.

From birth, I think two. Just another person, but obviously, for ethical reasons no-one's been able to test that.
#After a while though, one is sufficient because we can engage the social imagination and use the public concepts we imagine are available, even if they aren't. — Isaac

This is a good point to stress. Our Robinson Crusoe Cartesians like to take a result as if it were the given itself. I may end up a taciturn Heraclitus too wise for the company of others, but I started as a baby who couldn't lift my neck and (presumably) without even a concept that I was this self as locus of responsibility, tracked for what becomes 'my' promise-keeping and the reliability of 'my' wolf-reporting.

From the fact that 'existence' is a public word it does not follow that existence is a public concept. — Janus

I'm not so sure about your logic there, but I don't need that assumption. I hope at least a few people are enjoying their popcorn as you lecture me on the proper way to understand concepts, while insisting that they are private, that they mean whatever they look like to the little ghost in our pineal glands. Once you see it, the self-contradiction will be so glaring that you'll be amazed how cozy you were with it for so many years. Repent in sackcloth and ashes ! For you call black white and one zero. (Kidding.)

We each have our own range of associations, intuitive feelings and idiosyncratic understandings of the meaning of the word. — Janus

No one needs to dispute this. Just as some of us are nearsighted and colorblind and we don't see the world in the same way but do see the same world, there are also varying levels of mastery of using a concept, along with idiosyncratic uses that are sometimes adopted more widely.

I speculate that it's the very background theological bias I'm criticizing that's tempting my opponents to insist that concepts must be crystalline and perfectly definite to be public. That's like thinking the Charleston (the dance) is perfectly definite or that there's one exactly right way to perform a song.

The common mistake of confounding the thing with the use of the thing. — Mww

I suggest that it's not confusion but simply a matter of replacing a broken theory with something better. Instead of what's essentially a theology of mystic Forms, we develop the insight that meaning is use, talking instead of second nature and norms.

As with thinking, no, they are not. They may have public exhibition, but they are not themselves public. — Mww

Let's call concepts that people think with privately, according to your or Sellars' Jones' theory. Let's call koncepts what philosophers use to talk and make claims. Then koncepts are public and what actually matters here.

They reveal to us the many cracks in the foundation we require to even attempt to make sense of this place. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Do they reveal truths ? Are we in the same place ? Is it good to know truth ? Good to have reasons for our beliefs ? Wait a minute....is the philosopher implicitly a moral realist ?

I believe the common meaning would be something like ‘actually existing rather than imagined’ but there are many different meanings. I would use a similar meaning using the term generally speaking. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Do I only imagine that murder is proscribed ?

My hunch is that you want to say something like "humans in general only imagine that murder is wrong." This is like saying that everyone drives on the wrong side of the road.

Unless it's you who are the precisely the kind of theological moral realist who needs a god or an elementary particle to make it wrong.

I feel the hard edges of scientism would be much reduced if the 'science' they were 'istic' about was a little more expansive in scope. — Isaac

:up:

I'd expect biology and psychology to be fronts that could support a 'fancier' moral realism...if that was actually needed. But, as I think we both agree, it's a simple fact about the world that we have norms.

Another issue probably in the background here is cultural relativism.

I suspect he’s asking about the meta-ethics that is comparable to mathematical realism, whereas yours is comparable to something like mathematical formalism, which is a type of mathematical antirealism. — Michael

:up:

I think you are right about @Cartesian trigger-puppets, and I and others seem to mean something like formalism (to meet the minimum standard anyway), but I'd like them to acknowledge it, defining what they mean by 'real.'

I can't see where people get the idea that the products of human societies are somehow unreal. — Isaac

:up:

On the one hand we have idealists telling us nothing but the products of human minds is real, on the other moral anti-realists telling us that everything except the product of human minds is real! — Isaac

I think this generalizes pretty well too, into something like a quasi-mystical phenomenology versus crude nihilistic 'scientism' (as seen here, I suspect.)

It's as if you hope a physicist will find Wrongness in a bubble chamber one day. And, if he can't...there is no sin, just like the mountains told Francis Wolcott.

Someone should justify all this obsession with justification.

And ? Which are real ? What's your stance on this issue ? And why can't I be empirical about promises ? Isn't that what courts are for ?

Is it your stance that only stance-independent items should be counted as real ?

