laws, it's literally impossible to 'disobey them' (at least in the possible world wherein the physical law obtains). That's not at all the case for rules as we're talking about them."
Blasphemer.
Don’t you just hate it when it’s presupposed about you, that you don’t know something after you’ve already rejected it?
The source of the time-independent “rocks are rocks” tautology”
“.....It is clear that in the description of the most general form of proposition only what is essential to it may be described -- otherwise it would not be the most general form. That there is a general form is proved by the fact that there cannot be a proposition whose form could not have been foreseen (i.e. constructed). The general form of proposition is: Such and such is the case.
....and, lest we forget the case of the disappearing humans:
“....The totality of true propositions is the total natural science (or the totality of the natural sciences).
Propositions can represent the whole reality, but they cannot represent what they must have in common with reality in order to be able to represent it -- the logical form.
To be able to represent the logical form, we should have to be able to put ourselves with the propositions outside logic, that is outside the world....”
I know I know.....it’s been said (1787) one cannot and should not nit-pick a manuscript for his own particular purposes without jeopardizing the understanding of the totality of it. Been there, done that, got the extra-thick reading glasses to show for it. (Sigh)
Rhetorically speaking.
Many people have spoken of philosophy as an ongoing conversation, with no royal road. You become acquainted with various pieces by listening-in and only slowly become conversant yourself. Whatever language is, this aspect of it seems key.
Guess not.
Why would I continue to use terminological frameworks that are inherently incapable of taking proper account of meaning as a means for taking proper account of a kind of meaning?
:yikes:
Fully justified?
:worry:
You want a thesis on existential dependency and what can be gleaned - on an ontological level - by putting it to use?
Is the justification or truth of my assertions existentially dependent upon you?
I think not.
Is either meaningful?
Why don't you create a discussion of your own and ask that question? Can you please stop trying to be the chairperson in other people's discussions all the time?
The question directly addresses the situation you put forth. Why don't you try to deal with issues that your position has?
It's a take on Witt's beetle, by the way.
You're such an obtuse brat sometimes.
It's a scenario which you yourself thought up, and it asks a different question which I'm not concerned with. You should be putting a conscious effort into pursuing my line of inquiry, not coming of with what you think are "better" lines of enquiry. You are very annoying when you do this. You're not engaging with anyone in particular, you're trying to redirect the audience to your line of inquiry. In short, you're trying to take over control of chairing the discussion. And you do it all the time. That's really rude and inappropriate. And I find it much more of a slight than swearing or name calling or giving me a bit of attitude or whatnot: that's superficial stuff which I can overlook. That's water off a duck's back. But this? This is an affront.
Are you claiming that that is not relevant here?
:worry:
You talk about using outdated positions like logical positivism, while simultaneously using archaic linguistic frameworks. Those frameworks are the problem. They cannot properly account for meaning. The project is to take proper account of a kind of meaning.
The methodology you're insisting that everyone follow is utterly inadequate for the task.
You're doing much the same thing here.
The problem is the historical language use of 'ontology'...
Can you quote something that has been said, try to remain on point, and if you seem to be going down a different avenue of thought, then explain the relevance to what has been said? I don't want the subject changed without very good reason, and I'll be the judge of that. Can you please respect my wishes?
Pointing out that the methodology(the terminological framework) you're insisting on, is inherently inadequate for the task is the wrong way to involve myself in the discussion?
How else to I tell you that the problems are the inherently inadequate conceptions, language use, and/or the terminological frameworks you're adopting and working from?
Flies and bottles...
Step 1 is to quote something I said. The quote function is your friend.
Step one is for you to go back and revisit the post where I did quote you and offered relevant answers...
page 6 maybe?
I lost patience after your problematic first reply, which I did briefly address. You were just getting the wrong end of the stick, and it would sap my will and my energy to explain why that it is, and where you're going wrong, and I wouldn't find that rewarding. With others, they either got it, or they didn't get it quite so wrong, and it was something I could work with.
One person is insufficient for language. The entire scenario is ill conceived.
Linguistic meaning is existentially dependent upon language users. The meaning does not consist of language users. The meaning consists of correlations drawn between different things. The meaning lives or dies along with the users. If someone or other later finds a text, it is possible for them to decipher some of the meaning. That would require that an interpreter draw the same correlations between the marks and whatever else those marks were correlated with by the original actual users of that language...
How would anyone know if they had any of it right if there is no user to verify?
That's far too many assertions there that you're bombarding me with all at once. You're getting ahead of yourself now. Each one would require careful analysis. Each one would require an argument from you. I don't need to be presented with claims which are already what the debate hinges on, like this:
"Linguistic meaning is existentially dependent upon language users".
And this:
"The meaning consists of correlations drawn between different things".
And this, which is redundant, as it is basically just another way of putting the first claim:
"The meaning lives or dies along with the users".
Again, these should be your conclusions, not your premises!
And as for this:
"One person is insufficient for language".
Even if true, that's not a big deal, as that wasn't the point of the thought experiment. Just change the number to whatever you think the minimum requirement is.
All meaning consists of correlations drawn between different things.
Let's start there.
Do you disagree?
If so, offer me one example to the contrary. That's all it takes.
It seems a little unclear. I would change it to: all [i]linguistic[/I] meaning consists of correlations that [i]have been[/I] drawn between different things. That way it makes it clear that only linguistic meaning is being talked about, and it makes it clear that only a past act is required for there to be linguistic meaning. This past act required subjects, but that's all that they're required for, as far as I can reasonably assess. There's a linguistic meaning if it was set, and if nothing of relevance has changed.
All meaning consists of correlations drawn between different things.
Linguistic meaning is a kind of meaning.
Linguistic meaning consists of correlations drawn between different things.
"Drawn" is past tense, so the pedantry is unnecessary. It's not about you. It's about linguistic meaning being a kind of meaning. If all meaning consists of a set of necessary elemental constituents, and linguistic meaning is a kind of meaning, then linguistic meaning consists of those necessary elemental constituents.
Those are what linguistic meaning consists of, plus whatever else it takes to be linguistic(in addition to the basic necessary elemental constituents) as compared/contrasted to other kinds of meaning.
I don't care what you think about that, because I've confined the discussion to linguistic meaning only, so whether that's true or false is irrelevant.
Quoting creativesoul
I bloody well know that "drawn" is past-tense. Your statement contained an ambiguity because of what was missing, and what was missing can be filled in a number of ways. I know this because I'm just better at spotting these grammatical things than you are. You would do well to bear this in mind the next time you think of replying like that. I will show you what I mean, since you obviously missed it:
All [linguistic] meaning consists of correlations [that are] drawn between different things.
All [linguistic] meaning consists of correlations [that have been] drawn between different things.
It's only the second one that I'll accept.
All meaning consists of correlations that have been drawn between different things.
Linguistic meaning is a kind of meaning.
Linguistic meaning consists of correlations that have been drawn between different things.
Now...
Whatever drawing correlations between different things is existentially dependent upon, so too is linguistic meaning.
I don't care what you think about that, because I've confined the discussion to linguistic meaning only, so whether that's true or false is irrelevant.
Woah, déjà vu.
Now...
Quoting creativesoul
You have such an awkward way of wording things. What are you even talking about? Just say it. What is it that you think both things are dependent on?
Correlations that have been drawn between different things are themselves existentially dependent upon a creature capable of drawing them. No such creature, no such correlations.
Whatever drawing correlations is existentially dependent upon, so too is linguistic meaning.
I knew this would lead to disappointment. That is precisely what the debate hinges on. Assuming what you're supposed to be concluding is a logical fallacy.
Look, if you're just not up to it, if you're not on my level, then this won't be worth it for me.
I'd add that it has to be more than a mere correlation, it has to be a "direct connection" between two things (I would say an intentional connection, but it's to your benefit for me to not use that term, because we don't have nonmental intentionality).
The problem is that when no people exist, the world that's independent of us has no means of making such direct connections.
It needs to be a direct connection and not just a correlation, because, for example, "the composition of music employing the twelve-tone scale" is correlated with "dodge" in the dictionary, because the former is the definition of "dodecaphony," and "dodge" follows dodecaphony. (At least hypothetically--I didn't actually check a standard dictionary to check the example, but all we need is an example of the types of correlations we find--definitions of a term followed by another term.)
That is far more nuanced, but if you cannot accept the basics, that nuance will not be rightly understood.
Exactly.
No, you're just bad at logic beyond a more basic level. You can't just assume what the debate is over as part of your argument.
Quoting creativesoul
Jesus H. Christ. No.
I think the problem here is that you're not good enough at grammar or logic or both to avoid problems relating to tense.
Let's say that there is a correlation that has been drawn between apples and pears. It was drawn by a creature who died last night. The correlation depended on the creature for its existence, but it does no longer. The creature died, yet the correlation made by the creature remains.
The correlation was dependent on the creature's past actions for it to be there now. But it isn't dependent on the creature [i]now[/I]. The creature is dead after all.
That's an example of how to use the grammar of tenses properly, and how to do logic properly. Perhaps you can learn from my example.
Good.
So all correlations drawn between different things are existentially dependent upon a creature capable of drawing them.
Linguistic meaning consists of correlations that have been drawn between different things.
Linguistic meaning is existentially dependent upon a creature capable of drawing correlations.
That's an example of self contradiction.
Your 'logic' will inevitably change variables when attempting to set it all out. Save me the trouble of making you look bad here. It will. Trust me.
If you had any clue...
Shakes head and walks away...
No, I suspect that it's an example of you failing to realise that you're talking about a difference sense of existential dependence which completely misses the point of what I'm getting at.
Your sense seems to be the sense that I'm existentially dependent on my parents. If they had not conceived me, then I wouldn't be here right now.
My sense is, and has always been, that I'm not existentially dependent on my parents in the sense that they could both be dead right now, and yet I am still here.
I depended on my parents in order to exist, but I no longer do.
Fortunately, I'm very good at analysing what goes on in exchanges such as this. I can do it on a level far greater than you. You just think that I'm making a self-contradiction.
It's really unclear what you're talking about here though, and unfortunately not for the first time. It's not so much what you're saying that is unclear, but rather that you've once again left out what this is supposed to be required for. This is a reoccurring problem which you need to iron out.
You need to understand that when you say things like, "It has to be...", and, "It needs to be...", but you don't explicitly state what for, then that will cause a problem of ambiguity.
I thought that would be clear from what I wrote. It needs to be a direct connection and not just a correlation to do the work that we want done, because if it can just be a correlation, then we get the definition for "dodecaphony" attached to the word "dodge," for example.
What the...? To get the work done? What does [I]that[/I] mean?
All you seem to be doing with your example is showing that there's some kind of logical relationship which can be deduced from one set of terms to another. But you still haven't given me any reason to conclude that there is a need for anyone to exist at the time to make logical deductions about anything at all, or to make any kind of intentional anything, or draw connections of any kind, let alone with regard to your example with its weirdly obscure language. (Couldn't you find a more readily understandable example of this? All of this "dodge" and "dodecaphony" business makes it a lot harder to understand what the hell you're going on about).
This just looks like more psychologism nonsense.
For meaning to occur.
Quoting S
? No. I'm saying that there's a correlation in dictionaries, for example, between the definition of a term and the term that follows that definition.
In other words, we have word A and definition x. Then we have word B and definition y. B follows A in alphabetical order. Well, in dictionaries, there's a correlation between x and B. B immediately follows x after all, and that's the case in multiple dictionaries.
How on earth do you get from that to, "For meaning to occur at a given time, people must exist at that time"?
That wasn't what I was focusing on yet for this tangent. The point was simply to suggest that a mere correlation isn't sufficient. There needs to be a correlation, but we need more than that, too.
I think the question is relevant. It's not a matter of whether we can know (in the sense of have absolute certainty) that we have deciphered an ancient text correctly, but of whether it is possible to be wrong or right about whether we have deciphered its meaning. If we accept that there can be unknown, but decipherable meaning, in other words that there can be meaning there to be deciphered, then that would seem to commit us to accepting that meaning is not merely in the human mind.
I still don't accept that for there to be linguistic meaning [i]at the time[/I], there would need to be an intentional act of associating one thing, like bell ringing, to another thing, like a melody; or with dictionary definitions and alphabetical order, [i]at the time[/I].
But I do accept that some sort of human act would have been required at a time in the past for there to be meaning at the time that we're talking about.
That first paragraph above is my understanding of where you were going with that, or where you would [i]need to go[/I] for it to be logically relevant. It doesn't seem to take us anywhere new or helpful. It seems to be just a rehash of your psychologism, where you merely assert or assume that psychological requirements for other purposes, like understanding and whatnot, are somehow required for there to be linguistic meaning at the time. That last step, where you misapply these psychological requirements, is unreasonable and without foundation. Or you could be just talking past me by assuming your own interpretations of things like linguistic meaning, when I'm obviously not arguing for your interpretation, I'm arguing for mine.
It's like you begin by thinking along the lines of what it would take for someone to understand something, or some sort psychological or epistemological angle, but then you unreasonably switch to metaphysics and misapply this angle. There seems to be no logical basis for doing that. I'm after this presumed logical basis from you, but you never provide it.
That's partly why I think that it's so important for you to be explicit about what these requirements are [i]requirements for[/I] each time you go down this route. Because if at any point, you're just talking about what it generally takes for there to be understanding, or for someone at the time to know something about the meaning, or something like that, then we might well agree, but the problem there would be logical irrelevancy. It's the next step which is problematic, and which remains problematic and without a resolution.
I didn't think that his question was relevant because it was asking a question about a different issue. It was asking whether or not we can know, in practice, that the text had been translated correctly.
I think that for it to be relevant, it would become a loaded question, which is just to swap one logical problem (about irrelevance) for another (about a presumption of warranty). The controversial assumption would be that in order for the text to have meaning, it would have to be known at the time, in practice, whether or not the text could be correctly translated. And that assumption hasn't been warranted.
I think that he misunderstands or is misapplying Wittgenstein's beetle.
I was harsh, because it annoyed me that he wasn't explicit about all of this. I've had to try to work out all of the logical connections which he has left implicit. And his general manner of how he goes about discussions annoys me also, where he just comes out with something directed at no one in particular, and seemingly going down a disconnected line of thought, and multiple posts like that in a row. So I was partially venting about this stuff with my snappy replies to him.
Anyone who breaks one of my cardinal rules risks triggering my wrath:
Quoting S
Yes. And no one has provided any substantial basis for rejecting my position on that. We've just had illogic and trivial semantics.
We've also had inappropriate approaches, like the approach of a scientist who thinks that we need to perform some sort of experiment, or the approach of a psychologist who thinks that we need to analyse how a person understands meaning.
No. We need the approach of a logician.
Indeed.
If all we have is a previously unknown, never-before-seen, ancient text, then all we can be certain of is that that text was meaningful to the language community from whence it came. We cannot be certain about whether or not we - as interpreters - are drawing the same correlations between the text and other things.
Since all meaning consists of correlations drawn between different things, and all shared meaning consists of a plurality(within a community) of creatures drawing the same correlations between language elements and something else, then it only follows that we - as interpreters - cannot be certain that our correlations have the same content as the people from whence the writings came, because we have only the text.
As a result, we have no way to falsify/verify that we've drawn the same correlations between that text and the corresponding content within the original correlations drawn by the users.
That's an epistemological aspect.
I am of the position that meaning is not merely of the mind(thought/belief), but there is no meaning without the mind(thought/belief). This could be further explained, if need be. For the purposes here, it seems unnecessary.
All meaning consists of correlations drawn between different things, and the drawing of correlations is existentially dependent upon a creature capable of drawing such. It only follows that all meaning is existentially dependent upon a creature capable of drawing correlations. No creature, no correlations. No correlations, no meaning.
The connection between language elements(signs/symbols/tokens/phrases/movements/what have you) and the corresponding content is made by the creature. When all the language users die, the connection between the text and it's corresponding content ceases to exist. Without the correlations, there is no meaning.
All interpretation is of that which is already meaningful. There is no interpretation possible of an ancient unknown text from a group of long dead language users. Such a text is meaningless.
That's an 'ontological' aspect.
And why was it meaningful to them? Because they gave it meaning.
Quoting creativesoul
We don't need to be. Undeciphered meaning is still meaning, obviously.
Quoting creativesoul
And none of that is relevant to any of the questions I've asked. I haven't denied that there can be situations where there's an unknown meaning. I don't think that Janus has either. In fact, that was his whole point in bringing up the ancient text.
Quoting creativesoul
A position you still haven't [I]reasonably[/I] justified. The rest is just your question begging copypasta.
I don't know why people think they're doing something of significance when they include their conclusion - what the debate is over - in their premise or definition. This can be done with anything, so it's trivial. I can do it with a Creator, as I showed earlier.
Quoting creativesoul
Of course it follows, because you're begging the question. But that's still a fallacy.
[I]All life consists of purpose, and the giving of purpose is existentially dependent upon a Being capable of giving such. It only follows that all life is existentially dependent upon a Being capable of giving purpose.[/I]
And you don't ever seem to show any learning. You're still, for example, wording things in a way that I showed to have a problem of ambiguity with regard to tense. You're just copy and pasting the exact same text with the exact same problem.
a) "All meaning consists of correlations [which are] drawn between different things".
b) "All meaning consists of correlations [which have been] drawn between different things".
Which one do you mean?
You know, you wouldn't make a very good journalist. They're expected, wherever possible, to abide by a strict standard whereby they bracket in what would otherwise leave ambiguity whenever they quote someone. I can't see you managing well if you were tasked with that. I'm not even sure you understand the problem. It's either that you don't understand it or that you're deliberately ignoring it.
Or at least start preparing a damn good explanation for why you're doing this.
During feeding times, a mother duck can be very aggressive towards young males when her ducklings are little. I once watched one of them bite an adolescent male by the wing and get dragged about thirty yards. It was a tug-of-war. Quite funny to witness. The male was not at all alarmed, he had been through this many times before. Par for the course, so to speak. He showed no signs of being in pain. Rather, he simply walked at a slightly faster than normal pace dragging her along with him, while she was literally planting her feet into the ground in a failed attempt to pull him the other direction. She pulled and pulled against the grain, her feet never quite gaining traction...
The funny part was that towards the end of the struggle between the two, he stopped where some food was and took a couple of bites before continuing to drag her a bit farther..
He never missed a beat...
She finally let go.
Are you sure that she attacked him because she was acting in defence of her ducklings? Maybe he was just bad at philosophy, and she lost her patience with him. :smirk:
You're reading way too much into my comments about this part. Again, I was simply saying why a mere correlation isn't sufficient.
For...? (You still haven't learnt your lesson!). For there to be meaning, I take it. Which is the same problem, which still lacks a resolution.
Which is the same problem as what? (Seriously, I have no idea what the comparison would be to there)
Is it possible for you to provide me with a logical basis for your posited requirements for there to be meaning? Or have we reached a dead end? It just feels like I'm waiting and waiting here.
So your point is that a correlation isn't sufficient for there to be meaning, because your unjustified posited additional requirement of an intentional association is true? And I should accept it as true, even though you haven't justified it? Why should I accept [i]any[/I] additional posited requirements along those lines? Why shouldn't I just dismiss them? Why shouldn't they be cut out with Ockham's razor?
I don't know why you're not understanding what I'm typing. I think it's because you're reading too much into it. Empty your mind for a moment, and just read what I'm typing below. I'm not saying or trying to imply anything other than exactly what I'm typing. I'm explaining this verbosely and as simply as I can. If you don't read anything into it, hopefully this will aid in us agreeing on all of the following:
Let's consider dictionaries for a moment.
Dictionaries are big collections of terms to be defined, arranged in alphabetical order, and definitions of those terms.
Because of this, words to be defined like "dodge" follow words to be defined like "dodecaphony." Why? Because "dodge" comes in alphabetical order after "dodecaphony."
Let's imagine for the sake of this example that there's no English word between "dodecaphony" and "dodge." I don't know for sure if that's correct--if it isn't I can't offhand think of the word(s) in between the two, but whether it's exactly correct doesn't matter for this example.
After the word to be defined is a definition of that word. So the definition of "dodecaphony" follows the word "dodecaphony," And then the definition of "dodge" follows the word "dodge."
This means that there's a correlation between the definition of the word "dodecaphony" and the term "dodge," Why? Because for one (this isn't the only correlation, but it's definitely one correlation we can note), the word "dodge" always follows a set of words such as "the composition of music employing the twelvetone scale" (which is a definition of "dodecaphony.")
So far, that is ALL that I'm claiming in this part. So, we're not reading anything else into what I'm saying. Are you with me so far, or what part of the above do you disagree with?
