In comparison to the set of real numbers is it a bigger or smaller infinite?

EDIT: A bit of a nonsense question in follow up to a nonsense question -- but it'd at least give a basis of comparison.

It could be that knowledge is innumerable, which I suspect, but then how do we get to comparing people who have more or less?

That's interesting though because it shows how there should also be some qualitative dimension if we're going to say something like "A knows more than B", but the quality is a relationship to other bits of knowledge. So we have trivial knowledge, like "I live on planet Earth" and non-trivial knowledge, which seems to take some kind of either work, or evaluation.

I agree! These things sit together. And why it's almost a real question -- because we often do make this comparison between persons. We trust a mechanic to be able, to know, how to fix a car, and a dentist how to diagnose health problems of teeth -- but also we will often dismiss persons who demonstrate ignorance.

So there is a comparative notion which seems to indicate that one can have more or less knowledge. But what is the unit, then? That's the part that seems nonsensical, but if something is more usually we'd say it is a larger quantity, rather than a larger quality.

True! Let's say for any given time-frame, given that knowledge is in flux.

Moliere, I like your ideas, but you jumped ahead a bit. I want to read this page by page to get all the analysis from it. — schopenhauer1

Heh. Sorry!

Prehension is used here. However, it seems to be an overmined term. — schopenhauer1

How so? By overmining I understand there to be no objects. But prehension just puts objects on the same ontological level as humans by smushing perception and effect together. So it seems to recognize the reality of objects, though they are all interconnected -- which I think might speak against your thought here:

It can refer to "registers the presence of, responds to, affected by, another entity". He then adds in "drops of experience". Is this not conflating a certain type of phenomena (experience) with a more general idea of interactions in general? How are these two tied?

If objects are all connected, and perception, response, affect, and register are the relations between entities, then a drop of experience would just be another entity. It's the kind of entity we are -- and I am a little suspicious in general of reifications of experience so I don't think I'd put it like this, but that doesn't seem to be a conflation as much as a different way of looking.

OK, got it. Coercive political power is identified with organization then. And cooperation is opposed to organization as well.

In my previous replies that wasn't clear to me. I tend to think of cooperation as the same as organization.

Heh. See, that's exactly what someone who is organized would want people who are disorganized to do :D That's what I mean. It reads like fatalism, which is the sort of position advocated by those who like hierarchies. If there is an iron law of oligarchy, after all, then the scientific opponents of democracy -- though I wish to note here that I don't think this is a group -- must establish their own oligarchy if they want to be politically active, while the majority of people who are not will not be a part of that oligarchy. At least that's what seems to make sense from what's been said in the thread (obviously I haven't read the book, I'm just commenting along).

The problem with disorganizing is that organizations are more powerful than the disorganized. All it takes is for a group to decide that the benefits of organization outweigh the downsides, in their particular organization, and they'll naturally be more powerful -- and thereby will have political import regardless of ideology.

So it is and so it has been, as far as I can tell. What is our opinion on the matter? — NOS4A2

If Michels is right about the situation he's certainly wrong about the conclusion: "Thus the majority of human beings, in a condition of eternal tutelage, are predestined by tragic necessity to submit to the dominion of a small minority, and must be content to constitute the pedestal of an oligarchy."

Eternal tutelage and predistination and necessity -- these are the words of the masters. It's repeated so that the people who are at the bottom of the pedestal don't try to get to the top of the pedestal, or bring the pedestal down.

But the majority doesn't need to be content with this position, and have certainly toppled a few pedestals before.

That The Real Volcano essay in the book you linked was pretty great to read. I've been told I should read Whitehead before on the basis of things I've said, and this essay pretty much confirmed that advice.

I'm also happy to see the aesthetic nature of making a choice in metaphysics being expressed --

Harman’s difference from Whitehead,
and his creative contribution to Speculative Philosophy, consists in the ‘translation’ of
the deep problems of essence and change from one realm (that of relations) to another
(that of substances). These two realms, oddly enough, seem to be reversible into one
another—at least in an overall anti-correlationist framework. Given that ‘there is no
such thing as transport without transformation’, the only remaining question is what
sort of difference Harman’s transformation of ontology makes. I would suggest that the
contrast between Harman and Whitehead is basically a difference of style, or of aesthetics.
This means that my enjoyment of one of these thinkers’ approaches over the
other is finally a matter of taste, and is not subject to conceptual adjudication. And this
is appropriate, given that both thinkers privilege aesthetics over both ethics and epistemology.
Whitehead notoriously argues that ‘Beauty is a wider, and more fundamental,
notion than Truth’, and even that ‘the teleology of the Universe is directed to the
production of Beauty’.76 Harman, for his part, enigmatically suggests that, in a world of
substances withdrawn from all relations, ‘aesthetics becomes first philosophy’.77

Interesting stuff!