Consider that it may only be our mutual obedience to conceptual and inferential norms that makes this conversation possible. I also wonder why you'd be ashamed to embrace a spooky metaphysics. Autonomy perhaps ? Is that spooky ? Conforming to reason ? Wanting justifications for claims ?

cashed out in spooky metaphysics. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

What spooky metaphysics is that ? The fact that people in this familiar world of ours proscribe murder ?

It has to be cashed out empirically to be substantiated, doesn’t it? Realism is a thesis in ontology, right? — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Looks like I caught my fish. The reals on the bus go round and round.

Do you think promises are less real than electrons ? Than snowflakes ? Are inferences less real than mustaches ?

Where does the PI "morally implore us" to do anything at all; any of this? — Luke

:up:
I also don't see it, not in the text. I don't object to texts being wove in to new projects, but it's more agreeable when this is done boldly. Claim it.

Do you want me to prove that the sky is blue ? I am not trying to justify the norm that murder is wrong but merely pointing it out. 'Murder is proscribed.' Does that help ? This is different than 'Timmy is saddened by murders.' One statement is about a community, what it does not tolerate or endorse. The other is about a single person.

Is it not you who seek something deeper here ?

Depends on what you mean by truth. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I said 'true' not 'truth.' There is almost nothing to be said about truth. Its grammar is absolute and minimal.

The meaning is boringly clear. 'Murder is wrong' is a fact about the world, a fact about the norms of people in that world.

If nothing else, I appreciate being given the subject matter and thereby the opportunity, to talk too much. As you say: mass quantities of my sole remaining vice......exceptionally good coffee. — Mww

:up:
Same here !

Philosophers reveal our utter uncertainties and presuppositions. They reveal to us the many cracks in the foundation we require to even attempt to make sense of this place. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I agree. Of course. And water is wet, sir.

Do you understand/agree that at least one version of moral realism is boringly true ?

Don’t fear disillusionment—embrace it. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

That's what I might tell you. There's nothing behind the mask. There's nothing hidden.

Something else is requisite, antecedent to and more powerful than language, such that tying a shoe is accomplished, but after three or four steps, that damn tying is not again undone, or that tying a shoe is accomplished but not with that by which the tying can never be undone. — Mww

But who said the world or learning was all just language ? It's my understanding that the brain is the most complex worldly object we humans are aware of (until we finally build that moon-sized supercomputer.) The human hand isn't bad either. My focus on language is simply that of an epistemologist trying to figure out a philosopher's minimum commitment.


Was it not clear that my point was about language acquisition ? I oppose the view that (most) concepts are 'pre-given', as if existing fixed and eternal somewhere, graven on the soul or hid away in Heaven, apart from the doings of the animals who perform and refine them simultaneously. That we can arrange utterances into functional equivalence classes (translate 'hello', etc. ) need not force upon us obscure doctrines of spiritual entities or 'hard problems' that may be merely language traps.

The links concerning Kant are full of holes, as the respective texts would show. — Mww

To me that's no issue, for Kant (he won't like this) is a mere means here. Brandom has his motives for presenting his own philosophy in historical terms (themselves presented historically).

We learn from others, and it feels like cheating not to credit those who first got the piece of progress down, and we forgive them their absurdities as we hope our descendants will forgive us ours.

I’m far too old and been around far too many blocks to be offended by anything but the most egregious. But thanks for the sentiment. — Mww

:up:

Excellent. Let the game continue then.

Having the books with you and surviving, does not prove you could not have survived if you didn’t. — Mww

Irrelevant, it seems to me. The point is that of course the individual is an individual. Once out of nature, trained in the lingo of the tribe, I can wander lonely as a cloud, keeping a journal. The grand interior monologue of Hamlet is impossible without its humble beginnings in a child's making a poo poo in his mouth. Or is it a boo boo ?

Here's the real Descartes: https://historyofyesterday.com/dina-sanichar-the-feral-child-who-was-raised-by-wolves-32dec8e22e8d

given the axiomatic principle “thought (the process of thinking) is cognition** by means of conceptions” — Mww

Concepts are public. For the negation might as well mean the toast on Pluto is diaphanous. This does not mean that something some would call 'thinking' wasn't going on in wolf-boy Descartes above. Consider also Sellars' Jones. We could invent 'thoughts' as postulated, explanatory entities. But the concepts that matter, as a minimal epistemic given, are public. The rest is a mute soliisism.

