Sorry, I'm not good at social gestures. That's a real handicap, by the way. — Olivier5

No worries. I'll try to be mindful of that. Sorry if I came/come off rude. Text is a tricky medium.

I like the way Eugene Gendlin put it:

“…the past functions to "interpret" the present,...the past is changed by so functioning. This needs to be put even more strongly: The past functions not as itself, but as already changed by what it functions in”. — Joshs

Nice ! What's your favorite Gendlin text?

‘Greed’ is a convenient label we slap on others ( and sometimes ourselves) as a way of blaming them for our own failure to understand their behavior more insightfully. — Joshs

Well I give you points for radicality here.

FWIW, there's a passage in Aurelius about barking dogs,a metaphor for 'irrational' or blameworthy humans. The godlike man does not judge, does not get caught in up in merely human notions of good and evil.

Such notions are toys for mere monkeys ?

We can’t fathom why the other chose to act in the way they acted , because we don’t know how to step out of our world into theirs. — Joshs

I don't think there's (always) such a gulf. I may be a old soul who has made the very mistake myself. I take us to be basically or mostly in the same world, at least among those with whom we share an everyday culture.

So we assume the problem lies not with a difference in sense-making but with a difference in motivation, which we treat as separate from cognition. — Joshs

Do we treat it so ? The notion of rationalization links motivation and cognition directly. Folk psychoanalysis is part of our shared background.

That is, they blame wayward behavior on intransigent, irrational, arbitrary, pathological motives. — Joshs

I hesitate to agree. I suggest we look at relative intensities of essentially neutral drives. Sexual desire is a good thing until it's not (as when I flirt inappropriately or am unfaithful). Seeking material comfort and security is a good thing until it's not (as when I don't pay taxes and vote against the greater good or simply steal from others in a crude way). It's not so much what we want but whether we know how to share and respect boundaries. I will grant a few motives which themselves are vilified, such as sexual desires without any legal expression and a desire to wound or kill others...though the last could be useful in a soldier. I guess suicidal motivation is mostly forbidden too.

The content of thought doesn’t really have very much to do with either ethics or rational cognition, except as a place mark for the anticipatory organizational processes of sense-making. — Joshs

Not sure what you mean here.

“Dasein "occurs out of its future"."Da-sein, as existing, always already comes toward itself, that is, is futural in its being in general." Having-been arises from the future in such a way that the future that has-been (or better, is in the process of having-been) releases the present from itself. — Joshs

The past leaps ahead for a project in the way it handles the present ?

It adds the ability to explain how some meaning is not existentially dependent upon language use; how language is created; how naming and descriptive practices work; how rigid designators work; how reference works; how new meaning is formed; how meaningful language use transcends the individual speaker; how users of different languages can say much the same thing about the same things using remarkably different syntax and semantic structures. It's how meaningful language use(marks) becomes utterly meaningless and uninterpretable when all the users have long since perished; how the Rosetta stone became a translation device as a result of having enough shared meaning with at least one language still used; how all meaningful things become so; how symbolism works; etc. — creativesoul

:up:
All great issues.

I wonder to what degree exactly such an investigation can avoid attributing postulated linguistic beliefs, supplementing the math ? As a math guy myself, I know that the numbers are anchored in real world concepts in applications.

I like the correlation approach. I'd just say that this seems to be the kind of mathematical modeling of disposition that I mentioned as an option earlier...as the non-linguistic or less-linguistic approach that made sense. If such modelling is a part of psychology currently, perhaps there are more recent philosophers who have integrated this fact into their thinking?

The only people who don't worry about being taken for a fool, are fools. — Tate

:up:

Agreed. But we're philosophers ! Someone out there my lecture us on the tax we don't know we're paying. I've been reading The Confidence Man lately by Melville, and there are lots of speeches about the virtue of faith in our fellow man...speeches made by the devil in the midst of conning others admittedly...

The believer should probably recognize that P could be false, else she'll have no chance of avoiding being a victim of a big fat lie. — Tate

Philosophers fear being deceived more than others ? While strong poets fear being forgotten more than others ?

i don’t think this development should be understood via binaries like truth-nontruth and rational-irrational but along an axis of anticipatory sense-making. — Joshs

Why would basic judgments like right/wrong and good/bad not be crucial to such sense-making ? Are we not beings who desire and fear?

