What is harm? — Andrew4Handel

This seems to be just the contrast pole of the ‘Is good indefinable’ thread.

:up:

What a mess. So far every contribution to this thread has used circular terms to ‘define’ the good.
— Joshs

No, no, no. Read the previous page. Read my definition of "good". It is not circular. — god must be atheist

I must have missed how your definition avoids being circular. Did you somewhere indicate how good is more or other than just what benefits an individual relative to their needs?

I'm with Isaac on this one. There doesn't have to be a why. The speed of light has to be something. Why does there have to be a reason? Sometimes "just because" is a good answer to a question. — T Clark

‘Why’ questions have to do with the fact that explanations in science aren't just about what works, they are about coming up with different ways of construing how things might work. The why questions the frame within which the ‘how’ works A reductive stimulus -response account of human behavior works, but only when we ask why it works can we begin to see alternative ways of modeling behavior that also work, but according to a different ‘why’. It is via a ‘why’ that we can turn an arbitrary mechanistic explanation into one that transforms the arbitrary and seemingly random into a patterned regularity.

‘Just because’ ignores the fact that facts are what they are because of their role within paradigms( the ‘how’) , and paradigms are upended ( the why) on a regular basis.

we cannot conceive how a cascade of biological processes can lead to the observed symptoms of consciousness, because we cannot conceive how any physical process can lead to consciousness.
— hypericin

I can. It's simple. Some collection of biological processes leads to the observed symptoms of consciousness. Why wouldn't they? What's in the way? What compelling physical law prevents biological processes from causing whatever symptoms they so happen to cause? — Isaac

To be fair to hypericin, the recent ambitions to explain consciousness were only possible as a result of innovations in thinking about biological processes which
removed the basis of those processes from traditional
accounts of physical causality. One cannot derive consciousness from a conceptually impoverished physicalist account.

I don't think the question makes any sense at all. We don't ask why the speed of light is 299,792,458 metres per second — Isaac

Whenever our sciences leave us with an arbitrary starting point , this should be an impetus to start asking ‘why’ questions. Asking why a physical constant happens to be what it is is part of what led to the hypothesis that our universe with its constants may not be the only one , that perhaps an evolutionary development of universes produced a series of constants linked to each other via a genesis. Thus, ‘dont ask why’ was transformed into ‘this may be why’.

There are absolutes in this world, and there are relatives. "Good" is a relative. Only ethicists on the Kantian (?) vein of thought (or maybe in other veins as well) think that there is some ideal, everlasting, and perfect "good" out there — god must be atheist

I think all absolutes are also, at the same time, relatives. For instance, the qualitative content of a moment of awareness is contingent and relative, but its condition of possibility is time consciousness, the appearance of now as a tripartite structure of past(memory , present and future( expectation). This is true of ‘good’, of course, but in addition, what is experienced as good involves a validation of expectation, whereas
what is not good involves a mismatch between expectation and appearance.

The Kantian hope of an absolute specific qualitative content of meaning associated with the good ( categorical imperative) turned out to be only relative, but there are formal structural conditions of possibility for the experience of goodness that post-Kantian philosophers argue are absolute.

definitions are circular....

In @particular, the question as to whether it is good topreserve stable ongoing self-consistency of interaction with an environment under changing conditions"".

That's by no means obvious. Perhaps ask schopenhauer1 or any other antinatalist. — Banno

Definitions are circular within a finite frame. The circular series of terms for ‘good’ used in this thread that I referred to are mutually defined according to a common or interwoven sense, in which the ‘meaning of the ‘good ‘ is contingent, either relative to the individual or culture, but arbitrary in its basis. My circular frame of definitions for the ‘good’ are interwoven via a different sense. In my circle, the arbitrariness of the good is only an apparent arbitrariness. That it is only apparent makes it neither true nor false, but a certain useful way of understanding the good. My definition is useful in a different way , which leaves the previous definition intact ( if one only sees the good as arbitrary then that is valid, as far as it goes). I invite others to see my definition as enriching the arbitrary definition, by saying what others are unable to say about the good besides the fact that it is arbitrary. This would be like inviting others to see that the relation between an electric current and a magnetic field is not arbitrary but interlocked. I don’t need to say that what I show them is true, only that it allows me to do things that connect the two concepts in more ways than what they were able to do.


Schopenhauer1 believes it is good to not be born, and that it is not good to be alive. Is this a disagreement with
the idea that goodness is synonymous with "preserving stable ongoing self-consistency of interaction with an environment under changing conditions"?
I would say no, in the same way that showing a connection between electricity and magnetism is not a disagreement with seeing them as unconnected so much as having something more to say about them.
In this case , the more than can be said concerning the condition of possibility of having a desire to live , die or not be born involves showing what is presupposed in having any desire whatsoever namely the avoidance of interruption, discontinuity and chaos. This is not inconsistent with a circular frame of definitions that an antinatalist might use , rather it also says what they cannot say , or see.

I'm a meta-ethical nihilist of the error-theory variety. I don't think there's really a way to define good in some natural or factual way. I think the argument from difference is what persuades me of this, in the end -- people simply do disagree over what is most important and make choices between goods, and in those cases people have good reasons in spite of contradicting one another in a matter of choice, so to say one is good or the other is good is to make a similar choice. I think we make choices between competing goods, and "goods" is itself something which we define for ourselves — Moliere

The organizational dynamics I laid out don’t have to be understood in naturalized fashion. In fact I think it’s best understood as a metaphysical presupposition, and it underlies, in different ways, the ethical thinking of philosophers as diverse as Husserl, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Deleuze , Rorty , Gergen and Derrida.

Yes, people do disagree over what is most important if we look at their preferences strictly in terms of qualitative content. But we can’t stop there , because then we are only reifying the domain of good as an arbitrary value rather than getting at its origin. There is no such thing as a good in itself , even if we are restricting this good in itself to a contingent subject. What arises for any of us as something good is what works for us within the framework of a system of values to enrich and move forward that system. But value systems are always in the process of changing into new systems, so that the particular qualitative content that represents a good within one system is no longer works within the new system. So this is the contingent and relative aspect of good. But the other aspect of the good is universal and a priori.

