Riddle of idealism
A thought: idealism, or the role of the mental in constructing (our?) reality, seems inevitable once you spend enough time philosophizing.
On the other hand, that mind is intrinsic and underlies everything, is exactly what creatures with minds would say. Especially after they spend a lot of time thinking.
"I am the center of the universe, and everything else moves around me." - how am I to disprove this to myself?
On the other hand, that mind is intrinsic and underlies everything, is exactly what creatures with minds would say. Especially after they spend a lot of time thinking.
"I am the center of the universe, and everything else moves around me." - how am I to disprove this to myself?
Comments (292)
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Really? I have spent a decent amount of time philosophizing and I have not been lead to idealism. Also many philosophers have spent whole careers philosophizing and have not been lead to idealism.
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I should also mention that this seems more like Solipsism, than Idealism.
Oh, hang on........
A great question for me. Thanks for asking. Speaking geometrically, only circles, spheres and probably higher dimensional equivalents have centers, that are points equidistant from all other points, the circle/ sphere constitutes (the circumference of circles and surface of spheres).
What I wish you to take away from the geometry of centers is the notion of equality as represented by equidistance from the center.
Physically speaking, nothing is the center of the universe for it's obvious that any object is closer to some other object than another: no equidistance, no center.
However, in an abstract sense, a center of the universe seems reasonable; focus on equality: there are many concepts that are such that all are equal in its eyes e.g. death, justice, love, god, etc. These concepts, for the reason that every object in the universe is "equidistant" (equal in value) from them, are perfect candidates to serve as the center of the universe.
Are you death or are you justice or are you love? If you are any of these then sure, you're the center of the universe. If not, no, you're not the center of the universe.
Incredible, Shirley? (I know you're a stickler.)
Exactly. Anyone understands that solipsism is the logical conclusion that one reaches after having philosophized enough (and to say that someone has philosophized enough is to say that logic was involved) about idealism.
Idealism is essentially claiming the existence of homunculi all the way down. My brain has one, each neuron has one, each cell, each atom in my body are all possesed by homunculi.
:roll: (seems the nearest emoticon for "unconvinced"... don't mean "roll")
Really weird. I wonder how a Preformationist would explain evolution.
I like this.
What I had in in mind - and of course this isn't systematic, which is why it's in the misc forum - is how idealistic philosophy seems to proceed. Berkely, for example, rummages around his mind looking for something that isn't mental, can't find anything, and declares that all is mental. Somebody else refutes him by not thinking or arguing at all, but just by kicking a rock. The process paints a picture of some guy disappearing into his own mind sitting in an armchair, until somebody beans him with a spitball and suddenly he's back to his body.
But perhaps things are different than they were in Berkeley's day. Or perhaps you and the good bishop are just two different guys.
Of course, many idealists are also more sophisticated than that. They rummage around their mental locker looking for something they can know that is not in their own minds, and find nothing. Accordingly.... you get the picture.
True. But notice this thread is in the misc forum. I want to explore a point here about the relationship between idealistic philosophies and "being inside your head." I'm sort of playing around, but also sort of not.
The case against idealism has never turned upon finding something that is not of the mind; it turns instead on showing how the mind is itself 'non-ideal', how the mind itself already belongs to an outside: the mind as an involution of the outside, a fold in a fabric. It is the nature of mind itself on which the fate of idealism hangs: as origin as or product? Thought itself is a secrection, already impersonal, socialized, involuntary, alien. Thought as a monument or index of what is not thought.
I also like this.
And it brings Kant to mind. What would he have said? He could perhaps acknowledge (at least the possibility) that the mind is a fold in the fabric of reality. What he could not have accepted was the mind as a product of phenomenal reality. Where do you stand there, if anywhere?
Personally, I think that it's worthwhile to bracket phenomenonal reality, even though I can't fall into the transcendental illusion of saying that I know what's on the noumenal "oustide" of things. But yes, you can bracket it somehow, and the possibility of this bracketing is one means of escape from idealism, for all that idealists love phenomenology.
I think that idealism survived so long partially because its proponents set an impossibly high bar for its falsification: find me something in your mind that is not mental. But, as you pointed out, that's not a good bar to set. It shouldn't work like that.
Well, yeah. Idealism is weird.
Quoting praxis
I dunno. Probably the same as an idealist would being that they believe that little minds exist in the cells and atoms of their bodies.
Quoting Pneumenon
Quoting Pneumenon
Exactly. So how does an idealist escape the logical conclusion idealism leads to - solipsism?
It's quite a jump from rummaging through the mental locker and declare that it's all mental to declaring what presently isn't in the mental locker still exists and is also mental. If it's not presently in the mental locker, how and where does the idea of your mom exist? Where does the idea come from when it comes to be present in the mental locker - someplace else that is mental? How would you know if your mother only exists as an idea when you think it?
I wonder if trees believe everything is bark.
Some people are accused of being crazy if other people find out they think that, so for expedient purposes we should either hide or attempt to reject that belief or thought path.
It's actually dogs who believe that their bark is everything.
This entire thesis rests on suppositions: (1) that there's such a thing as the mind/body problem, (2) that there's a subject apart from an object, that there's an "external world," etc. These show up over and over again.
But as I've pointed out elsewhere, the very notion of subject/object, "inner and outer worlds," mind and body, etc., already presume an understanding of what it is to be. They themselves operate in the context of an ontology. In the West, at least, that ontology is still very much Greek. Until we understand this point fully, we're operating in a blind alley.
(This is not to say these problems don't exist, or that they're "wrong," by the way.)
this is true, although, this forum isn't exactly teaming with critical thinkers, so most here will probably disagree. unfortunately, today, most who have degrees in philosophy are postmodernists or empiricists and thereby have about as much knowledge about ontology as the uneducated laymen. it's almost impossible to have a conversation with them because once you ask them to give support for their presuppositions, they no longer want to discuss the topic.
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I'm no postmodernist and certainly no empiricist, and yet I roundly reject idealism. There are several reasons why, but the most fundamental can be encapsulated in the following argument:
1: If idealism is true, then everything is an idea or a mind.
2: All ideas and minds are existing objects, according to idealism.
3: Therefore, if idealism is true, everything is an existent objects. (1,2)
4: But some objects do not exist.
5: Therefore, idealism is not true. (3,4)
You need to change this to "entity" as opposed to "object." According to idealism, not all objects are spatially extended objects; meaning that there are both spatially extended objects and objects that are not spatially extended.
According to idealism, there is one mind that contains all other minds as subsets within itself, they are not, mutually exclusive, as it were, and they are not independent or self-existent, but contingent.
According to idealism, objects are sensible concepts; and some objects do not exist, or rather, cannot exist, because contradictions can exist as concepts (i.e. objects of awareness), but they absolutely cannot become actualized as spatially extended objects. This is the reason for your misunderstanding.
Of course, there are many different versions of idealism, but there is only one correct version. I will be releasing the book on it soon. I have found a method that essentially makes philosophy into a science, and allows us to ascertain all the questions concerning metaphysics which have hitherto remained unanswered.
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An entity is just an existing object, so effecting this change would make no difference either way to the argument.
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What do you mean by spatially extended here? If it means extended in an independently subsisting spatial reality, then the object is not an idea, thus this would not be coherent with idealism. If you mean existing in the spatial faculty of the mind, then the object is indeed an idea, and thus an existing object (or an 'entity', if you prefer). Leading into your next point, viz.
This means that, because sensible concepts are entities (according to idealism), even if the sensible concept is not spatially extended, it still exists as a sensible concept,and thus it still exists. And since all objects are sensible concepts, as you claim, then all objects exist. But many objects do not exist. Therefore, we must reject the notion that all objects are sensible concepts.
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Can you let me know when that happens please? :smile:
You need to clarify your definition of "object" here. an existing object that is either spatial, or non-spatial; but we cannot equate them in terms of identity because they have different logical forms.
Quoting Alvin Capello
when i say that an object is spatially extended, I mean that it has volume, and when i say that an object is not spatially extended, I mean that it does not have volume. According to my understanding, volume is contingent upon perception; meaning that there is no independently existing spatial reality. However, the answer here is a little more complicated because space implies geometry and geometry implies space, or rather, the idea of space.
Quoting Alvin Capello
the sensible concept itself is not spatially extended, but through geometry and mathematics, it somehow appears to be. it's not the case that, if a concept exists in the absolute mind, that it must become actualized in space as a sensible concept relative to a perceiving subject. what keeps concepts in the mind of the absolute from being sensible concepts in relation to perceiving subjects is intentionality. This is a very important point in regards to your argument. All objects that exist, exist, but not all objects exist in the spatial sense; only those that are willed to exist in a spatial sense, exist. A good analogy here is action vs. thought. Do al thoughts have to become actions in the world? No. Just the same, not all concepts must become sensible concepts.
I will post the news here when it comes out. I've been working for about 2 years on it, and it should be about another year until I finish it.
Kant is interesting because because although we can only know the world through our representations of it, Kant, in all his rigour, says that the same applies to the self: self-knowledge is not exempt from representation and the self has no special status in this regard: "I, as intelligence and a thinking subject, know myself as an object that is thought, insofar as I am given to myself … like other phenomena, only as I appear to myself … I therefore have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself." Elsewhere: "Of this I or he or it (the thing) which thinks, nothing further is represented than a transcendental subject of the thoughts = X … This I or He or It … is known only through the thoughts that are its predicates, and of it, apart from them, we cannot have any concept whatsoever".
This is the basis of what alot of commentators have referred to as the Kantian 'split subject': a subject at once both an object like any other and that which is a condition of any knowledge whatsoever. In the words of Markus Gabriel: "We have no grasp of that which constitutes our world even though it is we who perform said constitution. The uncanny stranger begins to pervade the sphere of the subject, threatening its identity from within. Kant is thus one of the first to become aware of the intimidating possibility of total semantic schizophrenia inherent in the anonymous transcendental subjectivity as such". The possibility of madness is one of the marks of the real in the subject - in thought - and not merely 'beyond it'. Kant himself vacillates on this point and it causes all sorts of issues, but there's definitely a way to read Kant as opening the issue of 'subject as object' in a way that's worth pursuing.
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It's rather hard to define in terms of other things, because objects are the absolute baseline of my philosophy. But if I have to give it a shot, I would say that an object is anything that can possess properties and stand in relations. Some objects, like horses, exist; while other objects, like unicorns, do not. Make no mistake though, unicorns still have four legs, fur, manes, etc. in exactly the same way that horses do; they just don't exist.
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I'm willing to grant on your own terms that concepts can exist in the absolute mind without becoming actualized in space. But if a concept (or object, as you mentioned earlier) exists in the absolute mind, then surely it exists. I'm claiming that many objects do not exist at all, in any sense of the term. Idealism does not allow for this; hence it must be rejected.
you need to define the object in terms of the subject, and this is because the properties of the object, without question, are contingent upon the brain. You must also understand that unicorns exist as images inside the mind, but do not exist in the world, so you cannot say that they absolutely do not exist, but exist as objects of imagination only. They thus have existence in some sense.
Quoting Alvin Capello
you're straw-manning a particular form of idealism here, and you're not acknowledging the fact that ideas exist as objects of memory.
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I do not define the object in terms of the subject, for the properties of the unicorn are not dependent upon the brain. Unicorns would still be horned horses, even if no humans had ever existed. And to say that unicorns exist as images in the mind is to make a common mistake. Surely ideas of unicorns exist in the mind, but unicorns themselves do not. A unicorn and the idea of a unicorn are two very different things, so conflating them is a mistake (indeed, I think this is one of the central errors of idealism). What I want to claim is that unicorns do not exist anywhere, and thus don't have existence in any sense.
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I accept this point, but a nonexistent object and the idea of a nonexistent object are very different things. The idea of a nonexistent object exists in the mind, but the nonexistent object that it is an idea of does not.
You're presupposing that the subject, in its entirety, is contingent upon the brain. In idealism, it isn't. In materialism, it is (this is called reductionism).
Quoting Alvin Capello
but according to idealism, the unicorn then, which is product of imagination, is thus a product of mind, albeit, a mind existing prior to the human mind.
Quoting Alvin Capello
Be careful. Quoting Alvin Capello
This is an assumption. You cannot say that unicorns do not have the potential to exist in the actualized sense. Maybe they existed before, exist now on some planet somewhere, or will exist in the future somewhere.
Quoting Alvin Capello
not exactly; not in terms of idealism. It's like saying that the computer code for the existence of a unicorn in a video game is "very different" from the unicorn in the game relative to the perspective of one of the characters.
Quoting Alvin Capello
again, this is a presupposition. In philosophy, we don't do presuppositions. Those are for theologians.
Quoting Alvin Capello
what do you mean by "very different." you don't have a point until you can represent this concept using sets. If they have the same logical form, how can they be "very different?" they only appear to be very different. There's no contradiction here. The idea of a nonexistent (i.e. non-actualized) object exists in mind, but you cannot prove that this object is not actualized somewhere else, and an idea came from another mind on another planet who perceived it, through a collective unconsicous, and into a human mind. This a huge flaw in your argument. you would first have to prove that this is not possible as opposed to take it as a presupposition.
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I'm not presupposing anything, I'm only responding to the point you made earlier, to wit:
I myself don't reduce the mind to the brain.
Most of your other remarks seem to involve it being possible that we might discover unicorns one day in reality. This is surely true, but the obvious thing to do here is to replace 'unicorn' with something we know a priori does not exist in reality. For instance, the round square that is not identical with itself, or the blind, non self-identical seeing-eye dog that doesn't exist in the actual world. The very descriptions of these 2 objects insure from the get go that they do not exist in actuality.
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A nonexistent object and the concept of a nonexistent object do not have the same logical forms; for in order to assess the structures of a golden mountain and the concept of a golden mountain, for instance, we would need to use different axioms.
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Well if the nonexistent objects under question are of the same sort as the 2 I mentioned earlier, viz. the round square that is not identical with itself, or the blind, non self-identical seeing-eye dog that doesn't exist in the actual world, then I can prove that these objects do not exist at all. This is because both of these objects violate the Law of Identity, and thus they cannot possibly exist in reality (even though the concepts of them exist in the mind).
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I would make exactly this claim. The unicorn in the video game and the computer code for the unicorn have very different properties, so they are very different
To immediately disregard the possibility that an opponent might come up with a successful argument is the height of dogmatism, and it is anti-philosophical.
I should also mention that i am absolutely not a materialist in any sense. Indeed, my argument can be tweaked to attack materialism too.
I’m not claiming that the mystical experience doesn’t exist, but if you claim that it overrides any arguments, then you are no longer doing philosophy.
Wait, you are writing the next Critique of Pure Reason and you don't even believe the world is real? Are you saying there is a greater reality in comparison to which this one we live in doesn t exist? Is this God or a Form?
You become one with absolute being, then you earn the title of "philosopher." until then, you are merely fumbling around the outskirts of knowledge because the existence of the absolute is still a presupposition for you and not a direct experience.
Quoting Gregory
Yes. According to my philosophy, the world is not not "real," but existing, as it appears, in relation to sense perception only. It is thus "illusory," as opposed to "real." Only a fool would understand that objects are composed of more than 99.99% empty space and still think that the world is "real."
There is a higher reality, yes, and it is much, much different than this one. Trying to explain it is pointless. It is like trying to teach the blind about sight. The only eternal form is the unchanging structure of God in Himself.
Boo! God clearly doesn't exist. Haven't you seen a Christmas tree? People say they didn't feel like a person till their teens. I felt like a full person with free will and reason at age 3. The only thing towards which this world doesnt exist Is Pure nothingness
this is an opinion. I don't see supporting arguments either. don't forget, opinions are like assholes, everyone's got one and they all stink.
Quoting Gregory
this is nonsensical and irrelevant.
Quoting Gregory
sounds like a belief.
Quoting Gregory
yep. me too.
Quoting Gregory
this is worded very poorly, and contradicts your belief in our prior conversation, in which, you claimed, without reason, that nothingness is prior to being, or rather, that being can come from nothingness. Then I said, if nothingness possesses within itself the potential to become something, that it cannot be nothing. Are you saying that you've changed your mind?
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Not at all. Philosophy is not a secret cult that you need to become initiated into. It is for everyone. Anyone who loves wisdom, and who is willing to critically analyze their own presuppositions and to rationally argue for their beliefs is a philosopher.
Yes. they both possess the ability to think.
the unenlightened philosopher is to the enlightened philosopher as the child is the educated adult. a child is a human, just the same as the adult, yes, and the unenlightened philosopher can think, just the same as the enlightened philosopher; but still, they are "very different," to borrow your terminology from earlier. One is on the earth staring at the ground, the other is in outer space, flying amongst the stars.
Quoting Gregory
are you sure that their is a foundation for the blank canvas? This might be a bad analogy...
Quoting Gregory
sounds like a presupposition.
Quoting Gregory
Do you have proof that nothing can contain something within itself. or are nothing and something mutually exclusive? how do they relate?
Quoting Gregory
this is incoherent. I remember you saying this last time we talked.
You are thinking about nothing in a mathematical sense. You're being far to Kantian. The stars are limited
It would seem to me that we have direct access to the "representation" itself, which is a real thing that has causal power. The "representation" would be an effect of prior causes. So, in effect, we have direct access to one effect of reality - our own mind - and we determine what the world is like by determining the causes of the effect. We can only get at the world through the effect of the mind. The mind is a real thing with causal power.
What is the "representation" made of relative to what is being represented? If the "representation" is such that it isn't related at least in it's ontological substance to what is being represented, can we really say that it is a representation of something else? How would it be a representation if there isn't some aspect that is similar between what is being represented and the representation? Doesn't there need to be some kind of causal relationship to say that something is a representation of something else?
Having access to a real thing that isn't just a representation but is also the cause of other "representations" - like your behavior and the words that you write or say - is having access to the part of the world itself. It is the basis upon which idealism is founded. Idealists believe, and I would agree with them on this point, is that the mind is real and is part of the world because it has a causal relationship with the world, being both an effect and a cause itself. If the mind can establish causal relationships with the rest of the world, then a good monist would declare that everything is mental.
For me, "mental" is an anthropomorphic, and therefore an inappropriate, term. I prefer the term, "information". Everything is information. How is declaring that everything is information different than declaring everything is mind? It seems to me that mind includes a central executive, or an information processor, that performs value-judgments with sensory data - determining what is important at that moment. Another name would be, "attention" - amplifying certain signals that are deemed meaningful to some goal present in the mind. Information is just information - without any values being integrated.
It seems to me that unicorns do exist. They exist as ideas, not as organisms. Ideas have just as much causal power as an organism. The idea (or more precisely, the imagining) of a unicorn can cause you to talk about, write about, draw a picture of it, - leave a "physical" mark on the world. How does a "mental" idea cause "physical" effects, if both the idea and the paper and ink are of completely different substances?
To say that something exists means that it has causal power. To say that it doesn't exist means that it doesn't have causal power.
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A unicorn and the idea of a unicorn are radically different kinds of objects. For one thing, a unicorn is a horned horse, while the idea of a unicorn is not a horned horse (rather, it represents a horned horse). So too, the idea of a unicorn exists in the mind, while a unicorn itself does not.
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I understand this view, but I don't accept it. The reason why is because many nonexistent objects have causal powers. For instance, Frodo Baggins caused the One Ring to be destroyed by casting it into the fires of Mount Doom, but Frodo doesn't exist.
On my view, to say that something exists is just to say that it has the property of existence; while to say that it doesn't exist is just to say that it lacks the property of existence. This might sound somewhat uninformative, but in my view existence is a simple property, and thus cannot be analyzed into something more basic.
It's not that there is high standard of falsification, but that falsification is impossible. People aren't squabbling over what appears in phenomena or not. Experience always appears consistent with both. Kicking a rock does not show idealism false because one is clearly experiencing it. Just another construction of experience.
Realism and idealism is a metaphysical distinction of things. When the realist says there is a rock I'm kicking, they are not saying a pheneonma is manifest in my experience. Instead, they are identifying the rock is not me. The rock is not me or my experience (of the rock).
Kantian analysis of the transcendental illusion only redoubles the idealist illusion. He traps our account only in the context of phenomenal experience. Our experiences are just of things which are in our experiences. Or So the story goes. Perfectly compatible with the idealist, for whom there are only the things in experience.
Kant didn't push through to recognise the transcendental illusion has a different genesis. Not a failure to recognise phenomenal reality or a worship of empty noumena phenonemal cause, but rather the error of failing to recognise transcendental reality. The mistake was just confusing on transcendental feature with another, such as the thing/causality/phenomena with God.
Frequently, we know about things which have no appearance in experience. In fact, this is everything, including all pheneonma. Each pheneonma is something outside experience, an existing thing which is not any experience if it. This is the metaphysical distintion of realism: the things I experience are not my experience.
As a distinction of difference/identity/defintion, there is no empirical observation or analysis which addresses the question.
Good observation.
Kant is creating problems with his solutions, not solving problems with his creations.
Properly stated, as a realist, it would be a claim one's imagination was in one's mind. In other words, just a recognition one's imagining are states of their experience.
The realist postion is things which do appear in our minds are not our minds. If we cannot imagine anything outside our minds, there is no consequence of rendering everything mental.
I suggest replacing 'mental' with 'social.' If we are talking about reality, than our talk is indeed presupposed in our talking about reality. Yet we can talk about what happened before we were able to talk (before our species was here.)
This is something like a knot, glitch, or riddle. I don't think this glitch has been fixed or the knot untied. But it ends up being mostly ignored, because we are primarily practical animals. The malfunctions or ambiguities in our talk 'must' be ignored, since we prioritize effective speech, etc.
You said that they are "radically different". I would agree, but probably not in the way that you meant. They are radically different because one exists and the other doesn't.
A horned horse also doesn't "exist", so "horned horse" is just another idea. So, your idea, "unicorn" would represent another idea, "horned horse". So you only end up representing other ideas in the case where the idea wasn't caused by an actual observation of that organism, like dogs and cats. Your idea "dog" is caused by your mental categorization of your observations of similar organisms. Being taught the word, "dog" to represent that mental category is something else, or a separate process. We don't need words to categorize the world. We need words to communicate our mental categories (ideas).
What caused the idea of "unicorn" to exist in your mind? Probably someone else communicating that idea to you. How did "unicorn" come to exist in the first mind that imagined it if there are no unicorn organisms for them to observe? How does any imagining in our mind come to exist? Imaginings are an amalgam of existing mental categories. Unicorns are an amalgam of horse and horn. You can only assemble an amalgam of mental categories that you already have, or already experienced. Your picture of a unicorn would be a representation of the original unicorn - the one you imagined.
Quoting Alvin Capello
Now you're confusing the idea of causation with the process of causation. You seem to have understood the difference between an organism and the idea of an organism, but here you regressed into confusing the process of causation with the idea of causation (Frodo causing the One Ring to be destroyed).
Quoting Alvin Capello
It's not just uninformative. It's circular. If this is how you define, "existence" then I don't understand your use of "existence" any better than when you first used the word.
That would be the naive realist position. For the indirect realist, the things that appear in our minds are about things that are not in our minds.
How is the idea of your best friend different or separate from your best friend? How is it similar? If you are saying that they are one and the same, then you are arguing for solipsism/naive realism. If you are arguing that they are different yet similar, and their differences are spatial-temporal and similarities being the causal relationship, then you are arguing for some kind of indirect realism.
Our minds are not cut off from the world. They are causally related. We use the world (air to speak, ink and paper to write) to communicate with each other - through the process of cause and effect. Effects are not their causes, but they are about their causes, so we can be safe in knowing that the things in our mind can be about the things in the world thanks to causation.
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When I said that a unicorn is a horned horse, I did not at all mean that it represents the idea of a horned horse. Rather, I meant that a unicorn is a physical horse with a physical horn (even though it’s nonexistent). A unicorn is a horse in exactly the same way in which existent horses are; and it has a horn in exactly the same way in which existing horned animals do.
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What caused the idea of unicorn to come into the mind of the first person who imagined it might have been a number of things. Perhaps it was an initial baptism they performed upon a characterization; that characterization being the set of properties {horse, has a horn}. Or maybe that person saw a unicorn in a dream or hallucination (I think we can perceive nonexistent objects) and performed the initial baptism that way. In either case, the idea has now reached me through a causal chain. This is basically Saul Kripke’s view on naming and reference. I am not an empiricist either, so I don’t think it is strictly necessary for someone to have already experienced the properties contained in a characterization, even though it is frequently the case that we do.
You are actually misunderstanding me here. When I said that Frodo caused the One Ring to be destroyed, I was referring to the process of causation. A physical Frodo dropped a physical ring into a physical fire, even though none of these exist.
It’s not circular; I just define existence as a property that some objects have and other objects lack. Magnanimity is also a property that some objects have and others lack; would you say that this too is circular?
