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

I think this is a good example of the standard sort of strawman that you engage in. You took "vis-a-vis ontology" and replaced it with "regarding ontology," and then pretended that I was referring to ontological arguments like Anselm's. The context about Wittgenstein should have been enough to preclude such a strawman, for obviously I have not claimed that Wittgenstein gave a bad "ontological argument." But even if it wasn't, the context of this debate that has already taken place earlier in the thread is obviously about the topic you raised: ontological implications of different logics, not ontological conclusions arrived at from pure logic.

This is bad-faith argumentation, and it's no secret you are engaged in it all the time.

(I suppose it is worth pointing out here that those who struggle with intellectual vices could use a "principle of charity" as a medicine, whether that vice stems from old age, pride, or other such things. Again, this is a practical consideration, but on point.)

- Exactly right. :100:

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

Very interesting. Thanks for sharing. :up:

I think Tarski is right that logic pulls more weight than it appears to at first glance, and it is for this reason that I think varieties of logical pluralism are especially problematic.

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

See 's post.

For my money, so-called "principles of charity" are always destructive of intellectual honesty, even in the one or two sentences where they appear in Aquinas. At best they fail the test of Occam's Razor, and are superfluous.

Consider the popular "steelman" interpretation. Is it good to steelman someone's argument when you are dialoguing with them? No, actually. You should try to interpret them accurately, neither engaging in "strawman" or "steelman." One does not need to appeal to "charity" to preclude advantageous misrepresentation.

Now, if one is not in a dialogue context but is instead reading an unfamiliar author, then I would say that one should give them the benefit of the doubt, ceteris paribus. This is a kind of charity, but I would say that it is more accurately a kind of maximization of the philosophical activity. If you are exploring ideas, then you should desire to explore the strongest ideas and arguments, for the sake of this activity.

I would say that charity pertains to the practical realm, and it influences speculative reason only indirectly, through the practical reason. For the understanding of the speculative reason, it is a non-starter.

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

It is obviously false. 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>.

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

Shouldn't he? The OP seems to presuppose that he can be faulted for this. Or at the very least, that it can be traced back to his writings.

- Good post.

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

A simpler game of Bingo is to just observe how much language an author uses in a technical sense, and how willing they are to drop the technical connotation. Aristotle almost always begins a discussion by looking at the common opinions and the common ways that words are used. Aquinas is famous for using very simple Latin with a minimum of technical terms (except those inherited from his context). It's fairly common to hear people mock Aristotle for the way he considers common opinion and common language use, but I believe it to be a sign of a good philosopher, one who is not pulling the wool over his eyes with the verbiage of a specialized system. I suppose we are just talking about ideology and ideologues.

In encountering Wittgenstenians, I have noticed a paradox in that there is an attempt to focus on common usage (perhaps to a fault), but then the utterances of these people are not to be interpreted according to common usage, but rather in accord with the technical color of a Wittgenstenian interpretation. How can it be that an approach which claims to privilege the common use of language does not use language in a common way?

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

Agreed. Stack Exchange is a computer science knowledge compendium that someone tried to repurpose for everything else. It's not a good fit for philosophy, even if there are certain cases or questions where that format is workable. I think it will instill bad methodologies and presuppositions in the students.

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

Yes, I agree with all of this. Earlier I said something similar:

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

As above, I think what is at stake is peace, not charity. The way that "charity" gets misused in these ways is a pet peeve of mine. Of justice, faith, and charity, only one is blind, not all three. :razz:

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

Right. It is to ignore the fact that the person was not intending to make a context-dependent truth claim. This relates to the edit I made to my last post to you regarding Sider's "hostile translations." Duplex veritas arose because there were multiple conflicting sources of truth (e.g. theology, philosophy, science, etc.). It arises in our culture for the same reason, except the conflicting sources are individuals, for individuals have now been made to be sources of truth in their own right. "To each their own truth."

