Another way to put this is that science isn’t going to tell us what thought or meaning or understanding are. Thus, “it is misleading to talk of thinking as of a ‘mental activity’.” — Antony Nickles

This is an extra ordinary remark. Thinking is a paradigm of a mental activity. Surely, what he needs to argue is that mental activities, in particular thinking, is not the kind of activity it suggests, because of the contrast with physical activities. Is doing a calculation with pencil and paper a mental or a physical activity?

Thus the reason he says trying to find the place of thinking must be rejected “to prevent confusion”. (p.8) — Antony Nickles

But on the previous page he says:-

Now does this mean that it is nonsensical to talk of a locality where thought takes place? Certainly not. This phrase has sense' if we give it sense. — Blue Book p.7

His suggestion is a way of giving "the locality of thinking" a sense that many people would find perfectly satisfactory.

“I can give you no agent who thinks.” (p.6) This seems speculative at this point (and needlessly provocative), and I take it to mean so far that if there is no casual scientific mechanism, then it is the (“external”) judgment of thought that matters, not its agent (though this belies responsibility). — Antony Nickles

His use of "agent" here is unusual. When I think by writing, the agent is my hands. When I think by imagining, there is no agent. I don't know why the obvious agent - me - doesn't count.

But it is clear here that it is not language which fools us, but our temptation to treat words as objects (like “time”), and it is this desire that mystifies us, as, on page 7, he shows how analogy allows us to mistakenly infer there is a place for thought because there is a place for words. — Antony Nickles

Yes. His concluding remarks about one's visual field nicely demonstrate how that is possible.

The 'is' in that sentence should not be read as the 'is' of identity. — Clearbury

If it was the "is" of identity, everything that is true of the person would also be true of the animal and of the machine. Which is not the case.
The only possibilities in philosophy seem to be reductionism or emergentism. I don't think that either are particularly attractive. As far as I know there hasn't been much work on the logic of cross-categorial relationships, beyond observing that descriptions in one category cannot be meaningfully applied in another category. In the case of human beings, we very much need to understand this.

I do blame him for endorsing one particularly horrific practice. — Vera Mont

Where does he say that?

Probably, most of the inquisitors didn't personally heat the pincers, but they understood the use of hot pincers and published theological justification for their use. — Vera Mont

Now I'm confused. Are discussing the wickedness of Descartes or of the Inquisition? Perhaps you just mean that they are a parallel case. In which case, where does Descartes publish a justification for the use of nails and planks on animals?

I've encountered a few intelligent posters who keep insisting that we go back to original research, because there's just not enough evidence to support the theory of evolution. I do think that's wilful ignorance. It's their loss; I don't punish them for it. I probably do the same regarding subjects I don't care about. — Vera Mont

It is indeed wilful ignorance, although they are something of a public nuisance. On the other hand, we all have to pay the price of the anti-vaxers' wilful ignorance.

Without consideration, or further inquiry? — Vera Mont

Sorry, I thought the need for further inquiry and consideration was a given - subject to the priority that you give to the issue.

It depends on why you're doing it: to protect potential victims, or to benefit from the deception - from laudable to trivial to reprehensible. — Vera Mont

Yes. I still think that disapproval is the default position. But that's just a detail.

Sure. But let's try to be accurate in our observations and honest in our assessment.
It's for their God, not me, to absolve them for their motives or toss them into The Pit for their crimes. — Vera Mont

Accurate and honest, certainly. Are we including fair and balanced as well? I hope so.
If it's for God to absolve them, isn't it also for their God to judge them?

There is no value judgment here of the worthiness of the goal or the cause of the problem. Whether it's aimed at a better cancer treatment or a more effective weapon of mass destruction, the thought process is rational. — Vera Mont

That's fair enough. There's a nasty gap, however, in how one assesses the worthiness of the goal or what's a problem, rather than a feature. But let's leave that alone, for now.

It mattered when the prevailing practice was questioned, opposed, justified on philosophical grounds and therefore continued. In this, he was greatly influential. — Vera Mont

It would take an angel to be on the right side of every debate at the same time. But then, you have high standards, it would seem.
He was indeed influential. But that doesn't necessarily mean that he approved of everything his followers did. I don't think anyone knows (unless you've got a source) what he thought of his followers in Amsterdam. For all we know, he would have disowned them.

Can you possibly imagine none of these intelligent men knew what the screaming signified? — Vera Mont

Yes and no. In the '50's, there was (in the UK) a big scandal about a toxicological test that involved dropping chemicals in the eyes of rabbits to find out what dose was required to kill 50% of the subjects. It was known as the L(ethal) D(ose) 50 test. The goal was, no doubt, desirable, but involved a great deal of pain for the rabbits. So they didn't report that the rabbits screamed in pain, but that they "vocalized". The defence, no doubt, was that it was important to preserve scientific objectivity. So they reported only the facts, without any subjective interpretation. Another example of how indoctrination with an ideology is at least as dangerous, and arguably more vicious, as old-fashioned vices like greed and sadism.

I never understood why you introduced the moral component. — Vera Mont

But why is lying a immoral? — Vera Mont

Unfortunately, our language is not neatly divided between facts and values. Some concepts incorporate an evaluative judgement as well as a factual component. Murder is not simply killing, but wrongful killing. Pain is not simply a sensation but a sensation that we seek to avoid and that, if we have any humanity, we will help others to avoid. And so on.
Actually, you are right - not all lying is wrong; we even have an expression (at least in my possibly rather archaic version of English) for lies that are OK - white lies. Nonetheless, deliberately leading someone to believe something that you know to be false is generally disapproved of. Ditto for hypocrisy.
So I thought you introduced the moral element and I was responding to that.

Obviously, stating one's belief is not lying. It only becomes so if one is exposed to the truth and rejects it. Making oneself believe what isn't true is lying to oneself, whether it's said to anyone else or not. Nobody believes falsehoods through simple carelessness, though they may repeat what they've heard because they don't care enough to reflect. That may be trivial or criminal, depending on the falsehood and its effect on the world. — Vera Mont

That sounds rather hard on people. Surely, if I'm exposed to some evidence for an idea, but there's not enough evidence to justify believing it, I am right to reject it, even if it turns out later to be true. In any case, there isn't enough time to live a life and think carefully about everything we need to know.

I don't believe there has ever been a sane adult in the world who is or was morally pure, or entirely truthful or altogether devoid of hypocrisy. None of our heroes and role models are so much more perfect than we are. Why is that a problem? — Vera Mont

I don't think it is. The best we can do is to try to avoid the biggest failures. So forgiveness becomes important, to prevent pursuit of the good turning into the tyranny of perfection.

