Are there really non-goofy people who propose calling pregnancy a disease? — T Clark

Before going into the details of what Aristotle said or did not say, I would like to think about Rorty as the poster child for what Gerson militates against. Rorty is baldly "historicist" in his description of the 'end of philosophy'. I agree with Gerson that Rorty is too general and reductive in how the practice is conceived. — Paine

But is Rorty the best exemplar of what Gerson opposes? I have been questioning the unity imparted by Gerson upon classical texts in previous discussions. The assumed unity of what is being opposed by Gerson needs some consideration. — Paine

Taken too broadly, this battle of the books will make no distinction between the differences between different models. To pluck out one among many, will the argument about what is innate versus what is developed through events in life hinge only upon the categories by which they are described? Or will the process lead to discoveries yet unknown by studying them?.

That prompts the question of how Aristotle was searching for something new or not. And that is different from asking how a set of propositions, defended (and opposed) centuries later, relates to contemporary activities. — Paine

Is it? — Srap Tasmaner

Is that also predominantly psychological? No philosophy? — Srap Tasmaner

But Wittgenstein himself only uses Augustine to put forth a very simplistic image of language (and I don't think he is being unfair to Augustine here, he is just not using very much of him). So, his ideas then aren't connected to past thought in a way they might have been. — Count Timothy von Icarus

And I think that's a very small-minded way of looking at it. Vervaeke’s opus is nearer my interests than most of what is written about here, and he's a legitimate academic, he's not fringe or crank. He dialogues with a lot of interesting people and they cover a lot of topics in depth. The reason he's developed a following is because he's saying something that needs to be said, and that a lot of people needed to hear, shame folks here don't appreciate that, but nothing I can say is likely to change it. — Wayfarer

His writings are not monologues. There is often if not always an interlocutor, even when the interlocutor is silent. — Fooloso4

Having been deeply influenced by Plato, my first impression of Wittgenstein was similar to yours. It took me years of struggling to interpret him to change my mind. As with Plato it is a matter of participation, of engagement with the texts, of questioning and challenging, of sorting things one way or another. — Fooloso4

This already draws from a more shallow pool, or at least tethers one to a more shallow pool, and it leads to pedantic pointing out of how language can lead to confusion, which I am not sure was not pointing out what was obvious for the common reader.. It seems more transformative if you drank the analytic kool-aid beforehand, but then that also makes the readership more shallow, and less relevant. — schopenhauer1

...but by doing so he left open and guarded rather then forced closed the problems of life, beauty, and what is higher. — Fooloso4

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.

After all, the absolute is not reality with appearances removed, but reality + all appearances. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Wouldn't discussions of God fall into this category? — Count Timothy von Icarus

The crucial distinction is that signs are always "how we know," whereas more pernicious forms of pluralism often seems to rely on the claim that "signs are what we know." But if everything is signs, "appearance," then there can be no real reality/appearance distinction. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yup, but the conclusions which are drawn from this vary quite a bit. We are drawn to ask: "where do theories come from?" That they have cultural, linguistic, and historical determinants is obvious, but there is a weird tendency to move from this insight to the idea that this makes them in some way arbitrary, and thus disconnected from truth. "X is socially and historically determined, thus X cannot tell us about the way the world really is." — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'd say that Hume's constant conjunction and the probability theories that tread similar ground are intellectually problematic insofar as they pre-pave a meta-rut for cognitive bias. For instance, we are now prone to mistake anthropological habits for natural probabilities. — Leontiskos

And I think that other way is captured, in part, in your usual suggestion that everything we do and say involves a metaphysics, generally unacknowledged and unexamined, and thus properly called our "metaphysical assumptions." — Srap Tasmaner

To avoid triviality, a first step is to restrict our attention to meanings with a “shape” that matches the grammar of quantifiers. We may achieve this indirectly, as follows. Understand a “candidate meaning” henceforth as an assignment of meanings to each sentence of the quantificational language in question, where the assigned meanings are assumed to determine, at the least, truth conditions. “Candidate meanings” here are located in the first instance at the level of the sentence; subsentential expressions (like quantifiers) can be thought of as having meaning insofar as they contribute to the meanings of sentences that contain them. Thus quantifiers are assured to have meanings whose “shapes” suffice to generate truth conditions for sentences containing quantifiers. — Sider, Ontological Realism, 8-9