Now arises the absurdity that the body can never go through the motions of tying shoes if it hadn’t been trained in a language system. — Mww

It arises for you perhaps, but I never made such a claim, nor should such a claim be inferred from what I did say. Is it so hard to grasp what's almost trivial ? That children learn language, including the proper use of 'I' and 'my' and 'yours' and 'hers' and 'shoes' as bodies in a world together, handling the objects they speak about, encouraged and discouraged in their usage ? Am I to think that you imagine the possibility of a Kant without some rich culture that birth and trained him, gave him the very languages of his art ?

For instance, Bakhurst (2011, 2015), following McDowell and Brandom as well as Vygotsky, characterises Bildung as a process of enculturation during which the child, by means of acquiring conceptual abilities, is transformed from being in the world to being a subject capable of thinking and acting in light of reasons, thereby taking a view on the world and herself. As Bakhurst points out, this ‘gradual mastery of techniques of language that enable the giving and taking of reasons’ (2015, p. 310) is an essentially social process, because in acquiring concepts the child essentially learns to participate in a social praxis. Similarly, by adopting an approach to pedagogy that draws on both Vygotsky and Brandom, Derry (2008, 2013) emphasises the importance of a normatively structured learning environment in which adults provide opportunities for children to engage in the social practice of giving and asking for reasons in order to gain understanding of the inferential relations that govern our use of concepts.
...
It is also very close to Brandom's view, which interprets intentionality as a fundamentally social phenomenon, namely as the ability for deontic score-keeping, that is the ability to ascribe and acknowledge justifications to others and oneself. Thus, on this view, human thinking, understood in terms of the possession and use of concepts, consists essentially in the ability to participate in the—necessarily social—game of giving and asking for reasons.

The essentially social nature of the development of human rationality is also stressed in recent empirical research, in particular in Tomasello's (2014) influential evolutionary and developmental account.11 On Tomasello's view, human rationality is essentially characterised by what he calls ‘we-intentionality’. He claims that our ability for objective-reflexive-normative thinking is the result of a ‘social turn’ in cognitive evolution, which was necessitated by the need for increasing social cooperation. This ability is thought to have developed in two steps over the course of human evolutionary history, which are thought to be mirrored to some extent by human ontogeny. The first step consists in the development of shared intentionality, which children acquire around the age of 9–12 months. Shared intentionality is characterised by the ability to take into account another's perspective (without necessarily explicitly distinguishing one's own perspective from that of the other), for instance when jointly attending to an object with a caregiver. Ultimately, this enables children to engage in cooperative communication and two-level collaboration with another person. The second step consists in the development of collective intentionality. Thus, from the age of about 3 years onwards, children begin to be oriented not just towards a specific other, but towards the group and they begin to communicate conventionally. That is, they learn to evaluate and justify their reasoning according to the standards of the group. Taken together, the development of ‘we-intentionality’ is thought to have provided early humans with crucial survival advantages over groups who were not able to engage in reasoning of this kind (Tomasello, 2014)

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-9752.12407

You seem to use ‘tautology’ synonymously with ‘necessary’ byw. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

That may be the case. I tend to think necessity is grammatical.

What if philosophers tend to say too much ? Trying to define wrong or true ? What if that's like defining a chess bishop beyond its role in the game ? "Is he Catholic or Episcopalian or what ?" What does 'up' mean ? What is it that rains when it's raining ?

I suspect I was right w/ my original atoms-and-void comment. You want an Impossible Object to make things Actually Wrong ? Or....you would like to think the moral realist needs one ? I see moral realism as at least potentially trivial. There are norms. Surprise surprise.

I suspect the outlandish theses are on the other side, lurking as secret premises. "Norms aren't really norms unless ... X "

The reals go round and round.

Note: Im not asking for a definition, but your meaning. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Would you mind explaining what you mean by 'meaning' first ? Please, though, no dictionary definition. Just your meaning.

Is it true that Rogan once wrote a definitive book on psychophysical parallelism, but tore it up one weekend making filters for his continental jazz cigarettes? — Tom Storm

:up:

I just want to know what it you mean by it. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

This dictionary definition is not a bad start, especially the bold part. "Not in conformity with fact or truth; incorrect or erroneous. Contrary to conscience, morality, or law. Unfair; unjust. "

What do you make of this ? Does it relate ?