It troubles me greatly that Aristotle thought some people are born to be slaves and slavery is an important part of family order, — Athena

The conventional defence is that nobody in the world at that time had any doubt about slavery. It's asking a lot of someone to come up with a revolutionary idea like that - indeed, it took centuries for human beings to develop the ideas that we take for granted.
What troubles me more than his ideas about slavery is that there appear to be some people around who are trying to promote his argument as a justification of slavery today.
If you look at the details, though, you'll find that his version of slavery strips out a great deal of what makes it so objectionable. It can be read as a promotion of decent treatment for slaves, including the opportunity to learn how to be free and a ban on enslaving free people.

Who is going to buy the stuff that makes corporations rich, if the people can not afford it? — Athena

Good question. I keep wondering who will buy all the products when production and distribution are completely handed over to robots and AI. I suppose the machines could sell things to each other, but they can only pay if they are paid for their labour.

When Adam Smith wrote of economics he also wrote of morality and explained the importance of good morality to economic success. — Athena

Yes. The problem is that it is in the interest of everyone to work out a free ride on everyone else's virtue, and it is against the interest of everyone to behave well and get ripped off. Race to the bottom.

Thrift Books has a few books written by Adam Smith for very little money. — Athena

I'm sure it would be quite an eye-opener to see what he actually said.

Yes, I agree that every species is unique in some way. For us it just happened to be symbolic language (unless there is at least one other species that unbeknownst to us also possesses it). — Janus

Some people think that there are number of factors working together. That seems a very likely possibility. Our bipedalism allowed our front feet to develop into hands which enabled us to handle objects in a much more precise way. Our large (for our body size) brain allowed us to develop our kind of language. Not to mention the critical importance of our being a social animal, without which our technologies could not have developed.

If we knew enough about the brain, we - the scientists - could stimulate a flower without us - the experimentee - ever having seen one. In this case, the "external object" merely verifies our criteria, the flower itself is not the ground of our judgment (or our asking about it), rather the "red flower" is something which fits our criteria. — Manuel

But there is no external object, so there is nothing to verify. There is no "flower itself" to be the ground of our judgement, so there is no ground for our judgement and nothing that fits our criteria. There is a temptation to fill the gap, but the fillers are mysterious magical objects and we end up with a philosophical labyrinth that we cannot escape from. Best not to start.

I could give you a plastic red flower, indistinguishable from a real red flower, and it would still fit your criteria. — Manuel

If it is a plastic red flower, then it is distinguishable from a real red flower. Of course, I might be deceived and treat it as a real red flower, but it isn't one. So my judgement that I'm holding a red flower is false.

Which is why I said I was a bit surprised to be included in this discussion. I'm well aware I'm quite likely in the minority view. — Manuel

Nothing wrong with being in the minority. What matters is the discussion.

That's just how he did justify the moral position held by a minority of thinkers at the time that it's wrong to torture animals. — Vera Mont

So I've learnt something to-day. Thank you for the link. I have looked through it, but not read it carefully yet.

I'm losing my grip on what our disagreement is about. Perhaps you'll forgive my not following the convention of linking my comments to quotations from what you say. Instead, I'ld like to offer an analysis of where we are at.

We seem to be using "hypocrisy" in slightly different ways. I think I can best explain through a different case. Many people seem to use the word "lying" to mean simply saying what is false. Whether they attach a moral judgement to the word is not clear to me, but my understanding of it is that saying what is false, knowing it to be false and with intent to deceive is morally reprehensible.
So, for me, saying what one sincerely believes to be true, even if it turns out to be false, is not lying. There's an exception, that one might sincerely believe something because of wishful thinking, or carelessness; but saying that it is true is a different moral failing, for which we don't have a name (I think). In the same way, you seem to call behaving in ways that are inconsistent "hypocrisy" but you seem to exempt some hypocrisy from moral criticism, if it has a rational justification.

But then, there is a difficulty about the intersection of rationality with morality. We like to think that they don't conflict. But when you say that Descartes was hypocritical but rational, I conclude that you are saying that the rationality of his hypocrisy justifies it, or at least exempts is from moral censure. I find that very confusing.

I believe it is the case that Descartes never indulged in the vicious torture of nailing animals to planks, but that some students who followed Descartes did. Furthermore, it seem that he also kept a companion dog in his house, which seems incompatible with believing that the animal was just a machine. Here's my opinion. The students were guilty of consistency, illustrating how rigid adherence to a ideology can lead one into really vicious moral errors. Descartes, on the other hand, was technically inconsistent with his theoretical beliefs, but exhibited good sense in not following through from his theory to his practice.

I hope at least some of this makes sense.

The flower is the stimulus, but without judgments ascertaining if what I gave you is correct, then the flower is quite useless. — Manuel

Yes, but without the flower, judgements about it are meaningless.

Well, the most immediate example would be of a blind person asking for a red flower. But then since they can't see, it would be strange for them to ask for a red one, as opposed to just a "flower". — Manuel

Some blind people have visual images - it depends whether they have had vision earlier in their lives. People born blind, I'm not so sure. But Wittgenstein's point is that one can bring you a red flower without a visual image.

So, I don't find the phrase "have in mind" to be particularly problematic in the least. — Manuel

Well, I think you'll find that not everyone interprets that phrase in the same way - especially in philosophy.

And yet... The Economy of the Hive — T Clark

Yes, quite so. I realized after I signed off that I was wide open to that. If economics is about allocation of resources in a system, then an economy will be an aspect of any society.

Tentatively, I wondered whether any animals have an equivalent of money and I'm a bit sceptical about the claim that bees indulge in trade.

If we are human animals, and human animals are persons, we ought to extend personal identity to the limits of the human animal’s life instead of limiting its application to the fleeting moments of psychological awareness or memory. — NOS4A2

I hadn't thought about this. I guess I assumed that a given human is the same machine, the same animal and the same person throughout their life - normally and paradigmatically. But there are questions about psychological identity (self-identity) and social identity that make it more complicated than that.
Worse than that, many animals have capacities that are at least person-like and a certain (complicated\) moral status - though no-one, so far as I know, thinks that they are morally responsible agents.
But I do agree that the identity of persons (and animals and other creatures) ought to be defined in terms of a life-cycle, not as something that is unchanging throughout life. I also think that my identity as a person is, to a great extent, a moral and a social question, not a psychological one.

But by this criteria, personhood is something that has to be fostered and developed. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, that's certainly true. The phenomena around feral children seem to confirm that and, in my understanding, suggest that there is a "window" in our development when those abilities need to be learnt, or are best learnt.

I didn't know people denied this. Certainly not here at TPF. Most here take it further, and say there is no difference between us and the other species. — Patterner

Yes, some people do say there is no difference. But if that were true, the species homo sapiens could not be defined. The issue is what the significance of the differences is. The objection is to the idea of human exceptionalism; I mean the attitude that thinks that animals have no moral claim on us and can be treated in the same way(s) that we treat any other physical resource.

The argument seems to be more of an assertion and seems to employ zero signficant logic in coming to its conclusion, — noAxioms

That may be because the debate is not really about a matter of fact, but a question of attitude and values.