1) Can objects be understood without reference to human subjectivity? — schopenhauer1

No.

Next!

:D

I think the way you're phrasing the question makes it hard to answer though. "Understand" clearly invokes an understand-er. And usually we mean at least living things which have the capacity to understand. So the requirement of understanding the object necessitates some kind of subjectivity in the sense of an individual making choices about what to believe.

But do the objects exist without reference to human subjectivity? Yes!

Which objects, though? Oh no. Don't ask me. I can't tell. In the essay I found myself agreeing with Shaviro's exposition of Whitehead more -- I tend to think that there is an over-abundance of being, that being overflows our words, and even our conceptual distinctions like objects with their wholes and parts (a material dualism).

I've mentioned it before on the forums, but where my thinking is is in connecting the absurd to the real -- that the absurd shows how our concepts do not circumscribe all of reality, and so Kant was mistaken that all of reality coheres at all. In a backwards way, coming from the Kantian perspective, if the absurd is real then the entire project falls apart -- we can experience something which is not bounded by the categories, and therefore realism is true because there is more to reality than our conceptual apparatus.

2) Is it even wise to try to overlook the human aspect to all knowledge? Is this not only a fool's errand but somehow anti-human or is this just trying to take out a pernicious anthropomorphism that might lead to a more open field of exploration?

I'm not sure that they can, but I don't think that undermines knowledge of objects either.

Why the fear of "anthropomorphism"?

Wise or not wise, though -- I think it's interesting stuff.

The problem for philosophy, who use language as their primary tool, is that language is something self-referential, a Wittgensteinian language game or a Quinean web of belief. If Quine is correct and the distinction between the analytic and synthetic disappears, philosophy cannot differentiate itself from the natural sciences, where both discuss pragmatic synthetic generalities rather than logical analytic truths. — RussellA

*nodding along, petting his cat, evil-like* Yes, yeess, yeeessss!!! :D

Although I'd put it like this -- philosophy cannot differentiate itself from the natural sciences with the analytic/synthetic distinction. We can make other distinctions, though. Philosophy is very good at making distinctions -- so good at it that we can get lost in them and forget what it was they were originally posited for. I think analytic/synthetic behaves like that: for Kant the whole distinction was to point out the curious category of a priori synthetic knowledge, but somehow we get to analyticity as truth from meaning alone in the circuitous route from there to now.

I think philosophical axiology is what really differentiates philosophy from the other branches of The Liberal Arts and Sciences in this big-picture view of knowledge -- and in this big-picture view of knowledge, the university only defines a small portion of what is known. Philosophy doesn't need to be bound by problems. It creates its own problems. It's not even necessarily bound by the university. It created the university. And questioning the analytic/synthetic distinction is part of that creative spirit that questions not just the distinctions of others, but also its own distinctions.

I find it difficult to think of the brain as operating like a grammatic machine, and expressed as much in saying "Why neurons firing rather than concentrations of proteins of a certain kind or ratios of concentrations of the various chemicals interacting or blood flows ?" -- that what we choose as an I-language, even if we delimit our domain to the brain, will be over-determined by the E-language we already know. We'll only know to focus in on this or that bit of the brain if it happens to have a relationship to the meaning of the language we are investigating, and we'll only focus on the bits of the brain that we happen to be able to discriminate.

But that doesn't mean that I'm saying we aren't using our brains. It's just this the category of I-languages that's being disputed -- one may just want to say that things like logic and grammar are a part of the language we're all familiar with and have been using all along rather than some un-definite imagined possible brain architecture or pattern. In addition, I don't think I'd forgo grammar. Grammar and language are as real as beans and brains, in my view. (it's the theories about grammar and language that end up in the land of abstractions)




Math is always weird. Depends on how we set up analyticity probably?

