Yeah, not so much. Leaves me pretty cold, really. :grimace: — Banno

Maybe if you walkabout in the desert it will help. :grin:

The American version has been around since the 1950s. — frank

Look I'm quoting myself.

These are people she has met personally.

And yes, we have also been involved in exposing scams. — Banno

Cool.

Come on, you know me better. Not I, Wife.

I'm not posturing, I'm pointing to a problem. And you did ask. — Banno

Your wife is a compassionate person. Hint to her to watch out for scams. It's hard to avoid them these days.

We've sent aid packages to folk we know in the US who have not been able to get the support they need. — Banno

You're such a compassionate person Banno. Thank you.

How would you say it stacks up to the USA's? Looks to be the same in terms of... — Moliere

I don't know. Everyone I've ever met who was living "on disability" (receiving SSI payments) was doing pretty well. Now does this mean they'll never have to be humble enough to ask for help? No. This isn't utopia. It's the real world. If you fall out of your power chair you're going to have to ask for help.

You have disability insurance through Social Security. It's pretty generous. He's talking about the Australian version of this. The American version has been around since the 1950s.

Sure, you start the thread, I'll follow. — Metaphysician Undercover

Ok. I'll post chunks of the SEP articles and comment. The goal will be to sort out the different perspectives on possible worlds and the ontological status of possibilia.

Seems simple enough. For the staff, one grumpy patient. For the man, yet another trip to an unfamiliar space full of people who will not listen. The cumulative effect of emotional micro trauma, of having to repeat the same thing over an over. It's a common grievance for folk with disabilities. — Banno

I understand that. I was just playing around with all the different fictions people want to read into my posts rather than just read what I said.

Why should it be you making that judgement rather than him? For you to decide that him getting in a mess is OK? — Banno

It's a matter of dignity, isn't it?

In order to save them having to come back when the poor bugger couldn't eat. Call me picky, but being able to eat seems important to patient wellbeing. — Banno

True, but I think he'd be able to eat, though he might end up with mashed potatoes on his hands.

Was his request unreasonable? — Banno

I don't know. The day staff may have forgotten to explain how he wants his food tray arranged because they were busy doing CPR down the hall. The library may have put off installing a ramp because the roof fell in on the philosophy section. What's reasonable?

He saved staff time by improving communication at the shift change — Banno

The point was to increase staff time at shift change.

My story was about how accommodations for the disabled come into existence. If you want to change the world, pay attention to how the world works. Philosophical finger wagging doesn't motivate. Money does. That sort of thing. But you glanced at my post from 10 feet away, saw the word "white" and reacted to that. That is a subplot to my story of how the world works.

The philosophy behind actual versus possible is lengthy and complex. If you want to walk through two SEP articles on it we can examine the views of all the interested parties. There's even a tie-in to negative dialectics!!!
— frank

Whatever you wish, I'm willing to follow. — Metaphysician Undercover

Are you serious?

Recently an elderly blind gentleman became frustrated because, while in the hospital, the fact that he's disabled was not communicated from day shift to night shift. Night staff came into his room unaware that he was blind. He had to explain it and all the accommodations he required.

Much turmoil was raised because he had to do this. Corrective action was required in the form of staff re-education on the importance of smooth transitions between shifts and what not. New emphasis was placed on shift communication taking place at the bedside, in front of the patient if appropriate so that things like blindness aren't overlooked.

Much eye-rolling did take place among staff, but rules that are enforced are followed, and these new rules were enforced. The question is: why? Why was one unhappy white man cause for such outpouring of regret on the part of the hospital?

Everyone who works at such hospitals knows why. It's because in this community, hospitals compete with one another for business. Hospitals spend money on grand education initiatives of all sorts because patient experience impacts the bottom line.

In short, the hospital reacted this way because money was involved. That's how the world works.

You have not addressed this question: — Metaphysician Undercover

The philosophy behind actual versus possible is lengthy and complex. If you want to walk through two SEP articles on it we can examine the views of all the interested parties. There's even a tie-in to negative dialectics!!!

I wonder if the assumption that everybody needs a standing army in peacetime is a result of our recent heritage. It took the US a two year ramp up to become effective during WW2. But now we're all supposed to be ready to destroy Moscow at a moment's notice with nuclear armed subs, bombers, ICBMs, medium range missiles. WTF?