Autonomy is self-government, self-determination. I think the Kantian conception of
autonomy can be summarized like this: one is self-determining when one’s thinking and
acting are determined by reasons that one recognizes as such. We can think of
“autonomy” as labelling a capacity, the capacity to appreciate the force of reasons and
respond to it. But determining oneself is actually exercising that capacity. That is what it
is to be in control of one’s own life.

Why should I bother to be autonomous ? Is the force of reason a private matter ?

I'm an atheist. I'm just trying to fish out your presuppositions.

I endorsed the idea that "ethical sentences express propositions that refer to objective features of the world (that is, features independent of subjective opinion), some of which may be true to the extent that they report those features accurately."

I think I can assume and assert that the widespread proscription of murder is a genuine/objective/real feature of the world.

So you want an Entity ?

If God says its wrong, does that work ? If not, why not ?

Who wrote the logic textbooks ? And why should we trust them ?

Or, another angle:

The voice is heard ( understood ) ­... closest to the self as the absolute effacement of the signifier: pure auto-affection that necessarily has the form of time and which does not borrow from outside of itself, in the world or in "reality," any accessory signifier, any substance of expression foreign to its own spontaneity. It is the unique experience of the signified producing itself spontaneously, from within the self, and nevertheless, as signified concept, in the element of ideality or universality. The unworldly character of this substance of expression is constitutive of this ideality. This experience of the effacement of the signifier in the voice is not merely one illusion among many ---since it is the condition of the very idea of truth... Within the closure of this experience, the word [mot] is lived as the elementary and undecomposable unity of the signified and the voice, of the concept and a transparent substance of expression. This experience is considered in its greatest purity --- and at the same time in the condition of its possibility --- as the experience of "being." The word "being," or at any rate the words designating the sense of being in different languages, is, with some others, an "originary word," the transcendental word assuring the possibility of being-word to all other words. As such, it is precomprehended in all language and...only this precomprehension would permit the opening of the question of the sense of being in general...Heidegger reminds us constantly that the sense of being is neither the word "being" nor the concept of being. But as that sense is nothing outside of language and the language of words, it is tied, if not to a particular word or to a particular system of language..., at least to the possibility of the word in general. And to the possibility of its irreducible simplicity...

Don't know if you've been down Heidegger Road, but it seems that the ghost theory leads to a kind of shining void.

A tautology is.

The experience that we need in order to understand logic is not that something or other is the state of things, but that something is: that, however, is not experience.

It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.

When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words.
The riddle does not exist.

If a question can be framed at all, it is also possible to answer it.

To say 'I wonder at such and such being the case' has only sense if I can imagine it not to be the case. In this sense one can wonder at the existence of, say, a house when one sees it and has not visited it for a long time and has imagined that it had been pulled down in the meantime. But it is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing. I could of course wonder at the world round me being as it is. If for instance I had this experience while looking into the blue sky, I could wonder at the sky being blue as opposed to the case when it's clouded. But that's not what I mean. I am wondering at the sky being whatever it is. One might be tempted to say that what I am wondering at is a tautology, namely at the sky being blue or not blue. But then it's just nonsense to say that one is wondering at a tautology.

... what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest.

I am my world.

There is there.

To me it's not that surprising. I'm assuming you've studied real analysis. Imagine trying to do that without the axioms of $\mathbb{R}$.

To format math, just use "math" where you'd otherwise use "quote" (in the proper brackets) and proceed with the usual Latex code.

I don't claim to speak for Witt, but I am indeed pointing away from the ghost theory toward a linguistic theory, to how selves actually function, looking for the meaning of 'I' in its use by the tribe.

I do not regard interpretation as merely a way of determining what someone else is thinking but as a way of thinking. — Fooloso4

:up:

if there's no individual who thinks, — Tate

The idea is that we, as individual claim-making monkeys, run cultural software that includes the concept of the responsible self, easily but problematically imagined as a kind a ghost in the skull.

Oh, sorry. I misunderstood. — Tate

:up:

Sorry if I came off rude.

I'm dismayed. You seem to be responding to someone else. I do hold myself to the usual coherence norms, and I invite you to root out contradictions in my position. But let it be my position. Perhaps you can quote me. Show me where I deny the self, etc.