This thread could in theory lead to a discussion about what grammar is. I come from linguistics, and I've often felt confused about how philosophers use the term grammar. It sometimes feels like philosophers think grammar is the structure of thought, when it's just the structure of language.

"Jack-in-the-box" and where the plural goes is actually a pretty good example. People here keep talking about Jacks and Boxes, but the grammatical structure does suggest you tag the -s onto Jack. — Dawnstorm

The discussion here about "jack-in-the-box" is mostly humorous, but it does show that grammar and thought needn't be the same. — Dawnstorm

A valiant attempt, which I appreciate. Perhaps if I’d left this discussion on the main page, your post would have produced an interesting discussion.

Perfectly good word there, fine example of where to put the S — Sir2u

So what?

I was genuinely open to persuasion, but since you characteristically responded obnoxiously, to the Lounge it goes.

Gins and tonic, passersby, etc. This is barely even linguistics, and I'm not sure why it's been put in philosophy of language.

Can anyone tell me why this shouldn't be put in the Lounge?

Who was it who said...

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; tiny minds discuss grammar.

The Histories by Herodotus.

What say you, Jamal? — Noble Dust

I refer you to the post above from , because I don’t remember that one very well, though I think I did read it. I have a feeling it’s a less substantial work than the other Austers I’ve read, all of which I remember more.

According to the records, as of three years ago, Jamal has read Mr Vertigo, Leviathan, Moon Palace, and a couple of others — praxis

I think this is my list, in order of reading:

The New York Trilogy
Moon Palace
Leviathan
The Book of Illusions
Oracle Night
Mr Vertigo

Except for Mr Vertigo, which I read about 8 or 9 or 6 years ago, I read the others probably between 25 and 19 years ago. They’re all memorable except Oracle Night, which I seem to recall thinking was just doing things he’d done better in the others, but which I also seem to recall quite enjoying. Or maybe it was that one that made me bored with Auster. Or maybe I never read it at all.

I’d be interested to (re)read it.

Attention spans are down to 5 seconds.
Being interrupted or talked over.
No one reads anything greater than 3 or 4 sentences.
No one will read, watch, or listen to what you recommend - no matter how enthusiastically.
People who, when describing what person X said, does a voice impression that reduces that X to a blithering idiot.
Anyone who thinks "Saving Private Ryan" is a great movie.
Reaction videos.
The phrase "YOLO." — Mikie

I share your intense annoyance at being interrupted or talked over, but the others don't bother me much. To be sure, I'm annoyed at how addictive reaction videos can be--I've even watched reaction videos of reaction videos--but I can't say I experience intense annoyance; I've never seen Saving Private Ryan and have no interest in seeing it (I suppose the one that annoys me that everyone goes on about is the Shawshank Redemption, which I dislike); I had to look up "YOLO".

Recommendations are quite interesting and I know it can be frustrating when people ignore yours. I've followed up on a few recommendations I've been given that have shaped my life importantly. However, you learn from disappointed experience to ignore most of them. Obviously who gives the recommendation is important, but also I think how the recommendation is given matters. I think the recommender has to make a case for it, rather than just "check out x, it's cool". It also has to come at the right time for the recommendee.

Current intense annoyances of mine:

• Liars and bullshitters: the reason this is intensely annoying to me and not just a bothersome but ordinary fact of life is that I didn't know until recently just how many of them there are. There are a lot of them. Disappointed!
• The bureaucracy of national residency, visas, taxes, etc.
• The punishment of ordinary Russian citizens by EU sanctions, banks, etc.

I am from the United States and am moderately conservative. I am a Christian of the Catholic/Orthodox variety. — Leontiskos

Hey, you didn’t tell me that when you were asking for an invitation! :angry:

Only kidding. Welcome aboard.

Seems like Dick was in the vanguard — T Clark

From a certain perspective, maybe he was, since he was influential in the New Wave SF of the sixties, when authors were reacting against the Utopianism of Golden Age SF. But since the nineties, I get the impression there’s been a lot of more or less utopian space opera. I don’t really read that stuff though (Banks, Reynolds, Hamilton, Vinge, etc.)