I believe all worldviews are equally valid , moral and rational. — Joshs

I can maybe guess at what you mean, but surely you know what Chad will ask you here. What about Hitler and the boys ? Can we really not find them wrong, mistaken, crooked ?

I do not dispute that a 'monster' can feel pretty good about himself. From his perspective, all is well. It's 'rational' to collect baby's bones. (I'm thinking of the end of the first season of True Detective.)

I agree pretty much with Rorty about a necessary or unchosen or ineluctable ethnocentrism. We are thrown into patterns of feeling and response. We can't really be so neutral but merely slip into a relatively detached and god-liked mode.

postmodernists assert that it is not irrationality that leads to fascisms and totalitarianisms but rigid or one-dimensional notions of the rational and the true. — Joshs

Or, as I might put, irrational notions of the rational and true...

Are you sure this isn't just a trigger word for you ? Do you object to 'right' or 'correct' or 'proper' in the same way ? Of course we will always, as humans, debate their appropriate or right or correct application.

It has been said that postmodernism plays into the human predilection to give into irrationalism. — Joshs

I like some of the thinkers with bad reputations. Just because the 'wrong' (irrational) people use 'irrational' irrationally does not ruin the concept. Indeed, we are going to have some word, I venture, for 'not inferring correctly.'

If falsehood is the opposite of truth telling, isn’t a lie motivated by a prior breakdown in communication that it is an attempt to rationally cope with? — Joshs

There's an industry of criminals who trick the elderly out their money posing as IT. Is it not safe to assume that they are motivated by greed? Perhaps also by envy ?

Put differently, isn’t one person’s irrationality simply another’s rationality? — Joshs

I think we can try to take a god's perspective on the great stage of fools and say so.

But does this not cut back against itself ? Aren't I just as rational as you then ? From what lofty perch can you criticize or instruct me ? If not from one implicitly higher and better and more rational?

Hence normative. Ought is primary.

Hey man, congrats..you used all the keywords of the literati here :lol:..”language” public”..just throw in some Philosophical Investigations quotes, talk about Wittgenstein and you’re in! Chad it up! — schopenhauer1

You are basically correct. I bring the theology of Chad. I speak therefore as an insider, shamelessly elitist in my normative rationality. I am sufficiently magnanimous to tolerate the delusions of others who stay out of my way. Does the hale young man on two strong legs resent the brittle old man's crutch ?

The propensity to believe is the exact same thing as understanding the language. — unenlightened

Nicely put ! There is something primary in taking to be true. For the believer, the world 'is' P.

The culture is literally being destroyed as we speak because meaning is use, and language is useless unless it tells the truth. Cue Orwell, cue Kant. — unenlightened

I'm on a nearby wavelength. Rationality is normative. Truthtelling is fundamental. Irrationality is antisocial.

Personally I think it is an imposition to throw yet another babe into the vat of acid. Is it wrong ? No easy answer. The safe thing is nothing at all. But is this safety better than variety? Than the possibility of falling in (requited) love for the first time ? Then glorying in a conquest on a day of victory ? Life is exploitation Chad. I am the Chad of Chads, rabid protean capitalism incarnate, amoral lifeslime. I joke about and confess that in us which is other than those more welcome better angels.

If talking about the potential for something to happen based on conditions.. everyone is on board, yay! If it is talking about a possible person, that would be imposed upon had it been born, boo! And the proverbial crowds throw their rotten tomatoes... — schopenhauer1

Antinatalism is OK with me, but, having read Darwin and the boys, I don't think much will come of it, unless you all get your wish from a nuclear winter, as Chads slug it out for nubiles, wallowing in the happiness of being envied...and a bit in the pleasures of flesh. Are we self-replicating, self-torturing slime ? Sure we are, in a certain slant of light, winter afternoons. Let us write novels about a terrorist group that actually gets it. You do see that we have to destroy all life in the universe, don't you? This slime, if given time, will up and walk and talk and spread its sinister wings. We must stamp it out entirely. But what of abiogenesis ? If life can erupt once from nonlife, it can erupt again. It seems we must destroy the universe itself...or accelerate its heat death making sentient organization impossible. The non-selfish thing to do is breed breed breed and advance our technical power for the eventual cosmic suicide. We suffer Christ-like now so that they will neither suffer nor joy in a future that will arrive unwitnessed. Thigh will be dim inert as it is uneven. (Thesis chew sorry.)