But no matter how you phrase the question, you are still talking about what people want to communicate. They can be long dead people, but we are talking about words (symbols) that are supposed to be understood by someone. Even if you differentiate between meaning and understanding, for something to have meaning it must be possible to understand that meaning.
If it's impossible to understand the meaning, because e.g. nothing that speaks any language exists, how are words in a dictionary different from random scratches in a rock, or the pattern of waves on the ocean?
Quoting Janus
Well meaning created by humans can be unknown but decipherable by humans. For any language to work at all, we need to be able to mirror other humans to some extend. We cannot read minds, yet we can approximate what other people think by listening/reading etc. This ability allows us to decipher meaning even in dead languages, but we do that by simulating what other humans think. The meaning doesn't travel from our eyes to our brains.
I agree, but I don't see any relevance to the point at issue in the rest of what you say there.
Exactly, but S apparently believes that a "christening of meaning" (at least per communal usage) makes some sort of objective, persistent abstract existent obtain, an abstract existent for which it's a category error to contemplate location, concrete properties, etc.
If you agree with all of that, the point is simply that correlation isn't sufficient for meaning, because otherwise you'd have to say that the meaning of "dodge" has something to do with 12-tone music composition.
It's only impossible to understand in practice, not in principle. In principle, if there was a being able to decipher the meaning there, then it could be understood.
The difference is obviously that random scratches on a rock have not been given a meaning, so there isn't one. There is not, and was never at any point, a [I]this means that[/I].
Neither do I, and that has got to be problem numero uno here. People keep losing sight of logical relevance. So much of what people have typed up and submitted has been a complete waste of time and effort.
Exactly! When scholars attempt to decipher ancient texts, they examine patterns of repeating symbols or heiroglyphics to discover clues to their meaning, and painstakingly construct the meaning of the text. Interpretations can be wrong, of course, at least in part.
But that they could be wrong about the meaning of an ancient text indicates that there must be a right interpretation; so it follows that the text has meaning, even if we cannot discover what it is. In something which consisted in merely random marks it would not be possible to construct any interpretation.
The fact that there are meaningful patterns in such texts is on account of their intentional nature. This is the salient difference between texts and naturally occurring patterns. texts are intentionally produced and forever embody that act of intentional production; and that just is what we call 'meaning'.
No you wouldn't. That simply doesn't follow as far as I can tell.
So, as I asked, what part of the second-to-last post of mine did you disagree with? Are you saying there's not a correlation in dictionaries between the definition of "dodecaphony" and the word "dodge"?
It seems ridiculous to me to say that just because dictionaries are in alphabetical order, and there are definitions in close proximity, that somehow the meanings would be mixed up. There's no logically relevant correlation as far as I can make out. The meaning of the word "dodge" wouldn't somehow have a meaning corresponding with a definition for a different word which just happens to be before or after it.
The word would continue to mean what it did before. You haven't reasonably demonstrated otherwise.
If we're adding "logically relevant" to "correlation," then it's something other than a mere correlation, no?
Well that now seems to be confirmed as a silly tangent. I've only ever spoke of correlation in a sense that is logically relevant to my argument, not correlation in any other sense that you could randomly pluck out of thin air.
This is why I stressed that you were reading something into my comment that I wasn't saying.
All I said was that I'd say that meaning requires something other than mere correlation. That wasn't code for anything else. I wasn't trying to be sly. There were a number of posts that posited meaning simply as a correlation. I was simply stressing that it has to be more than a mere correlation. Maybe sometimes we can just agree and not have to argue about everything.
If I was reading anything into it, it was so as to interpret you as saying something logically relevant, and not an utterly trivial tangent that has been a bloody waste of my time and energy. I was trying to apply the principle of charity.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Jesus Christ. I can't believe I got sucked in to that one! Isn't it charitable to assume that when people speak of a correlation, they're not speaking of any old random correlation, but one that is actually relevant and makes sense? Was it really worth trying to score such a superficial point? Go on then. Give yourself a pat on the back.
We are on the same page. :up:
I wasn't trying to "score a point." And if folks have in mind that it has to be something more than a mere correlation, why wouldn't they just say, "Yes, of course (I simply didn't spell that out because I thought it should have been obvious)," when I write that I'd say it has to be more than mere correlation?
Apples and oranges often come in baskets together. Now sometimes they don't, but let's presume for the sake of argument, they do. So, now there's a correlation between apples and oranges, right? Agree, so far? Because I'm just building up to accusing you of saying apples are oranges...
:lol:
Talk of interpreting an ancient text presupposes that it is meaningful. That presupposition is mistaken, as it is based upon an ill conceived notion of meaning. All meaning consists of correlations that have been drawn between different things. All such correlations were made by the language users. The language users are all dead. Without the users there are no correlations. Where there are no correlations, there is no meaning.
That's true by definition, but it's also true of the pattern of waves on the ocean.
Quoting S
And if someone did give meaning to the scratches? Would the scratches then be any different, objectively, than they were before?
Quoting Janus
But that intentionality is only visible to an intelligence with something akin to human "rationality". Without an intelligence, the patterns would still be there, but patterns are literally everywhere.
How many times do I have to repeat the point? Intentionally produced patterns are not the same as naturally occurring patterns; the former are semantically meaningful, and the latter are not. By your lights an ancient text was meaningful when produced, became meaningless when it was lost, and became meaningful again when it was found. This is nonsense thinking.
And note: this is not to say that natural patterns cannot have any meaning, either; the point is that whatever meaning natural patterns might have is not intentionally produced. Natural patterns are signs, not symbols; so for example fossils are signs of animals or plants that once existed, lava flows are signs of past volcanic activity, and so on.
Actually the unintentional meaningfulness of natural patterns only supports the point that meaning is not merely in human or animal minds.
Conflating meaning with causality. Equivocating the term "meaning" as well.
p2.All correlations are existentially dependent upon a creature capable of drawing such correlations
C1.All meaning is existentially dependent upon a creature capable of drawing correlations between different things(from p1, p2)
p4.Linguistic meaning is a kind of meaning
C2.All linguistic meaning is existentially dependent upon a creature capable of drawing correlations between different things(from C1, p4)
Well, what do you expect? There's a reason we're losing patience with you, you know? Perhaps reflect back on your reply and consider what might have triggered such a reaction from Janus.
I just pointed out a case of affirming the consequent.
Excuse me? The pattern of waves on the ocean do not have linguistic meaning, which I've said countless times is the only kind of meaning I'm talking about.
And no, it's not true by definition, it's true as a matter of logic. I didn't mean it as a tautology. It's like saying that if there was a being capable of swimming, then the being could go out swimming one day. There's a distinction between capability and possibility which you seem to be overlooking.
Quoting Echarmion
In what sense? You're not being very clear. Physically? No. In terms of meaning? Yes, obviously. Having meaning is obviously different from having no meaning.
Yes, like the cup that keeps blipping in and out of existence when we observe it, then look away, then observe it again!
It's the same dodgy idealist logic.
p2.All correlations are existentially dependent upon a creature capable of drawing such correlations
C1.All meaning is existentially dependent upon a creature drawing correlations between different things(from p1, p2)
p3.Linguistic meaning is a kind of meaning
C2.All linguistic meaning is existentially dependent upon a creature drawing correlations between different things(from C1, p3)
p4.When more than one creature in a community draws the same correlations, meaning is shared, and linguistic meaning emerges via language creation
C3.Ancient texts were once meaningful solely as a result of being one part of the language users' correlations(from C2, p4)
p5.The language users from whence the ancient text came, to whom it was meaningful, no longer exist
p6.The language users' correlations between the text and other things no longer exist
C4.The ancient text is meaningless[b](from C3, p5, p6)
Not the same to a human mind. You haven't established how they are not the same in any other way, e.g. physically.
Quoting Janus
No, by my lights an ancient text is meaningful to a human mind, but not meaningful outside of it. If meaning were to be found in the text itself, how would that meaning reach the mind of the reader? Does it travel on photons? Because that sounds like nonsense to me.
Quoting Janus
How so? You just said that intentionally produced patterns are not like other patterns.
Quoting S
Unless there was a being capable of deciphering the meaning.
Quoting S
Begging the question. That the scratches have themselves meaning is what you seek to establish.
Quoting creativesoul
[I]This[/I] is the problem.
You can repeat it a million times, but it will [I]still[/I] be a problem, unless you actually [I]resolve[/I] the problem.
First, the unresolved problem of ambiguity:
a) I'm existentially dependent on my parents. If they had not conceived me, then I wouldn't be here right now.
b) I'm not existentially dependent on my parents. They are both dead right now, yet I am still here.
Which [I]sense[/I] of existential dependence do you mean?
The meaningfulness and the meaning of intentionally produced marks (heiroglyphics) is embodied in the marks themselves. It is the semiotically meaningful character of intentionally produced marks that distinguishes them from naturally occurring marks. If you can't understand that I dont know what else to say.
No. It's not.
There are no examples of a correlation being drawn between language use and something else that do not include a creature drawing the mental correlation between them.
Open them... look for yourself.
The meaningfulness of the word "tree" does not embody the tree nor the utterer of the word. It would need to if what you say were true.
The meaningfulness of the word "tree" is the result of language users uttering "tree" as a means for picking out the referent.
The meaning of "tree" consists of the term, the referent, and the language user uttering the word while talking about the tree(the referent).<-----that is the attribution of meaning.
You can repeat it a million times, but it will still be a problem, unless you actually resolve the problem.
First, the unresolved problem of ambiguity:
a) I'm existentially dependent on my parents. If they had not conceived me, then I wouldn't be here right now.
b) I'm not existentially dependent on my parents. They are both dead right now, yet I am still here.
Which sense of existential dependence do you mean?
If it's b), then we disagree, and since our disagreement is a result of your definition of meaning - which you refuse to let go of, even for a second - [I]and nothing else[/I], then it's a dead end with you.
You merely define a subjective dependence into being, which is utterly trivial, and which can be done with just about anything, including a Creator, as previously demonstrated.
I understand what you are saying. But you're begging the question. How is it embodied? How does it travel from the marks to the reader? Absent humans or any similar intelligence, what constitutes the difference between meaningful marks and any other configuration of reality?
Now, to anyone who has their hand raised: does your definition necessarily imply a subject?
Also, if your definition doesn't necessarily imply a subject, are you just asserting without proper argument that meaning requires a subject, or that it requires subjective activity, which in turn requires a subject? Bearing in mind that simply including this as a premise in a valid argument doesn't resolve the problem at all.
If this applies to you, then please don't just ignore me. Respond. It will be much more productive to bring this problem out in the open than to carry on the discussion as though we can take it anywhere meaningful.[/b]
I suspect that what we may have here is a chronic case of talking past each other, with some participants making little-to-no attempt at addressing my argument on its own terms, and instead simply pushing their own problematic arguments with their problematic premises and definitions, without actually addressing the underlying problems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deixis
In my view, it seems to be a nonphysical realm. Or rather, a realm for which it is not appropriate to think of in terms of the physical. It's a subset of what's the case. It's the case that the text is meaningful. But there are lines of enquiry here which seem inappropriate, and which seem to be based on pre-held assumptions - minimally, that it even makes sense or is appropriate to ask such questions in this context to begin with. You know, category errors, like asking where is Tuesday, or what are its physical attributes, or something like that.
I like the way you're actually battling with an idea that being on this forum has made you consider, which you don't actually want to consider.
In order to 'set the meaning', you already have to be able to say what something means. And that is something Rover cannot do, beyond 'sick 'em, Rover', or 'over there!'
You'd be in very good company there.
As I explained above, S apparently believes that a "christening of meaning" (at least per communal usage) makes some sort of objective, persistent abstract existent obtain, an abstract existent for which it's a category error to contemplate location, concrete properties, etc.
I can tell you where Tuesday is. (Although by this point, you should be able to successfully guess my answer without me having to provide it.)
As in a[/I] subject, like a person, a [i]who? Or as in subject-predicate? (Which would include a [I]what[/I]).
I read the articulate you linked to. What I referred to as a subjective context earlier is what the article calls personal deixis. These statements wouldn't make sense without a subject, without a me, I, them, you, etc., in a hypothetical scenario where there is none.
But, in my view, and so far as I'm aware, these statements with a subjective context are the only kind of statements which play out differently in the hypothetical scenario.
The other statements I take to be objective. It would be true that the word "dog" means what it does in the language. My logic can deal with that without a problem. It is only the logic of others, where they read a subject or subjectivity into it, where problems are encountered. They've incessantly tried to make their problems my problems, without success.
What problems do you think crop up if "dog" doesn't mean something objectively?
If it logically implies a subject where there are none, as in the hypothetical scenario, then that's a contradiction, which is a problem. Of course, that's only if my interlocutor accepts the hypothetical post-human scenario. If they don't, then we go no further in a sense, but I find them disingenuous if they do that, since we're all capable of imagining the hypothetical scenario. It seems more like a post hoc rationalisation to deny that it's possible.
Considered and rejected.
I don't remember what your hypothetical scenario is (I'm guessing that it's just something about meaning when no people exist).
Why is insisting that it's imaginable any different than someone insisting that it's imaginable that there are emotions like happiness, sadness, etc. when no people exist, or someone insisting that it's imaginable that there are ecliptics when there are no solar systems, etc.?
How would you class the Fibonacci sequence? Is it a naturally occurring pattern, void of semantic meaning, or is it intentionally produced?
What? That needs an explanation, because at first blush it simply seems false. Why couldn't I just coin a name at the time? I don't have to say anything. I can just look at something and coin a name for it, then that's what it means in my language.
I would advise against trying to engage with him productively. He seems like a dead end. He won't really listen, he'll just keep pushing his view, asserting this and that, and so on. He has shown little interest in engaging my position on its own terms or working out the problems with his own position which I identify.
Well, straightaway, for me, it's counterintuitive to apply the categories you do for stuff like this. Stuff about the necessity of a physical location, stuff about a subject being required. And then I think about why that is. And I consider your explanation, and it just doesn't work out. It just doesn't seem right. And then, of course, that fits my view about the persistence of post-human stuff such as rules and meaning, which I believed separately anyway, and which wouldn't fit with your view. So the explanation comes together for me. I'm going with what I find works best, and although my account might not be complete, it is working for me better than yours.
I think the subjective approach can explain a whole bunch of stuff. Stuff related to understanding, as I've acknowledged throughout. But it shouldn't try to transcend where it works. It shouldn't try to be more than an epistemology, and venture into the world of logic or metaphysics. When it does that, it becomes anthropocentric, and we should all know that anthropocentric models can fail spectacularly, as history has shown.
For me, it's difficult to separate epistemology from ontology. If I'm going to ask myself, "How do we know that 'dog' still means something if no people exist," I don't know how I could answer that without exploring just what meaning is ontologically in the first place. At it seems to me like once we know that, it's easy to answer the epistemological question.
Yeah, and I think that that can lead to some of the biggest problems in metaphysics. It leads to what raises big red flags for me.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Sure, in that sense it seems alright. I do the same thing. But the sort of thing I meant by that - and if you're a metaphysical realist then you should agree with me here - is the kind of thinking that goes, "But how do we know that the cup is still there?", which is fine in a sense, but not in the sense where it is being asked because in their head they're imagining a link between knowledge and existence, such that the cup can't exist at the time without us knowing that it does at the time. That's a gross overestimation of the role that our knowledge plays, in my assessment. It's anthropocentric.
I'm a metaphysical realist in general, but I believe that some things, like emotions, desires, thoughts, etc. are only mental phenomena. That's not giving them any different status aside from placing that phenomena in a particular location--brain activity.
Okay...
So, do you agree with my point there being cases where the role of knowledge in relation to metaphysics is being overestimated?
In the cases like you're describing, I'd just say that the person is confused. Knowing something and how we know it is often not the same thing as what we know about. (They're only the same when the topic is knowledge itself.)
People too quickly jump into thinking, "But how can that be so without me knowing about it?", as if our knowing about it determines the metaphysics. As if the world won't just carry on as before, only without us and our knowledge.
I suspect that this is where people are going wrong with both metaphysical idealism and linguistic idealism. It's a bad way of thinking.
I agree with that, but I don't think it implies that meaning would exist if we didn't, any more than emotions, desires, etc. would exist if we didn't. Some things are mental "in nature" and some are not. The mental-in-nature stuff requires things with minds.
It's no different than saying that some things are, say (to use your other thread), potato-oriented (we don't have a word like "potatal" lol) in nature and some things are not. So we're just not going to have potato-oriented phenomena if potatoes do not exist.
Raise your hand...
Like we're in grade school. Love it.
You really don't remember?
That there is meaning when no people exist is my conclusion, utilising the thought experiment. That conclusion leads to the conclusion that meaning, once set, is objective.
You could put it in your neutral way of talking about ink marks on a piece of paper if you want to. It's a scenario where everyone is dead. An hour previously, when everyone was still alive, these ink marks had meaning. On that we presumably agree. But, of course, I would say that, afterwards, as before, they're not [I]just[/I] ink marks: they have a meaning.
See me after class.
Did the words have meaning before they were discovered again? Have they had meaning since they were written in the same way? What about when it was unknown and forgotten in the earth?
I've been trying to follow the discussion but I lost the thread. Will someone help me get back on track?
Simple.
When is meaning?
But... but why is dog?
Yeah of course that scrap of paper, with those blotchy squiggles, have meaning after all humans are dead. Say a bird grabs the paper and utilises the paper for nest padding. Voilà, now its meaning is warmth and insulation or some shit like that. The real question is: is there meaning when no life at all exists?
Answer one, answer both.
It's awesome. Such a treasure.
Quoting fdrake
Yes, yes, and yes.
Quoting fdrake
There's a whole bunch of different aspects to this discussion. What was intended as my main focus pretty much went out the window, and now it's a rehash of realists vs. idealists on linguistic meaning, which was Part 2 of my previous discussion.
Ancient texts were introduced to show the faults of idealism with regards to linguistic meaning. The idealists have predictably failed to come up with a reasonable response to this.
Exactly. Ask @Terrapin Station. He has the answers to these kind of questions. :lol:
Where is Tuesday?
The meaning is embodied in the repeating patterns of the text. That's what makes it possible to decipher the meaning of the text. The question "How does it travel from the marks to the reader" incorporates an assumption that the meaning is somehow something magically 'over and above' the marks. It is not. We see the marks, we examine the marks, we analyze the repeating patterns of the marks and we attempt to decipher the meaning that we surmise is there.
The differences between intentionally produced, semantically meaningful marks and naturally occurring marks are physical; the natural marks have no sets of different recurring patterns, whereas if there are recurring patterns in natural marks they will be simpler and 'all-over' like ripples in sand, for example.
And you have some kind of information transfer/encoding approach to the meaning of the words on the Rosetta stone. We could work out what they meant because there was a meaning to be worked out; rooted in the information content of causal chains of language use connecting their ancient word use with our modern translation?
You're late to the discussion, so perhaps you missed me say about a trillion times that I'm only talking about linguistic meaning. What you're describing is a different kind of meaning: meaning as a tool, or some shit like that.
Quoting emancipate
Yes. Linguistic meaning.
You have a way with words. I doubt I could've put it like that.
I like it. You and Janus each get a gold star for your contributions.
And Terrapin too, since bouncing back and forth off of each other has been productive to some extent, and I wouldn't have even created this discussion if it wasn't for his line of enquiry which really got me thinking. Although I'm still peeved about his "dodge" and "dodecaphony" shenanigans!
Blame @Pierre-Normand.
Yes, and I think decipherability is the key point in talking about this in order that a distinction be made between encoded linguistic patterns and random marks when discussing ancient texts; and similar scenarios, such as an alien civilization wiping itself out but leaving physical or digital writings, in which I think it also makes sense to call the writings meaningful because they would be potentially decipherable to us (in theory even if not in practice). However, in any scenario where there are no meaning makers at all left and no potential, even in theory, for decipherability, the connection is short-circuited, and I don't think it then makes sense to identify meaning (or non-meaning). So, the most sensible way of talking about this from my point of view is to admit meaning does not have to be in the here and now (it's not tied to some active brain state etc) but there must be potentializability for it to make sense to talk about it being instantiated in any given text.
(This is not to get at the "truth" of the matter, but to try to offer the least problematic solution.)
Okay, you get a gold star too. Although if you close this discussion I'm taking it back. I don't quite agree, but I like it, and it's a lot better than what some others have come out with.
I don't see a need for your terminology of theory and potentiality. My solution seems simpler, and makes use of logic. If the following conditional is true:
[I]If there was a being capable of understanding the text, then the text could be understood.[/I]
Then the text has meaning.
Quoting Baden
Mine seems less problematic.
