Zugzwang

Mind is not material. Black is not white. And so on. Point being that this seems more about grammar/usage than obscure immaterial entities. Wouldn't m...

I like the idea (which I can also make more sense of) that reality may just be too complex for us to model, that there are complicated patterns we'll ...

Yeah. And, side-point, it only seems 'rational' to me when we admit irrational tendencies like this. We include our bias in the model.

While all of this is plausible, I do suspect that the 'grammar' of the word 'private' drags us toward thinking of some mind-box with a private picture...

For me the issue is: why would the other species be seeing 'deeper' into reality? Maybe they have another sense organ, a bigger brain. I grant that th...

An important point, easy to miss, is that W's insights double-back to subvert taking his statements about language (or yours or mine) too seriously. T...

Ah but so many do raise the same old issues. How can I be sure? Not sure enough to act with confidence...but even surer than that somehow. Infinitely ...

:up:

Right. Not a Platonist at all. A critic of Cantor's Paradise.

I speculated that Antony meant something like that. In any case, I've sometimes thought of the later W as trying to wake philosophers up from the lang...

Hi. If I may interrupt, I think we tend to use 'meaning' in a way that suggests that it's attached to a person. 'I said ketchup, but I meant mustard.'...

I confess that I find the idea of the 'actual thing' problematic. In the above I find (correctly or not) two different ideas. First there's the 'actua...

I think you are missing my point. Consider my question: what kind of knowledge beyond the usual, practical stuff do you (or others) have in mind in th...

:up: While I don't see much intelligence in rocks and clouds, I think you are right to acknowledge the role that interpretive habit has on my not find...

I tried to find an online copy but found only a review. What do you make of this? https://www.academia.edu/45638569/Review_of_Stanley_Cavells_Conditio...

I agree with a point I think you are trying to make, but still: what kind of knowledge beyond the usual, practical stuff do you (or others) have in mi...

But what if the vague notion of the 'absolute' is one more social construction? It sounds like God, and perhaps the vague idea of knowledge-beyond-uti...

Some questions occur to me. How do we judge whether something is sufficiently unambiguous? In general I think we rely on practical criteria. We are si...

Excellent quote. The 'confused' idea here seems founded on 'mathematical' fantasy of how language works. 'God' knows exactly what 'chair' and 'is' and...

:up:

I just ordered the first Hacker & Baker volume, so I'll find out soon.

I think Wittgenstein was almost bound to be misunderstood this way, precisely because philosophers salivate for closed, static rule-systems (the intel...

If I can find the time, I think I'll like Cavell. I have read much of this thread, so I have an idea of what you mean. Instead of fundamental justific...

That's how I understand it also. As it take it, grammar (in this context) is just the way we (actually!) use words these days. The reasons that comput...

I'd like your input on the following, inspired by the quote above. Personally it seems impossible for anyone to know all there is to know about (the t...

Agreeing with you and this, I suggest that 'rule' and (in another post) 'govern' are useful but imperfect metaphors. There's no top-down authority on ...

It is a great line to wrestle with. I've tended to take this in terms of justifying claims that one knows something. A dry example: a king is put in c...

Of course. We navigate, interpret, improvise...always against a background of personal and social habit.

If I may jump in, all that's needed is a relatively stable background of conventions. For instance, I trust that you understand well enough what I'm g...

That's a good one. :up:

That's how I see it too. To be dead is to be gone, utterly gone. While we are still alive, we can worry about the living we'll leave behind, try to av...