Are philosophical problems language on holiday?
Wittgenstein's analysis of philosophy was that problems arise from not understanding the role of concepts in their language games. This leads to a misuse in a philosophical setting, resulting in conceptual muddles which appear to be deep questions.
Take the example of the problem of universals. A philosopher might ask why language is full of universal concepts if the world is full of individuals. This leads to attempts to resolve the paradox such as nominalism, conceptualism, and platonism. But the Wittgenstein approach would be that attempting to answer such questions is pointless. Instead, the question should be dissolved by understanding that universal talk is a generalizing short-cut for having to specify everything about an individual.
However, this misses the point. The problem of universals is asking the question what is it about individuals, if anything, which makes generalizing useful or even possible? And that leads to talk about properties, essences, similarity and what not. So we see that the problem isn't an abuse of language, it's a question about language's relation to the world.
Here we need to ask ourselves how did philosophy arise? Was it that some ancient folks starting taking words out of context? Or was it because there is a loose fit between language and the world, leading to all sorts of interesting puzzles? If it's the latter, then the problem is ordinary language, not philosophy.
Take the example of the problem of universals. A philosopher might ask why language is full of universal concepts if the world is full of individuals. This leads to attempts to resolve the paradox such as nominalism, conceptualism, and platonism. But the Wittgenstein approach would be that attempting to answer such questions is pointless. Instead, the question should be dissolved by understanding that universal talk is a generalizing short-cut for having to specify everything about an individual.
However, this misses the point. The problem of universals is asking the question what is it about individuals, if anything, which makes generalizing useful or even possible? And that leads to talk about properties, essences, similarity and what not. So we see that the problem isn't an abuse of language, it's a question about language's relation to the world.
Here we need to ask ourselves how did philosophy arise? Was it that some ancient folks starting taking words out of context? Or was it because there is a loose fit between language and the world, leading to all sorts of interesting puzzles? If it's the latter, then the problem is ordinary language, not philosophy.
Comments (197)
I don't understand this. I frankly admit it. What's universalism? Nominalism? Conceptualism? Platonism?
What IS the problem? Shouldn't we spell out in plain, simple language, what the problem is, before attempting to solve it?
And who is abusing the language? The OP? Nobody else has said anything yet, so he must be referring to himself. And he'd be referring to me too, based on "nobody else said anything", except he'd have had to accuse me proactively, in the opening paragraph, since that came before my post. Verrrry complicated matter.
What is the need? What unfulfilled desire eggs us on ot ask ourselves how philosophy arose? And why precisely here?
Ah! the problem again. What IS the problem?
Philosophers playing with their feces.
Shit! Who took my colonoscopy bag? It was here a minute ago.
Your way of framing the question is interesting. If Wittgenstein is right that a certain use of language is misleading, how did that start?
It is a very different approach from those who tell you where and when things went south.
Misusing the language in philosophical circles is like scattering scatological fragments in the heating and air conditioning ducts. Like disseminating semen that has gone bad in an artificial inseminating clinic. Like distributing disturbances into disturbed minds. Like handing out pro-abortion propaganda leaflets at a Baptist Barbie-doll Brutally Bruising, Smashing and Shredding Convention. -- Hey. This last one does not apply here.
He had said the opposite?
Philosophy was once all there was. It was science, politics, morality, psychology, religion, and all the other things where intellectual investigation might help clarify what the heck is going on. Although it seems often to be unrecognized, I think the only important question is "what do I do now?"
It seems like philosophy has been denatured. The life has been taken out of it. Some of that certainly is because important functions have been broken off and addressed elsewhere, e.g. science. I think there are still a lot of valuable contributions philosophy can make. For me, it all comes down to two things 1) Epistemology - not so much what we know, but how do we know what we know. 2) Recognition that all the things we think we know and see are human constructions. Stories. That seems to be more the realm of eastern rather than western philosophy. Whenever I read western philosophy, or the weak tea simulations that often show up here on the forum, I just see the unruly tangle of words you are discussing.
I come here to figure out these things for myself. There are people here who see some things more clearly than I do. The conversations I have here have been really helpful.
A lot of times in philosophy, I stumble upon something I came up with before on my own but didn't know the communal terms to describe it.
Something interesting about category errors.
If one asks "what color are orgasms?" people might say it's nonsensical. Yet people do have synesthesia so it's possibly a real phenomenon for some people and not others.
The problem of universals. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/universals-medieval/
I used it as an example, because it's easy to say how it might be stated as philosophers playing with feces while missing the deeper point it raises.
The NY Times had a good article on this a few years ago: https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/was-wittgenstein-right/
Descartes seems to be the big bad of philosophy, but I think he's just rephrasing what arose in ancient philosophy. And I don't think it's unique to Western Philosophy. The context and language might be a bit different, but the general ideas are there. Debates over idealism, realism, materialism, skepticism can be found in Indian and Chinese philosophy.
That's a good way of putting it.
Quoting Forgottenticket
Yeah, long before I read about p-zombies or even solipsism, I remember sitting in a busy dinner with a friend, and I started focusing on the clang of silverware and dishes with the buzz of conversation all around me, and the thought occurred to me that everyone else could just be acting as if they were experiencing the diner, yet I was the only one. For a few minutes, it actually seemed believable.
Here's maybe a better link to the problem: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nominalism-metaphysics/
I like that. Turns out that a lot of everyday notions are problematic, and don't stand up that well under inquiry. Science backs philosophy on this.