What you say seems to make good sense to me. It is verging on introducing the idea of the impossibility of saying anything about the noumenal. And that is to 'step up' to another level of discourse about what can meaningfully be said about 'things in themselves' in general.
I have been trying to address the question just from the 'commonsense' perspective of ordinary language use where 'meaning' indicates that something that has been encoded is either deciphered or at least decipherable.
So, if there is, for example, an ancient tablet inscribed a million years ago by a now extinct literate species on a planet 200.000.000 light years from any other sentient beings, that is potentially decipherable then we would ordinarily say that it is meaningful, even though there may be zero possibility of its ever actually being deciphered.
:up:
Quoting S
I don't have a huge problem with your straightforward view (less so than the opposition's alternatives). It mostly works. But I'm going for some extra nuance that deals with the sneaking-in-the-meaning-maker-by-the-back-door thing. Where do you see my view as being more problematic?
Edit: Maybe your edit addresses that.
I like that way of putting it.
Quoting Janus
Zero possibility? Wouldn't there just be an extremely low probability - next to nothing, but not zero?
There must [i]be[/I] a question poser (meaning-maker), or there must [i]have been[/I] one? It seems the latter to me.
I would say you get into murky territory when you posit a scenario that brackets out all meaning-makers to the extent that the question becomes somewhat incoherent. Is something still meaningful? There's no-meaning-maker, even in principle, to decide unless, again, they get snuck in by the back door.
Your use of terminology seems more open to problems of interpretation. Logic is good for cutting out ambiguity.
That's an interesting question. I guess it depends on what is physically possible. Is it physically possible for any vessel to travel at light-speed? At greater than light-speed? We just don't know, so I guess all we can say is that there seems to be "an extremely low probability".
But in any case, it seems absurd to think that whether or not the tablet is meaningful is dependent upon whether or not anyone could get to see it, regardless of whether anyone actually does get to see it.
Maybe at that level, it's a matter of taste. But I draw the line slightly more strictly than you as a defence against what I see as the only effective line of attack on the position, which is to point to an incoherence in completely bracketing out meaning-makers while seeming to rely on the logic, at least in principle, of their presence.
Oh no. Now you've gone and done it. We were doing so well until you suggested that there needs to be a "meaning-maker" to "decide" whether or not there is meaning.
The meaning-maker could have died hundreds of thousands of years ago. No one else "decides" the meaning. He decided it hundreds of thousands of years ago. Everyone else is redundant in that very specific sense. The either decipher or they don't. They either get it right or wrong.
Again, I mean in principle, not necessarily in practice. There doesn't have to be a decision on meaning only the theoretical possibility of one to allow for a world where the presence of meaning makes sense.
But "decision" is the wrong word. It's not a matter of decision. It's a matter of figuring out. The meaning has already been made.
I'm ok with using that term*. It doesn't affect the gist of what I'm saying. I'm in line with this:
Quoting Janus
If that helps.
*The "deciding" is in the figuring out
That's what I asked you, don't turn the question back on me. I don't use your system of classification, so I'm asking you, how you would class the Fibonacci sequence. Does it qualify as a naturally produced pattern, or is it an intentionally produced pattern, under your system of classification?
There are some natural occurring instances of the pattern. The mathematical Fibonacci series are intentionally produced.
I'm a bit of a Humean on "laws" of physics. It's possible that tomorrow I'll turn on the tap and the water will flow upwards. This logic ultimately reigns over whatever physics has to say, although this can be trivial in the sense that I would assign something like that a probability of, like, 0.00000000000(...) 1. But possible nevertheless.
With things like this, it's always ultimately just an extremely low probability.
Quoting Janus
If in principle they could understand what the text says, then it's meaningful. If in practice they can't, because, say, they can't even get there, no matter how hard they try, then that says nothing at all.
Of course it is logically possible that the water may flow upwards, and it may even be physically possible; but it may also not be physically possible; the latter possibility is what I was getting at.
My current thinking is that even playing along with that Kantian language game is part of the problem.
Okay, well, if it is physically possible, then that would just make my tap water example a bad example. I realised what you were getting at, and that's what I tried to get at in my reply. What I'm saying is that physical impossibilities aren't really impossible, but only conditionally so. They're really just extremely improbable. This is because, as I said, logical possibility reigns supreme. It overrides physical impossibility.
It doesn’t, actually. Noumena can never relate to any empirical relation, and noumena can be talked about. Otherwise, the word and its use wouldn’t stand in its philosophical place. Neither things-in-themselves nor noumena can be known as they actually must be, from either experience for lack of an intuition, or from understanding for lack of a conception.
“....noumena in the negative sense, that is, of things which the understanding is obliged to cogitate apart from any relation to our mode of intuition, consequently not as mere phenomena...”
“....cogitated by the understanding alone, and call them intelligible existences (noumena)...”
“....noumena have no determinate object corresponding to them, and cannot therefore possess objective validity....”
Noumena can never have anything to do with meaning, for meaning always has its object.
I would say that there are just things. And I can talk about them.
Really. (And people expect me to remember something like a Schopenhauer book I read 40 years ago., haha.)
Sometimes I can't even remember what movie I watched yesterday (I'll remember it when I look it up, but offhand, sometimes it's a challenge to remember what it was without looking it up). I would blame it on age, but I've always been like that.
:up:
Quoting Janus
I'm not just speaking common sense. I'm rejecting the Kantian distinction, shocking as that might be for some. There are things. And things are [i]just[/I] things. And then there is language, and facts and the like. And on the other side of that boundary, there is nonsense. Anything that can be said at all can be said clearly, and whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
I remember the word "sphygmomanometer", how to pronounce it, and what it means. I likewise remember "lysergic acid diethylamide". I remember the year of the Glorious Revolution: 1688. I remember other historical names and dates. I remember that Brain Hugh Warner, better known as Marilyn Manson, was born in Canton, Ohio, 1969. And I didn't even have to look any of that up. I know it off by heart.
I more or less remember the order of Kings and Queens from William the Conquerer right up to our present Queen.
But I forget what day it is, and when I'm asked by my boss whether I'm working tomorrow, or what time, I never know the answer. And I can forget things I was only told a matter of minutes ago.
I agree, but I understand the Kantian distinction as saying exactly that; the only thing that can be known (said) about noumena is that you cannot know (say) anything about them. They are even "them" only insofar as they logically correspond to phenomena.
I get the similarities between what early Wittgenstein was doing with his [i]Tractatus[/I] and what Kant was doing with his [i]Critique[/I]. Both are about limits. The limits of language, the limits of reason. The book I have on Wittgenstein's [i]Tractatus[/I] makes comparisons.
What you call "noumena", I call nonsense.
Yes, and it is literally non-sense, 'phenomena' pertains to what is of the senses, and 'noumena' pertains to what is not.
Quoting Mww
If noumena can be talked about then they must have something to do with meaning. Did you mean to say instead that they cannot be talked about?
I would say that the idea of noumena, the idea of things which cannot be known or talked about, can be talked about. But if there is an idea of something which cannot be known or talked about then that something cannot be known or talked about, which is strictly in accordance with the very idea itself.
I tell ya what Sapientia... If you'd like to, I'd love to...
There has yet to have been a formal debate on this forum. I think that our discussion has shown several conflicts between our respective views regarding linguistic meaning. Let's have a debate. You can call all your friends if you'd like to help you. You'll need it if this thread is any indication...
Does meaning transcend language use?
That would be the debate topic. You could argue in the affirmative, and I in the negative. We could set the parameters up after the agreement is made. Or if you'd like a different topic question... just say so. I'm down...
Whaddaya say? Ready to show everyone how clever you are?
:wink:
Is the naturally occurring pattern a different pattern from the intentionally produced pattern then?
Oh shit, deadnamed :scream:
I I II III IIIII IIIIIIII IIIIIIIIIIIII IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
or this:
IIIII IIIIIIII IIIIIIIIIIIII IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
are those two patterns the same?
What about these?:
OOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OIOIOIO OIOIOIO OIOIOIOIOIOIOI
OIOIOIOIOIOIOIOIOIOIO
No physically instantiated pattern can represent the whole series, or even any more than the tiniest part of it. So, although both natural and man-made patterns may instantiate the intentionally conceptualized series, the series as mathematically expressed is not a visual pattern, but a pattern that consists merely in a recurring specific operation of addition.
If viewed as you said, a logical correspondence to phenomena, and as I said, an intelligible extant, then there is no meaning associated with them.
It is apparent you may already be familiar with the interpretation that noumena serve the same purpose as schemata, wherein the conflict with impossibility of objective validity is reconciled. I personally don’t buy it, but I ain’t nobody, so........
But yes, the idea of noumena is subject to critical examination, in which case it is the idea with its object, and not noumenon.
in respect of 'noumenal':
[quote=Wikipedia]The Greek word ???????o? nooúmenon is the neuter middle-passive present participle of ????? noeîn "to think, to mean", which in turn originates from the word ???? noûs, an Attic contracted form of ???? nóos[a] "perception, understanding, mind."[3][4] A rough equivalent in English would be "something that is thought", or "the object of an act of thought".
...The Oxford Companion to Philosophy writes "Platonic Ideas and Forms are noumenon, and phenomena are things displaying themselves to the senses. [...] that noumena and the noumenal are objects of higher knowledge, truths, and values is Plato's principal legacy to philosophy."
...In Kant's account, when one employs a concept to describe or categorize noumena (the objects of inquiry, investigation or analysis of the workings of the world), one is employing a way of describing or categorizing phenomena (the observable manifestations of those objects of inquiry, investigation or analysis). Kant posited methods by which the understanding makes sense of, and thus intuits, phenomena: the concepts of the transcendental aesthetic, as well as of the transcendental analytic, logic and deduction.[8][9][10] Taken together, Kant's "categories of understanding" are the principles of the human mind which necessarily are brought to bear in attempting to understand (that is, to understand, or attempt to understand, "things in themselves"). In each case the word "transcendental" refers to the process that the human mind must exercise to understand or grasp the form of, and order among, phenomena. Kant asserts that to "transcend" a direct observation or experience is to use reason and classifications to strive to correlate with the phenomena that are observed. Humans can make sense out of phenomena in these various ways, but in doing so don't know the "things-in-themselves", the actual objects and dynamics of the natural world in their noumenal dimension - this being the negative correlate to phenomena, and that which escapes the limits of human understanding.[/quote]
So, 'the noumenal' is not merely an illusion, but closer to being 'an ideal object' that is known in the same way that numerical propositions are known, i.e. by being grasped directly by the intellect. Whereas knowledge of phenomena is knowledge of 'what appears'. Kant's interpretation actually picks up on some aspects of the 'matter-form' dualism that was characteristic of the preceding philosophical tradition.
I don't agree with this. Forgetting about noumena now (so as not to muddy the waters unnecessarily) if you found an ancient manuscript with what appeared to be a completely unfamiliar script, you could not say what its meaning is, or even whether it will be actually possible to decipher it.
Moreover, however unlikely it might be, it's possible it could simply be intentionally produced undecipherable marks that are designed to mimic script, but have no actual meaning beyond that. More likely, though, is that it would be intentionally produced meaningful script. So, that's what should be said about it: it is likely that it is meaningful, even though we cannot say, and may never be able to say, what the meaning is.
So saying that we cannot say what meaning is there, is certainly not the same as saying there is no meaning there.
Certainly, we can say - with great likelihood - that the ancient text was meaningful to the language users. Upon what ground do you conclude that it remains meaningful after the language users perish?
That is precisely what's at stake... yes?
@S
This may have already been mentioned, but what about unintentionally produced marks that seem to have meaning but don't. Borges' library of Babel, or a million monkeys.The likelihood of these things happening doesn't matter so much as the fact that they're possible in principle.
So wild sci-fi scenario - for some reason a civilization sends out some spaceship with a computer on it - as a kind of voyager golden disc thing. It's basically a giant word processor and printer. It crashes on a planet with some monkey-type species who mess around with it, eventually, against all odds, producing a totally novel short story in english. Not only does it have plot and characters - it has voice.
Let's say such marks don't have meaning. Still, whoever finds them, should they be a english speaker, is going to meaningfully interpret them. They'll be moved by the story. Does that mean these marks didn't have meaning until they were given meaning by the person who read them - and so, because of that, retain meaning forever after?
Or are they meaningful as soon as they're produced, even though unintentional?
It's a far-fetched scenario, granted, but still.
@Baden Curious what your take is as well.
I edited that line out to prevent the uproar sure to follow. It was put there with respect to noumena, with which I will hold in its original assertorial configuration.
That being said, and empirically speaking, that which is assumed to contain possible meaning, must still meet the criteria of possible decryption and possible understanding. Failing either of those, the actual meaning remains no more than assumption, and becomes factually irrelevant. There is nothing given from these failings that even suggests a congruent rationality imbued the assumed meaning in the first place.
From a practical point of view, I got no Interest in a meaning I can’t understand.
The logical possibility of some kind of 'million monkey's' scenario, however unlikely, or even physically impossible such a thing might be, presents an interesting question.
If something like that actually happened, then I would call it a mis-attribution of meaning. The meaningfulness of nature itself as the intentional 'book of God' may or may not be such a mis-attribution of meaning.
I'd say that whatever meaning might be mis-attributed by interpreters to such a phenomenon, the phenomenon would not retain meaning ever after, merely on account of mis-attribution; because it would not be meaning inherent in the phenomenon itself.
Yes, but the existence of your interest or ability to decipher meaning says nothing about the existence of meaning itself; it only speaks to your interest or ability to decipher meaning which may or may not exist.
But what is the 'phenomenon' here? Say someone reads the meaningless text, is moved by it, and so transcribes it, creating an identical text. Then they're killed by the monkeys, dropping the text near the original. Someone else finds both. There's no way to tell which is which - they're phenomenologically identical
It's an interesting thought experiment. I don't believe such a thing could actually happen, but if it did, for sure we would not be able to tell the difference. But I still maintain that if something is not intentionally produced then it is not intentionally meaningful. It could be accidentally meaningful, I guess; I think that's a valid distinction. I mean, that is exactly the distinction that pertains to the possibility of meaning in nature itself; intentionally meaningful if created as such, and accidentally meaningful if not.
Yeah, I totally agree that such a thing almost certainly would never happen. But I think it's enough to drive a wedge, and hopefully draw something out?
so, intentional vs accidental meaning - Is the hallmark of an artifact that has intentional meaning that its creator intended that object to bear the meaning they've endowed it with, in order to convey it to others?
Yes, well it drew out the distinction between intentional and accidental meaning, I guess.
Quoting csalisbury
That raises another interesting question! I think the script on which any work is written is already imbued with meaning. In the 'million monkeys' scenario, the monkeys are already, by virtue of typing letters, making intentionally (on account of the intentionality embodied within the typewriter) meaningful marks.
Those letters become more (accidentally) meaningful if they form meaningful words. More meaningful again if phrases are accidentally created, and still more meaningful if there are whole sentences.
If an entire coherent text with no non-words or nonsense phrases and sentences at all were accidentally created then that would be the limit case. So, in the 'monkey' case it is only the letters that have intentional (not by the monkeys but by the creator(s) of the typewriter) meaning.
Logical possibilities are not facts.
This is precisely what's at issue. How do you determine whether or not a text has meaning? What standard do you use as a means for comparison/contrast when considering all the different candidates?
Quoting creativesoul
No, it's not what is at issue at all. Whether or not a text has meaning is not dependent on whether we can determine that it does. This is exactly the same kind of thing as to say that whether or not the universe was created by God or spontaneously arose or never had a beginning at all is not governed by whether we can determine which alternative is true.
It might or might not be possible to decipher the text in the future even if it is impossible now.
Quoting creativesoul
You are either confusing yourself, or deliberately attempting to confuse me, by conflating the idea that it is a fact that certain things are possible, and others are not possible, with the idea that possibilities are not facts.
I haven’t read through much of this thread, but isn’t the question whether a mind is needed to give the text meaning? Is that the point of this thread?
You're right. That's not what is at issue at all. The fact that you do not have a clear cut criterion for what all meaning consists of is at issue.
Quoting Echarmion
Quoting Echarmion
Quoting Echarmion
Echarmion, I did not mean to pick you exclusively, but you said it most concisely. Based on the above, here is a hypothetical that I would like to know what your side thinks (if this point has already been made, sorry - I try to read carefully):
[i]All human go extinct very suddenly. Our written word survives everywhere. Libraries are full of books, some may last thousands of years. To further help the case, computers can digitally preserve information for eons, someone will just have to provide electricity and turn them on (yes there will be limits and difficulties). Beyond that, many words are literally carved in stone or other methods that would result in long-term preservation.
So, for your beliefs none of those texts have any meaning once humans (or a language capable being) disappear...right?
What if 1000 years later aliens arrive or a new species evolves (gonna need more than 1000 years) with language capabilities and somehow finds a largely preserved database of human information. Like humans re-discovered the meaning of cuneiform or Egyptian hieroglyphs, these new beings could rediscover the meaning of our texts...right?[/i]
Please list all aspects of this hypothetical that are wrong because it creates a bit of a problem for your side: So that dictionary (or whatever surviving texts) had meaning when humans were alive, then had no meaning for a long time, then suddenly had meaning again when the next "language capable" being shows up?
How are you interpreting the definition of meaning? google says meaning is (had to combine with definition for "mean" because google uses "meant" in definition of "meaning"): intending to convey, indicate, or refer to (a particular thing or notion); signify.
Where does your side's, "relative to an observer" come from? Don't get me wrong, obviously without an observer there is no one to understand the meaning. But so what? Totally separate point. Maybe someone will come along...right? And when that new person arrives, they do not invent the meaning...right? So it already existed...or not?
Set it out.
What all would have to also be the case in order for us to decipher the meaning of an ancient text?
Fair enough. I've not been reading everything you write to everyone.
I agree that intention is essential to meaning. As far as the million (or quadrillion) monkeys accidentally typing something meaningful, I would say that the work is given meaning by the intentional act of the reader interpreting it. We see rock formations that look like people or human objects or animals or the like. Just as they are “accidents” of nature, they are given “meaning” by the mind of the beholder.
So... when looking at a text how do you know that it's been correctly deciphered?
The pattern embodies the meaning. If there were no pattern there would be no meaning and nothing to decipher. This is even true of natural marks that embody patterns; the patterns may give a clue as to the origin of the marks.
So... when looking at a text how do you know that it's been correctly deciphered?
That's true and that has already been covered by the notion of "accidental" (as opposed to intentional) meaning. Of course we can impute meaning where it is not there; but from that it does not follow that whether or not there is meaning there is dependent upon our imputations.
What do you mean by this?
Don't like answering questions about the position you hold?
:worry:
I'm just trying to understand it, and making a well-fitted noose at the same time...
Intentional patterns presuppose a pattern maker with volition.
Doesn't that deny non-linguistic meaning?
What if all universes were incapable of supporting life? Would they still hold meaningful information?
It would have no meaning unless someone who spoke the language the sonnet was written in viewed it. Then intentional meaning would probably be (incorrectly) imputed. It would still possess accidental meaning, though
Quoting Noah Te Stroete
Obviously there could then be no intentionally meaningful information unless they were created by an intentional entity (God). Would there be any energetic relations, processes and differences or inorganic entities in your scenario? If so, I say they would still embody accidental meaningful information.
I agree with this.
This sounds like my persuasion of the blending of materialism and idealism.
Well, at least we agree on something. Weren’t you the one who said I was going to be sodomized by a robot? LOL
Are you saying that an intentionally written sonnet always has meaning, but an accidentally written sonnet has meaning created for it upon viewing?
Wouldn't that require there to be some material difference between the two texts? And does the meaning of the intentional text then travel with every copy or representation of the text? How could a viewer tell whether the text they are looking at is a copy of the original, intentional sonnet by Shakespeare or the random work of monkeys?
Yes but that is off-topic, or it is an off topic. :joke:
One thing I’ve learned in my 39 years of life is we’re all a little “off”.
The text was always the same, I am not supposing it materially changes as soon as a language capable intelligence shows up. The text is a specific configuration of matter. It was originally intended to convey information to other humans. A human that read the text could understand what it means. In that sense, the text "has meaning".
But without an intelligence to read the text, it's simply a configuration of matter. It still embodies information in a way, as does every configuration of matter. But it's indistinguishable from that other matter. To an intelligence that is quite unlike our own, the dictionary might be a sign of a complex lifeform, but it wouldn't contain words any more than the remains of our buildings do.
Quoting ZhouBoTong
I am trying, as much as possible, to stick with @S notion that meaning is "X means Y" in the sense of a dictionary definition. So meaning is the "particular thing or notion", the symbol conveys.