Yes, I agree. For me, the main point is that it is a matter of values and not a matter of fact. In that case, it becomes a question of whether humans should be considered animals rather than whether they are or aren't. — T Clark

Yes, for the purposes of biology, h. sapiens is just another species. But it would be absurd to apply economic theory to a hive of bees or termintes. But it is not a question is once-for-all; it is pragmatic. For example, people need food and shelter, just the same as their animals; they suffer and die from diseases, just the same as their animals. But it would be absurd to grant animals the right to vote; that belongs to people. Again, in the context of athletics, working out how best to throw a discus requires regarding the body as a machine; for many medical purposes the heart is just a pump. And so on.

Why are you going on out on a plausibility limb to defend a hypocrisy that can't be sanctioned or punished at this late date? It served his purpose, so that was the rational path. — Vera Mont

Well, if you said that Galileo was a hypocrite, I would agree on the basis that it was, technically, but justified on the basis that being tortured or burnt at the stake was an unreasonable price to pay for following a purely academic line of research and so lying was a rational way to get out of his situation, even though, if you are a Kantian, lying is always wrong. Why? Because he explicitly contradicted himself. Descartes' case is much less clear. I'm just calling it as I see it.

I was skeptical, too. But it's what he claimed as the object of the exercise: get to the truth by doubting everything he'd ever been taught or believed. (Except that.) — Vera Mont

There's a genuine argument against radical scepticism, that no-one can seriously doubt that he is now sitting beside a stove, which will burn one if one isn't careful. Descartes isn't quite in that bracket because he frames his doubt as "merely" theoretical.

Was he unable to see the dog's responses as being like his own, or he did he choose to ignore the similarity because it wasn't convenient? — Vera Mont

There's not way of knowing, and consequently no evidence that it was just a matter of convenience.

It was a moral issue in Descartes' time. — Vera Mont

Cudworth thought (as did More) that Descartes’ view of animals as mindless machines was implausible.

I had heard of Cudworth. But I didn't know he crossed swords with Descartes. However, his critique is milder than yours, in my book.
I would expect, however that Cudworth did not think that animals had souls and did think that because they did not, they were of less or no moral value and consequently eating them was perfectly OK.

I was referring to a more modest capacity—the ability to articulate that we can use words and construct sentences. I wasn't claiming that we can articulate in any comprehensive sense how it is that we are able to do that. — Janus

Well, yes. Animals cannot articulate anything in that way. But that takes us back to the question what the significance is of the various species-unique abilities we can learn - given that every species is unique in some way.

I agree but he is taking his time drawing out this side here first. And my recollection of TLP is shoddy but I was trying to draw the parallel of his, as you say Atomism there, and the “queer”-ness of the mechanism here. — Antony Nickles

I don't quite understand the parallel. But perhaps it's better if I just wait and see how things develop. As you say, it's at a very early stage.

In any case, listing differences between us and other animals does not necessarily bear on whether we are animals. Animals differ widely between each other too. Corals are animals and so are apes. The argument could be made that there are more and more striking differences between apes and corals than between us and apes and yet both are indisputably animals. — Baden

That's exactly right. So the question becomes why it matters, one way or the other. One obvious candidate is the belief in some version of the immortal soul. Another is some version of the idea that the animal world, like the mineral one, is just there for us to exploit or, more politely, to adapt to our values and needs.

It's not a metaphysical claim, it's a linguistic one. We can define an animal as anything we want. It's a question of values - some people want to separate humans from animals for social, religious, or spiritual reasons. There is no scientific reason to do so. — T Clark

Well, there couldn't be a scientific reason for a definition that was made only for social, religious or spiritual reasons. But there might be good social, religious or spiritual reasons for some definitions. It all depends on what one considers a good reason to be - and, as you say, that comes down to a question of values.
What puzzles me most is why there is no recognition here that a given organism always falls under several classifications. In biology, there are species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, kingdom, and domain. The method of classification of animals and plants (called cladistics) is according to the proportion of measurable or like characteristics that they have in common. The agenda behind this (or part of it) is that it is assumed that the higher the proportion of characteristics that two organisms share, the more recently they both came from a common ancestor.

I suppose if some one said that human beings are machines, they might be taken to say that human beings are just machines. But that's a misunderstanding. We can think of ourselves as machines for certain purposes in certain contexts, and as animals for other purposes in other contexts, and as people, not to mention as male/female, adult/child and so on. So the substantive question becomes when it is useful or appropriate to think of human beings as animals and when is it not useful or inappropriate to think of them as something else.

I would tend to agree with Philip Cary that a defining feature of the ancient/medieval and modern splits is:
- Modern man worries about becoming a machine.
-Ancient/medieval man worries about degenerating into a brute. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, that seems right. But nothing is that simple. There is also the comfortable reflection that, thank God, we are not either.

But what actually settles the issue in this case are the criteria you asked for, not the flower itself. — Manuel

But I asked you to bring me the flower itself. The criteria are only a means to an end.

If the flower I give you does not satisfy the conditions you have, then it does not match what you have in mind. The problem is not in the object, but our interpretation of it. — Manuel

"Have in mind" is a problematic phrase in this context. Let's say "it is not what you asked me to bring you." The blue flower that I bring you is not a problem in itself. But there is a problem with it in the context of your request to me. It's true that my interpretation of your request is a misinterpretation. Is that what you mean?

Yes, but the position he is sketching out is like the counter-voice of the interlocutor in the PI. It is also his own experience from the Tractatus (claiming all “state of affairs” are objects Tract 4.2211). — Antony Nickles

Yes, that's why I'm suggesting that scepticism/certainty is not the only issue in play in this text. BTW, I'm a bit puzzled by "all states of affairs" are objects. I thought one of the main planks of the TLP was that the world is all that is the case - facts, states of affairs - and not objects. It follows from the idea that the atoms are propositions, since a word only has meaning in the context of a sentence.

Yes, Descartes thought his way through to radical skepticism, but what we are dealing with here is the first part, which is wanting certainty (thinking of the whole world as objects we should be able to “see”, or know, as we do trees, etc.), which is the desire that starts the spinning. — Antony Nickles

OK. One can see it that way. But I don't see a lot in the text that suggests that this was explicitly on W's agenda here. Whereas we know that at this time he had found his way out of the TLP and was developing his next steps.

a lot gets added onto it when we want that to be an object, of certainty, of knowledge, that a “queer mechanism” “associates”—in terms of necessarily equates—it to the world; that there is a mechanism in us that accomplishes that. — Antony Nickles

But he doesn't want to deny that "red" is associated with red things in the world. What he's after is that the meaning is the use. "But if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we should have to say that it was its use." (p. 4)

The point is that it is not entirely clear to me what the term "mental image" encapsulates. I don't know if it includes solely pictorial stuff, or if it includes semantic terms as well. I suspect it does play a role. — Manuel

For me "mental image" is just pictorial stuff. The semantic stuff is not inherent in the image, but is the use we make of it. I don't think he denies that there are such things or that we might make use of them. But he does insist that this is only one way that we might find the red flower.