That's a good point. I could have used free will or skepticism, it's just they seemed harder to express simply in this conversation.
We could say that the problem of free will can be dissolved by looking at how free will is used in ordinary language, until we realize the free will is expressing a view of human agency that many people implicitly hold. And this isn't simply a language game. It's more of an experience people have of being able to make what seems like undetermined choices originating with the person. And that's why people can be held responsible for their actions.
Now that might be partially cultural, owing to Judea-Christian influence in the West. And maybe one would say the Jewish-Christian language games have come to predominate in certain cultures.
Buy I'm skeptical that casting philosophical problems as misunderstanding language games really gets at the issue those concepts are expressing in the language game. Free will wouldn't be part of a language game if we didn't experience some sort of freedom in making choices.
I am awfully sorry, Marchesk, but in my favourite universe when someone introduces a topic, they describe the situation in their own words, and not simply insert a link to a (probably) very lengthy script.
If you introduce a topic, do that, please, in your own words, and describe the problem or topic in a few (the fewer the better) paragraphs. Linking external documents and demanding we discuss their contents, is not fair on a conversational website, at least that's how I feel.
I mean, it gives me a sense of unbalanced trade-off. We do the reading, we do the debating, and we do all the work, while you simply insert a text written by someone else. Yes, this is my main beef about it: it's not fair to do so.
I did, and you responded by saying you didn't understand the well known positions in the example used, so I posted links for you to familiarize yourself. The problem of universals isn't the point of this topic, it's Wittgenstein's approach to dissolving philosophical problems by saying that language goes on holiday when philosophers fail to understand words in their proper language games. This is also well known in philosophy, but The NY Times article sums that up nicely, and it's not a long read.
This is precisely what went on with me then. My language skills do not measure up to the presented topic. I have no clue what universalism is, and much less could know what Wittgenstein said something about a topic which I don't know anything about.
But did that stop me from showing via an empirical example that Wittgenstein was right on the button? No, it did not. My language went on holiday while I read your posts, and failed to understand the words in their proper language games.
What a preciously insidious genius this Wittgenstein guy was.
This is wow. I am reeling in the awe of his predictive genius.
I agree! I think the issue of the nature of universals is still a really important issue, and unsolved to this day.
My reading is that the Platonist/Aristotelian current in Western philosophy accepted the reality of universals, but that this attitude fell into disfavour in later medieval times, as a consequence of the rise of nominalism, principally by figures like Bacon and William of Ockham. And as they were the antecedents of what later was to become empiricism, then their attitude towards universals won the argument, as a case of history being written by the victors.
Myself, I think the notion of real universals is essential for grounding meaning, because language is structurally dependent on universals. Whenever we use general terms, in some sense we're invoking universals. Now, I think the reason that the nature of universals is no longer understood, is because the understanding of them was intimately connected to the broader Aristotelian tradition, wherein everything that exists has its four causes (material, efficient, formal and final). So the relationship between 'formal cause' and 'reason' underpinned the entire system of thought, indeed an entire philosophy. This is what was undermined by the advent of nominalism, and with it, went any real sense of metaphysics. (And that's why practically the only school of philosophy that understands metaphysics in those terms nowadays are the neo-thomists.)
But another point about Wittgenstein is that he didn't dismiss metaphysics in the way that the later positivists understood him to. The Vienna Circle adopted his ideas, believing that he thought metaphysics was essentially nonsensical verbiage. Whereas if you read the concluding passages of the Tractatus, leading up to the famous 'that of which we cannot speak', it is definitely animated by a sense of the mystical, of what lies 'beyond speech', which is completely alien to the Vienna positivists:
**
[quote=Ray Monk (biographer)] His work is opposed, as he once put it, to “the spirit which informs the vast stream of European and American civilisation in which all of us stand.” Nearly 50 years after his death, we can see, more clearly than ever, that the feeling that he was swimming against the tide was justified. If we wanted a label to describe this tide, we might call it “scientism,” the view that every intelligible question has either a scientific solution or no solution at all. It is against this view that Wittgenstein set his face.[sup] 1[/sup][/quote]
So I think his criticism of metaphysics was not that there is nothing beyond what can be validated by science (as the positivists believed) but that to speak of what is beyond science is to also go beyond the limits of language itself. That's the sense in which Wittgenstein's philosophy is more like Protestant than Catholic mysticism, but it still has that mystical side to it.
Or like Zen Buddhism. It's interesting that Witty said concerning consciousness and the beetle in a box not that it's nothing, only that we can't speak about it. Which is something Dennett noted and disagreed with Witty about, because obviously it must be eliminated!
Which makes me wonder, is language under Wittgenstein's understanding equivalent to a p-zombie? I'm digressing from universals here, but I heard on a recent panpsychist podcast discussing Wittgenstein where the philosopher guest stated that there was no hard problem because Witty showed us mind is public because language is public.
Anyway, the point of this discussion is whether philosophical problems such as universals, free will or consciousness can be dismissed by analyzing their use in language games and subsequent misuse by philosophers. But in the case of universals, if you're right that meaning is grounded by them, then we can't so easily dismiss them, since it goes deeper than playing language games. Universals make language games possible, if I understand you correctly.
But if we look at how ordinary objects are used in everyday language, then we can dismiss the problem as misunderstanding the role ordinary objects play. Tables and chairs are meaningful and useful for us.