Quoting ZhouBoTong
It comes from starting what I know about meaning, that it's something that is in my head, and working backwards to see if it's also something outside my head. I know I have thoughts. I don't necessarily know that they correspond to something "out there". For meaning to be "out there", it has to be shown what and where it is, and how it gets from "out there" to "in here".
I haven't seen an answer to the first question, let alone the second. @S has said something nonphysical is going on, which is something I agree with, I just think the nonphysical something is happening in my mind. Certain configurations of matter cause certain thoughts in my head, but that doesn't mean the matter is the thoughts.
Linguistic meaning is a redundant term. "il n'y a pas de hors-texte".
Its this narrow view of meaning that causes the problems
You assume that meaning can be explained in your opening example. But what you're not seeing is that 'explaining' is the very thing that you need to be able to do in order to show how 'meaning' operates. 'Explaining' relies on analysis of meaning - something which humans employ without having to think much about it. So your account relies on the very thing that it is trying to explain - which means it begs the question (i.e. assumes what it sets out to prove.)
When you point at a dog and name it 'dog', you're doing something that the dog itself can't do. Perhaps the dog responds to verbal commands such as 'fetch the stick', but that can be understood in terms of stimulus and response - that a sound 'stick' is associated with an object the dog knows. What dogs can't do, is utilise abstraction to signify meaning ('find your stick, behind one of the square objects'). Humans alone do that.
Quoting S
A dictionary definition is ‘An abstraction is a general idea rather than one relating to a particular object, person, or situation’. Abstraction relies on the ability to make judgements - about like, unlike, greater than, less than, and so on. So abstraction is fundamental to language. But it’s also fundamental to counting, and to logic. In other words, it’s fundamental to rational thought.
I think the reason that abstraction is sometimes thought to be self-explanatory is because we naturally deploy it whenever we reason. But understanding what it really is, is not at all easy.
Furthermore even though simple examples of word-association can be given, when you consider the intentional and/or relational nature of language, then it’s also not so simple. Humans alone are capable of hierarchical syntax in which words derive their meaning from their relationship with other words. Qualifications, tenses, and cases situate ideas in relation to other ideas and in relation to time (future, present, or past).
Some say that all of these are ‘brain states’, as if this explains how thought, abstraction and reason work. However to even say what a ‘brain state’ is one has to infer, abstract and theorise about what such and such data means. You will never find meaning in neural data, unless you’re an expert in interpreting it. And that expertise is internal to the nature of thought. It pertains to the level of abstract thought, syntax, and logic, which are in some basic sense prior to any declaration about what the empirical data means. You don’t find meaning ‘in the world’ (as scientific empiricists never tire of telling us.) But it must exist, otherwise empirical science itself would have no content.
So I think these are much deeper problems than you’re allowing. They can’t be eliminated with trite examples.
[quote=Rene Descartes]if there were machines that resembled our bodies and if they imitated our actions as much as is morally possible, we would always have two very certain means for recognizing that, nonetheless, they are not genuinely human.
The first is that they would never be able to use speech, or other signs composed by themselves, as we do to express our thoughts to others. For one could easily conceive of a machine that is made in such a way that it utters words, and even that it would utter some words in response to physical actions that cause a change in its organs—for example, if someone touched it in a particular place, it would ask what one wishes to say to it, or if it were touched somewhere else, it would cry out that it was being hurt, and so on. But it could not arrange words in different ways to reply to the meaning of everything that is said in its presence, as even the most unintelligent human beings can do.
The second means is that, even if they did many things as well as or, possibly, better than any of us, they would infallibly fail in others. Thus one would discover that they did not act on the basis of knowledge, but merely as a result of the disposition of their organs. For whereas reason is a universal instrument that can be used in all kinds of situations, these organs need a specific disposition for every particular action. [/quote]
Discourse on Method, 1637.
You are correct, of course. Generally, however, it must be admitted an intelligence is required for the existence of meaning, whether the instantiation of it, or the subsequent recognition of it. Given the abundance of theories on the topic over the centuries suggests a serious lack of consensus on the very idea of meaning itself.
Seems more parsimonious to think meaning is like the tree on the corner of 4th and Maple, Anytown, Anywhere......if there is one, fine, if there isn’t, fine. If we can’t tell the difference, the truth of the matter is moot.
If we were to artificially build a human out of just the same materials that naturally-formed humans are made of, in just the same relations, undergoing just the same processes, then they would be genuinely human.
That's building a machine. We'd just be building it out of materials and in a manner that we do not usually build machines.
We don't have the knowledge or technology to actually carry this out yet, but it's maybe not too far off.
It is difficult to understand because the argument is being forwarded by an intelligence the major premise denies. It does not stand to reason that a universe sans conscious minds must embody information, this claim stemming merely from the fact such entity currently inhabits a universe where meaningful information is embodied. Experience informs him one extant universe involves information, but that in itself does not permit him to say extant universes without him must also contain information. Just because it would seem absurd otherwise, is not sufficient reason to ground the impossibility of other kinds of universes beyond his ken.
“....those who do philosophy should not fear absurdies...” (Russell, 1912)
Furthermore, the minor premise negates the major, which dissolves the argument by creating a new one, and tacitly relegates the very concept of reactionable “meaning” to be intrinsic to the conscious mind.
It is well worth bearing in mind......constantly......human rationality is absolutely restricted to the human condition alone, and nothing should be ventured outside it with an expectation of knowledge.
My answer to that is "there are no correct interpretations."
There are interpretations that either match (if more or less exact with respect to a particular expression) or that people interpret to match (if more paraphrased in one's opinion) what other people, including the author, explain as an interpretation.
And there are interpretations that allow consistency, coherence, etc. among a number of different texts, where that can be opposed to interpretations that do not allow that.
But neither of those amount to an interpretation being correct.
That's S's (the thread-starter) view.
It's easy to understand that you're reifying a potential.
Your examples are not the same, because you cannot represent the Fibonacci series in a partial way, starting in the middle. It has a unique starting point of one unit, which is replicated. And the whole series relies on replicating that original unit. The pattern is not properly represented without the starting point.
Quoting Janus
So the question then. When a thing, produces a pattern based in that sequence, is this not necessarily an intentional pattern rather than a natural one? The pattern relies on assuming a fundamental unit, and then a "specific operation of addition" follows from that assumption of a fundamental unit. If this operation is intentional, then I would think that all so-called natural instances are really intentional. The thing creating the pattern must assume a fundamental unit and perform a specific operation of addition. But if the so-called natural occurrences of this pattern are not intentional, they actually are natural, then why assume that the human occurrence of the pattern, the assuming a fundamental unit, and performing a specific operation of addition, is necessarily intentional?
The debate offer extends to you as well...
Missed the boat on this question a bit, so excuse me if I'm repeating stuff others have said. Anyway, I'd want to avoid a situation where you have identical sets of marks and only one considered meaningful because of the intention of its creators. So, accidental meaning is OK by me. If Robinson Crusoe walking randomly around his beach created a well-formed arrow with his footprints, I would say he had created a sign that would not require a plane flying overhead to imbue it with meaning. So, I'm thinking of linguistic meaning here as a kind of orientation. Meaning is meaning to ____ or meaning for ____ . As long as you can fill in the blank with a perspective holder capable, at least in theory, of making meaning from x mark or set of marks orientated to their perspective then that's enough for me to say that x is a meaningful set of marks.
(Of course, in doing away with one issue, you create others. A problem for this view, for example, could be that in an infinite universe, there may be a perspective holder for any given set of random marks, making them all meaningful!)
@S @Janus
I think I'm more or less on the same page here. It seems weird to say that meaning is somehow injected, through intention, into an object and then remains there, dormant. That you can only awaken meaning if someone else had set it there to rest, so to speak.
But, I was thinking more about that view - and I think it may come from the intuition that a meaningful object is somehow trying to speak (or allow someone to speak through it.) Like, the french term for meaning is voulour-dire, wanting to say.
Always a mistake to make too much of language-specific etymology (I'm looking at you Heidegger) but I think it captures a certain intuition that I believe is playing out in the meaning-as-endowed-through-intention take. I think you can 'feel' it if you consider the feeling you'd get deciphering an ancient text versus the feeling you'd get reading a moving story you know was written by some insentient neural-net program.
In the first case, there's a deeply moving feeling of being spoken to across generations. In the latter, a weird uncanniness, possibly even horror.
It seems like the intuition behind these feelings has to do with meaning being part of a conversation - hearing and being heard - rather than a self-contained understanding.
I think the conclusions about meaningful objects drawn are wrong, but I feel like they're wrong for the right reasons, if that makes sense. Like there's an implicit understanding of meaning as communal, maybe?
(sidenote: a lot of these concerns are straight out of Derrida's voice and phenomenon. I thought it was a deeply flawed text, but it seems like a similar constellation if themes)
There is a "material difference" between the two texts: and that difference is the way they were created. It doesn't matter whether we can tell the difference or not. The other point is that works of art never would be created by the "random work of monkeys" anyway, and nor would objects indistinguishable from ancient tablets or manuscripts occur naturally, so the whole thought experiment is not really of much significance.
Yes, I haven't said intelligence is not required for the existence of meaning; it is in the sense that intentional meaning is always the product of intelligence. I don't think there is really any significant "lack of consensus on the very idea of meaning itself".: as I have said I think the common understanding of meaning is that it consists in intentional patterns; what there may be controversy over is the metaphysical or ontological implications of the existence of meaning.
To whom are you addressing the quote and what's its purpose?
D’accord.
Metaphysical or ontological existence of meaning........reason. Everybody knows that.
Machines are built, but organisms grow. The organic and the mechanical are different.
Also the same information can be represented in a variety of different ways, whilst still retaining its identity. This works in a number of ways. For instance, individual brains all operate in slightly different ways. Attempts to pinpoint which areas of the brain are utilised to learn even very simple words have never been able to identify any relationship or repeatable pattern.
And in the case of subjects who have adapted to an injury, whole areas of the brain can be re-purposed to perform functions completely different from those they are associated with in non-injured subjects.
Furthermore, the same information can be encoded in, or represented by, any number of languages or symbolic systems. It might be something very exact: a formula, for example. Get one element wrong, and the formula is not represented correctly. But the representations might all be fundamentally different - different languages, or in binary code, or in morse code. So, the physical representation is separate from the semantic content. And the semantic content can't be reduced to a physical state.
There is no physical equivalent anywhere in nature of "equals" ( "="). "Equals" is a purely intellectual entity. Yet it's used all the time, whenever we make a judgement.
Quoting fdrake
To those suggesting that meaning can be understood in terms of 'brain states'. I think Descartes' quotation is a succinct refutation of the possibility (all the more impressive, as it was written in 1633.)
This is not true.
The ratios between successive pairs of numbers in the sequences;
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34
2, 2, 4, 6, 10, 16, 26, 42, 68
3, 3, 6, 9, 15, 24, 39, 63, 102
4, 4, 8,12, 20, 32, 52, 84, 136
are identical. Look at the vertical columns. the numbers in the sequences below the numbers in the first sequence are multiples of those numbers. You can start with any number and the ratios between the numbers in any vertical column and any other vertical column are the same throughout. This means that every number is part of a Fibonacci sequence, which is as it should be.
Désolé je ne comprends pas.
There very well could be energetic relations, etc. in these “sterile” universes. However, “relations” and “differences” and “entities” are observational qualities that assume a conscious observer. In such a universe, an observer would be impossible. Unless there is God there, there is no accidental meaning even (in my view). However, the matter would still exist, it just would have no meaning.
Personally, I don’t think it makes sense to talk about matter or energy without assuming an observer. Hence, my shared belief with you that the idealism/materialism dichotomy is false. How would observation work without a physical location for that matter?
As a spiritual person, I am open to the possibility of consciousness surviving the death of the brain, but the mind would have to live on as some kind of energy. I don’t really know, though.
Btw, I edited my post if you have further comments.
If the structure and processes are the same, it doesn't make a difference how it was achieved.
Re the rest of the comment, dismissal of nominalism aside, the fact that brains can do "the same things" in different ways is no sort of argument against physicalism. And neither is that we don't have some blueprint yet.
Are you agreeing, via shared belief, that the idealist/materialist dichotomy is false, but the subject/object dualism is not?
I read for context but didn’t find anything to answer my own question.
It doesn't indicate the presence of meaning (to be deciphered).
It's simply that just in case there are people present, and those people think about the phenomena in question so that they assign meanings to it, there are meanings. It's possible if there are people present for them to assign meanings to any arbitrary thing.
Ok. Then how does the idealist/materialist dichotomy fit in? I just brought up subject/object dualism because it seems to relate one-to-one with idealist/materialist, plus you mentioned an assumed observer. What difference do you see between the two ways of describing the same bilateral doctrine?
I'm not familiar enough with how you think to know why you think a distinction between organic and machine has a structural symmetry to the distinction between meaningful activity and meaningless activity. Do you see the fact that brain states are actually states of an organism - and only organic things can have brain states - as undermining that structural symmetry? If not, why not?
You’re thinking it a dichotomy but in reality they are inseparable so it really shouldn’t be thought that way. Ok, I can dig it.
they’re not the same, and the difference matters. But not being able to recognize that is entailed by your position, so nothing further can or will be said.
I’d be even happier, ecstatic no less, if you’d chalk yourself up in the “meaning absolutely requires reason” column.
I’m a YankeeVirgoBabyboomer, and we operate better in a gang, doncha know.
Hmmm. The thesis would begin with.....meaning is a product of reason and is no way a property of that which reason examines.
The proof would take 7-8 pages, so we’ll forego that, with blessings (and chuckles) from the attendees, I’m sure.
So, you claim there is no difference between an ancient tablet and an object that displays naturally produced marks; that both embody no inherent meaning, that meanings are arbitrarily assigned to both, and that researchers who claim to have deciphered ancient texts are merely assigning arbitrary meanings? The researchers couldn't possibly have "cracked the code" and reproduced a translation of the ancient text, because the script on the manuscript or tablet is simply meaningless?
Cool.
I remember seeing that expression, but I didn’t stick around. Thread name?
Is 2 + 2 = 4 universally true?
It better be. Mathematical expressions were initially deemed logically infallible, hence universally true. But we’d never been anywhere off-planet. Now, with spacecraft still operating billions of miles away sorta sustains the reckoning for universality.
I’ll never know, but I have to think mathematical logic is both necessary and universal. I also think it will be just as necessary and universal for any other relational intelligence similar to ours. Different symbols probably, but same operational predicates.
Brief opening proposition here, or send me where I can see for myself?
In the words of the immortal Gilda Radnor.....never mind. Found it.
Perused the thread; agreed without exception. 2 + 2 will equal 4 anywhere in the Universe, as soon as we get there to prove it. Or maybe as soon as we get there and find some intelligence ready to prove it to us. Or maybe just us getting there proves it. Either way, there’s going to be a mind, and by association, reason itself, tagging along for the ride.
Tegmark (2007) thinks the Universe is a mathematical entity in and of itself. But that’s way above my capacity.
I loves me some cheese, boy howdy.
Not so sure about that headgear though. I haven’t sat in a barber chair since cars had fins, so.....not sure about the fit.
Where I started, was with the ability to create abstractions, which is the question in the OP. I argued that 'Abstraction relies on the ability to make judgements - about 'like', 'unlike', 'greater than', 'less than', and that therefore abstraction is fundamental to language, to counting (and so maths), and to logic.
From that, I argued that language in particular can't be depicted in the simplistic terms which the OP stated, as a simple matter of association, or stimulus and response, because of the fact that through reason and language, humans are able to abstract and to see the relations between abstractions, which is what grounds language, symbolic thought and reason.
The quotation from Descartes was about the faculty of reason in particular; he's making what I consider to be a similar point.
Whereas I think there is a near-universal (but often implicit) consensus in modern analytical philosophy that the nature of reason (language, thought) can be understood in terms of evolutionary theory and neurobiology - that's where talk of 'brain-states' comes from. So it's natural to believe that, through this perspective, we can in principle understand how reason and language evolved, and the sense in which they're a product of evolutionary development. And the way I'm challenging that, is by pointing to the deeply circular or question-begging nature of such arguments. What I'm arguing is that reason (language, thought) cannot be reduced or 'explained' in those terms, because ultimately reason itself is something more than, or other than, either a physical or biological faculty; indeed it is the source of all and any explanation. Through reason, humans are able to discern something other than or more than the physical; which indicates that man, 'the rational animal', is something more than, or other than, the simply biological. It's a form of transcendental argument.
(This is similar to the argument that Thomas Nagel develops in The Last Word and Mind and Cosmos.)
That material difference is lost whenever the text is copied. The pixels on a computer screen displaying a work of Shakespeare have no material connection to the original document.
Quoting Janus
It does, because if you cannot tell me how the texts differ without begging the question, how can you argue your point?
Quoting Janus
Just because your position cannot deal with the consequences of the thought experiment doesn't mean it's insignificant.
Re your comments, I'd say that:
(1) nothing whatsoever "embodies" inherent meaning (other than minds, at least),
(2) meanings are not arbitrarily assigned to anything (assuming that you're implying that it's random (or "random" if we don't buy that anything is literally/ontologically random))
I don't know if my use of the word "arbitrary" led you to these comments. The idea behind "It's possible if there are people present for them to assign meanings to any arbitrary thing" and similar phrases is that there is no restriction on the things in question--anything we consider could be something that people would assign meaning to. It doesn't imply that people are arbitrarily assigning meanings.
There are no meanings "in" anything but minds. There is no "embodied" meaning in anything other than minds (the embodiment there is via brains, since minds are identical to subsets of brain structure/function). No inherent meaning in anything other than minds, etc. But that doesn't imply that there's anything random(/"random") to the way that minds assign meanings to things (at least not normally--I wouldn't say it's impossible to "randomly" assigning meanings to some things, but that's not at all what people usually do).
And as I said above, in a reply to creativesoul, which is pertinent to "cracking codes": "there are interpretations that allow consistency, coherence, etc. among a number of different texts, where that can be opposed to interpretations that do not allow that." Part of what we consider to be cracking a code is that we've arrived at an interpretation that allows consistency, coherence, etc. among a number of different texts. That in no way implies that the meaning is in the texts in question. The meaning is in our heads.
I don't see how this differs from Solipsism. The only reason we see an apple on the table is because we assign some meaning to the breaking of the symmetry of the white tablecloth at the point it becomes red apple. It's all just 'stuff' without our meaning applied to it. Yet we do not act as if solipsism were the case, so I can't see how theories which assume it could be much use to us.
I don't see how you'd believe it has anything to do with solipsism whatsoever. Solipsism is "the philosophical idea that only one's own mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind."
I didn't say anything even remotely resembling or implying that.
It's not even "meaning solipsism" if you'd want to coin that term, because I'm not saying that there's just one person doing this or that we can only know that there's one person doing it. You could say that it's "meaning idealism" if you like, though.
I also don't at all agree with you that the way that we cleave things perceptually has any necessary connection at all to meaning.
You claimed that the pattern is only in the mind of the person observing the pattern, it does not exist in the text. I'm asking what the difference is, for you, between this view and the view that the apple does not exist in 'reality' but only in the mind of the person observing it, at it too is just a breaking of symmetry which is otherwise meaningless.
Nope. "Pattern" isn't the same as "meaning." I didn't use the word "pattern" at all. If in your view, meanings are patterns, period, and that's all they are, that's fine for you, but you can't graft that unusual view onto someone else's comments as if they must think the same thing you do, as if they must use words just the same way that you do.
I was only saying something about meaning qua meaning. Meaning in the sense of semantics/semantic content. I wasn't saying anything in general about realism/idealism. I'm a naive/direct realist in general. Apples exist in the external(-to-minds) world. The meaning of "apple" (or of apples if that's the sort of thing that someone applies meanings to) does not exist outside of minds, because meaning is a mental activity, just like desires or emotions are.
Nonsense.
Right, so you're happy for the pattern to be a property of the text in an objective sense, but you determine 'meaning' to be some state of the brain of some observer?
So, taking that to be the case, which object's property is its history. Is the hammer's history of being used to hit nails a property of the hammer, or of the brain recollecting it?
"Patterns" are simply the fact that not everything is a completely uniform, homogeneous "soup," especially when irregularities have repeated similarities. They don't imply anything about meaning.
History, or the past, isn't an existent property of anything. The past existed. It no longer exists. There would be properties of the hammer that are evidence that it was used to hit nails, but it would be a very loose manner of speaking to say that that "history is presently in the hammer (or anything else)." The present properties of the hammer might include, say, microscopic fracture patterns, that we could then use to deduce that it must have been used to strike nails (or something similar).
So where is the fact that the hammer was used to hit nails? If humans capable of recollecting the fact ceased to exist would it cease to be the case that the hammer was used to hit nails?
