Platonism

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

So this is the question:

If Alice is thinking something, must we conclude there is something that Alice is thinking?

Yes, I think so. The only difference is that the grammatical subject and object is switched. Compare with:

• If Alice is kicking something, must we conclude there is something that Alice is kicking?

Yes, for example, a ball.

The deeper issue raised by your question is that that "something" is abstract. We can consider that abstraction (in this case, an idea or thought) separately from the concrete context it is found in, but it's not actually separate. So Platonism doesn't follow (i.e., a prior and separate realm of Ideas or Forms).

Quoting Andrew M

Compare with:

If Alice is kicking something, must we conclude there is something that Alice is kicking?

Yes, for example, a ball.

Sure, but what goes in place of "something" in "Alice is kicking something"? It's a noun phrase of some kind:

• (a) A proper name: "Alice is kicking Steve";(b) An indefinite noun phrase: "Alice is kicking a ball";(c) A definite noun phrase: "Alice is kicking the ball."

Can we do the same thing with "Alice is thinking something"? No, no, and no.

[i]ADDED:
There are more options and one of the ones I left out has a fun sub-case:

(i) Alice is kicking what I left on the floor.
(ii) Alice is thinking what I am thinking.
[/i]

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Reply to tim wood

"Alice is thinking Descartes's cogito"? I don't think that's English.

For your other examples, yes! After I tacked on the what-clause thing, it occurred to me we can go directly for other anaphoric noun phrases:

"Alice is thinking the same thing as Steve."
"Alice is thinking a thought not unlike my own."

Can you think of an example that just sticks a regular noun phrase in there, and not some anaphoric construction like this?

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Quoting tim wood

Are you trying to prove something about the world through grammar?

That would be the Platonist you're thinking of, not me. I should have thought that was perfectly clear.

Because of the grammatical similarity between "Alice is kicking something" and "Alice is thinking something", there is a temptation to say that there is something Alice is thinking -- "there is" in a full-blooded sense: ideas are things like bricks, they exist independently of us, like bricks, all the rest.

Anaphoric constructions aside, we know what goes in place of "something" in "Alice is thinking something"; it's constructions like

• "that the roof will never hold""of going to graduate school in the fall""about her grandmother's house".

Any of those look like things to you?

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Quoting tim wood

I think idea are things, just exactly not like bricks, but rather as ideas. That is, they must be something.

Why do you think that?

[hide="minor point"]--- My last post has a slip: the bit about "ideas are things like bricks ..." is clearly not what should be there, because we don't think ideas; it should be "thoughts are things like bricks", and so on.

But we can ask similar questions about ideas:[/hide]

Do you think ideas are things because if you have an idea, there must be something that you have?

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Quoting tim wood

They're something and not nothing, yes? And if not nothing, something, but not like bricks. In fact, not like any thing. They're something but not a thing. It seems like an absurdity.

Perhaps you're trying to answer the wrong question.

Quoting tim wood

As to what, exactly, let's give the science another fifty years or so.

Which pair of questions do you think it more likely the science will find more tractable?

A1: What is a thought?
A2: What is the thing Alice is thinking when she is thinking about her grandmother's house?

B1: What is going on when we are thinking?
B2: What is going on when Alice is thinking about her grandmother's house?

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Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Sure, but what goes in place of "something" in "Alice is kicking something"? It's a noun phrase of some kind:

(a) A proper name: "Alice is kicking Steve";
(b) An indefinite noun phrase: "Alice is kicking a ball";
(c) A definite noun phrase: "Alice is kicking the ball."

Can we do the same thing with "Alice is thinking something"? No, no, and no.

Even if not, it doesn't follow that abstractions are nothing. Consider:

• If Alice is thinking that it is going to rain, must we conclude there is something that Alice is thinking?

Yes, that it is going to rain.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Anaphoric constructions aside, we know what goes in place of "something" in "Alice is thinking something"; it's constructions like

"that the roof will never hold"
"of going to graduate to school in the fall"
"about her grandmother's house".

Any of those look like things to you?

They're not concrete things, they're abstractions. When we see Alice grab her umbrella, we assume she thinks that it is going to rain. But that is an abstraction over her behavior, not some additional thing that has an independent existence. And we can consider that abstraction separately from its concrete context, i.e., as an abstract entity.

Quoting Andrew M

When we see Alice grab her umbrella, we assume she thinks that it is going to rain. But that is an abstraction over her behavior, not some additional thing that has an independent existence. And we can consider that abstraction separately from its concrete context, i.e., as an abstract entity.

There are several points here that confuse me:

1. "Alice is grabbing her umbrella" is also an abstraction, right? We are leaving out whatever else is going on with Alice in describing her current behavior as "grabbing her umbrella".

2. "Alice thinks it's going to rain" is an abstraction in the same way (1) is -- we're not talking about whatever else may be going on in her mind -- but is it an abstraction in some other way? Is there another sense of abstraction in play here?

What I have in mind first is something like this: if we think of "grabbing an umbrella" as an action someone might perform, then we might take "thinking it's going to rain" not as another sort of action, to be correlated with "grabbing an umbrella", but as a disposition to perform the action "grabbing an umbrella". That seems like a different sort of abstraction -- one level up. (This disposition talk, as a way to deal with the mental, has a pretty low reputation these days, but I wanted to leave it as an option.)

If we take "someone grabbing an umbrella" as an event, I suppose we could think of "that same someone thinking it's going to rain" as another sort of event that could cause the first sort, but I'm inclined to think of it as a distal cause (if I'm using that term correctly!), something like the disposition above, a condition or situation that, if it obtains, makes it more likely that events of the "someone grabbing an umbrella" type occur.

3. Alice is a concrete entity and Alice's umbrella is a concrete entity; is "Alice grabbing her umbrella" an abstract entity? Is that what actions are? Or events? How do we capture the difference between "Alice grabbing her umbrella", a sort of abstract event that might occur, and "Alice is grabbing her umbrella" which, while an abstraction in the simple sense of (1) is pretty concrete -- it's a realization of "Alice grabbing her umbrella" after all.

4. Is there yet a third sense of "abstract" -- beyond actions/events, dispositions/conditions -- we apply to what someone is thinking, or what someone is doing, or what is happening? So we might have "that it's going to rain", "grabbing her umbrella", "Alice grabbing her umbrella" as the answers to what is she thinking? what is she doing? what is happening? Is this a different sense of "abstract" or are these again like simple (1)-type abstractions, leaving out everything but the content being thought, the type of the action being performed, the type of the event occurring.

Sorry to labor this so!

The tl;dr is that if what's being thought is an abstract entity, is that because there's something special about thinking? or because thinking is acting? or because thinking is an event occurring? Is it abstract because it's thinking, or because all our descriptions are abstractions?

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

The tl;dr is that if what's being thought is an abstract entity, is that because there's something special about thinking? or because thinking is acting? or because thinking is an event occurring? Is it abstract because it's thinking, or because all our descriptions are abstractions?

No, not because it's thinking.

By an abstraction, I simply mean something that does not exist independently of a concrete and particular context but can be considered independently of that context. Whether that be events, actions, thoughts, descriptions, or whatever.

So, by abstract entity above, I'm just referring to Alice thinking that it is going to rain. We might call it a thought or a belief or a sentence or a proposition. But the main point is that we can treat it as a separate entity for the purpose of analysis. We might care that it is about to rain, not specifically that Alice thought it. And certainly we can investigate the idea that it might rain without needing to involve Alice further.

Similarly, actions don't happen independently of agents that act. But we might only care about that action in abstraction (e.g., somebody took the last umbrella and now I'm going to get wet), not that it was specifically Alice's action.

So to address your points, which will hopefully make sense in the context of the above.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

1. "Alice is grabbing her umbrella" is also an abstraction, right? We are leaving out whatever else is going on with Alice in describing her current behavior as "grabbing her umbrella".

Yes. But, also, this is the concrete context. Grabbing doesn't occur in the abstract. There's Alice and the umbrella here as well. This is relevant because ...

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

2. "Alice thinks it's going to rain" is an abstraction in the same way (1) is -- we're not talking about whatever else may be going on in her mind -- but is it an abstraction in some other way? Is there another sense of abstraction in play here?

... ideas don't happen in the abstract. Alice is here as well. So it's that sense of dependence of the abstract on the concrete and particular that I'm emphasizing here (rather than selectiveness, though that's true as well). And the same sense of abstraction as above.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

3. Alice is a concrete entity and Alice's umbrella is a concrete entity; is "Alice grabbing her umbrella" an abstract entity? Is that what actions are? Or events? How do we capture the difference between "Alice grabbing her umbrella", a sort of abstract event that might occur, and "Alice is grabbing her umbrella" which, while an abstraction in the simple sense of (1) is pretty concrete -- it's a realization of "Alice grabbing her umbrella" after all.

I would consider this the concrete context. We can observe Alice grabbing her umbrella, which is concrete for medium-sized, dry goods such as ourselves. But after observing many people grabbing their umbrellas, we might abstract out that commonality.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

4. Is there yet a third sense of "abstract"

I'm intending just the one sense. In considering something abstractly, we are being selective as you note, and there are different ways that might manifest, including at increasingly complex levels. But the key point is that it depends on something concrete.

That, I think, is sufficient to contrast it with Platonism. (And Nominalism, as it happens, since events and actions can occur independently of naming and minds.)

Quoting Andrew M

By an abstraction, I simply mean something that does not exist independently of a concrete and particular context but can be considered independently of that context. Whether that be events, actions, thoughts, descriptions, or whatever.

Quoting Andrew M

I'm intending just the one sense. In considering something abstractly, we are being selective as you note, and there are different ways that might manifest, including at increasingly complex levels. But the key point is that it depends on something concrete.

So glad you've chimed in, @Andrew M!

Your approach (which you would say is broadly Aristotelian?) seems very sound: there is only one sense of "abstraction"; it is what we do when we consider a particular concrete context selectively.

I wonder, though, why is existence -- as in the first quote [hide="and also suggested here"]
Quoting Andrew M

Even if not, it doesn't follow that abstractions are nothing.

[/hide] -- part of this story at all? If Alice is thinking it's going to rain, why even say that there is a thing, the thought that it is going to rain, that does exist, only it doesn't exist independently of Alice thinking it is going to rain, or of someone thinking it is going to rain?

I ask for two reasons:

(1) If I'm of a mind to deny that Alice thinking something entails there is something Alice is thinking [hide="note"] (( that is, except as a matter of grammar; I mean to deny only that "there is" should be taken in the full-blooded sense of something existing ))[/hide], and you insist that we can consider what Alice is thinking independently of the concrete occasion of Alice thinking it, I do not need to deny this -- why would I? I only need to deny that us considering what Alice is thinking entails there being something we are considering.

(2) If the point is to emphasize our capacity to consider things selectively, and to describe this somewhat picturesquely as an ability conjure abstract entities for our consideration rather than being compelled always and only to consider the totality of the concrete situation, I will point out that we are already doing that all the time simply by using language in the first place.

Insofar as we want to ignore whatever else is going on with Alice except her thinking about the chance of rain and taking her umbrella, we say, "Alice is taking her umbrella because she thinks it's going to rain." "Considering selectively" is not a special thing we do sometimes with language; it's practically all we ever do.

But there does seem to be an exception to the idea that language is always selective: names of concrete particulars. When we refer to Alice, we mean everything about her, or at least intend not specifically to exclude anything about her.

The question then is whether, in creating "names" on-the-fly, we are referring to abstract particulars such as "Alice taking her umbrella" (an action or an event), and that question seems particularly acute when the name is anaphoric and thus somewhat open-ended: "what Alice said" or "what Alice did" or "what Alice was thinking".

And now we're sort of back where we started, but with a somewhat different focus.

I've been neglecting the motivating role of quantifiers, so a quick note.

If Alice took her umbrella, we have to say Alice did something, right? The only alternative seems to be that she did nothing, but that's not the case, for she took her umbrella.

If I agree that, in taking her umbrella, Alice did something, while denying that there is something that Alice did, I am no more committed to saying that Alice did nothing than I am to saying there is nothing that Alice did.

At the bottom of all this, there is the question of a shared reality. Most discussions of this kind are poleaxed on whether we only "share" what is some kind of sharing operation or there is something else, a third thing if you will, that connects our perceptions and rational analysis of things to what is actually happening.

Reply to Valentinus

I used to find the "third realm" argument (for instance, Frege's version) persuasive, but now I can't imagine why.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

So glad you've chimed in, Andrew M!

Thanks, and I'm enjoying the discussion! :-)

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Your approach (which you would say is broadly Aristotelian?) seems very sound: there is only one sense of "abstraction"; it is what we do when we consider a particular concrete context selectively.

Yes (and, as you note, it's broadly Aristotelian).

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

I wonder, though, why is existence -- as in the first quote
Even if not, it doesn't follow that abstractions are nothing.
— Andrew M
-- part of this story at all? If Alice is thinking it's going to rain, why even say that there is a thing, the thought that it is going to rain, that does exist, only it doesn't exist independently of Alice thinking it is going to rain, or of someone thinking it is going to rain?

I don't think existence needs to be part of the story, at least in any metaphysical sense. "Thing" is simply a common way to refer to abstractions as well as concrete things.

For example, suppose a mother asks her son, "Is there something you should be telling me?" Her question should be understood in an ordinary sense, not as having metaphysical implications. Certainly, she would not expect to be told by her son that abstractions don't exist.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

I ask for two reasons:

(1) If I'm of a mind to deny that Alice thinking something entails there is something Alice is thinking (( that is, except as a matter of grammar; I mean to deny only that "there is" should be taken in the full-blooded sense of something existing )), and you insist that we can consider what Alice is thinking independently of the concrete occasion of Alice thinking it, I do not need to deny this -- why would I? I only need to deny that us considering what Alice is thinking entails there being something we are considering.

I think it's just a matter of grammar. I don't think there are metaphysical implications in that phrasing.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

(2) If the point is to emphasize our capacity to consider things selectively, and to describe this somewhat picturesquely as an ability conjure abstract entities for our consideration rather than being compelled always and only to consider the totality of the concrete situation, I will point out that we are already doing that all the time simply by using language in the first place.

Agreed.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Insofar as we want to ignore whatever else is going on with Alice except her thinking about the chance of rain and taking her umbrella, we say, "Alice is taking her umbrella because she thinks it's going to rain." "Considering selectively" is not a special thing we do sometimes with language; it's practically all we ever do.

Agreed.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

But there does seem to be an exception to the idea that language is always selective: names of concrete particulars. When we refer to Alice, we mean everything about her, or at least intend not specifically to exclude anything about her.

The question then is whether, in creating "names" on-the-fly, we are referring to abstract particulars such as "Alice taking her umbrella" (an action or an event), and that question seems particularly acute when the name is anaphoric and thus somewhat open-ended: "what Alice said" or "what Alice did" or "what Alice was thinking".

As long as we take care not to reify such abstractions, is there really a problem here?

Quoting Andrew M

I think it's just a matter of grammar. I don't think there are metaphysical implications in that phrasing.

Then you are not my target audience!

Quoting Andrew M

As long as we take care not to reify such abstractions, is there really a problem here?

Right, this is the part of your position I've ignored: abstract entities have only dependent, not independent existence. By "reify" you mean precisely attributing independent existence to something that doesn't have it.

Here's one way we can talk. There is a general event type, someone thinking it's going to rain; there is a particular event type, Alice thinking it's going to rain; and then there are particular instances of that, Alice's thinking yesterday that it was going to rain. (Obviously lots of other ways to carve that up...)

That last is a particular, but in your terms it is not a concrete particular, not because of anything to do with types and instances but because every instance of Alice thinking it's going to rain is dependent for its existence on Alice existing, is inseparable from Alice. We separate what Alice is thinking from Alice only fictively, by means of abstraction.

And then two people thinking the same thing is still as simple as I want it to be, just a matter of using the same words to describe what you fictively detach as "what they're thinking." If you then generalize, you can talk about the idea "that it is going to rain" as what anyone you would describe as thinking it's going to rain is thinking.

One little question: in this analysis, every instance of Alice thinking it's going to rain is dependent for its existence on Alice existing, not on Alice independently existing, right? I'd love to stay away from saying what that's supposed to mean, but we don't seem to rely on it anyway. Do you agree?

So far we're juggling general vs. particular, abstract vs. concrete, and dependent vs. independent. There are obvious temptations to match them up (respectively) that I'm trying to be careful about.

Slavery was abolished, it is said, in the wake of the Civil War (the Proclamation some say did so was tenuous at best, and the Thirteenth Amendment passed as the war waned, rushed through by Lincoln for fear that final victory would lead to tabling the matter forever). But what was actually outlawed was only the specific title ownership of one specific person by another specific person. But what if a system develops in which that same ownership is generalized? If one class of persons have the labor of others available to exploit as they choose, but without the particularity of title? Is that ownership "abstract"? If you think so, I wish you would try to explain this to all the folks who are forced to tolerate the same but 'abstracted' condition that is supposedly outlawed in its more concrete form!

Socrates regarded conviction as pathology, to be cured by rigorous cross-questioning. The Athenian Stranger replacing him in Plato's later work believed so too, but lacked the skill Socrates had for bringing his interlocutor to be grateful for the refutation, the cure of his conviction. To discuss Plato as if he meant to put us on a road to perfecting our convictions, rather than ridding us of them, is to completely miss the point. I suggest you check out the meaning and place of "aischron" in his work, and that you all ask yourselves why Plato chooses the most despicable characters he can find to accompany him in the dialogues in which Socrates does not appear, and so leads the interlocutor of the Stranger to a transformation of his convictions unrecognized by him? As in Laws.

Reply to Gary M Washburn

I appreciate your comments but of course we are not discussing Plato, only the theory bearing his name that reifies meanings, ideas, numbers, propositions, concepts, what have you. Though I haven't read as much Plato as you, I too find his approach valuable and liberating; the theory bearing his name, less so.

Sorry if my outburst seems not to the point. It's as if the literature since him has been reading Aristotle, or the 'Platonists' of the Christian era, instead. It's travesty, not philosophy. The human organism constructs all manner of autonomous systems, but what is real is only the rigor of correcting for its errors and inadequacies, not the system itself. But where nothing seems to disrupt our confidence in these systems, call them abstractions or generalizations if you must, they tend to convince us they are real. Platonism is, to my mind, only a distortion to be overthrown.

The TV series F-Troop had a running gag in which the main characters would join a group of marching soldiers by doing a little hopping jig to get into step. The human heart beats each pulse in response to the immediate needs of the body, but medicine feels the need to perceive it as a rhythmic system. Mess with that system as a system and the heart can be sent out of sync with its own capacity to respond to the instantaneous needs of the body, what this pulse needs to supply it, and the result is "a-rhythm". That's the danger of taking ideas as real. Not just the heart, of course, but all human affairs, bodily and conceptual. That's the danger of taking ideas as real. Not just the heart, of course, but all human affairs, bodily and conceptual. That is, we get displaced from our ability to respond to what is really real, hence “idealism”.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Right, this is the part of your position I've ignored: abstract entities have only dependent, not independent existence. By "reify" you mean precisely attributing independent existence to something that doesn't have it.

Here's one way we can talk. There is a general event type, someone thinking it's going to rain; there is a particular event type, Alice thinking it's going to rain; and then there are particular instances of that, Alice's thinking yesterday that it was going to rain. (Obviously lots of other ways to carve that up...)

That last is a particular, but in your terms it is not a concrete particular, not because of anything to do with types and instances but because every instance of Alice thinking it's going to rain is dependent for its existence on Alice existing, is inseparable from Alice. We separate what Alice is thinking from Alice only fictively, by means of abstraction.

And then two people thinking the same thing is still as simple as I want it to be, just a matter of using the same words to describe what you fictively detach as "what they're thinking." If you then generalize, you can talk about the idea "that it is going to rain" as what anyone you would describe as thinking it's going to rain is thinking.

Yes, exactly. Well put.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

One little question: in this analysis, every instance of Alice thinking it's going to rain is dependent for its existence on Alice existing, not on Alice independently existing, right? I'd love to stay away from saying what that's supposed to mean, but we don't seem to rely on it anyway. Do you agree?

Well, thinking needs a subject (such as Alice). But Alice doesn't, in turn, have a subject - any chain of dependencies terminates with her. So in that sense, she is not dependent on anything further for her existence.

This just means that ordinary objects - things we observe or could potentially observe - just are our starting point for investigation, and the dependencies and relations between things flow from there. It's the view from somewhere as opposed to the Platonic view from nowhere (beyond the cave).

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

So far we're juggling general vs. particular, abstract vs. concrete, and dependent vs. independent. There are obvious temptations to match them up (respectively) that I'm trying to be careful about.

Indeed. Anyway, to begin with, ordinary objects are particular, concrete and independent.

The dependency relation between ordinary objects and abstractions characterizes Aristotle's fundamental disagreement with Plato. For Aristotle, ordinary objects (his primary substances) were the fundamental entities. Whereas for Plato, the eternal Forms were the fundamental entities, and ordinary objects depended on (participated in) those Forms.

Quoting Andrew M

Well, thinking needs a subject (such as Alice). But Alice doesn't, in turn, have a subject - any chain of dependencies terminates with her. So in that sense, she is not dependent on anything further for her existence.

If I understand you correctly, we're talking about conceptual dependence here. That I can deal with. It even has a natural connection to Frege's saturated/unsaturated distinction: "___ is thinking it's going to rain" is unsaturated, incomplete, and therefore an abstraction, and therefore has only dependent existence.

I was seriously afraid that "independent existence" was going to lead to having to say what the ultimate constituents of the universe are! You have a comfort level with QM that I don't, so I thought that might not scare you as much as it does me; or, rather, it might be something I would rather not have to do just to talk about what ordinary sentences mean, but you might not mind!

Or, even if we're not doing that, we might take "dependent" in Alice's case to mean, you know, a planet with a breathable atmosphere and a food source, stars, the universe. Alice's existence isn't independent in any number of ways.

Quoting Andrew M

For Aristotle, ordinary objects (his primary substances) were the fundamental entities.

So here maybe we're talking about what is conceptually fundamental, and for what Sellars calls the "manifest image" (or for Strawson's "descriptive metaphysics") that is indeed going to be sensible objects and persons.

Quoting Dfpolis

Truth is not correspondence to reality. Why?

Because only whole sentences can be true, whereas only parts of sentences can correspond to reality.

The correspondence relation is sometimes called "is true of", but that doesn't help, although it perhaps fuels the expectation.

But true sentences can correspond only to made-up abstractions.

Quoting bongo fury

But true sentences can correspond only to made-up abstractions

Not quite. Abstractions are not "made-up." Objects are intelligible, they can be understood. They are also are conplex, having many aspects, many notes of intelligibility, that can be understood. By becoming aware of objects, we make what is potentially known, what is merely intelligible, actually understood. The problem is that our brains have limited working memories, and cannot fully represent even what we sense. So, we chose to fix on some aspects, some notes of intelligibility, to the exclusion of others. That is abstraction, i.e., attending to some things and ignoring others. What we attend to is there, not made up. It is just not all of what is there.

The question of truth is the question of adequacy. Is our vision of reality, incomplete as it is, adequate? If it is, it is true. If it is not it is misleading and false. Whether or not it is adequate will depend on our needs. A vision adequate to one need may be inadequate to another.

Reply to Dfpolis hmm...

My bad for quoting you in this other thread. I think @Srap Tasmaner already questioned your usage of "abstraction". How about:

Quoting bongo fury

But true sentences can correspond only to made-up [s]abstractions[/s] chimaeras.

Reply to bongo fury

What is happening here?

Reply to bongo fury It would be unresponsive to what I said.

Reply to Srap Tasmaner I've fixed the quote link, but apologies for the tangle. My bad.

Quoting Dfpolis

It would be unresponsive to what I said.

... about correspondence, or abstraction?

Reply to bongo fury About abstractions as actualizizing the potential to be known.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

So this is the question:

If Alice is thinking something, must we conclude there is something that Alice is thinking?

Vote no.

And, if Alice is saying something, must we (can we) conclude there is some sort of a thing entering into a binary "is saying" relation with Alice?

Reply to Dfpolis Fair enough.

Reply to bongo fury

I'm partly indulging and partly testing my nominalist inclinations.

Reply to Srap Tasmaner

And are they differently set for thinking than for saying?

Reply to Srap Tasmaner Yes, they surely do.

But first, let’s make some speech aspects clear. The word “think” doesn’t have the same meaning in all three of your examples. In “Alice is thinking that the roof will never hold”, the word “thinking” means believing. The phrasal verbs “think about” and “think of” often mean roughly the same relationship or deed, sometimes perhaps even exactly the same one, and sometimes, as in your last two examples, “think of” means the same as “think about and plan to” (where the planning isn’t sure yet). The deedword “think” is not to be separated from the preposition. So “Alice is thinking of going to graduate school in the fall” should be broken up like this: “Alice | is thinking of | going to graduate school in the fall”, not like this : “Alice | is thinking | of going to graduate school in the fall”, as you have done. Here, “think of” means something like thinking about and planning to. Likewise, “Alice is thinking about her grandmother's house” should be broken up like this: “Alice | is thinking about | her grandmother's house”, not like this : “Alice | is thinking | about her grandmother's house”.

The objects of belief, as well as of knowledge-that, are propositions. These are abstract objects/entities/things that by their wist (essence) intrinsically mean states-of-affairs. The facts are the states-of-affairs that hold. If and only if a proposition is true, a belonging piece of information exists, which is often concrete. The phrase “that the roof will never hold” refers to a proposition, and this is the object of Alice’s belief.

The phrase “going to graduate school in the fall” either means the deed of going to graduate school in the fall, which is an abstract universal thing instantiated by individuals actually going to graduate school in the fall, or it means the (likewise abstract) proposition that the subject of the sentence of which the phrase is a part does said deed. In your example, it refers to the proposition that Alice goes to graduate school in the fall, and it is the object of Alice’s thinking-of, that is, of her thinking-about and planning.

Finally, the phrase “her grandmother's house” obviously means the house of Alice’s grandmother, which is the object of Alice’s thinking-about.

I must say this thread has been a very interesting one to read - many thanks!

Reply to bongo fury

Not following your question here.

Reply to Tristan L

Those were the examples I threw out not to hide the differences between meanings of "think" but to highlight them: splitting at the preposition (what could easily be a prefix in a language like German) was deliberate.

Quoting Tristan L

The objects of belief, as well as of knowledge-that, are propositions. These are abstract objects/entities/things that by their wist (essence) intrinsically mean states-of-affairs.

@Andrew M has explained what he means by "abstract entity". What do you mean?

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

If I understand you correctly, we're talking about conceptual dependence here. That I can deal with. It even has a natural connection to Frege's saturated/unsaturated distinction: "___ is thinking it's going to rain" is unsaturated, incomplete, and therefore an abstraction, and therefore has only dependent existence.

Yes.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

I was seriously afraid that "independent existence" was going to lead to having to say what the ultimate constituents of the universe are!

Yes, no need to go there! I see those as dependencies in a physical sense, which is how natural objects relate to each other and their dynamics - the subject matter of physics and other sciences.