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

This seems likely, and perhaps in this case the "principle of charity" makes more sense (because translation is legitimately possible). Still, if translation is possible then it could be determined—even by the parties themselves—that the two parties are saying the same thing without resorting to a "principle of charity."

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

I've changed my mind a bit, and now no longer deem this debate a waste of time. I also better see why @J is interested in this topic. I wish I had looked at Sider's paper earlier.

"Quantifier variance" is the logical instantiation of the pluralism that the West struggles with culturally, religiously, morally, et al. The "principle of charity" is the newest version of the Enlightenment's doctrine of optimism, "Stop fighting wars over religion. The disputes probably aren't that important." The aversion to disagreement is a child of the aversion to wars, and "charity" is just a mask for "peace." All of this has simply been funneled down into the field of logic. Or so I say.

So I agree that the ideas are dumb, but the motivations are intelligible and they are not going away anytime soon. If logic can overcome "relativism on stilts" then all the better, but I obviously prefer Sider's more robust approach to Finn and Bueno's (or Banno's) flatfooted approach. I wouldn't say that logic is the last line of defense, but if we can't even avoid relativism when it comes to logic then we're probably too far gone.

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

That's right, just as it is question-begging to assume that the different uses of "to be" are compartmentally distinct.

This is what Sider refers to as a "hostile translation" on page 14. It is interpreting or translating someone's utterance in a way that they themselves reject.

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

Sure, but this is not quantifier variance, or even quantifier equivocation. One could represent the five modes with predicates, or else with alternative quantifiers.

The debates about univocity of being can apply between parties or within the thought of a single party, but quantifier variance occurs between two parties using two different notions of quantification. If the two parties have five different sub-quantifiers, and they agree on all of them, then quantifier variance is not occurring. ...All of this is also reminiscent of the duplex veritas debates of the Middle Ages.

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

I think that distinction that Sider makes is important, and I see what you are saying. What I would say is that the bolded part leads to a more thoroughgoing conceptual relativism, but the latter option is still a form of conceptual relativism. It's just that in the latter case both candidate meanings do a good job, and an equally good job, of carving at the joints. This latter form, when applied to logic, represents Banno's logical pluralism.

---

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

Right. I'm glad you saw this on your own.

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

Right. See the paper I linked earlier, "Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein on Self and Object," for an argument that Fregian logic is unable to capture ontological dynamism.

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

It should perhaps be noted that analogical predication (or also analogical being) cannot be captured by anything like a Venn diagram. To say that two kinds of being are equivocal is to separate them, and to say that two kinds of being are univocal is to collapse them into one. Analogy is the strange mean. I said more on this earlier in the thread.

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

The whole premise of your argument is that those who lived prior to modern optics were naive realists. Drop that premise and the whole argument disappears. Here it is again:

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

We haven't even gotten into how unintelligent this argument really is. One does not require modern optics to recognize the possibility of visual distortion. Eye disease, perspective, differing visual capabilities, and the fact that far-away objects are difficult to see all demonstrate such a thing. The ironic thing here is that the presuppositions of those who think the ancients were dumb, are dumb. "They didn't have modern optics therefore they couldn't understand visual distortion." That's a bad, bad argument.

They are taking the same logic and applying it to a different range of things. — Banno

This is literally the first objection that Sider dispatches on page 11 after giving the summarized form of QV, but I already told you this <here>.