Again, this has nothing to do with meaning. You're changing the topic from post to post. Just pointing that out if we want to stay on topic.
Anyway, the fact that the hammer was used to hit nails would be in the evidence such a the microscopic fractures (or whatever exactly the physical effects would be--I don't know the actual details for that).
That has nothing to do with us/our existence, and it also has nothing to do with meaning.
I'm trying to understand your position with regards to properties of objects which exist only in the mind of the observer. This seems crucial to the topic because the question is whether the meaning of the word 'dog' is a property of the word or of the word-user's mind. Now I understand where you put things like patterns, the only piece in the jigsaw that I'm still missing is where you locate history. What if the hammer suffered no impact at all, what if its history were simply to have been waived in the air? Would it no longer have such a history if there were no marks left from it?
No properties of something like a hammer only exist in the mind of an observer.
Meaning isn't a property of objects like hammers. Meaning is a mental activity that we engage in.
Re a word like "dog," as a word, objectively, it's only a sound or a set of ink marks on paper, a set of pixels on a screen, etc. Meaning is not a property of sounds or ink marks, etc.
Patterns occur both mentally and extramentally. Nothing is really a homogeneous soup. And history, as in past events, doesn't actually exist. It existed. It no longer exists.
Anything that exists is physical. Everything has properties. Everything has physical interactions with other things and has physical effects. A hammer waved in the air does affect both the hammer and the air. You can't do anything with no physical effects on the items involved, and everything "does something," everything extant is dynamic.
So it's utility for driving nails is not a property of a hammer?
Quoting Terrapin Station
Unless I've missed something, I thought that was the topic of this thread, merely asserting it does nothing to progress the discussion.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Hence my question. Are you saying that the fact that the word 'dog' was used to refer to dogs, is present only in the mind of someone recollecting it, such that if humans ceased to exist it would cease to be the case that 'dog' was used to refer to dogs?
Quoting Terrapin Station
I'm not sure on the physics of this. It seems possible to me for an entity to exist in the vacuum of space and suffer no effect from any other entity, for at least some period of time. Did the ink marks not have an effect on the reader of them?
Let's slow down for a minute, because I don't want posts to keep getting longer, especially if I'm having to repeat stuff I already said, explain things I already explained, etc.
I wrote, "No properties of something like a hammer only exist in the mind of an observer." There's no comma there. Another way to write that would be, "There aren't any properties of something like a hammer that exist only in the mind of an observer."
You responded with "So it's utility for driving nails is not a property of the hammer."
How would that make sense as a response to what I said?
Well get to the rest after we settle this part up.
" your position with regards to properties of objects which exist only in the mind of the observer. "
That's not my position. I didn't say anything like that.
So I said, "No properties of something like a hammer only exist in the mind of an observer."
It wouldn't make sense to read my "No" as a disagreement followed by an implied comma or period in the context of what I had quoted from you.
Quoting Isaac
The disagreement with S isn't at all about "The word 'dog' WAS used to refer to dogs." It's not about something historical.
The disagreement with S is that in S's view, the word dog has a meaning--not past tense, but present tense--at time T2, even if no persons exist at time T2. He's not saying something about how the word was used there. He's saying that the word has a meaning at T2, which is a correct meaning at T2 (not a correct meaning about or in the context of T1, where we're simply reporting usage at a past time).
It's a question. If no properties of a hammer only exist in the mind of the person observing, then it's utility for driving nails (being a property of the hammer) must somehow reside in the hammer, yes?
Quoting Terrapin Station
I understand that. This is the whole reason I'm asking you about where the fact of an object's history resides, because it seems to me nonsensical to say that an object does not currently (T2 as you put it) possess a history. If we accept this, then the word 'dog' also possesses a history. If that history reveals its use for picking out dogs, then such use is a property of the word. I assert that meaning is use and thus the word has a meaning (its use, or history of use) independent of humans currently using it.
That's not sorting this out. Asking "So it's utility . . . " suggests that I'd say it's not a property of the hammer, right?
That's what I'm asking (or rather confirming, as I thought). I'll make it clearer as a direct question. Do you think the fact that a hammer is used to drive nails is a property of the hammer?
No, that wouldn't just be a property of the hammer. It would be a property of the hammer, the nails, the air between the hammer and the nails, the person or machine swinging the hammer, etc.
OK, now you have the same ratio, but you've changed things. You have a repeating digit in each case now, as the fundamental unit. It doesn't matter if the fundamental unit is represented as 1, 2, 3, 4, or whatever, what is required is the fundamental unit. In so-called natural occurrences, the fundamental unit might be 2mm, 4 mm 1cm, whatever, the actual measured size is unimportant, what is important is that there is a fundamental unit. The point is that there is a fundamental unit of a particular size in each case, which is the starting point. The fundamental unit is a size which may or may not be arbitrary, but it is necessary to assume a fundamental unit, as a starting point. And so, that unit is the essential foundation of the mathematical operation which follows.
So the question was, when this occurs in "nature", is nature assuming this fundamental unit, and performing the mathematical operation which follows, or is there intention involved. If it is nature, then why wouldn't it be nature when human beings assume this fundamental unit and proceed with the mathematical operation?
But it would, at least in part, be a property of the hammer. What I'm not quite understanding about your position is why you want to make such a clear removal of the use of the ink-mark pattern from the actual pattern itself. It seem unnecessarily convoluted and I don't see the gain in thinking that way.
It seems both normal and entirely uncomplicated use to talk about the hammer as having the property of being used to hit nails. And by this, we don't mean that the hammer is currently being used for that. We mean it was used for that and could still be used for that in the future (in a world of arms and nails). It does not rely on its being currently used that way.
So I'm struggling to see why you define utility this way. Or if you don't, then why hammers can have a mind-independent property of being used to drive nails (past and future), whereas words (ink marks, say) cannot have the mind-independent property of being used (past and future) to refer to certain objects.
Did you read the part where I said that meanings aren't the same as patterns?
I can’t see where utility is any more a property than meaning is a pattern.
Anything extant is (or "has") properties.
I'd not be able to make sense out of saying that something exists (in whatever regard) but has no properties.
But the counter point will be.....no sense can be made out of something exists but has no utility. Which may be true, but that doesn’t make it a property. Properties are necessary; utility is contingent on properties.
Hence why we need to analyze what we're really claiming/what's really going on ontologically. "X has utility"--are we saying that x, some object, like a hammer, literally has properties that are identical to what we're calling utility? If not, then what exactly is utility ontologically? I can give you my analysis of it, but it's worth thinking about this.
Exactly. Otherwise, we’re left with a wet noodle with the same utility as a hammer with respect to striking nails. While both can be used for it, the ends will be quite different because of their respective properties.
Analyze away. I just won’t be able to read or reply for awhile.
So when you analyze it, you realize that hammers and wet noodles and nails and so on have different tensile/rigidity properties, different extensions/shapes, and so on, and that what we're doing when we say something about utility is making an assessment of those properties (a) relative to each other and (b) relative to our desires/preferences with respect to accomplishing certain things.
So utility is a property, but what it's primarily a property of is our minds (our brains functioning in particular ways) making an assessment.
Yes, I'm not sure what you want me to take from that. I'm saying, in the above, that the ink-mark pattern (a word) has a use (to pick out a dog in a sentence). That use is its meaning. It 'means' what it is successfully used for.
When we say a hammer 'is used for' driving nails, we include two important premises. Firstly, we treat this utility as a property of the hammer. Secondly, we derive this utility not from is actual concurrent usage, but from what is was used for (maybe yesterday) and what is still could be used for given the world continues to contain arms and nails etc.
So what is preventing us from from saying, of the ink-marks whose pattern we currently recognise as 'dog'....
1. They are used in language games to pick out dogs in a sentence, they therefore have a utility.
2. As with the hammer, it is pragmatic to treat that utility as a property of the object.
3. We can derive said utility from what it was used to do (maybe yesterday) and what it still could be used for given a world with more than one person for whom it is a part of their language.
So, for one, the ink marks do not have a use in the absence of people, do they?
No, but neither does the hammer. All use is contingent on a user. If you prefer we could refer to the hammer's potential use. It's still a property of the hammer (that it is potentially used to drive nails) and we still derive what that use is from its history (even if only a minute ago), not its current state.
If use doesn't obtain absent people, then use is NOT a property of the hammer, at least not alone. (Remember that above, when you asked me about this, I said: "No, that wouldn't just be a property of the hammer. It would be a property of the hammer, the nails, the air between the hammer and the nails, the person or machine swinging the hammer, etc.")
Re potentials, they only exist in my view in the sense of something not being impossible (and "potential" is usually used to denote a subset of not impossible things) . . .which means that potentials do not actually exist per se, and it's important to not reify potentials.
I don't get what you mean by this. In the first part you say "potentials only exist...", and in the second "potentials do not actually exist..." and I'm not seeing how you got from one to the other, and most importantly why you feel the need to. Why is it "... important not to reify potentials"?
Ok. I can go along with utility as an assessment of properties.
The minor eye-brow raising I might exhibit would be over any kind of properties of mind, but that’s beside the point.
The first part says "in the sense of . . ." --hence, they don't actually exist. We can't reify them. It's another way of saying that something isn't impossible (and we're usually referring to a limited subset of the not impossibles).
It's important not to posit ontological nonsense. Hence why we shouldn't reify them.
But that's begging the question. It's only ontological nonsense if we don't reify it. You still haven't answered why you think we shouldn't.
??? Potentials don't exist. The idea of them amounts to what I explained about possibilities. If that doesn't count as an explanation to you, you need to give your criteria for explanations in general.
That's what reification means. You're saying we shouldn't consider abstract exist because abstracts don't exist. That doesn't sound like much of an argument. That's why I asked you about radioactivity. Would you describe Carbon-14 as 'radioactive'?
Reification is taking something that is just an idea and projecting it into the external world as if it's not just an idea. The reason you shouldn't do that would be because you don't want to make logical mistakes, you don't want to say things that aren't true, etc. (And this isn't an argument per se. Just an explanation.)
Re the radioactivity question, you're proposing that radioactivity is just an idea? wtf?
What does "... as if it's not just an idea" mean here? What do thunk we might actually do with potentiality if we talk about it as existing which would cause us a problem which could be avoided by not treating it that way?
Quoting Terrapin Station
Firstly, I don't see any "logical" mistake here, you'll have to lay that out for me. And you're that sure you know what "true" is?
Quoting Terrapin Station
A carbon-14 atom only decays a proton/neutron every 5,700 years, so if its not currently releasing beta radiation, then it only has the potential to do so. So is it, by your definition, only radioactive once every 5,700 years, when it actually radiates, rather than just has the potential to?
I'd say that is untrue: there is always a causal connection between the original work of Shakespeare and any copy of it. In any case I don't see the relevance to the present argument.
Quoting Echarmion
We know there is a material difference between an intentionally produced object and one that is not intentionally produced; and that difference consists in the neural and perhaps physiological activity that gave rise to the one and not the other.
Quoting Echarmion
No, the thought experiment is not significant because such a thing has never happened and never will happen. In practice we can always tell the difference between human-made and naturally occurring objects. If you disagree perhaps you can provide a counterexample.
That's implied by your position. If my ideas and concepts have nothing to do with any thing in the external world, how can any of the states of the world be reflected in my ideas?
Take radioactivity. How can my idea of radioactivity be identifying an external state with impacts upon the human body? If we take a position that our ideas and concepts are just out ideas, this would be impossible. I could only ever think about my ideas. Describing external things, including my own body, could not occur. I would be unable to think about things which weren't my thoughts.
If we take ideas and concepts as reification, we are committed to a position in which radioactivity (one of our theories, our ideas, our concepts) is just an idea.
How can there be "consistency, coherence, etc." between texts if they are inherently meaningless. If the meaning were merely in our heads, then we could make absolutely anything consistent with anything else. What constraint would there be if your view were correct? How could your view even be correct, as opposed to being merely your arbitrary opinion if there is no inherent or shared meaning?
You might claim things that aren't true. If you don't care about that, then
What's implied by my position? I have no context re what you're responding to. Where did I say anything at all like "your ideas and concepts have nothing to do with anything in the external world?"
With respect to the interpretations.
For example:
I have one text: &@% that I interpret to read "Dogs are pets."
I discover a second text: !@(# that I interpret to read "The moon is not cheese."
Then I discover a third text: &@(% that my previous interpretations suggest would be "Dogs are not pets"
Especially if I have a reason to believe that the texts were written by the same person, that they were trying to describe generalities, etc., I might assume that my interpretations are inconsistent and that I haven't actually cracked the code. On the other hand, if my interpretations are consistent, coherent, etc., I might conclude that I cracked the code. My conclusions in both cases might not at all resemble what the author had in mind.
So the meaning of the text, the correct interpretation, is "what the author had in mind"? Are you saying that texts cannot convey what their authors had in mind?
I said already that in my view there is no such thing as a correct interpretation.
Texts themselves do not have meaning. We assign meanings to things. Meanings can't be made something nonmental.
Authors can give us explanatory utterances, but can't literally express meaning. The explanatory utterances are just further sets of sounds or marks that individuals have to assign meaning to. We figure that we understand something when we can do that in a consistent, coherent, way with respect to events (texts,behavior, etc,) in a particular context (for example, from that author).
Of course there may not be any such thing as an absolutely correct interpretation; would you also say that there are no more or less correct interpretations?
You read: "I saw a dog pissing on a telegraph pole when I was on my way to work".
You interpret the author to be talking about a mammal of the Canine species urinating on a timber log that has been set in the ground to support electrical wires.
Someone else interprets the author to be talking about fish swimming around the piles that support a jetty.
Which is the more correct interpretation?
Yes, I'd say that there are no "more or less correct" interpretations.
It's not "correct" to match what the author says. I agree with the viewpoint known as the "intentional fallacy":
https://www.britannica.com/art/intentional-fallacy
You didn't answer the question above about the two interpretations of the example sentence. Do you want to claim that both interpretations are equally valid?
"Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley argue in their essay 'The Intentional Fallacy' that 'the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art'."
Quoting Janus
Validity is a logical concept that has nothing to do with this.
There are no more or less correct interpretations. There are just different interpretations.
The author's intent isn't more correct.
When you take a position that abstraction to an idea (i.e. you have an idea about something) amounts to reification. So when we talk about, for example, the radioactivity C-14 carbon atom, the potential for it to decay, them meaning we speak and involve isn't limited to our ideas. The C-14 carbon atom actually has that feature/meaning we are describing.
It is why we ought be aware of C-14 possibly decaying if we have encounter one, as opposed to working under the impression that atom will not decay.
So when you take a position that meaning is only in our heads, you place the things and functions you are describing there too. Decaying just becomes our fictional abstraction, rather than a feature of the object, which might happen whet we are there or not.
This issue is true of all description of the world we might give, since our descriptions use meanings to report what we are talking about. Descriptions of the world require meaning to not just be in our heads, but in the world too.
C'mon, man. I didn't say anything at all resembling that.
You do it all the time when people describe certain things or features of things (ethics, mathematical relationships, meaning of idea/concept/language, etc.).
The notion meaning is "just a story"in our heads is something you have repeated in many arguments.
Description can never be just a story. When we describe or aim to describe something, whether it be what's in my fridge, the number of atoms in an object, a mathematical relationship or an ethical significance, our attention is directed towards something other than ourselves.
A question of na independent truth which is not just our story or made true by us thinking it.
Even in the case where a proposed description is wrong, let's say we attempt to describe God is the underlying cause of everything or engage in evo psych reifications about how people behave, meaning is still independent because the world has a meaning: the proposed description is mistaken.
So, neither of those example interpretations of the sentence I gave is more or less correct then? That would mean that neither of us can interpret (even more or less correctly) what the other is saying, from which it would follow that all philosophical argument consists in talking past one another. Is that your position?
Quoting Terrapin Station
'Validity' has an ordinary usage as well as its strict meaning in a logical context. And the incredible irony here is that you are now arguing that the term validity has a strictly correct meaning.
Quoting Terrapin Station
You haven't directly answered the question. I want you to say that both of the examples of interpretation of the sentience are equally valid or correct, if that is what you believe. But I suspect you don't want to commit to saying that because you know it would be an obviously stupid thing to say. So, you hide behind generalities.
And what does that have to do with "When you take a position that abstraction to an idea (i.e. you have an idea about something) amounts to reification"?
How many different ways do I have to answer that? It's not like I haven't been straightforward about my answer. For the third or fourth time now, no, there are no more or less correct interpretations.
Quoting Janus
What?? I didn't say that people can't or don't interpret. I said that different interpretations are not more or less correct.
Because it the same argument...
You understand the meaning of our descriptions to be nothing more than our fictions which have nothing to do with describing independently existing things-- i.e. a reification which only serves our one idea, rather than talking about a fact or feature of the independent world,
The phrase you used was "abstraction to an idea amounts to reification." Abstraction to an idea is an idea, right? It would be the process of abstraction (leading) to an idea.
What you just described above is not "abstraction to an idea amounts to reification"
Learn to read: I said not merely 'interpret' but 'interpret even more or less correctly'. If we are only interpreting what others say arbitrarily, that is if there is no more or less correct interpretation of anything anyone says, then conversation is just social noise, nothing is being conveyed form speaker to listener, and philosophical argument, as I said above, is a waste of time.
That would be a truly dumb position if that is indeed you position. But that shouldn't bother you, because you could interpret my saying it is a dumb position, as my saying that it is a genius position or that it means that you will be having your favorite food for dinner tonight, or whatever else your fucked-up imagination wants it to mean.
You mean not being able to correctly interpret what someone said? Are you really that stupid or are you merely trolling?
You haven't directly answered the question. I want you to say that both of the examples of interpretation of the sentience are equally valid or correct, if that is what you believe. But I suspect you don't want to commit to saying that because you know it would be an obviously stupid thing to say. So, you hide behind generalities.
Nope. Humorously, you don't know what I'm saying. Maybe we could have 50 more posts about it.
You put ("even more or less correctly") in parantheses.
Yes, a typo: it was meant to be "(even more or less) correctly".
But that's not my view. Validity is a very specific logical idea. Interpretations have nothing to do with that.
And if they're not more or less correct then they're not "equally correct." They NOT more or less correct. "Correct/incorrect" is a category error here.
lol--so it's my problem "not being able to read" when it was a typo.
Meaning is not independent of its idea. When I have an idea about something, be it a state, a mathematical relationship or an ethical significance, it constitutes the meaning in question. I'm not talking about an idea leading to an idea. There is no step of deriving my idea and its meaning from something else.
I'm talking about the presence of a describing idea itself.
Whatever idea/meaning I'm using to describe is reporting something independent me me or has some genuine relationship to doing so (in the case of false claims, the idea/meaning I have does not reflect what is independent of me).
Yeah, just ignore all of that stuff that I wrote in the last post addressed to you.
And you have to be kidding with crap like that. The whole post really. I can pick it apart, but what good is that going to do us? You're still going to keep writing like that.
I wasn't ignoring it. My point was it didn't apply: I wasn't trying to describe stepping from one idea to other.
I was talking about is what having an idea constitutes itself, and how this relates to meaning of our ideas and the outside world.
You're asking me if the interpretations are more or less correct. I said, "No, they're not more or less correct."
Are you saying that you're asking me:
(a) are they more correct?
or
(b) are they less correct?
Where I'm only allowed to choose (a) or (b)?
If so, my response is that "correct" is a category error here.
Is arguing in "good faith" only saying things that you think I should say/that you're comfortable with, even if you don't agree with it? If I believe that "correct/incorrect" is a category error here, what am I supposed to answer? Am I supposed to give an answer that I don't at all agree with, just because that's the answer you'll be comfortable with?
Phrases like "what having an idea constitutes itself" do not make any grammatical sense to me. So I don't know what to do with that.
Aside from that, we can just discuss whatever you'd like to discuss and forget about the earlier stuff, but try to write less "continentally" if you can or I'm just going to be stumped at most of it (in which case I won't be able to discuss much).
Quoting Janus
It seems to me that, like @Isaac, you now identify the meaning the text objectively has with a meaning that the text was, at some point in the past, assigned by the writer. You treat the causal chain that lead to the text as a property of the text. That is not accurate though.
Assuming a material, causal universe it makes sense to treat the past as a material property, since all past states are embodied in the current state. However, that is a property of the universe in it's entirety. The current state of the universe includes it's past state, including the brain states of writers, but it does so only by virtue of including, by definition, every effect of every event.
This is not true for the text itself. The text does not include all past States leading to it's creation. If it did, it would have to include all information on the universe going back indefinitely. The text is a partial effect of the past state that includes some information, but not all. You therefore have to explain how "the intention for the text to mean X", as a mental state, is represented by a brain state and this brain state is then fully represented by the text.