And he's right. Infants acquire the idea of object permanence even before the idea of object identity. They're not born with it, so far as we can tell, but it develops predictably, and so that pattern of development is more or less "built in." And it comes before language, and evidently would have to come before anything like rational thought, so it's not like you could reason your way there anyway. — Srap Tasmaner

Our metaphysical assumptions, if there are such things, are probably no more accessible to us than they are to non-linguistic beings. — Srap Tasmaner

That's pretty weird, but the main thing is that it suggests there's an entirely separate route to belief available: you saw the car accident happen, I only heard you talk about seeing it, and we both hold beliefs that it happened. — Srap Tasmaner

I suppose I'm suggesting that thinking a concept like "object permanence" is actually instantiated in the infant brain might be a sort of category mistake. The whole system will behave in a way that we recognize or categorize as embodying such a conception, but that doesn't mean it's "in there" somewhere. — Srap Tasmaner

I was very impressed by the idea (in Mercier and Sperber) that participants in a discussion systematically simplify and exaggerate their positions, in both the definiteness of their view and their confidence in it, and that this is strategic: you're responsible for bringing a view to the table, others bring others, and you argue to some kind of consensus that would enable group action. (Reasons are in part excuses you offer others to make going along with you palatable.) We're crap at judging our own views but pretty good at criticizing others. — Srap Tasmaner

And it's pretty obvious that something like this is right at the root of language use. We talk digital even if we mostly live analog. — Srap Tasmaner

Phaedo: Likely indeed, he said, but arguments are not like men in this particular.

Socrates: I was merely following your lead just now. The similarity lies rather in this: it is as when one who lacks skill in arguments puts his trust in an argument as being true, then shortly afterwards believes it to be false—as sometimes it is and sometimes it is not—and so with another argument and then another. You know how those in particular who spend their time c studying contradiction in the end believe themselves to have become very wise and that they alone have understood that there is no soundness or reliability in any object or in any argument, but that all that exists simply fluctuates up and down as if it were in the Euripus10 and does not remain in the same place for any time at all.

What you say, I said, is certainly true.

It would be pitiable, Phaedo, he said, when there is a true and reliable argument and one that can be understood, if a man who has dealt with such arguments as appear at one time true, at another time untrue, should not blame himself or his own lack of skill but, because of his distress, in the end gladly shift the blame away from himself to the arguments, and spend the rest of his life hating and reviling reasonable discussion and so be deprived of truth and knowledge of reality.

Yes, by Zeus, I said, that would be pitiable indeed.

This then is the first thing we should guard against, he said. We should not allow into our minds the conviction that argumentation has nothing sound about it; much rather we should believe that it is we who are not yet sound and that we must take courage and be eager to attain soundness, you and the others for the sake of your whole life still to come, and I for the sake of death itself. — Plato, Phaedo, 90b..., tr. Grube

I do think we are circling the gist of the grievance, but you frame it as: “Wittgenstein is either saying something or else he is not.” First, wanting him to just “say something” misses the reason that about half of PI is questions; as I said, questions for you to work out, to change you. — Antony Nickles

In his "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding," Locke makes an argument against the "innate ideas" of the rationalists.

[...]

However, here he differs from Aristotle quite a bit. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What enactivists find valuable about Wittgenstein is his recognition that linguistic meaning and intentionality cannot be fully understood via models that begin from the idea thatmentation is a matter of rational representation of a world performed inside a brain. — Joshs

Sigh. Look at what you quoted: — Srap Tasmaner

But there is quite definitely no great body of everyday discussion of whether certain kinds of things exist — Srap Tasmaner

I just heard on the radio an interview with a UCLA anthropoligist who's spent time along the migration trails from Central America to the US. He said his new book was intended just to add some nuance to the public conversation about migration, because nothing in life is black and white, and smugglers aren't just good or bad.

Which way do you want to go here? If this guy is good at his job, and it sounded to me like he is, then we might agree to say he is pursuing the truth, and is in a position to tell us truths we were unaware of. Fine.