There is ample archaeological and paleopathological evidence that ancient humans, including early Homo sapiens and even Neanderthals, cared for and cared for their fellow tribesmen with serious injuries, disabilities, or illnesses. This is evident in the traces of old injuries on the bones of the inhabitants of that time, and yet, later in life, the tooth enamel of such individuals often appears better than that of their fellow tribesmen (they ate pureed food). This is interpreted by scientists as evidence of healthy group members caring for the sick or disabled. — Astorre

I'm sure that's true. Advances in medicine mean more people will survive the acute phase of trauma, when blood loss, infection, and temporary neurological deficit would take out the average Neanderthal, the result being that we probably have more disabled people among us than in other times in history.

:smile:

Some of the disabled people you might see are there in your world because of advances in medicine that have taken place over the last 100 years (ironically, much of it in response to WW2). And the same medicine that kept people alive to face the challenges of a world that isn't built for them, is investing everyday in technology to give sight to the blind, to give hearing to the deaf, and to give robotic arms and legs to those who survived trauma and spinal injuries. Or do we use stem cells? Is that where our priorities should be?

The raw motivation to save damaged bodies is a kind of love. You're something other than your capabilities. You're a personality. You're a family member. You're a dreamer of dreams. It's love for that conception of personhood that has healthcare workers reflexively reaching to help. But on the other end is a healthcare industry. It's all about money. Who pays for what?

Does it come down to the bottom line no matter how you answer the question in my first paragraph? Should we make laws that require builders to adhere to disability related guidelines? Or should the state pay?

I keep coming back to language being inherently social. It follows that an explanation solely in terms of an individual's brain or cognition or whatever must be insufficient. — Banno

On the one hand, we can observe that humans are socializing mammals and that there's a genetic component to that. For instance, all socializing mammals produce hierarchies, and these social structures pervasively shape interactions between individuals, dictating greeting protocols, assigning roles, and even determining the sex of the offspring. There just isn't any way that all of that results from each generation working things out in practice. It has to start with individual genetics.

It's probably just natural that a scientist would go from observing predispositions in wolves to explaining human language and thought. The philosopher says back up.

The answer to the question is genetics.
Both the question and the answer are supposedly genetically determined.

This isn't going to work. We're saying the answer to the question was determined by the answer to the question. All of science turns into phenomenology, and worse, this puts the cognitive scientist into a black, isolated box, like a beetle. The scientist beetle churns out answers that determine themselves. Wittgenstein would be horrified.

My intuition is that the light at the end of the tunnel is that magical thing: meaning, as it crawls, beetle-like, from the nest we call truth conditions.

I suppose we might agree that there are real abstractions... as well as false, misleading and contradictory abstractions... — Banno

There could be an evil demon that makes me believe in numbers, but they aren't real?

If mentalese is computational, it is thereby algorithmic. Do you agree? — Banno

I was thinking about the idea of an innate universal language that Chalmers and Chomsky talked about. The idea was that all languages have been analyzed and a linguistic core extracted. This core would have to be innate, so fundamentally like whales and birds. A human would be born with the potential to communicate, and that potential would be triggered into development by social interaction. The brain is transformed by that development, but in the shadows, the core (developed by millions of years of species/environment interaction, or however) remains and can be detected.

This leaves the issue of how an internal dialog works open-ended. It's definitely not that a child decides to adopt certain rules. It's more that the child lives out the rules, keying in to points where the internal structure is matching the external circumstances. Maybe the core language truly is just the motor cortex flexing without the signals going all the way out to the muscles of speech.

Am I way off track?

Abstractions aren't real for you, frank? — Metaphysician Undercover

Sure, why not?

Wittgenstein’s private-language argument shows that such a system cannot constitute meaning. — Banno

I think this is based on the assumption that meaning is rule based. Kripke demonstrates that the private language argument itself gives us reason to doubt that it is.

I think I'm realist, that's why I have difficult making "possible worlds" (worlds which are not real), consistent with "the actual world" (a world which is real). — Metaphysician Undercover

Real? They're both abstract objects. :lol:

As Fitch showed, antirealists know everything that is to be known. There are no true statements outside of what an antirealist knows. Unless they reject classical logic. — Banno

:up:

Can you clarify this? What is a true statement that's beyond our knowledge? It doesn't make any sense to me. — Metaphysician Undercover

It makes sense to realists. Apparently you aren't one.

The actual world is an abstract object like any other possible world. A realist says the actual world contains true statements that are beyond our knowledge.

So it appears to rely on private language from the get go. — Banno

It's just the motor cortex running. Some of it gets picked up by the comprehension center. Wittgenstein never wrote anything that requires us to think of the mind as a void. There's all kinds of stuff happening.