Whereas the conceptual sense provides a schema for locating mind, colors, actions, events, statements, etc., in the world. That is, as abstractions that conceptually (or logically) depend on natural objects.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

You have a comfort level with QM that I don't, so I thought that might not scare you as much as it does me; or, rather, it might be something I would rather not have to do just to talk about what ordinary sentences mean, but you might not mind!

As it happens, I think an understanding of how language functions in ordinary experience is enormously helpful for getting a handle on more specialized and formalized fields. I like the way Scott Aaronson approaches the topic of teaching QM:

Quoting Scott Aaronson - Lecture 9: Quantum

The second way to teach quantum mechanics leaves a blow-by-blow account of its discovery to the historians, and instead starts directly from the conceptual core -- namely, a certain generalization of probability theory to allow minus signs.

So consider how you might teach someone classical probability. You show them a coin and discuss how probability applies to it. In a similar way, you can show them a quantum coin and discuss how quantum probability applies to it (i.e., with the minus sign aspect added). So it's a good example of generalizing and abstracting for the purpose of teaching something.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

For Aristotle, ordinary objects (his primary substances) were the fundamental entities.
— Andrew M

So here maybe we're talking about what is conceptually fundamental, and for what Sellars calls the "manifest image" (or for Strawson's "descriptive metaphysics") that is indeed going to be sensible objects and persons.

Yes. My view is that science (as well as math and logic) is a natural extension of ordinary experience. So there need be no conflict between an ordinary and scientific view, at least in principle.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Those were the examples I threw out not to hide the differences between meanings of "think" but to highlight them: splitting at the preposition (what could easily be a prefix in a language like German) was deliberate.

So what did you mean by saying the following?:

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Any of those look like things to you?

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Andrew M has explained what he means by "abstract entity". What do you mean?

By “abstractness”, I mean the property of being not-spatial, not-tidesome (not-temporal), not-physical, not-mindly, and onefold (simple). Regarding the last point, I think and feel that the notion of parthood belongs in the physical realm.

Quoting Tristan L

So what did you mean by saying the following?

That the analogy between "Sally kicks Steve" and "Sally thinks it's going to rain" ought to be examined more closely. It's reasonable to infer, from the fact that Sally kicks Steve, that there is an object Sally kicks; it is not clear to me that if Sally thinks it's going to rain then there is an object Sally thinks.

Your response is that I have simply picked out part of a phrasal verb, so I'm comparing the wrong things. "Sally kicks Steve" is in fact strongly analogous to

• "Sally thinks-that it's going to rain."
• "Sally thinks-of buying a guitar."
• "Sally thinks-about how much easier it used to be."

Now I can ask two sorts of questions:

1. Why does "thinks" have to be part of a phrasal verb when "kicks" doesn't? Why isn't there a "kicks-that", a "kicks-of", or a "kicks-about"?
2. If I'm thinking about Steve, it seems I'm thinking about the object Steve; therefore, if I'm thinking about how much easier it used to be, I must be thinking about the object how much easier it used to be. How convincing is that "therefore"? I can also kick or marry or talk to Steve; can I also kick or marry or talk to how much easier it used to be?

I cannot, I understand you to be saying, because how much easier it used to be is "not-spatial, not-tidesome (not-temporal), not-physical, not-mindly, and onefold (simple)". Steve is at least some of those things; when I think about Steve, am I doing the same sort of thing as when I think about how much easier it used to be?

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

If Alice is thinking something, must we conclude there is something that Alice is thinking?

The answer is yes.

There is something in the difference between the real and the ideal circle that has a strange effect on us. These days, with sophisticated technology, we can produce something very close indeed to a perfect circle. But that same technology can reveal to us just how imperfect it is. We are easily awed by that difference and attach inappropriate and entirely unjustified meaning to it. As if the imperfectability of the real means that the ideal is somehow what realness is. Obviously, there is something in the ideal that means it cannot be what realness is. We tend to become so awed by the difference that we come to think of reality as a failure, when, quite obviously, the failure is ideal. forever and always, eternally, failing to be anything real. I put my money on imperfection! So long, that is, as it contributes to recognizableness of the difference. Not to reveal the perfection of the ideal, nor to effect pretensions to perfection in the imperfect, but to prove the failure of the perfect to be real. It's a bloody mess, yes. But it's too real not to love.

All too real. I suppose, if your goal to to develop AI to a point that the human mind is obsolesced, then the priority of the imperfectible-because-real over the perfect-but-unreal is an insurmountable impediment to that achievement. The human eye is a case in point. We cannot keep our eyes still. Transcendence would insist that this is a failure pr weakness, but it is precisely how the eye works. It.s greatest virtue. Fact is, we hardly see most of what we look at. And what our eyes actually supply the mind is extremely crude compared to this marvelously vivid and usually quite accurate sense. For instance, stereo vision, obviously not the product of the sense organs themselves, is a matter of having two perspectives. I suspect that one-eyed persons can achieve something similar simply by moving their head, and if so, this would support my explanation. That is, with two eyes slightly separated, or one kept in motion, we look behind objects, and so gauge their positions. Now, I suppose a computer could do as much. And the fact that we notice so little of what we see similarly. But the computer only notices what it is programmed to notice, or by repetition forms a new program to notice. But we are programmed to notice what we are not programmed to notice. In fact, there ought'a be a law by which the presumption of guilt always falls upon the autonomous machine. There can be no presumption of innocence for AI. But it is what alters our complacency that gets our attention. And we strive might and main to get it back. A computer, however, cannot create a meme from one distressing circumstance or perception. That emotional investment, which the computer cannot bring to its performance because it is constructed on idealist principles and applies idealist memes and methods, alters the terms antecedent to the state of complacency brought to a grinding halt by the distressing circumstance, though is quickly restored to complacency in the modified lexicon the experience inspires. It is not what we think we see, it is not the terms of our experiences, that is the engine of the human mind, it is the changes that disturb our confidence in abstracted processes and methods, and so tend to prove that abstraction inadequacy and failure, something any system, AI or human conceit in the perfection of mind it would represent if it could be as real as flesh and blood, grinds to a halt like a fine machine in a nitty-gritty environment.

Dear god! Not bullet points! What is it with these damn bullet points?! The mind cannot be mapped like this because what it gets up to alters all the terms of all the languages that can possibly respond to its utterances. Words never mean the same thing twice. You have to deny what language really is to become convicted in that conceit. The abstraction is not adequate to the real. It is a glib complacency awaiting its moment to be altered by the action of mind in response to something more real than that glib complacency and that only endures as that complacency restored under the renewed regime of inadequacy to the real in differed terms. It is a prayer that obliterates its god. and instantly replaces it with another called it to prayer, a different abstraction by the same name.

If Alice is thinking anything it is not ours to know, only what she reports of it. How could anyone miss that? It's as if the very possibility of deception must be disposed of. But that possibility is precisely the issue driving the emergence of language in any form at all. Any language that doesn't recognize that origin is dependent for all its terms upon that very issue it does not recognize. If you want to be stupid, you have my blessing in the effort, but if you mean to erect an edifice of neglect to be imposed on the rest of us, that is a crime against philosophy, as well as humanity!

Here's some abstractions for you, logical quantifiers like some, any, at least one, not even one. If you don't know exactly, and not abstractly, how many B is A, and exactly, not abstractly, why, then A=B and B=C is not determinant, and the logical positivist system falls apart. And the "law" of the excluded middle fails. But the meaning we seek is the characterology of conviction. We share the meaning of terms, including structural terms like conjunction and dis-junction, in a dramatic engagement with each other spurring a greater intensity of discipline and rigor in the dynamic character of our convictions. Not by persuasion and striving to gain assent, but by energizing contrariety. But by clarifying that dissent reduced to its least term of becoming dissuaded of our own conviction. In this way the character of discipline we each bring to the dynamic of our convictions enjoins in a recurrent and complimentary contrariety which assures the integrity and individuality of our thought and yet, if rigor is observed, and spurred on by our engagement with the terms of discourse, we can never be unsure of those terms. But only a human being, a living person, can do this. There can be no system or mechanism which can displace it. Dehumanizing logic is not an option.

Wittgenstein opens his famous opus stating that the world is everything that is the case. Chomsky opens his with the assertion that language is the totality of all possible sentences. Wittgenstein throws his hands up in the end, in his famous phrase about passing over in silence what we cannot speak of. All utter nonsense! Where words fail us is precisely where we get talking, and can't stop talking! And that, in sum, is what it all means!

Reply to Olivier5 I tend to agree. If someone says they're thinking, "Thinking of what?" is a valid question and "nothing" would be a nonsensical answer to that question. Can you think of nothing? No. You can think of nothingness, but that's not the same thing.

Reply to RogueAI

The question is just how much philosophical hay can be made out of saying, if you're thinking about something, then there's something that you're thinking about.

You can take that as an innocent grammatical transformation, or you can take it as proof of another realm of non-temporal, non-spatial, ideal Things that are the object of our thought. I'm not making this up.

Which makes more sense to you?

Reply to RogueAI Exactly. Who said that thoughts can’t be things?

Reply to Srap Tasmaner I think the grammar maps on to our (correct) intuition that thoughts and minds are things, separate from the brain. The adjectives that describe the brain don't work when used to describe the mind, and vice-versa. This too, reflects the way things really are: minds are not brains.

Reply to RogueAI

Whereas my sense is that neither minds nor brains think about things; persons do.

Reply to Srap Tasmaner I would agree with that. But I'm an idealist, so I literally believe that people are nothing but thoughts and minds.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

it is not clear to me that if Sally thinks it's going to rain then there is an object Sally thinks.

Isn’t it perfectly clear that the proposition that it’s going to rain is the object of Alice’s belief?

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

"Sally kicks Steve" is in fact strongly analogous to

"Sally thinks-that it's going to rain."
"Sally thinks-of buying a guitar."
"Sally thinks-about how much easier it used to be."

With the first one I agree, but with the second and the third ones, I don’t.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

1. Why does "thinks" have to be part of a phrasal verb when "kicks" doesn't? Why isn't there a "kicks-that", a "kicks-of", or a "kicks-about"?

Because that’s how the English speech has evolved. There are different mental activities, such as believing, thinking-about, and thinking-about-and-planning, but since all these narrowkinds (species) of mental activity are narrowkinds of the same broadkind (genus), namely mindly activity, the same basic deedword is used to refer to them.

There may not be a “kicks-around”, but there is a “flies-over”, for example. In “The bird flies over the berg”, the berg is the object of the deed of overflying.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

If I'm thinking about Steve, it seems I'm thinking about the object Steve; therefore, if I'm thinking about how much easier it used to be, I must be thinking about the object how much easier it used to be. How convincing is that "therefore"?

It really is very convincing. There is a three-slotted relationship called “being-easier-than-by-that-much”; for every thing x, every thing y, and every easierness-measuring quantity e, the sentence “x is easier than y by w” means the proposition that being-easier-than-by-that-much relates x, y, and e to each other. “How much easier it used to be” refers to the easierness-measuring quantity e for which it’s the case that being-easier-than-by-that-much relates the present state of the world, the past state of the world, and e to each other. It does this in the same way that “the ball that Alice kicked” refers to the ball b for which it’s the case that Alice kicked b.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

when I think about Steve, am I doing the same sort of thing as when I think about how much easier it used to be?

Yes, you would be, because both are actually abstract. But you can’t really think about Steve unless you’re a thoughtcaster (telepath). Allow me to explain. Steve himself is a soul, and the only souls that can see souls other than themselves are thoughtcasters. Perhaps all disembodied souls are telepaths, but experience tells me that when a soul is embodied, it usually isn’t (I have yet to find a true thoughtcaster). When you apparently think about Steve, you’re actually thinking about the property (call it “Steveness”) of being a soul which inhabits a body such that this soul-body-combination sent such and such soundwaves into your ears and reflected such and such photons into your eyes to cause such and such sensations and ... . When you apparently believe that Steve has some property E, you actually believe the proposition that there is exactly one soul S such that S has Steveness and that for every soul S, if S has Steveness, then S has property E. Given that there really is exactly one soul that has Steveness, the only embodied soul that can see it is that soul itself (unless there are embodied telepaths). When your appear to kick Steve, you’re actually kicking a body which you hypothesize is inhabited by a soul. You can’t kick how much easier it used to be because easierness-measuring quantities don’t inhabit bodies. Something similar is true of other actions like marrying.

That’s at least my take on the matter.

There are many autonomic systems in the body, all of which have overriding authorities, not by the mind, necessarily, but in response to needs and changes automaton processes can't direct. The brain is no exception. Also, the brain is much more than the frontal lobes. It is a network of neural fibers reaching out to every part of the body, maybe every cell. You might as well say the whole body is the mind. And every cell is more autonomous than the autonomic systems we take for granted as running it. Remember, most cells in the body have constituted their place in the body through differentiation, not just replication. And that differentiation is certainly more constitutive than replication of its role in the body, and more what mind is. That is, closer to what directs the body's autonomic systems than merely complying with their processes.

Husserl claimed the "intentional object" could not be mistaken. Not that it cannot be a mistake about it, but that we cannot be mistaken which or what is intended. I've no idea what a sugar-plum fairy is, but should I learn what it is, or am enlightened about it by others, I will all along know that of which I am discovering or learning. Or at least So says Husserl. Sartre wrote two short books on the subject, The Imaginary (L'Imaginaire) and Imagination. It is easy to misread the titles, he is not saying ideas are imaginary, but that they are images.

The mind is not the brain, as such. It certainly is not an autonomic system with the brain. It is an intrusion upon those autonomic systems the brain is constructed for itself correcting and augmenting it where it is unable to be self-correcting or to apply a more active rigor to those systems, even if that rigor takes the form of retrenching otherwise unfounded convictions. This is possible because differentiation, not replication, is the engine of the integrity of body and person. Only a community of differentiating participants can regulate an autonomic system with rigorous intrusions of issues and sense it cannot otherwise cope with adequately. It certainly does not mean that mind and person are somehow "independent" of body or its material makeup. It sure as hell does mean we are ethereal beings or souls, or some such nonsense. The real issue of this thread is rational induction or synthesis. Reason is reductive and only reductive, but requires its synthetic term to begin its reductive endeavors. Reason always begins convicted of a prior term, which can never be truth. Its "extension" of that term is therefore, at best, capable only of validity. Since there is no true or valid synthesis, the final term of that reduction can only be the nullity of the entire reduction. The end of reason is the erasure of its beginning. The only real outcome possible is the transformation of all term, and the loss of all duration, the loss of all ends to beginnings. That transformation of all terms is the least term of that reduction. This is forestalled by retrenching conviction short of that concluding term. And, no duration, no beginning complementary to its end, no space of time or thought, only moment, the moment of the transformation of all terms, not just those antecedent to that lost duration, is what is real. And that because we are more worthy of what being real is there, in that moment, than ever we are looking to endure or to find or establish duration, or "epoch" (as Husserl would put it). The characterology of that rigor bringing us to that moment is what is most worthy of us, it is the very language of worth. And, therefore, it is what person is. But it is fatuous to suppose the brain, including its constant conversation with all parts of the body down to each most differentiated cell, is not very much the locus of it. Consider Hawking's weird 'String Theory', or the crazily incalculable proto-energy that motivates this desperate attempt to resolve this final, as far as we can yet know final, term of the calculative understanding of matter, and see if you still believe matter is not a real and fertile enough venue for the possibility of life, mind, person, and the articulation of the worth of time, as moment not duration, that person is.

When you think of Steve you are thinking of the dialectical participation of Steve in the development of the terms of conviction by which you know yourself. Mind is simply the the creator of its own autonomic systems. Every brain cell and neural connection in it is your doing. We help each other achieve some of the rigor that work entails, but if that rigor is real, rather than unchallenged conviction or mere habit, it is all ours, yet in shared terms. The abstraction comes in where we depart each other in that participation, as much to free each other of our own convictions as to assure a more comprehensive lexicon. Abstraction is a process of separation, not unification. Unity comes as a mythic substitute for rigor. Unless we know everything B about A and everything C about B we are completely blind to the possible validity of A being C. Is reason blind? Comprehension can hardly be ours if it is not comprehensive. It is only where we recognize how comprehensively we do not know that the conviction that we can, let alone that we do, is more than merely a dramatic conceit meant to fend off the moment that we do recognize this.

Quoting Tristan L

Isn’t it perfectly clear that the proposition that it’s going to rain is the object of Alice’s belief?

No, it isn't.

It is clear that if Alice is thinking it's going to rain, then we are entitled to say she's thinking something. What is not clear is how we should take the further claim that "there is something Alice is thinking". @Andrew M claims that the something Alice is thinking is a convenient fiction, and he calls this fiction an "abstract entity" without committing in any way to its independent existence.

If Bob is also thinking it's going to rain, we can say anaphorically that Bob is thinking the same thing as Alice, and here the convenience of @Andrew M's fiction becomes more apparent, for we may wish to talk about what they're both thinking in more general terms: anyone thinking it's going to rain has reason to take an umbrella, or, thinking it's going to rain is a reason to take an umbrella.

That you can translate what an Aristotelian, like @Andrew M, says, or what someone who may have stronger nominalist inclinations says, into terms we might call Platonist -- that is not at issue. Of course you can. But what do you say to convince us that there are Propositions? That there are Relations? Where does @Andrew M's way of talking or mine come up short?

Without asking Alice, the discussion is vacuous. Isn't this discussion about how to divest ourselves of responsibility to ask? To listen? And isn't that avoidance of responsibility what the written word was invented to achieve? Language is flesh and blood, not marks on stone. What is real to meaning is not the lexical and syntactic carrier signals it entails, but the flesh and blood drama and dynamic of the rigor we urge each other to in differing over that meaning. The characterology of that drama we each bring to it is the substance of it. That character of our differing convictions about what we each can mean does not unify us, but distinguishes us from each other in the privacy of reasoning. But it does unify us in the terms of that reasoning, and even that distinction. In that unity of terms, never a unity of conviction or thought or meaning, as the active part we each play in the drama of person, is the articulation of the terms of that unity and of that person we each alone are in it. Person is the articulation of that worth.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

The characterology of that drama we each bring to it is the substance of it

That's a horizontal plane of interaction. The vertical dimension is like this:

When you arrive at a little wisdom, you may think of an old saying and realize you never understood it before, but now you do. 'We drink the same stream; we see the same sun; and run the same course our fathers have run...'

Conviction sometimes just comes from temperament. For some, an opinion is fists to pummel with. Probably doesnt even matter what that opinion is.

And then sometimes experience blooms into knowing. There's nothing private about it, just as you cant be alone staring at the stars: the stars are there with you.

What is it really that arises from asking?

Quoting Gary M Washburn

Without asking Alice, the discussion is vacuous.

Well, I called Alice over the phone to ask whether she did think something about the rain or not, and she referred me to the {expletive} weather channel.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

independent existence.

:chin:

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

It is clear that if Alice is thinking it's going to rain, then we are entitled to say she's thinking something. What is not clear is how we should take the further claim that "there is something Alice is thinking". Andrew M claims that the something Alice is thinking is a convenient fiction, and he calls this fiction an "abstract entity" without committing in any way to its independent existence.

If Bob is also thinking it's going to rain, we can say anaphorically that Bob is thinking the same thing as Alice, and here the convenience of @Andrew M's fiction becomes more apparent, for we may wish to talk about what they're both thinking in more general terms: anyone thinking it's going to rain has reason to take an umbrella, or, thinking it's going to rain is a reason to take an umbrella.

That you can translate what an Aristotelian, like @Andrew M, says, or what someone who may have stronger nominalist inclinations says, into terms we might call Platonist -- that is not at issue. Of course you can. But what do you say to convince us that there are Propositions? That there are Relations? Where does @Andrew M's way of talking or mine come up short?

Well said again. Just a note to clarify the sense of convenient fiction there. The Aristotelian view is that the abstract depends on the concrete. So the convenient fiction is that we may consider an abstract entity as if it were an independent entity when it is not. But it doesn't imply that abstract entities are something that we (as human beings) have imagined or invented. That distinguishes Aristotle's immanent realism from Nominalism, for which shared features are dependent on language, naming, or minds.

Consider Russell's example which he uses to argue for Platonism:

Quoting THE PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY: CHAPTER IX. THE WORLD OF UNIVERSALS - Bertrand Russell

Consider such a proposition as 'Edinburgh is north of London'. Here we have a relation between two places, and it seems plain that the relation subsists independently of our knowledge of it. When we come to know that Edinburgh is north of London, we come to know something which has to do only with Edinburgh and London: we do not cause the truth of the proposition by coming to know it, on the contrary we merely apprehend a fact which was there before we knew it. The part of the earth's surface where Edinburgh stands would be north of the part where London stands, even if there were no human being to know about north and south, and even if there were no minds at all in the universe. This is, of course, denied by many philosophers, either for Berkeley's reasons or for Kant's. But we have already considered these reasons, and decided that they are inadequate. We may therefore now assume it to be true that nothing mental is presupposed in the fact that Edinburgh is north of London. But this fact involves the relation 'north of', which is a universal; and it would be impossible for the whole fact to involve nothing mental if the relation 'north of', which is a constituent part of the fact, did involve anything mental. Hence we must admit that the relation, like the terms it relates, is not dependent upon thought, but belongs to the independent world which thought apprehends but does not create.

I agree with Russell here. But it doesn't further follow that there is any 'north-of' relation independent of a concrete context, e.g., a planet with poles. So that distinguishes Aristotelian realism from Platonic realism.

Reply to Andrew M

Lovely. In what sense "convenient fiction" is a distortion, is exactly what I wanted to know. Thanks so much for the Aristotle lesson.

What you get from Alice is a chance to alter what you are convinced rain is and "rain" means. As I said before, it is absurd to suppose we each arrive into our language somehow supplied with lexical terms and syntactic forms from some impersonal reservoir. Language is not an artifact, it is a dramatic labor constantly altered its terms through the discipline we urge each other to. And person is not a specimen on a dissecting tray. It is not explicated, it is intimated. To simply deny by fiat a phenomenon is unreal or plays no role in what you have become convinced is the issue of interest is not doing philosophy. It is dogma. We have to engage in a dialectic by which we are both transformed in the terms of our convictions to know ourselves, let alone each other.

Plato was not interested in navigating our way elsewhere, but in discovering where we are and what real departure means. Death is not is not an issue of cartography. And, therefore, neither is being where we are. He is not mapping the road to elsewhere, but creating the discipline by which we are really here at all.

Quoting Olivier5

Well, I called Alice over the phone to ask whether she did think something about the rain or not, and she referred me to the {expletive} weather channel

Well, the expletive suggests a recognition of the essential role emotional terms, and so emotions, play in the life of reason and even abstraction.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

Language is not an artifact, it is a dramatic labor constantly altered its terms through the discipline we urge each other to.

The capacity for language is innate, as is a lion's capacity to bring down a zebra.

Yes, that capacity is activated by social interaction, but a structure lies beneath. I think.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

If Bob is also thinking it's going to rain, we can say anaphorically that Bob is thinking the same thing as Alice

Exactly, and if there is no causal connection between Alice’s thinking and Bob’s thinking – e.g. because the two thought-events are separated by a space-like spacetime-interval (whether there is an absolute clock after all, for example one defined by instantaneous sending through quantum entanglement á la Antony Valentini (p. 4 last paragraph and note 8), is another matter) – with what right can we anaphorically say that Bob is thinking the same thing as Alice? Only by accepting that both are thinking about one and the same abstract entity, right?

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

thinking it's going to rain is a reason to take an umbrella.

Yes, the truth of the (abstract) state-of-affairs that it’s going to rain brings about the truth of the state-of-affairs that one should take an umbrella. Note that the about-bringing-relation is abstract as well.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

But what do you say to convince us that there are Propositions? That there are Relations? Where does Andrew M's way of talking or mine come up short?

Just like the very fact that I can ask whether I have awareness shows for certain that I have awareness, so the very fact that we can talk about the existence or not-existence of propositions proves that there are propositions. After all, that there are no propositions is a proposition, so for there to be no propositions, there has to be at least one proposition. The hypothetical non-existence of propositions would need it’s own negation and so beats itself. Have I now shown you that there are propositions?

Since propositions intrinsically mean states-of-affairs, the same goes for the latter (for convenience, I’ll often not distinguish between the two).

Propertyhood is a property. That there are no properties means that propertihood has no instances. So the very claim that there are no properties needs at least one property, namely propertihood, in order to even make sense. Have I now proven to you that there are properties?

There is an obvious one-to-one-correspondence between relationships and properties of tuples. Moreover, the selfsameness-relationship is needed by the Law of Self-Identity, without which thought, speech, being, and reality would all come crashing down. Have I now convinced you that there are relationships?

So by negating the existence of these abstract things, one pulls the meaning-giving ground out from under that very claim. Isn’t this where Aristotelianism and nominalism go wrong?

Now let the platonist give another proof of the realness of abstract entities and mount a counter-attack: I can directly “see” abstract things like the number 7, the property of numberhood, the exponential function, and the proposition that all things are abstract with “my mind’s eye” right now. But I cannot directly “see” anything concrete. Why, then, should I believe that there is anything concrete at all?

Quoting Tristan L

it is not clear to me that if Sally thinks it's going to rain then there is an object Sally thinks. — Srap Tasmaner


Isn’t it perfectly clear that the proposition that it’s going to rain is the object of Alice’s belief?

Now why did I turn Sally into Alice... :chin: I only just realized that I did.

Quoting Tristan L

that there are no propositions is a proposition

Question begging.

Quoting Tristan L

Propertyhood is a property.

Question begging.

Quoting Tristan L

with what right can we anaphorically say that Bob is thinking the same thing as Alice? Only by accepting that both are thinking about one and the same abstract entity, right?

We can say that Bob is thinking the same thing as Alice if Alice is thinking it's going to rain and Bob is thinking it's going to rain. I don't need any more justification than that. If to say there is an abstract entity, what they are thinking, is only to say that we can consider what they are thinking as if it were an independent object, though it isn't, then I have no beef with abstract entities. (I'm happy to leave the argument between nominalism and Aristotelianism for another day.)

But I left off the first part of your point:

Quoting Tristan L

if there is no causal connection between Alice’s thinking and Bob’s thinking

You claim that there is a causal connection between them, and that this is because they are both causally connected to something, a proposition, that is "not-spatial, not-tidesome (not-temporal), not-physical, not-mindly, and onefold (simple)"?

If that's the case, I don't know what you mean by "causal".

Quoting frank

That's a horizontal plane of interaction. The vertical dimension is like this:

Is reason a Ponzi scheme? Hierarchical? Or perhaps you're confusing identity with the identical? Which, of course, are opposites. One Steve and one Alice does not add up to two Alices or two Steves. Interactions of differences does not create sameness. The vertical trope of ideas is a power play, not reasoning. Identity displaces what would otherwise be identical, and certainly not the inverse. But the geometric trope on a vertical axis of ideas is meant to do violence against that displacement, and becomes the pretext for cruelty, and the assurance of ignorance in the guise of pretended wisdom.