This is the aspect of the good which survives changes in values systems, it’s formal rather than specific structure. This aspect of the good we all can agree on. Since eventually any good within a particular value system will stop working for us as we move beyond that system, the philosophers I mentioned above agree that it is universally ‘better’ to keep oneself mobile , to celebrate the movement from one value system to one that replaces it rather than getting stuck in any one system for too long. So you see that for these thinkers the universal , formal aspect of goodness as efficacy of relational change ( usefulness) is more significant that the contingent and relative aspect that you highlight. It is this understanding of the universal aspect of the good that allows us to honor an endless plurality of value systems, and along with them an endless variety of qualitative senses of the good, rather than looking for the correct one. We understand that each sense of the good works within its system, and is valid for that reason and within that context.

Even if there are natural, ethical facts -- people choose against proper functioning and call it good. — Moliere

You lost me. How exactly are you understanding ‘proper functioning’ and what does it have to do with the normatively oriented organizational dynamics of living systems?
And give me an example of how one ‘chooses against proper functioning’? I have a feeling you are conflating ‘proper’ with a specific qualitative content of meaning, which places you squarely back within the circular defining of ‘good’( my qualitative meaning of good differs from your qualitative meaning of it).

So if the good is defined by happiness, we can ask "But is happiness really good?" -- does that question make sense to you?

If we double down and say, yes, happiness really is the good, then the question falls flat.

But if you agree that the question makes sense, rather than it being a tautology, then there must be a distinction between happiness and goodness such that we can ask the question and make sense of it — Moliere

What a mess. So far every contribution to this thread has used circular terms to ‘define’ the good. Even fairness implies a moral notion of equivalence or balance. Fair refers to a ‘good’ sort of balance. Justice may not be pleasant but it is ‘good’. Hmm, so there is no ‘pleasantness’ associated with aim of justice? What’s needed is a definition of good , pleasant , happy , absence of suffering, that breaks out of the circle and shatters Moore’s contention. We have a number of options to choose from here. We could look at biologically-based thinking that grounds affective valuation in the organizational principles of living systems.

Of course , in the most basic sense, all life forms are shaped by pressures for survival. But it is not simple survival that is at stake, but the ability to preserve stable ongoing self-consistency of interaction with an environment under changing conditions. Thus living systems have an overall normative directionality, and it is this which it is necessary to maintain when we talk about ‘survival’. So what is ‘good’ for an organism is good from the perspective of its own aims and purposes, which are anticipatory. Living systems are anticipatory sense-makers. In a cognizing creature, what is good is associated with what is coherent , intelligible, predictable in a relative sense, and what is ‘better is aligned with what enables one to attain greater intimacy, consistency and intelligibility of events. What is bad is associated with chaos , confusion, the interruption of coherent sense-making.

It s not as if the subjective feelings of good and bad are mechanisms arbitrarily tacked onto these organizational
dynamics, such that at some point the correlation between goodness and intelligibility could be severed and good could become attached to incoherence.
Goodness is simply another way to talk about what enhances normative functioning of a cognizing system.
Goodness must be detached from the reliance most moral theories place on specific qualitative content of meaning, and instead conceived in terms of the anticipatory integrity of sense-making.

After Davidson in On the very idea..., any completely incommensurable worldview could not be recognised as a world view. — Banno

Davidson thinks he is dismissing the very notion of a conceptual scheme, when in fact he is only dismissing the Quinean model and its underlying Kantian scheme-content dualism( Davidson’s third dogma of empiricism) , which involves the identification of conceptual schemes with sentential languages and the thesis of redistribution of truth-values across different conceptual schemes. Two schemes/languages differ when some substantial sentences of one language are not held to be true in the other in a systematic manner.

Conceptual relativism does not involve “confrontations between two conceptual schemes with different distributions of truth-values over their assertions, but rather confrontations between two languages with different distributions of truth-value status over their sentences due to incompat­ible metaphysical presuppositions. They do not lie in the sphere of disagreement or conflict of the sort arising when one theory holds something to be true that the other holds to be false. The difference lies in the fact that one side has nothing to say about what is claimed by the other side. It is not that they say the same thing differently, but rather that they say totally different things. The key contrast here is between saying something (asserting or denying) and saying nothing.”(On Davidson’s Refutation of Conceptual Schemes and Conceptual Relativism)

If every new use of a word is an original creation, language would be neither usable nor learnable. It would be mere babble, a different word each time.

Rather, as Davidson suggests in derangement of epitaphs, novel use is built on convention. — Banno

There is a way of continuing to be the same differently. Novelty built on convention doesn’t have to mean that the convention is ‘extant’ and then utilized to build the novel use, or , put differently, that a word belongs to a ‘type of use’, as Hacker and Baker argue. It can mean that what the convention ‘was’ is just as much determined by how it is used freshly as the novel speech is governed by the past convention which it employs. That way we don’t end up talking as though words ‘refer to’ types of use or conventions or are accountable to an independently specifiable rule or norm.

↪fdrake
Banno may or may not be emotionally attached to naive realism and uses his intellect to find ways to ignore challenges to it and deny others the right to entertain those challenges. His strategy is to somehow use language as a foundation while simultaneously denying that foundationalism of any kind is appropriate. Thus he can't really allow any ineffable components because that screws with his foundation.

Josh's foundation is some sort of ever evolving change. Where Banno abhors privacy in a sort of neurotic way, Josh abhors stasis. And this is the central conflict. Josh needs part of the world to always be slightly out of reach, unknown, unexplained, etc. He needs an open window for his foundation of Becoming, so he's fond of the ineffable. — frank

I think I like this characterization of my position. But as regards Banno, I would ask you if you think that his thinking is significantly removed from the vicinity of Davidson and Anscombe, who he admires, and who are certainly not naive realists.

