Don't look for an all purpose essence. Look to particular cases of use. I think the imperative to refer to transwomen as women was part of a political cause that gained strength very quickly in the UK and in the US. It's been subsiding, starting in the UK, and now in the US. One factor in the draw down was the information that having gender dysphoria does not mean a person is trans.

My point is that the contexts in which we would say a transwoman is a woman are usually political, and that scene in presently in flux.

I think you're just misreading my comment and not keeping it contextualized. My comment was responsive to yours, which started off with the word "really" as if to imply you were offering a moment of true objectivity. — Hanover

My point was that meaning is found in use, which is why I told a story about a particular case. I didn't claim to know something about it that isn't known to us all, and I don't even know what a third gender is.

So I see that you do believe a transgender woman is rightly called a woman. Thanks for the clarification.

Then you suggested we've banned people for such commentary, resulting in whatever just followed, which really is not helpful, considering it incorrectly asserts inconsistency on the mod team and sends the message to others, to the extent they listen to you, that we will not tolerate any opinion that even subtly questions mainstream liberal progressive views on trassexual speech or categories. — Hanover

I correctly asserted that in the past a moderator stated that he would ban people for disagreeing that transgender woman is a woman. That's a fact. I misunderstood your comment to be saying that a transgender woman should rightly be called a biological male. My point was that attitudes have changed drastically in a short amount of time.

Does anybody else want to vomit all over frank? This is the day for it.

But Hanover didn't deny that transwomen are women, not did his statement imply it. — Jamal

He most certainly did.

The fact that you don't know that a moderator threatened to ban anyone who denied that transwomen are women just shows you weren't paying attention. I always figured the sentiment was coming from a need to defend the person who died.

It's not outrageous to ask someone on a philosophy forum to back up an eccentric and implausible statement. — Jamal

Did you know we had a longstanding member who became trans and subsequently committed suicide?

So I actually have to ask you to point me to where it was said, or to explain what was said? Because I'm pretty sure you're wrong. — Jamal

You really want me to look it up?

I don't think so. — Jamal

Actually, yes.

To be fully objective, it's a biological man who identifies and presents as a biologucal woman. Your definition suggests a third gender. Mine is silent to that because that is disputed. — Hanover

Heh, we used to have a moderator who warned he would ban anyone who said what you just said, as if that was hate speech or something. I guess times have changed.

I see this from time to time. One I'm thinking of tries to baffle with bullshit. Best to walk away, right?
— frank

Sure, but walking away does not solve, or even ameliorate, the problem. — Janus

Maybe. If someone uses AI to create a fascinating post, could you engage with it?

1) A man is a male person because they had an xy chromosome, testicles, a penis, and a prostate gland at birth. His mature reproductive sex role is to eject sperm during sexual intercourse.

2) A woman is a female person born with an xx chromosome, ovaries, a uterus, a vagina, fallopian tubes, a cervix, etc. Her reproductive role is to produce an egg for fertilization by sperm after sexual intercourse, and harbor the developing fetus for 9 months. — BC

Sometimes people who become trans go off to another city and start over where they can be taken as their new gender. Still, sooner or later, they have to reveal to prospective partners that they're trans, and it's not a small bump in the relationship road.

So when we say that a transwoman is a woman, there's information we're leaving out. Really, a transwoman is a transwoman.

and the ways in which prominent members of this site have used it to make themselves look smarter than they really are — Janus

I see this from time to time. One I'm thinking of tries to baffle with bullshit. Best to walk away, right?

. I believe not entirely, — Patterner

What do you think the nature of the nonphysical part is?

That you can't prove we aren't nonphysical.

I don't think you can prove that we aren't physical.

"We can by inductive reasoning" just is "the future will resemble the past". It's re-stating, not explaining. — Banno

:up:

My guess is he's running a scam.

Perhaps there's already an AGI and it's starting a pro-ai psyops campaign to influence public opinion in message boards like this. — RogueAI

I was just asking out of curiosity.

Yes, the text was created by AI because I asked it to. To explain the way I have a conversation with it. — BelegCZ

I guess I'm curious about why you use it. Is it because English isn't your first language and using AI makes that easier? Is it because you use it pervasively to save time? Or why?