And for that, we need to identify a property of the text at present that carries that information.
By the way: I am not getting notifications for your replies for some reason.
Quoting Janus
You cannot possibly know that it never will happen.
Quoting Janus
I cannot tell the difference between stone age tools and stones chipped by chance, at least not with high certainty.
But if we limit ourselves to texts: it's a truism that everything we identify as a human text must be possible to identify as a human text. There is no telling whether we have correctly identified all human symbols from the past. Perhaps some old scribbles that look like art to us are really text? And there are things like the Voynich manuscript.
Anyways I don't claim that humans cannot identify human texts. I am saying we identify them by running them through our specifically human pattern recognition hardware. We figure out what texts say by imagining ourselves as the author of the text and using the result as the "meaning of the text". But that meaning never traveled from the text into our brains, because how would that even work?
I don't know about @Janus, but this is not an accurate paraphrasing of my position. What I'm saying is that the meaning of a word is not what the author intended it to mean, it is what the word is used for. When we say a tool "is used for" some task, we are not expecting it to actually be in such use at the time, it is an historical fact about that tool and yet we speak quite plainly of it as a property of the tool. I don't see any difference with the pattern of ink-marks we call a written word. If it was, at one time, used for a certain task, then such a history is a property of that word. Given that its use is its meaning, then its meaning is a property of that word. The same way its use for driving nails is a property of the hammer, its tendency to emit beta radiation is a property of Carbon-14... Past events and future potential are quite unproblematically spoken of as properties of the objects.
Whether you use a past intent or a past use, the argument stays the same. The history of an object is not necessarily a property of the object, for the reasons stated.
Quoting Isaac
This line of argument seems circular to me. You take a possible statement about an object "this object is used for X" and interpret this statement to mean that the (past and present) usage of the object is a property of the object. You then use this interpretation to prove that the interpretation is correct.
You're assuming the thoughts behind the statement and then you're further claiming that because people think this way, this is how things actually are. None of these steps really follow though.
The (historical) use of a tool is also not the same as the instability of certain configurations of protons, neutrons and electrons. That instability is a property of the atom whether or not that atom is currently decayed.
I never said "correct". What possible measure of "correct" could we be using here? Against which table of answers are we comparing ours to check if it's right? I said "unproblematic".
Quoting Echarmion
As above, I never said "... actually are", and as above, if you're interested in getting at how things "actually are" what are you going to use to see how close you've got?
Quoting Echarmion
But we don't talk about the instability of the configuration of protons and neutrons. We talk about the emission of beta radiation. We don't say that a property of Carbon-14 is that its neutrons are arranged in such-and-such a way, we say that it is radioactive, meaning, quite clearly, that it emits (in this case) beta radiation.
That probably doesn't amount to something different than what I'd say, but I'd avoid phrasing it as "the past being embodied" etc. What's embodied is evidence of past states (which just amounts to present properties which are the effects of and from which we can deduce past states), but not literally the past itself.
In any event, the more important point is that "culture A used x to refer to y" doesn't make x refer to y outside of that particular historical context. But S would say that x refers to y (historical) context-independently.
Also, I wouldn't call the above meaning.
A common definition of "radioactive" is "emitting or relating to the emission of ionizing radiation or particles," but in any event, that issue had nothing to do with meaning.
It does if you'd make the least effort to follow my line of argument instead of just dismissing as irrelevant anything which you cannot, after barely a minute's thought, see the relevance of.
The point is that radioactive is talked about as a property of Carbon-14, yet, as your definition demonstrates, it does not directly refer to anything about the atom which is currently the case. It refers to a property of the atom which is the case only once every 5,700 years. That is, its emission of a particle of beta radiation.
Tell me what this has to do with meaning, and if I think you've made a good case for that, we'll talk about it in this rather than in another thread.
Quoting Isaac
Presumably, you are making a case for meaning to be objective and using the "unproblematic" use of language as an argument. If that's not what you're doing, then what were you trying to say?
Quoting Isaac
Yes, but when we say a substance is "radioactive", we do not mean to say that every single atom is at this exact point in time decaying and emitting radiation. We treat "radioactive" as a property of the substance because it's atoms are unstable, not because the substance is used to produce radiation.
This splitting hairs over the exact meaning of common phrases is precisely why arguments from "ordinary language" don't work.
The meaning of a word is the use it is put to (I haven't yet argued for this yet, arguments in favour are relatively common).
The use something is put to does not need to be a present, currently occurring use, but can be a part of its history (my argument about the way in which we say a hammer is used to drive nails even if it is not currently being used that way) .
The non-present, history (or future potential) of an object is unproblematically referred to as a property of that object (my argument about Carbon-14).
So, the meaning of a word (the use it has been put to in its history) can be unproblematically seen as a property of the word.
Yes, you could say that. I'd more emphasise that I'm making the case for there being no purpose behind arguments to the contrary because there is no problem to solve by them.
Quoting Echarmion
Exactly my point (except the last bit about utility). The object (Carbon-14) does not have to actually currently be emitting beta particles in order to have the property of being radioactive, even though radioactive means "emits particles of radiation". It is sufficient that it did emit such particles and that it could do again in the future.
So, with a word. If it did once cause a particular reaction in language users when spoken, then that is sufficient to say that the ability to cause such a reaction is a property of the word.
Okay, that makes sense at least with respect to why you've been pursuing the angles you've been pursuing, but the problem is that I don't agree with any of it, starting with the old "meaning is use" idea.
We could say that the meaning of x to S is determined by the way S "uses" x, but that would have to amount to us saying that the use we're talking about is the specific associative way that S thinks about x, and we could say just as well that "meaning is thought." That would be as accurate/ inaccurate, detailed/not detailed, in a similar way, to "meaning is use."
Aside from that, "meaning is use" has some merit as a bumper sticker slogan in that we pay a lot of attention to behavior, context, etc. when we assign meanings to other persons' utterances, and that can influence our own meanings.
Yeah, I thought you might not agree with that bit, but perhaps the whole argument about meaning as use is best given its own thread. Perhaps we should shelve that for now and concede that it is a block to agreement here.
The other aspects of disagreement might be fruitful in their own right, but again, without conceding to meaning as use, they don't alone argue for anything related to the OP.
I think if your position is that meaning is a private subjective sensation, however, there is still (to my mind) the question of whether the ability to cause such sensations in language users is a property of the word, as per the ability of Carbon-14 to produce beta particles, or the ability of a blue cup to cause correctly calibrated spectrometers to register 'blue'. But that may be a different argument to the one set out in the OP here.
Yeah this is basically the same conversation as the other thread now. ;-)
At any rate, meaning, on my view, is the associative act that we're performing. I wouldn't say that external things cause that associative act . . . the associative act is in response to external things often, and we could say that they catalyze it, but I wouldn't say they cause it, because you could easily expose someone to a cup or whatever and they might not perform the associative act at all.
I guess that's what I was trying to get at with the incorrectly calibrated spectrometer. There's still some other chain of events which have to all be in place on order for the spectrometer to record 'blue' as a consequence of what the light waves reflected from the cup do to it.
How would you describe the colour of the cup when in the depths of space? Is it blue because /if/ white light hit it it /would/ reflect back blue? Doesn't that, and the above, fall foul of your restriction the the response must be the same each time for it to count as a property of the object?
To record blue, sure. x having property F is a different thing than D recording that x has property F.
Quoting Isaac
We're really having a communication problem if you believe that I said anything at all like that.
What I said was that I don't buy that potentials are real, except as a manner of speaking about something not being impossible. Potentials are not existent >>whatevers<< that somehow obtain as something not actualized. Potentials are the fact that (a) it's not impossible for x to be in state S, and (b) the properties of x make it more likely that x will be in state S in the future than other possible states.
Again, this stuff, on my view, has zilch to do with the thread topic, though.
I would say that a text, insofar as its author created it for some reason, embodies something of the intentions of its author. A text also possesses intentionality in the phenomenological sense that it is about something. But all texts can be transliterated or paraphrased in various ways which can yield a number of more or less different interpretations. The so-called "literal" meaning of an ancient text, as is the case with a modern text, will be detremined by the common use of the icons, symbols, words, phrases, and so on, in the culture in which it was created.
Quoting Echarmion
I haven't said a text "includes" all past states leading to its creation. What does "include" even mean here? The text is the result of all past states leading to its creation. Each instantiation of a text is thus unique, but all reproductions of an original text are obviously causally connected to the original. .
And if you cling to that and don't step outside of it, even for just a second, then we won't get anywhere. It's a dead end.
Quoting Isaac
The question doesn't make sense.
Quoting Isaac
No.
Indeed!
It's partly about something historical, and that part is important. If it weren't for that, then it wouldn't have meaning.
The big difference between us, which you've made more explicit in your last few posts, is that I don't just trivially define meaning in a way which necessitates a subject, whereas you do.
Meaning doesn't require a subject due to a definition. The realization that it requires a subject is the result of an ontological investigation/analysis.
That sentence doesn't make much sense to me. You could argue the entire question is somewhat pointless, as it doesn't make any practical difference, but how can only one position on the question have "no purpose"? Isn't the question which position is true?
Quoting Isaac
But this is a very peculiar way to talk about properties. You're not really making an argument here, merely asserting that it's possible to define property in such a way as to refer to past events that were in some way caused by the object. Of course it's possible to define any word any way you like, but there is still a difference between properties that an object has, and which are detectable by only observing the object itself, and the entire history of an object, which you cannot know from just observing the object. This is why the actual configuration of the atom is different from the past uses the atom was put to.
Quoting Janus
It seems to me, though, that you have essentially stopped actually arguing for your position, and are now imply pointing out it's nuances. Which is fine, it just doesn't adress the points I raised.
Quoting Janus
Right. But in that case, how exactly do the past states imbue the current text with meaning? What is your argument?
If you mean to say that the natural occurrence of an object indistinguishable from a carved stone tablet or a manuscript is possible, then I think you're dreaming. Of course nothing at all can ever be known with the kind of absolute certainty that you seem to be demanding, and many of the most wildly implausible things are logically possible.
Quoting Echarmion
What position did you take me to be arguing for before and now not? Set that out and I will tell you whether I was, and still am, arguing for what you think I was. I haven't changed my mind about what I have been arguing.
Quoting Echarmion
What we have been arguing about here is what it is reasonable to believe, and what it is reasonable to say, and also whether the terms we use in saying what we say are in accordance with ordinary usage. So, I have been arguing that it is reasonable to say that an intentionally produced inscribed stone tablet embodies meaning, on account of the fact that it was meaningful in the culture within which it was produced, and also on account of the possibility that what it meant could be, at least to some significant degree, deciphered.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decipherment
This is supposedly an ontology thread, though. Are "manners of speaking" really good enough for ontology? And if so, wouldn't ontology simply turn into journalism about common ways to talk?
I know of no law of physics that prohibits such a natural formation. It is, of course, highly unlikely. But the point of thought-experiments is not to provide probable predictions. It's to highlight the points at which arguments break down.
Quoting Janus
That's an absurd approach to a debate. If you think I have misunderstood you, I am happy to apologize and allow you to clarify.
Quoting Janus
For a given definition of reasonable, sure. You can define terms any way you like. But what was the point in arguing if all you wanted to do was tell us one of the possible definitions of "meaning"?
No, if you want to claim there is no inherent difference between objects intentionally produced and those naturally produced then you would need to provide an actual example of an object whose kind of origin, whether artifical or natural, cannot be determined.
Quoting Echarmion
No it's not an absurd approach. I have no idea what you are referring to with this:
Quoting Echarmion
So, the discussion cannot continue unless you clarify what you were referring to there; that is clarify what you think I was arguing for, why you think I was no longer arguing for it, and why you think what I was saying instead ( "pointing out its nuances") doesn't address the points you raised. You need to address specific points; if you just make sweeping statements how am I to know what you are referring to ?
Quoting Echarmion
It's not a "given definition of reasonable"; you have to give reasons for what you are saying, that is what it means to be reasonable. Of course any reasons will be based on some presupposition or other, there are no arguments that are not grounded on some presupposition or other. If our starting presuppositions are at odds, then there is no point arguing about anything because we will simply talk past one another and waste a lot of time and energy.
Also I am not merely concerned to set out definitions of meaning. I am simply saying that according to ordinary usage of the term an ancient manuscript is meaningful even if we cannot decipher it. We see it as a meaningful object even if we don't know what it means. I have also been arguing that since such an object is, in principle at least, decipherable, it must embody meaning. If it didn't embody any meaning then it would not be decipherable; that is, there would be nothing to decipher. It embodies meaning simply because it was intentionally produced to convey something, to be meaningful.
You could just say that you'd not call it "deciphering," but deciphering a text can simply be a matter of assigning meaning to it--not discovering meaning that's somehow literally in it, ontologically.
Sure... if you say so...
:up:
:up: :up:
This is [i]very, very peculiar[/I]. The fact is a property of the air between the hammer and the nails, amongst other things?
No. Properties of the air between the hammer and the nails would be nitrogen, oxygen, argon and carbon dioxide. You won't find a fact in the air. That's crazy talk.
What you're saying here is just as absurd as those moral objectivists who suggest that wrong is an objective property of kicking puppies.
In both cases, you won't find what is said to be there through an examination the things themselves: of air or hammers or swinging, or of kicking or puppies.
The inconsistencies among your various positions are becoming more apparent over time. Your own reasoning can be used against you.
The only part I disagree with is where you say that this is a property of the hammer. That seems to take our way of talking about the hammer far too literally. To say that the hammer has a use, or a potential use, is not to say that the hammer has [i]this[/I] as a property, it would just be to say that the hammer is used in this way, or that it could be, [i]given[/I] its properties, e.g. a rubber grip with an ergonomic design, a metal head with a broad, flat end, etc. And more specific meanings can be further qualified or clarified, so that, for example, when someone says that you don't use a hammer to saw a piece of plywood, they're talking about what it was [i]designed[/I] to be used for.
Are you getting this stuff from Heidegger, by the way?
How so? What is the property of 'being blue' if not the fact that any properly calibrated recording device (human or machine) when intercepting reflected white light from the object in question would register it as 'blue'? As I asked before, in the depths of darkest space, is the cup still blue?
Quoting Terrapin Station
Yes, I get that, but the justification you gave me for believing that was that the word (in our example) does not cause the same response in each person, therefore (you say) the response it causes cannot be a property of the word. If that's not the justification, then what is?
To make a general point here, I'm mostly pretty clear now on what it is you believe. I'm interested now in why you believe it, but quite a bit of your responses are taken up re-stating what it is you believe. Let's presume, for the time being that I get that, and get into the more interesting points about why.
Quoting Echarmion
Of course not. How on earth could we possibly judge which position was true? The question is whether meaning is best seen as something that persists objectively without minds or not. I can't think of any way we could check which is true. Maybe you mean something by 'true' that is different to my meaning. For me, it is true that P if P. So, it is true that meaning persist without minds if meaning persists without minds - something we can never possibly know empirically.
Quoting Echarmion
But that's my point. It isn't at all peculiar. We do it all the time. Do we not say that a property of Carbon-14 is that it is radioactive? And have we not just established that radioactive literally means emitting particles. Therefore we very clearly do talk about a property of an object being something it has done and will do but is not currently doing.
Quoting Echarmion
I took your line of argument to be that it was not possible to define property this way, so an argument that it is is a viable counter. Again (as you've yet to answer) if we're not comparing the merits of these alternative possible ways of talking, then what is it you think we're doing. If you think we're trying to find which one is 'right' how are you going to know when we've got there?
For me, our way of talking is all there is to discuss about the matter. Obviously our way of talking reflects, and to an extent constructs, a world-view which could be more or less useful to us, but that is the full extent to which it matters, in my view.
I agree that an argument could be made for ensuring that when we say "the hammer is used for driving nails" we know that such use is not literally contained in it, such that we could draw it out and examine it alone, but I don't see a problem with defining a property of an object as being those responses it has some tendency to produce. My reason for this is that, firstly, I'm far more comfortable than most here seem to be with fuzzy-edges and definitions which do not have clear criteria, "stand roughly there" and defining "game" being the classic examples. This means that I'm not at all bothered that a hammer only has a propensity to be used for driving nails, that's good enough for me. If I saw a hammer in a builder's yard I wouldn't suspect it to part of the builder's lunch.
Secondly, I think that it eliminates what might otherwise be an unhelpful line between those properties we're happy to assign to object on account of their constancy (like 'blueness') and those which are not constant (like use). 'Blueness' is not as constant as we think, it still require calibration to interpret, it's still, to a certain extent, only a tendency. The division is a gradation, not a clean line.
To say the hammer is blue (as a property) is to say that it has a tendency to cause properly calibrated objects capable of registering 'blueness' to register blue.
To say the hammer is used to drive nails (as a property) is to say that it has a tendency to cause properly calibrated devices (in this case humans wishing to drive nails) to drive nails with it.
Does that make any sense to you?
I've never been so insulted in my whole life!
Facts are simply "ways that things are" --their material make-up and their relations, including dynamic relations (and the relations obviously include "to other things"), and all of this is also identical to properties. This is also known as "states of affairs."
Hammering nails does not happen in a vacuum (at least not normally). The air in the vicinity is affected, too, and it's a part of the system/process in question.
Facts are consituted in meaning. Any given fact has a meaning, some sort of relation to other facts.
When we talk about a fact, our words refer to it because they capture meaning of the thing we are talking about. It's how, for example, "the tree in my backyard" picks out one specific thing amongst the many in the world.
Our ideas show us the world. Every single time we understand a fact, we do so by our idea which is an awareness of the fact we are talking about.
Meaning is one fact distinguished from another, one properly present compares to another, one thing (e.g. "this tree) rather than another (e.g. "that other tree" ).
Without meaning, there are no facts/relations present, no world we might understand or investigate.
No idea what that would be saying exactly.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Only insofar as someone thinks about it associatively.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
If you use the word "meaning" for relations in general, what word are we going to use for associative thinking?
. . . I'd have to do something in the vein of the above for every phrase in your post, basically.
Is the scenario such that there is light reflecting off of the cup of a certain range in wavelength which corresponds to that categorised as the colour blue? If so, then yes, in accordance with this criterion; this criterion which makes sense, unlike other criteria which lead to problems, like colourless things floating around in space, in spite of this. Of course, it wouldn't [i]look[/I] blue. It wouldn't look blue to anyone if no one was even looking at it. But who cares about that, except people who like creating problems for no good reason? Why should any serious philosophy care about these pointless troublemakers?
Categorised as 'blue' by what?
Quoting S
Exactly my point. We say the cup is blue, we say that its blueness is a property of the cup. Its being blue, however, is only something which is manifest relative to some device responding to its blueness (and responding correctly). This fact, however, causes no problem whatsoever for us calling the cup 'blue' or talking as if blueness were a property of the cup. Therefore, it need cause us no problem whatsoever to refer to meaning being a property of a word, despite the fact that it too is only manifest when some properly calibrated device (a language use) hears the word.
Empirically. That's the key word. And it trivialises things in my assessment. That we can't know something empirically is not that we can't know something.
I'm not following you. Trivialise how? And what things?
I get the first bit, you're saying the empirical evidence isn't the only evidence of a thing being true. I'm not entirely on board with that, but I get the idea. It's the last bit I don't get.
I'm fine with what Wittgenstein called family resemblance. I don't see that as a valid basis for what you're doing. You could just say that it has a use. You don't have to say that its use is a property of it.
Quoting Isaac
No, it doesn't require any interpretation. These question begging assertions from people like you are a massive problem.
Quoting Isaac
Stuff like that is best put in the form of a logical conditional which ensures objectivity, thereby eliminating problems associated with subjectivism:
[I]If there was a device capable of measuring the wavelength, and if it was used to measure the wavelength, and if the measured wavelength was within the corresponding range for the colour, then it is that colour[/I].
For all cases where that conditional is true, it would be that colour.
I've resolved this "problem" in philosophy. We can move on to the next "problem" in philosophy.
Quoting Isaac
That's not a property, at least per my way of speaking. But hey ho.
I'm not quite sure what it is you think I'm doing, so I don't know whether to argue the point, or correct you. If 'it has' anything, then the thing 'it has' is a property of 'it'. If I say walnuts have a hard shell, then a hard shell is a property of a walnut.
But the more relevant point here is what problem you are trying to solve. If I call an object's uses (either past or potential) a property of the object, what problems does that cause that I might be advised to change my approach here?
Quoting S
Again, I disagree with your conclusion here, but much more importantly, I'm missing what these problems are it is causing.