But does that mean the statement "Smugglers are bad" must be true or false? — Srap Tasmaner

But does that mean the statement "Smugglers are bad" must be true or false? Why would it? And what do we say about Jason De León's book? That it's the truth? The whole truth and nothing but the truth? A version of the truth? A part of the truth? But a partial truth can be misleading, so the understanding of truth is not monotonic even if the acquisition of truth is. How do we judge his work? None of us saw what he saw; we can't go back in time and skulk behind a tree to see if his reporting is accurate. We could interview his informants, if we could find them, but even the people that were there might not have noticed something that he did, and anyway some of them are dead now. — Srap Tasmaner

Again, how immeasurably greater is the pleasure, when a man feels a thing to be his own; for surely the love of self is a feeling implanted by nature and not given in vain, although selfishness is rightly censured; this, however, is not the mere love of self, but the love of self in excess, like the miser's love of money; for all, or almost all, men love money and other such objects in a measure. And further, there is the greatest pleasure in doing a kindness or service to friends or guests or companions, which can only be rendered when a man has private property. These advantages are lost by excessive unification of the state. The exhibition of two excellences, besides, is visibly annihilated in such a state: first, temperance towards women (for it is an honourable action to abstain from another's wife for temperance sake); secondly, liberality in the matter of property. No one, when men have all things in common, will any longer set an example of liberality or do any liberal action; for liberality consists in the use which is made of property.

Such legislation may have a specious appearance of benevolence; men readily listen to it, and are easily induced to believe that in some wonderful manner everybody will become everybody's friend-especially when someone is heard denouncing the evils now existing in states, suits about contracts, convictions for perjury, flatteries of rich men and the like, which are said to arise out of the possession of private property. These evils, however, are due not to the absence of communism but to the wickedness of human nature. Indeed, we see that there is much more quarrelling among those who have all things in common, though there are not many of them when compared with the vast numbers who have private property. — Aristotle, Politics, II.5, tr. Jowett

In my opinion he should not. An author does not maintain control over how his words are understood or used by others. — Fooloso4

But I can still play at philosophy, and it's an old habit. — Srap Tasmaner

I could argue against "contextless truth" and "carving nature at the joints" but I wouldn't be arguing for an alternative philosophical position. And I'd spend a lot of time arguing against misunderstanding positions I don't even hold, just out of scrupulousness I guess. Trying to think well is about as much of a program as I have. — Srap Tasmaner

One more thing I think is happening sometimes is people take everything Witt writes as if it was a statement, like a claim to knowledge or an argument for the purpose of having a conclusion admitted. But I hear them like conjecture, or even more, like characterizations of remarks, that only lead to asking: “why would we say that?” Or: “look at it in this way”. But the only way to treat a picture like a conclusion is to accept it whole hog, without justification and without means of refuting it, when the picture is just meant to say: “do you see what I see in this (by/for yourself)?” — Antony Nickles

The knower is as it were a mirror for the known (the microcosm). Whatever this relationship is, and however it is to be properly explained, it is not the kind of relationship which Wittgenstein's simple objects can enter into. The knowing subject is therefore not part of the world, or an object that can be met with in the world alongside the other objects in the world. The self is pure medium, pure mirror for the world; their limits coincide. The self is, in a sense, one with the world. It gives way to it. Solipsism collapses into realism. — Peter Simpson, Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein on Self and Object

The idea is, you go there to ask questions and elicit answers, NOT to engage in the kind of free-wheeling debates that we have here (if the back and forth yields a debate, it is split off into a different, 'chat room', format, which I've never pursued). — Wayfarer

Surely "true" here is short for "true in L, under I", but I find it odd they didn't just say that, since all the model-theoretic machinery seems ready to hand.

So that's caveat number 1 to your point: truth is always truth in a language, under a particular interpretation. It doesn't even make sense -- heh, in this theoretical context -- to say otherwise, to say "just plain true, dammit!" — Srap Tasmaner

The first kind of ideology is, after all, not ideology but just another name for thinking. Edge describes it as the fact that we have no access to a world independent of our senses and judgments. Indeed. No one can think without thinking and, since we are sensing creatures, without sensing either. But Edge then immediately slides into a suggestio falsi by glossing what he said as that we always think, when we think, with an inherited language-picture of the world. He then gives a further gloss that the drive to get beyond such a picture to ‘the resplendent and glorious room of objectivity’ is ‘fruitless’ because we cannot get to a place ‘independent of human thought, talk, language and belief’. Of course not. But whoever thought one had to in order to get to objectivity, to truth, to the way things are? One gets to objectivity by thinking. — Peter L. P. Simpson, A Response to Edge

Pluralism doesn't have to mean everyone's always right. It just means understanding something about how you're right, and that there may be other ways to be right. — Srap Tasmaner

As already noted, if logic had no ontological implications then there could be no historical progression in logic vis-a-vis ontology, there could be no better or worse logics vis-a-vis ontology, and Wittgenstein's logic could not have excluded dynamism from his ontology, <which it did>. — Leontiskos

Does any one else see this as a bad argument? Count Timothy von Icarus? @Srap Tasmaner?