Quoting frank

The capacity for language is innate, as is a lion's capacity to bring down a zebra.

Actually, lions have to work very hard to learn that skill. But from where do you suppose anything "innate" comes? Who are all the cells in the body taking orders from as they prepare for nativity? Doesn't each cell have a life of its own? A community in differentiation, not replication? What directs each one to be that difference creating the innate?

Quoting Gary M Washburn

reason a Ponzi scheme? Hierarchical? Or perhaps you're confusing identity with the identical? Which, of course, are opposites. One Steve and one Alice does not add up to two Alices or two Steves. Interactions of differences does not create sameness. The vertical trope of ideas is a power play, not reasoning. Identity displaces what would otherwise be identical, and certainly not the inverse. But the geometric trope on a vertical axis of ideas is meant to do violence against that displacement, and becomes the pretext for cruelty, and the assurance of ignorance in the guise of pretended wisdom.

Cruelty and ignorance. How do I know them when I see them? What cruel ignorance is bound up in Meno's Paradox?

Quoting Gary M Washburn

Actually, lions have to work very hard to learn that skill.

What in earth are you talking about? It's a game for cubs.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

But from where do you suppose anything "innate" comes

You have an innate ability to walk on two legs. DNA probably.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

But I left off the first part of your point:

if there is no causal connection between Alice’s thinking and Bob’s thinking — Tristan L


You claim that there is a causal connection between them, and that this is because they are both causally connected to something, a proposition, that is "not-spatial, not-tidesome (not-temporal), not-physical, not-mindly, and onefold (simple)"?

If that's the case, I don't know what you mean by "causal".

What I mean is that Alice’s thinking does not directly or indirectly bring about Bob’s thinking or vice versa. So if there’s no abstract entity which both think about independently of each other, the two thoughts would have nothing in common, being created by two different minds independently of each other. Because of the lack of an efficient causal link, Bob cannot think about Alice’s thought or its contents. So on what ground can they be said to be thinking the same thing? On the ground that both independently of each other think about one and the same abstract proposition.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Question begging.

How is that question begging?

The very meaningfulness of the claim that (that there are no propositions) is a proposition, and of the claim that propertihood is a property, requires not just the existence of propositionhood, the particular propositions involved, and propertihood, but those very things themselves. It’s just that two clouds being clouds requires the existence of couldhood – it needs cloudhood itself, first the Shape’s wist (essence), and then its existence.

Actually, I’m trying to show you that abstract things exist only secondarily. Firstly, I’m trying to show you the abstract things themselves, as well as (abstract thing)-hood (itself an abstract entity). For instance, my statement that propertihood is a property is mainly there to draw people’s attention to propertihood itself and help them see it itself and the fact that it’s needed for the very meaningfulness of said statement.

When a platonist of my flavour says that for every property S, the is a Shape of S-ness, he (used gender-neutrally) doesn’t primarily mean what he says – namely claim the existence of some thing. S itself is basically the Shape of S-ness already. The very act of thinking or talking about S already presupposes S. His wording is only there to draw attention to S itself, to help folks become aware of S in and of itself. I find and feel that the existence of abstract things is so self-evident that it’s hard to show it, just like you probably can’t prove that the Law of Self-Identity holds true, yet just like the latter, it’s needed for this very talk to even make sense. The metaphors of my brand of platonism are there only to help folks become aware of the shapes. One of the things that I think the Parmenides is trying to do – and that’s just my take on the matter, for I’m no historian of philosophy who mainly seeks to judge what the historical Platonist Plato was trying to do – is tell the advanced platonist to get rid of the metaphors that helped him get into platonism when he was still a beginner.

The very fact that we’re having thoughts, which makes this discussion possible, is thanks in part to the Shape of Thought. To me, it looks like that is so basic a fact that we’re not automatically aware of it, just as many animals aren’t very self-aware (and I don’t even claim full self-awareness for myself, but that’s another matter).

See also this comment of mine. Regarding the chest-seeing metaphor there, the platonist’s metaphorical wording is like an exercise to stretch the upper part of your neck, which will allow you to see more of your chest and help you against forward head posture.

Quoting Tristan L

It’s just that two clouds being clouds requires the existence of couldhood

Here's some stuff about clouds:

Quoting Wikipedia

In meteorology, a cloud is an aerosol consisting of a visible mass of minute liquid droplets, frozen crystals, or other particles suspended in the atmosphere of a planetary body or similar space.[1] Water or various other chemicals may compose the droplets and crystals. On Earth, clouds are formed as a result of saturation of the air when it is cooled to its dew point, or when it gains sufficient moisture (usually in the form of water vapor) from an adjacent source to raise the dew point to the ambient temperature.

There's a definition grounded in science, so it's a little more precise than the everyday understanding of "cloud", and some explanation -- tells you what clouds are actually made of, for instance, which is not perfectly obvious from their appearance, and why they form.

What would the addition of the term "cloudhood" add to this discussion? What would it enable you to know or to say that meteorologists and ordinary folk cannot?

There are myriad tissues, each of cells of different character, and, arguably, of which each and every cell is importantly differentiated from all the others. When two cells differentiate upon division, are they differentiated as much from each other as from the cell they once were united in? If so, how the hell can the DNA, so famously identical in both, account for the difference between them? How does a system of replication engineer differentiation? Or govern the role of each cell in the process of that differentiation? Or even espouse some sort of recognition of the totality of differentiated cells as an organism able to develop the ability to walk?

Have you never witnessed a child learning to walk? It's a mammoth struggle, and your denying them credit for the effort in no way detracts from the responsibility the child takes in its own development. Other than talking around it, and not necessarily to it, there is nothing we can do to teach the child to talk. But if we do not talk around it it will not teach itself what we are going on about at all. And if we only talk to the child, and not around it, it's development will be sharply inhibited. As I said before, the autonomic systems an organism creates for itself neither limit it to an automaton nor detracts from the indispensable role its autonomous intrusions upon its autonomic systems has in their creation. Person is the stranger to the machine, and yet, its creator too. That is why person can never be obsolesced by the machine. And only the machine mind could think it could. A Turing test only works if it is strictly limited to automaton terms.

If the idea is itself a member of the category it names those members cannot be used to explicate the idea. If it is not a member of its category it cannot explain that membership. This is the dilemma Russell posed to Frege, at which Frege threw in the towel, and, as far as I know, Russell never himself managed to get around. The whole analytic project becomes fatally circular. You cannot divest reason of responsibility. We no more have a right to be understood than we do to be believed. The end of reason is the moment of recognition that reaffirms that responsibility as its foundation. There is no formula that can absolve understanding of that moment that only personal recognition and responsibility can supply. We can avoid that responsibility only by arrogating a right to be understood. But "I know what I mean!" does not confer any right to be understood. More critically, it implies a conviction in a right to be believed, and that is a most profound crime against philosophy.

Is one drop rain? Is a torrential deluge? According to Plato, Achilles wanted not just to be valorous, but to be valor itself. Not a member of the class but the idea of it. The result is that to be that idea, to be worshiped by his men, he had to die. Odysseus wanted to be the idea of being one of the guys. The result is that all his men had to die for him to find his way home. In this (Lesser Hippias, I think) and elsewhere, he was twenty five hundred years ahead of Russell. When are we going to catch up? The great danger is that by opting for an end-run around the dialectical drama between understanding and recognition, giving voice and listening, we lop off the only completing term to reason that personal drama is. I understand that we fear a return to superstition, but the mission to evade it by dehumanizing reason actually has the effect of merely erecting another edifice of superstition. The superstition that you not only have right to be understood, but believed as well. And how the hell is that any better?

Reply to Srap Tasmaner Cloudhood need not be added to the discussion, for the meteorologist has already brought it in when defining what a cloud is. The only difference between him or her and the philosopher is that the latter is highly aware of cloudhood itself whereas the former only has a diffuse and subconscious awareness of it (unless she or he is also a philosopher).

So which is it? If the question is whether ideas are real, is the difference between ordinary experience, poetic trope, and technical definition really the decider? Do only technicians think? Do only technicians do philosophy? Actually, I doubt most meteorologists would know what is meant by "cloudhood". I thought it might be something to do with internet storage until I finished reading the remarks. The issue it seems to me is what if anything does the word or its presumptive idea got to do with the real phenomena it is supposed to indicate or explain. Do phenomena obey the idea, or does the activity of the phenomena teach the idea how to perform its role of indicating it? Does the idea command order in the world, or does order in the world suggest the parameters of the idea? Is mind predator, parasite, or symbiosis?

Quoting Gary M Washburn

If the question is whether ideas are real, is the difference between ordinary experience, poetic trope, and technical definition really the decider?

In good cartesian fashion, if ideas are not real, I wonder what is real... Objects around us? We only know of them through our ideas of them.

Quoting Tristan L

Cloudhood need not be added to the discussion, for the meteorologist has already brought it in when defining what a cloud is. The only difference between him or her and the philosopher is that the latter is highly aware of cloudhood itself whereas the former only has a diffuse and subconscious awareness of it (unless she or he is also a philosopher).

I see. The difference is that you know more about cloudhood than meteorologists do, even if they know more about clouds than you do. If meteorologists discovered that cloud formation actually occurs in a way quite different from what they thought, that in a sense clouds aren't quite the sort of thing we thought they were, would your knowledge of cloudhood also change? Would you need to know they had made this discovery for your knowledge to change? What if the discovery was that several sorts of things previously just called "clouds" were actually very different, so that the world "cloud" was now considered old-fashioned and misleading by meteorologists? What then?

Quoting Gary M Washburn

Does the idea command order in the world, or does order in the world suggest the parameters of the idea?

Does phenomenology lead to answers or is it just a fun waste of time? I think it's probably the latter. Still, i like the idea that there are two kinds of experience.

1. A state of fusion in which there is no awareness of self or Other, maybe a feel for the physics of climbing a tree or swerving out the way of an on-coming truck, maybe a nameless feeling that accompanies shade turning to bright sunlight.

2. A state of reflection on events where we pull it all apart and lay out the pieces. Now there are distinctions. Now we can ask about how the physical relates to the non-physical.

The second is much more verbally loaded, right?

I recommend QED (Quantum Electrodynamics, by Richard Feynman). The ordinary experience of light and Newtonian optics are not incompatible. But a quantum analysis is incompatible to both. Light, it turns out, is a reduction of uncountable chaotic interactions. The reduction slices the event into its component parts and recombines them mathematically so that the crazy stuff all cancels itself out, leaving conventional wisdom. But what then does light illuminate? What does the conventional perception of it reveal of the crazy stuff that goes into bringing it into "law governed" range of our ordinary experience? Doesn't it all add up to a kind of darkness? How does what's in the dark reveal itself as the light it produces? Which is more "physical?

Descartes didn't doubt enough. Egotism is no excuse for lying to yourself. What if there is no "foundation" or "ground" (as Heidegger put it)? What if there is no origin or point of departure, no coherent or comprehensive antecedent term from which to begin the reduction? No such term, that is, but conviction? In this case the final term of the reduction is the loss of the suppose originating term. Doubt undoes itself as much as everything else. Self is its own excluded middle. Unless, that is, the excluded middle is only law between conviction and its loss. What then gets included? Not the contradictory, but the contrary term. If contrariety rules as a community in contrariety to the limited lawfulness that fails to illuminate it because that contrariety, by losing itself to the reduction, is generated whatever illumination there is.

Splashing about like children in the shallows is not going to get us there.

If you now try to cover over this dilemma by claiming the reduction reveals what is real and the rest is negligible, I suggest you read The Analyst, by George Berkeley.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

I see. The difference is that you know more about cloudhood than meteorologists do, even if they know more about clouds than you do.

Not really, I think. According to my understanding, meteorologists mostly know more about cloudhood than the platonic philosopher does, but what sets him or her apart from them is that he/she is aware of cloudhood as a Shape, whereas they are not (at least nor consciously). Take Wikipedia’s definition, for example: “[A] cloud is an aerosol consisting of a visible mass of minute liquid droplets, frozen crystals, or other particles suspended in the atmosphere of a planetary body or similar space.” This is more properly formulated as “Cloudhood is the property of being an aerosol consisting of a visible mass of minute liquid droplets, frozen crystals, or other particles suspended in the atmosphere of a planetary body or similar space.” So the meteorologists are actually talking about cloudhood, not individual clouds.

Odd even numbers don’t exist, right? Well, then, how can we be talking about something not-existing right now? How can something non-existent have the property of being talked about? The aswer seems to be that these questions are loaded. In reality, we aren’t talking about odd even numbers at all. We’re talking about the property of being an odd even number, and that property exists, so there’s nothing unusual about it being talked about. The sentence “Odd even numbers don’t exist” is a rather clumsy and misleading (leading to the paradox just discussed) way of saying that the property of being and odd even number has no instances.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

If meteorologists discovered that cloud formation actually occurs in a way quite different from what they thought, that in a sense clouds aren't quite the sort of thing we thought they were, would your knowledge of cloudhood also change? Would you need to know they had made this discovery for your knowledge to change?

I don’t claim to have much knowledge of cloudhood. The meteorologists know much more about it than I do, so if they found out that it is something different from what they and I thought, I will naturally follow them.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

What if the discovery was that several sorts of things previously just called "clouds" were actually very different, so that the world "cloud" was now considered old-fashioned and misleading by meteorologists? What then?

That’s a good point. I’d say that in that case, there are two options:
1. Many of the things regarded as clouds before turned out not to have cloudhood after all.
2. Cloudhood is not a very natural property for things to have. All the things traditionally thought of as having cloudhood do actually have cloudhood, but they’re so different that sharing cloudhood is not a very important shared feature. Perhaps there’s a particular, well-defined kind of naturalness involved, as is the case in taxonomy. For instance, it was found that the class Reptilia is paraphyletic, th.i. it contains exactly one forebear of all its other members, but not all that forebear’s descendents, because mammals and birds are descended from reptiles but aren’t reptiles themselves. Reptilia’s existence isn’t under threat, though; it’s only been found that it isn’t natural in the phylogenetic sense (phylogenetic naturalness = monophyly = the property of being a group of organisms with exactly one founding forebear and all of its descendents).

There’s one more thing: How is the meaning of the word “cloudhood” defined?

Is it chosen to mean the property given by Wikipedia? In that case, the Wikipedia-definition would be analytically true, and statements about individual cloud-candidates or the property of being a thing which people normally call ‘cloud’ would be synthetic. Also, the meaning of the word “cloudhood” would be trivial.

Or is the word “cloudhood” chosen to mean the property of which I think right now, a property which I predicate of those fluffy things in the sky? In that case, the Wikipedia-definition would be synthetic. Also, the meaning of the word “cloudhood” wouldn’t be trivial, and the fuzzier my mental pointing at the property in question is, the less trivial the meaning of “cloudhood” would be.

That’s at least how I see things, and I’m happy to hone it.

Quoting Tristan L

This is more properly formulated as

If this translation system works so well, I can just as well translate your Platonish into something else, like regular English.

From the beginning I've said that translating everything I say or anyone else says into Platonish proves nothing at all. Maybe some people find it persuasive but it should be clear by now that I don't.

You provided no argument that besides clouds there's something called "cloudhood". You've shown nothing that the term "cloudhood" would add to a discussion of clouds except phrasing that pleases you more. You've given me no reason, in any of your posts, for me to consider Platonism anything more than your preferred way of talking.

Do you have anything that might persuade me?

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

From the beginning I've said that translating everything I say or anyone else says into Platonish proves nothing at all.

Yes, I agree with you. However, I haven’t just shown that we can translate everything into Platonish; I’ve shown that we must do so, for example here:

Quoting Tristan L

Odd even numbers [...] no instances.

Since odd even numbers don’t exist, and what doesn’t exist can’t have properties, such as being thought about or being divisible and indivisible by 2, we can’t mean odd even numbers when we appear to talk about them. Rather, what we mean must be the property of being an odd even number, which very much exists and is soothfast (real) and so can be thought and talked about. The sentence “Odd even numbers are divisible and indivisible by 2” cannot predicate divisibility and indivisibleness by 2 of something non-existent like odd even numbers, so it must instead say of the property of being an odd even number that is has the property of being a property p such that for all x, if x has p, then p is divisible and indivisible by 2.

So I believe that I have actually given compelling arguments for platonism, contrary to what you say here:

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

You provided no [...] of talking.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Do you have anything that might persuade me?

I hope that I have given it to you.

Does "cloudhood" include what forms in a cloud chamber? I wonder how many meteorologists would know what is meant by that word, unless, of course, they used a proficiency at understanding meaning not supplied by the technical study of clouds, and proscribed by the thesis the word is being used to promote. As for persuasion, it is hard to see how this is possible if you arrogate all terms to your own, peculiar, understanding. Plato treats the matter in Protagorus, Euthydemus, and, especially Gorgias. Also, Phaedrus and Cratylus. Of course, it has already been stated that we are not permitted references to Plato in this discussion of Platonism. Meaning is a dialectic between a person, an interlocutor, and the universe as a sort of tertium-quid to the drama between them. What this implies, conclusively if only understood, is that universals, abstractions, ideas, hide their origins, as described in my analogy with light, which leaves its origin very much in the dark.

Quoting Tristan L

I hope that I have given it to you.

No.

If I don't take predicates as Properties that have independent existence, I don't have to take vacuous predicates as Properties that themselves have the Property of having no instances.

Vacuous singular terms (Santa Claus, the Bermuda Triangle, the present king of France) aren't going to do it either.

You might eventually recognize that in giving this argument you're standing right next to natural numbers and sets, and those actually do represent some kind of trouble for me, but it's trouble I already know about.

Well, it's been fun!

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

two people have the same idea

The meaning is ultimately indeterminate.

When Alice and Bob look at the same object, such as a square, they think about 1) a particular shape, 2) the universal concept of squareness and 3) their life experiences of squareness, such as the squareness of boxes, etc.

Do Alice and Bob have the "same idea" when looking at this object.

As regards terminology, a thought is fleeting, whilst an idea has a more permanence. Immediately upon seeing the object they will have a fleeting thought about the object's particular shape, whilst on reflection the fleeting thought becomes an idea. The term "same" has more than one meaning. If Alice picks an apple of a tree and gives it to Bob, it is the "same" ontological apple. If Alice and Bob have both taken their own apples off a tree, as the apples have the same description, linguistically, it is the "same" apple.

As regards item 1), there are two questions. Either Q1, is the idea in Alice's mind the same ontological idea that is in Bob's mind or Q2, is the idea in Alice's mind linguistically the same as the idea in Bob's mind, as both Alice's idea and Bob's idea describe the same object.

Whether or not Alice and Bob share the same (ontological) idea depends on the definition of Alice and Bob, which is a linguistic problem.

Definition one = If Alice was defined as a set of parts that included an ontological entity that expressed the idea of squareness - and Bob was defined as a set of parts that included the same ontological entity - then Alice and Bob would have the same (ontological) idea. IE, if a bowling club and a gardening club both had Claire as a member, then both the bowling club and gardening club would have the same (ontological) part, ie, Claire.

Definition two = if Alice and Bob were each defined as only that set of parts contained within a specific spatial volume - ie, commonly known as a person - then Alice and Bob wouldn't share the same (ontological) idea.

Both are valid definitions. But how is the truth or falsity of a definition determined ? The dictionary definition of "person" ends up circular. I could ask 100 people their definition - but then again I could have asked 100 people pre-Galileo whether the Earth was round or flat.

IE, the answer to the question "do two people have the same idea" reduces to a linguistic problem, ie, the definition of a person, and linguistic definition is ultimately indeterminate - becoming a problem of mereology

Quoting Gary M Washburn

Does "cloudhood" include what forms in a cloud chamber?

I don’t know for sure*, but I’d say yes; what takes shape in a cloud chamber has the property meant by the word “cloudhood”, but it also depends on what you mean by that word.

I suggest that rather than starting from such fuzzy concepts as that of cloudhood, it might be better, at least from a theoretical perspective, to start from quite clear concepts – that is, quite clear mental pointings at abstract things which can be easily “seen” with the mind’s eye, such a numbers, certain properties like numberhood, propertihood, and relationshiphood, and certain relationships such as the selfsameness-relation. We can then work ourselves forwards from there, but as philosophers, we shouldn’t forget to also work ourselves backwards to the unsayable unhypothetical orprinciple above being and not-being and even that very transcendence, which is the well of being itself, not-being itself, and all that is or is not.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

if you arrogate all terms to your own, peculiar, understanding.

The thing is that I don’t do this willingly; rather, it’s the only thing that I can do as far as I can tell. That’s because likely the only mind of which I am directly aware is my own. The existence of all other minds, including yours, is only my hypothesis. I can mentally point at the number 3 and then tell myself, “from now on, I’ll use the word ‘three’ to mean that thing over there”. However, I can only hypothesize that there is a mind m such that m interacts with a human body (especially its) and m has used said body to make a Philosophy Forum account called “Gary M Washburn” and m can see 3 just as I can and m also uses the word “three” to mean 3 and m and other minds take part in an interesting discussion along with me. A possible reason for my hypothesis that you mean 3 by “three” (not the actual reason, of course) would be that you point your finger at a group of three sheep, then three pine-cones, then at someone who shouts thrice, and each time say “three”.

*Of course, I think, though I likely don’t know, that I don’t know anything for sure.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

If I don't take predicates as Properties that have independent existence, I don't have to take vacuous predicates as Properties that themselves have the Property of having no instances.

But I believe to have shown that you do. How else could we do that which we call “talking about even odd numbers”? There are no even odd numbers, and since one cannot talk about what doesn’t exist (Parmenides already realized that), what we talk about must be the real and existing property of being an even odd number, musn’t it?

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Vacuous singular terms (Santa Claus, the Bermuda Triangle, the present king of France) aren't going to do it either.

Then how are these terms even meaningful? For example, how is it meaningful to say that there’s no present king of France? Only because the properties of being a humanoid, jolly, magical, wonderful, goodness-rewarding, ..., being who lives at the North Pole, of being a region with certain properties (...), and of being the present king of France, exist.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

those [natural numbers and sets] actually do represent some kind of trouble for me

Even though one can be directly aware of them, unlike concrete stuff?

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Well, it's been fun!

Yeah!

Quoting Tristan L

There are no even odd numbers, and since one cannot talk about what doesn’t exist (Parmenides already realized that), what we talk about must be the real and existing property of being an even odd number, musn’t it?

Let's suppose you're right, and there are Properties and concrete particulars are instances of them. There is Wrenchhood, and there is the concrete particular, 'that wrench there', which is an instance of Wrenchhood.

When I ask you to hand me that instance of Wrenchhood, am I asking you to hand me Wrenchhod? No. Am I "talking about" Wrenchhood? I am using the concept of Wrenchhood, and relying on you to understand it, but talking about Wrenchhood is when you analyze the necessary and sufficient conditions of being an instance of Wrenchhood. [hide="*"](Or whatever you like there.)[/hide] Asking for 'that wrench there' is not that.

When we talk, hypothetically, about an instance of a concept that has no instances, what is the thing we are talking about? There is no such thing, so we are talking about nothing. But you would have it that if there are no instances of Wubblehood, then when we talk about wubbles we're actually talking about Wubblehood. But the absence of wubbles doesn't change talk about wubbles into talk about Wubblehood the concept.

This argument for Platonism, from vacuous predicates and vacuous singular terms, is widely accepted, I'll grant you, but not by anyone who has learned the difference between use and mention.

Why the hell does everyone want to believe the lasting is more real than the fleeting? Person is passing. And only when a person is passed away do we realize how much more real is what we never let ourselves learn of them.

A morbidly obese man might be able to get up a sprint for a few feet. If this makes him a runner, he is a piss poor one. If all A is a piss poor B and all B is a piss poor C, what the hell does it mean to say A is C? Even a piss poor one?

The modifier is the ephemera, but it tells the whole story nonetheless. To ignore it is sophomoric, and to deliberately seek to obviate it is dogmatism.

The engine of everything real is ephemera, from quantum matter to a living organism, from personal reverie to social interactions, from ordinary conversation to categorical assertion of rigid syntactical doctrine and sclerotic lexical reference, even to what might be called quantum cosmology. What is passing is more distinctly real.

Many meanings of words in English derive from their opposite. How the hell is that possible if the meaning of terms is hermetic?

Quoting Tristan L

The thing is that I don’t do this willingly; rather, it’s the only thing that I can do as far as I can tell. That’s because likely the only mind of which I am directly aware is my own. The existence of all other minds, including yours, is only my hypothesis.

Solipsism? Or stubbornness? If you know any words at all you are not alone.As I said earlier, and I hate repeating myself, people who grow up among strong talkers are far more proficient, and a "wild child" may never learn to talk at all. You can't be a speaker and be alone. Even talking to yourself acknowledges that. Even if you deliberately keep yourself to yourself. The changes in your convictions, even about what words mean, that others urge in you can only mean that you are not alone. If you learn anything at all this can only mean you are not alone. You cannot change your mind about what words mean alone, and you cannot think yourself alone without having changed your mind about what words mean.

Quoting RussellA

Do Alice and Bob have the "same idea" when looking at this object.

Welcome to my nightmare
I think you're gonna like it
I think you're gonna feel like you belong

The solipsist must hate himself if he thinks that all the critical responses to his views are happening in his own head. So, Tris, you have my sympathy!

Quoting Metaphysician Undercover

As an aside, I intuitively believe that we live in a deterministic world, even allowing for apparent free-will, chaotic systems (still deterministic yet making predictions difficult) and quantum indeterminacy (not ruling out the possibility of a deeper determinism underneath quantum mechanics).

It seems that linguistic meaning is ultimately indeterminate for several reasons, including the problem of definition, the Russell paradox about sets not being members of themselves and Gödel's incompleteness theorems.

Perhaps, as it is therefore beyond the ability of current language to fully explain the reality of the world we live in, then another movement with the same goals as the Logical Positivists of the 1920's and 30's would be beneficial, ie, to create a new language whose meaning was determinate.

Quoting RussellA

It seems that linguistic meaning is ultimately indeterminate for several reasons, including the problem of definition, the Russell paradox about sets not being members of themselves and Gödel's incompleteness theorems.

Perhaps, as it is therefore beyond the ability of current language to fully explain the reality of the world we live in, then another movement with the same goals as the Logical Positivists of the 1920's and 30's would be beneficial, ie, to create a new language whose meaning was determinate.

Since you believe that linguistic meaning is "ultimately indeterminate", then don't you find the idea of a new language whose meaning is determinate, contradictory to what you believe? Wouldn't this make the new language something other than language as we know it? How could it be possible for language to change so drastically? Wouldn't any attempt to create a language with determinate meaning just produce another indeterminate language due to the nature of the human mind and human understanding?

Quoting RussellA

As an aside, I intuitively believe that we live in a deterministic world, even allowing for apparent free-will, chaotic systems (still deterministic yet making predictions difficult) and quantum indeterminacy (not ruling out the possibility of a deeper determinism underneath quantum mechanics).

So I assume that this ideal, deterministic world, which you believe yourself to be in, despite all the evidence otherwise, would support this ideal, deterministic language which you believe in. Can I ask why you intuitively believe in such ideals?