If assuming idealism, by not assuming a solipsistic idealism. All other beings are just as much at their own center of the universe as you yourself are (thereby nullifying you being the absolute center). I’ve, for example, read Aikido philosophy to articulate things in just this manner.
It’s somewhat like saying that, because our planet is spherical, all inhabitants of Earth are always on top of the world in more or less equal fashion – so that no one person or populace is more on top of the world than any other. It to me also meshes well enough with modern cosmology’s stance that the physical universe has no - dare I say, objective - center.
Embellishing this with some imperfect thought:
We all interact with that which is impartially applicable to all sentient beings, and hence in this sense with that which is independent of us – which in common understanding is termed the physical or, alternatively, nature. Given a non-solipsistic idealism, that which is commonly termed physical will itself be contingent on the coexistence of minds (in the plural, since it's not solipsism). Via analogy, this could be in some ways comparable to the following understanding of geometric space:
The existence of geometric space is contingent on the coexistence of multiple, otherwise volume-less (hence space-less) geometric points. Hence, the very plurality of points is what the given manifestation of geometric space is dependent on, with no individual geometric point in any way being the cause to the space all share. If there is only one point in the whole of existence, then, because the one point is volumeless, there will be no space. Then, given a plurality of geometric points, the space that is thereby inter-dependently manifested by all coexistent points will itself be independent of the properties of any particular geometric point – including its location or whether the particular geometric point ceases to be. Further embellishing this analogy, one can imagine that each geometric point is itself at its own center of three-dimensional space – such that what is up or down, front or back, and left or right will be relative to each geometric point. Again, each geometric point is at the center of space in total – a space inter-dependently caused by the coexistence of multiple points standing in relation but not caused by any individual point - such that up or down, front or back, and left or right as three spatial planes hold their existence by virtue of being impartially shared among all spatially related points. Here, there is no absolute center to the three-dimensional space which the plurality of geometric points brings about; nor is there any absolute up or down, front or back, and left or right to the three-dimensional space which the geometric points inhabit.
If this analogy doesn’t make any sense, so be it. But to the extent that it might, in the aforementioned analogy each individual sentient being is represented by a geometric point, and the universe by three-dimensional space.
Not here to argue for idealism, just wanted to address the OP with a, I grant, somewhat whimsical way of thinking about the paradox of each sentient being dwelling in its own center of an otherwise centerless universe – and this within a framework of idealism.
Quoting Valentinus
:up:
Quoting StreetlightX
:clap:
Quoting StreetlightX
:wink: i.e. suffering ...
Quoting jjAmEs
E.g. à la Witty's "private language argument", etc.
Indeed, that's what I had in mind. Also Derrida's related take:
[quote= Derrida]
Could we maintain that, following the death of the receiver, or even of both partners, the mark left by one of them is still writing? Yes, to the extent that, organized by a code, even an unknown and nonlinguistic one, it is constituted in its identity as mark by its iterability, in the absence of such and such a person, and hence ultimately of every empirically determined "subject." This implies that there is no such thing as a code-organon of iterability-which could be structurally secret. The possibility of repeating and thus of identifying the marks is implicit in every code, making it into a network [une grille] that is communicable, transmittable, decipherable, iterable for a third, and hence for every possible user in general. To be what it is, all writing must, therefore, be capable of functioning in the radical absence of every empirically determined receiver in general.
[/quote]
http://lab404.com/misc/ltdinc.pdf
What all the 'private spiritual substance' perspectives tend to ignore is the radical dependence of this 'foundational' subject on convention or the social. Dreyfus might call it the 'who of everyday dasein.' But Saussure was on to it before that. Feuerbach wrote his dissertation on it (or something close.) And so on.
Others have made excellent points already. The main idea is that thought is external-social-alien and not internal-private-familiar. Or (at least) that thought or mind is more like the first and less like the second than we tend to suppose. Wittgenstein's beetle is a powerful indicator of this, but the idea goes back further. In Feuerbach it's already emphasized, albeit in a jargon appropriate to the spirit of the time.
[quote = link]
This criticism, he argued, presupposes a conception of reason as a cognitive faculty of the individual thinking subject that is employed as an instrument for apprehending truths. He aimed to show that this view of the nature of reason is mistaken, that reason is one and the same in all thinking subjects, that it is universal and infinite, and that thinking (Denken) is not an activity performed by the individual, but rather by “the species” acting through the individual. “In thinking”, Feuerbach wrote, “I am bound together with, or rather, I am one with—indeed, I myself am—all human beings” (GW I:18).
[/quote]
Along with this is the idea that the notion of self doesn't make sense without the notion of others in a shared world. It's all of a piece, the entire system of distinctions. This system makes all questioning possible in the first place. Don't questions and answers presuppose a reality shared with others that make them meaningful?
Huh? I take Wittgenstein's "beetle" as an indication of the exact opposite to what you say. The only thing external, social, is the word "beetle". The important thing, what matters, is what's in the box, and this is internal, private.
Actually, MU, words are just visual scribbles and sounds. The hearing or seeing the word, "beetle" would be just as "internal" as any other experience of some visual or sound. If we all have different "beetles", then how we hear and see any word would be different for each of us as well. How would we be able to communicate if we actually do have different beetles in each of our boxes? It must be that we all have similar beetles if we are able to communicate.
Our inner sensations are themselves a langage informing us of the state of our bodies relative to the state of the world. We only need a public language to communicate to others our inner sensations. We translate our private sensations to a particular sound or scribble, which are themselves seen or heard internally.
It seems to me that we all have the same beetle in our boxes if we understand when someone is using language and when they aren't. When a sound that we hear is language use as opposed to a glass breaking, waves crashing, the wind blowing, etc., how do we make the distinction if we needed a public language to make that distinction first? If language can only be public, then how does one come to make the distinction between sounds that are language-use and sounds that aren't if we'd need a public language to make that distinction? We would all need to understand prior to learning a public language that languages are different than other sounds. In this sense we all have the same beetle in our boxes.
Let me remind you that similar does not mean the same, it means different with similarities. So even if we have similar things under the title "beetle", they are not the same, and contrary to your claim, they actually are different.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Above you said "similar". Now you say "the same". Which do you really believe? Clearly, under the terms of Wittgenstein's example, the thing in my box is not the same thing which is in your box.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x86hLtOkou8
To me that's a radical misreading. The sign functions independently of what's in the box. That word 'beetle' is one fragment of a massive system of conventions that are as much about non-speech actions as speech actions. Since, by assumption, the private inside is inaccessible, it 'obviously' can play no role in grounding a 'meaning' that must be public and external to be a code, a language that one can learn and participate in.
I think we can be more radical and forget the beetle. Even if we have a strong intuitive sense of 'the same beetle,' all that reality matters is the synchronization of practical activities. IMV, we don't even ever know exactly what we mean by the strings of marks and noises that we have been trained to employ. Of course we have some fuzzy experience of 'meaning,' but we are primarily coordinating social activity with such signs --and we only have to do that well enough to survive and reproduce. Metaphorically we are cyborgs. Linguistic conventions make us fully human, yet they belong to no individual. And they more external than internal, it seems, despite our useful notion of the soul or psyche.
[quote=James]
A social organism of any sort whatever, large or small, is what it is because each member proceeds to his own duty with a trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs. Wherever a desired result is achieved by the co-operation of many independent persons, its existence as a fact is a pure consequence of the precursive faith in one another of those immediately concerned. A government, an army, a commercial system, a ship, a college, an athletic team, all exist on this condition, without which not only is nothing achieved, but nothing is even attempted.
[/quote]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatism
We can narrow this insight to just language. How much trust is built in to our asking of a question? We assume (not explicitly) that we are potentially overheard. The intelligibility of our discourse is radically taken for granted. It is automatic and not usually left to the conscious mind. It is like breathing. It is our form of life, or pre-theoretical and even deeply tacit understanding of being and the world. It is what we have already 'recklessly' assumed in our supposedly radically skeptical questioning.
No it doesn't, obviously, because then the sign wouldn't refer to anything. If we're telling everyone that there is something in the box named "beetle", and we really don't have anything in the box, then language is just a huge deception. In order that it's not deception there must be something in the box, and the sign refers to that thing. Therefore the sign does not function independently of what's in the box unless you characterize language as deception.
The parable shows what's wrong with the common-sense paradigm. Wittgenstein is trying to show the fly the way out of the bottle. Basically the internal meaning versus external vehicle paradigm is useful for certain purposes but problematic when taken as absolute / foundational.
Perhaps the basic 'sin' of metaphysics is mistaking a useful but imperfect piece of social software as a magic foundation on which everything else can be supported. Instead the foundation is a swamp, an entire form of life that is ground by no particular piece of that form of life.
You might find Derrida's treatment of Saussure fascinating on this issue. The concept of the sign itself breaks down upon close examination. It's one more potent but perishable tool that works well enough but won't function as some perfect center or foundation.
Also, here's W:
[quote=Wittgenstein]
If I say of myself that it is only from my own case that I know what the word "pain" means - must I not say the same of other people too? And how can I generalize the one case so irresponsibly?
Now someone tells me that he knows what pain is only from his own case! --Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a "beetle". No one can look into anyone else's box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. --Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. --But suppose the word "beetle" had a use in these people's language? --If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty. --No, one can 'divide through' by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.
[/quote]
This suggests that your interpretation of W is a bad reading. Of course we have uses for words that refer to some interior. But it all falls apart on close examination. It's already there, the whole collapse, in positing some distinct interior that is radically other. This interior could not interact with the complementary exterior. Dualism as a first approximation is not ridiculous, but taking a serviceable but rough and imperfect distinction as absolute just doesn't work. The fantasy of a divine geometry (constructing existence from a system of words deductively) is only that, a fantasy. And it scratches a religious itch. Self-caused. Self-justified. Self-known. Etc. A continuation of monotheism in another register.
I don't know why some posters are under the impression that idealism is completely bogus because the very idea that it is is a mind-state. Plus, we all know that at any given moment we're more mental creatures than physical. Think of it; we can imagine ourselves as disembodied minds but I have never met someone say that fae thinks faerself as a body without a mind i.e. if materialism is true, the idea of a zombie doesn't make sense.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Your explanation of "similar" is circular.
Similar: resembling without being identical.
The way our beetles are different is that they are in different spatial-temporal locations. Your beetle is not my beetle and they are separate. However we are looking at the exact same beetle - the color black, the shape of the letter W, the sound of the letter W, are all the same for each of us, or else how would we be able to communicate? If I said, "beetle" and you hear, "bottle", then how are we going to ever be able to communicate our beetles?
Even if you experience purple when I experience blue, we both experience those colors consistently when there is a particular wavelength of light interacting with our eyes. Because the experience (the effect) is consistent with the cause, we would both never know what that our inner experience is different, but we would both be talking about the same thing - that particular wavelength of light, just as if we spoke different languages, we use different symbols to refer to the same thing. Our inner language of sensory data (colors, sounds, texture, etc,) make speak to use differently, but we translate our inner language to a public one in order to communicate with each other. If we didn't have similar beetles, we would never understand what we are talking about.
Considering W was a bad writer, it's no surprise there are bad readings of his writings.
It seems to me that if we all have different beetles in our box, then how do we communicate, how do we even begin to consider what is in W's box? He seems to say that we don't have the same beetle and could never understand each other's beetle, let alone explaining the causes that lead us to have different beetles rather than similar beetles considering that we are all members of the same species with similar sensory organs, yet goes about explaining his beetle as if everyone else can understand his beetle. Is W saying that he got his ideas from someone else? Where did his ideas come from?
Natural selection would be the explanation as to how we all have the same beetles in our box. Natural selections "selected" the beetles (colors, sounds, etc,) that the brain uses to interpret the world. So what would cause us to become separated? There needs to be a causal explanation as to why we would all have different beetles.
But you are the center of your universe. You cannot define "I" as extrinsic to "your" mind. It is tautologically true.
I think we probably do see the same colors, etc., for reasons you've mentioned. But I think it misses the point of Wittgenstein in the passage quoted. Language can't depend on what is radically private. The most obvious thing to consider is how our actions are synchronized.
To work what is radically private by assumption into causal explanations seems like a bad way to go. It's inaccessible and uncheckable by definition. Whatever it is, it can't play an important role.
Sorry Harry, but there is a law of identity for a reason. The fact that your beetle is not my beetle, and that they are separate, is sufficient to prove that they are not the exact same beetle. Your claim that they are is utter nonsense.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Clearly these things are not the same, yet we are able to communicate. Therefore communication is not prerequisite on them being the same.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Colour does not consist of "a particular wavelength of light", it's far more complex than that, so we can't even start on this analogy.
Quoting Harry Hindu
As I said, "similar" does not mean "the same", it means different. Your post is just a big contradiction. You start out by saying that our beetles must be "the same" in order for their to be communication, and you end up by saying that they must be similar (different) in order for there to be communication. Which do you really believe is the case, must they be the same, or different?
If you're agreeing that we all experience the same colors, then I don't understand why you disagree with me about a "private" language. If we all experience the same colors, then it seems to me that we all share the same language of the mind. It seems that we are all informed of the state of the world in the same way. Being informed is part of what communication is, and we are all informed the same way.
How does one even come to understand language-use without first understanding the concept of communication? It seems to me that you need to be able to understand communication for you to understand when some sound you hear is someone is communicating with you as opposed to a glass breaking, a wave crashing or the wind blowing. You'd have to understand communication for you to be able to make the distinction between language-use and other sounds. How do you do that if you need language to synchronize our actions - distinguishing between different sounds prior to learning a language. How can you learn a language if you don't already understand the concept of communication, or aboutness prior to learning a language?
In order to learn a language, you have to already understand the concept of object permanence, (ie realism) - that there are things in the world that are outside of your experience and that language can be about those things. Language about things that are already in your experience is redundant information. Seeing that it is raining and being told it is raining is redundant because the sound, "It is raining" is about it raining, just as seeing it raining is about it raining. "It" means "the state-of-affairs". If a public language was only about synchronizing actions, then how can language-use be redundant to observing the state-of-affairs the language-use is about?
The only time it wouldn't be redundant is if one person is trying to teach the symbols to use when it is raining to inform others that are not privy to the same information. We seem to understand that using language to report what is already seen is redundant. And you'd need to be able to make the distinction, prior to learning any language, between the sound of rain falling and the sound of someone speaking, and to make the connection that the sound of someone speaking is about the sound of the rain falling, not trying to synchronize actions other than how some state-of-affairs is represented and reported to others that are not privy to that information, like telling a friend on the phone in another city that it is raining in your city. If your friend already knew it was raining, what would be the purpose in telling them? The synchronization of our actions (knowing that it is raining; knowing is an action) happened independent of language use. It seems to me that one has to privately make the distinction between the sounds of language-use and other sounds in order to understand when language is being used as opposed to some other sound.
When you injure your leg and you experience pain, is the pain about the injury? Is the pain caused by the injury? If there is no causal relationship then why does the doctor try to remove your experience of pain by attending to your leg?
What does "private" vs "public" language even mean when we are share the same world and are participants in the causal relationships that make up the world. Language-use is a causal sequence. Effects are about their causes. Hearing someone speak (the effect) is about the contents of the speaker's mind. The sound you experience isn't the speakers mind, it is about it. So, what is "private" is the cause. We can only get at the cause through it's subsequent effects. Effects are not their causes, hence the "private" vs. "public" distinction. We can only experience the private, or the effect, but it is public in that it is connected causally with the rest of the world, hence effects are about their causes, or the private experience is about the public, shared world.
As I said, they are the same independent of the difference of being in different spatial-temporal locations. You see the word, "Wittgenstein" the same as I do, just from a different location in space. We are looking at the same thing - the word on the screen. Our experiences are about the same thing. If not then we're not talking about the same thing when we talk.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I didn't say that color consists of a particular wavelength of light. I said that we both experience the same color when the same wavelength of light interacts with our eyes. Colors are properties of minds. Wavelengths are properties of EM energy. The former is about the latter.
Why do philosophers seem to shun this notion of "aboutness". Our minds have this defining property of being about the world, while at the same time being part of the world. It seems to me that minds inherently understand aboutness - that sounds are about what is making the sound, not the thing itself - that pee and poo is about the health of another organism, that the sound of grass and brush rustling is about something moving in the brush, etc. So it seems to me that the "private" language is really a shared language of the world communicating with minds about it's state-of-affairs. It even informs you when someone is using language as opposed to not. How can you learn a language if you don't already understand the concept of communication, or aboutness prior to learning a language? The type of brain and sensory organs one has seems to be the difference in the complexity of this "private" language.
I don't see how you make this conclusion. What I said is supported. We each have something different in our boxes which we call a "beetle". The "language-game" might be entirely external, as Wittgenstein implies, but this does not indicate that it's not the case that what's important is what's in the box. What's external is just a game, what's internal is what's important.
Quoting Harry Hindu
In other words they are not the same, they are different. Shall we proceed with the true premise, that they are not the same, they are different?
Quoting Harry Hindu
We might be seeing the same thing, but each of our respective experiencing of that is different. And that's what we're talking about, what's inside each of our minds, and that is different. My experiences involved with that word are different from yours.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I don't agree with this. I disagree with people about the colour of things quite frequently. Sometimes I see as a green what others see as a blue, or I see as a purple what others see as a pink, etc.. We clearly do not see the same colour when the same wavelengths interact with our eyes. What colour it is, is a judgement made, based on training and habit, which varies from one to the other.
Quoting Harry Hindu
This, I can't see as relevant to what we're talking about. But I really don't understand any point being made here, if there is a point being made here, so maybe that's why. We were talking about whether what's in my mind is the same as what's in your mind. And I really don't see how they could be the same or else I would know what you are thinking.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It is critically relevant to what we are talking about, MU. Think about about it. When someone experiences a particular color and they use a word to refer to that color, the color you're experiencing (whether it is different or not) will be associated with that word. That is the word you'd use for that color experience. How would you ever know that what you see is different than what someone else is if you are both using the same word to refer to a particular color experience? So you could never actually know that when someone sees blue, you see green, because that is the word you learned to associate with that color experience. You would know what beetle is another's box if you know that your beetle is different. In other words, the beetle is no longer private.
If you claim to have different color experience, how do you know that you don't have different auditory experiences? How do you know you don't hear a different sound when hearing people speak? Wouldn't you make the wrong sounds if you heard the wrong sounds when someone spoke? Speaking requires control over your lips and tongue and emulating the movements of other's mouths when learning how to say a word, so your visual experience of their mouth and the auditory experience of the sound would be different than what they hear themselves say. How would you learn to communicate and make the right sounds if you didn't have an accurate experience of someone else speaking? It must be that we do experience the world similarly so that we all make the same sounds with our mouths, or scribbles on a screen, when speaking or writing.
We know that they are different, by what I said above. You are not in my mind experiencing what I see, and I am not in your mind experiencing what you see. So, by that principle, which is called the law of identity, I know that what you see is not the same, and therefore, is different from what I see.
It's quite simple really, if we adhere to fundamental principles like the law of identity.
Quoting Harry Hindu
To the contrary, we know that they are different. by the same fundamental principle.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Communicating doesn't consist of making "the right sounds", it consists of understanding. The fact is that in every different situation there are many different words, or sounds, which could be used for the specific purpose, so there is no such thing as "the right sound".
Don't get me wrong, I'm not ruling out similarity, as playing an essential role. I am just trying to induce the proper distinction between "similar" which implies different, from "same" which implies not different. In this way we won't be inclined to say that similar things are the same, and we'll have some rigorous logical principles to approach the issue..
To me this is a default view that some of the more recent philosophers have successfully challenged. Our so-called 'rigorous logical principles' are perhaps reducible to making the right sounds and simply conforming to norms that are mostly tacit.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The quote is explicit about what's in the box cancelling out. But W's view is of course less important than the issue itself. Perhaps most of us would grant that the beetle is what's important. But upon close examination the whole idea of the inside opposed to an outside comes apart.
--We never know exactly what we mean.
--What exactly do you mean when you say we never know exactly what we mean?
--I'll never know, but I can come up with more phrases for the same vague insight.
We can never know if we see the same colors. It's intuitively plausible, and an argument can be made for it, but it's unnecessary. Generations come and go without knowing whether they use 'green' to refer to the same quale. Or whether anyone ever has the same signified for 'toothache.'
Quoting Harry Hindu
Quoting Harry Hindu
I see what you mean, but I just approach it differently. Instead of dwelling on the understanding of an individual subject (which is inaccessible by definition), I think it's better to focus on individuals being trained into a form of life. By the time we can reason about such things, we are already deeply enmeshed in a world shared with others. We 'understand' some language as a whole. We know our way around a certain way of life. We say and do the right things within the social order. To be sure we have something we call private experience.
But (and I think we agree) speech is directed at a shared world. You like the language of causality for this. I like to think of a shared software that makes the reasoning individual possible. We know that we have separate brains, so we can worry about reducing this 'virtuality software' to the scientific image. At the same time the scientific image we construct is part of the virtuality of language. The individual thinks via an inherited system of signs, and IMV there is no sharp separation between thought and action. 'How are you?' is as much like raising a paw as it is asking a question. And words like 'physical' and 'mental' have no deep and final meaning out of all contexts, tho philosophers do what they can to establish one.
Great addition!
The problem is that it doesn't work that way around. As I said, in any situation there are numerous possibilities which are acceptable to serve the purpose, so there is not such thing as "the right sounds", there are numerous acceptable possibilities. Therefore rigorous logical principles cannot be reduced to "the right sounds". However, the inverse is possible, "the right sounds" can be reduced to rigorous logical principles. In other words, rigorous logical principles are what makes "the right sounds" a coherent concept, but "the right sounds" is arbitrary, subject to any intention, without rigorous logical principles.
Quoting jjAmEs
I covered this already. If there is nothing in the box, then communication and language is pure deception. If you still do not see that this leads us down a path of nonsensical interpretation, look at it this way:
Wittgenstein's premise clearly states "Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a 'beetle'." If there is nothing in the box, then the premise of the example, which states that everyone has a box with something in it, is contradicted. We'd have to start over with a new premise, everyone has a box, and claims that there is something in it, when there may not be something in it. But that's a completely different scenario from the one presented, everyone has a box with something in it. Therefore we cannot "cancel out" what's in the box, as irrelevant, without significantly changing the scenario of Wittgenstein's example, in a way which contradicts the described situation.
Quoting jjAmEs
Again, you have things backwards. Upon close examination, the idea that "the whole idea of the inside opposed to an outside comes apart" comes apart. It is only when an undisciplined mind reads such examples without adhering to rigorous principles of logic, that the illusion you see is created. I think that the illusion is created to demonstrate that language can be used to deceive, as a possibility, and so "the right sounds" may involve contradiction when that is the intent.
If you can make any sounds you want, then understanding isn't part of the language game. You just make sounds. If there is a language "game" then there are rules to follow when referring to certain things. When people use language incorrectly, or in the wrong contexts, like talking as if you were Elvis Presley and claiming that you are, and acting like you are, then we typically think those people delusional or insane.
Regarding similarity vs. difference vs. same: If our experiences are so different, then how is it that we can communicate and understand each other? How could we learn to use words the same way and then use them the same way if we are so different? We at least seem to agree that we both experience colors and sounds, but not the same colors and sounds? Why that distinction? How would we know that we both experience colors and what those are and that we are both talking about the same thing when we write the scribble, "colors" on a screen? It would seem to me that we talk about those things in the right contexts, like when colors are in both of our experiences, and we refer to the experience (which refers to the body's interaction with the world) when talking.
Wouldn't the idea that we are both similar beings, as in human-beings, lead one to believe that we have similar experiences, at least more similar than you would with a dog or goat?
Why wouldn't we see the same colors if we are members of the same species? It would be surprising for someone to say that we are so different that some humans might have experiences more like bats or beetles. How many varieties of experience of the world are there? Does the type of brain have some influence on how you experience the world? Do different types of brains have different types of experiences? What reason would we have to posit that the same type of being, human-beings, have different experiences? What is the scope of the difference? If we can't realize whether or not we have the same quale, when using "green", how do we know if we even are referring to the same quale when we use, "colors"?
If we can't say that what everyone experiences is different or not, then it can be safely said that we each have or own private language. What one person's quale is when interacting with a particular wavelength of light is their "word", or symbol, for that wavelength. What another experiences is their "word", or symbol for that wavelength. Because we each experience that symbol when interacting with that wavelength of EM energy, we can use symbols that we both can observe (like ink on paper, sounds from the mouth, hand motions, etc.) to translate our private language to a public one. Because we both consistently have a color experience (even though they may not be the same color) when interacting with that wavelength, just as we consistently experience someone saying "green" when we experience that color, we can harness some aspect of the world that we both have access to to communicate our experiences that we don't have access to. So our private world becomes public once we translate our private experience into public symbols.