It's hard to parse out, there is a lot of stuff going on when we speak about a "red flower", which includes not only the words, but the word order, any mental associations we may specifically have, assuming that what is asked for is a "real red flower" as opposed to a "plastic red flower", if you don't know the language and someone asks you for a red flower, you could end up buying a brand that is spelled "red flower", and on and on. — Manuel

I'm sorry, I don't see your point. Of course there are a lot of assumptions and background conditions. Of course, things go wrong sometimes. The point is that whatever is in my mind can't prevent those. More than that, there seems to be no guarantee that I have the right mental image or that I do not misinterpret the mental image that I do have. Whatever is going on in my mind, the test is whether I get it right and come up with the red flower I was asked for - and that is not settled in my mind.

In short, there is a lot going on, and it is not evident to me that mental images don't play an important role. Also, what "mental images" specifically covers can be subtle. — Manuel

Does that mean that it is evident to you that mental images do play an important role? What might that be?

I say this because it's just as queer to think that we need mental content as to say that we don't need it, — Manuel

That's true. It's a common problem with philosophical ideas, because, at least in logical positivism they are (supposed to be) logically analytic, which means to assert or deny them is either trivial or nonsense. But I don't think that's what Wittgenstein is after here. It's not whether we have or don't have something going on in our minds when we pick a flower or obey an order. He's pointing out that whatever is in our minds, it can't do what philosophers have supposed it does. There's a moment of arm-waving and hocus-pocus when we are told that a mental image tells us which flowers are red or an internal map that we follow when we are going to the shops. Whether the image is mental or physical, it has to be read - interpreted. That's his target.

I take it that the desire for wanting necessity causes us to reach for an explanation that has certainty, like: in the case of ‘seeing an object’. What I think we miss is that: in order to have an answer that is necessary, certain, we have to create a particular kind of answer. — Antony Nickles

I don't disagree with you. But isn't there more to all this than radical certainty? For example, the insistence that it is the system that gives meaning to the word implies moving away from atomism (as in the Tractatus) towards a kind of holism or contextualism. Again, his claim that meaning is use directs us away from the pursuit of an abstract system in an abstract heaven back toward our everyday rule-governed behaviour.

I do hate what he and his cohort did to our relationship with nature and other species, the two hundred years of suffering they inflicted on helpless animals — Vera Mont

That's fair enough. I actually agree about the suffering. It's just that I doubt that he and his colleagues made much practical difference. It's not as if animal welfare has ever been a moral issue before our time.

I was referring to his very sensible use of God to avoid confrontation with the Inquisition. — Vera Mont

That's a question of his motivation. There's a passage in the Discourse on Method where he says that while he is subjecting his beliefs to methodical doubt, he sticks to conventional views. That can certainly be read as pragmatic rather than sincere.

He just pretended to rediscover it after ridding himself of all learned beliefs — Vera Mont

It would prefer "after supposedly ridding himself of all learned beliefs". It is hard to believe he hadn't read Aquinas' Five Ways and it wouldn't be surprising if he did a bit of cherry-picking through the rubbish.

So we might agree that other animals don't have a symbolic language in the sense that the language has the kind of syntactic and semantic properties that human verbal language has. — jkop

I see our language capability as a hyper-development of abilities that (all? most?) animals have to a greater or less extent. Other species have hyper-developed other abilities, such as the hyper-development of echo-location in bats and dolphins or vision in hawks and other predator birds.

Descartes God was a creative invention, just like his clockwork world. It's easy to play back-and-dorth with fiction; take no principles at all. — Vera Mont

H'm. You seem to really have it in for Descartes. He is iconic and takes a lot of stick. But he wasn't the one who invented God, or even the argument he used to argue for the reality of that God. True, he contributed massively to the clockwork world, there were many others involved as well. But still, you're not wrong.

I think it is plausible to think that we and the other animals may have an instinct to copy behavior. So some behaviors may be a combination of instinctive and learned. Learned not in the sense of deliberately taught but in the sense of acquired by mimicry. — Janus

That's perfectly true and I think that mimicry is more important to our learning that is generally recognized. People seem to prefer to emphasis association. I don't know why. Aristotle knew better, of course, and I think he may be alone amongst the canonical philosophers in that.

I think part of what I would count as the possession of symbolic language consists in the ability to explicitly understand that such and such a sound, gesture or mark conventionally stands for whatever it symbolizes. — Janus

There's a bit of a problem with that. Articulating our understanding of how to use words and construct sentences is much more difficult than it seems. For the most part, mostly our use of language is underpinned by skills that we do not, and often cannot, articulate.

After Galileo had his little confrontation with the good fathers - and quite rationally stood down from his heretical belief in the Earth moving around the sun - every thinker in Europe had some difficult moments rethinking their strategy. So Descartes has his big truth-seeking exercise: purges his mind of all beliefs, everything he's ever been taught, delves way down in there for one incontrovertible fact and comes up with "I exist" OK... "But wait, here's another incontrovertible truth: God. Didn't learn about God; it wasn't a belief: I just happened to find Him in here at the bottom of my completely empty mind. And now, I shall proceed to unfold my theory of a mechanistic universe, only God's winding all the clockwork animals. Oh, and people are a mechanistic body with a completely independent, immaterial soul.
Are you convinced of his sincerity? — Vera Mont

Oddly enough, I am convinced of Descartes' sincerity. It is Galileo who gets himself into a morally complicated situation. (I mean that he could be accused of hypocrisy, but I think he was (rationally and morally) justified in what he did.)

Galileo, as you say, recanted. The inquisitors forbade him from teaching or even discussing his heretical theory. However, the story goes that, as he left the Vatican, he paused on the steps and said (to himself) "Even so, it moves". If he had said that in the hearing of the inquisitors, he would thereby have recanted his recantation. But he kept that remark to himself, thus leading the inquisitors to believe that he had rejected the theory that he actually believed - the essence of hypocrisy. But I agree with you about the need to survive as best we can, so I have no criticism of him.

Descartes' position is also complicated, but much less black-and-white than Galileo's. Of course, I don't question the repressive regime that all these guys lived under, and his position is not entirely clear; I don't deny that he may have been influenced by it. But the key point is that his scepticism is a thought-experiment. He presents his story in the Meditations as if he is really believing the sceptical conclusions. But his introduction makes it clear that he doesn't, and the reader knows perfectly well that he is going to go on and rescue the situation. The genius of the Meditations is that it is a story with a plot exactly like every adventure (thriller) story - disaster looms and seems inevitable, but our hero risks everything in order to dash in and rescue the situation. There are arguments, to be sure, but the suspense of the plot does the real work of persuasion. True, the world will seem different, but we are safe and that's the important thing. T.S. Eliot says it well - after all our wanderings we will come back home "and know the place for the first time"; there may even be toast and honey for tea. It is very odd that Descartes and Hume are both classified as sceptical philosophers, when actually, they are nothing of the kind.

