hanaH

Sure. If Wittgenstein wasn't trying to get people to think of meaning differently, why bother to write? Once the world was thought to be flat. Once ph...

There's a difference between equality before the law (in this case, rules) and intellectual/spiritual equality, for instance. Peer-review and exposure...

You are echoing Nietzsche. You may already know that. The point is that...yeah, I've been down this road. It offers some fascinating scenery.

Are you serious? Of course. Promised and threatened. Not only as child but quite recently by a stranger with a megaphone. Kierkegaard-style jive, whic...

Life is, among other things, a competition, an arms race. To say so isn't to celebrate or denigrate.

Consider the vervet monkey: Very short : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8ZG8Dpc8mM Slightly longer, more serious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l...

One way to understand the value is reproducibility is to think of the technology that results, which we prefer to be reliable. In general, science can...

You mention various ways that technology fails us or creates new problems. I don't deny that. So how might we figure out if it's a net good? Well we c...

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Found this, and I think it adds to the thread: https://www.britannica.com/topic/philosophy-of-mind/Radical-behaviourism To me this is not about someth...

Fair enough. We can drop it for now. Good chat!

You address whether the claim was true (but why should that matter, right? we're on a spiritual quest here.) Sure, but half of the children dying is m...

This may help (from the Blue Book).

I hear you, but if the proposed referent of "pain" is uncheckable, then there's no reason to even assume that it's singular (or that you and I have th...

To me this is not so obvious, however initially plausible. If you assume that meaning is referent, then it's a tautology. But in the Wittgensteinian s...

Till next time. :flower:

Ask yourself what that can really mean. Public speech may report experiences using mentalistic language, but these reports themselves are strings of p...

I hear you, and this is something like the point of the beetle in the box. The "headache in itself" plays no role. It's impossible in principle to com...

All I can say is read more carefully. It wasn't a good paraphrase. Note that you brought the evolution of species up. At some point I mentioned the ev...

I think you are still misreading me. It's not about denying or affirming mental states. It's about cutting out an explanatory middle man, an appendix ...

I agree that you could do that, and we do use 'mean' that way often enough. You make a good point at the end, which incidentally Wittgenstein also mad...

:up:

Sure. I'd say that (roughy) we reason from uncontroversial statements toward more controversial statements. "The rat pushed the lever." This is someth...

I stand by that. It makes sense to look at simpler animals and their communication for the foundations of our own. The point is merely to stress that ...

I don't think I understand you here. In case it helps, That's one way to grok "meaning is use." This is not intended to exhaust the use of the phrase.

:up: Perhaps it's human vanity that prevents us from simply looking at social animals and seeing how their signals allow them to coordinate their beha...

I get what you are saying, but I think it's problematic to call some personally assigned referent an "alternative meaning." This is because it's best ...

This sounds grand and dramatic, but it boils down to clever primates constantly trying to make their lives a little better. About half of humans died ...

I don't think you are wrong. Something like humanism replaces religion for a certain kind of philosopher (Hume & Hobbes both come to mind.) I'm not sa...

@"Wayfarer" I'm happy to talk more if you decide to be serious again.

:up: :up: We might add an appreciation of the little we know, which has seriously improved things for the species so far.

Excellent juxtaposition!

Sure. I'm not trying to play the skeptic, nor am I trying to found some theory of knowledge. You might say I'm emphasizing the behaviorist streak in W...

I have the usual sense of having an idea "in mind" and, like others, I'll talk about having a "realization." "Mental" language will always be with us....

I think you have the wrong idea about where I'm coming from.

In my view, that's a common misunderstanding of critical philosophers in general. It's not religion as such or the immaterial as such that's a problem...

For many philosophy has been about something like essences. It's been something like a pseudo-science of folk science of such essences. Call them form...

Interesting point, but I suggest that we have no way of knowing that we mean the same thing by 'pain' if we insist on acting as if we can be rational ...

Note, though, that you assume that there is a singular held-in-common experience of pain. But this is "inner experience," which can't be compared and ...

Excellent post. Thanks for the reply.

You realize that we are animals, right? We tend to flatter ourselves that our communication is quasi-divine. Why are humans so sure that they don't al...

'Designed'? Who designed it? Did Esperanto finally catch on? Instead it's probably more like this. That much is clear. I'll try again. I'm pointed out...

Really? I find that claim strange. Imagine a boy who knows very little about female anatomy. He does know that women get their monthlies, and he knows...

Indeed, and we've embraced a use of "inner experiences" that makes them useless apart from this uselessness. (Or an ordinary kind of thing was rarefie...

It seems to me that the inner sensation is useless. It doesn't matter if we all have different beetles in our boxes or if some of us have no beetles. ...

:up: It says almost nothing extremely well! (I mean it sticks to something like a quantitative/logical skeleton of reality, the tendons & ligaments of...

Words don't necessarily stand for things. The 'nomenclature theory' is a target for Wittgenstein (and for Saussure, incidentally). 'Meaning' is conven...

He was legit. The TLP might look like the work of mystic crank, but the later stuff is so unpretentious and readable...which doesn't mean trivial to u...

Yeah, that's what I had in mind. I also am becoming more interested in economics and game theory...as something like the heart of reality...and that m...

Just watched it. Nice vid! Right. So the test, maybe good for some things, is maybe just overblown. "Smith just cured cancer. Now let's see what he ca...