I have a few more things to say about the ineffable.
I entered into this conversation with a critique of formal logic that focuses on its inability to indicate in its terms what you call the becoming of sense. I’d like to expand on that a bit. In the early 1960’s Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published. In it he characterized the participants in competing scientific paradigmatic communities as living in different , incommensurable worlds. He believed that this incommensurability was bridgeable, though, due to the fact that there was enough commonality in the larger experience of various empirical communities to allow for a basis of translation of empirical concepts. Paul Feyerabend had a more radical view of incommensurability, arguing that it isn’t just scientific paradigms narrowly construed that separates members of empirical communities , but larger cultural worldviews.
Furthermore, the shifting foundation of the meaning of scientific ( and cultural) concepts doesn’t only take place during scientific revolutions , but also during periods of what Kuhn called normal science. We can find even more powerful ways of thinking about the role of transformation of sense in everyday discourse in writers such as Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Deleuze, Foucault and Rorty.
It is no coincidence that central to the work of all these thinkers is a critique of propositional logic.

The assumption they all share is that the transformation
in the meaning of language concepts that Kuhn associated with scientific revolutions is already at work in the most basic uses of everyday language.
Thus, even predicational logic must in some way be expressing more than what it is commonly assumed to be expressing (the novel arrangement of extant concepts).

Put differently, there is no such thing as an extant concept, only concepts that, in their incorporation into a syllogism as subject, predicate or related element, arrive as already changed in their sense by the situational context of the structure of the syllogism. As Wittgenstein said, a word only exists in its actual use. That does not mean that a situational use of a word links up to an extant category stored in individual or social memory. It means that the category doesn’t have an existence outside of the situational use of the word, that there are in fact no extant categories.

In sum, word use is creation, pure and simple, and no component of a logical proposition involves the recycling of an extant meaning. My understanding of ineffability has to do with this impossibility of recycling, the fact that we can’t return to a prior sense of a meaning, there is no repetition of an identity. So what is slightly out of reach isnt the future of language but its past. Language is itself ineffable in the sense that to repeat, represent and recognize is to transform. Notice that this idea of ineffability makes it intrinsic to recognition, comprehension, intelligibility, relevance and meaning rather than something opposed to it or outside of it. Ineffability is the condition of possibility of understanding.







I

the laws of biology, chemistry, electricity, and quantum mechanics in no way explain consciousness—or even hint that consciousness is possible… no understanding of physical processes, however complete, explains consciousness. — Art48

As others have pointed out, it may be the particular organizational terms ( reductive causality) in which the sciences of physics and chemistry are rendered that has limited an empirical description of consciousness. Neuroscience believes it is beginning to make headway, and this is due in large part to an enrichment of the language of empirical causality. As dynamical, reciprocal forms of causation are adopted consciousness becomes amenable to modelling. So it seems that it is not an unbridgeable divide between subjective experience and the physical world that has been responsible for science’s difficulties in explaining consciousness. Rather, it is the restrictive ways we have chosen to render physical processes that is the culprit.

If you can translate this out of Heideggerese for the purposes of this thread, I'd really appreciate it. I do think there's good things to pursue in that approach, but I don't think it's right to turn the discussion into more Heidegger quibbles — fdrake

This quote from Joseph Rouse belongs to a paper in which he critiques Steven Crowell’s Heideggerian account of identifying with a vocation. Even though he is channeling Heidegger to an extent here , his overall project owes more to recent ideas in ecological biology (niche construction) and the later Wittgenstein than to Heidegger, and his main interlocutors come from the Analytic tradition( Sellars, Davidson, Putnam, Brandom, Haugeland, McDowell).

His central interest concerns how conceptual understanding, as a form of biological niche construction, forms and is reciprocally shaped by both discursive and material interactions with an environment. The point he is trying to make is that as individuals we are not simply locked into particular conceptual norms , even if only temporarily. Every moment of interchange allows for the contestation and re-defining of those norms in partially shared contexts of discourse. Identities are placed over us from the culture, they are redetermined in each context, for each participant of a language game.

Rorty is just an ontological anti-realist. There's a whole spectrum of that including various hard and soft options. It's all analytical philosophy, though. If you want to read an article about it, it will be an analytical philosopher you're reading. Nothing particularly reformed about it, I don't think — frank

Except that on one side are those who find the symbolism of logical formalism important, perhaps indispensable , because it gets at the root of all those things that are relevant to philosophy ( the nature of language, meaning , truth, justification ) and on the other those who find it not very useful and certainly not engaging with the fundamental issues of philosophy. They side with the later Wittgenstein who found formal
logic to get in the way of a clarified understanding of such fundamental issues. Would you call someone who had almost no use for formal logic , and thought ‘ truth’ was a confused idea an analytic philosopher? Even Putnam said analytic philosophy had reached the end of its relevance .

our language of logic is what makes it so more than what is the case. We can say what we like, and define what we like, and while that will change how we talk about things that won't change whatever "stuff" is. — Moliere

Reformed analytic philosophers like Rorty will argue the opposite. Once we divest ourselves of our temptation to assume intrinsic features of the world, all we have is our changing performances of language as they simultaneously express and shape our material
interactions with each other. Formal logic and its various notions of ‘truth’ depends for its sense on faith in intrinsicality. Even those at the very progressive edge of the analytic tradition, like Hilary Putnam, who is a conceptual relativist, hold onto a valuative realism
On the one hand, he argues “So much about the identity relations between different categories of mathematical objects is conventional, that the picture of ourselves a describing a bunch of objects that are there "anyway" is in trouble from the start.” “…what leads to "Platonizing" is yielding to the temptation to find mysterious entities which somehow guarantee or stand behind correct judgments of the reasonable and the unreasonable.”

But then he insists there are intrinsic non-relative valuative grounds for scientific and ethical truth. This belief allows him to uphold ideas of warranted justification and truth.