The difference between the two is that Galileo pretended to accept that his theory was an erroneous hypothesis when he believed that it was a true account and while Descartes never pretended that his scepticism was more than a possibility; he was exploring it n order to refute it.

You can't be moral when you're dead - so you compromise to stay alive. That's rational. The same person who made that compromise might still be honest with his friends, faithful to his wife, accurate in his court testimony, prompt in the payment of his debts and play a clean game of billiards.
Why insist that anyone be pure in both thinking and probity? That's just not human. The insides of our heads are never swept clean like Descartes imagined that one time. — Vera Mont

Yes, I agree with you. There's a kind of morality that makes black-and-white judgements and refuses to acknowledge complexity and ambiguity. Everyone has to duck and cover in order to get along. But without that society could not function. Keeping the peace and the show on the road are practically and morally important goals both for individuals and for the collective.

You seem to keep going around circle of deviation — Corvus

I agree. I don't even understand what you mean by a circle of deviation. I was indeed deviating in the sense that I was trying to break out of your circle of repetition. Best wishes to you as well.

It is a very peculiar way of putting down your own definition on someone else's writing, making out as if it was written by someone else. — Corvus

Like a Amazon delivery van delivers what you have ordered from Amazon? I am not sure if that was what you meant. Hope not. You find out truth or falsity on something using reason. — Corvus

No, not like that at all. Your way of putting it is better.

Rationality is a method to finding truth, but rationality itself is not truth. — Corvus

Checking out you knew or not, that is the work of reason. Reason itself is not truth. — Corvus

But then, I just don't understand what you mean by these comments. Reason and truth are not the same thing. But they are connected. You seem to recognize that, but then deny it. I must be missing something.

I don't believe there such a thing as a great big all-encompassing Truth to which you can apply rational thought. You can think quite a lot about how to talk about Truth, but you can't comprehend it with reason; the Truth is too abstract to capture with anything but faith. (Not saying definitively that It isn't 'out there'; only that I can't believe in it.) — Vera Mont

Oh, I agree with you entirely about Truth. But I do think there are truths. (After that, it all gets complicated.)

You can only judge according to your own values. — Vera Mont

That's true. But I would only make judgement taking into account the situation or context of the action - especially when it is very different from my own. BTW, I've heard people commenting on Descartes' personal moral stance before, but I've never quite understood what the problem is.

A functioning democracy depends on education for that purpose. — Athena

Yes. Somehow, that important truth has got lost in public discussion in these days .

Welfare subsidizes Industry by providing the assistance low wagers need. Only we have very little understanding of this so we are not managing our reality well. — Athena

It is very curious that industry can be relied on to adopt the narrowest point of view. It's not as if industry doesn't end up footing the bill for their starvation wages. It doesn't seem to occur to them that they might have to pay smaller taxes if only they paid a decent wage and make bigger profits because they would have a larger market for their goods.

I'm not! Quite the reverse: I'm saying that those who didn't stick their necks out for what we consider "the truth" today were acting rationally. So are those who go along to get along now. — Vera Mont

I'm sorry I misunderstood you.

a career priest [Augustine] might propound Christian/Platonic values as a rational way to support the status quo. — Vera Mont

I understood that as saying that Augustine might propound Christian/Platonic values in order to support the status quo - which is true. But then he would be guilty of hypocrisy. I wanted to point out that it is also possible that he might propound those values because he believed in Christianity and Platonism, whether or not they supported the status quo.

There are many cases when it is very hard to assess people. Heidegger (support for Nazism) and Hegel (support for the Prussian monarchy) are particularly difficult cases. Descartes has also been suspected, maybe because of his explicit policy of accepting orthodox morality while he is applying his methodology of doubt. I'm just saying that I don't think we should rush to judgement. But I see now that you were not rushing to judgement and I was. So I apologize.

Rational thought is less often used in the service of Truth than in achieving goals. — Vera Mont

I'm not quite sure what you are saying here. Practical reason is inherently morally ambiguous; a bad actor can be entirely rational. It is only theoretical reason that is in the service of truth.

But there have always been rebels who spoke out against the wrongs in their society — Vera Mont

Quite so. But there it can be very hard to tell which of them has really put their finger on an actual wrong, as opposed to a perceived wrong.

The captives felt it was wrong to be captured, but when they had the chance, they would do the same to an enemy. — Vera Mont

That's certainly an acid test.

Sadly, they were. There are still many people like that. Slavery and genocide are still with us. — Patterner

You are right about slavery and genocide. The (rather few) days when we could all be confident in the eventual triumph of western liberal values are long gone. It's all been a big let down.
But one cannot aspire to moral standards unless they can be articulated in the world that one lives in and I don't think it is appropriate to apply the standards of other societies to lives lived in that way. For example, the first traces in history of human rights did not appear until the fifth century BCE - in Persia. It took a long time before the idea was articulated in the late Roman Empire and even longer before Thomas Paine was able to articulate them with some clarity in the 18th century CE.
All that can be expected or required of us is to get along as well as we can in the world that we know, with all its many imperfections. That's the only standard that it is reasonable to apply. The virtues of saints and heroes are supererogatory - beyond what is required or expected. Certainly, they are to be admired, but it is not necessary to imitate them in order to live a good life.

Yes, it is an inherent mental capability — Vera Mont

Yes, that's the idea that the psychologists are pursuing. But the evidence for the existence of such a mental capacity is thin, to say the least.
IQ tests were supposed to be such that one could not benefit from practising. But it turns out that you can, although it is also true that there is a limit to how much one can improve. It also turns out that IQ questions are culturally biased and it is very difficult to construct questions that are not biased in that way.

Everything that we learn to do is the result of our genes and our environment working together; one simply cannot disentangle one from the other.

Rational thought is less often used in the service of Truth than in achieving goals. — Vera Mont

Yes, that's true. But I don't think we should be too hard on people who go along with the conventional views in society. It's perfectly possible to accept orthodoxy, not because it is easier, but because it seems to you to be true or even because you can't conceive of an alternative. It took thousands of years for us to develop the idea that there is something wrong with slavery and racism, and it seems absurd to think that all those people were morally deficient in some way.

I'm motivated by the reflection that much of what we believe and take for granted is likely to turn out to be false, or at least to be replaced by some other orthodoxy by our children or children's children. So I think I'm living in a glass house and don't want to start throwing stones.

Your knowledge on something can be rational, but still be wrong. — Corvus

It is true that one can believe something on rational grounds, and be wrong. But if you are wrong, you didn't know it. Knowledge cannot be wrong. If someone believes that it will rain on Tuesday, and it doesn't, they didn't know that it will rain on Tuesday.

You have modified the content of my post with your own writing. That is not what I wrote in my post on what intelligence means. It would help clarifying the points if you could go over what intelligence means, and what reasoning means in general terms, and think about the difference between the two. — Corvus

You seem to be misunderstanding me. I didn't modify your post at all. I simply presented to you my own definition of intelligence, which is different from yours.