In a sense I guess he invented dystopian fiction — T Clark

Dystopian fiction goes back to the nineteenth century and there are several famous examples from the early twentieth century, so I don’t think so.

Otherwise, thank you for attempting to explain your tastes, not an easy thing to do.

Yeah, I haven’t read as much PKD as you. Maybe I’ll change my mind. Sounds interesting.

Here’s where I’m coming from. So-called depressing stories and novels, though they might be about the pointlessness of existence and the stupidity of humankind and so on, can be so well-written, so full of energy and ideas, that they stimulate you more than depress you.

I'm responding just to say that Philip K. Dick is not depressing to me. On the contrary, I find his writing delightful and stimulating, the opposite of depressing. Especially Ubik. It's a blast. I expect many of his other novels, most of which I haven't read, to be similarly anti-depressive.

Edit: what is depressing about PKD? I don't get it.

My favourite temperature for an appendectomy is 21 Celsius, dry air.

Real name - Adrian Czajkowski — T Clark

Just a different spelling. People don’t buy books by apparently unpronounceable authors.

Just read The Unlimited Dream Company by J. G. Ballard.

The last time I read a Ballard novel (Crash) and gave it a review, I was too hasty—I’ve since revised my estimation upwards—so I’ll refrain from saying much about this one. Once again, I didn’t like it much, but who knows what I’ll think in a few weeks. Some quotations:

Soon after dawn I stood naked on the lawn among the drowsy pelicans.

Again I ejaculated beside the tennis courts, and hurled my semen across the flower-beds.

At the filling-station I ejaculated across the fuel pumps, and over the paintwork of the cars standing in front of the showroom. — Ballard

Adrian Tchaikovsky — T Clark

I like the spider stuff.

Both from The Atrocity Exhibition. Weird stuff — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, I should probably read them as part of that book, as they were published.

But don't miss Vermilion Sands for the other side of Ballard — Srap Tasmaner

Now on my list :up:

Currently reading The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa.

Has no one on this site read any sociology or anthropology? — unenlightened

I can name three or four members who probably have. Only slightly fewer than those who have read any philosophy.

It seems to me a lot of our traditional "mental" vocabulary does not refer to exclusively internal states of human beings, but rather to mental rather than, I guess, bodily interactions with the environment and objects. We distinguish, and presumably have for a very long time, between chopping down a tree and looking at it, wondering if it's big enough for the beam we need. Both descriptions involve both the guy with the sharp implement and the tree, so just as <chopping down a tree> doesn't map cleanly onto postures and movements of my body alone, in the absence of a tree, so <estimating a tree's yield> needn't map onto something going on in my brain in the absence of a tree. — Srap Tasmaner

I agree. We talked about the mind long before we gave much thought to brains--that is, when we were describing certain activities rather than describing something the brain does--but even from this point of view, what is mental can still be seen as material, just not in the neuro-reductionist way.

As it happens, representational theories of mind will map the necessary tree onto my internal representation of the tree, and you'll see often on this forum theories that claim my goal in either case to produce a certain state of my internal model. I think that's a very different issue from whether our everyday vocabulary around thinking, perceiving, imagining, remembering, and so on, not only presupposes objects for these activities but folds them into terms that are in some ways holistic. — Srap Tasmaner

I'm not quite clear what you mean here. If you mean that a non-neuro-reductionist understanding of the mind, while it does presuppose mental objects, need not presuppose internal representations, then I think I probably agree.

Welcome Spencer :smile:

Not a fan, but he did bring hot dogs to Russia.

Does that make any sense? — Srap Tasmaner

I'm not finding much time to dedicate to TPF right now, except for posting photos of my lunch. I'll try to come back to it.

The last time I had a pizza, probably two months ago, it was quite chilly. Maybe around 10-15 Celsius. I still wanted to sit outside in my shorts and t-shirt, and I refused the kindly offered blanket until I changed my mind and asked for a blanket after all. The pizza, which did not have a blanket, got cold very quickly, but it was good.

My favourite weather for eating asparagus is drizzle.