However, what if I want to know whether our understanding of ordinary objects is backed up by science? Then I'm back to the same problem. Because then I'm not asking about the usefulness of tables and chairs, I'm asking whether they exist as we think of them. I'm asking a question about the world and our commonsense understanding of it. My conclusion is that our ordinary language is simply mistaken. The problem is with our everyday concepts, not the philosophical inquiry.
Ordinary objects are a good example of the loose fit between language (or mind) and world (or science).
A neat example. The answer is found more clearly in Austin than Wittgenstein.
Is the problem that of working out what a universal refers to? What sort of thing?
And if so, why assume that there is some thing that each word refers to?
The problem is working out how universals are useful. They may or not point to a particular thing (a universal object) in the world, but it would be fair to assume there is something about individual things which allows us to universalize.
At which point we look at the similarity among individual things and debate what that entails. Or alternatively, the similarity reflects an organizational feature of our minds.
Well, I don't see how you can avoid the notion of very general ideas and of meaningful abstraction in language. My belief is, thought and language are built on these types of concepts, but they're so deeply embedded in the fabric of the mind that we tend to look through them, rather than at them.
Accordingly when we try and look at them, then we find them very difficult to understand, even though the mind subliminally uses them all the time.
I think whenever we understand things as a type or a species, then we're in some sense dealing with or recognising universals. I even go so far as to wonder whether the whole idea of mass production, of templates and forms, of models and types, which are so fundamental to modern existence, actually owe their existence to the Aristotelian separation of form and matter. (Interesting fact: Aristotle used one of Plato's terms, eîdos, to mean the abstract universal object represented by a particular. This word is more familiar to us in its Latin translation: species.) And furthermore, only a language-using and rational being - a 'rational animal' - could actually produce such things or see things this way. But it's taken for granted or explained away in a lot of current philosophy.
Quoting Marchesk
Plato's dialogues were concerned with what we can say we know for certain. One principle that appeared clear to him was that the knowledge of mathematical and geometrical forms was more certain and less likely to mislead than 'mere testimony of sense'. I think this was grounded in an intuition of the rational order of the world, which (we have to remember) was just then in the process of being discovered. So the Greeks, for example, a genius like Archimedes, were discovering universal principles of reason, on which basically Western culture and science were to be founded. Hence the often-stated depiction of Platonism as being a philosophy in which the material world is but a poor imitation of the ideal 'realm of forms'. So in that schema, I think there is no doubt individual particulars exist but only as simulacra of the real ideas they stand in for. However, I think our grasp of the notion of the forms is pretty scanty.
In which case, is this a question about what it is that certain sports cars and sunsets have in common, or is it a question about hw we use the word "red"?
I would say we use the word red the way we do because lots of things have reddish hue.
I guess we can just focus on a color property, and notice that we use the universal term "red" for all the particular instances of reds.
Quoting MarcheskGood. Moving on, then.
Quoting Marchesk
I wonder if you might reconsider whether it is the case that there must be something had in common by everything to which we ascribe the word "red"?
Why must this be so?
Sometimes we don't. At the edges, we do differ as to our opinions of which colour word is appropriate.
Could it be that what red things have in common is just that we have learned to use the word "red" when talking about them? That what they have in common is our use of a certain word?
What does this mean exactly? Because it sounds like our use of red and green are arbitrary, and we could have divided up color space differently, and it would have been just as useful.
Quoting Banno
This is a good point. Boundary conditions are important to take into consideration.
Well, isn't that so? There are documented cultural differences between colour names and ongoing discussions of perceptions - the contention that the Greeks could not recognise blue, for example. But we need not go that far for the discussion at hand. You and I presumably do agree on what is green and what is red, in the main; is it because we have learned to identify some essence of red that permeates certain things, or is it just simply that we have learned how to use the word "red" in our English speaking community?
At the very least, we have learned to use red for a range of color shades. And these shades can be given numbers based on a three-value primary color scale, which corresponds to the three kinds of cones we have in our eyes.
It is interesting that some cultures may have differences in color concepts. Does that imply something about language's effect on the brain?
Yes, but then does this mean the problem arose because philosophers took universal concepts out of context?
Speaking roughly, The Greeks treated all words as if they were nouns, and hence sort after the "thing" that words like "red" named; hence the forms... They were misled by a certain picture of how language works.
Edit: That is, they took the notion of names out of context in applying it to universals.
That's a very interesting experiment, and I did hear about the lack of blue references in Homer's works on a RadioLab episode, but it's also quite a controversial claim.
It's a lot trickier with perception, since other issues such as direct and color realism come into play, but Chalmers point can be more easily made with dream red. How does neuroscience account for an experience of red when you're not seeing a red object?
But that does not bear directly on the case in hand: that he whole philosophical exercise of explaining universals is based on a certain picture of how words work, and dissipates when that picture is dropped.
Not sure about neuroscience, but I don't see a philosophical issue. If red is not the name of a thing, then there is no need for there to be a thing that is red. That is, we can make sense of talk of red in dreams; and that's all there is. We do not need to invoke red dream-things.
If it does indeed dissipate. If so, then we have an iconic example of this kind of therapeutic philosophy working. Which raises the question of how many philosophical problems can be dissipated.
But first i would need more arguments to believe in the dissipation of universals. Does this problem not come up in languages which don't make nouns of all words? Do we not see a parallel of the problem in Indian, Arabic or Chinese philosophy?
I would expect nothing less...
But I hope you see the thrust of this very powerful approach to doing philosophy.