Rorty , however , believes the following about warranted justification as it is used in formal logic:

“The metaphysician thinks that there is an overriding intellectual duty to present arguments for one's controversial views - arguments which will start from relatively uncontroversial premises. The ironist thinks that such arguments - logical arguments - are all very well in their way, and useful as expository devices, but in the end not much more than ways of getting people to change their practices without admitting they have done so. The ironist's preferred form of argument is dialectical in the sense that she takes the unit of persuasion to be a vocabulary rather than a proposition. Her method is redescription rather than inference. Ironists specialize in redescribing ranges of obiects or events in partially neologistic jargon, in the hope of inciting people to adopt and extend that jargon. An ironist hopes that by the time she has finished using old words in new senses, not to mention introducing brand-new words, people will no longer ask questions phrased in the old words. So the ironist thinks of logic as ancillary to dialectic, whereas the metaphysician thinks of dialectic as a species of rhetoric, which in turn is a shoddy substitute for logic.”

I met a man today who claimed to know everything everyone was thinking. — trogdor

It’s interesting that you didn’t add that he knew WHY they were thinking what they were thinking, which is much more important. For instance, perhaps he could hear their thoughts broadcast to him. That would not solve the issue of interpreting motivation or sense, and it would not by itself allow him to empathize with their perspective.
We can turn this around and posit a man who couldn’t hear people’s thoughts , but when they deliberately communicated with him, he always know why they were thinking what they were thinking, such that he was able to always see things sympathetically from their point of view. Some are better at this than others, and this skill is much more valuable than simply being able to hear people’s thoughts.

In both examples, external norms seem to render identifications as determinative. This, secretly, is also part of the Behaviour Only account, as what counts as a characteristic property for an identity is also - at least partially - determined by an agent's relationship with binding norms. Eg, the general understanding of what it means to be a Star Wars fan, and what institutional rites need to apply to the agent to make them a police officer over and above the constituents of the property cluster.

Just as unenlightened said, when you look at personal identity closely, not even the bits which are "in you", or that "you feel" come even close to establishing your identity. In that regard, personal identity is deeply impersonal. Thus something like an institutional account of personal identity needs to be explored. — fdrake

Neither what is only ‘in you’ nor what is externally institutional get at how we understand language. The two need to be intimately interwoven such that the meaning of an identity is always only partially shared.

As Joseph Rouse argues,

“We find ourselves already thrown into some “abilities-to-be” and not others, in a meaningful situation whose salient significance is responsive to how we press ahead into those possibilities. Both whether to continue in those roles, and what those roles would demand of us, is not already determined, however, but is at issue in whether and how we take them up. If I am a parent or a teacher, what it is to be a parent or teacher is not already determined but is continually worked out in how I take up those roles and respond to what they make salient in my situation. What I and others have been doing all along is at issue in those ongoing responses, along with what the practice and its roles and disclosures would thereby become. The disclosedness of my role or vocation is the space of intelligible possibility opened by our mutual involvement with one another in ongoing patterns of practice whose continuation and significance are not already determined but are instead determinative of who and how we are.”

I say the "is" of predications such as "the cat is on the mat" have no great semantic role, and evidence this by the fact that there are languages that do not have any such arrangement - first order logic and sign language and so on.

You contend that the "is" has some thing to do with being, and is indispensable. — Banno

I’m sorry I haven’t made myself very clear.


Predicational logic assumes already defined and separable units or parts.The fact that these parts are already defined means that their ‘being’ is treated as a frozen ‘is’ for the purposes of the proposition. But we do not learn, know, or use language by knowing separate, defined, unitized 'variables' of circumstances. Using language is a creative activity in which some new event of meaning crosses with a substrate such as to redefine the sense of the substrate in the act of creating the new sense. It is irrelevant whether we use the copula ‘is’ or not in a sentence. What matter is that we realize that the being of all of the components of a proposition does. ot amount to a static ‘is’ ( even if we dub them categories of use). None of the members of a proposition have any existence outside of the unique context of their actual use.

Let's see if we can address this without needing to account for the metaphysics of humour. — Banno

“The metaphysics of humour is somewhat of a mystery, as it is not a science that has been heavily studied in the metaphysical context. Generally speaking, jokes and humorous scenarios can be thought of as moments of understanding outside of the conventional sense. This understanding often comes from a sense of familiarity, as the joke addresses a relatable issue. As such, the understanding gained from humor can be thought of as a type of insight into the world and our relation to it. Humor also serves as a way of helping to decrease stress, foster communion with others, or gain awareness and perspective. Therefore, it can be seen as a type of metaphysical experience, as it helps people to form a tangible connection and deeper understanding with reality. The laughter and joy elicited by humor can be a sort of spiritual release, that can bring a sense of affirmation or peaceful reconciliation to such metaphysical understanding.“(Chat GPT :nerd: )

If you don't have one, then we can move beyond this and discuss the ramifications of metaphysical subjectivism, namely how it slips into idealism and solipsism. It's the position that Descartes started with.

If, however, you do believe truth does exist independent of justification, then you'll have to explain why it is irrelevant when we execute the wrong person — Hanover

Do you believe that radically relativistic perspectives of truth within philosophy, such as we see with postmodernist and post-structuralist writers, are examples of metaphysical subjectivism?

"One cannot intend more than one meaning at a time". It's not obvious that this is so. We do have double entendre, after all, which seems to do exactly that. — Banno

Why does it seem to do exactly that? Because logical analysis uses at its ground-floor starting point the product of a genesis of sense, the point after one has lumped together two temporally distinct acts into a single meaning. Double entendre is a category that includes two members. How do we learn that those two members form a category?
Let’s use a visual analogy. Double entendre is like those optical illusions where one has to perform a shift of attention, or gestalt shift, to see an image as one form vs another. For instance , one either sees the image as a vase or as two faces facing each other, but one cannot see both figures at the same time. But we learn to create one categorical concept out of this series of experiences, which includes both images as well as the shift between them , and this concept is called the Rubin Vase illusion.

The moments of attentional sense making up the genesis of this concept begin with our experience of one imagine, then the other, followed by a synthesizing act of sense in which we form the concept of a two-sides gestalt shift. Similarly , in learning the meaning of double entendre, we understand first one meaning of a word, then a second meaning of the same word, followed by a synthesizing conceptualization encompassing both meanings as mutually exclusive but paired together, and we call this concept ‘double entendre’. Its meaning includes within it its genesis from these separate acts of meaning.
Double entendre means the grouping together in one word mutually incompatible meanings. Put differently, it is a single concept expressing the impossibility understanding two distinct meanings at the same time.