As I said to Ludwig V in the prior post, we can make the actual world one of the possible worlds, but this contradicts realism. — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't think it does. Take a moment to read through the first two paragraphs of the SEP article on possible worlds:

Anne is working at her desk. While she is directly aware only of her immediate situation — her being seated in front of her computer, the music playing in the background, the sound of her husband's voice on the phone in the next room, and so on — she is quite certain that this situation is only part of a series of increasingly more inclusive, albeit less immediate, situations: the situation in her house as a whole, the one in her neighborhood, the city she lives in, the state, the North American continent, the Earth, the solar system, the galaxy, and so on. On the face of it, anyway, it seems quite reasonable to believe that this series has a limit, that is, that there is a maximally inclusive situation encompassing all others: things, as a whole or, more succinctly, the actual world.

Most of us also believe that things, as a whole, needn't have been just as they are. Rather, things might have been different in countless ways, both trivial and profound. History, from the very beginning, could have unfolded quite other than it did in fact: the matter constituting a distant star might never have organized well enough to give light; species that survived might just as well have died off; battles won might have been lost; children born might never have been conceived and children never conceived might otherwise have been born. In any case, no matter how things had gone they would still have been part of a single, maximally inclusive, all-encompassing situation, a single world. Intuitively, then, the actual world is only one among many possible worlds. — SEP

Point me to one place where you showed error in my reasoning please. — Metaphysician Undercover

However solid your reasoning may be, you just have to accept the usage of whatever possible world semanticist you're reviewing. They generally say that actuality is a brand of possibility, the intuition being that all events of the actual world are logically possible.

The sentence "trans men are men" isn't ambiguous, just as the sentences "bats are flying mammals" and "bats are used in baseball" are not ambiguous. — Michael

Out of context, those sentences have no particular meaning.

You seem really out of touch to me.

....in fact, far more young voters say the US cannot be trusted at all (39% of 18-29 year-olds) compared to China (26%)... — Crikey Daily

That's as it should be.

As if minimizing the number of downtrodden while increasing the amount of Americans with plenty of spendable income somehow does not result in tremendous stability? — creativesoul

That's an interesting question, and history answers that it definitely does not produce stability. When the general population is fat and happy, the labor market becomes costly and inflexible. If 1970s labor unions in the US and the UK would have had the ability to stop grandstanding and work with employers, it would have been harder for neoliberals like Reagan and Thatcher to take control. The neoliberal solution was to bring labor to its knees and make them beholden for every crumb. That produced stability.

[quote="Christoffer;1027780" Most ironically, conservatives sometimes are just the progressives in youth becoming so attached to the principles they fought for that they become conservatives around it, arguing their, in their era, progressive ideas, were universal truths.[/quote]

This is true.

A healthy society is, I think leaning more towards progressive thinking, because it is a realization that "truth" requires dedication to figuring it out. Conservative ideas of preservation of certain rules and principles usually comes from an ignorance of how reality works, not seeing that society change all the time and it changes with new knowledge and discovery about the human condition. — Christoffer

I'd like to define a healthy society empirically. Is it flexible enough to survive crises? Or does it shatter against the rocks, leaving the population to suffer in turmoil? There are times when a progressive outlook, one ready to embrace change, is optimal because old strategies have been tried and failed. But when thing are stable, conservatives seek to protect hard-earned wisdom, so they really should prevail during those times.

So Kant in talking about metaphysics discusses issues that are "metaphysical" in the ancient sense but also "epistemological" in our sense. — Manuel

Good to know. :up:

I think you misunderstood my post.

I think we're on the same page. A reason to reject the empiricist view that I learn about space and time from experience is that I can't imagine such a process. It isn't possible that I looked at a chair and observed that it has spatial and temporal extension. I can't imagine a chair that doesn't possess those properties. The concepts are fused.

On the other hand, time and space have no meaning in a void. There has to be at least two objects moving relative to one another to have space and time. So again, the experience of observing an object and knowledge of space and time happen simultaneously.

Cool. Bookmarked.

Kant proposed in Transcendental Idealism that a priori knowledge is that knowledge derived from our sensibilities that is necessary to make sense of these very same sensibilities.” — RussellA

I disagree with this. Maybe we could read through the Transcendental Aesthetic together and come to agreement. Who's up for that?

This is something hard to fathom — ssu

I live in an insignificant little state and it's population is twice that of Finland. Could I see half my state become socialist? Sure, especially if it didn't have to defend itself.

So is it really that conservatives are willing to let nature take care of social problems? Everybody is for themselves? — ssu

In general, yes. Sometimes conservatives live in a politically moderate climate. They make adjustments.