Red is the name of an experience, and is the experience of red that Chalmers thinks raises a hard problem.
I see the potential yet remain skeptical. Sure, it probably works on some problems. But as a universal acid? Is all metaphysics merely an abuse of language?
Well... at the least, if we sort out our language use we might find ourselves in a much better position to actually state the problem.
42.
Sure. Do you want to have this discussion here?
I thought that was the answer? Are you playing a different language game?
I suppose we should just focus on Wittgenstein's approach and whether it works.
Even better, how we would know whether it works. When can we say a long standing philosophical problem has been properly dissolved?
Do you want to talk about realism and chairs? Another example?
IS the issue there that we see chairs as solid, manipulable items in our world, but scientists tell us they are particles and space - something quite different?
Yes, realism about ordinary objects given what science has to say.
The latter Wittgenstein repudiated this by adhering to an approach that negated the 'objectivity' of a universal by the way we use language. Family resemblances/pragmatism, and intuitionism, or the property of human beings that allows them to agree that red is red, and whatnot.
Ok, let's look at the word real.
We talk of a real coin as opposed to a counterfeit. A real McCubbin as opposed to a fake. A real gem as opposed to an artificial one.
What we mean by "it's real!" is decided by what we are opposing it to.
How's that?
Yeah, one question that lingers in my mind, is whether Wittgenstein advocated nominalism in his latter or early period. (Debatable)
Haven't yet read Austin, though it might be a good thing to do.
Ehhh, wouldn't it be the other way around? What we suppose is fake, an illusion, fictional, etc. is decided by being opposed to what we have reason to believe is real.
I don't think that all of them are, unless I really don't understand what many folks are saying (and vice versa). It seems to me like many of us really have different beliefs about what (sorts of things) exist(s), what's possible/impossible, what we can know, what the nature of things is, how things work, etc.
If everyone really agrees with me on all of that, and I really agree with everyone else, and we just don't realize it because of language issues, then we sure do not know how to sort out those language issues, do we?
Okay, so the context is wanting to know whether the world is populated by ordinary objects in addition to their scientific versions (particles and empty space). Or whether they are the same thing, or don't exist (the scientific version is exclusive).
The "scientific versions" aren't different than the "ordinary versions." They're other ways of looking at the ordinary versions, they're the ordinary versions from other reference points, at least different explanatory reference points.
The problem is that this leads to paradoxes because the scientific version raises issues for our concept of ordinary objects.
For example, How do you decide exactly which collection of particles is the chair? Note that if you give an imprecise answer here, this conflicts with our notion of chairs having precise boundaries.
Chairs aren't vague objects with imprecise boundaries such that we can give a rough answer to which collection of particles count as the chair. This is the problem of many.
You'd have to give an example. The only thing I can think of is that the concept of a particular "ordinary object" might not include what's really going on to make the ordinary object as it is from a typical phenomenal standpoint, but ordinary object concepts are not usually claims in that regard anyway.
Quoting Banno
So, if someone insists the painting is real, what do they mean?
Is the chair real?
In context of art, they're disagreeing over whether it's a forgery. In general, they're being pandantic about the painting existing.
Quoting Banno
Not if we take science seriously, in my opinion. Is there some other context you have in mind when we ask that question?
I updated my response as you were posting. Go back and read the extra part about boundaries, particle collections and vagueness. I can also link you to an article on the problem of many.
Science isn't saying anything at all like "chairs aren't real" lol
Are they?
Quoting Marchesk
Are they? IF one of them says, "sure, it's not a forgery - but it's not real..." what do we say?
Yeah, but you're missing the philosophical argument here. The problem arises because philosophers noticed conflicts between our notion of everyday objects and what science says they're made up of.
We seek clarification, because it doesn't make sense without proper context.
Ordinary object concepts aren't about molecules, are they?
They are not, which is a problem when doing ontology, since science says they're made up of molecules.
That would be a misunderstanding of what science is doing/saying. There's no conflict.
If you say so. But I'm telling you it is problem discussed in contemporary metaphysics. Of course not everyone agrees it's a problem
It's not a problem. As I said, "The only thing I can think of is that the concept of a particular 'ordinary object' might not include what's really going on to make the ordinary object as it is from a typical phenomenal standpoint, but ordinary object concepts are not usually claims in that regard anyway."
So you're saying professional philosophers agree it's not a problem and don't discuss it? Or that you have just solved it now?
So there are two important things here. The first is that our concept of ordinary objects may not reflect what makes an ordinary object, which leaves the door open to the possibility that there are no ordinary objects.
The second is more along the lines that language is being taken out of context. I disagree here, because I've always understand ordinary objects to be an implicit claim to existence, thus everyone's shock when someone says they don't exist. Or laughter after passing the pipe.
What I said was that anyone who thinks this is a problem doesn't understand what science is doing.
Huh? What do the two have to do with each other?
I think they understand well enough. The question is whether they properly understand what language is doing, and whether focusing on language can dissolve this inquiry.
Ontology.
I think anyone who has ever had a dream would be aware of zombies or solipsism. Children today play VR so they are more familiar with the concepts.
The mind/body problem I discovered myself at a young age. I was reading the back of a science book and it was about Cajal's discoveries of the brain being contiguous rather than a complete living thing. So I was wondering how everything pieced together as one experience. Before that I believed thinking was some type of continuous electrical field.