Truth emerges when your belief or knowledge is examined and verified by reason. Reason itself cannot deliver truth as you claim. — Corvus

If reason cannot deliver truth, then it cannot verity my belief or knowledge.

We were not talking about truth, and truth as a property of belief or knowledge has nothing to do with rational thinking. Your knowledge on something can be rational, but still be wrong. — Corvus

Clearly, we have different concepts of rationality. If rationality has nothing to do with truth, what is the point of it? How does it differ from reading tea leaves of consulting an astrologer?

There is certainly a problem about rational justification if one allows that someone can be justified in believing something and be wrong; it becomes even more confusing if you allow that someone can know something and be wrong. But the answer is to find a solution.

For that, you need to verify your knowledge or beliefs if they are not from deductive reasoning. — Corvus

Doesn't "verify" mean something like to demonstrate the truth or accuracy of something, as by the presentation of evidence? In that case, we must be talking about truth. Though you are right that it is possible to believe something on rational grounds and be wrong.

Intelligence means knowing something, or being able to do something in coherent way. It is not same as The ability to acquire, understand, and use knowledgesomething, which are what rational thinking does. — Corvus

I thought it was something like the ability to acquire, understand, and use knowledge. That would make it something different from knowledge but more about how to acquire knowledge.

Any reasonable person would want his / her beliefs, knowledge, actions or perceptions to be rational than irrational. No one wants to have beliefs, knowledge, actions or perceptions which are irrational by human nature. That is why it does matter for your beliefs, actions, knowledge or perceptions to be rational. — Corvus

Yes, that's a good way to answer the question. "Any reasonable person..." By definition, nobody could be reasonable unless they preferred being rational to being irrational. Which means that, as a definition, what you say is circular. But that's perfectly OK in this case.
The usual answer is that rationality is our way to truth (or justification in the case of actions). That's circular as well, since truth is what rationality delivers.
Rationality is what delivers the truth, so there can be no question whether rationality delivers truth. It would be like trying to measure the standard metre in Paris in order to find out whether it is a metre long.
What you end up with is that rationality provides the justification for everything else and therefore has no rational justification.

Religious beliefs always have been from the blind faith rather than anything to do with being rational or irrational. — Corvus

H'm that's a bit quick. What about people like Aquinas or Descartes who believed that they had rational arguments for belief in God? That's quite different from belief from blind faith. True, most people (but not all) believe their arguments were not valid. But they certainly weren't blind faith.
There are theologians who take as their starting-point the "presupposition" that the Bible is the word of God. It has something of the status of an axiom. Something posited as true, but not capable of being proved or disproved. Their theology follows by rational process. Sometimes rational thinking has irrational elements.

Your problem seem to be confusion between intelligence and knowledge with reasoning and being rational. — Corvus

My problem is that I've never been able to grasp a clear meaning for the term "intelligence". So I mostly ignore it, especially in philosophy.

You could respond instinctively to the gooses hissing which I would say would be a non-symbolically mediated understanding of it. Discursive knowledge would seem to be always in symbolic form I guess. — Janus

Well, given the definition that we have of what a symbol is, any knowledge that is discursive would be in human-style language, so it follows that it would be in symbolic form.
But I like the idea of a non-symbolically mediated understanding it, though I'm taking that as what is called "tacit" knowledge. But then, we have to acknowledge that human beings are also capable of that same form of understanding.

"Instinctively" is a bit of a trap. Strictly speaking, instinctive behaviour is a set behaviour pattern that is not learned, but inherited. It is not, therefore, based on any process of learning or reasoning. It is capable of rational justification at the level of evolution as contributing to the ability of the creature to sruvive and reproduce. Most, if not all, behaviour, of sentient creatures is a combination of instinct, learning and response to the relevant context. Spiders do not learn to weave webs, but they weave them in a context and adapt the pattern to suit. Newly-born foals struggle to their feet and look for milk responding to and managin in the actual context they are in.

Thinking about this, there's no doubt that there are instinctive elements in our reading of body language - very small babies respond to smiling faces. But they can recognize mother at a very early stage, which must be learnt. Again, the behaviour of lobsters in cages when they are frightened is not difficult to recognize. But we do have to learn much body language in order to read it and it does not follow from the fact that we can read human body language that we can read the body language of other creatures without learning. But small children do have to be taught to recognize the body language of dogs.

Would that be an appropriate response? You might instinctively take it as a friendly greeting, or as just something geese do with no meaning.
In fact, it's a simple enough communication, usually accompanied by threatening stance and body language. — Vera Mont

Yes. It is possible, of course, that the unlearned response of the goose to a threat is recognizable by analogy with the threatening behaviour of other creatures and is recognized on that basis. No doubt those unlearned responses have evolved to work across species. A threat that was only recognized by other geese would be much less useful that one that can be recognized by other species.

All true. So why the symbol question? I've seen it bandied about and argued over, but I can't figure out the significance of it. — Vera Mont

The idea is that use of symbols is a distinctively human capacity - and the basis of our kind of language. If you look into what philosophers have said about it, there's a great deal of confusion about it. Peirce, for example, treats both what we call signs as distinct from symbols in the same class and calls that class "symbols". Cassirer doesn't seem to discuss what we are calling signs at all, though he does distinguish between symbolic meaning and "expressive meaning". This is not territory that I'm familiar with. I'm just illustrating how messy the philosophy of this topic is.
(Signs are here used to mean "Smoke means (is a sign of) fire" or "Clouds mean (are a sign of) rain" - causal connections. Not everyone draws the same distinction.)

It's just the distinction between symbolic and non-symbolic signs. The former denote whatever they do by convention. As far as we know only humans possess symbolic language. Again though I want to stress that I don't see that fact as a justification for human exceptionalism. — Janus

I agree. Discursive knowledge needs to be seen as a species-specific capacity alongside the species-specific capacity of bats and dolphins to find their way by echo-location, not as a radical distinction between humans and other species.

If a person is going to work for low wages because the economy requires people who work for no pay or low wages, what is that person's reward for putting the health of the national economy first? Should we close these people out of society's benefits because they can not pay for those benefits, or do we need planning, cooperation, utilities and a big "thank you" as opposed to a snide "oh, that is welfare"? — Athena

Well, I would say that an economy that requires people to work for wages that cannot sustain a decent life is broken. But that requirement is so common that I suspect I'm just being idealistic. Still, it seems inhumane and immoral not to see those jobs as problematic.

If only we could get away from the idea that welfare is charity! In a broken economy, it may be true. But it just reinforces exploitation. Welfare is not charity. It is insurance - pooling risks that would be catastrophic for individuals so that they can be dealt with or at least ameliorated. Life insurance is not charity, but common sense. Of course, some people prefer to stick to the short-term and drive their cars. That's why car insurance is a legal requirement. But, rationally speaking, insurance makes sense and is not charity. More than that, rationally speaking again, there are some risks that are so large that only the state can take them on.