The first thing to mention is that mathematics will be useful to us regardless of how we interpret it with respect to analyticity. So, on my view of analyticity, mathematics could count but I suppose the question is -- is there a non-trivial way to set up analyticity with respect to math?

It'd depend on how we want to dub a particular mathematical sentence to serve as an analytic example in comparison to our synthetic sentences. So we might want to say "For any constant A: "A = A" is analytic, and any instantiation of said sentence is synthetic, i.e. "1 = 1"" as a means to differentiating between individual mathematical sentences and sentences that are tautologously true within a mathematical system -- setting up a notion of "constant" to fulfill the same role as "Bachelor" and "unmarried man" in the bachelor example of analyticity.

:D

Are you so certain of your foundations that you'd put them in analogy to architecture?

Why not riverbed bottoms and hinges at the top?

This, for me at least, is probably why I'd favor the E-language over I-language expression of analyticity. I've been using the E-language for quite some time. The I-language, at least my understanding of it, is built upon my understanding of the E-language and my ability to use it. And, since we're dealing here with one another and not some individual phenomenological situation of problems and equipment and horizon, I'd certainly have to use the E-language in talking about analyticity even if there's some I-language foundationally at work in my use of E-language.

I'm starting to think that the E/I-language is to the side of analyticity, though I started out the other way at the beginning of this thread.

Maybe another way to put it --

Another meta-lingual category is rhyming. Time and rhyme rhyme, but that they do so is a convention of what rhyming is.

Rhyming focuses on sound synonymy. Analyticity focuses on meaning synonymy.

That some bits of language come out the same on the left and right hand side in terms of meaning is an accident in the same way rhyming is an accident -- it happens, but it's not philosophically interesting.

As the meaning of every word in language derives from convention, in what other way can a statement be analytic if not by convention. — RussellA

So far I've thought convention, as in stipulation, is the only way -- so it's trivial.

Though I'm not sure meaning is entirely conventional, either. At least not in the same way that analytic statements are. Here they are conventional because there's no criteria for deciding if a sentence is analytic other than to say "Here is the set of analytic statements"

When driving through a busy city, I don't have time to put all my thoughts into words taken from my E-language. Yet, I couldn't successfully navigate the streets and other traffic without being aware of complex concepts existing within my I-language,

Chomsky in New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind seemed to argue that not only are there complex concepts in the I-language but that they are also innate. I can understand primitive concepts being innate and complex concepts learnt but would agree that both are within our I-language.

If analyticity requires complex concepts, and complex concepts exist within the I-language, then analyticity can also exist within the I-language. — RussellA

How about like this -- if the only way we can express our I-language is through E-language, as we are doing in this thread, then what does "I-language" add?

It seems we're still stuck with E-language in determining analyticity, right?

I think the most sensical approach so far is simple concepts?

But I'd still prefer to just use English rather than simple concepts -- it seems like English is expressive enough to make sense of simple concepts and complex concepts. Maybe there's some I-language in there somewhere, but does it have anything to do with analyticity? Is "Red is a color" an analytic statement? Why is "color" considered simple, or "line" considered simple, when these are more like rarified bits of experience which require reflection and interpretation? Are necessity and contingency simples? How do we make non-arbitrary choices on basic concepts?


This is neat:

@RussellA would both eat the cake that all sentences are true by convention while keeping the cake that some sentences are true by the meaning of their terms. — Banno

If we accept that analytic statements are analytic on the basis of convention then we accept that they are, at the same time, not going to have anything philosophically interesting about them. That "A is A" isn't a truth for logicians, but a feature of a particular way of arranging language logic-wise.

As regards the statement "bachelors are unmarried men", it is not possible to know whether it is analytic or synthetic until first knowing the meanings of the words used, in the same way that it is not possible to know whether the statement "moja ndio si ndoa mwanadamu" is analytic or synthetic until knowing the meanings of the words used.

Therefore, the first task is to know what the words mean. — RussellA

We must know the meaning, of course. But do we build a meaning from the individual words? What are the tokens of meaning? Why not sentences? Why not gestures?