I can't take Ryle's stuff seriously. There is obviously a full phenomenal world with thinking that exists beyond our culture/ the way we are trained to talk about thinking.
lol - in other words, you stated it as if there's some implicational relationship, but there isn't.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/problem-of-many/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-h6L-pBG7o
https://people.umass.edu/lrb/files/bak08metM.pdf
Why would you even doubt something so easily proven? Do you require more links?
So you're claiming that this, for example, reflects the misunderstanding of thinking that scientists are saying that chairs don't really exist because they're made up of molecules/atoms/etc. with "empty space" between them, with unclear surface boundaries if you look at them on a microscopic scale, etc.?
Let me give an example. Here is an image of ancient Hebrew cosmology:
Now given what we know from science, do the waters above the firmament exist? If human beings get things like that wrong, isn't it possible that our notion of everyday objects is also mistaken?
Let's be clear what is being claimed. It is not that the chair-stuff doesn't exist, only that our concept of a chair does not map onto the physical reality.
Are we changing the subtopic from whether it's philosophers who are misunderstanding what science is doing?
The subtopic is whether philosophy questions, particularly metaphysical ones, but could also are an abuse of language.
So you just want to drop anything but what you initially wanted to talk about now. Forget trying to support the claim that philosophers are perpetuating a particular misunderstanding of science rather than computer techs etc. who like to talk about philosophy online.
I supported the claim with links to philosophical sources, not computer techs talking about philosophy. You can do a Google search yourself if you're not satisfied.
The issue isn't one of misunderstanding science, btw.
I asked you "So you're claiming that this, for example, reflects the misunderstanding of thinking that scientists are saying that chairs don't really exist because they're made up of molecules/atoms/etc. with "empty space" between them, with unclear surface boundaries if you look at them on a microscopic scale, etc.? "
Because if you're claiming that, you're wrong. That article isn't even about that.
You ignored clarifying if you're claiming that and tried to redirect.
I'm not saying anything about what scientists said. Jesus man! This is an issue in metaphysics.
Some philosophers noticed that our concepts of ordinary objects result in paradoxes when combined with our scientific understanding, leading to a metaphysical discussion of whether ordinary objects exist as we conceive them.
Good that you're trying to argue with me when you're not even understanding and don't particularly care about what I'm saying, haha.
You're an ass.
That you feel that way is probably why you're arguing with me despite not really understanding or caring about what I'm saying. Good basis for a conversation.
So, instead someone insists it's not a real picture. We seek clarification. They say it is made up of particles and space.
If they say it was not a real picture, it was an illusion, we could make sense of that by contrasting a real painting with an illusion - there are paintings that are real, and paintings that are illusions.
But there are no paintings that are not made up of particles and space!
We noted earlier that we use being real in contrast to something else - forged, imaginary, fake... In such cases there are real things, not forged, not imagined, not fake.
That's not the case with a thing being made of particles.
The notion of real has been misused here.
However, notice the difference if someone asks whether the world consists of pictures, like we might ask whether the universe is populated by ordinary objects. In this context, the meaning of real is contrasted with that of appearance.
When the question is asked, "Do ordinary objects like tables and chairs exist?", the question is asking whether our conception of normal objects fits with being made up of particles and space.
Quoting Marchesk
Exactly. Ideas and mental categories are just other things that we refer to with words, and ideas can refer to things in the world, but not always. The problem is that we cant discern which of our ideas are about the world and which are just imaginings. Is the color we see an actual property of the object or of my perception of it? When you talk about objects, are talking about mental objects, or non-mental objects? Are you talking about the perception, or the cause of your perception?
And if you're talking about your perception, can you also be talking about the object because perceptions have a property of aboutness to them. Is that a scary or taboo word around here - "aboutness". Thats a philosophical word, no?
We know 'chairs exist' due to the set of interactional expectancies the word 'chair' signifies.
It is irrelevant to then argue about 'the atomic structure of chairs', because it has no effect on the utility of 'chairs' for us (except perhaps in terms of materials science). The concept 'existence' applied to 'chairs', or 'molecules' or 'gods' implies nothing other than the functional utility of those concepts which varies according to context and user. So molecular contextual users of 'existence' have nothing to say to god contextual users of 'existence' other than to argue about utility. They are both on holiday in 'hotel existence' (probably in the bar!).
"The world consists of..." We are now playing a play a parlour game called "metaphysics". Why not? Let's just be sure to mark the transition.
Quoting Marchesk
When the physicist tells us that the chair is made up of particles and space, he is making a statement about the chair. So yes, our notion of normal objects fits with their being made up of particles and space.
So then there should be no paradoxes from fitting our notion of normal objects with what the physicist tells us.
Are there any such paradoxes?
Anyway, I've always understood exists in ordinary language to mean whether something is real. Do dragons exist, no. Do dinosaurs? They did in the past. Elephants? Yes, today they exist. What about life on Mars? We don't know, but it's a possibility, either now or sometime in the past.
Consider the notion of material solidity of ordinary objects before atomic theory was accepted. Take a standard materialist arguing against an atomist. It's clear our everyday notion of solidity did not include particles and space.
What sort of thing is a concept?
I don't know a good definition. It's a way our cognition organizes our experiences into understandable units, I guess. So the world is full of objects and events that we can recognize and do useful things with, such as survive.
Let's look at... democracy. How does the concept of democracy differ from democracy?
Or... how does the concept of 2 differ from 2?
One is a word that has meaning and the second is the actual political organization that some countries use in a mixed manner which the word is about.