I'm asking if it is possible that you divorce yourself not from the factual memory but from the hurt (emotional memory) and thus you meet the situation fresh. — TheMadMan

I think that’s difficult to do because one has to have a reason and a way to modify how one approaches the situation. All we have to go on is how we have previously understood it. In order to behave freshly , we have to be able to come up with a new insight, and we can’t just will that.
There is a psychotherapeutic approach called focusing (developed by Carl Roger’s colleague Gene Gendlin) which enables us to tap into our bodily feelings in such a way as to allow new understandings to emerge. Rather than verbally rehashing a stuck situation, we non-judgmentally sense it as a whole from a holistic bodily felt perspective, being on the lookout for shifts in meaning.

↪Joshs

All that seems overly complicated. Putting it more directly, seem to me that "snow is white" is about two things, snow and white; but you insist that it is about three things: snow, white and being — Banno

It is about intentionality, that is , aboutness, which is an act of doing. To intend is to be about something in a certain way, and there cannot be a sense of meaning without aboutness. To think the word ‘snow’ is to think about snow in some manner of givenness ( recollection, imagination, perception). One cannot intend more than one meaning at a time , so the syllogism should be seen as a temporal succession, a movement from one aboutness to another which progressively constructs a higher level concept. One can also think of an act of aboutness as a shift of attention.

Let’s put this in visual terms. I am told to imagine that snow is white. My attention is initially directed , even before I process the meaning of the word ‘snow’ , toward the context of the request, which could be seeing the syllogism as part of a discussion in the philosophy forum. From that attentive context, my attention is now directed toward the image of snow, an image which belongs in my mind to this larger context of an example within a philosophy discussion. From this image of snow my attention is then directed to the word ‘is’ ( if that happens to be part of the syllogism’s construction). Before I hear the word ‘white’ , the word ‘is’ initially directs my attention( primes me) in an open-ended way to prepare for some new event of understanding involving snow( many possibilities are prepared for at once, such as snow is nice , snow is snow, snow is falling, snow is colder than fire).

Hearing the word ‘white’ after the ‘is’ directs my attention in a focused way onto one of these many possibilities, not simply white as a free standing category, but white in its role as a modifier of snow. More specifically, the ‘white’ here modifies the meaning of ‘snow’ by representing a component or dependent part of snow , as something which is contained by or included within snow. This is a spatial aspect of snow , like saying that something is to the left of , on top of , underneath, alongside , outside of or encircling snow. Notice that the word ‘is’ is not necessary to convey these spatial meanings. The important point is that these directional concepts are real. People with damage to spatial areas of the cortex cannot comprehend the meaning of certain kinds of spatial relationships between objects.

In order to understand spatial positioning or containment relationships ( P is a part of S) , one must hold the substrate ( snow) in memory all the while manipulating the contained item (white) , such that one can then experience both the containing ( snow) and the contained ( white) ina single experience. This requires more memory effort than such patients are capable of. The substrate is lost sight of when they move on to the attribute, so it is never seen in its role as attribute, but only as a free-floating concept. The concept ‘inside of ‘ simply doesn’t exist for them.
If you present ‘snow is white’ to someone with this kind of injury, they’ll respond ‘Fine, I know what snow is , and I know what white is , and I even understand that you are claiming some kind of connection between the two, but I don’t understand what kind of connection this is supposed to be.’ On the other hand , they may have no trouble parsing ‘snow is pretty’ , a non-spatial relationship.

My point isnt that one needs a healthy psychological system in order to understand syllogisms , it is that relational elements of syllogisms are real concepts that involve cognitive achievements. There is no more danger of a regress with these sorts of ‘connector’ concepts than there is with the nouns that populate logical propositions.

Assuming one doesn’t have these neurological abnormalities, my attention to the belongingness of white to snow changes my initial understanding of snow, when it was the only word of the syllogism I was exposed to, from a general idea of snow to ‘this snow that is white’.

In sum, the final result of the temporal succession of attentional , and intentional, shifts that marks my moving through the words of the proposition is not three components( ‘snow’ , ‘white’ and ‘a dependent part of’) or two components( snow and white), but only one component, ‘the white snow’, which has embedded within its meaning all of the attentional shifts of sense that mark the history of its construction in the very short period of time it takes to read or hear the syllogism.

That's how it usually is. The 'now' stops being 'now' and becomes the future through the past.

The question is: Is there a 'now' that is not mechanically determined by the past, a 'now' that is constantly refreshing? — TheMadMan

A number of schools of philosophy, as well as researchers in perceptual psychology, believe that a ‘now’ divorced from memories of a past is a now with no content and no meaning. For instance, to recognize the words on this page , or any object in your environment, requires the filling in of what you see with all sorts of information from past experience. Otherwise nothing would makes sense. As a other example, it would be impossible to enjoy music if all we ever experienced was each note in the pure ‘now’ of its appearance. Following a melody requires that we retain in memory the previous notes as the next one is being played.
I would argue that the key to optical moral judgement has to do with what sort of larger framework of interpretation we use to guide our experience of the moment, not cutting ourselves off from that background understanding, which would not only be impossible but would render our world incomprehensible to us. This relation between past and preset is not mechanical, because we subtly reinterpret our past in each fresh moment of experience.

I only acted through my understanding of the present situation' says virtue (although virtue would prefer to remain silent).

So we have the moral person who acts through the traditions of their organized belief system and we have the person of Heraclitus, of Chuang Tzu, of Christ and of many old wisdom who acts spontaneously through their understanding — TheMadMan

Isn’t acting spontaneously still a making reference to one’s accumulated experience, which is shaped by their culture?
Is t the immediate ‘now’ always a synthesis of past and present?