To know if P is analytic we must know not just P, not just the meanings of the words (think of bi-lingual dictionaries and how little they tell you) -- but we must know the language those words are in. Language allows us to interpret symbols, which is how we come to know meaning. And no sentence stands outside of context, even the ones we're using here. (It is a philosophical context, but still)

Let's just grant the I-language of simple concepts and what-have-you. Somehow this allows us to use an E-language. The examples of analytic statements aren't in terms of simple concepts, though -- they're in E-language. And it seems you agree there's an element of convention in the E-language.

Isn't analyticity on the side of E-language, rather than I-language?

I like you drawing out the conclusions -- and I agree with these conclusions. My feeble attempt with nonsense was to show how an E-language can give sense to nonsense, and make an analytic statement in spite of the nonsense.

Hopefully suggesting that sense-making, at least, isn't I-langauge dependent. If we can make sense of nonsense words with "not-adjective noun is un-adjectived noun" then the I-language must do something else other than "make sense of things" -- this is a total nonsense phrase but we can understand the temptation to call it analytic from the grammar of English.

EDIT: Which basically goes to agree withyour point here.

I cannot eat my cake and keep it, and that's not an analytic feature of language.

Yes -- analytic statements lose all their advantages in my interpretation of them. At least for anyone who wants them to be anything more than a convention. I think my interpretation acknowledges why I can understand others who claim P is an analytic statement, and deflates the reason why it is. (I was tempted to go into 7 + 5 = 12 -- but it just seemed too off topic)

This answers the OP, "Are there analytic statements?" — RussellA

I think I answered in the affirmative in my opening post, while relying on a theory of analytic statements that reduces them to convention.

Yup.

I think fallacies are most useful in self-reflection. It's good to point them out in that spirit -- rather than in an attempt to prove something.

I think this an interesting fallacy in that it is at least a dialogic dialogue-centric? fallacy -- it's explicitly in terms of a conversation, unlike most fallacies which mention either counter-examples (in the case of informal fallacies, like this one) or rules of validity.

Less archaically though -- We agree analyticity is an aspect of language. I'm guessing that we roughly agree that analyticity is when a concept either "contains" another concept or somehow necessitates it or, maybe in the weakest sense if analytic/synthetic are exclusive categories, analytic statements are those which are not synthetic.

The example is meant to demonstrate how nonsense terms can come to make sense from the English grammar, rather than because of an I-language.

Following on from the OP, the analytic and synthetic are aspects of language. The necessary and contingent are aspects of logic, and the a priori and a posteriori are aspects of knowledge.

Yes, analytic statements are not necessarily statements of knowledge. — RussellA

Cool.

So all Brambles are Unbrimbled Tembres.

Unbrimbled when one removes a brimb from one who has been brimbled, and Tembre's being the Brimbled Brambles.

There is the I-language in the mind, and the E-language in the world.

There is the word "love" in the E-language which refers to the concept of love. The concept being referred to doesn't exist in the either the E-language or the world independent of any mind.

Where else can the concept of love exist if not in the I-language of the mind. — RussellA

Heh, the whole reason I liked "I-language" was because I thought it side-stepped the whole mind thing :D.

Where do concepts exist? I'm not sure. Or if it's even quite right to say they exist, or if this is a reification.

If I touch a hot stove and see my hand blisters, in my I-language, I am conscious of pain and quickly remove my hand. But if my I-language was formed by my social environment rather than my innate instinct, in a different social environment on touching a hot stove and seeing my hand blister I could well be conscious of pleasure and leave my hand where it was.

But this is not something that is empirically discovered. In all societies, if someone touches a hot stove, they don't leave their hand there but quickly remove it. This suggests that their I- languages are the same, meaning that I-languages are not determined by the social environment but have been determined by innate instinct.

As Chomsky proposed, the I-language is not a “language” that is spoken at all, but is an internal, largely innate computational system in the brain that is responsible for a speaker’s linguistic competence. — RussellA

It's because the I-language is not spoken that I doubt concepts are at work. We talk about concepts fairly frequently, and successfully. Freedom, Love, Democracy -- conceptually rendered it's nothing like a neural net, for instance.

Starting to think that the speculation of multiplicity is off topic, though. The reason I thought I-languages might be interpreted analytically is because neural nets are, at base, a bundle of computations. Suggesting something like analyticity in a mathematical sense, at least -- in the sense of there being a sequence or an order of some kind which eventually sets up some kind of relationship to full-blown symbolic meaning.