Quoting Banno
That is a tricky question. Two things or mathematical two?
OK, now to get bit pedantic. You've given me the difference between "democracy" - the word, note the quote marks - and democracy - the thing.
But is there also a third thing, the concept of democracy, that is different to both the word "Democracy and to democracy?
Is there a third thing, the concept of 2, which is not the same as 2, nor as "2"?
Being pedantic here, I understand "word" to be the symbolic form we use in some language to denote the meaning which is also the concept, and in order for there to be concepts, which although social in nature, depends on having brains that can cognate (form concepts).
This is difficult question, because we might want to locate concepts in culture. Being pedantic, I wanted to differentiate between the sounds we say or print and the meaning they denote. But our ability to understand and generate concepts is definitely in the brain (or mind).
Quoting Marchesk
See the incidental treatment of concept as a noun? But we can't quite identify what it is the name of... We talk of the meaning of the word and the concept; but neither is very clear.
What if instead of talking about concepts, we talk instead about how words are used? Let's leave aside this third category, not name, not thing, but concept; let's talk instead about words and what we do with them.
So when we have a problem with the "concept itself", let's just drop back for a bit and look at how we are using the words.
And there are words like molecules and quanta.
Yes, and these have a more technical use than chairs and tables.
But there is no incompatibility here. We can talk about the chair in terms of moving it around the table, and then in terms of it's chemistry. We are still talking about the chair.
Going back to this particular sentence. Many religious believers do not understand God or gods existing as fulfilling some functional utility, anymore than they think that about other people existing. I speak as a former believer.
Some more nuanced or philosophically inclined religious believers might phrase things along those utility lines where God is inside us or some principle of the universe, taking into account the lack of empirical supports for gods. But your average believer, to the extent they believe, probably think in terms of God as existing like a person.
We can, but then some pedantic person might point out that the chemistry entails the possibility that we're moving about more than one chair, since the molecules making it up don't have clear boundaries.
But I think you want to say something deeper...
We're moving about a single chair, and some annoying shit wants to point out that since the chair is made up of molecules, and those molecules don't have a determinate boundary, that we can't say exactly which molecules make up the chair. So there are 1 million chairs for each different collection of molecules that could make up the chair.
But that's a problem since we're only moving one chair. The deeper issue is that our use of "chair" includes a determinate boundary where we can clearly say it's a single chair. But the physics makes the boundary indeterminate. So we have a conflict with how we use chair and it's physical constitution.
Why should it then stop us from talking about the chair?
Perhaps the error here is to think that we cannot talk about things that do not have a 'determinate' boundary...
We can and do.
It's perhaps only metaphysicians that get confused into thinking we can't.
It's only in the context of the 'real/ illusion' distinction that the term 'real' has any bite. Regarding the distinctions between being a McCubbin or not, and being wood or plastic, the term 'real' is redundant. So, the painting is either a McCubbin or not and the frame is wood or plastic.
In those latter contexts we could say that a painting that appears to be a McCubbin creates the illusion that it is so, and that a plastic frame that appears to be wood creates the illusion that it is wood; but then there is no such distinction between different contexts as you claimed.
The issue here isn't whether we language is practical. The issue comes up when you take your first physics class and learn that the world is a lot stranger than everyday experience would suggest. But this goes all they way back to noticing the appearance/reality distinction that got people asking metaphysical questions.
So I think this sort of dissolving is missing the point. I want to know what the world is like, not whether ordinary concepts are useful. Of course they are and we can continue to talk about and move chairs regardless of the physics.
And that would be true if we lived inside the Matrix. But it would completely miss the point when we're asking what sort of world we live in.
The world is like chairs and desks and particles and space. What is it that remains a puzzle?
The world is also like the sun moving through the sky on a flat, stationary land at the center of the cosmos. What remains a puzzle?
The puzzle is the difference between how the world appears to us and how it is.
Quoting Banno
[quote=Ed Feser]As Aristotelians and Thomists use the term, intellect is that faculty by which we grasp abstract concepts (like the concepts man and mortal), put them together into judgments (like the judgment that all men are mortal), and reason logically from one judgment to another (as when we reason from all men are mortal and Socrates is a man to the conclusion that Socrates is mortal). It is to be distinguished from imagination, the faculty by which we form mental images; and from sensation, the faculty by which we perceive the goings on in the external material world and the internal world of the body. ...
Concepts that are the constituents of intellectual activity are universal while mental images and sensations are always essentially particular. Any mental image I can form of a man is always going to be of a man of a particular sort -- tall, short, fat, thin, blonde, redheaded, bald, or what have you. It will fit at most many men, but not all. But my concept "man" applies to every single man without exception. Or to use my stock example, any mental image I can form of a triangle will be an image of an isosceles , scalene, or equilateral triangle, of a black, blue, or green triangle, etc. But the abstract concept triangularity applies to all triangles without exception. 1 [/quote]
Quoting Marchesk
Nobody knows what anything really is. That is what philosophical scepticism really means. Our situation as intelligent beings is still such that everything we experience could still be an elaborate charade, and we'd have no way of knowing. (This even describes the situation of natural science, as a sufficiently elaborate charade might appear as empirically consistent.) Philosophy suggests one should be disturbed by this possibility, otherwise one is not taking the question seriously.
Quoting Wayfarer
What do you make of this now, after our discussion?
Specifically, is "...what it really is" coherent?