I would like to hear the facts/things/ideas/rules(name it whatever you want) that you think that apply in universe/cosmos and that we (as humans) can be sure about them.
The absolute truths that if you remove everything "human-ish" from them, everything phenomenalogical etc they still apply also in universe ...This is what I mean by absolute truths. Not anything mystique nor metaphysical. — dimosthenis9

Hi there ! Fun OP.

I don't see how you can remove everything humanish from a truth which is a sentence in a human language. The very idea of some stuff on the other side of everything humanish seems (humanishly) "mystique nor metaphysical."

Within those new constraints, I suggest that the beliefs we can be most confident about are those that it makes no sense to deny...because denying them is incoherent. Here are a examples:

There is a world 'external' to us in the minimally specified sense that we can be right or wrong about it. It's a world and not us because we can be wrong about it. Proof ?

Consider the negation: "It's wrong to think there is something we can be wrong about."

We share a language, and meaning is 'public.' Proof ? Consider the negation. "We do not share a language. Meaning may be private." This is spoke as a truth with the assumption of the very intelligibly it denies. It's like "communication is impossible." We might therefore rephrase the original statement as "there is communication." One fine point here is the difference between a contingently available listener and the potential listener implicit in any language-as-shared-code.

This can be summed up as 'we are together in a world we can make true and false statements about.' As far as I can tell, to say otherwise is absurd. There is a primacy of the social here that sets this starting point or 'given' apart from other versions.

Only truth telling can support language, and habitual liars are not worth listening to as their speech has no meaning. Thus to the extent that we live in a world of language, we live in a moral social world in which the truth has value and falsehood is destructive of meaning of society and of our world. — unenlightened

:up:

World-sharing seems primary. An assertion updates the world in the tribe mind ?

But the lie is dependent on the truth-telling of the community. — unenlightened

:up:

Does the concept of a belief depend on the concept of a truth in the same way ? Is "seems" a parasite on "is"?

It's indicating the strength of my belief, or the urgency with which I need you to agree. — Isaac

:up:

This may be the redundancy theory with a new attention paid to pragmatics. 'The ice cream is very very cold.' 'It is indeed true that it is indeed true that it is indeed true.'

What is it to take something to be true ? If I believe a pastry is toxic, I (probably) don't eat it. Does 'believe' itself have a kind of absoluteness ? He did X, because he believed Y. Because the world seemed like Y to him. It turns out he was (acting like he was) in the wrong world.

My personal opinion of "truth" is that it should unambiguously tell us whether we are animals or creation of god. — SpaceDweller

Don't theist believe that a god created all of the animals and not just us ?

I acknowledge that the God issue is decisive. If there is God (as typically conceived), then are slaves who should maybe not bother with philosophy. I take it for granted that there is not such a God, and that there's only us down here, trying to be less stupid than we were yesterminute.

Please settle on an icon. I'm dizzy watching them come and go. — jgill

I think I'm into this pumpkin pie now.

The picture ceases to be the construction of one mind and becomes the combined work of a community. — Banno

:up:

Age'll do that to you, make you realize the world is bigger than you.

Well I wouldn't try to sell anyone on Hegel in 2022, not the whole clump of him anyway.

If I could go back in time, I'd have studied Sellars and Brandom sooner.

I add this to supplement the normative and semantic theme simultaneously. Rationality is presented not as a better way to use language but as its beating heart.