I don't dispute that the external "game" is separate from the internal "understanding". What I said is that what is important is the internal part, the understanding, not the external part, the game. The problem is that the rules cannot be attributed to the external part, they are rules of understanding, and they are not necessary. But without some sort of rules for understanding, misunderstanding is likely. The rules cannot be features of the external part, because then there would be no internal rules for understanding the external rules, and misunderstanding would be pervasive.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I don't see your point. You're eating hamburgers off the BBQ, and I'm hungry, two distinctly different experiences. I grunt, make various noises and gestures until you understand that I'm hungry and you offer me a burger. I have communicated something to you. Where is the need for us to have the same experience? Remember, I don't deny that similar experiences are necessary, so you might have experienced hunger at one time and this experience which was similar to mine, helped you to understand. What I deny is the need for the same experience.
Quoting Harry Hindu
We don't use words the same way, all circumstances are unique and therefore different. We use them in various different ways, with differing degrees and features of similarity, that's why the same word may be interpreted in different ways..
Quoting Harry Hindu
The distinction is for the purpose of understanding each other. There is a difference between "same" and "similar". If we are having a discussion, and you use them interchangeably, I am likely to misunderstand you, because of ambiguity or even equivocation. So before we proceed in this discussion, I want to make sure you have a good understanding of how I want you to use these terms. If you can't recognize the difference between similar and same, then we won't get very far in any efforts to understand each other.
Quoting Harry Hindu
We are clearly not talking about "the same thing" in this situation, so I don't know why you keep coming back to this, talking as if you think that we are talking about the same thing.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Similar, yes, but not the same. Are you starting to catch on yet? Do you think you can refrain from using "same", when you really mean similar, so that I am not confused and misunderstanding what you are trying to say? So for example, when you said "we are both talking about the same thing when we write the scribble 'colors' on the screen", what you really meant is that we are talking about similar ideas we each have, not the same idea. And if you insist that it truly is "the same" idea, in both your mind, and in my mind, at the same time, I would have to disagree with you and ask you how you think the same thing can be in your mind and my mind at the same time. Can we agree that what you meant was "similar"?
I think that inference only makes sense if one clings to consciousness-grounded paradigm that is exploded by the beetle-in-the-box example. The whole habit of trying to ground everything in consciousness deserves rethinking when it comes to language. As I see it, there are certain biases or prejudices that are so automatic that we don't even notice them and find the questioning of them absurd at first. I suggest that it makes as much sense to ground the subject/consciousness in language as it does to ground language in the subject/consciousness. The whole philosophical discourse of consciousness occurs within public sign-systems. The subject is an effect of language, not as a body, of course, but as a concept, as one more sign that only makes sense in a system of signs.
If you haven't seen this, you might find it interesting.
http://www.colby.edu/music/nuss/mu254/articles/Culler.pdf
Exactly. I just say that 'thinking they are insane' is pretty much just having certain chains of signs in our internal monologue. Or we say it out loud and lock people up for their own safety. To me the big idea is that we are radically conventional/cultural/social animals. If we notice that thinking is largely just chains of signs that we only sometimes speak out loud, then we can start to get some distance from the assumption of some ideal thought content that only uses words as a vehicle. I think we focus too much on ideally constative utterances when it's more about speech acts as a kind of activity for manipulating the environment, sometimes by coordinating work or enforcing norms.
We say that we know what we mean when we can find other chains of signs that do pretty much the same job. But I suggest that it's more about an assured knowhow than a grasp of language-independent essences.
To be frank, I relate our disagreement to theism/atheism disagreements. IMV certain philosophers have made strong cases against traditional metaphysical assumptions/paradigms. But we're not rigorously logical beings, and even a certain notion of rigorous logic depends on a demolished picture of language.
I do think certain vague insights can come into half-focus. One such insight is that we never know exactly what we mean. We emit various chains of signs and use them to gesture toward some never-to-shared-interior that is supposed to ground everything. Of course we have a vague sense of what 'soul' or 'consciousness' means, but excellent thinkers have long ago pointed out the limits of what functions like a dogmatic quasi-theological concept.
What would strengthen your case from my point of view is some chain of signs that demonstrates to me that you've actually absorbed the critics I have in mind. I have the sense that you are more or less shutting out ahead of time what could change your mind.
http://www.colby.edu/music/nuss/mu254/articles/Culler.pdf
Though not new to me, I find this to be an interesting take.
I'd like to know if you'd affirm the same of the term awareness. More specifically, in your view, is it a valid position to affirm that the English linguistic percept of "awareness" is in itself what manifests the occurrence of awareness - such that the term does not reference anything that can occur in the term's absence?
If yes, this would naturally entail that language-less beings are devoid of sentience due to their lacking of awareness - to include not only lesser animals but young toddlers as well - for none such hold a linguistically framed concept of "awareness".
BTW, I in part ask because a) the concept of "awareness" can of course only be linguistically conveyed and because, b) given the wide array of possible denotations that can be applied to the term "consciousness" - while it is conceivable given some such denotations that awareness can occur sans consciousness (e.g., an ant can be so claimed to be devoid of a consciousness while yet aware of stimuli) - denoting consciousness as something that can occur in the absence of awareness makes the term "consciousness" utterly nonsensical. And our own awareness - via which we perceive just as much as we cognize intuitions and introspections - seems to me to be the pivotal "beetle".
So, to sum: in your view, is it a valid possibility that awareness cannot occur in the absence of language?
I like this idea too, and I find it taking different forms throughout the history of philosophy.
Quoting javra
Personally I wouldn't claim so definite and radical. I don't deny some kind of beetle in the box. Or the kind of experience that tempts us to ground everything in the subject instead of the social software.The Turing test seems to fit in here. Is my textstream on this site generated by a neural network? Is yours? When I pet my cat, I 'know' that she has some kind of inner life. But what do I mean when I say that I know this? What do I mean exactly by awareness that isn't linguistic? Even if I believe in it, which I do more or less, I'm never quite sure what I believe in. All I can do is churn out more signs. About which I can also only churn out more signs. The ghost of exact meaning is supposed by some to haunt all of this sign shuttling. I relate to the ghost of inexact meaning, the what-it-is-like of 'grasping' (hand metaphor) a concept. So for me it's not about a denial of consciousness outside language.
Quoting javra
You make some good points. 'My' position is like a clump of hair in the drain. It's a bundle of stolen and vague insights. 'Consciousness' is a sign that we employ with a mostly tacit know-how. To be sure, we can do our best to find some approximation of context-independent meaning for it. Or we can try yet again for the perfect technical /metaphysical jargon that starts with everyday blurry meanings and is sharpened into effectiveness.
Are we articulating -- necessarily imperfectly and incompletely -- a mostly blind know-how when we do so? We never lose the ability to make rough sense of someone using the word 'incorrectly' or against our careful theoretical judgments. To me any sign/concept is part of an 'organic' system of conventions that we can never dominate or make completely explicit. I can't prove that metaphysically. If I'm right, I can never prove I'm right. The whole vision of metaphysical certainty is built on a certain vision of how meaning and language work. Perhaps this is why Wittgenstein wrote PI in such a strange style.
I agree that certain attempts at fixing the meaning of 'consciousness' lead to absurdities or nonsense. But to me this is a local effect generated from fragile local semi-fixed and semi-exact meanings. The sign is alive and well and valuable in our language, no matter its slipperiness or the slipperiness of all signs for that within us that would catch them in an iron glove.
I hope my answer is somehow helpful or at least not boring.
Oh, yes. Meta's misguided reading has been pointed out before.
Definitely not boring, and certainty insightful. I agree that meaning is not static, fixed, but instead fluid and alive (allegorically speaking). It's also a given to me that language is inter-subjective, rather than what I'd term intra-subjective (as would be one's private awareness of a flashing insight, for example) - and, hence, that linguistic meaning is largely social and historical. Myself, I however am also of the general opinion that most concepts - or, at least, those which are most important - do however reference concrete existents, for lack of better terms, this in reference to what's going on within (again, as I term it, in reference to each of our own intra-subjective reality). That said, I by no means deny the complexity to our semantics, which you've eloquently expressed.
Thank you for the candid reply.
I hear you, and I guess I think something like that too. I emphasize the other stuff because that's what's counter-intuitive, what surprised me in my favorite thinkers.
Quoting javra
Right. We agree. It's not about a denial of intra-subjective meaning (the beetle) but only about making vivid how radically social -historical -conventional language is. Culler's little book on Saussure really impressed me. And Limited Inc by Derrida (and Sarl/Searle, really) is quite a journey, quite a combat. The role of the subject / consciousness /intention is just huge in philosophy, something like a 'theological' center. I gotta link to this, in case you're interested: http://lab404.com/misc/ltdinc.pdf
Quoting javra
My pleasure, and thanks for yours.
In a way it's not surprising. Wittgenstein hurts. Or rather his insights are threatening to those invested in a certain game and self-image. I suspect that these days that I'm biased in the other direction (expressing vague insights informally and suspicious of the idea of The Method that will churn out The Exact and Final Truth.)
I'll check it out. Seems like a worthwhile read.
Have to ask, have you ever experienced concepts that are not communicable via the language(s) you speak?
Yea, I know, the beetle.
Since I'm Romanian-American, as example, in Romanian there is no translation of "awareness" - as there is, for example, of "cat" ("pisica"). There is "con?tin??" - which stands for both consciousness and conscience - as well as "cognizen??", which is fluidly translated into "cognizance" - but there's no term for "awareness". This example, of course, is easier than expressing Romanian words for which there is no English translation. It's because of such multilingual experiences - along with sentiments and for me at times concepts which I find are not communicable via the languages I know (other than via generalities that miss the mark, e.g. "an aesthetic experience") - that I take the following view:
Allegorically, words as signs are akin to boxes into which we package our intended semantics so as to have our meaning delivered to some other who then opens the box, so to speak, in order to grasp - as best they can - what we wanted to be understood by them. These boxes are intersubjectively manifested, with a long history to them, and so goad that which we can and cannot convey - both to others as well as to ourselves. In the case of the latter, a language's words limits the forms which our linguistically conveyed thoughts can take. Hence, language shapes thoughts by imposing itself upon which concepts are possible to convey. Yet, at the same time, it is due to the very existence of "beetles" which it references that language has any import for us. Rather than it being a unidirectional causal process - either envisioned from without (language) toward within (subjects) or vice versa - I strongly believe the relation between language and subject to be bidirectional. New words come into use via individual subjects' intentions (culturally speaking, this being a bottom-up influence upon language). Once these words become mainstream, they then shape that which can be conveyed and the very thoughts of those who convey information (language's top-down influence upon subjects). These are my general musings on the subject, here given for disclosure.
At any rate, we all have our unique experiences. Again, was curious if you've ever experienced concepts that were not communicable via language.
Now that I think of it, to me many art forms are just this: the attempted communication of experiences, sometimes conceptual, that are not communicable via language.
I relate to the experience of looking for the right words or deciding that a previous phrase wasn't quite right. 'How can I know what I think till I see what I write?'
A related side-issue is feeling misunderstood or not. If I share an idea, I hope for some different chain of signs from the listener that will convince me that the communication was successful. (You can see that I am enmeshed in the usual thinking in terms of consciousness and the transmission of private content, so the 'opposed' view is more of supplement than a replacement.)
Quoting javra
Saussure/Culler mention examples like this. Not only is the signifier arbitrary, but so is the signified. Different languages have different ways of breaking up or articulating reality. I find that fascinating.
Quoting javra
I like your musings. Some kind of bidirectional process makes sense. After all, we do have individual nervous systems. We experience something we call 'meaning.' I envy your perspective in which the problem of translation is concrete and not abstract.
Quoting javra
I think this intuitive view gets something right. But I'd like to add the notion of the artist discovering experiences by experimenting with the medium. I've worked in various media (music and visual art, for example) and personally I did not in general know where I was going or wanted to say. Instead I experienced a 'reactive' critical faculty that was or was not satisfied as I tried this or that, starting perhaps with vague general ideas. If all went well, I'd end up with shapes or sounds that felt good. These days I get my artistic fix from what I'm doing right now. I don't know what I'm going to write until I write it. Sometimes I'm delighted with a phrase. In retrospect it usually fits in with the clump I mentioned earlier. Another nice theme is the continuity of personality, the semi-fiction of a unifying self or signature. I never know exactly who I am. I drag a history behind me from which I project a vague project.
In my understanding of art, a good artist often (but maybe not always) can see his/her own work as if it were the work of a stranger. And this art always exists against and depends for its effect upon a background of other artworks and conventions.
For me the artist would share with others in the experience of the art afterward. But he or she would never know for sure that the experience/beetle was the same. Certain gestures and chains of signs would make the artist feel appreciated or misunderstood.
*Here's an excellent summary of the other link, presented with less potentially frustrating impishness : http://www.colby.edu/music/nuss/mu254/articles/Culler.pdf
To me it's 17 pages of gold.
Yes, me as well. Though I yet maintain that there is some underlying reality that is signified. In a way it reminds me of a ruby metaphor: the same gem gets expressed, and conceptualized, via one of its many faces. Though each conceptualization, as abstraction, picks up a different impression of the underlying reality, the underlying reality as a whole still is. Maybe I'm over-generalizing here, but I find this for example holds in relation to what can be termed "awareness".
Quoting jjAmEs
:grin: Yup, I can relate. Sometimes, I'd dabble random dots on a blank paper and then proceed to connect them till something interesting would appear. Then I'd refine this general appearance into a finalized product that "felt good". I think that's the extreme I've gone in that direction. Music too, placing bits of sound that worked individually into a streamlined whole. Still, I've also often had a general image, or feeling, that I wanted to make tangible - not a picture perfect imagination, but a clear awareness of the impact I wanted the subject matter to convey. Then, of course, as the work progressed, aesthetic decisions changed what I initially conceived into a somewhat altered final product.
Quoting jjAmEs
Seems as though this goes without saying. Agreed. Then there's the case to be made of the artwork holding the artist as its principle audience. One knows, senses, when it came out at its best. The pleasure then is intrinsic, rather than being obtained from other's reaction.
Hmm, notice this is changing the thread's topic a bit - possibly a bit too much. But its good to relate about these things.
To me that's a totally plausible and intuitive hypothesis or reported experience. I guess I lean toward the identification of thought and language. Since translation is common, that makes the idea of some language-intuitive content quite appealing and natural. How does one see that a translation is correct? That some bridge has been formed between different convention systems ? One defends a translation with a chain of signs.
What's interesting is that we can all more or less believe in the beetle (the ruby itself) while only ever being able to trade signs and gestures. The whole speech/writing thing in Derrida really shines on this forum. I have the impression (I believe) that you are a human being. You pass the Turing test. I 'know' that you have a 'soul.' I hope that I seem to have a soul and experience feelings and signifieds.
But technology is moving in the Blade Runner direction. If deciding whether textstreams were written by genuine minds or algorithms ever becomes difficult, that's going to mess with us. I haven't studied NLP closely, but I have studied deep learning generally. It's all statistics really. I don't know if the tech will ever get quite that good, but our crazy species may have thousands of years ahead of it, despite its recklessness. In 4013, we may convert an entire planet into a computer. We might agree that it's the best conversationalist ever without being sure that is has thoughts or feelings. (To be clear, I 'know' that we human beings have thoughts and feelings, without knowing exactly what I mean by saying that I know it.)
I offer this not to be contrary but only to keep things interesting by defending an opposing view. It's not for me about destroying the concept of consciousness but instead in recontextualizing it. The idea is (as I understand it) that we have certain conventions that give concepts identity. We have a repeatable or iterable code that can function in our absence. Others can stumble on our post here in 3 years and make of it what they will. Or maybe we'll return one day and not remember exactly what we meant. And we can always be quoted (perhaps by ourselves) in a new context, and the meaning of all the signs will drift or shift. I think we agree here, since we both accept that language is historical, etc.
Quoting javra
I can relate to that too. As a musician I slowly focused in on a certain emotion and style as the identity of the band. I guess this is more of the bidirectional theme.
Quoting javra
That's a good point. In a way it's the artist's job to be the ideal audience. The ideal situation is that the artist has a more refined sensibility than the audience proper and that the artwork (difficult at first) extends the sensibilities and taste of its consumers. Vonnegut wrote that it takes seeing 1000 paintings to know a good painting from a bad one. I think I know what he meant (see his ruby).
In some ways, maybe the artist takes pleasure in the artwork already from the perspective of an ideal audience. To me this is like Feuerbach's idea that the species thinks through language and not primarily the individual. Despite being a once rebellious youth, I've come around to understand objectivity as the ideal of subjectivity. Even in my rebellion I was striving toward some 'iterable' and implicitly universal ideal. To me the notions of the true and good are loaded with some intuition of an ideal community, perhaps only virtual and to come. Even irony is tangled up with this. But it's also wandering off topic.
It is good to share this stuff. Feel free to link to any art you have online. I'll check it out.
You make me feel so Jung :grin:
You do not have to account for extention if the act of perception occurs at the object itself; that is to say that perception operates from the periphery to the centre. However, you do have to account for how unextended representation becomes extended when perception occurs from the centre and is projected outwards. Infact you have to account for how all the attributes that were stripped from the object and made ideal, map back onto the object. Does this make 'sense' ?
Tell that to this person:
Quoting Banno
If "we never know exactly what we mean", how could there be such a thing as a "misguided reading"? "Misguided" would be an arbitrary determination. And you jAmEs, have already made the same accusation, so now you contradict yourself.
Quoting jjAmEs
When a person makes claims, and supports them by an appeal to authority, instead of backing up the claims with explanations and principles, I conclude that the person is incapable of supporting those claims. That's the category I place you, because that's all you've done, made one obviously untenable assertion after the other without providing any support.
I clearly demonstrated the fault in your claim, in my last reply to you, and you simply ignored it. So I conclude that you are incapable of supporting your position, and simply appeal to authorities whom you most likely misinterpret as well.
I wasn't trying to make a distinction between an "external" game and "internal" understanding. It seems to me that if there is no "internal" understanding, there is no "external" game. It requires at least two people to understand the rules for there to be an external game, and there requires external parts for there to be an understanding about - different pieces have different rules.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
MU, experiences and thoughts are about things. If you and I have a visual experience of a hamburger, are our experiences not about the same thing? If they are about the same thing, or causally related to the same thing, then how is it that our experiences of it aren't the same, or at least similar? If they aren't about the same thing, then we would just be talking past each other or living in different realities.
That isn't what I was trying to do. Language is just visual scribbles and sounds, like mostly everything else in consciousness - that is about things that aren't the scribbles and sounds. If we can adopt various sounds and scribbles in our experience to mean certain things, then how is it that we can't just use the visuals and sounds that we already experience prior to learning any language to be about some other experience? We don't need language to have a narrative. We simply need categories, which are basically the same thing as concepts. Animals can establish causal relationships (explanations) without having any language. A deer passing through the forest scents the ground and detects a certain odor. A sequence of ideas is generated in the mind of the deer. Nothing in the deer's experience can produce that odor but a wolf; therefore the scientific inference is drawn that wolves have passed that way. But it is a part of the deer's scientific knowledge, based on previous experience, individual and racial; that wolves are dangerous beasts, and so, combining direct observation in the present with the application of a general principle based on past experience, the deer reaches the very logical conclusion that it may wisely turn about and run in another direction. All this implies, essentially, a comprehension and use of scientific principles; and, strange as it seems to speak of a deer as possessing scientific knowledge, yet there is really no absurdity in the statement. The deer does possess scientific knowledge; knowledge differing in degree only, not in kind, from the knowledge of a Newton. Nor is the animal, within the range of its intelligence, less logical, less scientific in the application of that knowledge, than is the human. The animal that could not make accurate scientific observations of its surroundings, and deduce accurate scientific conclusions from them, would soon pay the penalty of its lack of logic.
Pre-linguistic children establish object permanence - converting from solipsism to realism - all prior to language-use. At this point in our lives - when we are very young we understand the concept of existing information that is missing from our minds - that information exists even when it isn't in our minds, and that information is called "private" by English speakers. So the words only refer to existing experiences that aren't words. We can establish patters without words. Words simply communicate the pattern that we already have established.
Actually, I think it was jAmEs who made that distinction, which I agreed to. The problem was, that jAmEs wanted to exclude the role of the internal understanding, as unnecessary.
Quoting jjAmEs
This led to a contradiction in the reading of Wittgenstein. The premise of the example is that everyone has something in the box, but Wittgenstein later says "the box might even be empty". Clearly we have a contradiction here. "Everyone has something in the box", and "the box might be empty", are incompatible.
I propose that the contradiction is introduced intentionally by Wittgenstein, to mislead people like jAMeS, and perhaps Banno, who do not have a solid education in philosophy, being trained to identify such misleading examples. The faulty example, (presented with explicit contradiction), leads these undisciplined minds toward the conclusion that the internal "private" plays no role.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Ok, so you did not fall into Wittgenstein's trap, like jAmEs did.
Quoting Harry Hindu
This doesn't make any sense. You want to conclude that if our thoughts are about the same thing, then the thoughts themselves are the same. To think about something is to create a relationship with that thing. It's illogical, that I, being a thing, would have the same relationship as you, being a second thing, to a third thing. In order for you and I to have the same relationship with another thing, we'd have to both be the same thing. You and I would be one thing. Therefore we should conclude that yours and my experiences of that third thing are not the same.
The other option you propose is that the experiences of you and I are similar. That they are similar would need to be demonstrated. I think we demonstrate the similarities, along with the differences, through communication.
Wittgenstein begins with the supposition that everyone has "a box with something in it which we call a 'beetle'". Nobody can ever look into anyone else's box and everyone says they know what a beetle is only by looking at their own beetle. In that case, it's possible for each person to have something different in their box, or for what's in the box to be constantly changing.
Wittgenstein then asks:
"But what if these people's word "beetle" had a use nonetheless?"
THEN it would not be the name of a thing. THEN the thing in the box doesn't belong to the language-game at all. THEN the box might even be (or may as well be) empty.
Whatever is in the box, or in everyone's box, would be irrelevant if the word "beetle" had an established use in the language game. How do I know that what you mean by "beetle" is the same as what I mean by "beetle"? Because that's the assumption here: that the word "beetle" has a conventional use nonetheless. If each person can only know what's in their own box and not what's in anyone else's, and yet we can all still somehow use and understand the meaning of the word "beetle", then the putative thing in each person's box is irrelevant and "cancels out, whatever it is".
Here's the point. Just because the word is not used as the name for the thing in the box, this does not leave the thing in the box as playing no role, as jAmEs concludes. That's the way we use words, they indicate a type of thing, yet we also use them to refer to particulars. The word has a dual use. Wittgenstein is trying to exclude one of these. But that exclusion is not justified.
So the conclusion, that the thing in the box has no role in the language game is not valid, because it does not account for that role, in which the person uses the word to refer to the thing in their own box, or to the thing in someone else's box. Furthermore, that the person's box might be empty, amounts to deception if the person refers to what's in one's own box when there is nothing there. And, as I've already explained, that the box might be empty is deception on the part of Wittgenstein, because the example stipulates that there is something in the box, so he contradicts himself here, in the effort to mislead you into thinking that the exclusion described above is justified.
What does it mean to say that our what our thoughts are about are the same, but the thoughts themselves aren't? If you only know about something by your thoughts, and they are different than mine then how do we know that we are thinking about the same thing?
You say that we can demonstrate the similarities and differences through communication. What would you be communicating - your thoughts or the thing your thoughts are about? If you can only talk about your thoughts - which you say are different, then we would be communicating different things, and never anything similar.
Say you and I are standing on opposite ends of a table looking at an apple on the table. Your view is one side of the apple and my view is the opposite side of the apple. But within my view is you, looking at the apple. It is a fundamental, pre-linguistic understanding that human beings have is that other humans have a view from their location is space. Even chimps seem to have this understanding as they understand that blocking someone's eyes is blocking their view. We don't need to communicate with each other to understand that we are both looking at the same thing.
I’ll expand my views on this a little in reference to consciousness. As I was previously implying, consciousness as an abstract conceptual noun has no meaning in the absence of awareness. Although “awareness” and “cognizance” can hold different spectrums of meaning, “to be aware” and “to cognize” do not - this at least when applied to the first-person point of view (rather than a total mind): to be aware of X is to cognize X and vice versa. Here we have multiple abstract conceptual nouns that convey somewhat different concepts that, nevertheless, reference the same exact beetle that is in everybody’s box. Though we’re all uniquely informed as first-person points-of-view by information at large, this being in part what makes us all uniquely different, we all nevertheless hold an identical beetle in that we are all endowed with (else are) a first-person point of view. Granting that an ant is a sentient being and not an automaton, so too does an ant hold the same beetle in its box: that of having, else being, a first-person point-of-view. For emphasis, all first-person points-of-view will be different in form - again, partly due to the differing information they are informed by, also by biological predispositions that are genetically inherited, etc.; nevertheless, all first-person points of view will be the same, by which I mean qualitatively identical, in their one property of so being first-person points-of-view – differently worded, in being a first-person nexus of awareness.