What it seems we'd agree upon is that I-languages are not spoken like normal languages (which actually speaks to why I tend to deny mentalese -- it's like a homuncular fallacy for meaning). I think I'd just include concepts, as well as logic, within E-language. Or, at least, while I-language remains unclear it follows that E-languages are a clearer category for including things we can make sense of.

True, "war is war" is analytic if "is" refers to identity, and "war is war" is synthetic if "is" refers to predicating.

But also, using "is" as identity, if the set of words "A","B","C" and "D" is named "war", then the statement "war is B" is analytic, regardless of the meaning of "A", "B", "C" and "D".

Similarly, if the set of words "A" and "B" is named "bachelor", then the statement "a bachelor is B" is analytic, regardless of the meanings of "A" and "B". — RussellA

This sets out how to use analyticity. It's a convention -- if we interpreted "is" in a certain way, and we interpret the terms in a certain way, then it follows that A is D, analytically.

It reads more like a stipulation than a feature of knowledge.

I often wonder about the relation between machine-learning and human learning. I don't think it's clear what the token of meaning is in terms of an I-language. Neural nets are a model of neurons, but no one knows that human-learning happens at the level of neurons -- it's just a thing we can measure and we make guesses about it. But it could be something else that we haven't been able to measure yet. Say proteins, or codons, or base pairs, or ratios between those -- they could potentially be an I-language in the sense that it's measurable and makes sense of at least a generative grammar.

I was thinking an I-language would be anything but a concept. More charitably, because I don't think mentalese makes sense ultimately, I'd say an I-language is public, in principle. Something like neural nets comes to mind, but instead of machine learning it's whatever our learning is that sits in analogue to neural nets. Perhaps different E-langauges have different I-languages, but the I-language would be formed from our social environment as we learn our first language so just by virtue of sharing an E-language an I-language could not be private in the public/private Witti sense. I just wanted to flesh that out a little more rather than assuming it.

Even then, I think I'm taking back some of what I thought before. If the language is public then it is subject to revision and then analytic statements will only be known in a post hoc manner (I am usually skeptical of a priori knowledge). We can classify statements such as the case of bachelors and unmarried men and dub them analytic. And we can also say "War is war" and know that the meaning is not analytic -- it's the "is" of predicating rather than the "is" of identity (which really only goes against attempting to define analyticity according to formal characteristics*)

*Defining it formally with E-languages at least. But I'd include logic as within the E-language category.

Heh, I was starting to think the same, in terms of being off topic. Somehow I do that...

I think that's what I've been saying?

Though I'm acknowledging this more general notion of economy, where people did in fact trade goods and services and used currency outside of the rise of capitalism. But that is a sort of trans-historical mega-theory of economy that isn't really related to neoliberalism.

OK, so... it seems we're agreeing as long as we acknowledge that TRULY free markets, in the general sense, can exist without a state -- but when talking about neoliberalism, those markets cannot exist without a state.

And you can see how that requires a state?

Alright, fair. It's just wrong. So not a truism.

I want to restrict the domain of discourse for "market", with respect to neoliberalism, to capitalism. So capitalist markets are what we are talking about, rather than some general theory of economy.

I believe my response to @frank covers this. Is neoliberalism an ideology that connects itself to the bronze age?

I simply wouldn't talk of "markets" when it comes to the bronze age. Currency and trade aren't the same things as capitalism.

I guess I don't know what you're referring to then. — frank

pointed out some of the events I was thinking of. There's a list on wikipedia, but some of those I wouldn't include because they're obviously of the global sort like the IMF, where I'm attempting to put together something like a ideology enforced by states. Or, perhaps a better way to put it, this is the story when you zoom in to the national level, where the ideology is instantiated.

Yup, like them too. They trade in money, after all -- legal tender, and all that.

Yup. Unfortunately so. It should be an obvious truism.

Maybe what's needed is a good distinction between Keynesian state intervention and neoliberal state intervention to make the case... I mean from my perspective there's no such thing as a market without state intervention. Markets are instantiated by states. So the notion of governments not assisting private entities is, from the standpoint of political economy, simply not possible. They make the very conditions of markets by enforcing legal claims of property.