I've noticed that where I work, AI likes to say "I hope this message finds you well." I guess just knowing that's coming from an AI makes it sound self-conscious and hollow.

Like the OP, this post appears to be AI generated.

You say all of this, along with whatever other processes are taking place, is a description of not only things like receiving sensory input and distinguishing wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum, and receptors on my tongue distinguishing molecules that have made contact, but also seeing the color red, and tasting the sweetness of sugar. More than that, it's a description of my thoughts. — Patterner

You can initiate a fight or flight response by deciding to think of something scary. Maybe that would be an argument that a description of how neurons communicate isn't a description of thought.

You can also get a dose of adrenaline by making yourself hyperventilate. Don't do it in the middle of the night though, because you won't be able to sleep afterwards.

:up:

No, it does not fail.

There are different subjects in your premises. Zeus is a deity, and its characteristics are based on Greek mythology. It is the subject of a "myth", nothing close to something real.

Meanwhile, Michael or Javi is real, because you are causing me to feel certain experiences. There are some chances that you might appear in my dreams, because the source of your existence (at least in what I consider real) is based in my experience of interacting with you. Then, you exist.

I have never experienced Zeus, nor did I dream with him. I think it is pretty obvious the cause: his source of existence is missing.

However, the source of your existence is obvious to me. — javi2541997

This touches on an aspect of belief that Davidson focuses on: that no belief exists in isolation. Each of your beliefs is part of a web of inter-related beliefs. Your belief that Zeus is not real is a component of your cohesive worldview, it's ultimately bound up with everything else you believe, such as that strawberries are plants and clouds are made of water vapor. This web or field of beliefs, along with the concept of truth, essentially is your rationality. It can be updated, but not all at once, so in a sense it's self stabilizing.

And now you put your rationality to the job of determining its own foundations and effectiveness at delivering you reliable information. You're asking the eye to see itself. As always, it will go to work trying to give you the explanation you seek. That's what it does. It follows the Law of Explanation, which is that everything must have one, including the Law itself.

If someone suggested a referendum, wouldn't Putin just send them to the front in Ukraine?

:up:

And crucially, none of this rescues us from Hume’s problem — Banno

This. If anything, abduction is a description of the problem.

Probably Putin wouldn't perform this referendum, but the fact of his refusal will make the Russians experience a cognitive dissonance, they will start understanding that Putin lies to them. — Linkey

They probably already know that.

How about the USA cedes territory to Russia? — Michael

We could give them South Carolina.

I disagree. He's not a naive realist, and he's not a realist in any other ordinary way, but I don't think he believes that reality is constituted by the mind. — Jamal

Ontological anti-realism isn't the view that reality is constituted by the mind. You're thinking of Dummett's anti-realism.

Ontological anti-realists wouldn't try to settle the debate about whether the mind or the body takes precedence. Sometimes it's the kind of skepticism we find in Wittgenstein, which is that we don't have a vantage point from which to rule on the question. In continental philosophy, it's dialectics: that mind and body are thesis and anti-thesis. What's the synthesis? The Absolute, which was once another name for God. The fact that the Absolute inherits shades of divinity contributes to the illusion that it's something static. The only thing we'll ever know about the Absolute is the experience of following the contours of the mind, which is dialectics. It's very cool to be reminded of that.

Add to that his commitment to aspects of reality denigrated or ignored by other philosophers: the particular and contingent, and suffering — Jamal

I'm struggling to fit Adorno into my philosophical landscape, and this is another thread to it: Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche all orbit around suffering, primarily with the aim of accepting it as part of life: and not just an unfortunate part, and definitely not a result of capitalism, but rather the primary engine of the psyche. Does this trivialize or denigrate suffering? Actually, I think it does. The philosophy of acceptance needs to be tempered by actually facing it.