If "we'd have no way of knowing" then the question as to "what anything really is" would seem to be useless at best, incoherent at worst. So why do you think we should "take the question seriously", much less be disturbed by it?
Realizing that we cannot answer such questions, if we define "really is" as 'being nature utterly independent of our experience', is actually very easy. It shows us the limits of knowledge and what questions are not worth asking, because they only create further confusion and waste time that could be spent on more fruitful inquiries.
It’s the same thing as saying it’s intelligible that there could be things we can’t know about. We’re only human.
Yes, but they weren’t always.
To identify what it is to be "like something" is to identify the qualities of anything as they are experienced. If one tries to apply the question outside the context of experience, the question becomes meaningless. It is what Kant refers to as the "transcendental illusion".
Quoting Wayfarer
Compare this to "Nobody knows what anything is".
Well, seems to me that this is not so.
What does adding the word "really" do here?
Does it really just mark the place where there be dragons? That's not such a bad thing, so long as we do not go on to describe those dragons in detail.
Metaphysics tends to describe the dragons in detail.
But don't we only know that due to observations (experience) of the universe? Otherwise how would we know?
Quoting Marchesk
The wave-function is a theoretical entity, conceptualized as a way to understand what is observed.
What does adding the word "really" do here? :joke: I agree with your point btw!
Marks the place were this refers back to @Marchesk's suggestion that it's about the stuff we don't know.
What sort of thing do you think the number two is?
That's what the number 2 is.
We talk about concepts. We use them to design things. We based much of 20th Century art on them. That's what concepts are.
But not with the suggestion that the concept is the thing the word stands for; nor that the concept is a thing in one's head or mind.
Concepts don't have the property of location.
It seems to me that we are talking about relationships when talking about how it appears, and not when talking about how it is. Appearances are how something is relative to something else, like how the coffee cup is relative to some body with senses, like eyes. You don't see the other side of the cup, only the side facing the senses.
How something is, is how it is independent of any view - not relative to any sensory organs. It seems to me that we're simply making category errors when we confuse appearances with how things are.
Let's take three medieval monks discussing the Lucretius' poem on atomism. One defends the atomistic metaphysics, arguing that the world is really made of atoms and the void, a second is skeptical, saying it doesn't appear that way, atoms aren't part of our experience. And a third, being a pre-Witty Pyrrhon skeptic says the discussion is bunk, because we can't know any metaphysical truths.
Turns out the atomists were basically correct, at least regarding ordinary matter. So the discussion was meaningful. Even the part about atoms "swerving" randomly has its parallel in quantum indeterminism.
From this, we might be led to conclude that metaphysics is meaningful if future science either confirms or falsifies the basic ideas of said metaphysics.
Sure, we might naturally tend to think that science shows us at least something of what the world is really (read "really" here as 'absolutely mind-independently') "like", but that doesn't mean we could know this to be so, or even what "really" or "like" really mean in this supposed contextless or context-independent context.
Is any thing some way independently of any view? The category error seems to consist in thinking that it could be. I think the best that can be said about this would be that a thing is such as to appear such and such a way to such and such a viewer.
Quoting Janus
More "Here be Dragons" talk. It amounts to nothing.
As it happens, I did a term paper on Lucretius, and got an HD for it (from Keith Campbell.)
But it's often forgotten what problem the atomists set out to solve. This was the relationship of the many and the One. The One (from Parmenides) was the Real; but mutable nature was illusory. But how could this be? Well, the atomist solution was that the indivisible atom - 'atom' means literally 'uncuttable' - preserved the immutability and changelessness of the One while also manifesting as the multitudinous forms that we see around us. It was an ingenious solution, and was revived in the French Enlightenment, due to the influence of materialist philosophers such as Baron D'Holbach ('all I see are bodies in motion'). Combined with Galileo's new mathematical physics and Cartesian geometry, it seemed to promise a universal theory, which the materialists to this day still advocate. However, Heisenberg came out in favour of Plato over Democritus and materialism generally is subject to the basic criticism that the nature of the 'fundamental units of matter' turns out to be highly ambiguous (among many other things).
Regarding certainty - I could add that the things we do know with certainty are logical and arithmetical truths, e.g. that A=A. The "=" sign in that expression is, if you like, the most completely accurate statement of what "is". When the Greek rationalists began to explore these subjects, they recognised on this basis mathematical, rational, and formal truths to possess a higher degree of certainty than the testimony of senses. Ultimately that gave rise to Aristotelian 'form-matter dualism'. So the 'form' of the thing was related to what made it truly what it was; the ability of the intellect/nous to perceive the form was analogous to the way that the mind grasps mathematical proofs. The material substance, however, was grasped by the senses, and then the two combined by the 'active intellect' so that we know what 'type' a thing is. This is very much at the basis of science itself, with the caveat that hylomorphic dualism is not materialist in orientation. (But then, I am of the view that materialism has hijacked the mainstream of Western philosophy which is not in itself materialist.)
He seems like he cares. But does he really? Maybe he's just pretending and only cares about himself.
The stick looks bent in water, but is it really? Maybe the water does bend sticks. Or maybe the light is bent by the water.
You say that humans couldn't have built the pyramids, but did ancient aliens really build stone structures on Earth? Or are you underestimating human ingenuity?
Really's role is to question the potential difference between how something appears to be, or is said to be, and how it is.
The temptation here might be to say there is no "how it is", only how things appear to be. But that raises problems. For one, it means we can't say whether the stick is bent by the water or the light is refracted. For another, we can't explain why there are discrepancies in appearance.