, you are suggesting that "fa" is an incomplete analysis of predication, that we must represent as well the relation between f and a... and that the "is" is needed to explicate something in addition to "fa". — Banno

My argument, drawing from Husserl, is that fa is not an analysis of predication so much as a naive restatement of the idealization that predication represents, and that there is a ‘pre-predicative’ stratum of cognition that predication and all its symbols are built on top of. Trying to use these symbols, like fa, to describe this pre-predicative stratum is putting the cart before the horse.
This pre-predicative level of cognition has been misunderstood as a psychological realm, as if one were using neuroscience to explain the basis of the recognition of symbols , identities and propositions. But a neuroscientific approach that is founded on mathematical methods which in turn are founded on propositional logic is also putting the cart before the horse.

Regarding the treatment of the ‘is’ as an ‘added’ relation between S and P, let’s go back to Bradley. According to Wiki,

“Bradley seems to conclude that the regress should lead us to abandon the idea that relations are "independently real". One way to take this suggestion is as recommending that in the case of a respecting b, we are dealing with a state of affairs that has only two constituents: a and b. It does not, in addition, involve a third item…”

Not sure if you agree with this, but assuming you do, help me understand in what way there are only two constituents in the case of ‘Snow is white’. Certainly we can remove the ‘is’ and end up with the two symbols fa.
But when I hear the words snow is white, how am I able to understand what this means? Let’s begin with the first word of the syllogism. Snow in this context doesn’t refer to the memory of a particular instance of my encounter with snow , it refers to any and all possible instances, that is, snow in general. Would you say, then, that what I am understanding here is the general category of snow? And what about the predicate ‘white’? Am I not treating this word in the context of the syllogism as the general category of the color white? And how am I supposed to understand what this genera category of white is doing in the same syllogism with the general category of snow?
Of all the ways I can think about snow, only one way directs me toward a property or attribute of it, something that describes only own aspect of what snow is, in addition to its being wet, crystalline, sparkly, and so on.
So if, according to Bradley the only constituents of ‘snow is white’ are the two general categories ‘snow’ and ‘white’, what do we call our being directed toward an attribute of snow? If this is not a relation, and not a constituent, do we say that it simply belongs equally and inseparably to the two constituents? This could work if the meaning of ‘snow’ and ‘ white’ have been modified such that , in their participation in the syllogism , they no longer have separable identities apart from their role in the syllogism. Is this what you would say? Because if one can still tease out from the predication a general category of meaning called ‘snow’ and one called ‘white’ then one clearly has a third category, or at least sense, here in the form of ‘is a part of’. Then in order to understand the syllogism as a whole , one must go back and forth between ‘snow’ , ‘white’, and ‘is a part of’. I believe the first option rather than the second. How about you?

My point was that whenever the ‘is’ makes its appearance in a sentence it does so for a reason.
— Joshs
As I explained, it's to stop "Snow White" from being confused with "snow is white". — Banno

I don’t think you mean to say that this is the only function of the word ‘is’, because it can do many things in a sentence. I assume you’re trying to tell me what is NOT a necessary function of the ‘is’ , namely , telling us that two other terms are related in some way.

You might have caught my subtle hint that you seem to be running up against Bradley's regress. I gather you don't agree. — Banno

All components of language are doings, changes, transformations. They relate a prior sense with a new sense by modifying the old sense. The simplest way to convey this is with a sentence that consists of a single word or gesture. All higher structures of language build on this by elaboration and enrichment. Since a single word in itself already can convey a relation in the sense of a doing, I don’t think Bradley’s regress has any relevance to my argument. From my perspective, every addition to the relation conveyed by a one-word sentence would have to be considered a new and different relation rather than a regressive defining of the original relation. The ‘is’, when it is employed , contributes a new kind of transforming relation ( a doing) on top of that constituted by a pair of terms , rather than originally creating the relation between those terms.

Again, there are languages in which it doesn't occur; it is not needed in first order logic; and supposing that it is a relation leads immediately to Bradley's regress. That is, you are suggesting that "fa" is an incomplete analysis of predication, that we must represent as well the relation between f and a. — Banno

I didn’t mean to suggest that the ‘is’ is necessary in order
for predication to do its job. My point was that whenever the ‘is’ makes its appearance in a sentence it does so for a reason. It does something. Rather than calling it a relation, I would say that it modifies the sentence in some way. It acts as a verb, or perhaps an adverb, but then modern philology recognized that the roots on which languages are based act more as verbs than as nouns. The ‘S’ is already a doing, a performance, even before it is linked to a ‘P’, which is a further performance.

↪Joshs "Snow is white" is just a noun and a predicate... f(a). The "is" does nothing. — Banno

If it is in a sentence, it plays a semantic role in that sentence, albeit one that can vary widely in importance depending on the context. Components of a sentence are like notes in a song. Every note has a meaning in the context of the piece. There are no notes which ‘do nothing’. I say ‘ All snow is white’. You say, ‘No, it IS NOT!’ I say , yes, all snow IS white.’ Or I say ‘this snow was white’. You correct me by saying, ‘No, this snow IS white’. It seems to me the ‘is’ carries the central semantic message via the emphasis in these sentences, but via slightly different senses of meaning. Hebrew doesnt use the word ‘is’, because other elements of a sentence take over the function of identifying tense, personal pronoun, etc. But this doesn’t mean that there is no semantic effect of this difference in grammatical structure between English and Hebrew, or between English and any other language. These differences are among the reasons that there cannot be a perfect translation from one language to another.

No response to the rest of my post?

It has a use? What does it do? It doesn't even occur in certain other languages, where the concatenation of a predicate and a noun will suffice. It does Fa in standard logical parlance.
It tells us how to bind or separate them.
— Joshs
"...how to..."? It's a set of instructions? — Banno

‘Snow is white’: In this case , the ‘is’ tells us that white is a dependent attribute of snow. ‘Snow is snow’: In this case, the ‘is’ tells us that snow is identical to itself. ‘Snow’ is whiter than rain’: In this case the ‘is’ tells us that two independent objects are being compared. Of course, the ‘is’ isn’t doing this all by itself. The sentence that it occurs in defines its sense. And this must be true for the sense of the S and the P also. And I take it your point is that the ‘use’ of all of these components of a propositional statement involves not just the role of each symbol in the context of the sentence , but the use of the sentence in the context of public communication.