But Adorno believes this knowledge of our mediation can reveal mediation's crimes and misdemeanors. — Jamal

Absolutely. Pun intended. :smile:

Speaking of change, a cool thing to do is compare Adorno's conception of emancipation to Heidegger's, then think about how very different their approaches to dialectics were. Adorno and Heidegger are at the poles on both philosophical and political spectrums, so you can walk through how they relate to each other dialectically, and the whole thing subsequently swirls down the drain. Just kidding.

Another cool thing, regarding change, is to rethink how Hegel figured in Marxism. Somewhere along the line, I got the impression that Marx was more a student of Feuerbach than Hegel, so a project would be to revisit Feuerbach's way of turning Hegel on his head, vs. Adorno's.

And more change: We presently live at a time when extremes of right and left are weirdly allied. What would Adorno say about that?

I might go back and reread with those questions in mind. ND is very dense and mysterious, so a little more staring at the page might be good. :razz:

Sometimes knowledge enters philosophical consideration in the form of a propositional attitude. The SEP says it well:

Propositional attitude reporting sentences concern cognitive relations people bear to propositions. A paradigm example is the sentence ‘Jill believes that Jack broke his crown’. Arguably, ‘believes, ‘hopes’, and ‘knows’ are propositional attitude verb and, when followed by a clause that includes a full sentence expressing a proposition (a that-clause) form propositional attitude reporting sentences. Attributions of cognitive relations to propositions can also take other forms. For example, ‘Jack believes what Jill said’ and ‘Jack believes everything Jill believes’ are both propositional attitude ascriptions, even though the attitude verb is not followed by a that-clause. Some philosophers and linguists also claim that sentences like ‘Jill wanted Jack to fall’, ‘Jack and Jill are seeking water’, and ‘Jack fears Jill’, for example, are to be analyzed as propositional attitude ascribing sentences, the first saying, perhaps, something to the effect that Jill wants that Jack falls, the second that Jack and Jill strive that they find water, and the third that Jack fears that Jill will hurt him. But such analyses are controversial. (See the entry on intensional transitive verbs.)

Having a successful theory of propositional attitude reports is important, as they serve as a converging point for a number of different fields, including philosophy of language, natural language semantics, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and epistemology.

In this article, we examine attempts to deal with a puzzle about propositional attitude reporting sentences that was first posed by Gottlob Frege in his 1892. Subsequent literature has been concerned with developing a semantic theory that offers an adequate treatment of this puzzle. We present the main theories and note the considerations that count in their favor and some of the problems that they face.

1. Frege’s puzzle — sep article on propositional attitude reporting

I recently did a thread in Frege's puzzle, but I'd be happy to revisit it if anyone's interested.

Knowledge applies in a wide variety of language games and we can expect its definition to be adjusted to suit each context — Ludwig V

Yep.

Our primary disagreement seems to be concerning what type of existence things like society, economic systems, and ideology, have. You claim these to be objects, i claim them to be concepts. I've shown willingness to compromise. I'm ready to allow that they are material objects, under the principles of Marxist materialism, whereby concepts are material objects. This way, these things can be concepts as I claim, and also material objects, as you want them to be interpreted. — Metaphysician Undercover

Adorno was an ontological anti-realist. He wouldn't take the concept, as you're using the word, and materiality to be anymore than a dichotomy that plays out in one kind of dialectical story. What's implied by dialectics is unification. When you realize that ideas and materiality are two sides of one coin, the image of dissolution of the division appears to the mind. Giving a name to the outcome of this dissolution, and then reifying it, is positive dialectics.

In other words, try to remember that "dialectics" is in the title. That is the framework for all that follows.

But I just finished The Magus by John Fowles yesterday and it's vying for the top 5 spot - it's astonishing — Manuel

So is the French Lieutenant's Woman.

OK. Then can you tell me anything about the other meanings? — Ludwig V

There's know that and there's know how. Sometimes it's know of. In some cases, it might be a combination?

I know how you feel.
You should know better than to eat wild mushrooms.
I didn't know which path I should take.
I want to know what it's like to jump from an airplane.
How do the migrating butterflies know the way to Mexico?
I love you more than you'll ever know.
Frank doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground.

I don't think it's really necessary to build a formula for each usage. Do you?