Thinking of conceptual content in terms of inferential role, and of understanding correspondingly as practical mastery of such an inferential role—as the ability to sort into good and bad the inferences in which the concept appears in the premises or conclusions—has other advantages as well. It is a powerful corrective to the philosophically unilluminating and pedagogically damaging cartesian picture of the achievement of understanding as the turning on of some kind of inner light, which permits one then to see clearly. This is what the elementary-school kid thinks happens in math class when the girl next to him “gets it”, and he doesn’t. He is waiting for the light to go on in his head, too, so that he’ll understand fractions. In fact, he’s just got to practice making the moves, and distinguishing which ones are OK and which ones are not, until he masters the practical inferential abilities in question. It is not unusual for teachers of technical material to have students who can do all the problem-sets and proofs, can tell what does and doesn’t follow from some situation described using the concepts being taught, but still think that they don’t understand those concepts. A feeling of familiarity and confidence in knowing one’s way around in an inferential network often lags one’s actual mastery of it. The important thing is to realize that the understanding is that practical mastery, and the feeling (the cartesian light) is at best an indicator of it—often an unreliable one.
...
One might ask whether the inferentialist approach does not require overestimating the extent to which we are rational. Are we really very good at telling what is a reason for what? How often do we act for reasons—and in particular, for good reasons? The question betrays a misunderstanding. We are rational creatures in the sense that our claims and aims are always liable to assessment as to our reasons for them. How good we are at satisfying those demands doesn’t change our status as rational. And it must be kept in mind that on this way of thinking about the nature of semantic content, it makes no sense to think of us first having a bunch of sentences expressing definite propositions, which accordingly stand in inferential relations to one another, and only then having there be a question about how many of those inferences we get right. For it is our practices of treating what is expressed by some noises as reasons for what is expressed by other noises that makes those noises express conceptual contents in the first place. Once the enterprise is up and running, we can certainly make mistakes about what follows from the commitments we have undertaken, and what would justify them. But there is no possibility of us massively or globally getting the inferences wrong (for very much the same Quinean reasons that Davidson has emphasized).

I have been arguing that it is better to think in terms of understanding than knowledge, and better to think of meaning-and-understanding (which on this approach are two sides of one coin) in terms of inference than in terms of truth. So far, I have approached this issue largely from the point of view of semantics and the philosophy of language. But there is more at stake here. For this way of thinking about semantic content goes to the heart of the question of what it is to be sapient—to be the kind of creature we most fundamentally are. It says that we are beings that live, and move, and have our being in the space of reasons. We are, at base, creatures who give and ask for reasons—who are sensitive to that “force of the better reason”, persuasive rather than coercive, which so mystified and fascinated the ancient Greek philosophers. Crossing that all-important line from mere sentience to sapience is participating in practices of giving and asking for reasons: practices in which some performances have the pragmatic significance of claims or assertions, which accordingly, as both standing in need of reasons and capable of serving as reasons (that is, of playing the role both of conclusion and as premise in inference) count as expressing propositional semantic content.

This semantic rationalism—which goes with thinking of content in the first instance in terms of inference rather than reference, reason rather than truth—flies in the face of many famous movements in 20th century philosophical thought. The American pragmatists, above all, John Dewey, used the possibility of explaining knowing that in terms of knowing how not only to assimilate our sapient intellectual activity to the skillful doings of merely sapient animals, but at the same time to blur the sharp, bright line I am trying to draw between sapience and sentience. Wittgenstein famously said that language does not have a ‘downtown’: a core set of practices on which the rest depend, and around which they are arrayed, like suburbs. But inferentialism says that practices of giving and asking for reasons are the ‘downtown’ of language. For it is only by incorporating such practices that practices put in play propositional and other conceptual contents at all—and hence count as discursive practices, practices in which it is possible to say anything. The first ‘Sprachspiel’, language game, Wittgenstein introduces in the Philosophical Investigations has a builder issuing sorderss to an assistant. When he says ‘Slab!’ the assistant has been trained to respond by bringing a slab. When he says ‘Block!’ the assistant has been trained to respond by bringing a block. From the inferentialist point of view, this does not qualify as a Sprachspiel at all; it is a vocal, but not a verbal game. For the assistant is just a practical version of the parrot I considered earlier: he has been trained reliably to respond differentially to stimuli. But he grasps no concepts, and if this is the whole game, the builder expresses none. An order or command is not just any signal that is appropriately responded to in one way rather than another. It is something that determines what is an appropriate response by saying what one is to do, by describing it, specifying what concepts are to apply to a doing in order for it to count as obeying the order. Derrida’s crusade against what he calls the ‘logocentrism’ of the Western philosophical tradition has brilliantly and inventively emphasized all the other things one can do with language, besides arguing, inferring, explaining, theorizing, and asserting. Thus we get the playful essays in which the key to his reading of Hegel is that his name in French rhymes with ‘eagle’, his reading of Nietzsche that turns on what Derrida claims is the most important of his philosophical writings (a slip of paper that turned up in his belongings after his death, reading only “I have forgotten my umbrella,”), and the unforgettable meditation on the significance of the width of the margins of the page for the meaning of the text printed there. But if inferentialism is the right way to think about contentfulness, then the game of giving and asking for reasons is privileged among the games we play with words. For it is the one in virtue of which they mean anything at all—the one presupposed and built upon by all the other uses we can then put those meanings to, once they are available. Again, the master-idea of Foucault’s critique of modernity is that reason is just one more historically conditioned form of power, in principle no better (and in its pervasive institutionalization, in many ways worse) than any other form of oppression. But if giving and asking for reasons is the practice that institutes meanings in the first place, then it is does not belong in a box with violence and intimidation, which show up rather in the contrast class precisely insofar as they constrain what we do by something other than reasons. — Brandom