Quoting S
So explain how such a thing does not fit exactly into the same set of conditional statements you just parsed for the ability to describe 'blue' as a property of the hammer?
If there was a device capable of {driving nails with a hammer} , and if it {wanted to drive some nails, with no other impeding factor}, and if the {hammer had the property of tending to be used to drive nails} , then it is {used to drive nails} .
It has [i]already been[/I] categorised as blue, [i]by us[/I]. It is set in the rules.
Quoting Isaac
Manifest? But what we're talking about - things like whether the cup is blue or a word has a meaning - are determined irrespective of what you call "manifestation". This "manifestation" of which you speak just seems to be about a sort of relationship which becomes "active" when it involves a subject or a device as a receiver in the relationship. But I think that that's beside the point. The "passive" shouldn't be discounted. There's no gap which needs to be covered over by a certain way of talking. It really is blue, and the word really does mean something, even when this is not "manifest" to someone or something.
What I meant is that it trivialises things without a logical connection which makes it relevant. (And in that case, it would be relevant but mistaken, so it is actually lose-lose here, but at least it is better to be wrong then to miss the point entirely). And people sometimes don't even make the logical connections they're making explicit, let alone attempt a proper justification. Just look at this discussion and others like it! It can be like trying to get blood out of a stone with some people.
So, just saying something about what we can know empirically, in itself, doesn't really say anything at all.
As I explained, if you apply that in every case, then in some cases you will end up making the mistake of an overly literal interpretation. This is one of those cases. Your example of the walnut is not.
Here was my explanation from earlier:
Quoting S
Quoting Isaac
I just find it a funny way of using the language. It doesn't seem right to me, so you can speak funny if you want to, but I decline.
Quoting Isaac
Why would it require interpretation? It wouldn't. And that results in colourless things in space, in spite of conditions whereby it makes sense to say that they're coloured. Why not go with what makes sense? Why turn the role that we or our devices play into a more fundamental role, when that isn't necessary? It seems like a backwards way of thinking, like anthropocentrism, like Ptolemy's way of thinking whereby the Earth is at the centre of the solar system. Does the Earth need to be at the centre? No. So don't make it that way.
My way is more in line with the principle of Ockham's razor, it seems.
Quoting Isaac
I don't get why you're turning this molehill into a mountain. It has properties which could make it a tool, like almost everything else. But the properties of the object and what the object could be used for are two distinct things. I prefer to be clear and logical, so I reject a conflation of the two.
Wait, what? Seriously? :lol:
I mean, I would be insulted too, but then I don't go on about hammers in a way that seems reminiscent of something I recall once reading about Heidegger.
But this is exactly what your opposition here are doing with words and meaning.
I don't get why you're turning this molehill into a mountain. It has properties which could make it a {meaningful word}, like almost {any other pattern of marks}. But the properties of the object and what the object could {mean to a language user} are two distinct things. I prefer to be clear and logical, so I reject a conflation of the two.
I'm trying to argue that the meaning of a word is a property of the word, by showing how the reaction of other objects is essential to the definition of loads of properties which we routinely call properties of the object. I'm thus saying that the fact that words require humans to interpret need not prevent us from treating their meaning as a property.
It seems to me that your argument is that for some properties, the fact that they require some interaction to manifest them is trivial, for others it is non-trivial but irrelevant to possession of a property and for a third group it is very relevant and effectively prohibits us from treating the property as a property of the object in question. Your basis for this seems to be "that's just the way thing are... obviously!".
You'll have to spell out the connection there as I'm not seeing it. As far as I'm concerned, I've just said that it is unproblematic to refer to the use an object is generally put to as a property of that object, wheras Heidegger made up a load of shit about 'being' and then tried to claim German was the best language because he was a Nazi. Not seeing the similarity.
That's about conventional language usage per se, though. Where manners of speaking are ubiquitous, and so on. That's different than doing ontology.
I've not been talking about definitions or what we call things, but what things are, regardless of definitions/what we call them. In short, I'm not talking about language (usage) per se.
If you're approaching this from an angle of "This is how we conventionally use language," that's fine, and there's no dispute about that, but that's not what I'm talking about. The way we conventionally use language can not line up very well with what's really the case.
In Terrapinese, which is the name that I've just coined for your language, that is true. I, however, think that there are better available languages to use. We could just break what you're talking about down and call it something like "composition" and "relationship". Facts are simply what's the case.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I'm not talking about a system or a process, I'm talking about a fact. I don't deny the stuff the fact is about. I just don't conflate the two.
Why do philosophy-types feel the need to conflate distinct things in a way that causes problems? I've encountered this multiple times now in varying contexts. What good could this possibly do? Horses aren't cats for crying out loud!
What I said there, except possibly for the bit about properties, is completely non-controversial in analytic philosophy.
Quoting S
How would we have a fact that's not a system or process?
Facts arent about anything. "Fact" isnt the same thing as "true proposition." Facts are what true propositions are about.
If this stuff isn't clear to you it would have to be very confusing to read analytic philosophy.
Quoting Terrapin Station
So (again I suspect a serious axiomatic difference looming) how are you judging "what things are". When there is some disagreement as to what things are, what table of correct answers are you referring to to check who's right?
Of course, if your 'table of answers' is just the observable world, then your ontology becomes an exercise in looking, in which case, get out of your armchair and go look for stuff.
Yeah, you observe/examine/etc. the world
You've slipped in 'examine' there, which is a loaded term. If 'examine' is part of your process, beyond simple observation, then how do you check the results of your examination?
Examination is just a more rigorous approach to observation. The world is the arbiter.
So ontology as a philosophical exercise is pointless then? One merely need go look for a thing (rigourously) to check if it exists?
I'm talking about ontology. You don't do ontology by looking at how we conventionally use language, as I said two or three times above.
Yeah, I get that. What I'm confused about is that it seems like your answer to the question "does meaning exist?" would be to check if you can see it, and if you can't it doesn't. We can't 'see' mental states either, so for you meaning simply doesn't exist, not in the word, nor anywhere.
You're not doing that (I'll refrain from using a colorful adjective) thing where you're (hopefully pretending to) reading me as saying something literally about employing (unaided) vision, are you?
And please tell me that you are indeed pretending to be that %&#$ if that was the idea there.
No, you can have as much machinery and other senses involved as you like. You still won't be able to 'detect' the meaning of a word somewhere.
Okay, so #1, there isn't zero evidence of mentality.
#2, if we're going to posit existents for which there is zero empirical evidence of them, what would you take to be good grounds for that?
I didn't say there was. Evidence for the existence of mentality is a far cry from having directly identified the meaning of a word located in someone's brain. Earlier (in another conversation) you were very dismissive of the whole of neuropsychology pointing to unconscious mental states, now you seem to be sure it's basically discovered the location of the meaning of words.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Convenience. Practicality. What's the point in doing anything? We just want to achieve our goals, and if some world-view is a pragmatic way of consistently doing that then I'd turn the question round - what possible grounds could we have for not?
I'm saying nothing at all about it being unconscious.
Are you now claiming that we don't actually think meanings, that meanings are in no sense a conscious phenomenon?
Quoting Isaac
What would an example of that be?
I already did in a previous response to you. I also already pointed out that we have no way of telling how many artificial objects we have wrongly identified as natural.
Quoting Janus
I think what you were saying didn't adress the points I raised becuse it didn't adress the points I raised. You ignored my entire post save for the two sentences you quoted. Here is a relevant quote from my post:
Quoting Echarmion
As a response you simply repeated that you think that the text "embodies" something of the intentions of the author. You then went on to explain how that position is compatible with different interpretations. But that's taking several further steps ahead when we are still talking about how the intention is linked to the text in the first place.
The topic oft the thread is "the ontology of linguistic meaning". I think you were arguing in favor of the position that meaning is, ontologically, a property of the symbols or sounds themselves. As opposed of it being merely an interpretation created by minds.
Quoting Janus
I am not disagreeing with any of that in principle. But it does mean that two conflicting positions can both be equally reasonable. That is not something everyone will agree with.
Quoting Janus
I am not disagreeing with a undeciphered manuscript being meaningful to humans. As long as it's identifiable as texts to humans, one could even say it has "linguistic meaning". I just don't think it follows that the object must therefore embody meaning absent of human minds. Humans can decipher symbols created by other humans because they can put themselves in the shoes of the hypothetical writer. That same process can also be used to "decipher" the meaning of natural disasters or illness, by presuming an intentional actor behind those events and imagining their thought process.
This explains both how a text can "have" a relatively stable meaning while at the same time being subject to various interpretations. And it does not have to explain how the meaning travels from the author to the text and then back to the reader, which again I haven't yet seen anyone explain.
Quoting Isaac
And how can we possibly judge how to "best see" meaning if no true statements can be made about what meaning is? Of course we cannot know empirically what meaning is ontologically, but we're not doing empirical science. We are trying to figure out, with arguments, what can be known about the ontology of meaning.
Quoting Isaac
We haven't "established" that. That's your interpretation of the phrase "X is radioactive". But what about this interpretation: "the atomic structure of X is such that it's unstable and prone to decay, with an average chance of Y per T"?
Quoting Isaac
The thread title is "the ontology of linguistic meaning". If we were comparing the merits of alternative possible ways of talking, then all we'd have to decide is whether or not we are communicating effectively. That is very clearly not what anyone in this thread has been doing so far. I have given arguments for why I think meaning is something that occurs in minds and is not part of the text absend any minds, i.e. without minds there will be no meaning. Obviously, I think that these arguments represent "knowing when we've got there". If you think these arguments do not work or cannot possibly answer the question, I'd like to know why.
No, I've not made my analogy clear enough. I'm not referring to the facts themselves about unconscious states, I'm referring to the fact that you dismissed masses of scientific evidence pointing to their existence. That seemed incongruous to me with your attitude here that the mere suggestion of scientific investigation that mental states could hold meaning is now sufficient for us to presume it is so. Your threshold for required evidence seems to be inconsistent.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Achieving your goals with it. If we were of the opinion that gravity were not predictable, how far do you think we'd get with our objectives? So treating gravity as if it were predicable and consistent seems to be a good idea. Doesn't matter if it really is until the approach we have stops working (or looks like it might).
This is basic pragmatism though, I'm sure I don't need to explain all this to you. Suffice to say I'm broadly a pragmatist, in the British tradition.
I don't believe that there are masses of evidence pointing to the existence of unconscious mental phenomena, though. And you simply went with the old chestnut that I should "look it up myself."
There may be plenty of evidence that's misinterpreted as being evidence of unconscious mental phenomena, but then that's the issue there. At any rate, that's getting off-topic per the thread.
Quoting Isaac
Say what? I'm not saying anything about "scientific investigation" there. If someone thinks that meaning doesn't occur mentally, we can deal with that when we encounter that person. If you don't think this, then it's kind of pointless to spend time on it, because it's not at issue.
I said nothing whatsoever about my "theshold for evidence." If you think that meaning doesn't occur mentally, that's fine. Say so, and then we'll talk about that.
Quoting Isaac
Say what??? (with a couple more question marks this time). Are you claiming that we do not have empirical evidence of gravitational attraction?
I wanted you to give me an example of something that we'd posit, with there being zero empirical evidence of it, for good practical reasons.
By which works best to achieve our goals.
Quoting Echarmion
Yes, and I've asked you several times now for an explanation of how we judge which arguments are true, if not by empirical methods.
Quoting Echarmion
That's just not the definition though. The definition is emitting particles, it's an action, not a state. You can re-state the definition to suit your world-view, but I'd wonder why you were doing so.
Quoting Echarmion
Yes, but others don't, so now what?
Maybe I'll look into your claim out of interest, but obviously even if true, it wouldn't mean that you're not wrong, or that you're not speaking a language which clashes with ordinary language use. If you're right about this being normal in analytic philosophy, then it would just mean that Analyticese would be a better name for the language you're speaking.
What seems controversial to me is [i]not[/I] that the fact that there's a cat on the mat is [i]about[/I] stuff which can be described as you described it. That's the important difference as I see it.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Easy. That's not how I use the word. Nor is it how it is ordinarily used. It doesn't even make sense to say that facts like that today is Saturday, or that I am in my room, or that I can't run faster than the speed of light, and so on, are systems or processes. They're just facts.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Of course they are! And this is where you're clashing with ordinary language usage big time. The fact that there's a cat on the mat is about a cat and a mat and location. Even a child could tell you that it's about a cat.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I agree. Facts and true propositions are distinct, and correspond.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Lol, no. The true proposition "I am in my room" is not [i]about[/I] a fact. It is about me and my room and my location. It just [i]corresponds[/I] with a fact. A true proposition like "It is a fact that I'm in my room" is about a fact.
That only works if our goals are not connected to the question what meaning is, which is to say the goals are entirely off-topic for this discussion. Again I feel I need to point out that this thread has a topic, which you are now apparently entirely ignoring.
Quoting Isaac
Empirical methods don't judge arguments. We have the scientific method, which is empirical, and it generates theories. Arguments are judged by their logical validity. And the premises can be judged based on whether they agree with current theories generated by the scientific method, or they can be derived from synthetic a priori statements. An example for the latter would be the famous "I think, therefore I am".
If you deny any knowledge outside of empirical theories, you run into the problem of having to explain why the scientific method works to generate those theories.
Quoting Isaac
But we're not talking about what the definitions say. Your argument goes like this: radioactivity, as defined by the dictionary, is a property, radioactivity is defined in the dictionary as having emitted radioation. Therfore, the definition of radioactivity references past events. Therefore, properties can reference past events.
But I disagree with the premise. I don't think "radioactive" is a property if you stick to the letter of that definition. I think the dictionary definition provides a shorthand reference to the actual property of radioactive substances, which is that their atoms are unstable and therefore prone to emit radiation.
Quoting Isaac
They either think about it and revise their decision, think about it and point out the flaws in my argument, or ignore me and go on with their lifes.
I know, that's the point. There are masses of evidence, but without actually checking you've just decided to believe there isn't. I have no problem with that, if it works for you, I'm just wondering why you don't want the same principle to apply to locating meaning. I think there's scarcely any different level of evidence of the meaning of a word being located in the brain yet you seem to think that matter to be basically settled.
Quoting Terrapin Station
My bad, I simply paraphrased your "rigourous observation with examination" into 'scientific investigation', it seemed not an unreasonable shorthand to me, apologies if it doesn't properly capture what you meant.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I don't think that 'meaning' is a thing that can occur anywhere. 'Meaning' is a word which we use for various purposes depending on the context. If you're asking me where do people store the data by which they use words consistently for the same successful purposes, then I'd say that's almost certainly in their head, but I don't think anyone would disagree. The OP is about ontology, what exists, not where some specific data is located.
Quoting Terrapin Station
We have (as far as I know) no evidence at all that gravity will continue tomorrow as it was yesterday. See Hume.
:up:
At best, that's hugely incomplete. There's the meaning that I'm thinking about right now. But to jump to the conclusion that meaning is therefore a mental activity would be completely unwarranted.
I'm claiming that meanings (my interpretation, not yours) aren't necessarily thought, and aren't necessarily a conscious phenomenon. Meaningful thoughts aren't the same as meanings. Meanings don't have to be thought.
But that leads to seemingly absurd logical consequences. A sign saying "Caves up ahead" wouldn't mean that there are caves up ahead? Just because no one is there interpreting it? :brow:
How do people even take this claim seriously?
It's a relief to see that I'm not alone on this. I've learnt to see the word "empirical" as a red flag now in contexts like this.
Quoting Echarmion
Oh dear. I think that that's a massive error. It very much has to do with the use of language. And I did even question in my opening post whether this could all boil down to that. You're matching up your language with what you think works best. But I've pointed out big problems with using "meaning" in that way.
The rather obvious problem with your argument is that any truth to it is only trivial. If meaning is [insert any definition you like], then [logical consequence of definition]. So it does become an issue beyond what meaning is. It becomes an issue of what definition works best.
The only thing I can offer you at this point is a bit of armchair psychology, namely that I think your problem is that you are imagining a scenario without humans, but when you are then trying to look at that which remains, you are looking at it from a human view (in this case, literally imagining a yellow sign with text on it).
As an exercise, let's imagine the only humans left are blind, and have been for generations. How would you explain to them what a yellow sign with text on it even is?
I don't doubt that! I don't doubt that even if you replace {mean to a language user} with {mean}! I never said that they weren't two distinct things!
Do you remember what the issue here is actually about? Or what my position actually is? Because that doesn't seem to address it.
Quoting Isaac
There's a lot in there that I simply don't accept at face value, and I would therefore need to see your support.
Quoting Isaac
I judge these things on a case by case basis. And merely pointing out that it seems to you as though my basis is, "that's just the way thing are... obviously!", is about as helpful as being handed a bottomless bucket in a boat that is overflowing with water. If it were so that that's my basis, then how do you expect me to rectify that? You'd have to be a lot more specific for starters. It's not at all clear what exactly you're even talking about.
:rofl:
Well, you made me doubt myself, so I googled "Heidegger" and "hammer" and stuff came up. The hammer is apparently a "ready-to-hand". :rofl:
It's actually the opposite of it being the case that no true statements can be made about what meaning is, and that's where I have some sympathy with this pragmatic approach. There's nothing stopping me from adopting the definitions of others, which would logically lead me to trivial truths, [I]except[/I] that I don't think that it would be very helpful.
Quoting Isaac
I go with whatever explanation seems to do the job and is plausible enough. My method is to consider things like ordinary language use and logical consequences.
Quoting Isaac
It then becomes about what criteria for knowledge works best. I had this in my other discussion, where someone seemed to be suggesting that our experience plays a bigger role than I judged to be necessary or productive, and also that we require certitude or greater certitude where again I didn't judge that to be necessary or productive, given where it leads.
Sure, and definitely the latter is true. A lot of philosophy jargon departs from everyday speech. That's true in any field, really.
Quoting S
But I don't know how it makes sense to say of anything that it's not part of a system that it's not a process.
Quoting S
Right. In colloquial speech, "fact" is often used as a synonym for "true proposition" (although "proposition" in colloquial speech isn't nearly as well-defined as it is in analytic philosophy, and almost no one would define in as analytic philosophers do). Analytic philosophers, and by extension the sciences, etc., do not use "fact" that way. And there are reasons for this, due to analysis, the utility of making certain distinctions, etc.
Quoting S
If you're not using them the same, but facts are somehow about something in your view, however you're using the term would be a mystery to me, Maybe it's stemming from unfamiliarity with the analytic phil sense of proposition, though.
Quoting S
Which is a fact on the analytic phil and standard scientific usage.
But I think that your problem is imagining that it's a problem that I'm imagining it, when that isn't a problem at all, it's actually just an old Berkeleyan argument which is deceptive and illogical.
And no, if you try to make my position subjective, with all of this "looks like" and "yellow" and whatnot, then you're doing it wrong. I'm not a subjectivist, so I don't go by a subjectivist interpretation. I'm an objectivist and go by my own objectivist interpretation. You'd have to apply the right interpretation to avoid drawing an irrelevant conclusion.
Why would it supposedly matter whether I could or couldn't explain it to them? I don't accept that anything of relevance hinges on that to begin with. If you manage to justify this hidden premise of yours then I'll accept that it matters, but until then, this does nothing.
Oops. Patronization fallacy. It's not that I'm unfamiliar with everything considered to be evidence for this.
Quoting Isaac
There is a ton of good evidence that mentality is simply brain function. Maybe you don't agree with that. That's fine. If you didn't agree with it and I were trying to convince you of it, I'd present some of the evidence for it, and then you could present your argument for why you don't believe that it is good evidence of it. That's how this works.
That's what I do re the supposed evidence for unconscious mental phenomena.
Quoting Isaac
On my view, the notion of an existent anything that doesn't have a location, a particular (set of) time(s) and place(s) of occurrence, etc. is incoherent.
But I doubt it when you say things like that, because to me it seems like you make your own self-fulfilling prophecies.
I'm saying that to say that it's a fact that I'm alive at the time of typing this is not to say anything about a system or process, but only to say that it is the case that I'm alive at the time of writing this. We both know what that means. If it wasn't the case, then how could you be reading this?
That I'm alive is not a system or a process. It is just a fact. And pointing out systems or processes related to the fact won't change that. That I'm related to my mother doesn't mean that I am my mother. That my mother is at her home doesn't mean that I am at her home. And that I talk about myself doesn't mean that I'm talking about my mother. The connections you seem to be making seem illogical.
It seems in form to be the same logical error of conflating an orange with related things, like our experience of an orange. People should just stop doing this.
Quoting Terrapin Station
No, I don't think that it has anything to do with that. It's not that it is commonly used as synonymous with a true proposition, it's that they have things in common, as early Wittgenstein noted with his picture theory of language.