But the reason for the introduction of the very first state welfare system (in Prussia in the late 19th century) was neither charitable nor an insurance policy. It was a question of riot control by a rigidly conservative and aristocratic chancellor - Bismarck. There are articles about it in, for example, Wikipedia.

Welfare is enlightened and rational self-interest, not charity.

Firstly, using a lot (random selection) has a problem: if a small number of people who received the offer accepted to participate in this group, these people are not a representative sample, and their opinions do not represent the opinions of the whole population. — Linkey

My impression is that the selection is random, but weighted so that the assembly overall is representative of the population. Men/women. Old/young. Class. and so on, as long as you wish.

The aim is not to represent the existing opinions of the whole population, but to enable the members to work out their own views and negotiate with others who disagree. (Negotiation with other points of view is difficult to impossible in the public forum). The result is expected to be a view that is likely to be at least acceptable to as much of the population as possible.

To solve this problem, sufficient sums of money must be offered to these people for participating in these groups. — Linkey

Participation is time-consuming. I don't know whether paying people for work-time lost is practiced, but it obviously could be.

My point was only that something quite like your suggestion is practiced already, and is proving useful - at least to policy-makers.

You want to take away from citizens even that illusion of control? — Vera Mont

I agree with you. I don't think anyone is suggesting that citizens' assemblies like these should acquire any legislative powers. Their effect is only on the people developing policy. But the reform of abortion in Ireland is a good example of how influential they can be.

The constitutional and legislative provisions were discussed at a Citizens' Assembly in 2016–17, and at an Oireachtas committee in 2017, both of which recommended substantial reform and framed the debate of the referendum in May 2018.[5] — Wikipedia - Abortion in the Republic of Ireland

Is there any way for ordinary people to dispossess the rich of their wealth? Sure -- some sort of revolution. This has happened a few times. Societies operated for the convenience of wealthy people, however, discourage revolutionary thinking. It generally gets nipped in the bud, so to speak. — BC

I'm afraid there's always a ruling class, if only because not everybody is willing to deal with the (often very boring) business of government. Revolutions just install a new ruling class. The best you can hope for is a ruling class that is sufficiently intelligent to realize that keeping the people reasonably happy is in their self-interest. The best way to deal with them is to have a way of getting rid of them when they become intolerable or incompetent (as Popper so wisely pointed out). That's the single greatest advantage of democracy.

Some of your questions are trivial. Concerning the necessity to gather information before voting, I have an idea of using a lot: a group of 200 random people would be chosen, the state will give them the money for studiing the subject, and possbly they will vote instead of the whole population. This is one implementation of the "lottocracy", for me there are better ones, but they are more difficult for explaining. — Linkey

This sounds very like what I know as citizens' assemblies. They seem to be very helpful in formulating policy. But I don't think that anyone sees them as a possible legislative bodies. For more detail, see, for example, On Citizens' assemblies

Right, I think conventionality is the key difference between signs which count as symbols and those which do not. — Janus

So when the goose hisses at me that is a sign (expression) of anger or hostility, which means that I do well to behave cautiously, yet I can only articulate what the sign means by using symbols. Obviously, then, the way I understand what the goose's hiss means, is by means of symbols, which the goose cannot use. Yet the difference in meaning between the two is hard to discern.
Does that make sense? I'm not sure.

Asking for grounds or justification for your belief, knowledge, actions and perception is not Formal Logic. It is just a rational thinking process for finding out if your beliefs, knowledge, actions or perceptions were rational or irrational. — Corvus

Why does it matter whether our beliefs, knowledge, actions or perceptions were rational or irrational? Is it because that is how we know that they are true - or, in the case of actions, justified?
So it seems that even if I believe my perceptions without any grounds, I can justify them - that is, provide reasons (grounds) for believing them - after I come to believe them.

There's a lot packed in to your comments of the last few days. Thanks. I've had to be selective in what I reply to. I hope I've identified the best places to focus.

My issue with the phrase "what's going on in the heads" is that it presupposes a false equivalence. — creativesoul

Do you mean false equivalence between human thinking and animal thinking? I was using the phrase to refer to what is often described as the phenomenology of thinking. Perhaps most helpful would be to talk about what people will report as their thinking.

Meaningful thought emerged long before naming and describing practices. — creativesoul

Quite so. But I don't think there's any reason to suppose that meaningful thought without name or describing has been banished from human life. The complication is that we often want to talk about, or at least express such thoughts or experiences, and then we often find ourselves struck dumb or confused.

There are some things at work here, beneath all our discourse/ conversation about what counts as rational thought/minds. — creativesoul

Yes, indeed. If we could identify what they are, we might make a leap forward in our understanding of what's going onin philosophical discussion of that topic. The question about animals is particularly useful because it is a specific application of those concepts in a particular context where we find it difficult to be sure how to apply them. Our paradigm of rational thinking is articulate thinking independent of action. But that depends on our language, and animals do not have that kind of language. So we disagree about how to apply them.

One of my difficulties here is that there is an almost irresistible temptation to think that what is at stake is a process that is independent of the action - a process that is referred to by "thinking" or "reasoning". I happen to have recently read Lee Braver's "Groundless Grounds". In that book, he articulates an idea of rational reconstruction as a way of coming to understand what is happening when we attribute the application of reason where there does not appear to be any such process involved. He doesn't mention animals, but I think that it is also a good way to understand what is going on when we attribute reason to animals.

One way of explaining this is by means of an analogy. Aristotle developed the concept of the practical syllogism. He doesn't claim that When I eat my breakfast, I must have said to myself "This is food. Food is good for me. I should eat this." (Partly because he recognizes that that process doesn't necessarily result in action.) What he is doing here is exactly parallel to what he does when he formulates the idea of the theoretical syllogism - "All humans are mortal. Socrates is a human. Socrates is mortal." It is a formulation that helps us analyze and understand the actual ways that humans think. Theoretical and practical syllogisms are rational reconstructions of thinking, not empirical descriptions.

Sorry. Premature posting. Fat thumbs.

that an abstract object is abstract on account of the fact that it refers to no particular thing but ranges over a whole class of particulars thus qualifying it as a generalization. — Janus

You are quite right that that classes are abstract objects and that they range over particulars. But it doesn't follow that all abstract objects are classes.

I see the distinction between abstract objects as particulars and generalizations as a valid one. — Janus

Well, we can agree on that, though we may find complications if we looked more closely at the detail.

But it has not been converted by a linguistic culture into a symbol that stands by convention as signifying anger hostility or danger. — Janus

You are quite right, particularly about the hissing being an expression. The difference between that and a symbol would take some teasing out but set that aside. The lack of a convention does suggest that it is not. When we say that the goose is expressing anger and hostility, we are recognizing (and telling others) that one should expect a defensive reaction if you behave in certain ways. Recognizing that pattern of behaviour is recognising the meaning of the hiss. Our interpretation of, and talk about, the hiss is our application of our description.