Here, to me, the occurrence of first-person points-of-view is a concrete, albeit intangible, reality – in the sense that our so being is directly experienced by us, rather than being something which we abstract from direct experiences. And to say that I as a first-person point-of-view “am conscious of”, “am aware of”, or “am cognizant of” makes not the slightest difference in what I am intending to be understood by the given signs. But once we enter into the world of abstracted nouns, things change. As abstracted nouns, consciousness, awareness, and cognizance – though their meanings overlap – can each convey different meanings. And, to the extent that these terms can translate into other languages, these meanings are culturally relative, rather than universal.
Notwithstanding, all these abstracted nouns are generalized from that which is directly experienced, and, in this sense, concrete: the first person point of view which is conscious of / aware of / cognizant of. And this concrete experience of what is will itself be of a proverbial beetle.
So our abstractions, our concepts, do float about, so to speak, in a linguistic webbing of our own intersubjective making. Our linguistic conventions do give the concepts we entertain their identity. Yet, as is the case with consciousness, these abstract nouns are yet abstracted by us from an underlying non-abstract reality that is. Rather than it being abstract nouns all the way down.
Not saying this to object to your perspectives, but in attempts to better find a suitable middle ground.
Quoting jjAmEs
Oh, man. This made me blush. Didn’t mean to imply that I’ve either been prolific or good at the artistic stuff I’ve engaged in - though it’s always been a pleasurable challenge for me. As it is, I haven’t yet posted most anything of my arts on line. Certainly nice to have been asked, though. Ditto, btw. If you have anything online, it would be nice to check it out.
Ha! It’s good to be Jung at heart. :razz: (Well, in some ways at least, given that we are referencing Carl Jung).
The same way we know anything, with less than absolute certainty.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Strictly speaking, what I pass to you in communication is words. And the words might be used to reference my thoughts, or the things my thoughts are about, depending on the situation, but generally a combination of both.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Yes we do, because there are many things in a person's field of vision, and without some form of communication I can only assume that your interest is the same as mine. Most likely it is not, and we are not looking at the same thing, so it would not be a very reliable assumption.
Quoting javra
Your claim that all first-person points-of-view are exactly the same, by virtue of being first-person points-of-view, is just like saying that all things are exactly the same by virtue of being things. How is that a useful assumption, rather than a misleading assumption, in this context?
That's not necessarily the way we use words. Unless you have a supporting argument that it is? But I can think of a few words that are used in neither of these ways.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Everyone says they know what a beetle is only by looking at their own beetle. So how does a person know that what they mean by "beetle" is the same as what anyone else means by it? How can the word be used in this way?
That's right, there is no necessity to the way that we use words, it is done by free will choice. But I did describe a couple of ways that people do use words, so it is not irrelevant.
Quoting Luke
When everyone knows that what is in one's own box is not the same thing which is in another's box, and each person calls what is in one's own box a "beetle", why would anyone believe that what someone means by "beetle is the same as what someone else means by beetle?
Your assumption here doesn't make any sense. Clearly, under the terms of the example no one would think that any two people would mean the same thing with the word "beetle".
Quoting Luke
A word is seldom used in this way, to mean exactly the same thing as what someone else means, and that's what I spent time explaining to Harry. Since "beetle" refers to what's in all those different boxes, two people would only mean the same thing when using the word, if they were both referring to what's in one particular box. If this is case, then which beetle is being referred to, would have to be indicated in some other way.
So you can see that when a word is used in this way, which you suggested, to mean the same thing as someone else means, this must be in some way indicated, that the meaning in this instance of use is meant to be the same as another instance. Two common ways of indicating this are by providing a reference, and the use of a definition.
What is in one box is not necessarily different from what is in another; only that nobody can know what is in another's box.
Regardless, if everyone assumes that what is in everyone else's box is different to what is in theirs, then the word "beetle" can only be used to refer to "the contents of a person's box", or to "the thing in the box, whatever it is".
Therefore, it doesn't matter what particular thing is in anyone's box. The particular contents of a particular box is irrelevant to the use of the word. The word can be used only to refer to some unknown thing in the box. As Wittgenstein says "...one can 'divide through' by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is." The word could still be used in this way even if there were nothing in the box.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Surely, "beetle" means "the contents of a person's box".
Otherwise, if nobody knows what anybody else means by "beetle", then how can this word be used in the language at all?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The word does refer to what's in all (or any of) those different boxes, but the particular contents of those boxes is irrelevant to the word's use.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
What "other way" is there? Maybe one person could point at another while saying "beetle", or they could even say "your beetle" to make reference to the contents of that person's particular box. But the word would still only mean "the contents of your box, whatever it is".
You seem to have misread what I wrote. To try to better explain via the law of identity: X = X. Hence, "a first person point of view = a first person point of view". This just as much as "a thing = a thing". I did state and then emphasize that each first person point of view is different in various ways - but that all first person points of view are nevertheless identical strictly in so being first person points of view. To then use your example, all things are identical strictly in their property of being things. A rock is no more nor less a thing than is a bolder - despite the two things mentioned being distinctly different in givens such as their spatial properties. The thingness, or thinghood (don't laugh, these are words one can find in a dictionary), of all things is nevertheless exactly the same, this by virtue of all things being things - rather than for example being actions. Again, just as X = X, so too does a thing = a thing.
Now, thingness is an abstraction we abstract from individual things. In the context of consciousness, or else of awareness, though the words "a first-person point of view" are themselves abstractions, what I'm saying is that we each can reference these words to a personal experience of being which, of itself as experience, is intimately real and non-abstract.
I get the Cartesian skepticism that could unfold (the "what if" and "how do you know with infallible certainty" questions). Still, you experience yourself to be, among other things, a first person point of view, as I myself do. These experiences are as real as experiences get. We are of course uniquely different in innumerable ways as first person points of view. Nevertheless, if you are a first person point of view, and if I am a first person point of view - this among all our other attributes which differentiates us - then (get ready) how would the "first-person-point-of-view-ness(or, -hood)" which we both share be in and of itself in any way different ... as that which we both at base minimally are as aware beings?
Do you for example experience being a first person point of view by physiologically seeing some given from two different points of view at the same time and in the same way?
Again, I do maintain that the beetle you hold of being a first person point of view and the beetle which I hold of likewise being a first person point of view - in so far as strictly this one attribute of being is concerned - can only be qualitatively identical (again, in so far as strictly concerns this one attribute). That we, for example, each see different things that impart upon us different forms as first person points of view does not, of itself, annul the fact that we both minimally are first person points of view as aware beings that cognize things. As a bolder is no more or less a thing than is a pebble, so too are you or I no more or less a first person point of view than the other.
Of course the two distinct things in two distinct boxes are necessarily different from each other, that's what makes them two distinct things. Are you familiar with the law of identity? I went through this already with Harry. They are necessarily different from one another, as two distinct things. Why would you think they could be the same?
Quoting Luke
And why would you think this? It is common practise for different people to use the same word differently in different situations. Strictly speaking we ought not even call these two distinct instances "the same word".
Quoting Luke
I agree with the first part here, "the particular contents of the particular box is irrelevant". That is why the relation between a word and a thing is somewhat arbitrary. However, the second part does not follow logically, and that is what misled jAmEs. We cannot cancel out the thing in the box, unless we are prepared to classify language use as deception.
When a person speaks about the thing in the box, it is implied that there is a thing in the box which is spoken about. The fact that the thing in the box could be anything does not mean that the thing in the box could be nothing. If there is nothing in the box the person is practising deception. One cannot proceed logically from the premise of "I've got something in the box which could be anything", through the premise of "the precise nature of the thing is not indicated by the name it has", to the conclusion "therefore I might have nothing in the box". That is not a logical conclusion.
So the situation here is that if there is nothing in someone's box, then that person is deceiving others when referring to the beetle in the box. Wittgenstein has indicated that this is a possibility, a person could imply "I have something in the box", by referring to the beetle in the box, when there is nothing in the box. Therefore it is possible that language could be used for deception. He supports this principle further, in practise, with that deceptive argument, proceeding from the premise that everyone has something in the box, to the conclusion that there might be nothing in the box. That's a fallacy. The success of that argument, in misleading people like jAmEs, is evidence of what Wittgenstein is arguing, that language might be used for deception.
Quoting Luke
No it does not, "beetle" is the name of the thing in the box. The example states that everyone has a box with something in it, called a beetle. This statement of yours just creates the ambiguity which is required to veil the deception. "Contents of a person's box" might be construed as nothing. But that is not what is stated. So your statement appears to be like a person's statement who is defending oneself after having been caught in a lie. You are saying, it's not really a lie if you understand my words this way instead of that way, so I didn't really tell a lie if you interpret like this. But what is really at issue here is the intent to deceive, and this you cannot remove by introducing such ambiguity. Ambiguity is used to hide the intent to deceive, it does not remove it.
Quoting Luke
I don't see any criticism here, everyone knows what everyone means by "beetle", it's the name of the thing in a person's box. The only issue is that when we're talking we can't just refer to it as "the beetle", because we need to distinguish "your beetle" from "my beetle" from "his beetle", and "her beetle" etc.. This is no different from talking about a part of the body like a right hand. We all have one, but we can't just refer to our own as "the right hand", because there are as many right hands (almost) as there are people. In no way does this indicate that nobody could know what anyone means by "right hand".
Quoting Luke
This statement is deceptive as well. Creating this illusion is what allows for Wittgenstein's deception to proceed. I have a box, with a thing in it called a beetle. You likewise. I know that I call my thing "beetle", and you know that you call your thing "beetle". The example does not indicate why any of us is inclined to call the thing in the box by that specific name. We cannot assume coincidence in this matter, therefore we can look for some convention, or rule being followed, if you have this box, with something in it, call that thing a beetle.
Under the foregoing framework for the example, assuming a convention, or rule, the contents of the box is irrelevant. However, that framework is inappropriate, and not an adequate description of language use, nor is it applicable to real life. It's not a real example. There is no rule, or convention, which stipulates when you have a feeling within your body (beetle in the box), you must call it "pain". There are all sorts of different feelings within your body, therefore all sorts of different things within your box. So Wittgenstein's example obscures this fact, the multitude of things in the box, hiding the need to be able to distinguish one thing from another, within one's own box, with the premise that there is only one thing in the box, thereby establishing the groundwork for the deception. Recognizing this fact brings the deception into focus.
Quoting Luke
There are countless different ways to indicate whose box , pointing as you said, "Luke's box", "the person's box who is walking through the door", etc..
And no, the word does not mean "the contents of your box", it refers to the thing in your box. Furthermore, when you put the example into context, the demonstration which Wittgenstein is making, you'll see that "contents of a person's box" makes no sense. As I explained there are really many different things within that box, and Wittgenstein has distinctly said that the word refers to something in the box. So the whole example falls apart, as a person needs a way to distinguish one thing from another within one's own box. The whole idea that there is only one thing in the box is faulty. Then the example will be seen for what it is, an exercise in deception.
Quoting javra
The law of identity states that a thing is the same as itself. Therefore, one person's point of view is the same as that person's point of view. Another person's point of view is not the same. I have to say that you are employing a misunderstanding of the law of identity. This law is actually meant to prevent procedures like yours. We ought not say that one red thing is the same as another red thing, just because they are both red, so we employ the law of identity to prevent people from creating a logical argument which employs this idea as a premise. Trying to use the law of identity to support this procedure just demonstrates a misunderstanding of the law of identity.
Quoting javra
It's just like the beetle in the box. We call it a "first-person-point-of-view", no matter who has it, but this does not necessitate that there is any specific thing about it which is the same. We are just calling different things by the same name, just like two different people might be called "John".
Quoting javra
I am not laughing, but this is exactly what Wittgenstein would laugh at, the idea that there is such a thing as "thingness". That's why he set up those deceptive arguments, like the beetle in the box, to lead (mislead perhaps) people away from this idea. The problem is that his arguments which appear to be intended to lead people away from this idea, are really deceptions, such that the people who are led away from this idea have been deceived. If we read deeper into what Wittgenstein is saying, we'll see that he is really trying to demonstrate what this "ness" or "hood" really consists of.
Taking a different route, if I’m understanding you correctly: Since no singular first person point of view remains the same over time - e.g., the you of five seconds past is not identical to the you of the present - there thereby can be no personal identity through time. Is this correct?
I should add that I don't consider the first person point of view to be a thing, i.e.a homunculus.
Simply by using the word 'beetle' one is "practising deception"? Are deaf people practising deception when they talk about sounds, and blind people when they talk about colours?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The only implication here is your own stubborn assumption that the use of the word must depend on what is inside the box.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Of course it's possible. Did you think it was not possible?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Great! Then it is also irrelevant (to the use of the word) whether a particular box contains something or not.
Is someone "practising deception" if they talk about unicorns or Santa Claus (since these don't really refer to anything)?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Probably for the same reasons that any of us uses any given language at all.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Let's discuss Wittgenstein's actual example, though, instead of importing into it all of these extraneous details and assumptions.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Are we discussing Wittgenstein's example here, or some other scenario that is only in your mind?
No, that's not what I had in mine. You, as a thing just like any other thing, have small changes which occur to you over time, so your point of view changes, nevertheless you are still the same thing, and it is still your point of view. So the law of identity, which states that a thing is the same as itself, allows that a thing which is changing as time passes, might continue to be the same thing, because the thing never ceases to be the same as itself despite the fact that it is changing over time.
Quoting javra
It was you who was talking about a first-person-point-of view as if it were a thing, which could be identified with other first-person-points-of view. If the first-person-point-of-view is not a thing which can be talked about, then what is it that you are referring to with this phrase?
Quoting Luke
If you are saying "I have a thing in my box which I am calling a beetle", when you have nothing in your box, wouldn't you agree with me that this is deception?
Quoting Luke
Did you not read what I wrote? Or do you have some sort of mental block which prevents you from understanding simple logic? The description is of something in the box. What it is, which in the box, is irrelevant to that description. It is simply stated that there is something in the box. How can you think that this means that it is also irrelevant whether or not there is even something in the box? It is described as something in the box, so whether or not there is something in the box is what makes the description true or false. How can you claim that whether or not there is something in the box is irrelevant, just because it is stipulated that what it is which is in the box is irrelevant. That is a completely illogical conclusion.
Quoting Luke
Often yes, when they talk about fictional characters as if they are not fictional, they are practising deception. When parents tell their children about Santa Clause they are very clearly practising deception. Also, if one writes a book of fiction and presents it as if it were a factual book, this is deception. However, if it is explicit, or implicit, that the fictional character is a fictional character, there is no deception. In the case of the "beetle" in the box, when there is nothing in the box, it is clearly deception, because the person talks as if there is something in the box, referring to it as a beetle, while knowing that there is not anything in the box.
Quoting Luke
Yes, this is Wittgenstein's example. Look where it is presented by jAmEs:
What is being exemplified is "pain". But people feel many things other than just pain. Therefore there must be more than one thing in the box in the analogy. People feel pleasure, pain, all sorts of emotions, and sensations. So the analogy of "beetle in the box" is completely inapplicable in the first place, because there must be all sorts of different things in the box, beetles, ants, caterpillars, butterflies, etc., just like there are all sorts of feelings other than pain within the person. So the issue is how do we know how to give which name to which thing in the box, and this is not even broached by Wiitgenstein, who is presenting the analogy as one thing in the box. The analogy is very clearly an exercise in, or demonstration of deception, at numerous different levels. It's almost as if Wittgenstein looked for as many ways as possible to deceive people within one simple example, just to demonstrate the reality of deception. Can you not see, that what "the beetle in the box" is demonstrating is deception?
I got a notification.
Hip hip hooray!
See PI 290-291 regarding your use of "description" here.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
We are talking about the use of the word 'beetle'. As you have agreed, the contents of the box are irrelevant to the use of the word. That is, the use of the word does not rely on the contents of the box. Why should it be any different if the box was empty? The word could still be used in exactly the same way even if the box was empty, despite your tirades about deception.
"That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of 'object and designation' the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant." (PI 293)
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Ever heard of a thought experiment?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You think this is the issue?
How do you know any words (and their uses)? Did you invent them?
There you go, changing the terms again to "contents". Didn't I point out this mistake to you already? I didn't agree that the contents of the box are irrelevant, nor did Wittgenstein imply such, in the analogy. Something is in the box, and that is very relevant. It is the premise of the analogy. How could it not be relevant? The exact nature of the thing in the box is not relevant, and that is what I agreed to. What is in the box could be anything.
Quoting Luke
No! Obviously this is false! if you are talking to me about the thing in your box, when there is nothing in your box, and you know that there is nothing in your box, then you are practising deception. That's clear and succinct. If you fail to acknowledge this, then so be it. Most people who deceive will continue to deny that they were deceiving long after being caught in the deception. So this is not a completely unusual response from you, to claim that there is no deception where there clearly is deception.
I didn't change any terms. You said: "I agree with the first part here, "the particular contents of the particular box is irrelevant"."
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I didn't make any claims here about practising or not practising deception. I said that the word could still be used in the same way even if the box was empty. Your response does not address this at all. Your position seems to be that the box's contents are irrelevant to the use of the word if there is something in the box but relevant to the use of the word if there is nothing in the box.
As I said, it can't be used in the same way, without deception. Talking about the thing in your box, when there is nothing in your box, is deception, and that fact cannot be avoided.
It's very relevant.
If you allow for the possibility of deception in the use of language, do you see that "everyone's box has something in it" , and "the box might be empty", are contradictory, and therefore deceptive?
Whether or not there is something in the box is always relevant under the premise of the analogy, because what you would call "the same use" would be deception when there is nothing in the box, and therefore it would not really be the same, the use would be to deceive.
Where's my contradiction?
You never answered my earlier question: Is it deceptive for a deaf person to talk about sounds and for a blind person to talk about colours? What's the deception?
If the deaf person is not hearing sounds, recognizes and understands this, and yet is talking about hearing sounds, that is deception, just like when the person with no beetle in the box, recognizes and understands that there is nothing in the box, yet is talking about the beetle in the box, that is deception.
I never said that they claim to be hearing sounds, only that they can talk about sounds. It does not affect their use of the word "sounds".
Perhaps I didn't make myself clear. When the deaf person is not hearing sounds yet is referring to the sounds which he or she is hearing, that is deception, like when the person without a beetle in the box is referring to the beetle in the box.
Do you understand that as deception?
If the "use" of the word is to refer to something which is not there, as if it were there, when the person knows that it is not there, then the "use" is deception. The person is using the words to deceive.
A person can say "I hear sounds", whether or not the person actually hears sounds. The "use" is dependent on whether the person actually hears sounds or not, because if sounds are not actually heard the "use" is deception. The person is using the words to deceive.
We are very likely interpreting the term “thing” in different ways. “I am a thing” to me doesn’t register.
As for the main gist of the quote:
A rock as a thing is in perpetual change and this change eventually results in sediments. Though the same physical components are present, the rock is not the same thing as the sediments which inevitably result. There will be a time over this course of slow transformation - in which the rock turns to sediments - when the given rock ceases to be the same given rock, instead being a different rock. Sortie’s paradox here applies (imo, as it applies to the identity of all spatiotemporal givens). Before this time is arrived at, its sameness over time is not a result of the same unchanging total package of constituent parts - which never remains the same - but only of the same holistic form which is maintained despite all the changes that unfold. Nothing spatiotemporal ever remains in a static state of being - and so identity through time is not a property applicable to the organization of the parts but only to the holistic form which the parts bring about. Hence, one cannot step twice into the same river in terms of constituent components - yet it remains the same river in terms of its holistic form via which it is recognized over time to be the same river. Such is my view.
If a given’s constituents are never identical across time, but only its holistic form can so remain, then the notion of identity can only apply to holistic forms. Coming round to the previous topic, again, what I’ve been trying to express is that the holistic form of a first-person point of view is the same, qualitatively identical, for all numerically different first person points of view - despite the constituents of awareness pertaining to each being drastically different, thereby being a part of what makes each numerically different first person point of view unique.
Via analogy only: the holistic form which makes some given be a rock is of itself the same, qualitatively identical, for all numerically different rocks - despite the constituents of each individual rock being drastically different. This rock is not that rock for a multitude of reasons, their unique spatial location included, but both clear cut cases of rocks will equally be a rock.
Maybe you no longer subscribe to realism when it comes to universals? I thought you did. Or maybe we hold drastically different understandings of these as well.
All the same, I’m not here trying to convince you but am instead justifying my stance, which you took issue with. And I don't find the metaphysics of identity to be an easy topic.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Not in the slightest. This is what you’ve projected upon what I said, via your own means of interpretation.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
A process, maybe? All the same, as I see it, what a first person point of view is ontologically - a thing, a process, both, or neither - does not need to be in any way known by us for one to hold a rather strong certainty that such nevertheless is, at the very least in the here and now.
The word could be used in this way, to deceive, but it need not be. However, it has been your claim that the word can only be used in this way if the sense is lacking; that any use of the word must be a deception.
OK, just so you know where I'm coming from, I do not accept the idea of a "holistic form". I think this is an imaginary thing, and that any designation "such is the holistic form of the thing" would be arbitrary, or at least be based on principles which would have a large degree of arbitrariness.
Quoting javra
Therefore I take this determination of "qualitatively identical" as arbitrary. I'll refer to my original example, you might as well say that all things are qualitatively identical, despite having drastic differences between them and being numerically different, on account of them all being things. What is the point in saying things like these are "identical"?
Quoting javra
I don't think I was ever much of a realist in this sense of the word.
Quoting javra
Identity is definitely not an easy topic, but you seem to have a much better understanding of it than many. I'm glad you took the time to explain your concept of "holistic form", and although I am sure that I do not adequately understand it, it doesn't appear to be appealing to me. How can the holistic form of a thing stay the same when the thing is changing. What kind of "form" is that?
Quoting javra
Here's something to consider. If you look at the rock as matter, then even after it turns to sediments, the matter is still the same matter. So in a way there is something of the rock, its matter, which will always remain the same, even after the rock is gone.
Quoting javra
But the constituent parts, the matter, stays the same regardless of whether they exist as the rock, or something else. So we have something which remains the same through time, the matter. And, since the form of the object is continually changing, if we gave identity to the form of the thing, it would be a new thing at every moment. Instead, if we give identity to the matter of the thing, we can always identify that same matter, as time passes, regardless of what form it is in.
Quoting javra
I think I can agree with this.
Quoting Luke
What is really the case is that when you have named the thing in your box "beetle", and there is nothing in your box, the word is necessarily used to deceive. The deception pervades all usage because you are implying that there is something in the box that you have named "beetle" when you know there is not. Until you make it known to others that there really is nothing in your box which is called "beetle", i.e. that the beetle is a fiction (in which case you are not using "beetle" to refer to the thing in your box anymore), all the usage of that term will be instances of deception.
The deception is inherent within the dictates of the analogy. The name refers to the thing in the box. The person knows what's in one's box. Those two are premised. We can add the further premise, that to refer to the thing in the box when you know that there is nothing in the box, is deception. Therefore to use the word when you know that there is nothing in the box is deception.
On the other hand, when there really is something in the box, one might still use the word for deception as well.
Wittgenstein doesn't say that you name it. He says that the word has a use in these people's language. Anyone can learn the language, of course, and learn to use the word "beetle" accordingly.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Unless they make it known that they are deaf, a deaf person is practising deception with any and all usage of the word "sounds"? Do you realise how absurd this is?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Are you back-pedalling on your former agreement that the contents of the box are irrelevant to the use of the word?
What is irrelevant to the question of whether the use of the word depends on the contents of the box is your trivial concern regarding a particular use of the word in order to deceive. The same word or statement could be used in the same way, with the same meaning, in either an honest or a dishonest fashion. It makes no difference to the use/meaning of the word or statement.
That's irrelevant, I'm not talking about "anyone", I'm talking specifically about the person whose box is empty. That person would be practising deception, according to the contradiction in the terms of the analogy.
Quoting Luke
I'm not talking about a deaf person either, that's an irrelevant distraction you've created.
Quoting Luke
Since you misunderstood what I agreed to, or more precisely misrepresented it for a straw man, then I must "back-pedal" to ensure that you understand what I meant.
Quoting Luke
So being honest, and being dishonest are "the same" to you? One person makes a truthful honest statement, and another person states the same words in deception, and these two people are using those words in the same way? Tell me another one.