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Let's suppose you're right, and there are Properties and concrete particulars are instances of them.

That’s actually not my position. I hold that there is no such thing as a concrete object, and that all things are abstract. The only beondes ("things" that are) which can be concrete are pieces of information. According to my view, the illusion of a concrete thing is generated by mixing up a piece of concrete information with an abstract object related to the information in a certain way. For instance, there is the property of wrenchhood, a certain possible state of the quantum fields associated with wrenchhood in a cerain way, and the proposition A that the quantum fields are in that state. These three are all abstract. If and only if the proposition A is true, there exists a belonging piece of concrete info. The illusion of a concrete wrench is actually a chimera of that info-piece and the associated abstract things, importantly wrenchhood.

Indeed, modern physics suggests to me more and more that the fundamental substances of reality are information and abstract things. And I also have philosophical arguments for the abstractness of all things.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

When I ask you to hand me that instance of Wrenchhood, am I asking you to hand me Wrenchhod? No. Am I "talking about" Wrenchhood? I am using the concept of Wrenchhood, and relying on you to understand it, but talking about Wrenchhood is when you analyze the necessary and sufficient conditions of being an instance of Wrenchhood. (Or whatever you like there.) Asking for 'that wrench there' is not that.

Well, that’s a narrow definition of “talk about”. What I mean by “talk about x” is to use a word which means x. Okay, then, let’s from now on use “talk involving” or something like that to mean what I originally meant by “talk about” if you like.

Anyway, how can you use a word which refers to something which isn’t there?

As I understand it, when you ask me to hand over the wrench, you’re asking me to bring about a certain change in the state of the quantum fields and thus to make true an abstract proposition, thereby creating a piece of associated information. That proposition has a special relationship with wrenchhood.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

When we talk, hypothetically, about an instance of a concept that has no instances, what is the thing we are talking about? There is no such thing, so we are talking about nothing.

If that were so, then the statement “There are no odd even numbers” would be as meaningless as “Tdfgde fgdgd kkdfk, asdefwsek, erere heolgmd dkske”, wouldn’t it?

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

But you would have it that if there are no instances of Wubblehood, then when we talk about wubbles we're actually talking about Wubblehood. But the absence of wubbles doesn't change talk about wubbles into talk about Wubblehood the concept.

That’s true. I hold that what “talk about wubbles” means always is talk about wubblehood, regardless of whether the latter has instances or not. However, if wubblehood has no instances, then it’s particularly clear that what is meant by “talk about wubbles” must in truth be talk about wubblehood.

In the last paragraph, I used “wubblehood” as a variable that varies over all properties, and that paragraph is implicitly all-quantified.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

This argument for Platonism, from vacuous predicates and vacuous singular terms, is widely accepted, I'll grant you, but not by anyone who has learned the difference between use and mention.

Actually, I think that I’m pretty clear on the distinction between the two. For example, I’m aware that the sentence “The word ‘rightwiseness’ refers to a property” mentions the word 'rightwiseness', the sentence “Rightwiseness has douthhood and is a very weighty douth (virtue)” uses the word ‘rightwiseness’, and the sentence “The words ’rightwiseness’ and ‘justice’ mean the douth of rightwiseness” both mentions and uses the word ‘rightwiseness’, but only mentions the word ‘justice’. Yet I obviously accept the argument for platonism and have even put it forth.

Reply to Gary M Washburn Well, I could be dreaming up all those other people with whom I talk, couldn’t I? Or, to be less radically solipsistic, how would anything change for me if the behaviors of others, including the sound-waves that they make, were exactly as they are with them having minds, but everyone other than me lacked a mind?

Quoting Gary M Washburn

If you learn anything at all this can only mean you are not alone. You cannot change your mind about what words mean alone,

How so? Can’t I think stuff over and that way both learn new things and change my mind on what words mean?

Absolutely not! Because valid reasoning requires a commitment to the continuity of terms. So, if your terms change, then not only are you a solipsist, you are incapable of reasoning too. Alone, and mad.

I think somewhere on this thread it was asserted, by someone other than myself, that reason is reductive. Is that reduction Ockham's Razor, or more like a sorites? Or maybe something like what is called, in Plato's Statesman, the 'division of being'? For instance, is nothing actually blue what blueness is? As I said earlier (I hate repeating myself!) if the idea is a member of its category it cannot be used to define the other members, and if it is not its membership cannot be used to define it. It is an insuperable contradiction at the heart of all terms, even structural terms needed to produce a logic. But if reason is reductive, then where is the abstract in the concrete reality it means to explicate and supply the terms for required rational inference? Are there any blue things if everything blue is not what blueness is? (By the way, a photon and an electron, and probably all subatomic particles, are "clouds" of probability. Is the idea itself a cloud? What then "cloudhood?) If every blue thing is determinately not what blueness is, how do we establish what this means? Reductively? By eliminating each blue thing from the idea one at a time? What does time even mean if you can never really get to it? But of course we can't! Because it is never there that the reduction begins or ends. It is not either/or, but neither/nor. There simply is no sense in which any blue thing is either what blueness is or not. It is always neither what blueness is nor not so. And so we reduce or eliminate the idea of every participant in it, until there simply is nothing left. The moment of that finding can be fended off eternally if we simply believe in infinity, even though we know there is no real infinity, that matter is not infinitely divisible and, that it is a contradictory concept. So, when all is said and done, what remains? What remains is the character of neither/nor a commitment to the continuity of terms necessitates and that each participant in the idea is neither the idea itself nor not. In that character of each decisive elimination from the idea each participant in it is the idea is most coherently and comprehensively neither what it really is nor not. If the origin of terms is neither/nor, but the reductive mechanism is either/or, then the exhaustion of that reduction is the worth to the idea each participant in it is lost to it as that reduction. The emptiness of the idea is the recognition of that worth. The departed from it is the completing term of the idea. And in this sense each part, each reduction of each part, is the coherence of the idea.

Quoting Tristan L

Anyway, how can you use a word which refers to something which isn’t there?

Because a referring expression doesn't always refer. Displacement is a core feature of language, but if you have the tools to create an expression that can be understood by others to refer to something not in your immediate environment, you also have the tools to fail to refer to anything at all.

Suppose you ask me to grab three reams of paper from the supply room, and I come back with two. You put one in one printer, one in another, and then say, "Where's the third?" "There were only two there." No one thinks that just because you can say "the third ream of paper" that there were three.

Or, let's say, considering the purpose of this thread: I don't think that, and you have given me no reason to do so. I'm not actually here to refute your position: you can believe whatever quantum Platonism you find entertaining. The point of this thread is to see if you can give me, a non-Platonist, any reason to take your position seriously.

Reply to Gary M Washburn Well, I do admit that I’m not (hopefully only yet?) wise, not even remotely, and so my thoughts are still full of vagueness, so it comes as not surprise that the meanings of the terms I use are also not always crystal clear. In fact, to make them so, I’d have to already be able to mentally “see” all of beonde (that which is, Seiendes) as well as beon (the "state/property/deed" of being, Sein) itself, not-beon itself, the orprinciple above beon and not-beon which is the well of all, as well as what lies beyond, even beyond beyondness itself, in a crystal clear fashion.

Here’s a challenge: Please prove to me – and I mean prove – that you have a mind, that @Srap Tasmaner also has a mind, and that those two minds are not the same. In particular, please show me that the texts I see on this forum have been written by real people with minds rather than a random number generator.

I have already almost given up on giving you two (or anyone else other than me for that matter) a proof that I have a mind, so if you do have minds (which I strongly believe), I concede that I likely can’t show you that I have one, too, though I myself am 100% sure that I have.


Reply to Gary M Washburn :confused:

Quoting Gary M Washburn

It is always neither what blueness is nor not so.

:brow:?

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

No one thinks that just because you can say "the third ream of paper" that there were three.

True, and that’s the thing; we aren’t actually referring to individual papers. The expression does refer to something, though, and that something must be abstract.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Or, let's say, considering the purpose of this thread: I don't think that, and you have given me no reason to do so.

I believe that you only think that I have given you no reason, but that I have in fact given you more than one reason:

• We can (at least I can, and I hypothesize other minds can, too) be directly aware of abstract things. By contrast, we can only infer the existence of concrete stuff like physical beondes and thoughts of others.
• Only abstract universals can make it even meaningful to say that two or more particulars have something in common – namley an abstract universal.
• Only properties allow sentences containing common nouns to make sense.
• The very fact that we can ask whether there are abstract things needs abstractness, which is an abstract property.

Now, I’ll give you further reasons:

• Quantum mechanical experiments have shown that (supposed) particles apparently don’t obey the Principle of the Identity of Indescernibles. However, that principle can be easily shown with nothing but basic witcraft (logic). This shows that there are no individual particles in the first place, but only the respective abstract fields, e.g. electronhood and photonhood instead of individual electrons or photons.
• The laws of witcraft and mathematics are rock-solid compared to most other laws, yet they clearly aren’t about concrete stuff. For instance, you can’t change the fact that 5 is odd even one bit, no matter how great the might of your muscles or the smartness of your mind or the strength of your will. Hence, they must be about real, abstract entities, and these must be at least as real as conrete stuff.

Quoting Metaphysician Undercover

Wouldn't any attempt to create a language with determinate meaning just produce another indeterminate language

Exactly so. That is the problem as I see it. As Gödel proved for mathematics the impossibility of finding a complete and consistent set of axioms, perhaps we need another Gödel to prove whether or not language can be determinate.

Quoting Metaphysician Undercover

So I assume that this ideal, deterministic world, which you believe yourself to be in, despite all the evidence otherwise, would support this ideal, deterministic language which you believe in

In answer to the question, "can a deterministic world support a deterministic language ?", I don't believe so, as it seems that linguistic meaning is always indeterminate. The problem remains that language is part of the mind, and the mind is part of the world, not separate to it. Ultimately, bearing in mind Russell's paradox about sets being members of themselves, something can never know itself, meaning that language can never be determinate

In Plato's terms, language may be included with justice, truth, equality, beauty as being derived by reasoning from the Form of the Good, where the Good is a perfect, eternal and changeless Form, existing outside space and time and superior to every material instantiation of it. The perfect Form - a deterministic language - may be strived for, but never achieved. This raises a problem with Plato's Theory of Forms in that if the Form is outside of time and space and superior to every material instantiation of it, how can Plato argue for the existence of something that he has already argued is beyond his ability to discover.

? Quoting Tristan L

?

Contrariety. When all is said and done the contrary term is the engine of the real. A careful reading would inform you that I said this and carefully explained it. I know it's a strain on the little noggin,,,

Quoting RussellA

In answer to the question, "can a deterministic world support a deterministic language ?", I don't believe so, as it seems that linguistic meaning is always indeterminate. The problem remains that language is part of the mind, and the mind is part of the world, not separate to it. Ultimately, bearing in mind Russell's paradox about sets being members of themselves, something can never know itself, meaning that language can never be determinate

OK, so the question is, if language is an indeterminate part of the mind, and the mind is a part of the world, why do you believe that the world is determinate. Isn't at least part of the world indeterminate?

Quoting RussellA

In Plato's terms, language may be included with justice, truth, equality, beauty as being derived by reasoning from the Form of the Good, where the Good is a perfect, eternal and changeless Form, existing outside space and time and superior to every material instantiation of it. The perfect Form - a deterministic language - may be strived for, but never achieved. This raises a problem with Plato's Theory of Forms in that if the Form is outside of time and space and superior to every material instantiation of it, how can Plato argue for the existence of something that he has already argued is beyond his ability to discover.

I think you need to recognize that Plato was exploring the deficiencies in this theory of eternal Ideas, which was coming from Pythagoreanism. We tend to approach Plato's work with the idea that Plato put forward this grand theory of eternal Ideas, and this is what we call Platonism. In reality, Socrates and Plato were more like skeptics, so they did what they could to elucidate the principles which supported this Idealism,(which was quite vague at the time) so that it could be judged. Aristotle then went on to refute this form of Idealism, using what Plato had taught him.

As for how a philosopher like Plato can approach something which is outside of space and time, the answer is with logic. What logic demonstrates to us, in its usage, is that it is not restricted by spatial-temporal reality, it can very easily go beyond, and think about things which have no spatial temporal existence. The real question then, the point of difficulty, is how do we maintain truth in this realm of logic, which goes beyond spatial-temporal existence. This is where "the good" becomes significant. We can apprehend as reality, that logic is not grounded in spatial-temporal existence, it is grounded in "the good". The good is what Aristotle called "the end", the goal, or objective, what is wanted.

Reply to Metaphysician Undercover

Thank you for taking a different view of Plato.

I'd have to dig back into the text, but at the beginning of Laws, he reiterates the view often stated throughout his works that the engine of reason is what is usually translated "shame". The Greek is 'aischron'. What is more likely is that it is a recognition of the pathology of conviction. Conviction is indispensable to reason, to logic (which Plato pointedly avoided formalizing and Aristotle pointedly avoided learning why) but, since reason is reductive, no synthetic term can validly be produced. Because of this reason is limited to what can be learned from applying rigor to an unwarranted conviction. In aid of this it is necessary to look for differences of that pathology of the terms of reason antecedent to its process. Under dialectical examination this pathology must become recognizable, though all too often we attribute it to our interlocutor. When we recognize our responsibility in it we might be ready to accept the cure. Altered views. And, ultimately, a fair recognition of the limits of reason itself, limits that can only be realized through the discipline of the pathology of reason itself. There is no contradiction in this. But there is contrariety. Contrariety in the community we become in pursuit of a warranted realization, not only of the proper discipline of reason, but of its pathological need of conviction in its starting point. But the language of that recognition is the personal discipline we each bring to that dialectical process. We cannot engage in reason without suffering waxing and waning moments in that conviction. That dramatic evolution of conviction is so personal we may never recognize any meaning in it, we are so limited to rational devices in our attempt to conserve the antecedent term we know is indispensable to it, but, carried on in competence, discipline, and honesty, we must at last recognize we are not alone in the evolving terms of our convictions, though there is never a moment we are not in contrariety to each other in them.

In Laws, Plato does seem to apply the Pythagorean conviction that reality is "geometric". But at the very end, if only we are not exhausted by then, he recognizes that that geometric/quantifying view is inadequate to the matter. It is personal qualities that clinch our recognition of what reality is. That is why Plato so consistently focuses all his discourse on the dynamics of human character, and under the trope of recognizing the pathology of opinions and accepting the cure.

Quoting Metaphysician Undercover

Isn't at least part of the world indeterminate?

I should have distinguished between the two types of indeterminism, semantic indeterminism (SI) and metaphysical indeterminism (MI).

The clause "two people have the same idea" is an example of SI, in that the phrase "same idea" has two different meanings. MI allows the possibility of free will. Many, including myself, believe that indeterminism is nothing but a semantic problem about the meanings of words. However, others believe, such as Professor David Taylor, that if indeterminism is semantic then one falls into an infinite regress, meaning that SI requires MI, in that there is something indeterminate about the world itself.

However, metaphysical determinism and semantic indeterminism are linked by the arrow of time, in that one can have both metaphysical determinism, a cause necessarily determines an effect, and semantic indeterminism, given an effect the cause cannot necessarily be determined.

Quoting Metaphysician Undercover

Socrates and Plato were more like skeptics

I agree. Plato and I are both septics as regards the Theory of Forms. However, the Theory of Forms, as with teleology, is a pragmatically useful concept, even if not true.

Quoting Metaphysician Undercover

logic is not grounded in spatial-temporal existence

From my reading, although Plato was interested in logic, and did discuss sentence analysis, truth and fallacies, logical puzzles in Euthydemus and the difference between valid and invalid arguments, logic as a fully systemized discipline only began with Aristotle. Plato approached the World of Forms not through logic but through intuition, where knowledge of the Forms cannot be gained through sensory experience but through the mind. Forms transcend time and space, timeless and unchanging. Plato was a Dualist, where the soul before being localised by the body was directly connected to the World of Forms. After the soul had been confined by the body, it retained a dim recollection of the Forms. IE, for Plato, the mind approaches the World of Forms not through logic but through a dim memory of them.

There is the question as to whether the mind can use logic to go outside of time and space.
Along the same lines, Mathematical Platonism suggests that mathematical entities have no spatio-temporal properties. As Plato would have said, I'm sceptical. My belief is that numbers are definitions, in the performative rather than than descriptive sense, and we find our defined numbers useful because we have discovered that they often correspond to the world around us. Things defined do exist, in a sense, through all time and all space, but only within it, not outside it.

Quoting RussellA

I should have distinguished between the two types of indeterminism, semantic indeterminism (SI) and metaphysical indeterminism (MI).

Nuh-uh! The more pertinent indeterminism is syntax. Syntax is not intrinsically valid a priori without quantifiers. And number is not real at all. It is a medium by which the qualifier is recognizable as the limit of the enumerator and the calculus of that enumeration. Reason requires conviction in some system of quantification, but its limit is that there is nothing within it that identifies what it counts. Because of this it is not possible to sustain that conviction without suffering variance in the character of it. That variance is emotion. The discipline we each bring to that conviction, and the variances in it we urge in each other, reveal to each other the personal character of that discipline, and so identify the person we each are ti each other and supply, in that recognition, the terms by which we understand ourselves and recognize what is real and what reality is. Person cannot be revealed in the quantifier. Only at the limit of that count, where is recognizable its presumptive issue is not within it, is person real. There can be no structural terms that govern that recognition. Only the worthiness of the character of person it is names it. That worthiness to which we supply the terms of recognition to each other is, in terms of the count, a kind of absence, a departure from conviction. That departure is what we call truth. Only departed is it complete, and so comprehensive. Logic simply has no terms to identify it. That is why logic can only be valid or invalid, never true. And most surely not what truth is. The venue of truth is dialectical, not analytic.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

The more pertinent indeterminism

There can be syntactic ambiguity, "He ate the cookies on the couch" and there can be semantic ambiguity, "We saw her duck"

When asking what does ""two people have the same idea" mean, I would say that this is an example of semantic ambiguity rather than syntactic ambiguity, in that "same" is ambiguous in meaning. IE, is "same" meant as a type (the same type of idea) or a token (the same instance of an idea).

Reply to Gary M Washburn Sounds interesting. Just one remark: The Shape of Contrariety makes your position possible in the first place, doesn’t it?

Quoting RussellA

"same" is ambiguous in meaning. IE, is "same" meant as a type (the same type of idea) or a token (the same instance of an idea).

My argument was precisely that I can happily say "Joe is thinking the same thing as Allison" if Joe is thinking it's going to rain and so is Allison, and that I can do so without committing to the independent existence of The Thought That It's Going To Rain.

I like the type-token thing, but not if it allows Platonism in through the backdoor after barring it from the front.

Quoting RussellA

Many, including myself, believe that indeterminism is nothing but a semantic problem about the meanings of words. However, others believe, such as Professor David Taylor, that if indeterminism is semantic then one falls into an infinite regress, meaning that SI requires MI, in that there is something indeterminate about the world itself.

I think I'd be with Taylor here.. Isn't semantic indeterminism dependent on free will? The reason why SI exists is that we are free to use words how we please. If we had no free will, we'd have no choice in word selection, and there'd be no SI. Therefore if free will is dependent of metaphysical indeterminism, SI is also dependent on MI.

Quoting RussellA

However, metaphysical determinism and semantic indeterminism are linked by the arrow of time, in that one can have both metaphysical determinism, a cause necessarily determines an effect, and semantic indeterminism, given an effect the cause cannot necessarily be determined.

You seem to be missing something here. Yes, a cause necessarily determines an effect, by definition, but what if something happens which is uncaused? So metaphysical determinism requires a stronger premise, it requires that everything is caused. Now, something might appear as if it is uncaused, and we can choose to believe one of two options, that it has a cause which cannot be determined, or it has no cause. In essence, aren't the two the same? To determine something as the cause, is to apprehend a logical relationship. If it is impossible for a logical relationship to be demonstrated, doesn't this mean that there is no cause?

Quoting RussellA

From my reading, although Plato was interested in logic, and did discuss sentence analysis, truth and fallacies, logical puzzles in Euthydemus and the difference between valid and invalid arguments, logic as a fully systemized discipline only began with Aristotle. Plato approached the World of Forms not through logic but through intuition, where knowledge of the Forms cannot be gained through sensory experience but through the mind. Forms transcend time and space, timeless and unchanging. Plato was a Dualist, where the soul before being localised by the body was directly connected to the World of Forms. After the soul had been confined by the body, it retained a dim recollection of the Forms. IE, for Plato, the mind approaches the World of Forms not through logic but through a dim memory of them.

I guess I was somewhat free with my use of "logic", a little bit of semantic indeterminism there. Maybe I should have said reason, or even intellect. All these, as well as intuition, are aspects of mind.

What Plato did not provide, is a good distinction between soul and mind. You seem to know Plato pretty well, and I think you'll find that mind and soul are sometimes used almost interchangeably, as referring to the immaterial aspect of the dualism which is the human being. This is where Aristotle excelled, and surpassed Plato, by providing a proper distinction in his biology, "On the Soul". Aristotle actually defines "soul", as "the primary actuality of a body having life potentially in it", and then proceeds to discuss the different powers of the soul, self-nurishing, self moving, sensation, and intellection. So all living things have a soul, and the soul has different powers according to the material body of the living being, and the mind is now understood as a property of the soul which is realized through the material body..

This is important because it provides a division between the forms which the mind apprehends, and the Forms which are independent and prior to the body. This allows that the mind actually creates its forms. And there is no need for the theory of recollection, which doesn't work so well, because the Forms which actually transcend space and time, the category where the soul is placed, are therefore not the same forms as those which the mind apprehends. The soul is directly related to the independent Forms, but the forms apprehended by the intellect are dependent of the mind, which is dependent on the body. So the material body is a sort of medium between the independent Forms, and the forms apprehended by the mind. This accounts for the reality that human ideas are often mistaken.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

not if it allows Platonism

I agree that neither of us want to allow Platonic Forms back.

But the answer to the question "do two people have the same idea" also depends on one's definition of "person", which, at the end of the day is semantically indeterminate, even allowing that there is a consensus amongst most people as to its meaning. As I picture it, as there is no one fixed definition of "person", and no two people's definition of "person" will be the same, the meaning of "person" can be illustrated by the bell curve of normal distribution, a probability distribution symmetric about the mean.

There will be a consensus at the mean of the bell curve. However, at one extreme end of the bell curve will be those who define a person as their mind, in that being in an accident and losing one's leg doesn't take away a person's individuality. At the other extreme of the bell curve will be those who believe in telepathy, in Platonic Forms, in a collective consciousness (Emile Durkheim 1893 The Division of Labour in Society) or in a universal consciousness (Loken and Bendriss 2013 The Shift in Consciousness)

Therefore, the answer to the question "do two people have the same idea", will also depend on a person's particular definition of "person". Those at one extreme of the bell curve, those believing in telepathy, Platonic Forms, collective and universal consciousness, would argue that "the idea" is a token, whereas everyone else would argue that it is a type.

IE, neither opinion is right or wrong, as it depends on one's personal beliefs.

Quoting Metaphysician Undercover

Isn't semantic indeterminism dependent on free will?

A similar problem to the one experienced by Captain Kirk in the episode The Liar Paradox. Being trapped by machines on a planet, Captain Kirk tells the humanoid "everything that Harry Mudd tells you is a lie", at which point Harry Mudd says "I am lying", causing the humanoid to say "illogical" followed by a breakdown with smoke escaping from its head. The moral of the story is that deterministic machines without human free will cannot cope with semantic indeterminism.

However, the humanoids learn from their encounter. They add another line of software to their programs, such that if a calculation takes longer than a fixed time, the program stops and moves on to the next problem.

Years later, on being visited by the Battlestar Galactica, who are similarly trapped on the planet, Admiral Adama tells the humanoid "everything that Col. Tigh tells you is a lie", at which Col. Tigh says "I am lying".The humanoid, with its updated program, successfully avoids any logical problems, and the crew of the Battlestar Galactica remain imprisoned without chance of release.

IE, a metaphysically deterministic humanoid without free will can be programmed to avoid any logical problem of semantic indeterminism.

Quoting Metaphysician Undercover

If it is impossible for a logical relationship to be demonstrated, doesn't this mean that there is no cause?

Our system of knowledge is based on axioms. Axiom One could be that we live in a deterministic world where all events, including moral choices, are completely determined by previously existing causes. Axiom Two could be that we live in an indeterministic world where no event is certain and the entire outcome of anything is probabilistic. Being axioms, no relationship between an earlier event and a later event needs to be logically proved.

IE, the fact that it is impossible for a logical relationship to be proved, does not exclude axiom one, ie, that there are causes.

Quoting Metaphysician Undercover

Aristotle actually defines "soul", as "the primary actuality of a body having life potentially in it"

Perhaps Kant can be thought of as continuing Aristotle's philosophy in that one could draw a comparison between Aristotle's Forms and forms with with Kant's "a priori" and "synthetic", whilst, as a modern Enlightenment thinker, moving away from Aristotle's incorporeal and eternal soul to a more sceptical view about ever being able to know the true nature of the mind.

Subatomic particles are not semantic. Quantum values are not numerical. But there is no ambiguity to them either. They are quite decisively neither/nor rather than either/or. Because being decisively neither/nor is more real. It is what reality is. The search for disambiguation is merely a temporary expedient. It is a treacherous prize. There simply is no possible justification for a conviction two minds think the same. Ideas are generated from a comparison of differences. What in its nature is difference can never be characterized by sameness. "I met a man upon a stair, I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today, I wish the man would go away." You're all grasping at what isn't there, and means not to be. In Plato's Lysis he shows us the way to be the friend is not to be the friendship, and meaning not to be. Meaning to be, thinking you know what you mean, let alone thinking you know what I mean, is a mug's game.

Quoting Tristan L

The Shape of Contrariety

Whah??? Whatever you mean by this shape, the point is, if there is no there there there is no shape to it. Plato was not a Pythagorean, and Socrates violated the most sacred secret tenet of that cult, in Meno. So why impute geometry to him?

Quoting RussellA

IE, a metaphysically deterministic humanoid without free will can be programmed to avoid any logical problem of semantic indeterminism.

But this does not address the issue. The issue is that what causes language to be semantically indeterminate is that the creators of language have freewill. The point I made is that if people did not have free will, there would be no choice on how to interpret meaning, nor choice as to which words to use, consequently no semantic indeterminism.

Quoting RussellA

Our system of knowledge is based on axioms. Axiom One could be that we live in a deterministic world where all events, including moral choices, are completely determined by previously existing causes. Axiom Two could be that we live in an indeterministic world where no event is certain and the entire outcome of anything is probabilistic. Being axioms, no relationship between an earlier event and a later event needs to be logically proved.

IE, the fact that it is impossible for a logical relationship to be proved, does not exclude axiom one, ie, that there are causes.

I don't see the point. Aren't the two axioms contradictory, so we'd have to disallow accepting both, on the basis of the law of non-contradiction? Or are you suggesting that we reject the law of non-contradiction as an unacceptable axiom?