.

But it seems to me that at least some sentences are true or false, and that we sometimes even know which ones. — Banno

I agree. Maybe Hegel would too. I've read a fair amount of his work, and I don't recall him disputing relatively simple claims being true or false.

But the picture can never be in the picture. When we present a theory of propositions, we've strayed beyond what language good for, into nonsense. — Tate

But this means that his theory doesn't even include its condition of possiblity. A theory of language and meaning that must exclude that theory itself ...fails?

Added Braver's take (small part of it). Verdict: more of an anti-realist. Hegel rejects bivalence only in a dialectical sense. Philosophers offer partial truths, not wholly true or false, which are synthesized into less partial, more complete truths.

Hegel's idealism is not the metaphysical, Berkeleyan claim that only minds and ideas exist, but rather the negative anti-realist claim that we have no way of talking about input ab extra.

Although experience comes in from the outside in some sense, when we try to pin down what this means, it ends up becoming 'an otherness which is superseded in the act of grasping it.' — Braver

We can no longer talk of things at all,i.e.,of something that would be for consciousness merely the negative of itself.
...
Thought is always in its own sphere; its relations are with itself, and it is its own object. — Hegel

You are brave, saying that out loud... — Banno

The part about Hegel ? Or about Davidson ? (I'm guessing Hegel.)

I suppose that if Hegel is an idealist, as is commonly supposed, then he drops bivalent logic somewhere...? — Banno

I can look into that. I have Braver's book, A Thing of This World, which approaches the great antirealists in analytic terms (including explicitly bivalence.)

I think Hegel is an idealist in the way that Davidson is, which might be to say misunderstood as one. (Do folks accuse Davidson of that? I only know him via Rorty, really.)

We use language (propositions) to describe reality, propositions are separate from the facts of reality. — Sam26

My concern with this approach is that it's not clear what the pictures are picturing. How does language function as an image for what you insist is not already linguistic ? We don't hold up propositions to promises or electrons.

If that's what Davidson is saying, then I disagree. — Sam26

I suspected you disagreed, actually, from what you said before.

Cool, so it seems reasonable to think that people's experience of pain is similar at least to the extent that they generally find it unpleasant and seek to avoid it. — Janus

The lawyer with behaviorist tendencies in me would talk of a clear tendency to avoid what's called pain (and a clear tendency to pursue what's called pleasure.)

When I talk of "private meaning" I don't mean private semantic meaning, but pre-linguistic affects that it seems reasonable to think we have in common with animals. — Janus

I agree. I'd say (with my philosopher hat off) 'of course raw feels exist' and those 'raw feels' include an empathy that finds itself mirrored in pets. There's a strong feeling or hunch with the feeling that the feeling is shared, that love is one, basically.

But without the idealism. That is, maintaining a bivalent logic in the face of unknown truths. — Banno

Care to say more ? I don't know if I ever paid much attention to that theme in Hegel.

Yes; it's in a sense the elimination of the picture giving the meaning in favour of the use replacing the meaning in an expression. That the cat is on the mat is not a picture of the world, it is the world. — Banno

I continue to think that we agree.

Do we agree that there is no point in making promises or bananas less real than protons ?