Quoting jkg20
This would make sense, and showing each other what's in the box would avoid the possibility of someone referring to the thing within the empty box, which is the deception I referred to, but this is not a condition of the analogy. In the analogy what is in the box is meant to be private, that's why it's described as in the box, and only the holder of the box can see inside. And that described privacy is why the possibility of deception looms. Further, deception is then necessitated when Wittgenstein introduces the contradiction "the box might be empty".
But I'm not sure about your use of "undisplayable". In relation to the analogy, if people wanted to display what's inside, they could open the box and show it to others, making the thing displayable. How would that work with "pain"? The display of pain is itself the person's action, which includes spoken words. How could we exclude the possibility of deception if the person cannot open oneself up, to show the thing itself, the "pain"? The sports player might be faking pain to get the opponent penalized, how could that person open oneself up to show that the pain is real? If an individual wants to ensure to another, that deception is not the case, and display one's own pain to convince others of one's honesty, how is that possible?
Because deception is possible, and it is impossible for us to convince others beyond the shadow of a doubt that we are not deceiving them concerning what's inside, your assumption that we "must be able to show others what is in the box" is not only inconsistent with Wittgenstein's example, but also inconsistent with lived experience.
Quoting jkg20
It appears to make sense that everyone's box might be empty, and that's why the others in this thread fall for this deceptive suggestion. Logically though, it makes no sense at all, because it directly contradicts the opening premise, that everyone has a box with something in it. That premise excludes the possibility of any box being empty. Furthermore, the premise indicates that "beetle" refers to what's in one's box, so if the box is empty the person practises deception when using that word. Therefore, it makes sense that everyone's box might be empty in the same way that deception makes sense (it is a real aspect of language use), and it makes sense in the same way that contradiction makes sense (it is a real aspect of Wittgenstein's analogy).
Quick addendum: re. the football player faking pain: I take Wittgenstein as promoting the idea that fake pain behaviour is not pain behaviour, even if it looks like it.
What I've been addressing as deception, Is the supposed conclusion Wittgenstein makes, that the box might even be empty. This possibility comes about through your ii, "nobody can show anybody else what is inside their box", in conjunction with Wittgenstein's suggestion that the people have a use for the word "beetle", which is other than to name the thing in the box.
Notice that this suggestion of another use, is inconsistent with the premise that "beetle" is the name for the thing in the box. In effect, what Wittgenstein has done is offered a second definition for "beetle". Only if we accept this second definition of "beetle" (the other use that people have for the word), which is inconsistent with the first definition (the word refers to the thing in the box), can we proceed to the conclusion that the box might be empty. However, this conclusion contradicts the premise that everyone has something in their box. We can see that the conclusion, which contradicts the premise, is only provided for by introducing a second definition of "beetle". In other word's it's derived from equivocation.
So, the two definitions of "beetle" are completely distinct. At the beginning of the analogy it refers to the thing in the box. At the end of the analogy, it is simply indicated that "beetle" has another use. This other use, whatever it might be, is completely unrelated to, and irrelevant to the thing in the box. The "beetle in the box" is completely and absolutely unrelated to the other use for "beetle. Anyone who assumes that there is some relation here does so by equivocation. So if we apply this back to "pain", then this other use for the word "pain" would be completely unrelated to anything any person felt. But that extreme separation is sort of nonsensical.
Quoting jkg20
Let me address this (iii) now. Wittgenstein has offered two distinct scenarios. One,(iii), that the meaning of "beetle" is determined solely by what's in the box ("beetle" refers necessarily to what's in the box), and the other, that there's a meaning for "beetle" which is completely distinct from what's in the box. We can see these two as the two limiting extremes for usage of the word. In reality, all instances of usage fall somewhere in between. So we can dismiss (iii) as inconsistent with reality.
This leads me to (ii), the idea that no one can show another what is inside their box. I think you and I both agree that communication is the act which shows another what is in the box. Therefore we can dismiss (ii) along with (iii). The only thing we're left with is (i), that there is something inside each box. So the analogy really tells us nothing about the relationship between language and what's inside, pain, or other feelings whatsoever, "what's in the box".
Quoting jkg20
This is why deception is relevant and significant. If we agree that communication is an act of showing another what's in the box, we have to account for why we sometimes there is deception, and we cannot distinguish the real showing from the fake showing. Fake pain behaviour is not pain behaviour, but we can be deceived into thinking that the fake pain behaviour is real pain behaviour. This makes our dismissal of (ii) "nobody can show any body else what is inside their box", a little bit ambiguous, needing qualification. We can show others what's in the box, but we can also hide (keep private) what is inside the box, through deception. The showing depends on how we choose to act.
Exactly, we are agreed:
Wittgenstien
Yes, showing, for me, that the language game itself is incoherent : the meaning of "beetle" cannot be entirely determined by necessarily private objects.
Wittgenstein is not saying that where everyone could look into each others boxes, that the things inside the box would nevertheless still have no place in a coherent language game with the word "beetle". As you say, the analogy itself is entirely silent on that.
For me we are being invited to conclude that people must be able to show each other their beetles, otherwise "beetle" never gets to really mean anything at all.
More tentatively, I think we are also being invited to reach for a conclusion that where we can all show each other what is inside our boxes, what is inside our boxes cannot vary too much without "beetle" losing its usefulness entirely. But there I meander a long way away from the text.
I'm talking about Wittgenstein's example at §293, in summary:
1. Suppose that everyone has a box with something in it which we call a "beetle".
2. Suppose that no one can ever look into anyone else's box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his own beetle. Then it would be possible for everyone to have something different in their box.
3. Suppose that the word "beetle" has a use in these people's language nonetheless.
4. Then the word "beetle" would not be as the name of a thing. The thing in the box does not belong to the language game at all. The box could effectively be empty, as this would make no difference to the language game or the meaning/use of the word "beetle".
There is no contradiction here. He doesn't say both that there is something and nothing in the box. He says only that if the word was to have a use in these people's language, then it would have no effect on the language game if the box was empty.
Yes it might be the case that this particular language-game, that the meaning of "beetle" is entirely determined by private objects. But it is also the case that the other language-game portrayed, the one in which the private objects are completely irrelevant, is also incoherent. Notice that there are two distinct language-games in this analogy, which are somewhat opposed in principle. Neither is acceptable as each is impossible in its own way.
Quoting jkg20
This might be the case, that we are invited to conclude that the only real language-game is the one in which we are able to show each other our beetles. But this is where the matter gets difficult. Can we actually show each other our beetles? Now deception is relevant. If I can deceive you, then I am not actually showing you my beetle. Furthermore, if any instance of what appears to you as me showing you my beetle might actually be an instance of deception, then I can never actually be showing you my beetle. I am actually doing something else So what am I actually doing, or showing you? It can't be more than a representation of my beetle, which may or may not be an accurate representation. Now we have no real language-game at all, because we are not actually capable of showing to another one's own beetle. We might try, through the use of language, but we are actually incapable.
But your conclusion, that "beetle" never really gets to mean anything is not quite correct, I believe. It's more appropriate to conclude that the meaning is indefinite. Now we're right back to the beginning premise, everyone has a beetle in the box, but with one important difference, not even the person who holds the box can see what's in it. If you could, you could properly represent it and show it to others, and this is what the possibility of deception demonstrates that we cannot do. So we assume that since others appear to have a similar box, then the thing which is within those other boxes might be similar as well. So we seek assistance from others, in an attempt to figure out and understand what is within one's own box.
Quoting Luke
These are the questionable statements. This use of "beetle" is something completely distinct from, other than, to refer to the thing in the box. So we have a second definition of "beetle" here, and an invitation to equivocate.
To avoid equivocation we must choose one of the two definitions of "beetle". If we choose the first, then it is impossible that any of the boxes are empty, and "beetle" necessarily refers to the thing in the box. If we choose the second, the entire "beetle in the box" scenario becomes completely irrelevant, because "beetle" has a complete different meaning dependent on some other use, and we know not what that other use is.
Quoting Luke
Yes there is contradiction because #1 and #3 define "beetle" in incompatible ways, and that is contradiction. Either "beetle" refers to the thing in the box, or it has a meaning prescribed by some other use, but to allow two incompatible definitions of the same word is to allow contradiction.
Look at #1, "beetle" is the name of something in the box. Now look at #4 , "beetle" is not used as the name of a thing. Do you see the contradiction now? #4 is a blatant contradiction of #1. I know that you'll want to excuse the contradiction, saying #4 is some sort of hypothetical, but so is #1 a hypothetical. So we have two distinct, and incompatible hypotheticals, (1&2) vs.(3&4). If taken together as one hypothetical "the beetle and the analogy", this hypothetical is self-contradicting.
Where do you infer this from?
Everyone uses the word "beetle" to refer to some unknown, inaccessible thing inside a box. You seem to accept this. It doesn't matter what the inaccessible thing in a box is, everyone calls it a "beetle" anyway. How does this change if there is nothing in a box? Everyone else's box is inaccessible and everyone would still call whatever is (or is not) in a box a "beetle" anyway. That's how the word is used and that's what it means. Your complaint that the word is supposed to refer to some positive thing and that it cannot refer to nothing carries no weight, because whatever is in a box makes no difference to the meaning or use of the word.
This is the point of the conditional, that if the word has a use in these people's language, then the word "beetle" would not be the name of a thing and this thing does not belong to the language game at all. The word would not be used to refer to anything in particular, but would only refer generally to whatever is in a box, which could include nothing. As Wittgenstein says: "The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something"
This is precisely what Wittgenstein has to deny, and it is indeed difficult, but I think he does deny it.
Accepting the antecedent of the inference you make above involves accepting the concealed premise that could be expressed in the first instance as: if there is no difference between the appearance of two things, in this case types of behaviour, there is no real difference in what they are. In itself, of course, that can be denied, since it is just a version of the unwarranted inference from appearance to reality. Nevertheless, if one does deny that inference, i.e. if one does accept that pain behaviour and fake pain behaviour can have the exactly the same appearance but may yet nevertheless be metaphysically entirely distinct phenomena, then the difficult question is to try to explain how we can be fooled into thinking someone is in pain: it seems that there just must be some common denominator between fake pain behaviour and pain behaviour, but if we accept that, then falling back into skepticism about us ever being able to show each other our pain seems inevitable.
This reminds me a little of the difficulties with the disjunctivist repsonses to the argument from halluncination in perception, which I suppose is no accident given that this started out as a thread on idealism.
Incidently, anyone who thinks idealism is dead could do worse than ressurect an old article by Mary Calkins, called "The idealist to the realist" : it is short and freely available on jstor. It dates from the 1920's, but most of the points it makes remain salient.
You are willfully ignoring what I wrote. The scenario of #4 where there is "nothing in the box", describes a completely different language-game, one completely different, and incompatible with #1, in which it is stipulated that there is something in the box. #4 contradicts #1 and is therefore not a possible scenario under the premise #1. Sure, my complaint "carries no weight" to you, because you are willing to ignore contradiction in an example. That is an indication of undisciplined philosophy. So your statement needs to be qualified, my complaint carries no wait to an undisciplined philosopher.
Quoting Luke
No, the point of 3 & 4 is stated explicitly as the word "beetle" has a use in these people's language which is other than, to refer to the thing in the box. Therefore the premises of 1&2 describe a language-game in which "beetle" refers to something in the box, and 3&4 describe a completely different, unrelated language-game, within which "beetle" is used in a completely different, unrelated way. And, these two distinct language-games cannot be united into one game, or represented as one game without contradiction.
What we can conclude from this demonstration, is as jkg20 implies, we cannot represent language, as a whole, as a language-game. This concept, that language use as a whole, can be represented as a language-game, is incoherent. We can represent distinct language-games, but since there is contradiction between these distinct games, as demonstrated by Wittgenstein's example, the idea that the distinct games being played, can be represented as one game, is a faulty idea because of this demonstrated incoherency.
Quoting Luke
The thing in the box has no place in that particular language-game, the one described by 3&4. However, the thing in the box plays an essential role in the other language-game, the one described by 1&2. Therefore the same word, "beetle", is employed in distinct language-games which have been described as incompatible with each other. Accordingly, we cannot say that the use of the word "beetle" is representable as a single language-game. That would be a faulty representation of language use.
Quoting jkg20
This is not really what I meant to be saying with the antecedent though. I take the possibility of deception for granted. We can say that deception is a real thing which evidently happens, and, due to its nature, we do not know that we have been deceived when it occurs. That is the key point, deception is unidentifiable, because if it is identified it is not deception, only an attempt to deceive. And the other point is that deception occurs. This is what validates skepticism. Since we can never be absolutely, purely, and ideally certain, even if it's only a one in a million chance that I am wrong, I have no way of knowing in which of those million instances I am wrong. If I knew it I would have corrected it. Therefore doubt is warranted in all those instances. Each instance can endlessly be reassessed for the possibility of mistake.
So, we must assume that in every instance there is the possibility of deception. If we could describe the situation as "the person is showing one's beetle", then there would be no possibility of deception. So we cannot describe the situation like that. Therefore we need to describe it in some other way. What is the person doing then, if not showing the beetle?
Quoting jkg20
This is why I proposed "representing" instead. The person is carrying out activity which appears to be "showing one's beetle", but cannot actually be described as such because of the possibility of deception.
So instead of "showing one's beetle" we could describe it as representing one's beetle, and this provides for the medium between what is expressed, and what is inside, allowing for the possibility of deception.
Furthermore, once we allow for this medium between what's inside (the beetle), and the person's actions, we can understand all sorts of possibilities for what the person is actually doing, rather than simply "representing". This idea of "representing" was proposed as a replacement for "showing", and so it was selected as similar to "showing". But once we dismiss "showing", then we have a complete separation between the beetle in the box (1&2 in my discussion with Luke above), and the 'other use' for the word (3&4). Theoretically, this 'other use' might not even be related to the beetle, as in the analogy. So we have a whole range (infinite possibility), of relations between what the person is doing, (representing, hiding, maybe even manipulating the beetle), and the beetle itself. There is nothing to indicate that any specific relation between the actions and the beetle is necessary. And this extends right to the extreme of the analogy, where the beetle might not even be related to what the person is doing. But this would imply nonsensical, random actions, so the extreme expressed in this analogy is doubtful.
The skepticism you refer to is good and healthy. It allows us to get beyond appearances and see things the way they really are. We do not know the relationship between what's inside (the beetle, or "pain" in this case), and our actions. We can talk about some possible relations, such as the actions are showing the inside, or representing the inside, and in morality we say that the inside (intention) has a causal effect on the actions, but we really do not understand these relations. There is no necessity here, in the sense of such and such inside feeling, pain for example, is necessarily expressed in this way. So, if someone claims that the person must be "showing one's beetle", in order that the person could act in a communicative way, it is good to approach such a statement with healthy skepticism, because there are many different relations between the person's actions and the beetle, which are evident in the different forms of communication. No particular relationship is necessary.
You are overlooking the crucial conditional. Again.
You are ignoring that the word has a use in these people's language.
I don't know whether it's a problem which is peculiar to English, but there is a difficulty in trying to describe the thing in the box without referring to it as a positive "thing", where it instead refers to either a something or a nothing. Yet, this is what the word "beetle" refers to: whatever is in the box, a something or a nothing. What would you call this instead of a "thing"? Is there a more neutral term?
You took issue with my earlier use of "contents" of the box, I suspect because this deflated your argument, but that's really what the word refers to - some unknown quantity, an algebraic 'x', some "thing" which might not be a thing, just whatever it is that is in the box....or not. Whatever is (or is not) inside the box is called a "beetle".
Can you think of a better word than "thing" for the contents of a box which could be anything or nothing; a non-positive synonym for "thing"; a thing which is "not even a something"?
Anyway, that's where I see you going wrong here. Obviously, apart from your complete misunderstanding of all of Wittgenstein's work, including his private language argument. To avoid further repetition, I'll leave it there.
No I'm not overlooking that. That is the second language-game referred to in 3&4, in which the word "beetle" is used, but which is completely distinct from the first language-game referred to in 1&2.
Quoting Luke
The second language game clearly has nothing to do with the thing in the box.
See, the people have a use for "beetle", but this use has nothing to do with the thing in the box. The thing in the box has absolutely no relevance in this language-game. "The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all;..."
Quoting Luke
We have absolutely no idea what the word "beetle" is used for in this second language-game. Wittgenstein gives us no indication of this, only that it does not refer to a thing, and that the thing in the box is completely irrelevant to this use.
You're clearly wrong to suggest that the word refers to a thing of any sort. And, I don't see why you would think that the box is relevant to this use at all. We are talking about a completely distinct language-game for the word "beetle". It could refer to someone's mother's behavior for all we know. There is no indication at all of what the word is used for in that second language-game, only that it does not refer to a thing, and that the thing in the box has no place in this language-game (therefore is completely irrelevant to this game).
Quoting Luke
The "contents of the box" is completely irrelevant in this second language-game. "Beetle" is used for something completely different. That is exactly what Wittgenstein says, whether you understand it or not. So just forget the idea that the contents, or even the box for that matter, is at all related to the use of "beetle" in this language-game. It is a completely different language-game from the language-game described at 1&2, in which "beetle" refers to something in a box.
I'm not sure about "unidentifiable" here, why isn't a case of deception just a successful attempt to deceive? After all, if each instance of deception were of necessity unidentifiable, no deception would ever be discovered, and so how would the notion of deception ever get a hold? The opposite take from yours would be that deception must be discoverable, and so identifiable, but to be deception it must of course allow for being, as a matter of fact, unidentified. Here we do not need a paradigm of deception in your sense, just the paradigm of sincere behaviour and the idea of an attempt to emulate that behaviour for, at least in some cases, deceitful purposes. So, if all deceptive behaviour must be identifiable as deception, that might entail, with some additional premises of course, that deceptive behaviour does not share a common denominator with sincere behaviour, and so sincere behaviour in the case of pain can really be a case of showing the world what is your box. This still leaves the tricky business of explaining how actual cases of deception work, but perhaps Wittgenstein would just say that it will vary from case to case and that no matter how many examples we produce we will not obtain a general principle that will apply to all cases.
.
I can think of many greater differences than the difference between mock and sincere pain behavoiur, the difference between pain behaviour and smoking calmly in an armchair, for instance. Pain behaviour and mock pain behaviour might be different, but there is also the apparent similarity to account for. If one suggests, quite naturally, that there is a common denominator between mock and genuine pain behaviour, e.g. the bodily movements, including the movements of the larynx and lips, then the question arises, "so what is added in the genuine case to distinguish it from the mock case?" The response, "it is not nothing but it is not something either " or "you are being lead astray by language" then just rings to some like a hollow refusal to engage with the issue.
Exactly, now you're catching on to what I'm saying, Luke. Thanks for the quote. How did you find that?
The "radical break" which Wittgenstein refers to is the second purpose for "beetle". In this second language-game, "beetle" has nothing to do with the thing in the box or even the box itself. When you see it this way, the appearance of contradiction and paradox disappears, and the situation is entirely comprehendible. No longer must "beetle" relate to some mysterious thing in the box which no one seems to have access to, we may dismiss the whole "beetle and box" scenario as completely irrelevant to what "beetle" is now used for.
However, once we make this radical break we cannot start referring back to the contrary premise, that "beetle" is somehow related to a thing in the box. If the thing in the box is reduced to nothing in relation to the meaning of "beetle", then we cannot talk about the meaning of "beetle" as if the thing is something within this use of "beetle". Therefore, in order that we can still talk about the thing in the box, which has already been named "beetle", we must respect that "beetle" has two very distinct, and absolutely incompatible uses, or meanings. If we equivocate we have contradiction. Consequently we have a radical break in "the purpose of language" ("beetle" is used in two incompatible ways), which forces the conclusion that language cannot be described as a single language-game. There are two distinct and incompatible types of "purpose for language"
In jkg20's term of "showing", we can characterize this radical break as honestly showing the beetle, and dishonestly not-showing the beetle. Notice the one kind of "purpose for language", in which the beetle is completely irrelevant (not-showing the beetle) is described as dishonesty. But I am arguing that the relationship between the individual and the beetle cannot be characterized as a matter of showing and not-showing. That relationship is far more complex, involving endless possibilities. The person does not even have access to one's own beetle when the intent is to honestly show the beetle (as is the case when one sees the physician for assistance in understanding one's own feelings).
Quoting jkg20
I suppose "unidentified" would be the better word then, but it doesn't change the argument. The successful attempt to deceive is unidentified as an attempt to decive. And, the fact that some attempts are identified as deception justifies the claim that there are likely others which go unidentified. If you change "unidentifiable" to "unidentified" you can proceed with the argument.
If we could truthfully describe the situation as "the person is showing one's beetle", there would be no possibility of deception, nothing concerning the beetle could be intentionally hidden or undisclosed, everything would be disclosed in the showing of the beetle, and there would be no such thing as deception. This is why the relationship between the person, and the beetle which is in one's box, cannot be described in these terms of "showing".
Furthermore, there would be the matter of unintentional not-showing which I alluded to in the prior post. But "showing" is an intentional act. The human being experiences all sorts of different feelings and emotions, and "showing" consists of putting words to these, or demonstrating their existence in some other way. Many of the feelings that a person has cannot even be adequately described by that individual. So a person doesn't even really get to see one's own beetle, and what appears like intentional deception may simply be an unintentional misunderstanding of one's own beetle.
Now we get to what I described in the prior post. We must find the means to apprehend our own beetles (internal feelings), if we are so inclined, and we do this by looking to others who have gone before us in this arduous process, for guidance. There is a "body of knowledge" which has been constructed and accumulated for this very purpose of apprehending one's own inner feelings. If, for example, you believe that you might be feeling what is called "pain" inside, you would go to see a physician who has studied the relevant knowledge, for guidance on understanding this feeling.
I don't see this as the issue that Wittgenstein seeks to address with his beetle in the box, which may explain why you find his so-called response(s) as "like a hollow refusal to engage with the issue". Almost (if not) always, Wittgenstein's concern is with language. I consider the beetle in the box to be an extension of his preceding comments on private language.
Quoting from the book Wittgenstein and His Interpreters: Essays in Memory of Gordon Baker, from a chapter by David G. Stern, who writes:
I offer this as a more appropriate reading of the issue of the beetle example. Framing the issue as a linguistic concern is also supported by what Wittgenstein immediately goes on to state in his next section:
Well if it were only language Wittgenstein was concerned with, then fine, nothing more need be said. However, I have met so called Wittgensteinians that feel that in being concerned with language Wittgenstein somehow managed to solve metaphysical problems along the way, rather than just avoiding them or, perhaps more charitably, expressing them in a different way.
Look at it this way Luke. Ask yourself, as Wittgenstein asks, what is the difference between pain-behaviour with pain and pain-behaviour without pain. You should find that the difference is exactly as described, the presence of pain in the one case, and the absence of pain in the other case. The latter we can call deception.
If you understand this, you'll see that the second language-game in the 'beetle in the box' analogy, the game in which the thing in the box is described as completely unnecessary and irrelevant, can be classed as deception, just like pain behaviour without pain is deception.
It is nevertheless a very real purpose for language, and therefore a very real type of language-game, but it is completely incompatible with the other type of language-game within which the thing in the box is an essential aspect. As philosophers we despise that second type of language game, (within which the thing in the box is irrelevant) as dishonest, despicable, and therefore unacceptable.
If Wittgenstein actually said this, it would just be a false statement, so it wouldn't really matter. But I doubt he actually said that because he's very careful not to make false statements. The fact is that we might, anyone of us, at any time, be deceived by mock pain-behaviour. The statement "I have a pain in my stomach" is pain-behaviour. Whenever someone believes a statement such as this, when it is not true, that person has been deceived by mock pain-behaviour.
Quoting jkg20
The obvious, and very simple answer, is that the difference is found in the difference between the existence, and non-existence of pain. We can begin with the assumption that there is behaviour which is meant to indicate the presence of pain, pain-behaviour. We cannot provide an adequate description which will separate real pain-behaviour from mock pain-behaviour sufficient to completely eliminate the possibility of mistake (deception), therefore the only reliable description is the logical determination, that one is associated with the real presence of pain, and the other not.
Therefore, instead of taking the route which dictates that the existence or non-existence of pain is irrelevant, because we might distinguish real pain-behaviour from mock pain-behaviour without addressing this question, we must address this question of what differentiates the existence of pain from the non-existence of pain.
This is compatible with the idea that we can nevertheless in some circumstances recognise genuine pain behaviour for what it is, i.e. the manifestation of pain. At least, you would need more argument to show that the mere fact that we can go wrong means that we can never get it right. What it is to get it right, of course, remains open for discussion, but the idea that getting it right means, at least sometimes, being directly confronted with someone's pain and not simply a representative intermediary of it, has still yet to be refuted as far as I can tell.