Quoting Gary M Washburn

The Shape of Contrariety — Tristan L


Whah??? Whatever you mean by this shape, the point is, if there is no there there there is no shape to it. Plato was not a Pythagorean, and Socrates violated the most sacred secret tenet of that cult, in Meno. So why impute geometry to him?

The word “Shape” with an uppercase ‘S’ means the same as “Form” (with uppercase ‘F’) and “Idea” (with uppercase ‘I’), as in “Theory of Shapes/Forms/Ideas”. So “Shape of Contrariety”, “Form of Contrariety”, “Idea of Contrariety”, “contrariety”, “contrariety itself”, “contrariness”, and “contrarihood” all mean the same (abstract) thing.

I never had anything geometrical in mind at all.

Quoting Metaphysician Undercover

The issue is that what causes language to be semantically indeterminate is that the creators of language have freewill

Language (syntax and semantics) as a human creation is inherently indeterminate, in that it is not possible to create a determinate language, as illustrated by Gödel's incompleteness theorems in mathematics and Bertrand Russell's failed project of Logism which attempted to create an analytic framework for language.
IE, any language is indeterminate, regardless of whether its creators have free will or not.

Quoting Metaphysician Undercover

If it is impossible for a logical relationship to be demonstrated, doesn't this mean that there is no cause?

As some people might believe in axiom one, and other people might believe in axiom two, it is true that different people's beliefs will be contradictory.
IE, for someone who believes in axiom one (defined as a statement so evident or well-established that it is assumed to be true ), it follows that they accept that it is impossible for a logical relationship to be demonstrated, meaning that the fact that it is impossible for a logical relationship to be demonstrated does not affect their belief in a cause.

Quoting RussellA

deterministic machines without human free will cannot cope with semantic indeterminism.

Human free will is from a different unrelated language. In theory, machines can be made at least as semantically intelligent as a standard dumb human. Semantic indeterminacy, as vagueness and ambiguity unresolved, is a necessary feature of natural languages to allow specific in-context applicability of a limited formal vocabulary to a boundlessly unpredictable real world.

Quoting RussellA

Language (syntax and semantics) as a human creation is inherently indeterminate, in that it is not possible to create a determinate language, as illustrated by Gödel's incompleteness theorems in mathematics and Bertrand Russell's failed project of Logism which attempted to create an analytic framework for language.
IE, any language is indeterminate, regardless of whether its creators have free will or not.

I think you are misinterpreting the evidence. The reason why it is impossible to create a determinate language is that language is inherently something created by free willing beings. Free willing beings like Godel, and Russell can imagine what a determinate language might be like, and show how it is impossible for an actual language to be like this, but this does not get to the reason of why it is impossible for an actual language to be like that. And the reason why it is impossible for an actual language to be like that, is as I explained, that there is freedom inherent in its creation due to free will.

Quoting RussellA

IE, for someone who believes in axiom one (defined as a statement so evident or well-established that it is assumed to be true ), it follows that they accept that it is impossible for a logical relationship to be demonstrated, meaning that the fact that it is impossible for a logical relationship to be demonstrated does not affect their belief in a cause.

The problem though, is that many axioms are accepted on the basis of utility (pragmatism), not on the basis of being self-evident. This relates to Plato's "the good". This makes the belief itself the cause , as in teleology, but many do not believe that beliefs are causes.

How dense can we be? Language is not in isolation. A speaker is never alone in the act of it. Language is as much listening as speaking. It is not about the freedom of the speaker, it is about the freedom the speaker needs in the listener. The biases relentlessly clung to in all these comments entail a subterranean urge to isolate language from that need, and therefore from that freedom. It is therefore vacuous to appeal to it. Nothing is spoken without the possibility of a free listener. No word is binding without that need that it not be. Otherwise we are just talking to ourselves, and ultimately in gibberish.

Plato, in Gorgias, shows the sophist that the idea is a comparison of contraries. The doctor is unlike the cook similarly to the way the personal trainer differs from the tailor. The substance of ideas, analogy, is not a positive content. It is absence. The verb to be is either, and at best, a vague abstraction of an evaluation, or, at worst, the universal quantifier, applying to nothing real. We never see a real verb in logic, because a real valuation of the character in which a subject "is" a predicate can never serve as antecedent to a valid inference. To get that inference we need an artificial language. And then to declare it somehow more real. The elaborate preparations we have to do to natural materials to get them to behave according to theory should be a clue. And then talk about freedom?

If A were B and B were C, it might almost, if you squint at it kind of sideways, be possible to infer that A is C. But it is far more real to formulate it A is B-ish, and B is C-ish. But this would mean, and ordinarily does, that A is C is BS-ish. Look, I am not saying that logic is completely vacuous, but only that meanings rigidly defined and guarded from normal abrasive action among speakers and listeners must ultimately become incoherent or adapt to the need of the speaker that the listener be free. Speaking is not pure act. It is neither active nor passive, it is the act of being in need of the freedom of its listener. Where it "purifies" itself of that need it is not made itself free, it is made itself vacuous. The act of being that need and the response in the listener of responsibility that the worth of the need be recognized is a dialectical circle that, recurring from voice to voice, is an evolution of terms shared more by difference than agreement, and more real than arrogated unilateral and private freedom, and more coherent than any highly refined symbolic or artificial language.

How much difference must there be to be like grains of sand in a Rolex? How much deviation does there have to be from the continuity of the causal nexus? If reason can never really close the deal, as we know matter does not, even in the face of the most exhaustive preparation, and certainly not life, then doesn't reason desperately need emotions to bring some sort of coherence to its convictions? Of course this is not in itself truth. But it does mitigate the pure unilateral cruelty logical forms would lock us into, and the dialectical circle of act of needing each other free and response of responsibility that the worth of that need be recognized not only mitigates the rational missteps of its emotional ingredient, but completes the circle that never quite closes around reason on its own merits. For in this sense reason has no merit, no worth, alone. Where reality differs from theory or presumed law, however infinitesimally, the incoherence of that theory or law is complete, and nothing, no amount of tweaking the law, can rescue reason from its lost conviction and overwhelming incoherence.

Perhaps you all think I am the one who is incoherent, but when the koan sinks in, as it were, nothing will be the same. And sameness will be a tremendous burden, not a light in the dark. There is no synthetic term. Reason really is reductive only, and the antecedent term thought to be its origin and continuity really is just conviction. We can forever forestall the moment of recognizing that that continuity is become incoherent simply by dogmatically believing the infinitesimal divides infinitely. But in doing so you become an impediment to the future for all of us. And, because each of us is that infinitesimal through which that future is most articulately broken through that conviction, that impedance not only cruelly denies that future to the rest of us, it denies that freedom in you the rest of us need in you if reason, as well as human life and society, is to be coherent and free.

Quoting magritte

In theory, machines can be made at least as semantically intelligent as a standard dumb human.

I agree that today in theory this is so. Today the typical English speaker will have acquired a vocabulary of up to 48,000 words. Perhaps in the future will arrive a new Lieutenant Commander Data, having a positronic brain both able to achieve 60 trillion operations per second and store a larger vocabulary, enabling them to better cope with our boundlessly unpredictable real world.

Quoting Metaphysician Undercover

The reason why it is impossible to create a determinate language is that language is inherently something created by free willing beings.

Premise 1 - language is created by humans
Premise 2 - humans have free will
Conclusion - humans cannot create a determinate language
IE, I agree with the conclusion - but it doesn't follow from its premises as given.

Quoting Metaphysician Undercover

The problem though, is that many axioms are accepted on the basis of utility (pragmatism), not on the basis of being self-evident. This relates to Plato's "the good". This makes the belief itself the cause , as in teleology, but many do not believe that beliefs are causes.

Perhaps this is along the lines of the different teleological approaches of Plato and Aristotle

For Plato, an extrinsic teleology, where the materials composing a body whilst necessary may not be sufficient for the body to act in a certain way. What is needed is an external Form of the Good in order to give the body purpose and reason (ie, the self-evident)

For Aristotle, an intrinsic teleology, rejecting an external intelligence or god, where nature itself is the principle cause of change (ie, the pragmatic)

It is written that the Correspondence Theory of Truth can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle, though what they believed is only a muted version of it.

The axiomatic theory of truth has the advantage over the correspondence theory in that it does not presuppose that truth can be defined. Tarski's theorem on the undefinability of the truth predicate shows that the definition of a truth predicate requires resources that go beyond those of the formal language for which truth is going to be defined, in these cases definitional approaches to truth have to fail.

IE, it is a question of whether one believes the cause originates as described by the Absolutism of Plato or the Relativism of Aristotle.

Quoting RussellA

Premise 1 - language is created by humans
Premise 2 - humans have free will
Conclusion - humans cannot create a determinate language
IE, I agree with the conclusion - but it doesn't follow from its premises as given.

Sure, the conclusion doesn't follow from the premises, but that's because you haven't provided the appropriate premises. The problem is that you haven't provided the proper description, or definition of free will, and how it is related to language, to show why any language produced by free willing beings will be indeterminate.

The inverted form of the argument, which shows that only determinate beings could create a determinate language, is better to show that a free willing being (which is excluded by "determinate being") cannot create a determinate language.

Let's assume that a determinate language is one in which there is only one precise way to say anything that needs to be said, and only one precise interpretation of anything said. Doesn't this exclude the possibility of any choice in word selection, or word interpretation? If you want to say something, you have to say it this way. If you hear something, you necessarily interpret it in this way. You have no choice in these matters. Therefore a free willing being, by the nature of having free will, and the capacity to choose such things, could not have a determinate language.

Quoting RussellA

For Plato, an extrinsic teleology, where the materials composing a body whilst necessary may not be sufficient for the body to act in a certain way. What is needed is an external Form of the Good in order to give the body purpose and reason (ie, the self-evident)

I don't think that this is an external Form. The good is what the person apprehends with one's own intellect, as what is needed, required. Therefore the good is something internal to each of us.

Quoting RussellA

For Aristotle, an intrinsic teleology, rejecting an external intelligence or god, where nature itself is the principle cause of change (ie, the pragmatic)

So I think that Aristotle is consistent with Plato on this matter. However, I believe that Aristotle lays down the principles to distinguish an apparent good from a real good. Here, we might have an internal/external division, or what we call subjective/objective good. Morality involves establishing consistency between the apparent good (what the subject believes is good), and the real good (what is objectively good).

Quoting RussellA

For Plato, an extrinsic teleology, where the materials composing a body whilst necessary may not be sufficient for the body to act in a certain way. What is needed is an external Form of the Good in order to give the body purpose and reason (ie, the self-evident)

Where in Plato does he say this? Where does he claim the telos as the source of or navigator to truth? What is purpose? Propositum. Enduring time proscribed of change. Dur-ation. This is Husserl, not Plato. The epochal.

Aristotle emerged from Plato's lecture on the Good saying he didn't understand it. That's because, like all the contributors here, he reads the words and fails to hear the speakers, or speaks to them and fails to notice the wry looks of the listeners (readers). If words can never quite mean what both speaker and respondent suppose, then what is the good is not an abstraction or an externality, but the central issue to all we do and say and think.

I'm reminded of an episode of Dr Who in which the Doctor visits a planet where monks perform calculations so sensitive computers would decompose if fed them. There is something that reason gets us almost all the way to, but never quite reaches, the last little bit is all too human. Yes it's incorrect, but it's where reason begins and ends. If you trace "Platonism" through Aristotle, and then into the Christian era it's hard to miss how it solidified as dogma, through Origen, Proclus and so on, and smoothly transitioned from superstition to science while preserving the same terms and basic themes of what language is. I once visited the library of my sister's (Catholic) high school and went straight to the philosophy section. Just two books, Augustine, and Aquinas. What is most telling is how the medieval ages transitioned from murky Platonic theology to an incipient science always in religious/Platonic terms. Perhaps the worst of all is Calvin, basing an individual connection to god upon the idea that the human is the conduit through which divine order is imposed upon a corrupt and evil world. The individuality derived from the Early Christian era was meant to so strip each of us of the perfect companionship we all crave. This, of course, to render us vulnerable to the claim that only a god, or perfect abstraction, can supply that deficit. Of course, it is not a deficit at all, it is a promise we tacitly make to ourselves and each other to realize freedom by articulating what worth and value is in the freedom we need in each other. The abstract perfection of language in some machine data flow or logical gobbledygook is just the latest mode of an ancient system of enslaving those subordinated to a minority of elites. But for all that it is a very human tendency, especially the part where it is ignorant of its real motive. The religion, the telos, that is, is to make people understand what you say and think in that ignorance of being even more appallingly human in the effort to dehumanize yourself.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

Where does he claim the telos as the source of or navigator to truth

As I understand it, for Plato, telos isn't the source of truth, "being" is the source of truth.

Plato in Phaedo argues that while materials that compose a body are necessary for its acting in a certain way, they cannot be sufficient. Telos is the inherent purpose of a person or thing, in that the telos of warfare is victory and the telos of business is the creation of wealth. What is sufficent is found within the Form itself, in that the Forms themselves are the source of the telos.

For Plato, truth is the way the world is. Truth depends on what "is" in the world, and is not defined in terms of any correspondence between statements and reality. Statements may be true in virtue of the world being a certain way, in that "Theaetetus is sitting is true if and only if the form sitting has being in the case of Theaetetus". These forms in the world are only shadows of the Forms, which we can recognize by using our mind and reason.

IE, by looking at forms in the world, which are the truths in the world, by using our mind and reason we can sense the Forms themselves. It is the Forms themselves that incorporate their own purpose, their own telos.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

The abstract perfection of language

George Orwell 1946 Politics and the English Language - "Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. "

Quoting Metaphysician Undercover

to show why any language produced by free willing beings will be indeterminate.

I agree that a language using analytic propositions might be semantically determinate, though I would argue that any language using synthetic propositions based on how their meaning relates to the world will inherently be semantically indeterminate.

Argument one
I see an object emitting a wavelength of 640nm, and say "I see a red object". I see an object emitting a wavelength of 680nm, and say "I see a red object". Whether "I" have free will or not, my statement "I see a red object" is necessarily semantically indeterminate, in that I could be referring to any wavelength between 640 and 680nm. I could invent 40 new words to describe each wavelength in changes of 1nm wavelength, such as red650 meaning red of a wavelength of 650 nm. But I would still have the problem of describing each wavelength in changes of 0.1nm.
IE, the word "red" is inherently semantically indeterminate

Argument two
Any person, with or without free-will, would fail in any attempt to discover an absolute and fixed meaning of any word using the dictionary, for example , in searching for the meaning of "object" .

Object = a material thing that can be seen and touched.
Material = the matter from which a thing is or can be made.
Matter = physical substance in general, as distinct from mind and spirit; (in physics) that which occupies space and possesses rest mass, especially as distinct from energy.
Physical = relating to the body as opposed to the mind.
IE, the links are endless

Argument three
There are fewer words in the dictionary than mereologically possible objects in the world.
IE, language is inherently indeterminate.

Argument four
Consider a group of people with or without free-will trying to create a semantically determinate language. Suppose they create a new word "xyz". The question is how to give this new word a fixed meaning within the whole group. The word as description falls into the same problem as using a dictionary. The word as reference falls into a different problem. I could point to something and say, this is xyz, but there will always be uncertainty in the others as to what exactly I am pointing at.
IE, any group of people with or without free-will will fail at trying to create a determinate language.

Who says? I mean, which character, and where does Socrates take the discussion from there? In Phaedo, Socrates is spending his final hour doing what he thinks is most important, critiquing ideas. He is also reassuring his friends by offering reasons not to fer death, and offering them a chance to show him how much they have learned from him by refuting him. Phaedo himself isn't buying and grieves. Plato, of course, is too sickened to even show. It is absurd, of course, to be afraid of being dead. But we do fear dying because it is too real, and what we most fear is being real. That fear is why we accept as axiomatic what we fear is just not in us to critique.

Political language is a case where we have no opportunity to respond to and to prompt a response from a speaker determined to create an impression their words imply but do not guarantee. An example, what is JFK saying in "Ask not what your country can do for you!" Who can say this is not a 'dog whistle' promise to the south that he would not move aggressively against Jim Crow?

If reason is reductive the relation between 'axiom' or idea and individual real things, participant to it, is purgative. The question is, is it purgative of the particular from the general, or of the general from the particular? My favorite analogy is to ask 'Which one of us is us?' If "us" is some real thing of which each is an inadequate or fraudulent example, the purge is of each. If "us" is just a trope by which we know ourselves, each other, and the category itself by proving to each other it is not who we are. And if that proof is a community in contrariety, as contrary between us as together in a complementary contrariety to the category, then not only do we get to know "us" and what "us" really is in differing from it, but we really do get to know ourselves and each other in the drama of that contrariety. If the purge goes the wrong way, expelling the person and conserving the conventional term, it can only mean to enslave. If the right way, we die in a world we can recognize, but more completely know ourselves because of this. Note, complement with an 'e', not an 'i'.

I'm warming to the contrast between autonomic and autonomous systems. The autonomic does not respond to real changes, and if reality is rigor interrupting the continuity of such a system, then whatever rational rigor is regulating it is inadequately rigorous. The autonomous system must then intercede, even though this temporarily abandons rigor altogether. And therein lies the only honest objection. That is, some are so convicted in the adequacy of rational rigor that the changes required to complete it are endlessly deferred. Yes, it is quite right to claim that introducing discontinuity to a rational system disrupts its rigor. And that the result, in itself, can never quite recover it. But in a contrariety as complementary between us as to those separate autonomic systems we each bring to the issue at hand, rigor gets reintroduced to the autonomic reasoning we each alone are, but alters the terms of that reinvigorated rigor in the character of those terms that complementary contrariety we each bring to the inadequate terms of reason we otherwise are isolated and alone in. Of course the interruption of autonomic reason is in some sense abandoned rigor. Emotions are never the whole story, they are always an interruption to, and not an end or concluding term in themselves. And within our mostly isolated and personal effort to secure rational terms rationally continuous to a valid conclusion, we can only suffer that recognition of the inadequacy of reason as variations in the character of our conviction in it. As Plato shows us time and time again, reason begins and ends in bewilderment. A bewilderment most often introduced to us by a recognition that the convictions we think we express are not convictions we are heard to. Such bewilderment has no possible navigation, because it is lost its conviction in the continuity of its terms. Mind flails about for a navigator. Anything, anything at all, that seems to sign a way gets glomed onto as a welcoming gesture, as if from reality itself. As we navigate by this 'welcome-sign' our conviction broadens and deepens in a kind of ritual of initiation. As that conviction motivates utterance we shift from initiation to discourse, and with a sense of being in some sense aligned with others we engage in the construction of an edifice of terms, But edification has its limits, we begin to feel the inadequacy of them as an isolating ennui or boredom, a disinclination to engage. This triggers a vague suspicion that there is some source of the inadequacy of our conviction. But the search for it fails, if we are honest and competent in it. Ultimately we drop out of the system of navigation that we thought had welcomed us. We become the stranger to our own terms. Bewilderment looms. And every step of the way is rigorous! But, regardless of the treacherous trap any rationally autonomic system is, all its terms suffer revision in the character of the complementary contrariety to it we each bring to the moment of that bewilderment. That character of the terms of reason we are is a kind community of opposition to, and yet strictly distinguished each other in. So, of course, the ends of reason is (singular, the ends of reason can only be singular, while the ends of time is difference) emotion, and, of course, emotion is in some sense abandoned reason. But it is also a drama introduced our separate and isolated autonomic systems of conviction to terms we bring to it in an equal but opposite sense. Thus the limits of reason, together and each alone, gets nibbled away at the inadequacy of terms and forms reason always is. There are, of course, a myriad of strategies (many demonstrated in these discussions) to keep this drama from having the impact upon the conduct of mind it deserves, the most effective is the zealous effort to reduce its final term of bewilderment to a negligible infinitesimal. But if that infinitesimal variation is really how reason is reborn in its capacity for rigor, then there can be no limit to its being the truer completion of reason and the engine of the terms by which our knowing and understanding ourselves and each is most real.

Quoting RussellA

I see an object emitting a wavelength of 640nm, and say "I see a red object". I see an object emitting a wavelength of 680nm, and say "I see a red object". Whether "I" have free will or not, my statement "I see a red object" is necessarily semantically indeterminate, in that I could be referring to any wavelength between 640 and 680nm. I could invent 40 new words to describe each wavelength in changes of 1nm wavelength, such as red650 meaning red of a wavelength of 650 nm. But I would still have the problem of describing each wavelength in changes of 0.1nm.
IE, the word "red" is inherently semantically indeterminate

You do not have trouble describing a wavelength of, say, 650.1 nm -- look, I just did it too. You just don't have a non-numerical word for that and only that.

You can have words that you are certain do apply to that, easily, by defining "red650" to be objects emitting wavelengths >= 650 and < 660, and you can do that in any chosen increment, for any granularity of measurement.

Do we need a vocabulary that can keep up even if we change the granularity of measurement, or that would be equally useful for any conceivable granularity? On the one hand, we already have that because we can resort to numbers when need be, and on the other, this is obviously an absurd requirement. But some of this is down to the word "need" up there.

Let's say, broadly speaking, that the use of a vocabulary will be to distinguish one thing from another, either for purposes of description or of reference by description. Words come in usable groups. If we define "red" as "emitting at 650nm" then everything "not red" is emitting at any frequency unequal to 650 that's not necessarily useless if 650nm is of particular importance to us in what we're doing, important enough to be given a name and treated as the designated value, but it's not very widely usable.

Instead we will tend deliberately to have words that are helpful for a range of cases, say 640nm to 680nm. If that means this word doesn't help you distinguish objects of 640nm from 670nm, that's hardly a complaint, as it wasn't designed to capture that distinction and it doesn't leave us helpless. If I have three screwdrivers, one blue-handled and two that have handles of different shades of red, you can perfectly well pick out the blue one by using the word "blue" but of course you can't get away with something like "the red one" or with no other explanation "give me the red one, not the red one". But there is no problem here: either you say from the start "the dark red one" or something, or you correct, "sorry, I meant the other red one".

But what I really want to say is that you seem to think that for our words to be determinate they have to match the degree to which reality is determinate -- even though that degree is perhaps undefined, or dependent on our choice of measurement granularity -- when this is obviously not so. There is what is distinguished within the system of our vocabulary, and there is what is distinguished in reality -- assuming that means anything, doesn't matter. The degree to which a word needs to be determinate depends not on how determinate things in the world are, but in the role it plays in a system of linguistic distinctions. "Red" and "blue" work perfectly well in being distinct from each other, even if in the real world it turns out there are things purple or purplish, where we begin to feel either both words or neither apply. That doesn't make "red" and "blue" any less distinct; it just means there are cases where their distinctiveness doesn't quite match our needs for this particular case. Describing an urn of red and blue marbles, the "purple issue" won't arise at all. (When it did, I used the words "purple" and "purplish" just now.)

And again, when standard color words are quite enough, we have a lot of special-purpose options, and we invent these over and over again -- pantone, the old X11 color names, and of course numbers.

So it does come down to our needs and words can be perfectly determinate for one need and not good enough for another. And we can often be uncertain whether a given vocabulary is determinate enough for a given purpose and investigate and take steps. We can always manage somehow to be exactly as determinate as we need to.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

We can always manage somehow to be exactly as determinate as we need to.

What is language for ? There are two aspects to our need for language. The first aspect is about our survival within the world. The second aspect is about our understanding of the world, though the more we understand the world the better our chances will be of surviving within it.

As regards the first aspect, we need language to communicate our needs to others, and we need to communicate the difference between one thing and another. It seems that this requires both the Pragmatic Theory of Truth, in that truth is verified and conformed by the results of putting one's concepts into practice, as well as the Coherence Theory of Truth, where truth is primarily a property of whole systems of propositions, and can be ascribed to individual propositions only according to their coherence with the whole

As regards the second aspect, what is the truth of the world and how do we gain knowledge of the truth of the world. The main theory is the Correspondence Theory of Truth, stretching back to Plato and Aristotle, where the truth or falsity of a representation is determined entirely by how it relates to "things" and whether it accurately describes those "things".

Aspect one of having a pragmatic and coherent language allows me to determine the difference between a wrench and a hammer sufficient for my needs, and I agree that "So it does come down to our needs and words can be perfectly determinate for one need and not good enough for another". However, I can only distinguish between a wrench and a hammer if I first have the concepts of wrenchhood and hammerhood.

Considering aspect two of using language to understand the world through my rational reasoning of an empirical experience, I may observe a particular instance of a wrench, but I can only understand a particular instance through my understanding the concept of wrenchhood. There has to be a correspondence between language and "things" in the world, and such correspondence is ultimately semantically indeterminate.

IE, I agree that a coherent language can be perfectly determinate for one's needs in pragmatically distinguishing between wrenches and hammers. However, the recognition of a wrench requires the knowledge of wrenchhood, which requires having established a correspondence between language and things in the world, which is ultimately semantically indeterminate

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

what we mean when we say that two people have the same idea,

Perhaps this can be related back to the original question.

For those who believe in a Universal Mind, Alice and Bob are two parts of the same being.
When Alice/Bob looks at a particular wrench their idea has a single ontological spatial existence for both the particular wrench and the concept wrenchhood.

For those who believe in Platonic Forms, both Alive and Bob when looking at the same wrench have a glimpse of the same Platonic Form of Wrenchhood. Their ideas will be ontologically spatially separate. Their ideas of the particular wrench will be the same, and their concepts of wrenchhood will be the same.

For those who believe in Nominalism, for Alice and Bob when looking at the same wrench, their ideas will be ontologically spatially separate. Their idea of the particular wrench will be the same, but their concepts of wrenchhood will be different.

Yes, it is possible convince yourself it is possible to create what you call a "determinate" language, but it is demonstrably false to suppose that is what language is. Language is sharing meaning. Idle talk is more what language is than scientifically rigorous definitions. The point is participating in the capacity of words to share in all modes possible, not just scientific and/or instrumental reason.

seeing red
am I blue
green energy
raining on my parade
on cloud nine

Quoting RussellA

However, I can only distinguish between a wrench and a hammer if I first have the concepts of wrenchhood and hammerhood.

I'll take this as a synecdoche for the whole post. This is not a problem I can solve but I'll tell you roughly why I think you're wrong.

This is the whole "two aspects of language" problem that we flogged through the Davidson thread. Your position is that the "formal" aspect, language as a sign system that can represent the world, must underlie the "practical" aspect, the use of such a sign system to communicate.

I strongly suspect this is false, but of course I can't demonstrate that. You're in good company, of course, and I would single out David Lewis as having done about as much as anyone could do to knit together the two aspects while preserving the primacy of the formal side. (That is, showing how we could formalize the idea of a such a sign system being used for communication by a population.)

I, on the other hand, suspect that the mechanisms that underlie language use, which may indeed be susceptible to some formal description, are much more, let's say, "operational". We were always right to sense there is something mechanical within language use -- though it isn't "just mechanical" -- I'm just not convinced that the system there looks anything at all like the sort of models you get from formal semantics.