If logic does not have ontological implications, then there are no better or worse logics regarding ontology.

But it remains that there may be better or worse uses of logic in ontological arguments.

Or is there a more charitable way to read this than as a transcendental argument with a false conclusion? — Banno

There's a touching passage in Tarski's little Introduction to Logic that I'll quote in full here — Srap Tasmaner

I would say it is generally taking arguments in the strongest, most compelling sense possible. However, if one starts to think that the most compelling sense of the arguments is to take them as... — Count Timothy von Icarus

To be fair, is this obvious? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Wittgenstein, of course, should not be faulted for what Wittgensteinians say and do. — Fooloso4

In the architectonic form, the thread is entirely derailed into the poster's fairly rigid system. — fdrake

It's more well suited to disciplines that have explicit agreed upon correct answers... — flannel jesus

My thinking was, if you assume QV, then when people who embrace those sorts of systems have disagreements, in a way, QV seems to assume that they are either wrong in their metaphysics or else not saying what they are saying. So the original example I thought of was comparing something like the classical Christian tradition to Shankara. In ways, the conception of infinite being is similar, but Shankara denies the existence of finite being, it being entirely maya—illusion. If QV is maintained by a third party, it seems like they can't take either of these claims in the way they are intended, which doesn't seem charitable. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It is to ignore the possibility that one person might be right and the other might be wrong about what they are intending to claim. This is another instance of the sort of relativism that Nagel generally opposes in The Last Word, for the legitimacy of the two philosophers' first-order arguments are precisely what is being dismissed when one thinks it could only be a conceptual or terminological dispute. Conceptual-or-terminological is a second-order reduction. — Leontiskos

I had a similar discussion with Joshs re truth being true withing a given metaphysics versus being true universally. It seems to me that if you tell a lot of people, "yes, what you're saying is true...but only in your context," you're actually telling them that what they think is false, because they don't think the truth is context dependent in this way. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I guess my intuition, which might very well be wrong, was that if they do an equally good job then there would be an morphism between them, and so it's pluralism of a limited type—perhaps the way some models for computation end up equivalent. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Conceptual relativism on stilts. Which honestly I'm not absolutely against (unlike both Banno and @Leontiskos) but I'm unsympathetic with the whole approach and nothing I've read was at all persuasive. — Srap Tasmaner

To simply assume that a whole swath of discussions in philosophy must only arise from philosophers' "confusion," rather than real problems is not charitable. At its worst it's question begging. For example, to say that Przywara must be switching languages or domains with the analogia seems to be saying he is wrong in an important way, or even moreso, just refusing to take his thought the way it is intended. — Count Timothy von Icarus

For example, when Eriugena discusses his five modes of being, he clearly is intending one domain — Count Timothy von Icarus

This definition, at least taken in isolation, seems to avoid the issues above to some degree. "...either because there is no such notion of carving at the joints that applies to candidate meanings, or because there is such a notion and C is maximal with respect to it." It is more the bolded part that leads towards relativism, not different uses of "exists/subsists/etc." — Count Timothy von Icarus

The "is" of predication, identity, and existence are not separated out in the same way in this tradition. In part, this is because they were seen as deeply related. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Given the view that things just are their properties (which are relational), a not unpopular view in contemporary metaphysics, the the sum total of what can be predicated of a thing is its identity, or at least something very close to it. — Count Timothy von Icarus

In such a view, there is no Porphyryean tree that has infinite and finite being alongside each other. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That is very far from saying "that everyone who lived before modern optics must have been a naive realist". — Janus

It seems that, by and large, the ancient and medieval philosophers were naive realists even if they believed in the reality of a higher realm. This is arguably because, before the modern sciences of optics and visual perception, the eyes were thought to be the 'windows' through which the soul looked out onto the world, so there would have been no notion of "distortion" which may be posited in relation to the senses as they are now understood. — Janus