Well, to get it right requires an objective and verifiable definition of "pain". This is why Wittgenstein's whole issue, of whether or not we can know what pain is, from our own experience, is an important issue. And, his presupposed assumption which Luke clings to, that we cannot know what pain is simply from one's own experience, is correct in the first place. But that is because one person cannot decide how we define "pain". I cannot simply turn to what's inside and call whatever is there "pain", because I might be calling what others call pleasure, "pain". So the issue is the consensus as to what feelings fulfill the conditions of "pain.
This is why I argue that the "going wrong" is a lot more complicated than the simple possibility of being deceived by someone else. Far more often, the going wrong is a matter of not understanding what's inside oneself, the matter of not being able to see one's own beetle. Consider the following variation to Wittgenstein's beetle example. We all have something in the box at any time, but I'm feeling pain, you're feeling pleasure, someone else feels grief, another feels joy, and we're all calling whatever we feel by the name "beetle". I think this is what Wittgenstein meant when he said the thing might be continually changing. Clearly, to be able to communicate concerning these inner feelings we need to figure out how to identify and distinguish one feeling from another.
We do not do this by ourselves, one person doesn't simply say, I'm going to call this feeling pain, and that feeling pleasure, etc., we have to learn from others through some sort of empathy, and settle on agreement, or something like that. But then there really is no "correct", objective definition of pain, no genuine manifestation of pain, just whatever we agree is acceptable as deserving the label. This does not mean that the thing in the box is irrelevant though, it means that there is a multitude of things in the box which need to be identified and distinguished from each other and called by the acceptable names. And that's the real problem, we can't just look inside and call whatever is there "pain", as if we could look into the box and call whatever is there "beetle, we need to learn how to distinguish which feelings are called pain, which are called pleasure, etc..
Quoting jkg20
You can make that conclusion, but then we're right back to where we started, and that is having to deal with the matter of deception. Since there is no objective "pain", the question as to whether somebody suffers pain or not may be simply presented as an issue of correctly interpreting the person's behaviour, according to the agreed upon conditions of "pain". The acceptable definition of "pain" might be exhibiting such and such behaviour. So we're back to Luke's position where the beetle, (what the person is actually feeling as something separate from how the person is acting), is irrelevant. In your position, the person's actions are the beetle, the beetle is shown in one's actions, and there is nothing hidden in the box.
But, since there is a real, known difference between honestly expressing one's feelings, and deceptively expressing one's feelings, your conclusion has already been refuted. If there was no intermediary between one's pain, and one's expression of pain (pain behaviour) such deception would be impossible. If the intermediary was only added in the cases of deception, for the purpose of deceiving, it would be evident, the person would not be showing the beetle, creating a veil in between, when other times the person would be showing the beetle and there would be no veil. Therefore deception would be impossible.
The obvious rejoinder to this is dreams. Our own dreams are the equivalent to a beetle in a box as nobody else can experience a dream we have. And yet we can easily communicate dreams we remember to other people.
So how does that work? People do legitimately dream and they do legitimately talk and write about dreams remembered. We can't check their accuracy. But we can certainly understand what is being related, more or less.
And dreams are certainly private. Yes, we have tools today to tell when people are dreaming, more or less. But we can't tell what the content of their dreams are. Maybe someday dreams will be read out by some sophisticated scanner and machine learning software, and posted on Youtube for everyone to see. It won't be exactly the same as having the dream (the original emotions and feeling of the dream is exclusive to the dreamer), but we will at least get to watch them.
But until then, they are beetles in a box of our sleep.
That being said, I agree that ontological idealism is false, and tried desperately to argue against their positions in the past when it seemed idealism was the leading metaphysics of the forum at the time. But the scales have decisively tipped in the other direction since their departure.
So to even it just slightly, a problem for metaphysical realism is that it's prone to skepticism, which the simulation and BIV arguments demonstrate. If it's possible the world of perception is somehow an illusion, then idealism is less easy to dismiss. And really it goes back to the ancient problem of perception all the way up to the modern debate over consciousness, with stops along the way at Descartes, Hume, Kant and the more recent indirect/direct realism debate.
This is a good point, but the problems still exist even if you reframe the debate, as you mentioned in parentheses. It doesn't make the fundamental issues with perception, consciousness and language go away.
It's true that I'm part of the world, not a mind ontologically separated from it. But that doesn't mean my experience of the world is some unfiltered omniscient window onto things as they are such that I can dismiss philosophical concerns over knowledge and what exists.
Sometimes. But in many cases, it simply causes the question or the problem to disappear. Why? Well take consciousness -- the "hard problem." What's the problem, exactly? Someone has to tell us what "consciousness" is. Likewise with "God's existence." Why is that not a "hard problem"? It certainly was for centuries, but that essentially drifted away.
I think the same is true of the mind/body problem, which serves as the underlying assumption to all "problems" and investigations into perception, language, etc.
It was for centuries when monotheistic religions dominated culture, but now that people are free to argue against God's existence, and there are lots of good arguments at least calling it into question, the problem is not hard for non-believers.
Consciousness is a different matter because we all see colors, feel pains, hear sounds, etc. But those don't form the scientific theories we use to understand the world and the workings of our own bodies.
In neither case is it a matter of definition or word usage. It's rather a matter of what kind of world we live in.
You mean that Evolog guy? Maybe the bloke changed his avatar name to something less fancy, and changed his mind about terming things “objective idealism” to terming things “neutral monism”, thinking it to make the same difference anyway. The same way that “non-Cartesian skepticism” and “fallibilism” do. The tyke might still be around, I’m guessing. No offense in calling him a tyke, btw: my own avatar name “javra” translates to “mongrel”, in case it wasn’t known. But, then again, you might have had someone else in mind.
It's a good thing I only referred to real pain behaviour then, I guess.
Wittgenstein is silent on the issue of real vs. mock pain behaviour at §293 because that's not what he's talking about in that section. However, I understand that you and MU are interested in the question, so I agree that Wittgenstein is inconsiderate for not addressing it there.
Anyway, I only entered this discussion to correct MU's claim that Wittgenstein contradicts himself at §293, which I think I have done. MU won't agree, of course. I was foolish to think that he might actually try and understand Wittgenstein.
Here's that quote I mentioned. It probably won't satisfy radical sceptics, but Wittgenstein discusses pain and pain-behaviour throughout the late 200s/early 300s of Philosophical Investigations if you're interested:
I still do not see the impossibility you are talking about, although it might be there somewhere. Let's change the example. A fake Picasso and a genuine Picasso can both have exactly the same appearance. Nevertheless, a fake Picasso and a genuine Picasso are distinct things. Sure, both Picasso and the faker need the same materials in order to accomplish their goals. However, Picasso's goal is not to produce a genuine Picasso, he could hardly fail to do that after all. He is also not attempting to produce a representation of a genuine Picasso. The faker's goal, however, is precisely to do the latter. With genuine Picasso everything is there on the surface, so to speak. With a fake Picasso the story is much more complicated. In many cases, deception requires a lot more work than sincerity, although of course it can sometimes be hard to be honest as well.
Your "obvious rejoinder" could be any subjective sensation, but I think it misses the point of Wittgenstein's example. It is not about an inability to communicate regarding dreams or sensations. As I quoted earlier, the target of Wittgenstein's beetle example is the view that each of us "knows what 'pain' means only from one's own case, for it seems that it is the sensation one has that gives the word its meaning".
If I were to tell you that I had an amazing dream while driving to work the other day, you might think I must be talking about a day dream. If I were to insist that I was not day dreaming but really dreaming, then you would have to question whether I was using the word correctly and actually knew what a dream was.
This (hastily drawn) example is intended to show that we do not know the meaning of the word 'dream' only from our own case, nor is it the sensation of dreaming one has that gives the word its meaning. Otherwise, why should you not accept my story?
To repeat the dilemma I quoted earlier: "If what is in the box is relevant to the meaning of 'beetle' then no one else can understand what I mean by 'beetle'; and if 'beetle' is understood by others, it cannot signify what is in each person's private box."
If I understand Wittgenstein correctly (and I might not), then it is not the subjective experience of dreaming that determines the meaning of the word. Obviously, we are all taught how to use language, including words such as 'pain', 'dream', and 'remember', by others who cannot access one's private sensations. This all relates to Wittgenstein's remarks on the misguided notion of a private language.
To be cautious as W exegesis, I think you would need to add the qualifier "just" between the "not" and "the subjective experience". Some people read W as denying outright that the inner has any role to play at all in determining the meaning of words, which I do not think he does. What I think he does is challenge the idea that "inner" here means "necessarily private and unknowable to others". Anyway, that's my interpretation, which might be wrong of course.
That's an interesting take, but how do you reconcile it with the closing line of §293: "if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of ‘object and name’, the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant"?
I didn't say Wittgenstein contradicts himself, he's very careful not to do that. However he invites you to make an interpretation which requires contradiction by using two univocally distinct, and incompatible by way of contradiction, definitions of "beetle".
I argued that jAmEs' and your interpretation requires that Wittgenstein contradicted himself, therefore they are faulty interpretations. The second described use of "beetle" in the analogy, in which there might be nothing in the box, is a completely different and contradictory set of circumstances from the first described use, in which there is necessarily something in the box. There is a clean break between the two described language-games. If you interpret that the second described use is somehow related to the first described use, as you continue to, you imply that Wittgenstein contradicted himself.
Therefore if Wittgenstein did not contradict himself, you have a faulty interpretation, because you continue to relate the two senses of "beetle" in your faulty interpretation. It is only in the second definition of "beetle" that what is in the box is irrelevant. In the first sense of "beetle", what is in the box is very relevant.
Quoting jkg20
This example might not be so good, because what you question is the need to assume an intermediary between the internal feeling of pain (beetle), and the observable act. The intermediary, which allows for the existence of deception is an activity which lies unobservable between the observable behaviour and the internal intention, veiling the intention. The existence of unobservable activity, and its role as the intermediary between the internal "beetle", and the outward observable action, is what allows for the occurrence of deception. Therefore the observer never has a clear, unobstructed view of the internal feeling, because one is always looking through the veil of unobservable activity. The important concept here is unobservable activity.
Would you agree that there is never a direct and necessary cause/effect relation between the internal feeling, and the outward action, such that we could look at action Y and say it was directly caused by feeling X? There is internal, unobservable activity between these two. And this is why we cannot say that we observe directly the inner feeling, or even deduce the inner feeling from the outer act. Consider a reflexologist who taps the knee with a hammer. The fact that this medical specialist can make determinations about one's neurological system, from this act, indicates that there is not a direct cause/effect relation between the hammer tapping, and the physical response. There is unobserved activity in the neurological system which lies between. In this case, the neurological medium is at the unconscious level, but we are talking about activity at the conscious level. From the perspective of the consciousness and self-reflection, the neurological medium between the outward act, and the internal feeling, appears to us as intention instead.
So consider your example. We are concerned with human activity, and distinguishing the genuine from the insincere. In the example, we have two finished products, two distinct paintings. The actions themselves, of the people doing the painting, is unobservable. This action is the intermediary, and if we could observe it, we would see how different the two actions actually are, we'd see that the forger is copying certain techniques. In the case of language, we have words as the finished product. The genuine and the insincere might appear as exactly the same words, especially in the written form where we cannot see the person's mannerisms ( and the proverbial "lying eyes"). However, if we could see the activity which is the thinking responsible for choosing the words, we'd see the difference. This activity, the thinking is the intermediary, unobservable activity.
Now we can proceed to observable activity itself, behaviour, of which speaking words is a type. So speaking words can be our example of behavioural activity. We can understand that the thinking activity by which a person chooses words, is in some way directed by intention. And it is the intention itself which is judged as either genuine or insincere. The unobservable activity of thinking is between the observable activity, and the intention, making the intention inaccessible through cause/effect analysis of the observable activity.
I might have misunderstood you then. I was under the impression that your view was that pain behaviour is the intermediary in cases of both genuine and fake pain. Now though you seem to be suggesting that the intermediary is also hidden. I'm not sure I understand that, but it might just be lack of imagination on my part.
This might be Wittgenstein's position, and it might appear to be true logically, because if the object is necessarily private, it cannot be observed, and therefore one might say that it ought not be considered. But that would be faulty logic. Being private, and unobservable does not necessitate that the object cannot be relevant, and cannot be known. We can consider a private cause with only an observable effect, as a relevant cause, and that cause as potentially knowable through understanding the effect.
Quoting jkg20
I was saying that there is necessarily an intermediary, in order that deception is possible. The intermediary disallows us from saying that the beetle could be shown, because we can't see past the intermediary. The intermediary, like a blind, could be partially seen and partially hidden. We see one side of the blind, but not the other side. So if we look at "pain behaviour", we see some of that behaviour, what is exposed to us, but not all of it because the other side is not exposed. We do not see the internal neurological activity and the thinking, but we hear the noises and see other actions. The internal thing, which we might say "causes" the observable activity is the unobservable side of the blind. It is a part of the behaviour, but an unobservable part. You might assume a direct causal relation between the pain and the behaviour, and therefore believe that the behaviour is a direct indicator of the pain, but deception demonstrates that this is incorrect, because intention plays a causal role in the behaviour as well. Therefore we cannot accept that the behaviour provides a direct indication of the feeling, because we haven't accounted for the influence of intention.
But It has to play a role because we talk about our subjective experiences. It would be absurd to relate my dream to you if my dream played no role in the language game, because then what the hell would I be talking about and how could you understand it?
But maybe I misunderstand the private language argument.
That's just not true. If it were so easy as simply being a "matter of what kind of world we live in," then we'd all still believe in Ishtar and Yhw and a geocentric universe. Words, word usage, meanings, etc., play an indispensable role in science AND folk science, as well as average everyday existence. There's no way around it.
We wouldn't because they don't exist and aren't consistent with our universe, but the kind of world we live in is no simple matter to figure out. That's why we had those crazy beliefs, and it's why philosophy kind of started with skepticism.
They don't exist? Do numbers exist? Depends on the meaning of "existence" -- which is a word, with various meanings. Guess that matters.
"Consistent with our universe" is meaningless. Maybe it implies some correspondence idea of knowledge, I don't know.
Regardless, your claim was that words and word usage doesn't matter. That's still completely wrong.
Could you explain how the beetle can be shown? I understand it to represent the subjective aspect of a sensation, or in philosophical jargon: qualia. This is what sections 296 and 298 that I quoted earlier appear to indicate; e.g. the 'something' that "accompanies my cry of pain" (which is "important" and "frightful").
There lies the rub. To be honest, I am not certain that this interpretation of W is correct, nor that the ideas I am trying to force on him do so either. I am trying to see if there is room for both the general Wittgensteinian position that "nothing is hidden, everything is on the surface" on the one had, and the idea that pain behaviour and mock pain behaviour are distinct things. If they are distinct, then it is fairly natural to think that the difference lies in what the actors are feeling, but if everything is on the surface, then so is what they are feeling. In the end, it may not be a tenable position, but I have yet to see an out and out contradiction in it.
I'm not interested in substituting discussions of philosophical issues for debating semantics. If that's what philosophy amounted to, then it would be a sub-discipline of linguistics.
Sure, if we're going to debate the existence of numbers, it's helpful to state what that means and what's being argued. But to insist that the debate is over the definition of existence, numbers or math is to misunderstand the argument.
Quoting Xtrix
It matters for how we say things and what we mean. It doesn't matter a lick for what is the case.
It is meaningful when you take into account the cosmology of the ancients who believed in those deities compared to cosmology today. Yahweh literally sat on a throne positioned above the visible stars, which were angels. Heaven was located in outer space. The earth had corners and the sky was held up by pillars, with a firmament that separated the water above from the Earth below. Hell, or Sheol, was a literal cavern in the ground where the dead went to wait.
The supernatural or spiritual realm wasn't some separate other plane of existence. It was part of the same cosmos.
That the beetle cannot be shown is the condition laid out in the premise, which makes the two uses of "beetle" completely separate, distinct, and incompatible with each other. If what I call "beetle" can never be corroborated with what you or anyone else calls "beetle", because we cannot see inside another's box, yet we still use a sense of "beetle" which is meaningful to us, then the two senses of "beetle" must be completely distinct and incompatible. If we could see inside each other's boxes, we could attribute that meaningful sense of "beetle" to the similarities of the thing
Luke's mistake is to dismiss the first sense of "beetle" as an invalid sense, through the devised loophole of finding similarity in "contents of the box" rather than within the thing in the box as stipulated by Wittgenstein. So the second sense of "beetle" is still related indirectly to the thing in the box by referring to the box instead of the thing. This loophole interpretation is the one which creates the contradiction between 'there is something in the box' and 'there might be nothing in the box'. This is the mistaken interpretation of those who believe that Wittgenstein demonstrated the impossibility of private language.
Wittgenstein's mistake is that he did not turn inward in self-reflection to understand the inner aspects of the human mind, in order to understand that not even the owner of the box can see the beetle. This would have revealed to him, the aspect of language which no one has the capacity to understand, that part of language which refers to the private. Instead, he presents the internal as accessible to the individual, one's own beetle can be seen by that individual, which is a false premise. And this is what is clearly lacking in Wittgenstein's analysis of language. He appears incognizant of the fact that language can be used to refer to the unknown, so he does not ever get to the point of presenting language in its natural form, instead he presents it as being constrained by knowledge.
This seems really odd. It sounds like you are suggesting there could be words and phrases in a language that cannot be understood by anyone. Perhaps I am biased, but wouldn't a word or phrase at least have to be understandable by someone to count as part of a language? I am unsure that I am right about W, but I am even less sure that you are.
Whether you are a realist or an idealist, certainly it, i.e. word usage, matters a lick for our capacity to find out, understand and express what is the case. That alone makes examining how words are used a useful activity for philosophers to engage in.
The joy is in the proof that other individuals exist, and we celebrate those who prove, through poetry, that we have our own. We are all valuable.
Eh that's just nonsense. First of all, linguistics has plenty of overlap with philosophy. Second, it's not a matter of "substitute" -- you cannot discuss or engage in philosophy at all without a semantic component. Ever. So to divide this into "semantics" on the one hand and "philosophical issues" on the other is pretty absurd.
Quoting Marchesk
Yes, it does. "What is the case" itself is completely meaningless otherwise. The very statement, "what is the case," itself has a meaning. In this case, it implies something beyond "merely" debating words and definitions.
No one is saying we should ONLY debate definitions. If this is what you're attributing to me, you're wrong. We don't put all action or investigation on hold until we settle on a definition.
On the other hand, all action and investigation is conducted on the basis of tacit meanings -- otherwise it'd be a matter of pure instinct.
Right, in that case it was "consistent with the universe" too.
I'm saying that there is part of language which cannot be understood. In other words it is impossible for anyone to completely understand the thing which we call "language". You might extend this also to imply that any particular instance of usage cannot be understood with absolute clarity and certainty. There is no absolutely correct, ideal meaning of a word or phrase. This is due to "the beetle in the box" being unknowable, even to the one holding the box. So if for example meaning is what is meant by the speaker of the word or phrase, even the speaker is not absolutely certain of what is meant. And if meaning is attributed to use, not even the speaker is absolutely certain of the purpose of the word or phrase.
Quoting jkg20
This is not W's position, it is mine, and it's where I think W went wrong. W described the person holding the box as being able to see the beetle, I describe the person as incapable of apprehending the beetle. My perspective resolves the incompatibility between having the meaning of "beetle" based in what's in the box, and having the meaning of "beetle" based in how people use the word. We can use "beetle" to refer to what's in the box, without knowing what's in the box. W did not entertain this possibility because he started in the Tractatus with the assumption that a word always had to refer to something, to have meaning. When he later realized that this wasn't true, in the PI he introduced the idea of "use" to understand meaning, meaning is derived from use. Those are the two, very distinct, sources of meaning described in the beetle in the box analogy. What Wittgenstein doesn't proceed to consider as a possibility, is the instances when a word is used to refer to an unknown thing. There's something (a beetle) in the box but it's not known what it is. In reality, the unknown plays a very important role in meaning, it makes an appearance to some degree in all usage. But it's difficult for most people to relate to unknown meaning.
This certainly made me re-think my position.
One way of looking at it is to re-visit what Wittgenstein says at §304. He admits that there is a difference between real and mock pain behaviour. ("What greater difference could there be?") Regarding the sensation itself, he affirms that it is not a Nothing; "only that a Nothing would render the same service as a Something about which nothing could be said". The private sensation is real, but nothing can be said about it; nothing further about it can be described or discussed in our public language. I think the same issue arises in more recent philosophical discussions such as 'Mary's Room' and the like.
Regarding your example, you are correct that "the difference lies in what the actors are feeling", since the distinction is between pain behaviour with pain and pain behaviour without pain. The difference is, obviously, the pain (having it or not having it). What is hidden, if anything, is what pain feels like for me, compared to what it feels like for you. Is it the same? We can't talk about it, so who knows? It won't affect the meaning or use of the word 'pain' anyway. Regardless of what it feels like internally for each of us, reactions to pain, or pain behaviours, tend to appear similar across genuine cases, which may help to explain why someone can pretend to be in pain. This public exhibition also seems the more likely determinant of the meaning/use of the word 'pain'.
I haven't seen that it's been very successful in resolving philosophical issues.
But it wasn't. Their cosmology was wrong.
The point is that debating meanings does not resolve debates such as realism/idealism, because the nature of the world does not depend on our language usage. Nor does our ability to know, for that matter.
I suppose that would depend on what you mean by the phrase "resolving a philosophical issue". I certainly know from experience that some people will stubbornly maintain an incoherent position even when it is pointed out to them that they are using words inappropriately when they try to express what they mean. Often such people resort to the Humpty Dumpty position that they can define the words the way they like. Finally, when that point is reached there is nothing to do but walk away from the discussion. So, if by successfully resolving philosophical issues, you mean convincing other people to change their minds, examining word use is not always effective. That I grant you. Sometimes, however, it is effective, and I have certainly had the wool pulled from my eyes by a person pointing out to me a subtle distinction in the use of words. However, you might have a more restrictive notion of what it would take to resolve a philosophical issue than I do. You may even have a more restrictive notion of what counts as a philosophical issue in the first place.
I'm not convinced about this, although perhaps it doesn't matter to the point you are making. I remember having sciatic pain described to me, before I ever had sciatica, as like having streaks of burning electricity pulsing down the leg. Then, one day, I felt something those words described well and it occurred to me that I was sufferring from sciatica, and my self diagnosis turned out to be spot on. So, whilst I certainly cannot feel another person's pain for them, just as I cannot doff their cap for them, I can feel same pain another person feels, I can take the cap from their head and doff with it myself, and we can, it seems, usefully describe to each other exactly what it is we are feeling. But perhaps there is a way of interpreting that story as well such that the inner drops out of the picture.
I had considered this sort of thing, but I wonder if it isn't more of a comparison - a simile or metaphor - rather than a direct description. It reminds me of the cliche "tastes like chicken" which isn't a very helpful description of taste, although it may give some idea. Come to think of it, it's funny how we generally describe the taste of most foods as the food itself, or in terms of one of the five basic taste descriptions (including salt-y), rather than in more specific terms. Anyway, I guess the question could become one of degree regarding what makes a (useful?) description.
Nonetheless, I think it makes sense to say that one can't compare their subjective experience to someone else's and that these private sensations are what some philosophers have assumed to give words their meanings. As noted in the SEP article on Private Language:
Point taken, descriptions of pains often resort to metaphor. But how about descriptions of afterimages? It doesn't seem to be a metaphorical or non literal use of colour and shape vocabularly when we describe them.
This is the faulty logic right here. If the difference between real pain behaviour and mock pain behaviour is the presence of real pain, you cannot proceed to your conclusion of "regardless of what it feels like internally for each of us", and make your judgement as to whether there is real pain based on people having similar behaviour. We must address the similarity of the feeling inside to avoid deception.
In other words, you cannot say: 1. The difference is the pain, either having it or not having it. And also say: 2. It does not matter what pain actually feels like to anyone of us, so long as the person behaves in a pain-like way, then there is pain. These two propositions are inconsistent. The first makes "pain" an internal feeling which one must have, thus requiring consistency in the naming of that feeling, while the second makes "pain" something that people are judged to have based on their behaviour, while consistency in the named feeling is irrelevant. The criteria for "pain", i.e. the definitions of that word, are completely distinct.
Therefore we have to turn to the internal thing, the thing which is called pain, to establish principles to differentiate real pain behaviour from mock pain behaviour. This is where Wittgenstein fails as you describe. "The private sensation is real, but nothing can be said about it; nothing further about it can be described or discussed in our public language." By claiming nothing can be said about this internal, private thing, he leaves us completely vulnerable, without any principles to address deception.