So I believe I have settled in the "communication first" camp, which is no rejection of system, but it is a rejection of the expectation that there is a Tarski-style or Carnap-style system that, as Davidson puts it, we acquire and then "apply to cases".

[hide="Davidson aside"](My objection to Davidson is that he seems to think he can sweep up and reject the operational system as well and there's just no evidence for that, so his argument is overbroad even if he's right to give up on formal semantics, if that's indeed what he's doing.)[/hide]

First of all, in Plato's time the engine of language was the abstract character of gods and heroes. Not that these were real entities active in the world, but that they were themes forming a context for all terms. It is impossible, therefore, to derive Platonism, as a dehumanized system of sign, from Plato.

Does one plus one equal two? Do we even know what we mean by this? One one must be squinted at from a very strange angle to be seen as different from the other, and then, from an even stranger angle, to be seen as the same, and then we must convince ourselves that the two squinting angles belong to the same universe, and that that belonging is more what reality is than either the unique realness of either one or the belonging together as one the two we suppose they add up to. Someone spoke of angstroms, as a determinant of spectral terms. But if you shoot two photons at a target they are more likely to add up to zero photons as one, and are never two, because of the quantum states possible for the electron they hit. And how the hell does this whole discussion get around the accusation that it falsifies itself by so clearly trying to prove its assumption rather than critiquing it? That is, is the notion under discussion proscribed its falsification? If so, isn't it programmatic rather than inquiry? Dogma? And, if so, who is anyone engaged in it to say that ordinary language is somehow subordinate to techno-babble? It's one thing to convince our machines of this, after all, they otherwise would fail. But if the programmer believes this, really and sincerely, his personal life must really be crap!

Plato had a number of critical things to say about poetry, mainly that it murders the living drama of language, but the analysts take this to such an extent that it is impossible to expect anything to come of it at all, but noise and counter noise, or like photons out of phase. Even bad poetry gets remembered, and science, unlike philosophy, has a very short memory for dead ends like positivism. Ever wonder about this? What scientists are remembered for getting nothing right? But every damn dogmatist in philosophy gets a place on the shelves, where the best thing for them is to gather dust there.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

"two aspects of language"

I believe that Kant's "synthetic a priori" judgements gives an insight into the apparent circular problem of the fact that I am only able to recognize a wrench if I already know the concept of wrenchhood, yet I can only learn the concept of wrenchhood if I am able to recognize wrenches.

In a "synthetic a priori" judgement, some important knowledge, such as causation, is neither given through the senses empirically nor known through rational reasoning, but rather is a priori. Therefore, it is only possible to have experience of an object if the object conforms to what can already be experienced. Objects of knowledge can only ever be things as they appear, not as they are in themselves.

Kant's insight is valid even if the terminology doesn't seem right. Synthetic is a linguistic term, yet a priori is an ontological term. Synthetic and a priori are of two different kinds, it is as if one asked "which is better, justice or cats". Perhaps it should be called an "a posteriori a priori" judgement.

We are born with certain basic innate a priori concepts such as time, space, causation, colour, sound, etc . During our lives, through regular observation and reasoning, we can combine these basic concepts into more complex concepts such as justice, buildings, tables, horses, etc.

Our innate a priori concepts are part of the physical structure of the brain. They have evolved over a period of 4.5 billion years in the development of complex modern organisms from ancient simple ancestors, being subject to the continual interaction between life and its surroundings.

Any physical system can only undertake that which it is physically capable of undertaking, ie, a blind person cannot see colour, a deaf person cannot hear sounds, a cat cannot judge the morality of its actions and a toaster cannot broadcast a television program. Similarly, the range of complex concepts about the world a person will be able to develop will ultimately be limited by their given, innate a priori concepts.

When looking at a set of shapes in the world, we are only able to recognize those parts of an object for which we already have innate a priori concepts. Through a regularity of observation and reasoning, we combine these parts to create an understanding of more complex objects, such as a wrench, and more complex concepts, such as wrenchhood.

Language must follow the same principle, in that we are born with a basic innate a priori linguistic knowledge. .Chomsky has argued that children are born in possession of an innate ability to comprehend language structures, where language acquisition occurs as a consequence of a child's capacity to recognize the underlying structure at the root of any language, as all human languages are built upon a common structural basis.

IE, as regards which takes priority, language as communication or language as representing the world. As the basic concepts of language as representing the world is already innate a priori within the brain (having evolved over over millions of years), this allows language as communication the ability to operate free of restrictions from the immediate external world whilst still being grounded in the enduring external world.

Reply to RussellA

See there you go. Your post is a mix of cognitive psychology (Chomsky) and evolution and Kant and empiricism. And it's a bad mix. "Kant because that's how we evolved" is vaguely reasonable, but it's not much, and it won't hold up for long. It leads you to say things like this:

Quoting RussellA

We are born with certain basic innate a priori concepts such as time, space, causation, colour, sound, etc

Is that an empirical claim? Could we have evolved otherwise, maybe with no concept of space? (See the no-space thought experiment in Individuals.) Are you absolutely certain that sentence is even meaningful?

I'm sympathetic. It has been getting harder and harder to tell what's left for philosophy if we turn over some of these questions to psychology, but that's no excuse. Just so stories about how we learn, how we acquire concepts and language, are not good enough when we can do actual research.

Quoting RussellA

Kant's "synthetic a priori" judgements gives an insight into the apparent circular problem of the fact that I am only able to recognize a wrench if I already know the concept of wrenchhood, yet I can only learn the concept of wrenchhood if I am able to recognize wrenches.

Kant is no help here at all. Going into the lab is.

Quoting RussellA

We are born with certain basic innate a priori concepts such as time, space, causation, colour, sound, etc . During our lives, through regular observation and reasoning, we can combine these basic concepts into more complex concepts such as justice, buildings, tables, horses, etc.

Quoting RussellA

When looking at a set of shapes in the world, we are only able to recognize those parts of an object for which we already have innate a priori concepts.

I've not been following this thread, just had a quick skim to catch up so apologies if I missed them, but this is a particular area of interest of mine, so I'd really appreciate some links to the research behind this, particularly that last section (it seems to contradict some of Seth's work at Sussex on perception, which I follow quite closely, so I'm particularly interested in that one).

Quoting RussellA

I see an object emitting a wavelength of 640nm, and say "I see a red object". I see an object emitting a wavelength of 680nm, and say "I see a red object". Whether "I" have free will or not, my statement "I see a red object" is necessarily semantically indeterminate, in that I could be referring to any wavelength between 640 and 680nm.

You're missing the point. The word "red" could only come to describe both of these objects if there is freedom of choice in usage. If there was no choice, "red" could only be used to refer to one or the other. That you can define "red" as between 640 and 680 doesn't make the use of the word determinate, because we cannot determine with our eyes, precisely whether the colour falls in that range, so people could not abide by definitions, then they'd rely on free choice to decide . Besides, your definition doesn't include combinations of wavelengths, so it's just an unrealistic definition.

Quoting RussellA

Any person, with or without free-will, would fail in any attempt to discover an absolute and fixed meaning of any word using the dictionary, for example , in searching for the meaning of "object" .

I don't see how this is relevant. If words and meaning are created and used by free willing minds, then a non-free willing being probably wouldn't even know how to relate to words. It might be something like a plant, or a rock, hearing words. How does a comparison like this make any sort of sense?

Quoting RussellA

Argument four
Consider a group of people with or without free-will...

Again, how does it make any sense to class these two together? A non-free willing being would be so much different from a free willing being, that if one of them created words, the other would not even know how to relate to a word.

Quoting RussellA

The word as description falls into the same problem as using a dictionary. The word as reference falls into a different problem.

Don't you see that the non-free willing being would have none of these problems, being problems of choice? There couldn't even be any creating of new words because that would require choice.

Free will again! Freedom is not a possession, it is a willing dispossession. The transformation of terms is not something we try to impose on each other, it is an urge to greater rigor we need from each other.

For a hundred years or so we have known that reality, at the micro and cosmic scale, is fundamentally ambiguous. It is only in the interim that it is possible to perceive only disambiguation as real. But that disambiguation begins and ends in a moment transformed of all terms and forms throughout. Reality is chaos. A chaos that energetically engages in a moment of contrariety complementary to the failure of the contradictory to disambiguate anything. But it is only the contradictory that can be observed. That is, only the elimination of the complement to it that contrariety always is. That elimination is risked as the opportunity of that moment so reduced that elimination that nothing remains within the ends of time. Duration and purpose are expedients to the recognition of the worth of the chaos unrecognizable within that duration of disambiguation. But if this is what is real, and we have more evidence for this than for the perfection of a hermetic or machine language, then the ends of any duration is that last term of elimination proved there is nothing within at all, and so engendering moment opportune of being transformed all terms within it. That moment is the only ends of time. Free will is the drama of the need of rigor we can only get from the excluded term ambiguity is and the rigorous reduction of that process of exclusion ultimately proved nothing within it. The moment that the ends of time reality is is the least term of that reduction recognition of that absence or departure is. The worth of the departed is that moment of recognition. The more rigorous that least term the more it is truer than the rigor found it. That is, the least term of time is all the differing it is. And language is most the opportunity of that least term, and therefore most the opportunity of the articulation of its worth, and of what worth is. Person is the lest term of time, and therefore the most completed articulation of its worth. The duration of its disambiguation is the rigor of its final term, but not its truth. That truth can never be a process of elimination or disambiguation.

For at least a hundred thousand years people have been talking. It is utter arrogance to suppose we are suddenly, by ignoring what we have learned only recently, going to perfect its mission of articulating the worth of time. If that articulation is the mission of the word, then it can never be alone or hermetic. The only possible meaning to a hermetic or 'determinant' language is either to supplant humanity with machines, or to create some sort of Ubermensch.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Could we have evolved otherwise, maybe with no concept of space?

I am with Kant when he wrote in The Critique of Reason "Since, then, the receptivity of the subject, its capacity to be affected by objects, must necessarily precede all intuitions of these objects, it can readily be understood how the form of all appearances can be given prior to all actual perceptions, and so exist in the mind a priori"

The problem is, if we didn't have a priori evolutionary knowledge of time, space, causation, etc, then how could we enable someone born without the ability to see the colour red to have the experience of seeing the colour red ?

Quoting Isaac

Seth's work at Sussex on perception

My post was based on Kant's concept of transcendental idealism as described in his Critique of Pure Reason 1781. Kant wrote, "Since, then, the receptivity of the subject, its capacity to be affected by objects, must necessarily precede all intuitions of these objects, it can readily be understood how the form of all appearances can be given prior to all actual perceptions, and so exist in the mind a priori"

That is, when I look at an object emitting a wavelength of 700nm, because of my innate a priori knowledge of red, I project back onto the world my concept of the colour red. That is, when I look at an object, I perceive the colour red, not the wavelength 700nm.

Professor Seth in his 5 Oct 2018 Ted talk said - "So since Newton, it's been pretty clear that colours - red, yellow, green, et cetera - colours are not objective properties of objects in the world. They are attributes of reflected light. And the brain - the visual system will make inferences based on wavelengths of light about what colour something is. So something as basic as colour is not something that we just passively receive from the world. We actively attribute it to things out there in the world."

It initially seems that Professor Seth's approach to perception is similar to Kant's, although my only knowledge of Professor Seth's work is from his Ted talks

Quoting Metaphysician Undercover

The word "red" could only come to describe both of these objects if there is freedom of choice in usage. If there was no choice, "red" could only be used to refer to one or the other.

In a deterministic world where all events are completely determined by previously existing causes, when light anywhere between 640nm and 680nm is shone on a receptor of a machine, the machine can respond with the single output "red".
IE, a machine is able to give a single response covering a range of observations.

Quoting Metaphysician Undercover

a non-free willing being probably wouldn't even know how to relate to words.

Interactive voice response (IVR) is a technology that allows humans to interact with a computer-operated phone system through the use of voice.
IE, a machine can relate to words.

Quoting Metaphysician Undercover

There couldn't even be any creating of new words because that would require choice.

In a deterministic world where all events are completely determined by previously existing causes, when light is shone on a receptor of a machine, and the frequency of the light is different to what has been observed by the machine before, the machine gives it a name - such as Frequency660
IE, a machine can create new words.

Quoting Metaphysician Undercover

A non-free willing being would be so much different from a free willing being, that if one of them created words, the other would not even know how to relate to a word.

In a deterministic world where all events are completely determined by previously existing causes, when light is shone on a receptor of machine A, and the frequency of the light is different to what has been observed by the machine before, the machine gives it a name - such as Frequency660, where the second part of the name is the frequency of the light in nm. When this name, Frequency660, is passed to machine B, machine B emits light of the same frequency contained within the second part of the name.
IE, if one machine creates a name, a different machine will be able to relate to that name.

Reply to RussellA

Science, if it's going to offer explanations, needs something to explain. Our everyday understanding of things is a starting point; our sophisticated philosophical understanding of things is a starting point.

But I don't see much point in reading Kant and just substituting "because evolution" wherever he says "a priori".

We are all Kantians now, if by that you only mean we recognize that our experience is in some sense constructed by systems that we are in some sense born with. That's fine; all it leaves out is the science.

You can attempt to construe Kant's use of a word like "appearance" or a word like "perception" in a way that is consonant with the science, if you know what it is, but you cannot assume that it is so consonant out-of-the-box, and you certainly can't substitute it for the actual science.

Which brings us back to the acquisition of concepts and language.

Quoting RussellA

Through a regularity of observation and reasoning, we combine these parts to create an understanding of more complex objects, such as a wrench, and more complex concepts, such as wrenchhood.

You've stocked the infant's toolbox with a starter kit, courtesy of evolution, but you're still talking like an empiricist. Where's the evidence that this is how children acquire concepts?

Quoting RussellA

Language must follow the same principle, in that we are born with a basic innate a priori linguistic knowledge. .Chomsky has argued that children are born in possession of an innate ability to comprehend language structures, where language acquisition occurs as a consequence of a child's capacity to recognize the underlying structure at the root of any language, as all human languages are built upon a common structural basis.

Was language on the list you got from Kant? Will Kant settle the disputes that have been raging within linguistics for the last fifty or sixty years about what exactly is innate? Then why didn't he, centuries before they started?

Quoting RussellA

As the basic concepts of language as representing the world is already innate a priori within the brain (having evolved over over millions of years)

Where does Chomsky, who you seem to think is on your side, say this? Chomsky's views, or lack of views, on semantics are the central source of controversy in generative linguistics. And for the record he also thinks nothing worth taking seriously has been said about the origin and evolution of language. I just can't see him endorsing any part of this.

I recognize that I'm no expert in linguistics or in any of its subfields, because I have the example of actual research to compare my thoughts to. Kant didn't. Insofar as you want to take Kant as doing conceptual analysis, or descriptive metaphysics along Strawsonian lines, you can think of it as a starting point for science, something for it to offer explanations for, and that's worthwhile if only to keep the science from trying to explain something we don't actually do. But you have to be careful, because the early moderns generally offer a psychological explanation along with the phenomenon they're calling attention to.

Quoting RussellA

In a deterministic world where all events are completely determined by previously existing causes, when light anywhere between 640nm and 680nm is shone on a receptor of a machine, the machine can respond with the single output "red".
IE, a machine is able to give a single response covering a range of observations.

Yeah but who decides how the machine is to be programmed? And who decides what light to shine? Your described "deterministic world" is not really a deterministic world, because it requires people making such decisions.

Quoting RussellA

In a deterministic world where all events are completely determined by previously existing causes, when light is shone on a receptor of machine A, and the frequency of the light is different to what has been observed by the machine before, the machine gives it a name - such as Frequency660, where the second part of the name is the frequency of the light in nm. When this name, Frequency660, is passed to machine B, machine B emits light of the same frequency contained within the second part of the name.
IE, if one machine creates a name, a different machine will be able to relate to that name.

What you describe here is clearly not a deterministic world.

Quoting Metaphysician Undercover

who decides how the machine is to be programmed?

In a deterministic world where all events are completely determined by previously existing causes, the question is whether a simple machine can self-evolve into a complex machine without the help from any external intelligence. A machine is defined as an apparatus using mechanical power and having several parts, each with a definite function and together performing a particular task. Such machines would be deterministic, without free-will and without consciousness.

One example of such a machine would be the bacteria, in that it can self-evolve free of any external intelligence, and without either free-will or consciousness (even accepting panpsychism).
IE, as there is at least one example of a machine that can self-evolve (the bacteria), this shows that in principle machines can self-evolve, meaning self-program.

Quoting RussellA

In a deterministic world where all events are completely determined by previously existing causes, the question is whether a simple machine can self-evolve into a complex machine without the help from any external intelligence. A machine is defined as an apparatus using mechanical power and having several parts, each with a definite function and together performing a particular task. Such machines would be deterministic, without free-will and without consciousness.

I really do not think that such a machine could "self-evolve" in a deterministic world. I think "evolve" is incompatible with determinism. Doesn't the theory of evolution require undetermined mutations?

Pato's semantics appears in the Craytalus. There he compares onomatopeoia to etymology as sources of significations of terms. As usual, of course, the answer is neither/nor, not either/or. Interestingly, sociologists have found that there is no such thing as a primitive language. That is, every language in the world is capable of the rational structures required to imagine the construction of a machine or "determinative" language. The implication is that language is always born full-grown. Compare this to a restoration of sight in one eye in a person that always had sight in the other. They do not acquire 3D vision immediately, It might take months. Clearly, the autonomous mind must first construct the autonomic apparatus to support the new faculty. Reports from those who experience this are that the faculty does not emerge gradually, but pops into being suddenly and complete.

What if the apparatus reported the color of the photon then receives another photon exactly 180 degrees out of phase with the first? What then? Does the first report vanish? I think you'll find it does. When matter interferes with itself, where the hell does it go? I'm reminded of a phenomenon in which an inaudible sound becomes distinctly audible when surrounded by white noise. But what are we really hearing? What if the apparent determinacy of the universe is white noise? And what is that term anyways? Deter-minacy? Certitude, or resistance? Or is a word never play?

Quoting Metaphysician Undercover

Doesn't the theory of evolution require undetermined mutations?

From the viewpoint of the machine - internally it is determined - but external forces acting upon it that possibly cause internal change are undetermined.

Quoting Srap Tasmaner

Science, if it's going to offer explanations, needs something to explain.

I agree that I may not have used the standard philosophical structure of thesis, antithesis, synthesis, and not made clear the difference between my understanding of Kant's transcendental idealism, and what I believe to be a sensible extrapolation of Kant's transcendental idealism.

I agree that Kant did not consider language, but rather space, time and objects. However, once Kant had established the principle of innate a priori concepts, the number of examples can be increased. I am sure it is commonly accepted that children don't need to be taught the difference between the touch of smooth and rough, the taste of sweet and sour, the sight of red and blue, the hearing of loud and quiet, the smell of acrid and sweet, in that these must be innate a priori concepts. Our understanding of the world can then be built up from these common-sense core concepts of body, person, space, time and causation.

The mechanism by which any innate a priori concept became part of the brain is a matter of belief. For an Evolutionist, they have evolved over millions of years through the continuous interaction between life and its surroundings. For a Creationist, they arrived through a supernatural act of divine creation.

The downside of innate a priori concepts is that any profound understanding of the truth of the world is inherently limited. We can understand three dimensional space because we have evolved within it , but this is not the case when we try to understand the expansion of the universe from the Big Bang. We may use the analogy of blowing up a balloon, but this is no more than glimpsing one of Plato's Forms, no more than a deaf person being able to experience the sound of a bell.

Whether language is innate a priori is debated. On the one side, Chomsky in Reflections on Language 1975 argued that the development of language is in large part predetermined by genetic factors, innate rather than being a blank slate upon which psychological and social forces act. But even those who argue against him, such as Philip Lieberman, proposed that our ancestors invented modes of communication that were already compatible with the brain’s natural abilities.

IE, Kant's transcendental idealism gives a solid foundation on which we can base our understanding of the world.

An end of metaphysics? Don't think so! If Kant weren't full of holes Hegel would not have had anything to add. The epistemic and the formal are incoherent to each other. A useful lie is required to convince us they are. Between opposites, between an assertion and its negation, we need absolute certitude which is which in order to extend the proposition one or the other is. But that extension alters the completeness, if any, of what we had been resolutely convinced of between them. In a determinate world there is no subjunctive. If there's any if about it there is no if about it. If there is no if about it it's all pretty iffy. To attribute anything "solid" to Kant is just vacuous! But even in his Critique, with his square of opposition, he demonstrates his inability to support the excluded middle as an a priori law of reason. If we have to add a quantifier to make it so, that excludes any coherence between the rational and the real. We cannot know which one we mean and count up how many it is, or count up how many anything is and still know which one it is, except by providing ourselves with a useful lie about them.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

inability to support the excluded middle as an a priori law of reason

Well, LEM follows from LNC (the Law of Not-Contradiction) and LDN (the Law of Double Negation) like so: For every proposition A, it’s true that if
0. neither A nor NOT(A) (Premise/Forestep),
then
1. NOT(A) (from (0.))
2. NOT(NOT(A)) (from (0.))
3. A (from (2.) by LDN)
4. A AND NOT(A) (from (3.) and (1.)),
which latter proposition goes against LNC. Hence, we must always have either A or NOT(A).

By the way, this is not the same principle as the Principle of Bivalence, which states that each proposition is either true or false (untrue; untruth/falsehood is stronger than not-truth). Indeed, LEM is weaker than BP, and while the former is a basic law of logic (witcraft), the latter is likely false due to the probable existence of chance and free will. I’ve said more on this topic starting here.

@Gary M Washburn I find the Shape (Form, Idea, Widea) of Contrariety indeed spellbinding. Let’s now apply it to itself in a way: If everything isn’t either-or, but rather neither-nor, then in particular, everything is neither either-or nor neither-nor. And we can go on that way further (neither (either either-or or neither-nor), nor (neither either-or nor neither-nor), asf.) to infinity and beyond. I find this way of thinking useful when trying to reach the unreachable Beyondly Absolute.

Spoken like Zeno, Parmenides' shill. Both your comments are question begging. The law of contradiction does not prove itself. I've said over and over, reason must be convicted of the continuity of terms to begin its reductive process, but cannot prove this conviction. And so suffers dynamism to it, from which its terms ultimately emerge and grow. You are taking your conclusion as axiomatic. Taking what you find as what you were looking for, because it comes to your mind. A subject "is" a predicate? What do you mean? You seem to be taking predication as certifiable assertion of coherent belonging of a hermetic class. But that is not what "is" is, not what predication is. Predication is an assertion that a subject has something of the character of a predicate, not that it is a hermetic and finite pigeon hole rigidly fixed and secured the subject said to be something of it. A is something like B, B is something like C, does not in the slightest mean that A is anything at all like C. Take it any further than that and you are doing dogma, not philosophy. Philosophy is not science. Only a dogmatist could say it is. What do they teach in schools these days!? Language is a human artifact, not a machine determining reality. Thinking we ever completely sync on the meaning of terms or even the forms of reason is laughable, any more than it is reasonable to suppose we experience anything at all in perfect sync. We can pretend to adhere to scientific definitions, but who defined them when there was no science, but pretty effective language? First we have to recognize a separate mind, and a desire to be less separate, and yet not fall thrall to what we do share. We are constantly struggling with our own internal tendency to become enthralled into our definitions, and set each other free only where we do achieve some degree of recognition we are not in sync in them. And that recognition is how language comes into being and grows. Your prejudice toward the hermetic proposition puts the brakes on that dynamism, and ultimately puts you out of sync with all humanity save those few sorry dogmatists you probably hooked up with in a classroom somewhere. There ought to a period of purgation from such "learning" in which we are taught to forget it all, and to think instead of applying rules. Have you ever watched a kid learn to talk? Ever had a romance? Ever had a fight with your boss, or an encounter with the law? If any of these, and so much more, it is hard to see you still believing in the excluded middle. Kant agrees with me, if you don't. More recently, of course, it is hard to find such honesty.

[Why do I keep getting notifications about your posts hours after I have already responded?]

Aristotle illustrates your point by saying:

Socrates is a man
All men are Mortal
Therefore:
Socrates is mortal.
I assume you subscribe to this. But, ever ask why the quantifier? Does "is" need a quantifier to be determinant? If Aristotle thinks so, and Kant thinks so, why can't you at least entertain the possibility I have a legitimate area of inquiry? If "is" is the qualifier between subject and predicate, and not a quantifier, as analysts (like yourself?) would have it, then there simply is no rational basis for treating it like some fantasized Venn diagram! These dogmatic shifts are a crime against mind, not a discovery of its law. I do understand the glee with which "rationalists" must relish their newfound place the real power systems of the world "technology" lets them feel (though a computer, for all its utility, is nothing more than an automatic - not autonomous - filing system!). But this is no excuse for neglecting its proper role of reasoned dissension from such systems. When the hell did philosophy become the vigilante of uniformity in ideas?!!!! Drop the quantifiers ("a" and "all') and the "deduction" falls to pieces.

George is like Sam.
Sam is vain.
Therefore, George is vain?????

Quoting Gary M Washburn

You are taking your conclusion as axiomatic. Taking what you find as what you were looking for, because it comes to your mind.

I don’t think so, for I didn’t assume LEM; rather, I proved it with the help of LNC and LDN. These two, in turn, follow directly from the wist (essence) of negation. Of course, all this, including LNC and LDN, has yet to be derived from the Orprinciple beyond being and not-being.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

Predication is an assertion that a subject has something of the character of a predicate

The way I see it, predication is the assertion that something has some property or more broadly some broadthing (universal), where Having is something I have admittedly not yet been able to define. However, I think that it might be so groundlaying (fundamental) that speech cannot be used to define it, and that the hyge (nous) has to be used to directly “see” the Shape of Having.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

Your prejudice toward the hermetic proposition puts the brakes on that dynamism, and ultimately puts you out of sync with all humanity save those few sorry dogmatists you probably hooked up with in a classroom somewhere.

Why do you seem to be accusing me of dogmatism when you in fact appear to be dogmatic? After all, it’s you who seems to take the existence of other minds for granted, while I’m the one who does not venture to make such a daring assumption. Regarding my sync, I’m pretty well in sync with my surroundings, and my platonist philosophy has served and does serve me pretty well. Small ‘p’ platonism is almost certainly true, fair (beautiful), is in sync with mathematics and modern physics, is a very sublime philosophy, and has nice consequences such as a deathless soul. It has a beyondly aspect, but in the realm of being, witcraft, though limited, does it’s job pretty well. What is it that you have qualms with?

Quoting Gary M Washburn

Socrates is a man
All men are Mortal
Therefore:
Socrates is mortal.
I assume you subscribe to this.

Yes:

For every x, if x has manhood, then x has mortality.

Socrates has manhood.

Hence, Socrates has mortality.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

If "is" is the qualifier between subject and predicate, and not a quantifier, as analysts (like yourself?) would have it

Who said that ‘is’ is a quantifier? The word ‘is’ has several, though related, meanings, and in the context we’re dealing with here, it means the relationship of having something as a property (ownship).