If you take that passage to be explicitly equating thinking with being, then I would say your lack of reading comprehension skills is "off the charts". — Janus

I was addressing your "thesis" that everyone who lived before modern optics must have been a naive realist. That's why I quoted your "thesis." (I am trying to be generous with the word 'thesis')

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

The historical ignorance here is off the charts. :yikes: Maybe start with Plato, a large part of whose philosophy is concerned with the unreliability of sense knowledge:

SOCRATES: There is more than one point besides these, Theodorus, on which a conviction might be secured—at least so far as it is a matter of proving that not every man’s judgment is true. But so long as we keep within the limits of that immediate present experience of the individual which gives rise to perceptions and to perceptual judgments, it is more difficult to convict these latter of being untrue—but perhaps I’m talking nonsense. Perhaps it is not possible to convict them at all; perhaps those who profess that they are perfectly evident and are always knowledge may be saying what really is. And it may be that our Theaetetus was not far from the mark with his proposition that knowledge and perception are the same thing. We shall have to come to closer grips with the theory, as the speech on behalf of Protagoras required us to do. We shall have to consider and test this moving Being, and find whether it rings true or sounds as if it had some flaw in it. There is no small fight going on about it, anyway—and no shortage of fighting men. — Plato, Theaetetus, 179c-d, tr. Levett & Burnyeat

Ironically, Pierce's semiotic triad, which is quite popular in continental philosophy, is pretty much the same as Augustine's in De Dialecta, and signs are a major focus in scholasticism, yet this view of past thought shows up in plenty of continental philosophy. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Peirce studied and benefitted from Latin thinkers like Aquinas and Scotus, and his theory of signs is especially indebted to the Latins:

And Peirce violated the cardinal commandment of modernity: Thou shalt not learn from the Latins. He read even there, and what he found, more than any single influence, revolutionized his philosophy. From Scotus in particular, but also from Fonseca and the Conimbricenses, he picked up the trail of the sign. He was never able to follow it as far as the text of Poinsot. This would have been only a question of time, no doubt; but in 1914 Peirce's time ran out.

Nonetheless, what he picked up from the later Latins was more than enough to convince him that the way of signs, however buried in the underbrush it had become since the moderns made the mistake of going the way of ideas instead, was the road to the future. . . — John Deely, Four Ages of Understanding: The First Postmodern Survey of Philosophy from Ancient Times to the Turn of the Twenty-first Century, p. 613

- Yes - gave the classic quote from Aristotle earlier today.

There is no definition in the quote you cite. — Banno

Mmk, Banno.

An adequate explanation of "what quantifier variance is" would show the difference between at least two forms of quantifier. The quote says that there are two differing forms of quantifier, but does not say how they differ. — Banno

No, this is completely wrong. Quantifier variance is a kind of insuperable second-order equivocation. Sider does not need to explicate two concrete usages of quantifiers to set out quantifier variance, any more than someone would need to explicate two equivocal terms in order to set out the meaning of equivocation. You are saying, "Sider didn't give an example of quantifier variance, therefore he didn't define quantifier variance." You're like the anti-Socrates, who receives a definition and then says that because it wasn't an example, therefore it wasn't a definition.

Can you specify what you mean by "their philosophy?" — Shawn

Their philosophy: the philosophy they do.

That quote does not set out what quantifier variance is. — Banno

Yes, it does.

Generally though, the analogy is not always used like this. Chess pieces are said to only be intelligible in terms of the other pieces, (the formalist mantra: "a thing is what it does") but chess itself sits off alone in analytical space as a self-contained entity. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think the lens for looking at this probably depends on your questions. If your goal is an analysis of rules and games, it makes sense to think of them as discrete entities. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Great points. :up:

Do you agree that the philosopher must uphold, almost, a fiduciary duty towards the public, in terms of living a certain life? — Shawn

I think it depends on their philosophy.

- :up:

Wittgenstein refers to many of his contemporaries in his writings. He does not mention studying others. I think the Count's point about the depth of 'classical education' is germane. But it is a matter impossible to settle from text alone. — Paine

My source here was a review by Gregory Sadler that I watched after I joined TPF and desired to learn more about Wittgenstein. See, for example, 26:44. But maybe I conflated a lack of engagement with contemporaries with a lack of engagement with the wider philosophical tradition. My point is that perhaps it is no accident that Wittgenstenians struggle to interact with other kinds of philosophy, if Wittgenstein's work was not intended to interact with other philosophy.