Lots can be said about it. In fact, it is what we are doing here: distinguishing real pain behaviour from mock pain behaviour. Our words are doing it. When we encounter someone doing one or the other, these words describe that difference. We can in fact describe it to others, "That is mock behaviour" or "That person is genuinely in pain" perfectly.
In either case, we have spoken about it in words. Wittgenstein is giving us what address the the deception in speech: there is no private language, the so called "private" thing was never private in the first place.
"Feels like" has similar publicity. I can know what other people feel. My experience may take on similar sensation. Here the topic has moved on from words. In this situation, we are not asking about what words are used, but whether someone feels the same as another. It's not a move from words to knowledge, but a sensation experience all along.
The lesson here is not to get fooled into thinking a specific language used (or not used) here makes a difference. When we are dealing with publicity, we are dealing with whether some people feel or understand as others do, whether it be a language, what happened yesterday or what someone is feeling. Such communication is defined by the existence of certain experiences in the people in question. It is something our experience does.
We might well talk about it, if we speak the same language about it. All we need are our words, which have specific references to our feeling of pain, such that when one of us hears the words, we experience awareness of the pain in question. "What pain feel like to me," whatever that entails (which varies and may be a host of different thing, depending on the pain we are talking about), just needs to be communicated.
It's not there is nothing to say about it, but that we cannot get at it from outside itself. There isn't one certain concept which we can derive what someone else is feeling.
Quoting Luke
So these aren't really telling us anything. Yes, they might be evidence someone is in pain... but that only functions if those behaviours are (and are known to be, in these instances) correlated with pain. In effect, to recognise a "pain behaviour," we have to already be aware the person is in pain. We have to know an instance of pain occurring before sorting a person's behaviour into "pain behaviour."
Wrong to us, yes. But this itself assumes some correspondence theory of truth about something "out there." That itself is the subject/object assumption.
Quoting Marchesk
Our ability to know, and our language use, does not influence the nature of the world? And exactly what is that "nature of the world" outside of our knowing and talking about it? Please enlighten me.
You believe in a correspondence theory of truth, assuming some "thing" is out there, some nature or universe, which we may try to 'read off' and understand but which isn't dependent on us at all. But anything, even that very belief, comes out of the human mind and is therefore bound by interpretation and perspective, which in turn are shaped by our values and beliefs, which likewise are shaped by our social worlds in which we get grow and develop. Maybe it's some "thing in itself" outside of our representations, but in that case you're simply talking about Kant.
I agree with this, that the so-called "private thing" is not private, but not for the reasons you give, nor what Wittgenstein implies. It is not "private" because no one has access to it, not even the person who feels it. The feeling is just a representation of what is really there. So we cannot say that the thing there, "the beetle" is private, because the person whom we assume has ownership of it does not even have access to it. But this does not make it public. It is internal and inaccessible, like Kant's thing in itself is external and inaccessible. The person who feels the pain only has access to a representation of what is being sensed, just like any other sensation. The feeling is a representation, not the thing itself.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
What I said above necessitates a private language. What appears to me, "the sensation", is distinct from any sensation which appears to you. Therefore the language which I use to refer to my sensations is inherently different from the language you use to refer to your sensations. I use symbols to refer to my sensations, you do the same. The sensations are not the same, so it's not the same language. Now we must communicate, agree, and conventionalize a common, or public language. As Wittgenstein demonstrates, the public language is completely distinct and incompatible with the private language, being developed for completely distinct purposes. That's what Wittgenstein demonstrates, that the private languages which we all use are distinct, incompatible, and not translatable to public languages, but not that private languages are impossible. To the contrary, we can see that private languages are necessary.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
How can you know what another person feels, when the person who has the feeling cannot even know that? Suppose I have a feeling, and I want to give it a name in the public language, so I call it "pain". How can I know that I am properly using the word "pain"? I can judge by other people's behaviour, like Luke says, but how can I get beyond the possibility of deception in that behaviour? It's not like a sensation occurs to me, and says to me, you must call me by this name because that's what I am. There is nothing but behaviour (speaking for example) to indicate to me how to use the words to refer to my feelings in the public language. So I cannot ever be certain.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Right, so how are we going to confirm this, that people feel or understand the same way as others? The incompatibility between the private language, by which the individual understands one's own feelings, and the public language, by which we talk about our feelings, demonstrates that it is impossible to confirm this.
Let me just make sure I understand your position. You believe that pain involves three things:
1. Pain behaviour, including talk, which is entirely public.
2. A sensation of pain, private to the person feeling pain that nobody else but that person can get access to.
3. Something, that the above mentioned sensation represents, and that nobody has any understanding of, including the person feeling the sensation.
I'm not asking for your arguments or your reasons for thinking this for the moment, I just want to make sure I've been able to extract the basis of your position from everything you have been saying.
If that's so, then acting like an idealist or not might be an external question, with emotive consequences. Certainly ordinary people (and philosophers!) really don't like idealism, and it's a fascinating psychological question why.
It may be cultural: in India, regular people are often idealists, in my experience. This is especially interesting if it's really true there's no cognitive content there. Why then do people get so upset? My guess is that it really is cultural, and hearing an idealist thesis triggers deep feelings of alarm at having one's culture questioned.
I would not quite agree with #3. I think we do have some knowledge of this "something", but limited knowledge. We obtain this knowledge through experience and logical process, in the same way that we obtain knowledge about anything. But the inward looking is a bit of an inversion to the outward looking so it requires a different process. A large part of this "something" is unknown, just like a large part of the external universe is unknown.
I may have misspoken when I stated earlier: "What is hidden, if anything, is what pain feels like for me, compared to what it feels like for you. Is it the same? We can't talk about it, so who knows?"
We can talk about it, but only in our public language (the same applies to our talk of afterimages or dream contents). I should have said that we can't talk about it using some private language that describes how it feels exclusively for me or exclusively for you. The point is that the meaning of a sensation word such as 'pain' is not derived from any individual's experience of that sensation. Rather than getting caught up in what we can and can't talk about (using public language) regarding sensations, I should instead follow Wittgenstein to say that the private aspect of an experience (assuming that there is one), "drops out of consideration as irrelevant" with regard to the meaning of a word like 'pain'.
You expect that Wittgenstein's philosophy should enable us to prevent deception?
1: For the person feeling a pain, the pain sensations they have represent some other thing or process.
2: For that person to really be in pain, the pain sensation must correctly represent the presence or occurrence of that other thing.
3: Where there is representation there is the possibility of misrepresentation.
4: So a person could be having pain sensations, but not actually be in pain because those sensations are incorrectly representing the presence of that other thing.
You don't need correspondence for realism to be the case. Deflation is another option. But setting aside the question of realism, ancient cosmology has been shown to be wrong epistemologically, without making any assumptions about what science tells us regarding the nature of reality.
It's no different than the flat earth people, except the ancient people didn't have the as good of evidence to work out that the world was round (and yet some did manage to do so). And the world being spherical (roughly) is something verifiable.
My notion is that it a consensus can be reached by professional philosophers. Ongoing debate tells me a consensus has not been reached regarding many issues, and so the last century of analyzing language has failed to be as successful as originally intended.
If we're going to debate anything, we have to use language. That doesn't mean the thing being debated is dependent on language. Analyzing the language usage of "social distance" and "flattening the curve" isn't going to tell us how long to continue to doing both, for example. That's a matter for the epidemiology of Covid-19 and health care capacity balanced against economic concerns.
Nor would analyzing he terminology of QM tell us the proper interpretation for the measurement problem. It would only help us understand what's being debated.
Even though we have to use it?
We also have to use our bodies. Does that make the world dependent on our hands, eyes, brains? Then again, this is philosophy and Berkeley thought things were dependent on being perceived.
I would say no, science shows us the world doesn't depend on us. QM and Covid-19 don't care what words we use.
I think it's worth being able to explore the questions raised. Humans are prone to wax philosophical anyway. But maybe finding resolution is a matter for science, where science can provide answers. At least we're not still stuck with the five elements of Aristotle or ancient atomism.
No, it makes the debate dependent on them.
Addendum, of course for W, the analysis of language will also have a role to play, but a different one, with the residual purely philosophical questions.
Sure, in a sense you're right. But in another, this is missing the point, because debates are usually about things and not the words themselves. Or at least they start out that way.
Which is ironic, because we're now debating word usage. Which seems to happen too often in these philosophical disputes. But let's agree. Debates depend on word usage. Okay, so how does that answer the realism/idealism question?
Because if I want to know whether the world is ideal or real, defining the terms doesn't answer the question. It just leaves a puzzle.
Alright, that sounds reasonable. But let's take the hard problem debate. It's not known whether science can resolve it. Philosophers like Chalmers argue science can't. Sow here does that leave the debate? Should we dismiss it as meaningless? But what if I find it meaningful and understand what's being argued? I know where Dennett and Chalmers disagree, and it's not over the meaning of qualia. It's over whether qualia exist.
If it were just the two of them creating a new thread on here, sure. But it's been an ongoing debate among many philosophers for several decades now. So if it were just a conceptual confusion, you would think someone would have pointed that out by now, and all the rest of the philosophers engaged in the debate would have been like, "Oh yeah! How did I not see that? Moving along ...".
But that doesn't happen. So either Witty diagnosed some really deep and difficult problem with philosophy. One that's hard to root out. Or his approach doesn't work for long standing and well known disputes, because maybe they're about something more than proper use of language.
The thing is that it's not like professional philosophers don't know about Wittgenstein, or Carnap or Sextus. And the other thing is that determining how correct Witty was depends, at least in part, on analyzing his language use. And there is some disagreement over that.
But maybe philosophers are just a cursed lot who love to argue.
I don't think so. There could well be systematic reasons why some conceptual disputes can't get cleared up, because we lack the cognitive ability to understand how we're confused, or to see how people think differently from each other, or use words semantically blindly. In fact that seems plausible, since lots of conceptual disputes just sort of go on forever.
Alternatively, it could be that only questions that are conceptually confused in this way in perpetuity are labeled philosophical, so by definition philosophical questions are conceptually confused without resolution.
But popular debates usually have a long history with people coming at them from many different angles. We could go back and say, well Chalmers messed up here using that terminology, and Dennett failed to understand the argument there, and so on. But what about Nagel, Frank, etc? They all present their own arguments and starting points.
Quoting jkg20
If there can't even be a consensus on whether getting clear about language resolves philosophical disputes, then why suppose it does?
Cognitive closure is one possibility that McGinn has put forward for difficult philosophical problems. But it's not a very popular position, because it smacks of "mysterianism", and if you can ask a question, you should have the means to answer it, in principle. A dog doesn't understand relativity because it can't grasp the concepts. A dog can't even ask questions about it. Or so the counter argument goes.
Quoting Snakes Alive
Sure, I'm not saying it's not useful or not important to philosophy. I'm expressing my skepticism that most philosophical debates are really about language misuse, and thus can be resolved by proper linguistic analysis. Or at least not the long-standing metaphysical ones, because those have been expressed in so many ways across cultures and different languages. You would think that if the realism/idealism debate was fundamentally a language mistake, then somebody would have pointed that out long ago, dissolving the matter.
Let's take an example from a real life incident that remains a mystery. The Dyatlov Pass is where nine Russian ski-hikers died during a 1959 winter trek in the Ural mountains. There are 70 some theories, and bunch of books on Amazon you can read on the case. The original investigation concluded that some unknown compelling force was responsible. The lead investigator, interviewed decades later, said that "fire orbs" were involved, but the higher ups wanted to shut down the investigation.
Something real did happen to those hikers. But the evidence is insufficient to decide which theory proposed so far, or even category of theory, is correct. So the debate continues on for those who remain interested, like with Jack the Ripper or other famous unsolved cases.
So what does that have to do with philosophy? It's an example where the ongoing debate is not one of language, and it won't be solved by analyzing terms used in the debate.
I'm sure Dennett or Chalmers or whoever have made mistakes in their arguments, and misused words. But that doesn't mean the issue itself is resolved. If it is, I'd be curious to see examples.
Not to my knowledge. But I'm not sure that absence of evidence in this case can be taken to provide evidence of absence.
Reminds of that interesting NY Times article a few years back about how philosophers in general have failed to take the latter Wittgenstein's arguments seriously enough. Whether he was right or wrong, his position warranted serious investigation.
I'll admit that I tend to dismiss him out of hand because I just can't believe that substantial philosophical arguments are mostly just language on holiday.
Haha, that's funny. Philosophy has a long history of rooting out and exposing deception. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle all addressed sophistry as a significant problem inherent within the educational institutions of the day. Then came skepticism. Now we have all sorts of modern attacks on deception, starting with Descartes. I believe that a philosophy with no principles for the recognition of deception, to distinguish real knowledge from fake knowledge, is useless, and not actually philosophy. But many, perhaps you, believe that philosophy is useless.
Quoting jkg20
I believe "process" is the better word here. And this is important to the topic of the thread, "idealism" because most forms of idealism represent ideas as static passive things. This is the problem Plato identified in Pythagorean idealism with the theory of participation, an inherent problem which Aristotle greatly expanded on to decisively refute that form of idealism. In this idealism,the thing being participated in, the idea is necessarily passive. That's a problem in metaphysics, which leads to the accusation by monists, that eternal ideas cannot have any causal affect in the world.
Also, as I tried to explain earlier, I would not call the sensation a representation. I think that this is a mistake which we get from Kant, who describes sensations as representations. From the philosophy of semiotics we can see that biological activities can be described in terms of "signs". The significance of a sign is described in terms of meaning, not in terms of representation. We can get some insight into this difference through Wittgenstein's two ways of describing meaning, as representation in the Tractatus, and as use in PI. We can understand that any sign, such as a word for example, has significance or meaning, which might or might not be accurately called a representation.
So, I first look at the sensation as a product, created by the biological systems. The biological systems use semiosis to create the sensation. Since we cannot conclude that the significance of a sign is necessarily as a representation, we cannot conclude that a sensation is a representation.
Quoting jkg20
If my explanation of #1 wasn't complicated enough, this is where things start to get complex. For a person to be really "in pain", we need a definition of what constitutes "pain". So now we have to turn to the public use of language, as "pain" is a word in the public communication system, and we need to look for the so-called objective definition of pain. If we were staying within the private realm, I could have a sensation, and mark it as S, and every time I had a similar sensation I'd call it S. If my judgement was good, I'd have consistency, in what S refers to. But S would probably refer to something very specific, a head ache, a sore thumb, or any other specific sensation, like when I call another person or animal by a particular name. When we go to the public sphere however, we allow our words to have extremely generalized and vague meaning, because the application, usage, in communication rather than naming particular sensations, is extremely varied. If "pain" could only refer to a sore thumb, then we'd need another word for a sore finger, and sore toes, legs, hands, etc. So "pain" being a public word in the domain of communication, rather than a private sign for a person's own internal usage, has a significantly vague meaning.
Furthermore, we now have the issue of the internal process which is being referred to with the word "pain". To judge whether a person is really in pain or not, we are looking on as an external observer, with an understanding of the public word, "pain". So we would be judging whether the person's sensation corresponds with "pain" as defined. Therefore in judging whether the person is really experiencing pain, and what we would call "real pain", we do not even approach this internal relation between the sensation, and the thing which the sensation is symbolic of. To put this in Kant's terms, we are judging the phenomena, the sensation, we are not getting to the noumena. But I do not agree with Kant, that we cannot get to the noumena, we actually do get to them through the private experience of reflection, and apprehension of the intelligible objects themselves, directly as intelligible objects, as described by Plato.
But here we are faced with the incompatibility. The intelligible object presents itself to us in the form of a symbol, a sign, which is a static thing. The sign though symbolizes something active, a process. The true intelligible object is active. So we have a gap to bridge. The true thing-itself is the process which is symbolized by the sign. Idealism assumes a static "idea", and asserts that this static thing is the true intelligible object, which in its own interpretations it is, but this static thing can only be a sign, or symbol of the underlying process (a "representation" of it, which is not even properly called a representation), and that process remains within the realm of the unintelligible for idealism. But actually we do have access to this process, to understand it, through understanding this relation between the sign and the process, which people call "representation", but more properly known as significance or meaning, because a static thing cannot correctly represent an activity.
Quoting jkg20
Yes, and the problem is far deeper than that simple representation you offer. What is called a "representation" is most likely not even a representation at all. Therefore we cannot start with the assumption of representation. This is the problem which Socrates demonstrate way back in Plato's Theaetetus, and Wittgenstein demonstrated in the Tractatus. If we start with the assumption that knowledge consists of representation, then knowledge must be correct, or "true" representation. Now we have Socrates' problem of how false representation is excluded from knowledge. It appears like it cannot be done. Now knowledge consists of both true and false representation, but that makes no sense to say that false representation could be knowledge. Therefore we ought to recognize that describing knowledge as representation is a mistake.
The concept of "description" becomes very important now. So we need to understand the difference between a description and a representation. We can use mathematics to make a model, a representation for example, but that representation is based on a description, it represents what has been described (observed). Now we need to proceed toward understanding what constitutes a description, an observation. Notice that we need to make available the apt terms, and this process of making them available is more a process of defining rather than representing. This is where Wittgenstein appears to stumble, by assuming that language in general has inherent limits, making some things impossible to understand, rather than allowing that it is limitless, and we only apply boundaries as necessary. However, to give Wittgenstein credit, he distinctly describes the latter in some passages, but he seems to always revert to the former. We can see in mathematics for example, the concept of infinite is intended to allow that anything can be counted.
Quoting jkg20
The problem here is the double representation, what Plato called narrative, which he warned us against. "Pain" here is the public word, defined by public use. So in reality it refers to having pain sensations. If the person has pain sensations, then it is real pain. We could even allow a further layer of representation and say it refers to pain behaviour, like Luke suggests. But each layer of representation gets us further from the truth. If we go the other way now, to the deeper internal level of what the sensation is symbolic of within the person, we cannot properly use that term "pain" here, this would create equivocation and the potential for the appearance of contradiction.
That's what "the beetle in the box" analogy shows, the inclination to equivocate in this respect. In the private language, the person notes the sensation as S. But the sensation noted as S, is symbolic of something further, and this is called the "beetle". So "beetle" here refers to that further thing which is indicated by a particular sensation. In the public language there is also "beetle". But "beetle" here in the public language refers to a person's sensation. Notice that "beetle" now has two completely different validations. Do you see that if the person is feeling the sensation of pain, the presence of "the beetle", but the sensations are incorrectly representing the presence of that thing, the person is truly in the presence of "the beetle" according to the public usage, but not in the presence of "the beetle" according to the private sense, in which the sensation is supposed to represent that deeper thing.
You're assuming there's something "out there" independent of our thoughts, words, and interrelations. While that may be the case in a Kantian sense, it makes no difference when discussing anything phenomenal. In that case, there's a contribution of the thinking mind -- always. Anything "beyond" this or "independent" of it we simply can't discuss.
So yes, what's debated is indeed partly dependent on language.
Quoting Marchesk
And how do we determine how long? Well, using words -- but how do we determine? By using models and analyzing statistics. Epidemiology and medicine don't have a nomenclature? Is how long we social distance for really independent of words and their meanings? Of course not.
You seem to be framing the problem as if people and phemenoma "suspend" until we find the "right" definition, or something to that effect. That's obviously not the case, and no rational person will argue that, so why create an obvious straw man?
There's an enormous amount of interpretation that goes on, even in looking at the world. Study vision, and you'll see what I mean. So even on a non-verbal level, we're interpreting. Thus, the world does depend on us. Assuming there's something out there, independent of our being, has a long tradition - but as long as we're assuming a subject/object ontology, there's simply no denying that any object and thus any phenomena is a representation to us, is filtered through the brain and, thus, dependent on us in part.
Realism does zero good to resort to, nor have you made any clear arguments in its favor.
I have often suspected that Wittgenstein, when we finally "get over him," will be ignored rather than refuted.
That might be the case for the kind of idealism that Berkeley advocated, although even that is not certain: I would need to see a detailed argument to convince me, not just some name dropping of millenia dead Athenians. As for Absolute idealism, the situation is even more complex, after all, central to many versions of it is the dynamic of the dialectic. But that aside, let us at least try to get me to understand at least one thing about your position.
We need to be very clear here that saying that one thing represents another does not entail that it is a representation of it. My lawyer can represent me in court, but he is not a representation of me. The point I want to get clear on about your position is whether you consider that the sensations of pain an individual feels has a representative function for that person, not whether those feelings of pain are representations or not. My expression of point 1 explicity did not call feelings of pain representations, it just described them as having a representative function. With that disinction in mind, do you accept 1 as it was stated, i.e, with the use of "thing" dropped:
1: For the person feeling a pain, the pain sensation they have represents some other process.
I've not offered any representation, by which I presume you mean "analysis of representation", deep or shallow, I'm just trying to pin down what your position actually is. We can then discuss the intricacies of what representation is, and how the concepts of representing and representation come apart, later on.
You seem to be changing the subject. Having a "representative function" implies being used for a representative purpose. So if you are asking whether the sensation has a representative function for the person experiencing the sensation, then you are asking whether the person uses the sensation for a representative purpose. I would say that in most cases the answer is no. An individual accepts the sensation for what it is, as a sensation, and does not seek the meaning behind it. It is only when a person investigates, to seek the meaning behind the sensation, that the person will move to establish a relationship between the sensation, and what lies behind it. In this case, the person might assign a representative purpose to the sensation, employing the sensation as a representation in an attempt to understand the underlying thing. This is what I think is wrong. The sensation is not a representation in its natural relationship with the underlying thing, so to employ it as a representation, (describe it that way or define it that way as a premise) for the purpose of proceeding with a logical investigation of the underlying thing, would be a mistake.
So the short answer, is yes, the sensation may have a representative function. But a function is dependent on a purpose. And if the goal or purpose is to understand the underlying thing, then I think it is a mistake to give the sensation a representative function. To use your lawyer analogy, you could hire a carpenter to represent you in court, therefore the carpenter would have a representative function, but that would be a mistake.
Quoting jkg20
As you can see, I think looking into representation would be to head in the wrong direction. And if the concepts of representing, and representation, run into difficulties or "come apart", I'm not at all surprised.
I have no idea why you would expect Wittgenstein's philosophy to help you identify when people are pretending to be in pain. This is not something Wittgenstein was attempting to do. None of the philosophers you mention above did so, either. You might as well complain that Kant didn't write a cookbook.
I'm really not trying intentionally to change the subject, I am just trying to get to an understanding of what you mean. The route might be meandering, but I retain a glimmer of hope of reaching the destination. In any case, it was you that introduced the idea of representation in relation to the whole "beetle" / "pain" discussion:
Anyway, let us drop the subject of representation and representing and so on for the moment and let me try a different tack. What would help me understand your position would be a response to the following requests:
You seem to have reached the opinion that there is some third process involved in pain that most people are ignorant of. Would you be able to express that opinion as the conclusion of a deductively valid argument? If so, would you do me the favour of giving that deductively valid argument, with precisesly articulated and numbered premises and do so, if possible, without name dropping any philosophers or philosophical movements? If, on the other hand, the opinion is one that cannot be reached by the route of a deductively valid argument, why do you think that is so?
Please do not read into these requests a belief on my part of the sacrosanctity of deductive logic, it is one philsosophical tool amongst others. It is, however, a tool that I am thoroughly comfortable handling, and if you yourself can use that tool to show how you reached your conclusion, it would greatly help me understand what you are trying to say.
I should perhaps be precise in what I mean by a "deductively valid argument", since I am demanding precision from you. I mean an argument consisting of premises which, if all true, can be shown to lead (through the use of standard logical rules of inference such as modus tollens, modus ponens, contradiction, universal and existential substitution and so on) to the truth of the conclusion.
This would be an argument from causation, similar to some arguments used to demonstrate the necessity of God, which might or might not be acceptable to you. Would you agree that the existence of anything requires a cause? Would you agree that pain is something? If so, then the sensation of pain must have a cause.
At first glance, you might think ok, the cause of pain is some physiological processes, let's say it is damage to the living body which causes pain. But that description wouldn't account for the defining feature of pain which is that it is an unpleasant feeling, one we try to avoid. I can cause damage to all kinds of things, without causing that unpleasant feeling within myself, so the cause of pain cannot be described that way. Therefore, to account for the cause of pain, we need to account for what is essential to that feeling, according to accepted definition, and this is the unpleasantness of the feeling. What causes the unpleasantness of the feeling is unknown.
So, I have presented two deductive arguments above. The first, quite basic, two premises with the conclusion that pain has a cause, so I won't bother numbering the premises. The second concerns the unknown nature of the cause. This argument is a bit more complicated because the first premise is that to understand the cause of pain, we must start with an acceptable definition of "pain". The second is that the defining feature of pain, that it is "unpleasant" , has a cause which is unknown. The cause of "unpleasantness" is unknown. From this argument we can conclude that the cause of pain is unknown.