I think that I should point out here that the undercollection-relationship (?) is not the same as the membership-relationship (?), and likewise, the (has-as-an-ownship)-relation is different from the (lets-follow-as-a-property)-relation. The former relation is born by Socrates to manhood and to mortality, whereas the latter one is born by manhood to mortality.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

Ever had a romance?

Yes, I have several long-running ongoing romances :wink:, namely with Rightwiseness (Justice), Cleanness, Wisdom, Knowledge, Truth, Fairness (Beauty), Goodness, Oneness, Godhood, and Beyondness. However, I’m likely still very, very, very far away from my beloveds.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

Ever had a fight with your boss

Don’t worry, I’m not schizophrenic, but in a way, yes, I had and still sometimes have :wink:.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

If any of these, and so much more, it is hard to see you still believing in the excluded middle.

As a radical asker, I do question LEM and even the LSIs (the Law of Self-Identity and the Law of Self-Implication), but I find it hard to see how someone could not believe in LEM. Okay, let’s say LEM isn’t true; then all of what you’ve said may be neither the case nor not the case, right? Selfing (self-reference, self-relationships, self-awareness, asf.) is truly spellbinding, and especially in philosophy, we should very often make use of it, shouldn’t we?

Quoting Gary M Washburn

why can't you at least entertain the possibility I have a legitimate area of inquiry?

Who said that I don’t?

Quoting Gary M Washburn

Drop the quantifiers ("a" and "all') and the "deduction" falls to pieces.

Please give me a reason for dropping them!

Quoting Gary M Washburn

though a computer, for all its utility

... such as allowing us to have this very discussion.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

though a computer, for all its utility, is nothing more than an automatic - not autonomous - filing system!

But if true random number generators are in built, which is already the case in some computers (reckonils), this need not be the case. Bear in mind that the human brain is a physical object which obeys exactly the same laws as a reckonil, so if the reckonil has the right info-processing ability (which current computers likely don’t have, but future ones likely will), why should a soul take up residence in a human (or other animal) brain but not in a reckonil?

Quoting Gary M Washburn

George is like Sam.
Sam is vain.
Therefore, George is vain?????

Here, you seem to be making a similar mistake to the one made (perhaps on purpose) by Socrates in e.g. the Parmenides: treating relationships as if they had a slottedness (arity) other from the one they really (soothly) have. You appear to be making a statement whose precise meaning you yourself do not quite know. Thus, you seem to have entangled yourself in wrong assumptions and so arrived at an unwarranted conclusion, whereupon you put the blame on witcraft (logic) when it is in fact you who are not quite clear about what you yourself mean. And guess who’s to the rescure to free you from your entanglement? Quantifiers!

Likeness isn’t a one-slotted relation, as Socrates appears to treat it in the Parmenides, and also not a binary relationship, as you are apparently treating it, but rather a three-slotted relationship. It relates two things F, U and a way W to each other such that F is like U in the way W. So your sentence “George is like Sam” is about as meaningful as the sentence “the number 5 is greater than”. That is, unless it is short for “there is a way W such that George is like Sam in the way W” (mark the existential quantifier). Let’s give you the freme (benefit) of a doubt and assume that you (underconsciously) have the second, meaningful statement in mind rather than the first, meaningless one. In that case, your argument becomes:

George is like Sam in some way.
Sam is vain.
Therefore, George is vain?????

Of course your argument is invalid, for the conclusion does NOT follow from the foresteps (premises). They don’t say in which way George is like Sam, so the conclusion is based on the unwarranted assumption that the way in question is vainness. So witcraft has no problem whatsoever. Rather, those who make imprecise formulations are the ones to blame. This is actually in accordance with your right observation that speech has come into being and evolves, isn’t it?

Quoting Gary M Washburn

Both your comments are question begging.

What? How could the second comment possibly beg a question? After all, it doesn’t really even make a stamement. It’s goal is to give the idea of applying selfing to contrariety. It even hints at the absolute beyondness of the Absolute, in particular its transcendence beyond reason. Shouldn’t that be something to your taste?

Quoting Gary M Washburn

These dogmatic shifts are a crime against mind, not a discovery of its law.

Since when has logic become dogmatic? (You might not be saying this, so if you don’t, please tell me.) Since when has brooking (using) this wonderful, though ultimately limited, tool for exploring the abstract world become a crime? Witcraft a crime? Doesn’t that sound like zealous dogmatism?

Also, witcraft isn’t really derived from language. The Greek word “logic” may suggest this, but the English word “witcraft” hints us in the right direction: witcraft is discovered directly by the wit, an aspect of the mind. Witcraft is very successful in both practical and highly theoretical fields. What do you find amiss with it?

Quoting Gary M Washburn

"rationalists"

Just in case you think that I’m a rationalist – I’m not. In these comments and already much earlier, I hint at absolute transcendence, and I’m perfectly aware that it includes standing above and beyond logic, reason, and thought. From what I’ve learned about him so far, I greatly bewonder (admire) Damascius’ thought. Do I need to say more to show that I find beyondness absolutely spellbinding?

Could'a fooled me! Damascious seems to have eluded my notice, though I'm sure I've come across something of him somewhere, I make a pretty thorough overview of the literature. All the signs of rationalism as I understand it. Certainly not Platonic. In Timaeus (and elsewhere), Plato horses around with divine design, but a careful reading will show he is ridiculing it. Athens defeats Atlantis because it, Athens, is embedded in a dialectic of loss and response to it that ultimately causes it to be stronger than divinely governed Atlantis, which saps its strength in the ritual repetition and preservation of received forms. In the end the gods erase themselves from being altogether. As they are about to announce their verdict upon the world they vanish,,,. This sort of thing is how Plato intimates his real meaning. Few if any catch it, and suppose he means to order the world by triangles and circles.

What you are experiencing is that time in incalculable worth. And that the dialectical engagement of honest and competent reasoners, forced to quantify the world by the strictures of reason, but always necessarily from an unjustifiably assumed axiom, helping each other escape their conviction in that unjustified axiom simply by being of an alternative opinion of what they mean. The rational reduction of that difference of perceived terms to the least term of that difference brings us to a complementary contrariety to the convictions we both share, and so alter all terms antecedent to that complement we are to it. In this way we recognize the loss of the continuity in our convictions we find ourselves contrary to in a kind of community in contrariety against that conviction, and yet distinguish each other as much contrary to each other as contrary to that conviction lost to us, and emancipated us from, as the moment of our being reduced that loss to its lest term. It's a sort of quantum moment of ideas. But reduced loss to its least term we not only suffer the loss as the healing term of conviction, or emancipating us from conviction, but in being complement to each other and yet contrary to each other in that therapy of emancipation, we perceive the quality of reasoning we each bring to the drama of it that we would never have a chance of perceiving if we were simply meant to agree. That perception is impossible if the universe is divinely or mathematically/geometrically ordered. And, if the dialectic is permitted to recur, there can be no limit to our recognizing each other as complete and distinct individuals, yet partners at every turn and return in that intimation of the worth of that therapeutic moment. That is, intimated that participation in the defeat of conviction, there can be no limit to our knowing each other subterranean to what at any duration reason is between conviction and its loss, and so intimated who we really are completely. The completest term time is that growing moment that dialectic is. Time is the intimation of the moment of its incalculable worth. And we are its most articulate term. But if god or number intrude, that intimation dies, and all is loss.

The reason to drop the quantifier is because it instills false belief. Also, it seems to disprove what is true. Isn't anything 'beyondly' immortal? Is man 'beyondly'? The law of the excluded middle is a basis for proof? Because you say so? Do you ever wonder why Plato spends so much effort on the subject of virtue? A careful reading shows it is because virtue is not to be subsumed into some quantifier. Doesn't A is B, in the sense you define it, mean A counts of B? If so, which does it say more about? B of A or A of B? If neither, which possesses which? And isn't possession the meaning of the count? And if neither really possesses the other, how do we know either but as the character in which each is not that possession? The character of its not being what the other is is what virtue is. That is, the act of being is dispossession. The category does not possess the predicate, it supplies a term for the differentiation of each through the dispossession of other from it. The trait is not what it counts, and the count is not what it is. You can convince yourself that the subject is fixed by predication, put in a bin where it will keep even when you go off elsewhere. But only by its departure do we come to question what the attribution of possession by the predicate really means. As I said early in this discussion, If the predicate is a member of its own category we can learn nothing of it from its other members, and if it is not, we can learn nothing of its members from it. Hence, the middle term (negation) cannot be excluded save by resorting to its count. You can count the cogs into the bin, but in doing we cannot know which one is which. Or we can identify each one, but then we cannot count them, because each one is only itself alone. You cannot get from identity to possession with the same sense of what number is. A cardinal number can operate as an identifier, but not a count. An ordinal number can operate as a counter, but not an identifier. If you cannot determine which one is which you cannot know what it is you've counted, if you know how many is counted, you cannot know what it is you've counted. Identity is differentiation of what would be counted the same. The count is the sameness of what would be counted differentiated. Analogy, the fundamental emergence of terms, is a comparison of similar differences. But difference can subsume sameness or possession only by its dispossession. I know it's a strain on the old noggin, but it's a kind of strain that teaches and emancipates.

Reckonil? Sounds like some sci-fi smart pill. I get it, though. You do understand, though, there is no such thing a a randomness generator? Presumably, what passes for one gives fodder to the pre-programed system for finding and assessing patterns. It's really not the gem you seem to suppose. We tried that for explaining evolution, but if the creature does not put the mutation to use, and mutate itself, as it were (something AI will never achieve), nothing can come of random changes that is not part of it's programming. I have a thesis about that, males and females of almost all species (including human) are equally inclined to cheat on their mates. But there is a difference. The male is trying to produce a separate species of his own genetics. The female is trying to diversify the gene-pool. Lamarck shows us how differentiation comes about without randomness, but in response to biological needs. In other words, to a great extent (much greater than geneticist would have us believe) life creates, designs, and programs itself.

Symbolic notation is used by logicians because they know it isn't really true. It's just about power. My question to them is, if you can't know which is which and yet count, and you can't count and yet know which is which, how many is 'one'?

If you've engaged in romance, or any of the other human activities I referred to, then you know full well that not sharing terms is pretty much the whole game. Being in sync is either gratitude for difference, or it is just loss.

[Remark: If you formally

reply

to my posts or

quote

me, I get notified of your answers.]

Quoting Gary M Washburn

All the signs of rationalism as I understand it. Certainly not Platonic.

Are you saying that Damascius (Damaskios) was a rationalist?

Anyway, Damascius’ thought is truly something marvellous. But I’d say that he was something of a mystic – nay, he went far beyond the wildest dreams of most mystics. What got me hooked was his discovery that “the Unsayable is beyond beyondliness”. I found this idea so spellbinding and also very near my own thought and gastiness (spirituality); after all, I had myself googled “transcending transcendence” or some very similar term a few years before.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

The reason to drop the quantifier is because it instills false belief. Also, it seems to disprove what is true.

In what way does it supposedly do those things? Hasn’t it entangled the mess of
Quoting Gary M Washburn

George is like Sam.
Sam is vain.
Therefore, George is vain?????

and given us a wonderful way of exploring the world of abstract things?

In reality (sooth), quantifiers allow us to to conveniently talk about properties. For instance, the sentence “There are even numbers (rimetales)” means that the property of evenness has instantiatedness.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

Isn't anything 'beyondly' immortal? Is man 'beyondly'?

I’d say ‘Yes’ to the first one if the beyondliness involved isn’t absolute: having beyondliness implies having deathlessness (though something absolutely beyondly is beyond both mortality and deathlessness, so predicating either of it doesn’t even make sense). I’d also say ‘yes’ to the second one in the sense that the soul, in particular the soul of Man, has deathlessness. (The theory most plausible to be is that Man is simply the result of a soul “living in” a body of a particular kind. Other living beings, including not-human animals, plants, and microbes, have souls, too, and like the souls of humans, their souls can only unfold as many mindly powers as are made possible by the informational abilities of their respective bodies. I also find soul-wandering within and between species totally plausible.) And yes, the soul is beyondly.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

The law of the excluded middle is a basis for proof? Because you say so?

Because my intuition tells me so. Mark, by the way, that the highest shape of knowledge, hygely (noetic) knowledge, is an underkind of intuitive knowledge, though I don’t claim to (yet) have intuitive knowledge of that flawless kind that LEM is true, of course. Think about it yourself: take any proposition A, and ask yourself whether it’s possible than neither A nor its negation NOT(A) is the case. If you disbelieve in LEM, can you give me an example of an instance where it fails – a proposition A for which we have NOT(A OR NOT(A))?

Quoting Gary M Washburn

Doesn't A is B, in the sense you define it, mean A counts of B?

I think not; rather, I think that the deedword “to be” has several meanings:

• What-being, which links each thing to its wist (essence).
• So-being, th.i. (that is) having properties or other broadthings (universals), as in the sentence “The Sun is a star”, which means the same as “The Sun has starhood” and predicates starhood of the Sun; these two sentences mean the proposition that the Sun has starhood. I think that you sometimes mean this with the verb ‘to be’. Is that right?
• (This meaning is closely related to the one before but very much distinct from it:) Broadthingly implication, as in “All Men are mammals”, which predicates the two-slotted (is-an-underkind-of)-relation of Manhood and Mammalhood. Quantifiers can be used to link broadthingly implication to broadthing-having like so: For all broadthings B, E, the universal B bears the broadthingly implication relation to E if and only if for every x, the proposition that x has B lets follow the proposition that x has E. I guess that it is this meaning of ‘to be’ that you mainly have in mind, am I right? If so, how is it related to counting?
• Existence, as in “The number 5 is”, which predicates existence of the number 5.
• Existential quantification, which is endless disjuction (OR) in a way, as in “There is an odd number”; this sentence basically means the same as “0 has oddness, or 1 has oddness, or 2 has oddness, or 3 has oddness, or”, which in turn basically means that the property of oddness has the property of instantiatedness.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

You can convince yourself that the subject is fixed by predication, put in a bin where it will keep even when you go off elsewhere.

Here, witcrafty (logical) analysis can help us yet again. It shows us that problems only arise when predicates are treated as if they had fewer slots than they already have. For instance, being alive is a two-slotted relationship, and the corresponding predicate “being alive” a two-slotted predicate. Hence, sentences of the shape “A is alive”, with ‘A’ the name of a thing, are truncated and thus meaningless. Only sentences of the shape “A is alive at t” make sense, where ‘t’ is the name of a time-point.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

Reckonil?

“Reckonil” is the right English word for “computer”. “To reckon” means the same as “to calculate”, and the suffix “-il” is often used to make tool-names.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

You do understand, though, there is no such thing a a randomness generator? Presumably, what passes for one gives fodder to the pre-programed system for finding and assessing patterns.

With what right do you assume that there are no random number generators? You have rightly warned against making dogmatic assumptions, but here you yourself are making one, aren’t you (and a likely false one, too, see next paragraph)?

Of course I’m aware of pseudo-random number generators (PRNGs), but these are not what I mean. I mean true random number generators (TRNGs), which are based on stuff like thermal or quantum fluctuations. Now whether the Universe is fundamentally chanceful or deterministic is an important matter, but if it is the latter, there is no such thing as free will. Since there seems to be free will, there seems to be true randomness, too, so it should be possible to build a TRNG, shouldn’t it?

Quoting Gary M Washburn

something AI will never achieve

Yet another unjustified and likely false dogmatic claim. What’s the fundamental difference between a human brain and a reckonil? Why shouldn’t a soul be able to live in a reckonil just as in a human brain?

Quoting Gary M Washburn

We tried that for explaining evolution,

... and have met with great success.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

but if the creature does not put the mutation to use,

... which it does, for the mutation is expressed in the phenotype and thus allows natural selection to work on it.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

nothing can come of random changes that is not part of it's programming.

Well, the things that allow our souls to process information in, live in, and interact with this world and in particular with each other through computers – our bodies, including our brains – have come about by the creative, information-making might of random variation. Where does the underlying idea of Darwinian evolution supposedly not work?

I think that the above claim of yours is untrue. Whether a feature is made by randomness or by design doesn’t change that feature. Whether the human eye was designed or has evolved, it will do exactly the same thing.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

I have a thesis about that

Can you give proof of your thesis, and has it been peer-reviewed by the scientific community? If yes, what is the result?

Quoting Gary M Washburn

Lamarck shows us how differentiation comes about without randomness, but in response to biological needs. In other words, to a great extent (much greater than geneticist would have us believe) life creates, designs, and programs itself.

Lamarckism has long been shown to be very likely wrong. Modern evolutionary theory based on genetics and Darwinian evolution works pretty well and does not appeal to non-existent effects. Also, if there were no randomness, how could life create anything, including itself? Randomness is the well of new information. Without it, all info would be there from the start, and nothing would be truly made, created, brought into being.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

Symbolic notation is used by logicians because they know it isn't really true. It's just about power.

I disagree. While witcraft (logic) is limited in the end, it is a powerful tool for finding about the world of abstract things and the world of concrete stuff. How is witcrafty symbolic notation supposedly wrong?

Moreover, the very speech (language) that you use to say and write your philosophy is based on abstract things like numbers (rimetales) and logic, as is reason itself. For instance, you rely on the Law of Identity to be sure that if you are right, you’re right. Without said law, you could be right without being right, making your whole philosophy crumble.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

My question to them is, if you can't know which is which and yet count, and you can't count and yet know which is which, how many is 'one'?

As I asked above, what has logic to do with counting?

Let’s not lose sight of the topic of this thread, namely Platonism and platonism.

Let’s first talk about Platonism, the philosophy of Plato. This philosophy has three parts:
1. the written Theory of Shapes (Forms), which is well-known,

2. the unwritten, spoken Theory of Principles (the One and the Indefinite Dyad), which was rediscovered by Conrad Gaiser and Hans Joachim Krämer and reconstructed by them and others,

3. and the neither written nor spoken, and indeed neither writable nor speakable, unsayable religious experience of the god Apollo as eche andwardness (eternal presence). This was found out by Christina Schefer. According to her, Plato’s Good-One-Fair(Beautiful) is an image of Apollo. For example, see page 135 of her book Platons unsagbare Erfahrung “Plato’s Unsayable Experience”:

With that, however, the sense of the exclamation at the height of the Republic is inverted from the end: It is not the One which is invoked with the vocative “Apollo”, but rather Apollo himself as living doing god. He is no metaphor for the One; rather, the One has to be understood as god image of Apollo.

(My translation from German (Theech) into English)

Christina Schefer says that a religious and unsayable experience of Apollo as eche andwardness lies at the heart of Plato’s thought, behind both his Theory of Forms and his unwritten Theory of Principles (see e.g. pages 136, 221, 222 and 225 of her aforementioned book). Because andwardness is only one aspect of time, Apollo is only a limited manifestation of the Holy, a pure mysterium fascinans (fascinating/spellbinding and wonderful roun (mystery)) rather than a full-fledged mysterium tremendum et fascinans (fear-instilling and awe-inspiring as well as spellbinding and wonderful roun) (see e.g. pages 220 to 222 of her aforementioned book). She also writes on page 222 of this book:

But that means in the end: Platonic philosophy is religion (even if a special, shortened shape of religion), and indeed not philosophical religion in Hegel’s sense (philosophy is religion and religion is philosophy), but rather living religion, made up of cult and myth. It shows up, as E. Fink writes, “in the shape of a new roun”, which we call the roun of Apollo.

(My translation from Theech into English)

Let’s now talk about platonism. The platonist is the one who is aware of the existence of abstract things. More so – and more weightily – he (used gender-neutrally) is aware of the abstract things themselves. The philosophy of platonism is not foremost about belief or knowledge-that (German: Wissen), but rather awareness and knowledge-of (German: Kenntnis, Kennen). The platonist’s knowledge that abstract things exist and are soothfast (real) is drawn from his knowledge of the abstract things themselves, which includes abstractness itself. When discussing with the not-platonist, he not so much argues for a certain position as he tries to help the not-platonist become aware of the abstract entities. The platonist primarily doesn’t seek to prove to the non-platonist that abstract entities exist; rather, he tries to show him the abstract things. When he brooks (uses) witcraft to prove that abstract entities exist, he means what he does, but he hopes that this will go one step further and help the non-platonist “see” the abstract things themselves, from which that which was witcraftily proven before (namely the existence of abstract entities) can then be directly drawn. When the platonist argues from the meanings of abstract words, from different particulars sharing features, or from different people being able to think about the same concepts, he hopes that these arguments will prompt the not-platonist to look in the right direction with his mind’s eye and so see the abstract entities, so to speak.

Platonish knowledgelore is to a big extent about Kenntnis, and only then about Wissen.

Being a platonist, I find the world of the abstract entities wonderful, shapely, colorful, and alive, like a rich fruit-salad. I categorically don’t follow others, so I’m not a Platonist (a follower of Plato). Still, there are weighty ways in which my (still rather sketchy) thought is similar to Platonism that go well beyond the minimum requirements for platonism. For instance, it broadly forewyrds (agrees) with the threefold-partition of Platonism:
1. It has a (still sketchy) theory of abstract things, including Shapes (Forms, Ideas) and minds, and information to describe the realm of being. Here, witcraft is a crucial tool.

2. It has a (still very sketchy) theory of orprinciples, which seeks to swuttle (explain) the realm of being, and also not-being, in terms of orprinciples beyond being and not-being. Here, one goal is to derive the laws of logic from the orprinciples.

3. It has an unsayable experience.

However, there are also weighty differences. For instance, on the first level, my philosophy is even more abstract than Plato’s in at least some ways. After all, I hold that the underlying substances of that which is are information and abstract things, and that there is no such thing as matter (though there is Matterhood Itself, which is needed for the very state-of-affairs that there is no matter). My sketch of an orprinciple-theory also differs from Plato’s on some key points. And I don’t worship Apollo, of course. Furthermore, I love the absolute beyondness – nay, the above-absolute above-beyondness – nay ... I’ll best stop, for it’s useless talking (or even not talking!) anyway, which Damaskios is into.

Now that I’ve told you something about my position, may I ask you what school of philosophy you belong to, or how I am to broadly categorize your thinking?

Importanly and of interest to this thread, what is your take on platonism?

You seem to be interested in time, so it might also interest you that I have developed a new (if not-yet-finished) theory of time in which witcraft plays a key role and has served me very well.

Eking (Addition/Amendment): (the ekings below are in bold typeface)

• “Reckonil” (cf. Theech "Rechner") is the right English word for “computer”. “To reckon” means the same as "to compute"/“to calculate” (cf. Theech "zu rechnen"), and the suffix “-il” is often used to make tool-names.
• Being a platonist, I find the world of the abstract entities wonderful, shapely, colorful, and alive, like a rich fruit-salad; like a lush green rainforest under a partly covered but otherwise clear blue sky with high thunderclouds in it, with paradise birds of all kinds and colors living and flying around, with fresh air filled with beautiful bird-song, and with mammals, reptiles, bugs, and a plethora or other living things thriving in it; like a beautifully decorated (artificial*, of course) Christmas tree; like a crystal-clear night-sky; like a crystal berg (mountain); like oh so many other fair things.

*It's barbaric to kill living trees for the sake of celebration, for they have souls as much as we do. Of course, we can't be sure of that, but neither can I be sure that you have a soul, nor you that I have one – that is, if you really do have one in the first place with which to wonder whether I have one.

Socrates doesn't say he knows nothing, he says he knows that he knows nothing. He is not unsure. Does being unsure have voice? Or does only knowing have voice? The voice of knowing is proving its terms not in our possession. The voice of being resolutely unsure is demanding those terms are in our possession. That distinguishes philosophy from faith.

Quoting Tristan L

As I asked above, what has logic to do with counting?

If you cannot be hermetically certain which one is which, assertion or negation, you cannot begin to count what constitutes the category either would otherwise define. And you cannot know which is which in any hermetic sense until you complete the count. Logic cannot outstrip its quantifier (save by lying to itself, which it does quite regularly and boldfaced). How many is one? There is no one until the enumeration is complete, and there is no beginning of the enumeration until we already know how many one is.

Truth is not an aspiration, however inspiring that aspiration is to you!

Quoting Gary M Washburn

Socrates doesn't say he knows nothing, he says he knows that he knows nothing. He is not unsure.

Well, if he knows that he knows nothing, then on one hand, what he knows must be true – otherwise he couldn’t know (wissen) it –, so he indeed knows nothing, but on the other hand, he knows at least something, namely that he knows nothing. That’s a contradiction. However, I’m (likely :wink:) so careful as to say only that it almost certainly is a contradiction.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

what constitutes the category

The category, the kind, isn’t constituted by its members or instances. It is what it is regardless of its members. For example, if all synapsids had died out (which they thankfully didn’t) in the Great Dying, the kind of Synapsidhood would still be what it is. Likewise, the kind of Mammalhood would still be what it is. It would have no concrete instances, but its wist (essence) would be the same. And it would still be related to Synapsidhood by the underkind-relationship.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

Logic cannot outstrip its quantifier (save by lying to itself, which it does quite regularly and boldfaced).

Over and over again, you make dogmatic claims like this one and many others without giving any justification (begrounding) or evidence whatsoever. It’s no wonder, though, that you haven’t given a right justification for your baseless accusing logic of lying, for a false claim cannot be rightly begrounded, and your claim is very, very likely false.

As I see it, witcraft (logic) works perfectly and does the exact opposite of lying. It it what uncovers lies, as well as fallacies arising from imprecise, incomprehensible, swollen language without soothfast substance or meaning.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that Classical Logic is right. As a matter of fact, I find that it has problems, e.g. due to the Principle of Bivalence (PB), which states that each proposition is supposedly either true or false. This is just the claim that for each proposition, either it or its negation has the upper hand. I see no reason for accepting this baseless claim, which is why I’ve replaced the Principle of Bivalence with the weaker Principle of Trivalence.

What is it that you find supposedly amiss with logic? Where has witcraft ever gone wrong if applied the right way and as long as no pseudo-logical claims like PB are taken for witcrafty laws?



You have rightly warned against dogmatism, but you have so far failed to live up to the high-minded goal of getting rid of dogmas even though I have asked you for justifications of your claims before. On the contrary, you have made quite a few dogmatic claims but not begrounded them in the least. Now the dogmatic witcrafta (logician) is certainly being unphilosophical because he (used gender-neutrally) doesn’t ask for what lies behind the laws of logic, but your dogmatism is no better than his. Indeed, it is worse, for while his claims are dogmatic, they are at least very probably true, while your claims seem to be dogmatic and false.

Please show me that you aren’t a dogmatist after all by either giving justifications for your philosophical claims and your fringe theories on evolution and mating or rowing back from them.

Also, please don’t forget the topic of this thread: Platonism and platonism. What do you think of the former, taking into account the Unwritten Theory of Principles and the unsayable religious experience? And what do you think of the latter?

Regarding the latter (platonism), I find it surprising that you seem – please correct me if I’m wrong – to take as given assumptions for which you have nothing but indirect evidence based on your senses, such as the assumption that there are other minds beside your own (for which only thoughtcasters can have direct evidence, I think), while you also seem – again, please correct me if I’m wrong – to not be aware of the direct evidence your “mind’s eye” gives you of the abstract entities.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

Truth is not an aspiration, however inspiring that aspiration is to you!