Quoting Terrapin Station
You can see it straight away when I talk about them. Here is a true statement: "I am alive". And what is the corresponding fact? That I'm alive.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Then I guess I reject that usage. [I]*Shrugs*[/I].
Quoting Echarmion
No, which approach works is connected to which approach works. One might presume a successful approach works because of its corresponding to the way the world actually is, but we do not need to know if it is.
Quoting Echarmion
I'm not ignoring it, arguing that it cannot be resolved and is just a result of confusion over terms is not ignoring it, its just not dealing with it in the way you want.
Quoting Echarmion
They very obviously can't. If the truth of a proposition outside of empirical observation were derived from a timely mechanistic check of each step against rules of logical validity then what the fuck do you think philosophy has been arsing around with for the last 2000 years? Do you think this matter has only just come up? That we're at the coal face here, checking each step against our table of 'logically valid moves'? Are we soon going to have to report back to the world "Done it! And the answer is..."
There's one of two possible scenarios I can see. Either it is not possible to judge arguments by their logical validity with sufficient granularity to obtain any useful results, or, it is possible to do so, but the process takes at least 2000 years and seems to require an unfeasible amount of circling back to previous ideas.
Quoting Echarmion
I certainly don't deny any knowledge outside of empirical theories. I explain why the scientific method works by the same justification as I'm arguing for philosophical theories. Theories that work stay, theories that don't work go. Any theories that are still working are still in the running. You can add useful devices like Occam's razor, but again, no one deduced that these devices work, we tried them, they produced useful results, so we kept them.
Quoting Echarmion
That's fine, but you haven't explained why you're right and I'm wrong, only that you think one thing and I another.
Quoting Echarmion
Again I refer you to the 2000+ years of philosophical investigations thus far, do you really think the first two options are going to get us anywhere?
Probably not at this stage, to be honest.
Quoting S
And you'd be absolutely right to ask, but it's a very big topic and each fork splits a thread like this in half making it very difficult to follow. I'm happy for now just to put the idea out there and relate it the problems of this topic. If people don't find it immediately appealing without a conclusive argument that's fine, a thread on each aspect is probably most appropriate.
Quoting S
Apologies, I will try to be clearer. You seem happy to say that meaning 'really is' a property of the word, blue 'really is' a property of the cup, but 'having a tendency, among humans wishing to drive nails, to be used to drive nails' cannot be a property of the hammer. I've not read yet anything I understood as a description of the factor(s) your using to make these categorisations other than that they seem obvious.
Quoting S
But only if it's a German hammer, right? I mean, they are objectively better.
Great, then you win the prize for the only one who has a method that has even the slightest chance of yielding any useful result in the next millenia.
Fair enough, my apologies.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I do agree with that, I just think there is the same quantity of evidence for unconscious mental states, but as I said in the previous thread, and am now even more sure of that you've mentioned your background reading in psychology, I think I just haven't properly grasped what you mean by 'mental states'.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Do you mean "that's what I would do"? Because if not, I'd love to read a properly cited piece about how the evidence for unconscious mental states is all wrong. Just because I'm too lazy to produce one in favour, doesn't mean I wouldn't love to read one in opposition.
Quoting Terrapin Station
How are you with the notion of quantum indeterminacy, out of interest? Do you find that coherent? I ask because the inability to completely conceive of something has never stopped me from using it.
Well, to be fair, it is now 24 pages later. Some people go off course far sooner, and sometimes right off the bat.
Quoting Isaac
Fair enough.
Quoting Isaac
Okay. So I'm applying whatever criteria make sense based on how the claims fall into different categories. That does seem kind of obvious to me, but I'm trying to think how I can explain it beyond what I've already said. You accept that "it has" can be used in a loose, non-literal sense, right? That's basically all I think is going on in some cases but not others. So that the word has meaning is of a loose, non-literal sense. I'm just saying something along the lines that it means something relative to the corresponding language rule. And that it has a use is like this also, in that it doesn't have such a property, it just means that it is such that it could be used for something or other. And even the blue cup is a bit like this, because it is more complex than the properties of the cup, it is about the wavelengths of the light reflecting off of it. I don't go as far as the early Wittgenstein and say that the world is composed of facts. I'm not sure what facts are, ontologically. And use is more conceptual or linguistic, not like a physical property. But the blue is a physical property. It is a physical property of a physical entity, light. That it is blue is that it is of a certain range of wavelength.
I meant that it really is the case that the word means something, and that the circumstances of the cup mean that it is correct to say that the cup is blue.
But it isn't really the case that the hammer has a property which we can rightly call its use. Not unless we adopt that funny way of speaking which I decline to adopt precisely because I find it to be a funny way of speaking. It has properties, and because of those properties, we can loosely talk about it "having" a use in a non-literal way. And that's the end of it, as far as I'm concerned. I can't stop other people from using language however they want to.
Sigh. Thanks for repeating this, I had overlooked it the first 500 times you said it.
Quoting S
It wasn't intended as an argument. It was intended as a thought exercise to try to bridge the apparent failure to communicate. To perhaps bring out the hidden premises, as you call it. Oh well.
Quoting Isaac
Or one might simply say that if an apporach works, it tells us something about how the world actually is (it's structure is such that the approach works, at least in our perception). I think that's less confusing, anyways.
Quoting Isaac
Thanks for clarifying then. I wasn't aware that this was what you were trying to do. I tried asking a few times, but maybe I worded my questions wrongly.
Quoting Isaac
The 2000 years (a low estimate I think) of disagreement come from trying to figure out what the correct premises are. And it took a while for the rules of logic to coalece to the extend they have today. And even then, not all philosophy is analytic philsophy.
I understand your view, but whenever this comes up, I point out that it took us thousands of years to come up with the scientific method itself. Even though it now seems entirely self-evident and "true". It's maybe the most universally accepted piece of philosophy there is. If there is no way to progress in philosophy, how did we come up with it, and why did it only happen a few hundred years ago?
Quoting Isaac
I'd argue that philosophy has come up with quite a few useful results over the last 2000 years.
Quoting Isaac
Ah, but that causes an infinite regress, because "working" also needs to be defined. That's easy to do for empirical science (because we were all brought up with the scientific method already part of the culture), but how do we know whether or not, say, a theory on moral philosophy "works"?
Quoting Isaac
Deciding that a device works and should therefore be kept is a deduction.
Quoting Isaac
No, I haven't. Neither have you. That was my point. Your original argument relied on that definition being "right".
Quoting Isaac
If you don't think so, then why the hell are you still here?
How could you think that being alive is not a process, for example? Are you alive if you're not experiencing metabolism? Cell division?
How could you think that you're not a system and part of other systems? Are you alive sans a circulatory system?
Yeah, sorry--that's what I would do in response to what someone takes to be good evidence for it, where I don't agree that it works as evidence for it.
You're welcome. It's called psychological conditioning. It's for your own good! :lol:
Quoting Echarmion
I really don't need a thought experiment. I know exactly where you're coming from. I just don't agree with you. The thought experiment is a failure before it even gets off the ground.
And you should know [i]my[/I] premises by now without the need of me repeating them 500 times or more. What's left that's "hidden", except what you were getting at with that thought experiment? You could've just explicitly stated the relevant premise instead of going down the thought experiment route. It's just the same old idealist logic you had in mind behind that thought experiment. Same logic, same problem.
Some aspects I think are just an instrumental way to make predictions. I don't take them as making any sort of ontological commitment. Some interpretations of qm are just nonsensical in my view. But I have no problem accepting the general notion of indeterminacy.
No, you need to follow my wording [i]precisely[/I]. I didn't say that [i]being alive[/I] is a fact. The fact is [I]that I am alive[/I]. By my view, it is proper to state a fact in similar way to stating truth-apt statements. "Being alive" is not truth-apt. "I am alive" is truth-apt. It is a fact that I'm alive. It is the case that I'm alive. It doesn't make any sense to say that it's a fact that being alive, or that it's the case that being alive.
Am I sounding like an analytic philosopher now? :grin:
Quoting Terrapin Station
All of these questions do not indicate an understanding of my earlier point where I explained what I do and do not doubt. I don't want to keep repeating it, so perhaps you could go back and try again without me having to do so.
The fact that you are alive is the fact that your body is undergoing metabolism, cell division, etc.
It relates to that fact. I am alive because of that.
But what of it? That still doesn't address my point. My point is that facts are not what they're about. So agreeing over bodily systems doesn't do anything at all. A fact is not a bodily system in my view.
Please keep in mind what I said elsewhere. If this is a dead end, be explicit about it, and don't keep pushing on to no avail. Think ahead.
First, I don't even have any idea what you're referring to with "fact," because per your claims, you're neither using it in the state of affairs sense nor in the colloquial "true proposition" sense.
Facts aren't about anything except if one is sloppily using the term to be a synonym for "true proposition."
I've already [i]shown[/I] you what I mean and explained my position. This reply from you doesn't help us move forward at all. So unless you have anything else, we're done here.
Nevertheless, I have no idea what you'd be referring to by the term, exactly. Do you want me to just pretend that I do because you don't want to try to explain it some other way?
But you're not helping me to help you. What can I do? It feels like you're just throwing your hands up in the air instead of working with me.
How would I help you help me? I haven't the faintest idea how you're using the term "fact" based on what you've said you don't have in mind with it.
Yeah, well, I don't think I'm going to humour you, because I believe that you know what I mean enough to understand me when I say, for example, that it's the case that I'm alive. You do understand my meaning, in spite of any protestations to the contrary.
I'd have no idea what "it's the case" is supposed to refer to if it's not a synonym for facts a la either states of affairs or the colloquial "true proposition" sense.
But okay, I guess just assume that I must know.
So you're just going to deliberately ignore what I said earlier on this very point? This is what I mean when I say you're not being helpful.
I have no idea what you're referring to here, so I suppose I have no option at the moment aside from "ignoring" it.
Yes, no option at all! It's impossible for you to put any more effort in on your end, so that you actually pay attention to what I'm saying, so that I don't have to repeat myself. At least take this as a lesson and learn from it.
I'm fed up with, "I don't know what you mean because I wasn't paying attention. Do all of the work again for me". It's bad form.
Maybe it would help if you didn't just quote one little bit of a reply to you, as you did in this case. It's okay to do that in my book, but [i]not[/I] if you don't pay sufficient attention to the important parts which you left out, as seems to be the case here. How about you try a little harder? How about you just scroll up the bloody page? No? Is that asking too much? You're a nightmare at times.
What did you "already do"? You haven't given any examples of objects whose origin, whether natural or artificial, is open to serious doubt.
Quoting Echarmion
I can respond to that part of what you write that I think is relevantly responding to what I have been saying. So, as I see it, what you claim is a relevant response is not so at all. I haven't claimed that texts "fully represent" author's intentions, much less "brain states". What I have said is that texts and other intentionally produced artifacts are the result of cultural conditions and their makers' intentions (which are themselves correlated with neural states) and that they therefore have a different kind of material origin than naturally occurring objects.
Quoting Echarmion
What purpose does "ontologically" serve here? Symbols carry meaning; if they didn't ancient texts would heave no meaning to decipher. This is a very straightforward argument.
Quoting Echarmion
I don't think it is "equally reasonable" to say that ancient artifacts are no different to natural objects in that they do not embody any intentional meaning. We are just going to talk past one another it seems, so I am not going to continue this conversation any further; I would rather just acknowledge your disagreement and leave it at that.
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I have - prehistoric tools.
Quoting Janus
You can also respond to the rest, if only to say that you don't see it's relevance. That way, I am not left wondering whether or not you read my posts at all.
Quoting Janus
That is so trivially true that it's not worth debating. I don't believe that this was your initial point, and if it was it wasn't very clear.
Quoting Janus
The purpose of specifying ontology is to go beyond such trivial claims as "symbols carry meaning" or "intentional objects have a different kind of origin from natural objects" and ask what meaning is and how it is carried.
Your "straightforward argument" has been addressed several times by now, repeating it doesn't get us anywhere.
Quoting Janus
I have explained multiple times how I think meaning "works". You can keep repeating you disagree, but unless you engage with my actual argument we won't get anywhere.
Quoting Janus
It seems this topic inevitably leads to the claim of "talking past each other" with no way to resolve the alleged misunderstanding. I find it puzzling, but of course it's your decision. See you around!
Thanks, I think I understand your position now. We're not too far apart to be honest, I'm just far more casual about having a wider range of modes of speaking that I'm happy to accept, if they work for the group using them. I don't think people will look at me in bafflement if I say that one of the properties of a hammer is that it can be used to drive nails. I also don't think people will become confused if you say that's not really a property of the hammer for the reasons you've just given, so both are fine with me.
I think people will be utterly confounded if we start trying to say that the word "dog" doesn't have anything that could be called a meaning the moment the last user of the word dies. That just seems like nonsense to me, so I'm immediately curious as to what advantage people think that way of talking has.
Yeah, that's fair enough, if it's less confusing to you to treat it as if the working theory describes the world, I see no problem with that, within science. The difficulty arises when the job the theory has to do is provide answers which can't be tested. Then I think you need to be far more flexible about what a good theory has that a bad one doesn't and what it's 'goodness' means.
Quoting Echarmion
Have you read Kuhn? I think your account of 'the scientific method' and the history of its development is flawed.
Quoting Echarmion
This is very interesting, care to name a few?
Quoting Echarmion
As I said, if you can achieve your goals with it. Or rather if you can achieve them better than with any of the available alternatives. You wouldn't ask how we judge whether a painting 'works'.
Quoting Echarmion
Not one that can be carried out entirely 'from the armchair' though, that's the point. One must use it an observe the results. One cannot simply deduce that it will work.
Quoting Echarmion
The difference is, I have no intention of doing so. I don't think there is a 'right' here in an objective sense. You're the one who thinks that there can be a 'right' and answer based on logical deduction, so I expected to read those deductions.
Quoting Echarmion
If you genuinely can't think of any reason someone might write for a forum such as this other than to 'prove' they're right, then that explains quite a lot a lot about the direction of your posts.
I ask because Feynman once said "Will you understand what I'm going to tell you?... No, you're not going to be able to understand it... That is because I don't understand it. Nobody does."
The point being, if you keep trying to make everything precise and coherent you're going to miss out on an awful lot of perfectly useful stuff. Human psychology is incredibly complicated, we have more neural connections than there are stars in the galaxy. If you're going to try and limit the ways we communicate, and the way we conceive of the world to those that your conscious thought finds coherent then I think you're going to live in a very limited world.
I agree. I don't think that they necessarily accept that it has an advantage over our ordinary way of talking. I think that that is lower down their list of priorities. Their priority is "being right". And some do not appreciate how large a role our use of language has to play here, instead dismissing this and thinking that they're just "doing ontology".
Not only is that a misrepresentation of what I said, it's also poisoning the well.
I think it's fair to ask you why you started arguing a point here, given your position on the value of argument as a whole. I find it incoherent to on the one hand state: Quoting Isaac, but to at the same time take a position within the argument, namely that it's "better" to consider meaning to be objective.
If I come across as annoyed, it is because I am getting the impression that you are on the one hand taking a position in a specific discussion but on the other hand deflecting any criticism by denying the value of the discussion itself. Perhaps I am just misunderstanding you though.
Quoting Isaac
I have not. I am vaguely familiar with his concepts of paradigm and the paradigm shift, which I consider fairly useful. What I know of his theories doesn't seem to be opposed to what I said. If you think it's worth considering, perhaps you could sketch the argument for me?
Quoting Isaac
Sure. In no particular oder: Stoicism, Kant's categorical imperative, the collection of different forms of logic, universal human rights, the concept of a social contract, various arguments against religious dogma, economic theory and of course the philosophy of science.
Quoting Isaac
You have to start somewhere though. If you start by observing, and go on observing, how do you arrive at anything other than observing?
Quoting Isaac
Right, and this is the reason for my annoyance. Because it looks to me like you started making a specific argument, which you now claim you never intended to follow up on.
Quoting Isaac
Are you asking me to provide a full derivation from first principles, or are you merely unsure of what my exact position is? If it's the former, I don't think that's a reasonable request to make. If it's the latter, I can provide you with some quotes from my past posts.
My first posts in this discussion were along the lines of
"I can't see how theories which assume it could be much use to us..."
"I'm asking what the difference is, for you..."
My first post to you merely clarified what I thought and my second post to you was the one in which I made it very clear I wasn't talking about 'right' at all.
So I'm very unclear as to what I've done to give you the impression that I'm arguing for a position with regards to the ontology of meaning other than the one I've been clear about from the start. That it is perfectly unproblematic to treat meaning as if it were a property of the word, but that the matter of whether it 'really is' a property of the word is a pseudo-problem and not worth considering.
Quoting Echarmion
Probably not the place for it, but broadly speaking Kuhn saw the testing of theories as being specific to a culturally ingrained method of problem solving, so his work does not support the notion that Science is somehow being 'done better' as a result of a set of philosophical methods unavailable to past cultures.
Quoting Echarmion
But that's just a list of philosophies you like. Every single one has strong opposition from intelligent experts in their field. The context of the question was your claim that arguments can be judged by their logical validity. My counter to that was that this was not possible with sufficient granularity to produce useful results. So 'useful' here means the use checking logical validity can be put to, not the use of the philosophical theory itself. I'm arguing that it is of little use to compare two philosophical theories on the basis of their logical validity. To disprove this, you would have to present a pair of competing philosophical theories, one of which was rejected by all epistemic peers as a consequence of such a comparison.
Quoting Echarmion
As above, I can't see what's given you the impression that I've made any kind of truth claim with regards to the ontology of meaning other than the scope argument which I am currently exhaustively following up on.
Quoting Echarmion
Yes, but the position in question was;
"I don't think "radioactive" is a property if you stick to the letter of that definition. I think the dictionary definition provides a shorthand reference to the actual property of radioactive substances, which is that their atoms are unstable and therefore prone to emit radiation."
Not only did it start with "I don't think... ", which seems to be a statement about the content of your mind rather than a state of affairs you've determined reality must match, but if it is the latter, it is this that I have not read your logical deduction of.
Slippery slope aside, I think I’ll agree. Empirical methods may demonstrate the validity of arguments having empirical grounds, as in hypothesis validated by means of experiment, but particular empirical arguments themselves can only arise from judgements made on relations given from experience or possible experience, and those relations are nothing more than synthetic a priori propositions. I would add, however, empirical arguments can be judged by analytic propositions a priori, relational as well, but having only general empirical content.
No empirical method is capable of judging arguments reason presents to itself, re: morality, the super-sensible, or the logically impossible.
Radioactive is a condition, not a property. If a nucleus has certain properties it will be radioactive and it won’t be if it doesn’t. Being radioactive is contingent, the properties are necessary to identify the object, from which the possibility of being radioactive follows.
Quoting Echarmion
Finally. Tacit understanding it is absolutely impossible to do otherwise, and only the rationally inept will attempt it.
I now return me to my regularly scheduled life.
You both still don't seem to realise that that, in itself, is beside the point. Yes, of course I'm imagining it from my human perspective. I am a human after all, and I can't imagine something without doing so from my perspective. That still doesn't mean that I can't imagine a scenario with no humans, and therefore no human perspectives. You're just playing with the language to make it superficially appear as though there's an impossibility which is logically relevant. It involves a sleight of hand, and is therefore an example of sophism, rather than philosophy.
It's impossible for me to imagine something without imagining something: if you're saying something like that, then that's true, but trivial and irrelevant. There's a number of related truisms I could mention here. I can't imagine something without being alive, or without being capable of imagination, or without knowing anything about the thing that I'm supposed to be imagining, and so on. None of them are of any logical relevance.
It's [i]not[/I] impossible for there to be a scenario, which can be imagined, whereby in that scenario, there are no humans, and therefore no human perspectives; and that in that scenario, there are rocks, and a sign which says "Caves up ahead". Obviously, I am [I]not[/I] in that scenario, so it doesn't matter that I'm human or that I'm imagining it and so on.
If you don't get this, then [i]you're[/I] rationally inept, @Mww.
So you’re not human after all! Haha ;)
Stupid swivelly-necked mo fo! :D
Note: Sudden found myself wearing my “silly” hat ... I’ll take it off now :/
You can take yours off?
The idea is the same as "You can't have a perception without it being a perception (obviously), but the perception can be of something that's not itself a perception." The mistake that's often made there is one of the things that leads to general, overarching idealism.
So obviously you have to be imagining things, it has to be from your perspective, etc., but what you imagine can be a world without people imagining things, and having perspectives, and so on.
Ah, someone who gets it. Others still have some catching up to do. It's cringey when they think that they're making a meaningful point, and when they think that we're being so irrational as to deny a truism. They should be embarrassed.