I can see you have not been persuaded by the argument thus far and probably won’t be, until you can see a reason why you should accept. At that point, you might typically say I see. So - what is it that you see? (Or in the other case, what is it you’re not seeing?) Whatever it is (or isn’t) it won’t be seen as a consequence of anything physical that has passed between us. — Wayfarer

If you think that the use of reason within this discussion demonstrates the soundness of the argument from reason, I think you’ve misunderstood Srap’s criticism.

He asked you to defend this:

No belief is rationally inferred if it can be fully explained in terms of nonrational causes — Wayfarer

That you will defend it with reason is irrelevant (although you haven’t actually defended it yet).

I’d add that metaphysical naturalism can be true even if beliefs cannot be fully explained in terms of nonrational causes. Nonreductive materialism is popular among philosophers. Which takes us back to @180 Proof’s early response, which I don’t think you’ve addressed.

Confusing. Firstly, the most important things you can do with a pizza are make it and eat it, and yet you only mention buying and ordering. Secondly, I know of the Fahrenheit scale but the numbers mean nothing to me, except that higher numbers are higher temperatures, just like other temperature scales. Thirdly, I don’t know what ambient temperature has to do with pizza. Certainly, I eat pizza in warm weather more than cold, but that’s mainly because I eat pizza only when I eat out, and when I eat out I like to sit at outdoor tables and don’t like sitting inside very much.

So I voted while imagining that the numbers were Celsius, according to which I’d happily eat pizza in temperatures around 25 degrees, which is warm.

Sorry, I’ll try to insult you more directly and competently next time. :up:

You must have missed when I called you a radge here:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/752675

Paisley is full of radges like Clarky, so I wouldn’t be surprised.

Yes, that was part of the problem.

Nice Paisley reference.

I banned @introbert for being mostly unintelligible.

The Terminal Beach by J. G. Ballard.

A collection of some of his earlier short stories. Mostly great. Lots of surrealism, Freud, Jung, and genre-wise more slipstream than science fiction.

I’ll probably read a volume of his later short fiction next. Two stories I’m particularly interested in are “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” and “The Assassination Of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered As A Downhill Motor Race”.

I usually use hyphens for dashes but in this post—in your honor—I've used em dashes. — T Clark

Much appreciated.

What a pain in the ass they are. — T Clark

Don't blame the dashes. Blame the world.

I think the content of your post that I took the above quotes from is fair enough but I think the assumptions made in your last sentence are inaccurate. You assume I don't understand before rejecting.
I disagree. — universeness

Yes, that was unnecessary. I was probably just trying to wind you up. It's a Scottish tradition; you can take it.

My point is that identifying reasons for falling in love with someone is not post hoc. They are present in your thoughts during the very moments that the experience starts imo, the reasoning is just very fast and 'flash like'. — universeness

This is the issue and I think you're wrong. It reminds me of something that Bertrand Russell said about perception somewhere. He said something like, perception is inference from sense data to an image or model of the environment, and when it's automatic--because the environment is familiar and doesn't contain any surprises--it just means that the inferential process has just got really quick. This idea works no better for perception than it does for love, and I just think you're misunderstanding your own feelings.

You, and imo, Zizek are suggesting that such as 'oh my goodness look at her over there, I think I'm in love!!' has no reasoning behind it. I think that's untrue. It's just that all the reasons are happening at top speed in your head. — universeness

So you might be conflating causes and reasons.

Aesthetically stunning ....... tick
Posture alluring (sitting or walking) ...... tick
Body language ....... tick
These reasons are manifest in parallel thought. — universeness

This is quite comical though. You don't fall in love using a checklist.

But what you're talking about here is an assessment of attractiveness, which I accept might have a checklisty character, although even then I think it's probably post hoc. In any case, the assessment of attractiveness is not falling in love.

Basically I agree with you. But the local religion is also part of the social and geopolitical situation. So perhaps it might be more accurate to say that religion is only part of the problem, or one factor in the problem. Or, perhaps still more accurate, that the local interpretation of the religion is a factor in the problem. — Ludwig V

:up:

living in a liberal secular society — Jamal

I'm not in Russia right now BTW

And when I say the things I've been saying it feels kinda wrong, in that I'm speaking from a position of privilege: the privilege of living in a liberal secular society that makes it too easy to take a contrarian anti-militant-atheist line.