Better, use is creating a category — Banno

Now we’re getting somewhere. This is what I was trying to get at. So if the components of a syllogism get their sense from their role in the sentence, and the sentence gets its sense from its use by a community, is this community use the creation of the category that defines the sense of a particular syllogism? And if so, do we do things with categories other than create them?
Are there instances or aspects of the actual engagement with a syllogism that don’t involve the fresh creation of a category? And if we are not always creating a category when we converse , how should we describe what we are doing with the category as we employ it in a syllogism? Tell me more about the difference between the creation and the employment of a category.

What is a prediction for you? Is it the relation between an S and a P?
— Joshs

You are asking what is the "...is..." in S is P?

It isn't anything; certainly not a relation.

Let's not reify syntax. — Banno

It has to be something. It carries a meaning, and the meaning changes with the structure of the logical relation.
Logic doesn’t consist of S’s and P’s basking in solipsism. It tells us how to bind or separate them. Actually, in my question concerning the nature of a predication, I’m more interested in the S and the P than in the copula , which , btw, I suggest gives us the structure of ‘use’.
I recognize that the forms of logic that you are most interested in represent innovations over older forms of logic in which the copula has no connection to use but instead simply connects independent symbols. In modern pragmatic logics, from my understanding, the objects that S and P stand for are always themselves the effects of use relations. Thus, no object senses escape the structure of public use.

It seems, though, that , even given that the ‘S’ in a predication is never independent of a use-context , these logics must be able to keep the sense of the ‘S’ stable. That is , its use points to a category that can be symbolized. A use belongs to a use category , and this is what the symbols in a logic stand for. I think this where interpersonal of the later Wittgenstein split off from each other. Those Wittgensteinians who endorse the value of formal logic see him as making symbolizable use categories irreducible ( Hacker and Baker) , while others argue that uses aren’t symbolizable categories but contingent, situational contexts.

↪Joshs Reality doesn't care whether you've read Foucault — Banno

Thank you for that exemplification of how some of us use the word ‘reality’.

↪universeness The 1986 remake as the classic?

I grieve for my people. — Banno

The fly-people?

Seemingly I am for the notion that meaning persists over time. Namely, if Plato's Dialogues translation, still conveys the same meaning as it did some two millennia ago, then why would anyone think that meaning doesn't persist over time. — Shawn

Every product of culture, without exception, must be continually reinterpreted for each era. This goes for music, art, literature, history, science and philosophy. There is no getting back to some veridical original meaning. History is repurposed from the perspective of current thinking and concerns.

There is only one motivation we should care about. Truth. Cold, unfeeling, horrifying truth that takes our feelings and stamps them to the ground. Until that is your motivation, everything you think of will be tainted in another direction. Sometimes truth fits our worldview wonderfully, other times it does not. — Philosophim

I guess Foucault won’t be on your reading list any time soon.

Identity, similarity and differentiation are predictions. Presumably you wish to say something like that while they are predications, the judgement isn't; but how could one make a judgement involving a predicate without using that predicate? — Banno

Perhaps the distinction Husserl makes between the pre-predicative and the predicative stratum of constitution (and his notion of pre-predicative judgment) implies a different use of the word predication than the one you are familiar with. What is a prediction for you? Is it the relation between an S and a P? If so, when you say all identity, similarity and differentiation involves predication, are you making the relation between a subject and a predicate the irreducible ground of sense as use? Are you claiming that predication is involved in the most basic forms of perceptual discrimination and construction?
If so , it isn’t surprising that Husserl’s writings on the pre-predicative genesis of predication doesn’t make sense to you. This realm of intentional constitution of sense simply doesn’t exist for you. Put differently, it will likely appear to you as a misguided attempt to anchor predicational use in some stratum that eludes language.

↪Joshs, ↪Heracloitus

Presumably Joshs is bracketing the next part of the conversation... epoché. — Banno

I was going to respond to your comment on the expression of a rule, and then realized I didn’t actually disagree with it.

First, it's worth noting that predication applies more broadly than to "judgements of experience". 2 is a number. That's not generally something one experiences as a phenomena... unless perhaps one has synethesia — Banno

From a Husserlian vantage, there is nothing to be said about anything outside of experience. The number 2 is an intentional experience in a particular mode of givenness.

— Banno

instead of “is it true that the cup is red" we ask if it is useful to talk of the cup as being red. And several things become immediately apparent.

It's clear that it is appropriate to call the cup red if it is helpful in the task at hand - "pass me the red cup" works if you are handed that cup and not the green one. And we can seek clarification: "Do you mean crimson one or the vermilion one?" and so on. There's an interaction between the participants here that can serve to specify the cup to whatever level one desires.

I hope it is clear why it is a bit silly to berate logicians for not starting with experiences. — Banno

Logicians do start with experience. More specifically, they start with an implicit theory of experience. Their theories of experience pay lip service to the sorts of preliminary processes that are necessary in order to establish logical subjects and predicates as recognizable, unitary objects that can be compared and distinguished , bound together or separated. Usually , this consists of acknowledging what they consider to be psychological developmental capacities like object permanence (it’s hard to manipulate abstract objects without seeing objects as persistingly self-identical) .

But these preliminary, or pre-predicative, capacities tend to be seen as peripheral to what the logicians you support see as the ‘ground floor’ of logic, ‘public use’.
You have said you are not a conceptual relativist, so use for you ultimately is tied to the way things really are, even if in an indirect way ala Davidson, or maybe Anscombe. There is no endless hermeneutic circle of use defined by family resemblance. This chain of ‘in order to’s’ must come to an end somewhere, and that end is presaged by the formal components of predicative logic.