But something is different from the times of Keynes. I agree the term is somewhat ambiguous, but there's a real phenomena there too.

But in general, government assistance to private entities is not in line with neoliberal ideas. . — frank

But it happens a lot. 2009 was not unique. And it seems to be needed when those ideas are implemented.

Chile was the first test case for the imposition of neoliberal ideas. Neoliberalism will tend to make an economy run hot, so when this happened to Chile, this was touted as success. — frank

So that'd be a reason to include it. But was the USian government assistance of Pinochet a result of neoliberalism? Or was it the result of one nation doing what nations do -- enforcing claims on resources, while picking on an ideological enemy? Or was that the result of Henry Kissinger just being himself?

In making neoliberalism more clear it seems like it's more of a prevailing ideology? So that'd indicate that these sorts of interventions are not the result of neoliberalism -- as a way of clarifying when it's appropriate to attribute something to neoliberalism. Neoliberalism came as an ideology which was later enforced by the government.

You should check out Harvey's book about it. I stayed outraged for about a week straight after I read it. Ahrrr! — frank

Yeah that's definitely the sort of thing I like to read. :D I should.

Yeah, though I want to clarify I mean historical events rather than from the nature of an entity so this is a perspective drawing from historical knowledge (or, at least, stuff I read) -- but that's definitely a theme of these historical events. If such and such fails then the net suffering is greater than if such and such does not fail is one form of market intervention I'd count. I'm not sure all of what I'd count. The relationship of unions to capital is another perspective I'd highlight.

One thing I wonder about including are international actions. I am uncertain that neoliberalism is international in the same way that, say, capitalism is international: Whereas capital has a way of connecting nations together into a higher order system, I'm not sure neoliberalism is quite like that -- it seems more like an ideology and its enactment, and less like a transnational system.

This being relevant because I'm not sure if one should include the various interventions in Latin and South America on the part of the US as an example, or if that's just the nature of the beast at the international level and neoliberalism is something which can only take place within a capitalist economy.

Well, that's what I mean by neoliberalism, anyways.

LIke any good leftist I blame Nixon. ;) Not really, Carter did it too. And I agree that it's in reaction to Keynesian economics. My reading is always eclectic so I might have missed some event prior in USian history, but the Lockheed bailouts:

Drowning in debt, in 1971 Lockheed (then the largest US defense contractor) asked the US government for a loan guarantee, to avoid insolvency. Lockheed argued that a government bailout was necessary due to the company's value for U.S. national security.[22] On May 13, 1971, the Richard Nixon administration sent a bill titled "The Emergency Loan Guarantee Act" to Congress requesting a $250 million loan guarantee for Lockheed and its L-1011 Tristar airbus program.[23] — wikipedia

really do look similar to many of what I'd term neoliberal interventions on behalf of the market. I know what you mean there, which is what really distinguishes neoliberalism from classical liberalism and the limited state types and is a reason to call it something different.

I'm wondering if analyticity is required for a generative grammer? I'm potshotting after reading the entries and @invicta's thread -- but I think that the I-language approach more implies that there'd be analytic I-sentence's (or whatever the token of meaning is in an I-language -- also worth noting that the I-language couldn't count as a private language up front, just to steer clear of that confusion).

I'm thinking something along the lines of the formal approach, of a sub-natural-language process which generates natural languages seems like it'd have analytic properties.


However, I tend to believe that the distinction is pragmatic rather than some feature of thought. Even if I grant some kind of mentalese or sub-natural-language generative process I would tend to favor the natural language expressions over this I-language, however it's parsed. (neat distinction though between E/I-language I hadn't encountered before)

Yup.

Especially when you consider, in the USA at least, how much these issues are pushed to the side. Consider, for instance, Roe v. Wade. Who won on that one?

EDIT: I think the reply might be something like universal healthcare -- but, in terms of capital, who won on that one?

In general that's a lesson I've noticed could be taught more -- communist or otherwise, politics doesn't begin with the party, the idea, the nation -- it begins with the people around you. It's an important perspective that's often lost in thinking about politics in theory, and is especially lost in the representative systems we have in place now where so much is done by appealing to an expert or an authority.

It's only by actively organizing that the ideas even begin to make sense as anything other than a philosophical exercise.