I wonder what the thoughts are of the members of this forum on this subject. — dclements

This article touches on some of the concerns: Population decline's effects on global economy.

South Korea is often held up as an example of negative growth that has passed the point of no return (where the present population no longer has the means to reverse negative growth.) The challenge is adapting to a no growth economy, which is foreign territory for a large chunk of the human population. AI and robots to the rescue?

But how does negation occur? — NotAristotle

It's part of the dialectical process.

JTB amounts to a procedure for working out whether some random belief is actually knowledge. — Ludwig V

I think it's just an expression of one of the meanings of "knowledge."

The non-conceptual is whatever isn't conceptual, which comes down mainly to two specific overlapping meanings: (a) it's what philosophical thought is properly directed towards, also known in ND as what is heterogeneous to thought—i.e., particular things, like physical objects, economic systems, works of art, etc.; or (b) it's whatever eludes conceptual capture. Sense (b) is equivalent to the meaning of the non-identical. — Jamal

I agree with this.

But I see that as a consequence of the basic concept<->(non-conceptual) object relationship. A good way to think about that is to see the non-conceptual as the thing in itself, if you can imagine this to be immanent to experience, decoupled from Kant's formal apparatus, and potentially determinate. In my opinion, Adorno is as Kantian as he is Hegelian, and often more so. You see it especially here. — Jamal

I interpreted Adorno differently. I don't want to drag the thread through parts of the text that have already been covered, but just to explain, these passages made me think Adorno was using or alluding to the specialized meaning Hegel gave to the word concept:

If dialectics has however become inescapable, then it cannot remain glued to its principle like ontology and transcendental philosophy, as a pivotal structure, however modifiable. The critique of ontology does not aim at any other ontology, nor even at one which is non-ontological. Otherwise it would merely posit an Other as what is simply and purely first; this time not the absolute identity, being, the concept, but the non-identical, the existent, facticity.
…
The idea of something immutable, identical to itself, would also thereby collapse. It is derived from the domination of the concept, which wished to be constant towards its content, precisely its “matter”, and for that reason is blind to such. -- ND pg 151, 154

I think the content of the concept is live cases of dialectical thinking, a dynamic flow of thought comparing and contrasting oppositions. An easy example of what Hegel meant by concept is Heidegger's Dasein. Though Heidegger treats it as something static, it's arrived at by a journey of thought that involves subjective and objective poles. Dasein is an example of positive dialectics where it appears we've reached some higher truth about Being and now we can cast aside those poles that had starring roles in the preceding journey. Adorno is saying that this casting aside of the content of the concept creates an illusion.

So it's true that the non-conceptual is particular things, like physical objects. Dialectics tells us that physical objects can't have some substantial existence independent of the "I" but we experience them as separate. That sense of clear separation is part of the journey of dialectics. So it's not just physical things that make up the non-conceptual. Your independent, unique self is also an example. Dialectics says you can't be an independent thing. But that's part of the mechanics of thought. It's a mistake to try to toss it in the trash.

The concept is the union of opposites, the union of subject and object. The nonconceptual is the disunity of same.

When I was reading ND, this is the meaning of "concept" I was thinking of. If you were using a different meaning, we would come up with very different interpretations of Adorno.

CONCEPT (Begriff). Also translated (by Miller) as 'Notion'. The verb begreifen incorporates greifen, to seize. For Hegel, a concept is not (as it is for Kant) a representation of what several things have in common. Per Inwood, concepts are for Hegel not sharply distinct from the 'I' or from objects, nor from one another. When Hegel speaks of the Concept, he sometimes just means concepts in general, but he also uses it to mean, per Solomon, the most adequate conception of the world as a whole. Per Geraets et al, the Concept refers to the movement of logical thinking in its self-comprehension. Solomon suggests that for Hegel the Concept sometimes has the force of 'ourconception of concepts', and that it may also refer to the process of conceptual change, since for Hegel the identity of concepts is bound up with dialectical movement. Inwood suggests that Hegel sometimes assimilates the Concept to God. Kainz glosses the Concept as a 'grasping-together of opposites'. — UC San Diego