If there is no "how it is", then there should never have been a question of appearance versus reality.
But people do guess at what it is. Thus the different interpretations of QM, and someday a clever experiment might provide evidence in favor of one of them.
Are we really going to say for example that Bohm's pilot wave theory or the Many Worlds Interpretation are meaningless just because nobody has figured out a way to test them?
I would suggest that at the border of accepted physics were new theories are being churned out before they can be put to the test, you will find metaphysics.
I was mainly trying to situate the discussion historically - how metaphysics was traditionally understood, and why it fell from favour. Looking at your OP again, I think Paragraph Three asks important questions. That's why I brought up the notion that universals have a role in anchoring meaning, in particular. (I don't know if you've ever come across Kelly Ross' article Meaning and the Problem of Universals but might be worth a look in this regard.)
On the other hand, I kind of understand Wittgenstein's point about sense and nonsense, about what can't be spoken. But I don't know if he really grasps the sense of Platonist metaphysics either. I find some forms of traditional philosophical metaphysics - mainly the Christian mystics - lucid and meaningful.
So, I think what Kant seems to have been the first to make a significant issue of; that everything we know is relative to the empirical context, and that metaphysics cannot ever be anything more than what seems to us to be true a priori, if even that, and that it is thus forever enclosed in the phenomenological arena, is irrefutable.
When dealing with 'language' concepts about 'concepts are all we've got !
And 'existence of life elsewhere' still a functional question relative to human 'expectancies' like the utility of abiogenetic speculation. . That is why large amounts of money are spent in trying to answer it.
As for 'reality', pragmatists might argue that this is a word which denotes the concept of 'universal consenus as to what is the case', which is to be expected due to the concept of 'our common physiology'. Kant and later phenomenologists point out that 'things-in-themselves' are either inaccessible, or even a useless concept.
(I acknowledge agreement with the post above which I only read after writing this reply).
I don't think this is right. We know the stick that appears bent in water is not "really" bent because when we pull it out of the water it instantly appears straight. We know that its bent appearance is due to light refraction because we observe that phenomenon in other contexts. We know it is not bent by the water because there is no known or conceivable mechanism which could cause this to happen.
The closest would be bending of furniture timbers by steaming, but that process requires heat and the bent stick does not actually get bent by the steam but softened so that it may then be bent into curves or s-shapes, then clamped until dry, when it will remain in the desired shape.
So the idea of "how it is" comes from comparing conflicting appearances, and explaining them not by comparing appearances with an actuality that is beyond appearances; which is impossible.
The depth signs round a swimming pool are warnings in that respect for those swimmers unaware of 'the apparent depth' issue.
In short, I am saying 'is-ness' is always related to human expectancies.
(Frogs 'expect food to be moving'. They starve when experimentally surrounded by what humans call 'dead flies'. For frogs there is no food source.)
[quote=Daniel Dennett]For these reasons the normal logic of relations cannot accommodate the presumed relation between an intentional state and its intentional object or objects, but it has also not proven comfortable for theorists to deny, on these grounds, that there are such things as intentional relations--to hold that mental states, for instance, are only apparently relational. This, then, is the unsolved problem of intentionality.
Faced with this problem, the Anglo-American tradition, characteristically, has tended to favor a tactical retreat, to a logical analysis of the language we use to talk about intentional states, events and other items. This move, from the direct analysis of the phenomena to the analysis of our ways of talking about the phenomena, has been aptly called "semantic ascent" by Quine, and its immediate advantages are twofold. First, we set aside epistemological and metaphysical distractions such as: "How can we ever know another person's mental state anyway?" and "Are mental states a variety of physical state, or are they somehow immaterial or spiritual?" The things people say about mental states are in any event out in the public world where we can get at them and study them directly. Second, switching to language puts at our disposal a number of sophisticated techniques and theories developed by philosophers, logicians, and linguists. Semantic ascent is not guaranteed to solve any problems, of course, but it may permit them to be reformulated in ways more accessible to ultimate solution.[/quote]
From here
The bolded passage seems to encapsulate the kind of approach modern analytical philosophy takes to many topics in philosophy, and certainly metaphysics. (I mean, metaphysics is kind of embarrassing to discuss in the context of analytic philosophy, as it seems to have religious undertones, and is generally opaque to scientific analysis.) But it's just this kind of attitude which gives rise to the 'language on holiday' kind of talk.
What about an entity with multiple senses like us? You only see one side of the coffe cup but can feel the other. Which sense is informing you how the coffee cup is? Or are you getting information about two different coffee cups - one you feel and the one you see?
Does your mind exist independently of some external view, or is the Cartesian theatre view what is necessary for your mind to exist?
If there are no independent things then categorizing the world would be a grave error and there would be no such things as category errors. If there is no independent thing of me, then I am the solipsist and you are not independent of me.
To say that there are no independent things is to say there are no distinctions, then why is my mind full of distinctions?
Does the mind make the world more complicated or less complicated? Is the world simpler than we think, or more complex than we could think?
Exactly. A mind-independent world makes sense of the variety of experiences we have, including having a body moving about in a world with many other things, people and animals in it. Also, it accords with science which doesn't put human beings at the center of everything.
We've only been around for a short while, and we only occupy a small space. The world is much bigger and older than us.
So what does it mean to say that I used a particular shape/color or sound in some way that I have learned? How does one use shapes and sounds (sensory impressions)?