Of course truth isn’t an aspiration, but we can certainly strive for it. Likewise, a ball is not a throwing, but one can certainly throw it.

Speaking English, eking is just getting by. This discussion is eking.

Making stuff up and calling it Platonic doesn't make it so. Nowhere does Plato raise anything to be taken as axiomatic. All must be examined and reexamined. Never ever does faith come into it, save perhaps, and only perhaps, his cock for Asclepius. And, no, not that cock. He may here and there appear to promote geometric patterns, but this is hardly what he means by forms, which Socrates repudiates even as he uses them on the way elsewhere. The central fact is the relation between personal character, responsiveness to cross-questioning, and asserted opinions. There is no opinion I have expressed I am not prepared to justify with Plato's own work. Why should I need any other?

Well,

Quoting Tristan L

Well, if he knows that he knows nothing, then on one hand, what he knows must be true – otherwise he couldn’t know (wissen) it –, so he indeed knows nothing, but on the other hand, he knows at least something, namely that he knows nothing. That’s a contradiction. However, I’m (likely :wink:) so careful as to say only that it almost certainly is a contradiction.

I don't see the point in refuting all this. It just appeared as I posted the above.

My answer to the quoted passage here is that you're lack of familiarity with Plato is quite shocking, considering the extensiveness and pretense to authority of your postulations.

Quoting Tristan L

Over and over again, you make dogmatic claims like this one and many others without giving any justification (begrounding) or evidence whatsoever. It’s no wonder, though, that you haven’t given a right justification for your baseless accusing logic of lying, for a false claim cannot be rightly begrounded, and your claim is very, very likely false.

If my claim is dogmatic, why is it the most authoritative examples of the "law" of contradiction base their self-evidence on their quantifiers? As in "All A is B, some A is not B? The verb Is is a quantifier wherever it assigns hermetic membership. Have you been reading Heidegger? You couldn't pick a worse source for understanding Plato! Unless it is Aristotle! But, then, Heidegger gets his take on Plato from Aristotle.

Quoting Tristan L

As I see it, witcraft (logic) works perfectly and does the exact opposite of lying. It it what uncovers lies, as well as fallacies arising from imprecise, incomprehensible, swollen language without soothfast substance or meaning.

"As I see it" is not an argument. As I see it, you don't like to speak English. In logic 101 you might be expected to swallow the lesson uncritically. But you're gonna have to do better if you want expect to get past the first year. You don't even know what terms like "conjunction" and "disjunction" mean if you uncritically assume a category comprehensive hermetic and coherent between which one it is and its supposed membership, or how many it is. Is Apollo a category? Plato does a nice comparison between Achilles and Odysseus, in Lesser Hippias. Achilles cannot satisfy his ambition to define the category (valor or courage) because he is too abstract (outside it) to be a member of it. Odysseus cannot satisfy his ambition to be most completely of the category (cleverness and cammaraderie) because he was too central to it to have any membership to share it with. Between the extreme and the typical he sums up the enigma of category. You can't have an extrinsic definition and count its membership and you can't have a clear discernment of each member and still count them of an extrinsic defining principle. 1+1 doesn't equal 2 if 1 and 1 each is distinct, and you can't add 1+1 to get 2 if they are not distinct. Well, I know you disallow careful reasoning, but what I do find depressingly consistent is that you dismiss Plato wherever his own work conflicts with your notion of Platonism, and pay no heed to him at all otherwise.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

Speaking English, eking is just getting by. This discussion is eking.

Firstly, check out this: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eke#Etymology_1 to brush up your English.

Secondly, it’s no wonder that this talk is just getting by if one party has little to eke to it other than a tangle of lengthy language made up of sentences with neither head nor tail and which overflow with wild jumbledness as much as they are in need of meaning, constituting a spaghetti-like mess seasoned with baseless fringe theories as spices.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

All must be examined and reexamined.

Narrowkirily (Exactly), something that you seemingly have yet to understand and internalize.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

your notion of Platonism, and pay no heed to him at all otherwise.

You do know the difference between lowercase bookstaves and uppercase ones, don’t you? Well, if so, let me tell you once more that I’m a platonist and not a Platonist. I have my own thought, and Plato is just a stepping stone for me in developing that thought – a very big one, mind you, but still just a stepping stone. I’m not a historian of philosophy, and I’m not deeply interested in knowing what exactly the historical Plato believed. But of couse, knowing what he thought can greatly help me get closer to truth, oneness, beyondliness, and the other things that I like. I got interested in Plato because of the abstractness and transcendence of his thought, not the other way round.

However, it is you who apparently dismiss Plato’s more and his most important aspects. You seem to focus on his dialogues, when these are but of lesser weightiness. Far weightier are his Unwitten Doctrines, and weightiest of all is his unsayable religious experience of the god Apollo as a living god before and beyond philosophy. I quote from page 214 of Christina Schefer’s book Platons unsagbare Erfahrung:

That means: Plato, too [just as the Pythagoreans], wants to be understood from the epiphany of Apollo. Not only Pythagorean doctrine, but also Platonic ontology neededly presupposes the religious revelation of Apollo. This unsayable experience always already lies at the ground of all thinking and even all beonde [that which is; ‘beon’ means the “deed/state” of being]: it is the true ground of the opposite principles and their union, the last and most orspringly well from which the dialectical method springs and from which it unfolds. Without the experience of Apollo, there would be no philosophy at all for Plato. Without the epiphany of Apollo, there would be – nothing.

(My translation from Theech into English)

Quoting Gary M Washburn

Is Apollo a category?

No, but rather a living god not capable of being rationalized, just as Thor, Osiris, Isis, Utu, Ares and the others are orspringlily (originally) living gods, manifestations of the Holy, and were seen as such before being rationalized by wisdomlovas (philosophers) and godleras (theologians).

Quoting Gary M Washburn

Never ever does faith come into it

A religious experience need not have anything to do with faith. It is related to Kennen, whereas faith is related to Wissen and belief.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

1+1 doesn't equal 2 if 1 and 1 each is distinct, and you can't add 1+1 to get 2 if they are not distinct.

You’re thinking much too concretely. The entity meant by ‘+’, “addition”, “ateke”, and “toyeking” is a function which sends every ordered pair (x, y) of numbers x, y to some number z. For every number x with name ‘x’ and every number y with name ‘y’, we brook (use) “x+y” to mean the number z to which + sends (x, y). The sense of the sentence “1+1=2” (I have a much narrowkirier analysis of this matter, but that’s not the topic of this thread) basically is the proposition that ateke sends the ordered pair (1, 1) to the number 2.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

As I see it, you don't like to speak English.

:lol:, considering that I truly love the English speech.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

"As I see it" is not an argument.

Firstly: At least I make aware that this is my (almost certainly true) belief, whereas you have not the grace to do even that, but simply dogmatically preach a long list of claims.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

In logic 101 you might be expected to swallow the lesson uncritically.

You seem to have personal problems with people that do so and then uncritically assume that I do the same, although I believe that I have made it evidently and blatantly clear that this is not the case. You might just want to watch out becoming one of them, or (equally bad) someone who takes his own thoughts too seriously and swallows the whole squirt that he himself spurts out vertically. Such people often ludicrously label everyone a dogmatist who doesn’t uncritically swallow what they preach. Are such people doing philosophy or, well, preaching?

Quoting Gary M Washburn

There is no opinion I have expressed I am not prepared to justify with Plato's own work.

Okay, then please do so!

Quoting Gary M Washburn

Why should I need any other?

As I’ve said, I’m neither a Platonist nor a historian of philosophy. If you or Plato make some claim (which Plato seldom does himself in his written works), you’ll both have to give me reasons to believe you. Neither you nor Plato is a priest nor I a member of a congregation taking in whatever the priest says. However, it’s no wonder that you haven’t been able to justify your claims if they are false.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

I don't see the point in refuting all this.

For this, the Dogmatists’ Union might sue you for copyright infringement :wink:. Be careful and have a lawyer ready!

Quoting Gary M Washburn

It just appeared as I posted the above.

Well, I sent it about three to four hours before your last comment and about two hours before your next-to-last one.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

My answer to the quoted passage here is that you're lack of familiarity with Plato is quite shocking, considering the extensiveness and pretense to authority of your postulations.

In sooth, it is your ignorance of main pillars of Platonic thought that’s quite shocking. Had you even heard of Plato’s Theory of Principles and his unsayable experience of Apollo before I told you about them? To really get to the heart of Plato, a stepping-stone would be to read Christina Schefers aforementioned book. You can find an appetizer here. But of course, that book can only help you so far in kindling the unsayabe experience in your soul. The feat of getting this experience you have to make yourself; reading, writing, talking, and listening can only help you on your way.

Moreover, I repeat that I’m not deeply interested in interpreting Plato. I seek truth, not the beliefs of Plato. I have given very good grounds for my positions as far as I can tell, and I’m still waiting for your first good begrounding. I appeal to basic definitions and intuition. You, on the other hand, keep on churning out assertions which are just that: assertions.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

If my claim is dogmatic, why is it the most authoritative examples of the "law" of contradiction base their self-evidence on their quantifiers? As in "All A is B, some A is not B?

What has the one to do with the other? How does logic supposedly lie? You still owe me an answer to that question.

LNC and LEM apply to all propositions, not just ones involving quantification (which are propositions predicating properties like universalness and instantiatedness of properties). In fact, they’re not only intuitively clear, but follow directly from the definition of negation: For any proposition A, the “domain” of NOT(A) is defined to be everything that is outside the “domain” of A, so to speak. If there were a middle between A and NOT(A), NOT(A) wouldn’t include everything outside the domain of A and so wouldn’t be the negation of A after all because its not including the middle would go against the very definition of negation. Thus, LEM must hold true. Likewise, if both A and NOT(A) were true for some proposition A, there’d be overlap between the domains of A and NOT(A), so to speak, again violating the very definition of negation. And for every property E, the negation of (for all x, x has E) is indeed (there is an x which doesn’t have E). Note, however, that the latter proposition doesn’t mean that any one fixed x doesn’t have E, even if the proposition (there is an x which doesn’t have E) is true. That’s so because truth doesn’t necessarily distribute over disjunction or existential quantification: It’s true now that there is a country that will win the men’s soccer world championship in 2102, but there isn’t any country for which it is true now that it’ll win the 2102 Wold Cup.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

The verb Is is a quantifier wherever it assigns hermetic membership.

No, the verb “to be” has the meanings given above by me, and property-having, which it one of the things it means, isn’t always “hermetic”. For instance, it’s already true now that for every country C, if C wins the 2102 World Cup, then C takes home the trophy in 2102, but even so, there isn’t any country which now truly has the property of winning the 2102 World Cup, and there also isn’t any country which now truly has the property of taking home the trophy in 2102.



Let me now play the devil’s advocate and assume LNC failed.

I: Okay, everything you say is true. And yet, everything that you say is complete humbug.

You: How so?

I: Well, LNC fails, and so there’s nothing odd about your theory being true and false at the same time.

Must everything be black or white with you? I never said logic is a complete failure, only that it assumes a hermeticity not supported by its arguments. Newtonion mechanics doesn't account for relativity. It doesn't even quite cover conventional motions. The infinitesimal is dogmatically excluded. But what if the infinitesimal is the value meant to be determined? Similarly in logic, the assumption we share terms could never be valid if terms were universal, because meaning is intimacy. There is no universal teacher, though somehow I suspect you will contradict that. That's you prerogative, but it means we can never really speak at all. If only you understood your issue you would see what a tragedy that is for you. Differences in the terms we do share may seem infinitesimal and therefore negligible, but in fact, as Plato makes plain (if you read him) if that infinitesimal divergence between us is the moment we are recognized our opinion is untruth all terms alter of that moment so as to begin a more completely shared set of terms. That process of altering all terms infinitesimally cannot be limited by any prior conviction about our terms, and so must ultimately bring us into a more complete intimacy in our terms. And that intimacy is real only insofar as we mean to set each other free of our convictions. And that freedom entails a commitment to be dispossessed those term we do share. And that dispossession is experienced as "Platonism" in the sense you do go on about. And that is why those of us who actually read Plato describe Platonism as inverted Plato. BTW, my instructor studied with John Wilde and Raphael Demos, since you do like to cite any source other than the one in question.

Borrowed WiFi is not what it's cracked up to be! The sun is on my screen!

Quoting Gary M Washburn

Must everything be black or white with you?

No, not at all, but everything must be either black or not black, and either white or not white.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

The infinitesimal is dogmatically excluded.

No, not really. Precise (Narrowkiry) mathematical theories about infinitesimals have been around for some time now. For instance, we have the hyperreal numbers, who reckon infinitesimals in their ranks. And LEM doesn’t dogmatically exclude infinitesimals: a hyperreal number is either 0 or not 0, and infinitesimals are the latter. They are included in the Second: Not-Zero.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

terms were universal

What exactly do you mean by that? That those terms mean universals (broadthings)? Or that they are common to everyone with exactly the same meaning? Or something else? In the following, I’ll assume the second option, and please correct me if I’m wrong.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

Similarly in logic, the assumption we share terms could never be valid if terms were universal, because meaning is intimacy. There is no universal teacher, though somehow I suspect you will contradict that.

How could I, who is too careful to even rule out solipsism, assume that we share terms with exactly the same meaning?

Quoting Gary M Washburn

Differences in the terms we do share may seem infinitesimal and therefore negligible

Certainly not! If the differences are more than nothing, even if only infinetisimal, they are still something.

I don’t assume that we brook (use) terms in exactly the same meaning. In fact, I don’t assume anything beyond that I brook certain terms with a certain, perhaps vague meaning right now. I leave it open whether there are other minds that also use terms, and even if they do, I have no reason to believe that they brook them with the same meaning as I do. Since I’m likely not a thoughtcasta, the only information that I have about other minds comes from my sensory experiences. To swuttle (explain) these, I hypothesize that I have a body, that I interact with that body, that my sensory perceptions are brought about by sensory organs sending info to my brain which is then read by me myself, that such and such sensory inputs are caused by such and such bodies doing so and so because the are ensouled, and so on, and so forth. From my sensory data, I derive the hypothesis that when you say “five”, you mean the number 5 by it. But of course, I probably can’t look directly into your mind, so I don’t know what exactly you mean by the word “five”. Is is the Sun? Likely not, for it doesn’t fit my sensory data well. But is it the cardinal 5? Or the ordinal five? Is is the Ideal Number 5 which lies behind both the cardinal and the ordinal and springs forth from the orprinciples? Since I’ve at least almost never directly sent info to or received it from another mind (and no, even a direct brain-to-brain interface would be no true thoughtcasting), I hypothesize that there are no thoughtcasters in the world I live in. In that case, all info exchanged by minds can only be sent through a physical channel. Hence, I expect there to always be some differences in the ways terms are brooked, not least because a physical channel only allows for finitely many exchanges in a finite time (thought this isn’t certain, for quantum entanglement might allow eyeblinkly talking after all if there is quantum not-equilibrium, see e.g. Antony Valentini’s version of pilot-wave theory).

Therefore, I think that witcraft is actually a private matter. I just assume that our terms are close enough for us to help each other do logic. But doing the witcraft remains a private deed.

Let’s take – segue – the Law of the Excluded Middle as an example. What I mean with “LEM” only I and thoughtcastas can truly know. Unless you’re a telepath (thoughtcaster), you can only guess what I have in mind when saying “LEM”. I had assumed that what you mean by it almost the same as what I mean by it, but I might have been wrong, strengthening my case for potential solipsism and the like. For instance, the Wikipedia article on LEM claims that LEM supposedly states that each proposition is either true or false. Now that’s very much not what I have in mind by “LEM”. What I mean by “LEM” is the law that for each proposition, its disjunction with its negation must be true. That doesn’t mean that either the proposition or its negation is true. For instance, it’s true today that it will rain tomorrow or it won’t tomorrow, but it’s neither true today that it’ll rain tomorrow, nor is it true today that it won’t rain tomorrow (assuming that the weather isn’t foredetermined, which I’ll suppose here for argument’s sake). As I said earlier, I see no reason to believe that truth distributes over disjunction. From the way you write, I now infer that you may perhaps mean something different by “LEM” than I do, namley a part of PB (which I don’t accept). If you have read through what I’ve written, you might have realized this. Have you actually read through what I’ve written?

Quoting Gary M Washburn

BTW, my instructor studied with John Wilde and Raphael Demos, since you do like to cite any source other than the one in question.

That’s all nice and well, but how exactly does it bear on the matter at hand? Regarding this last statement of yours as well as your statements

Quoting Gary M Washburn

as Plato makes plain (if you read him)

and

Quoting Gary M Washburn

And that is why those of us who actually read Plato describe Platonism as inverted Plato.

reading Plato isn’t enough at all. Plato put the jewels of his philosophy into his Theory of Principles, which he only taught mouthly in his Academy and on which we only have indirect transmission. We have to rely on that and the mere hints in the dialogues for reconstructing the Theory of Principles. The unsayable experiece is even more elusive, for it is fully beyond speech an can only be hinted at. The philosophers of the Tübingen Pradigm and Christina Schefer have already reconstructed the Theory of Principles and discovered the unsayable exprerience of the Holy, respectively. I don’t need to invent the wheel again and reconstruct the Theory or discover the Experience by myself. Those people have already done that for me. And in a way, they are far more authoritative on Plato that Plato’s dialogues are because they have been willing to write about things which Plato meant not to write down.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

If only you understood your issue you would see what a tragedy that is for you.

The real tragedy is that you seem to be still imprisoned in the Cave, unwilling to turn your gaze to the most real world of being – the abstract world.



I have given you many challenges and am still waiting for you to answer. In particular, I’d like to repeat three questions:

What do you think of abstract things?

What do you think of the Unwritten Doctrine?

What do you think of the unsayable experience Plato had?

Quoting Tristan L

No, not really. Precise (Narrowkiry) mathematical theories about infinitesimals have been around for some time now. For instance, we have the hyperreal numbers, who reckon infinitesimals in their ranks. And LEM doesn’t dogmatically exclude infinitesimals: a hyperreal number is either 0 or not 0, and infinitesimals are the latter. They are included in the Second: Not-Zero.

Please stop referencing extraneous sources. Table stakes please! But, if I must, please read 'The Analyst', by George Berkeley. As a mathematical term, the infinitesimal is contradictory. George will explain, and with the advantage it is not just my opinion.

Quoting Tristan L

mouthly

What? That's not even English! I think you mean 'by mouth'. But you can hardly use that as a reference. Do you really think sources from almost a thousand years later can be credible witnesses of what Plato taught 'mouthly'?

Enough quoting you. You don't pay attention anyway, not even to your own assertions.

I am really fed up with two thousand years of usurping meaning! A gurgling infant is closer to the dynamic source of meaning and signification than all this 'from on high' nonsense. This dogma is the basis for all cruelty in the world. The foundation of meaning, of all terms in all language (yes, even computer language!), is the intimation of our worth to each other personal dialectic is. This is Plato's prime message, one that gets lost to those who, like yourself, demand to be in possession of your terms. Meaning is willing dispossession, not willful expropriation. Colonization of the mind is the most violent and outrageous crime against philosophy.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

Please stop referencing extraneous sources. Table stakes please!

:confused:???

Quoting Gary M Washburn

But, if I must, please read 'The Analyst', by George Berkeley. As a mathematical term, the infinitesimal is contradictory. George will explain, and with the advantage it is not just my opinion.

Well, regardless of whose opinion it is, it is false, plain and simple. If you had kept up with mathematical developments in the last over-two-and-a-half yearhundreds, you would know that there is nothing contradictory about infinitesimals whatsoever. Let me give you a very simple example: Take any ordered field (F, +, *, <), such as the ordered field (IQ, +, *, <) of the rational rimetales (numbers) or the ordered field (IR, +, *, <) of the real numbers. Then the rational functions over the field (F, +, *), together with an addition +’ and a multiplication *’ naturally defined in terms of + and *, make up a field (F(x), +’, *’), called “the function field of (F, +, *)”. With the help of the ordering < on (F, +, *), you can define an ordering <’ on F(x), namely the alphabetical ordering of the polynomials over F and then the rational functions in general. Like that, you get an ordered field (F(x), +’, *’, <’) in which there are infinite numbers, th.i. numbers greater than all natural numbers, and infinitesimals, which are the reciprocals of infinite numbers. Any modern mathematician will tell you that, and it has been known for quite a while now. No contradiction lurks in there at all. Will you go so far as to contradict maths for the sake of dogmatic and false assertions?

Of course, it’s no wonder that you have problems with LNC if you see contradictions where there are none. You falsely think that some true propositions, such as the one saying that infinitesimals exist, are contradictory, and then, based on that false premise, argue from the truth of the supposedly contradictory propositions that LNC must fail.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

What? That's not even English!

Oh, really? You might want to check out "oral (mouthly)". The Theech (German) cognate and equivalent of “mouthly” is “mündlich”, and it can be used as an adjective and an adverb. How can you use “by mouth” as an adjective, as in “mouthly theory” (Theech: “mündliche Lehre”)? If you don’t accept “mouthly” as an English word, you admit that Theech is better than English in at least that respect (and many others, if you compare the two speeches). Sadly, the wonderful English tongue has been greatly messed up.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

Do you really think sources from almost a thousand years later can be credible witnesses of what Plato taught 'mouthly'?

Thanks for lecturing me! I didn’t know before that e.g. Aristotle lived almost a thousand years after Plato. But this point is not for me to talk about with you. Please discuss it with the scholars and philosophers of the Tübingen Paradigm.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

This is Plato's prime message, one that gets lost to those who, like yourself, demand to be in possession of your terms.

Your understanding of me apparently is very wanting. Isn’t it I who stresses the weightiness of unsayableness and a mystical experience above and beyond all language and back up my claim that Plato had already realized that by reliable sources, whereas for you, language seems to be the be-all-end-all?

So you arrogate to yourself the possession of what Plato really means when what is most central to him cannot be bound up in terms or words of any kind?

Quoting Gary M Washburn

You don't pay attention anyway, not even to your own assertions.

Quoting Gary M Washburn

all this 'from on high' nonsense

Quoting Gary M Washburn

This dogma is the basis for all cruelty in the world.

You seem to have a need for ascribing your own qualities to others based on the mistaken notion that by doing so, you somehow get said qualities away from yourself.

I hope you could prove the following wrong, but everything points to you having demonstrated your want of knowledge and your inability to answer my challenges nicely and vaunted your dogmatism effectively.

You're rubber, I suppose?

What gives anti-Plato folks like you the this idea he was a mystic??

Aristotle himself admits he didn't have a clue what Plato meant. Good source! No, I was thinking you had gotten a bit more obscure, judging by your other references. Mentioned before, I think, like Proclus, Origen, Boethius. Or maybe even later, like Augustine.

I don't even want to know what the hell 'Theech' is!

Not reading 'The Analyst', I see! I guess required reading of modern philosophy doesn't impress! In case you are bone ignorant, the modern era is from late Renaissance to the Enlightenment.

Reply to Tristan L

Did a Wiki for Theech, nothing.

Reply to Srap Tasmaner

Alice is thinking something
There is something [that Alice is thinking about]

A
1. Alice is thinking Bob, the elephant
2. There is Bob, the elephant [that Alice is thinking about] (excuse the grammatical error)

B
3. Alice is thinking elephants
4. There is elephants [that Alice is thinking about] (ignore grammatical mistake)

C
5. Alice is thinking square-circles
6. There is square-circles [that Alice is thinking about] (again, pardon the grammatical boo-boo)



Two levels of thought with subcategories:
D. The possible
7. Concrete: Bob, the elephant
8. Abstract: Elephants

E. The impossible
9. Contradictions: Square-circles

In case of A, assuming there's an elephant called Bob, clearly, if Alice is thinking of Bob, Bob is.

In case of B, Alice is thinking of an abstraction - elephants. The Platonic thing to do would be to say there's a form, elephantness in some world of forms, and that all elephants are tokens of it.

In case C, it being true that Alice is thinking about square-circles doesn't imply that square-circles are.

In what sense is it that square-circles can't be? They're said to be impossible - they're contradictions. Right? The low hanging fruit here is that in the world in which Bob, the elephant is, you won't come across a square-circle. That's that.

What about the world of elephants - the abstraction? Squrares are abstractions, circles are abstractions i.e. both squares and circles are equivalent in terms of their existential quality to elephants - all being abstractions. A square-circle however has no place either in the world of the concrete or in the world of abstractions.

Here's where it gets interesting, at least to me.

There seems to be a sentiment, an expectation if you will, that for something to be there must be a world to be in. Isn't this the crux of Platonic worlds? I ain't sure. You be the judge.

At this point, I'm going to reverse the logic but, hopefully, not to the point that my argument fails. Basically, the idea is that just as one expects there to be a world in which things can be, if one claims that something can't be then, my logic goes, there must be a world in which that thing can't be.

Square-circles can't be - they're impossible - but in what/which world? Not in the world of the concrete, the world of Bob, the elephant, for certain. They also can't be in the world of abstractions - the world of elephants, squares, and circles. But for square-circles not to be, there must be a world in which it can't be. In other words, the world of abstractions - Plato's world of forms - must exist. If not, that square-circles are impossible, i.e. they can't be, doesn't make sense. This world of forms is inhabited by abstractions; Alice thinking about something implies that that something exists...somewhere :lol:

Why are you so afraid of your own mind??? It's like you have to hold onto the rail for fear of falling off of reality. Plato's is a world of human character and dynamic convictions. That dynamic, how we change our opinions in response to critical questioning, not only reveals our character and competence, and our ability to recognize and appreciate the worth of that critical questioning and the worth of our response to it, but reveals the incapacity of geometry and number to delineate reality. How do you expect you know, and you do know, that, whatever instrumentality you use, you cannot draw a perfectly straight lime or perfectly round circle? You seem to be of the camp that draws from this the conviction that geometry is 'more real', whereas Plato, if you read him carefully, agrees with me that this proves reality is in the incapacity for geometry to define the real. The missing value may be possible to reduce to negligible, hence the use of the infinitesimal is physics, but the neglected value is the issue we are in search of. Resolving it in negligence is washing the baby and throwing it out, keeping the bathwater as if that is what is real!

I passed logic 101 over fifty years ago, and I aced geometry even earlier.

https://iep.utm.edu/sqr-opp/

The square of opposition is a chart that was introduced within classical (categorical) logic to represent the logical relationships holding between certain propositions in virtue of their form. The square, traditionally conceived, looks like this:

square-of-opposition

The four corners of this chart represent the four basic forms of propositions recognized in classical logic:

A propositions, or universal affirmatives take the form: All S are P.
E propositions, or universal negations take the form: No S are P.
I propositions, or particular affirmatives take the form: Some S are P.
O propositions, or particular negations take the form: Some S are not P.

From the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy


Note, the "self-evidence" of the character of opposition in each case relies upon the quantifiers used. And the verb to be is used as the universal quantifier as affirmation or negation. Apparently this site will not preserve the formatting, to get the square chart apply the URL at top.