Suggesting formal logic as your standard of rationality sounded very odd even as a conditional comment. — Corvus

You surprise me. I thought that was what you were suggesting. It's good to know that I was wrong.

That would mean children born deaf can think well enough to function, communicate and learn sign language. In fact, they begin to invent their own signals between 8 and 12 month, and can be taught the rudiments of ASL at that time, just as hearing babies begin to learn spoken language. They all do need sensory and intellectual stimulation. For non-verbal feral children the requirements of survival would provide plenty of stimulation, as it also does for fox kits and fledgling geese. — Vera Mont

Quite so.

I think this is a much more interesting issue to explore.

I understand animal warning cries to be signaling, not symbolizing, danger. I have acknowledged that I believe animals sense danger. I'm not sure what you think we are disagreeing about. — Janus

A symbol is a kind of sign but not all signs are symbols. Smoke is a sign of fire, but smoke does not symbolize fire. An animal cry may be a sign of whatever but it does not symbolize whatever it might be a sign of. — Janus

This is a much more pertinent, and illuminating, issue.
I think you are thinking of a distinction that was drawn quite a long time ago now to resolve a particular problem. "Clouds mean rain" and "'Cloud" means a mass of particles or droplets, as of dust, smoke, or steam, suspended in the atmosphere or existing in outer space". In other words, it was an attempt to distinguish what meaning means in the context of linguistic meaning and what it means in the context of drawing inferences from evidence. (I'm sorry I can't remember, and google doesn't find, any helpful reference)
I guess that if I must choose between the two, I would have to choose "sign", because the alternative "symbol" means attributing human-style language to the dog. But the catch with this is that if we say that a goose hissing is a sign of anger hostility or danger in your sense of sign, we are positing a purely causal relationship, which would be incompatible with attributing rationality, or even sentience, to the goose.
This means that we need to draw some more distinctions. Sign vs symbol is more complicated than ti seems. I don't have a neat account of the difference, just a few remarks towards a map. The same applies to the concept of action.

My first thought was that a stop sign is, just as it says, a sign. It doesn't symbolize a stopped car. — Patterner

This is a bit complicated. The question to ask what the difference is between a sign and a symbol in this context. For example, when the police or road workers cordon off a section of road - even close it - with a tape across the road, is that equivalent to the stop sign? I would say that it symbolizes a blockage - like a heap of rubble. Is a red light a sign or a symbol?

I was thinking a symbol would depict, even if the depiction was stylized, the thing. — Patterner

Mini-pictures have become a very popular way of conveying information, partly because they are supposed to be language-independent. They may be helpful, but in my view, they constitute another language; they are not always intuitive, but need to be learnt. I think the technical term for these is "icon", but it is obviously different from the sense that some rock bands are said to be "iconic". (I'm not suggesting that icons are not useful). (There are echoes here of Wittgenstein's Tractatus. I don't know whether that book influenced their popularity now. It seems possible, but unlikely).

But then I looked up 'symbol', and the first example is: for example, a red octagon is a common symbol for "STOP" — Patterner

"Sign" and "Symbol" don't seem to have a well-defined, technical, definition. The terms are applied differently in different contexts. One peculiarity of this specific example is that a stop sign is not merely reporting a situation, like the or a sign-post. It is giving an instruction.
So at a police road-block, when the officer holds up a hand, palm open and facing towards you (I think this is more or less universal), the officer is ordering you to stop in a non-verbal fashion. Is that gesture a sign or a symbol? Is it linguistic?

In the realm of actions, we have been mainly talking about actions that have a purpose, because that is where the question of rationality or not is clearest. But there are different kinds of action. Reflexes, habits, expressions (Ouch! I'm in pain!), are just the beginnings of a list.

Abstract objects may be treated as generalizations or particulars and I have not said nor implied anything that contradicts that. — Janus

H'm. That's a large and tempting rabbit-hole, but I'm thinking that diving down it would be a distraction.

If you are treating abstract objects as particulars then yes. My point was that numbers are themselves generalizations. There are countless instantiations of 'two' just as there are of 'tree' or 'animal'. — Janus

I'm not at all sure that's a helpful way to think of them, but we would have to dive down the rabbit-hole to clarify that.

It seems to me that you have missing the point of what I've been saying and not the other way around since I have said that whatever we know about animal minds is derived from observing their behaviour and body language and I have not been concerned at all with explaining their behaviour by purportedly somehow knowing what is going on in their minds. The same goes for humans except that they can also explain themselves linguistically. Of course the verity of those explanations relies on the one doing the explaining being both correct and honest. — Janus

That's all fine by me.

Why would formal logic make the whole humanity irrational?. Formal logic is another area of academic subjects which enables human reasoning more rational. — Corvus

That's not quite what I said. I'm sorry if I was not clear. I left out the conditional "if formal logic is your standard of rationality" and qualified "the whole of humanity" to "almost the whole of humanity". As you say, formal logic is something that helps us to be more rational, which means that almost all of us have some level of rationality. Since very few of us know any formal logic, it follows that the rationality of most of us does not lie in our ability to do formal logic. That seems about right.

It is not about right or wrong on the inductive reasoning, but isn't it about lack of logical or rational ground in the reasoning Hume was pointing out? — Corvus

Hume's criticism was aimed at the scholastic concept of some power, hidden from our experience, was what enable to first billiard ball to make the second billiard ball move. Many people have believed that the conclusion is simply that induction is invalid. However, Hume was not saying that we should or could just give up on it, in the way that one would simply give up on an invalid form of argument. There's room for debate about exactly what he was saying, but it was not that.
Induction is not deduction. It is better thought of as a trial and error process, which can never get us to deductive truth, but can get us nearer to it. Popper's version of this was conjecture and refutation, now often described as hypothesis and falsification. Neither of those formulations is really satisfactory. recognizes that hypotheses/conjectures that have been tested but not falsified are what we rely on pragmatically. Asking what rational ground we have for that is asking for a rational ground for relying on rational grounds.
Compare what happens when you ask for a rational ground for relying on sound deductive arguments. I refer you to C.L. Dodgson's article about the dialogue between Achilles and the Tortoise after their race.

I have never heard of anyone trying to justify what they saw. One can confirm what one saw. But usually one doesn't justify what one saw. One justifies what one believes, said, done and think, but not one saw, smelt, felt, drank, ate or heard. — Corvus

You said this earlier. It is another example of a situation in which asking for a rational ground (for believing that I saw what I saw, is not a question that has a rational answer. Yet believing that I saw what I saw is not irrational. For it can serve as a premiss in a sound deductive argument.

Humans have taken creative thinking and created their own reality. This is beyond what animals do. — Athena

"Creative" is a troublesome idea. There seems to be no clear boundary between creative and non-creative thinking. For example, I would say that the crow that we saw earlier in this thread was thinking creatively, when It realizes that a stick can serve as a way of getting the goodies.


I agree with everything you say.
People often regard improvements in technology and in their own prosperity as advances, when they are usually double-edged swords.