Husserl is also concerned with what works, but for him use applies not only to interactions between people involving objects but also to one’s pre-predicative perceptual involvement with objects. Every aspect of our experience of our world in terms of recognizable features, colors , shapes , the objectivizing constitution of whole objects from a changing flow of perceptual perspectives, distinctions between these constructed whole objects and their components parts , distinctions and similarities between one whole object and another, all of these involve a progressive emergence of more and more complex differentiations and syntheses based on perceived similarities(not a Humean causal concatenation but an intentional synthesis that draws from prior established correlations to produce more complex new syntheses.”.. each everyday experience involves an analogizing transfer of an originally instituted objective sense to a new case, with its anticipative apprehension of the object as having a similar sense.”) There are no qualia to be referred back to here. Everything about perceptual judgement is relative, circular and contingent , just as Isaac would have it.

Predicative judgements have their origin in these pre-predicative judgements of identity, similarity and differentiation. Being able to recognize a ceaselessly changing flow of visual perspectival variations, accompanied by independent auditory and tactile sensations, as ‘this persisting spatial object’ is more useful than experiencing a random flow of meaningless
phenomena. And abstracting further from such particular objects to a general object ‘S’ can be useful too. But we need to recognize the sort of synthetic constructive activity that is required to create the sense of ‘general category’. And the same is true of the further constituting activity involved in the relating of the general category ‘S’ to a ‘P’. For Husserl, every the the most seemingly transparent, obvious and irreducible steps of a logical construction involve the constituting of new senses of meaning(For instance, when I introduce an ‘S’ , that is one sense of meaning, and when I introduce a ‘P’ this changes the sense of the original ‘S’. When I add a conditional IFF this further changes the sense of the ‘S’, as well as the ‘P’.

[

folk have been using cognates of "S is F" without explaining what they are talking about. Is it that S=F (they are equal)? Or S ≡ F (they are materially equivalent)? Or just F(S) (predicating F to S)? or S∈F (S is an element of the set or class S), or none of these, or some combination, or something else? — Banno

Let’s start with Husserl’s characterization of the syllogism. He spends most of Experience and Judgement and Formal and Transcendental Logic unfolding the intentional strata that constitutively lead up to the understanding of the most elementary basis of formal logic, the predicative synthesis S is P.

“…what has been established from the beginning, from the founding of our logical tradition with Aristotle, is this: the most general characteristic of the predicative judgment is that it has two members: a “substrate” (hypokeimenon), about which something is affirmed, and that which is affirmed of it (kategoroumenon); from another point of view, according to grammatical form, we can distinguish onoma and rhema. Every declarative statement must be made up from these two members. Every judging presupposes that an object is on hand, that it is already given to us, and is that about which the statement is made.
(… a unitary proposition can be more or less highly articulated. For instance, the hypothetical judgment, / / A is b, then C is d. It is sharply articulated as having two parts; it too has a "caesura": / / A is b II then C is d. Each of these members is, in turn, articulated.)

Thus tradition provides us, so to speak, with an original model of the judgment which, qua judgment, we must interrogate as to its origin. We must leave entirely open here whether with this we are really dealing with the most primordial logical structure.

Only the elucidation of the origin of this structure, traditionally defined as judgment, can provide the answer to this question and to all further questions associated with it: to what extent is the predicative judgment the privileged and central theme of logic, so that, in its core, logic is necessarily apophantic logic, a theory of judgment? Furthermore, what is the mode of connection of these two members which are always to be distinguished in judgment? To what extent is the judgment synthesis and diaeresis (analysis) in one? This is a problem which has always created an embarrassment for the logician and for which there is no satisfactory solution to this day. What is it that is “bound together” and “separated” in the judgment? Further: which among the multiple judgment-forms which tradition distinguishes is the most primitive, i.e., that one which, as being the undermost, and founding all others, must be presupposed, and by an essential necessity conceived as underlying, in order that other forms of a “higher level” can be founded on it? Is there a single primal form, or are there several, enjoying equal rights, standing beside one another? “

“Since Aristotle, it has been held as certain that the basic schema of judgment is the copulative judgment, which is reducible to the basic form S is P. Every judgment having another composition, e.g., the form of a verbal proposition, can, according to this interpretation, be transformed without alteration of its logical sense into the form of the copulative bond; for example, “The man walks” is logically equivalent to “The man is walking.” The “is” is part of the rhema in which always “time is cosignified,” and in this it is like the verb. Thus, we require an exact understanding of what is involved in this copulative bond, of the nature and origin of the copulative predicative judgment, before we can take a position regarding the question of whether in fact this convertibility is justified and whether the difference between the judgments is merely one of a difference of linguistic form, which does not refer to a difference of the logical achievement of sense.

However, should the latter be the case, the problem would arise of knowing how both forms, the copulative proposition on the one hand, and the verbal on the other, relate to each other. Are they equally primitive logical achievements of sense, or is one (and which one?) the more primitive? Does the copulative form S is p, as tradition holds, really represent the basic schema of the judgment? Further, the question about the primordiality of this schema would in that case also have to be raised with regard to the fact that in it, as a matter of course, the subject is set in the form of the third person. In this, it is presupposed that, in the first and second persons, the judgment in the form “I am . . . ,” “You are . . . expresses no logical achievement of sense which deviates from that expressed in the privileged fundamental schema “It is . . . This presupposition requires testing and would again put the question of the primordiality of the traditional basic schema S is p in a new light.“

Husserl’s thesis is this:”Logic needs a theory of experience, in order to be able to give scientific information about the legitimating bases, and the legitimate limits, of its Apriori, and consequently about its own legitimate sense. Tthe ideal "existence" of the judgment-content is a presupposition for, and enters into, the ideal "existence" of the judgment (in the widest sense, that of a supposed categorial objectivity as supposed).

“The possibility of properly effectuating the possibility of a judgment (as a meaning) is rooted not only in the syntactical forms but also in the syntactical stuffs.

“This fact is easily over-looked by the formal logician, with his interest directed one-sidedly to the syntactical — the manifold forms of which are all that enters into logical theory — and with his algebraizing of the cores as theoretical irrelevancies, as empty somethings that need only be kept identical.”