1. Pain is an unpleasant feeling.
2. The cause of "unpleasantness" is unknown.
C. The cause of pain is unknown.
Quoting jkg20
Deductive logic is the best tool. However, to do its job, it requires clearly expressed premises which may be analyzed, criticized part by part, and judged for soundness. The problem being that the foundational premises are always derived from something other than deductive logic. And these must be well understood in order that the deductive argument may be judged for soundness.
So your request for a deductive argument is very good because it makes me lay out the premises, so that we can determine what principles support the premises.
So if we amalgamate the two arguments we have something like this I won't bother mentioning the actual rules of inference in use:
Premise 1. All things and processes that exist have a cause.
Premise 2. Pain is a thing that exists.
Lemma 1. From Premise 1 and 2, Pain has a cause.
Premise 3. Pain is an unpleasant feeling.
Premise 4. The cause of an unpleasant feeling is unknown.
Conclusion, From Lemma 1, Premise 3 and Premise 4, the cause of pain is unknown.
I think there are probably some people who will disagree with Premise 1, but there are already "something from nothing" discussions underway elsewhere on the forum, so I won't pick up on that here. Also, Premise 2 and Premise 3 seem true. I know that some people might try pointing out that masochists might enjoy pain and actually seek it out, so it is not unpleasant for everyone, but we could probably just replace "unpleasant" with "a certain kind of" in premise 3 and I think we will remain faithful to your argument as a whole. In any case, as you probably guessed, what I want to focus on is premise 4.
Let's take a particular case of pain, the one I have right now as I pinch myself pretty hard. It is pretty mild as pain goes, I'm not willing to go to extremes to make a philosophical point, but I am certainly feeling something unpleasant. Now I feel really tempted to say that I know what the cause of this unpleasant feeling is, it is me pinching myself, and if I am asked how I know that this is the cause I will say something along the lines "well, it started when I started pinching myself and it peters away when I stop pinching myself".
Now, this seems to be the kind of counterexample to premise 4 that you are trying to preempt in this paragraph.
Is your claim then, that I cannot know that pinching myself is the cause of the pain because I cannot know how it causes the pain? That seems like quite an ask as a general principle for being able to know what a cause of an event is. After all, it seems reasonable to suppose that I can know that the cause of my car starting is my turning the ignition key, without my having to know the details of how internal combustion engines work. I can also know that my spilling a cup of coffee on my laptop caused it to stop working without knowing the first thing about computer hardware.
I think it is pretty clear that you will find something wrong headed in the examples I have just given, so I guess what I am asking from you now is something along the lines of turning that paragraph of yours I just quoted, into a deductively valid argument which has Premise 4 as its conclusion, so I can see precisely where you think I am going wrong.
The issue is this. If the essence of "pain", the defining feature, is that it is a certain type of feeling, (in this case an unpleasant feeling), then to know the cause of pain in any particular instance, (in this case the instance of pinching yourself), is to know what causes the feeling in that instance, to be of the specified type (unpleasant). Can you say that you know what causes the feeling you get when you pinch yourself, to be of that specified type (unpleasant). As I suggested, we could turn to the fact that the act of pinching is damaging to your body, but damage to a body is not sufficient to account for the feeling of pain, because things can be damaged without causing that feeling.
The issue here is that we have to address the reason why some feelings are identifiable and distinguishable from other feelings as a particular type. This requires that we produce an acceptable notion of what a feeling is, which allows for different types. So, #4 premise deals with "pain" as an identifiable type of feeling. To know the cause of "pain" in general, is to know what makes some feelings distinguishable from other feelings, and identifiable as pain. So I think your example is a sort of category mistake. A combustion engine has no feelings. You might try to make it a sort anology, saying that the electrical activity is comparable to "feelings", and the car knows how to distinguish between being turned on and being turned off, but I would say that's a poor analogy
In the particular instance of my pinching myself, why is it not a sufficient account of my feelingthat specific pain? I can strike a match and it produces a flame. Sometimes I can strike a match and the flame is not produced. But where I strike a match and the flame is produced, it would seem sufficient to account for that flames presence that I struck the match. Premise 4 is the claim that I cannot know the cause of pain. My claim is simply that sometimes I can.
Are you suggesting that there is a general cause of pain? Why do you think that? From my own case, many different things cause me pain. There might be a general characteristic of pain, certainly, otherwise I would not be able to recognize the painful feelings. But why should all causes of pain share a general characteristic as well? Like effects must have like causes does not seem like a particularly tenable general principle. Perhaps, however, it is not that principle you are relying on. If you could give me the deductive argument for premise 4, perhaps I could see things more clearly.
Because we have to account for why the feeling produced is pain and not pleasure or some other feeling. Similarly, with the match, we need to account for why striking the match produces fire, and not water, air, or something else.
Quoting jkg20
When numerous different things have something in common, it makes sense to think that there is a common cause. When things are hot, for example, the common cause is the activity of the molecules. when things are red there is a similar cause. So when different feelings have something in common, pain, it makes sense to think that there is a common cause to the pain. Here's another example. Consider that each time you see a different scenario in front of you, this is a different sensation. But all these sensations have something in common, they are instances of sight. So it makes sense to think that they all have a similar cause. The cause of the sensation of sight is the activity of your eyes and brain.
Quoting jkg20
You are not looking at the pain itself here, the fact that the feeling is an unpleasant feeling is what makes it pain. As I explained above, we cannot look at the physical injury, and say that this is the cause of the pain, because physical injury is insufficient to account for the feeling of pain, the unpleasantness.
So, you have many different things which you associate with pain, but you cannot say that these things are the cause of pain. In fact, it makes no sense to say that all these different cause the same thing, pain. Take the example of sight, above. it makes no sense to say that all those different things which you see, cause the sensation of sight, because you have organs and a neurological system which really cause that sensation. Likewise it's nonsense to say that all these different things you associate with pain cause the pain, because you have organs and a neurological system which really cause the sensation of pain. We have numerous senses. You would not say that the thing seen causes the sensation of sight. So in the case of a tactile sense, why would you say that the thing which touches you causes the sensation of pain?
Quoting jkg20
I think if you look at the world around you, you'll see that the principle is very tenable. It's the basis of science and predictability. When there is similarity in the occurrence of complex events, it's not a matter of random chance or coincidence, and this allows us to produce scientific laws, and make predictions.
Quoting jkg20
We are not in the ream of deduction any more, we have moved into inductive principles. But that's what happens when we get to the bottom of a deductive argument, we get to the foundational premises which cannot have been produced by deduction. Otherwise we'd have an infinite regress of deductive arguments producing premises, because the premise of each argument would be produced by deduction and so on. So we must judge those basic premises by other means.
That there are scientific laws that are used to predict and model observable behaviour, no one would deny. Philosophical contention begins when one adopts more than an instrumentalist view of those laws and then, further, assumes that the same systematic approach works for all phenomena.
Is it? Why should I accept that seeing something is a sensation? Seeing something can cause me to have sensations, a tingle up my spine for instance, but that doesn't entail that seeing something is itself a sensation.
Clearly we need to go beyond instrumentalism to understand what things like feelings and ideas are. And of course there is going to be contention here. Isn't that the point I'm making, that these things, feelings, like pain, are to a significant degree, unknown? Have I made my point then?
So what are you saying, inductive reasoning is not useful to philosophy? Then how do you propose that we proceed toward understanding the existence of things like sensations?
Quoting jkg20
Sight is a sense. Seeing something is a sensation. Hearing something is a sensation. Smelling something is a sensation. Tasting something is a sensation. Feeling something is a sensation.
It appears to me like you are trying to distinguish between one type of sensation and another, and make the unjustified claim that one type of sensation is a sensation and the other type of sensation does not qualify to be called a sensation. Are you arguing that "feeling" is the only proper sense?
That we cannot even agree on what the word "sensation" refers to is more evidence that particular types of sensations cannot be properly categorized. That's the key point to my argument, We cannot properly classify different types of feelings or sensations (which feelings are and are not pain, for example) until we have a working definition of "sensation" itself, to be able to identify which things we ought to look at to determine whether they qualify as pain or some other type of feeling.
You asked me to prove #4, which makes a statement about the unknown. The fact that there is contention and disagreement on basic principles concerning this subject, is evidence which supports the truth of #4. Do you agree with this at least?
No I do not agree, not yet anyway. Premise 4 makes a general claim that the cause of no pain can be known. I have presented counterexamples of cases where I know what the cause of a pain is. You say I do not know in those cases, it seems because you have some commitment to the idea that claims to specific instances of knowledge have always to be backed up by the availability of some systematic theory. I find that stance more open to doubt than the stance that I know in some specific cases what the cause of my pain is. (Incidently, there are also cases where I do not have the faintest idea what is causing my pain.)
Again, why do I have to accept that just because there is a sense of sight that all sight involves sensations? It seems to me that I would have to buy in to a very specific account of what vision is in order to accept that inference.
I've clarified this already. I'm not saying that the cause of pain is unknowable, but that it is unknown. And the reason, as I've explained is that we do not have adequate knowledge of what pain is, in order to be able to identify a cause of it. How can we agree on the cause of "pain" when we cannot even agree on what "pain" refers to? That we cannot agree on what "pain" refers to, has been demonstrated in our discourse.
Quoting jkg20
Let me tell you again why your claims of having presented instances where you know what the cause of pain is, are false claims. You can identify something as a cause of a feeling, or sensation, but you haven't identified why that feeling or sensation occurs as pain rather than pleasure, or some other sort of sensation. Until you can explain why those occurrences cause the feeling of pain rather than some other feeling, you have not identified the cause of pain. You are just making unjustified assertions.
Quoting jkg20
Yes, you would have to buy into the conventional account which says that vision is a sense, and that sensations are what senses produce. The sense of sight produces the sensations involved with sight. So images such as dreams are not sensations produced by sight.
No one forces you to accept conventional definitions. But if you refuse conventional definitions in a philosophical discussion you need to justify your refusal or else it appears like you are simply refusing because conventional wisdom doesn't support your particular philosophy. Any philosophy not supported by conventional wisdom needs to be justified or else people just dismiss it as crackpottery.
Regardless, let's just accept that we cannot agree on what a "sensation" is, and we might allow that there is no such thing as "conventional wisdom" concerning this matter. Clearly this supports the truth of #4. We do not know the cause of pain. We say that pain is a certain type of feeling or sensation, but we do not even know what a feeling or sensation is. How can you suppose that we know the cause of pain when we do not even know what pain (as a type of feeling or sensation) is?
You said earlier that it was an "unpleasant feeling". Now you don't know what it is?
As for the cause of pain, science and medicine have some understanding of how pain works.
Luke got there before me, but I thought we were agreed that we know that pain is a certain type of feeling. Now you are suggesting we do not even know that? I'm completely lost now. I think I'll have to retire from this thread and return to something simpler like the complete works of Hegel.
Just a few final parting remarks.
First, I do not have a particular philosophy. I was trying to get clear about yours.
Second, what do you mean by "conventional definition". If you mean a definition you find in the dictionary, it is perfectly conventional to deny that vision always involves sensations. Sometimes it can, e.g. when seeing phosphenes and afterimages for instance, but that does not mean it always does. You would have to invoke some kind of argument from illusion or hallucination to get to the conclusion that all vision involves sensations, and I'm sure you are aware that arguments from illusion and hallucination are by no means generally accepted to be sound.
Correct, I can say that it is an unpleasant feeling, but I do not know in objective terms, what distinguishes a pleasant feeling from an unpleasant feeling. "Knowing" requires objectivity. The fact that I can talk about this distinction between pleasant and unpleasant, making my own subjective distinction between these two, and I can even assume that such an objective distinction might at some future time be produced, doesn't mean that I believe that there is currently an objectively defined difference between them, which I might refer to in making that judgement, and that would be required in order for me to know. Therefore claiming that I can distinguish pleasant feelings from unpleasant feelings, within myself, and refer to the unpleasant ones as pain, does not amount to a claim that I "know" what pain is. Knowledge requires more than a subjective opinion.
Quoting jkg20
Back when I posted that, I thought that we could agree that pain was a certain type of feeling. As the discussion progressed I attempted to ground the notion of "feeling" in sensation, and we could not agree. Therefore I concluded that we do not know what a feeling is. Since we had defined "pain" in relation to "feeling", and it became evident that we do not know what a feeling is, I had to make the further conclusion that we really do not know what pain is. Attempting to prove what something is, by relating it to something unknown, instead of relating it to something better know, is a step in the wrong direction. That could be a matter of deception. "I know what pain is, it's a feeling". What's a feeling? "I don't know". See, you could replace "feeling" here with any imaginary word and the deception would be exposed.
That was the difference in perspective between us. I attempted to prove that "pain" is unknown by relating it to something more general, vague, and ambiguous, "feeling", the direction which the common definition leads us, toward the unknown. You attempted to prove that "pain" is known, by relating it to particular instances of pain which you have experienced. The difference is that I was looking to the public, objective, and conventional definition, while you were looking to personal, private experiences. What I refer to as "pain" is justified. What you refer to is not, it's a matter of personal opinion.
Quoting jkg20
Conventional definition is the one commonly accepted and used. If you insist on demonstrating contradictory definitions, each of which could be called conventional, then this just proves my point, that the thing referred to by that word remains unknown because there is contradiction within the supposed knowledge of it.
Let's be clear here: do you lack knowledge of the cause or the effect? You don't know what pain is or you don't know what causes it?
Regarding the effect, you aren't making a subjective distinction between 'pleasant' and 'unpleasant'. You didn't invent the meanings of these words. If you are unsure what they mean, you can look up their meanings in a dictionary.
No one forces you to accept conventional definitions. But if you refuse conventional definitions in a philosophical discussion you need to justify your refusal or else it appears like you are simply refusing because conventional wisdom doesn't support your particular philosophy. Any philosophy not supported by conventional wisdom needs to be justified or else people just dismiss it as crackpottery.
Otherwise, if you want to know the causes of pain, then this might help to begin with:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7wfDenj6CQ
"Pain" is what we called a type of feeling. What I argued is that there is an underlying process, and the feeling, which we refer to as pain has a relation to this underlying process. Further, since we do not adequately know the underlying process, we cannot claim to completely understand pain itself. Jkg20 was skeptical about this underlying thing, so I referred to it as the cause of pain. So the argument is that to completely understand pain requires that we know its cause.
Quoting Luke
I don't think looking in the dictionary is going to help me to understand the phenomenon of pain. I went through this already with jkg20. I look up "pain", in the dictionary to get an objective definition, and it tells me that pain is an unpleasant feeling. Then I have a feeling which I judge as unpleasant and I call it pain. Clearly that is a subjective judgement.
Quoting Luke
Your referred video doesn't answer the question asked though, why a specific type of feeling is felt as pain rather than as pleasure, or something else. It even hinted at this problem with reference to variability in pain sensitivity. So notice the title, and the conclusion of the video, how your brain "responds" to pain. The narrator starts as if he is going to tell you what causes pain, but then he gets to this issue of variability, and concludes by talking about how you brain responds to pain. There's a gap, the cause of the feeling which is called pain, which is left unexplained.
self doubt or low self esteem.
I wouldn't recommend either. Self doubt and low self esteem usually mean misery. I guess we should all just try to find a balance.
Why do you judge it as "unpleasant" rather than "pleasant"?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The topic of the video is pain, including its known causes. Weren't you asking what causes pain? Wasn't that what you claimed not to know? Well, now you know, or have some knowledge. At any rate, the causes of pain are not "unknown" as you indicated earlier.
Furthermore, I don't understand your question about "why a feeling is felt as pain rather than pleasure". An unpleasant feeling simply is pain, as per your own definition.
That's the point.
Quoting Luke
I went through this already, what I meant by "cause". We are talking about a type of feeling, and what distinguishes it from other types of feelings. The issue is what causes this type of feeling to be felt as pain rather than as pleasure or something completely different.
Quoting Luke
Further, the issue wasn't that we have no knowledge about this. Clearly we have some knowledge on this subject, that's why we have conventional definitions of things like pain and pleasure. If there was no knowledge about them, we wouldn't even be able to agree on definitions. The issue is the deficiency and inadequacy of that knowledge.
We have the feeling, and we have the underlying thing which we say causes the feeling. As I explained to jkg20, we cannot say that the injury is the cause of the feeling, because damage to an object is not sufficient to account for the feeling. Furthermore, we need to account for why the different feelings are substantially different, some being painful and some pleasurable for example.
Quoting Luke
Do you recognize that some feelings are pleasurable and some are painful? If this is a true difference, then there must be something about the feeling itself which makes it painful or pleasurable. If there was not, then we could not distinguish between pleasure and pain, and we could name the particular instances of feeling, this or that, randomly. So, both of these are feelings, one is called pleasure, and one is called pain, but they are classed together, as feelings. Therefore we can ask what is it about the feeling itself which makes it felt as pain rather than as pleasure. There must be something within the feelings themselves, which allows them to be distinguished from each other, in this way, otherwise such judgements would be random.
What's the point? You said: "I have a feeling which I judge as unpleasant and I call it pain". I asked why you judge it as unpleasant rather than pleasant.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I don't understand. You appear to assume that a feeling of pain could instead have been a feeling of pleasure or some other feeling. Why assume this? If you're asking for something besides the cause of pain here, then what is it?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Because they're different feelings?
It's as though you were to ask why some colours are substantially different, some being green and some red for example, but then when vision and colour perception is explained to you, you claim that you were asking a different question.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You could look up a different video on the physiology of pleasure. I doubt it works the same way as the physiology of pain. Or you could tell us why you have a feeling that you judge as unpleasant and call it pain..
Right, that's the issue I'm trying to determine, that's why I said that's the point. I think that the feeling which I call "pain" is in some way similar to a feeling I had previously, which I called "pain", so I call it by the same name. I believe that's why I call it pain, because I've already called similar feelings pain, and that was acceptable, but I'm not really too sure about that. And, I've never been asked to validate, is it really pain I'm feeling, or am I making a false claim.
Quoting Luke
I assume this, because it's a part of an accepted philosophical procedure of dialectics, which we can use to find fault in descriptions. If it hasn't been demonstrated that it is impossible for the thing being described to be other than the description (in which case the description might be wrong), then we assume that it is possible for the thing to be otherwise from how it's described. Then we proceed to look for, and examine the reasons why the thing is described in the way that it is. This allows us to verify or falsify the description.
Judging by your reactions to my postings concerning deception, you do not seem to have a truly philosophical attitude toward the possibility of false description; as if the possibility of a false description (deception) ought not be a concern to philosophers.
Quoting Luke
There are numerous ways that "cause" can be used, and I think you must be interpreting it in a different way from how I am using it. So I'll explain how I use it. If something exists as a unique, particular thing, we can ask why is the thing the particular thing which it is, instead of something else. Then we seek the cause of that thing being the thing which it is, the reason why it is what it is instead of something else. We can also ask the same question about a type of thing, why is a specific type of thing this type instead of some other type. In this case we have a specified type of thing, "pain", as a type of feeling, and I am asking that question. So I am asking about the reason why this type of thing, pain is the type of thing which it is. This will validate this "type", as a valid type, there are real causes for a thing being of this named type rather than a different named type.. If no valid reason can be given, as to what causes a thing to be this type rather than to be some other type, then this descriptive 'type" cannot be accepted as a true descriptive term.
Quoting Luke
When I ask why is pain different from pleasure, "because they are different feelings" is not an answer. It's not an answer because that assumption is already implied in the question. If I asked why is red different from green, "because they are different colours" is not an acceptable answer because the assumption that they are different colours is already implied by the question. Similarly, the assumption that pain and pleasure are different feelings is already implied within the question.
From your responses, I believe that you are not at all interested in this question. That's fine, we can just drop it if that's what you want.
Quoting Luke
The problem is that what you think was explained to me, wasn't explained to me. I already explained that to you. The video presented what you propose as the cause of pain, but when it got to the point of what they called "variability in pain sensitivity", and this would be where the true cause of the sensation lies (what makes the sensation pain rather than some other feeling), it skipped over this, and went on to talk about the brain's responses to pain.
So it's not the case that I changed the question I was asking. You just misinterpreted what I meant by "cause of pain", as did jgk20, and you offered me a solution which related to your interpretation, rather than what I really meant. And then when I explain what I meant, you accuse me of changing the question. I'm not changing the question, your the second person that I've had to explain this very same question to already. And now I'll explain it again to you.
We are discussing here "pain", as a type of feeling, and the reasons why some feelings can be classed as this type rather than some other type. You show me through your video, how some particular instances of "feeling" are caused. The video gives no real explanation as to why the feeling which comes out of these circumstances is felt as pain and not some other type of feeling, so it does not answer the question. The reason why the video fails here is that it gives no indication of what type of thing a feeling is.
Do you see this? If we're grounding the concept of "pain" in "a type of feeling", then we require some explanation of what a feeling is, in order to be able differentiate it from other feelings as a valid "feeling". Your video goes in a completely different direction, instead of defining "pain" with "type of feeling", it grounds pain in an identifiable type of physical occurrence, an injury. This would require that we go by a different definition of "pain", "the feeling caused by a physical injury". But that was not our accepted definition of "pain". Furthermore, this definition would exclude a huge portion of the feelings which we call "pain", things such as emotional suffering, hunger, etc.. That would be an unwarranted narrowing of the definition of pain, which would mislead us in our enquiry as to what pain actually is.
@jkg20 was previously trying to work out the unknown aspect of pain you claimed there to be, other than our public expressions and private sensations of pain. I have been trying to work out whether it is the cause (of pain) or the effect (pain itself; what pain is; the meaning of "pain") to be this unknown aspect. More accurately, I have been trying to pin you down on what else there could be to explain about pain besides these two.
Now you're saying that this unknown aspect of pain of yours - which turns out to be not even specifically about pain - is actually an "explanation of what a feeling is"? Well, I could recommend that you look up the word "feeling" in the dictionary, or else look into the physiological causes of feelings. However, you'd probably just change the subject again.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It would make no difference if the video were to include all types of pain. You weren't interested in the narrow explanation because you weren't even talking about pain specifically.
As I described, both of these have unknown aspects. I don't see why any of this is a problem to you. Do you believe that anything is known in an absolute sense? Doesn't quantum physics and the uncertainty principle demonstrate to you that all things have unknown aspects? I don't understand this idea that some people have, that we have absolute knowledge about things, that's so evidently false. So I attempted to use the fact that the cause of pain is unknown, to demonstrate that pain itself has unknown aspects. But both you and jkg disputed that the cause of pain is unknown.
Quoting Luke
OK, so after my last long post with great effort to explain, hopefully you now understand.
Quoting Luke
Right, now you're catching on. Since we defined pain as a type of feeling, don't you agree that we need to know what a feeling is, in order to know what pain is? For example, if we defined "green" as a type of colour, we would need to know what colour is in order to know what green is. And if we defined "human being" as a type of animal, we would need to know what an animal is, to know what a human being is. If you disagree with this principle, which appears self-evident to me, can you please explain why you disagree with it.
Quoting Luke
As I explained to jkg already, this won't work if you're trying to prove that "pain", or now "feeling", is really known, because moving in this direction, toward the more general, the definitions get increasingly vague and ambiguous, thus demonstrating the truth of what I've been arguing, that the thing being discussed is really unknown.
Quoting Luke
Of course I was talking about pain specifically, "pain" as defined by us already, as a specific type of feeling. If you want to change the definition such that we are only talking bout a specific type of pain, or define pain in some completely different way, then it is clearly you who has come into this discussion intent on changing the subject. I am adhering to the conventional definition of pain which jkg and I agreed upon already. I have not changed the subject, but adhered strictly to it.
If you think this definition is unacceptable and you want to discuss "pain" under some other definition, then propose your definition and we can discuss its acceptability. But all that you are really doing, in declining the conventional definition is proving my point, that the nature of pain is unknown, because you'd be saying that "pain" refers to something different for you, from what it refers to for others who accept the conventional definition we've already been using. Therefore we couldn't even identify the thing referred to by "pain", let alone proceed in any attempt toward understanding and knowing it.
Do you believe that anything can be known in any sense?
"In any sense" means we'd have to consider various definitions of "know". If knowing requires absolutely excluding the possibility of mistake, then no we can't "know" anything in that sense. But if you allow that "know" implies that things which you know might turn out to be wrong, then yes, things can be known
So you should be coming around to seeing things my way then. We have less than perfect knowledge of pain. When someone has less than perfect knowledge about something, they might be deceived concerning that thing. Therefore we might be deceived concerning pain.
Remember, the real possibility of deception, and how to address this, was my concern. Do you agree with me, that the way to avoid deception is to obtain a better knowledge of the beetle itself, in the box, the feeling, "pain"?