---

For example, you have the three uses of "is." The "is of predication," the "is of identity," and the "is of existence." But in the history of philosophy, there is plenty of debate that might make one question how discrete these really are. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I am also thinking about the thread on quantification, and the way that the Wittgenstenian view in that thread is self-referential and largely incapable of interacting with the large number of alternative views.

---

It's also the notion that if one just really parses out Wittgenstein's Koans (aphorisms or propositions), one will "get it".. One just has to interpret Wittgenstein to the best ability..

One can always chastise oneself for not knowing enough, and by not knowing enough, one is not "getting it fully".. But why wouldn't that same thing be for any other philosopher? — schopenhauer1

I don't think it can be said for any philosopher but I think it can be said for some. I think Plato is the epitome, for meditation on Plato's dialogues shows them to be fecund beyond belief. I don't see any of that in Wittgenstein, and as I have learned more about his methodology I think I have begun to understand why it isn't there. But maybe I should try reading him again.

IIRC from some biographical thing I read he never bothered to read Aristotle in his lifetime. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It is also well-known that he never bothered to read his fellow contemporary philosophers, and that he had a tendency to use past philosophers simply as leverage for his own thought. Maybe all of these pieces of the puzzle fit together in an obvious way. Maybe he was self-absorbed.

Antonia Soulez (sorry, I cannot find a public link to it) makes interesting observations that Wittgenstein's references to Plato, Kant, Russell, etcetera are not designed to solve their problems but as instances of what concerns his views and development. That suggests a conscious departure from the "philosophy of history" discussion.

Some have made that departure to be a parting shot, an assassination in Deleuze's view or a trip to the couch for various expressions of "therapy."

As an opponent of the means of 'natural sciences" to explain everything, I think it is helpful to compare Wittgenstein to others who did something seemingly similar but chose to wear the ermine of The Philosopher of History.

Heidegger is the true antipode to Wittgenstein. — Paine

Thanks, very interesting. :up:
This all makes sense to me.

I would question whether this is a particularly helpful or good faith way to pose the question. — Count Timothy von Icarus

He's frustrated and he's posting out of frustration, but in this case I think there is a legitimate reason for the frustration. Perhaps it's okay to exorcise the Wittgenstenianism of the forum, if it truly is getting out of control. I want to say that whenever excessive gatekeeping occurs on a public forum it should be checked, and unfortunately the checks that occur naturally are also somewhat infelicitous. Maybe that's okay.

It seems like Wittgenstein's work is inherently resistant to interaction with the rest of philosophy. — Leontiskos

There are a lot of philosophers who are "in-house baseball," such that they are only accessible to those who have read them at some length (and this is particularly true of much of the continental tradition). There are others who are not enigmatic, and can be read profitably even by those who are unfamiliar with them. This latter group are most conducive to public philosophy forums.

Wittgenstein is a strange animal in that he appears to be publicly accessible, and his adherents genuinely believe that his thought will be easy to access. But then when someone less familiar with Wittgenstein starts reading him and asking obvious questions, the weather suddenly changes and Wittgenstein becomes this enigmatic figure whose thought one must be initiated into by special rituals. It seems to me that this is just a defense mechanism that intervenes whenever Wittgenstein looks to be wrong. To consider a real objection to Wittgenstein would require accepting the possibility that Wittgenstein's paradigm and presuppositions might be incomplete. It would require a mental distance where Wittgenstein and, say, Schopenhauer are placed on equal footing, and such things cannot be tolerated by those who are truly loyal to Wittgenstein!

The aphoristic style lends itself to people reading it like a prophet.. holy writ almost. — schopenhauer1

Yep. But there's also the strange juxtaposition with the analytic context, which is different from Nietzsche.

I mean... :yikes: — schopenhauer1

Usually thinkers have successors, but it seems like Wittgenstein doesn't have any clear-cut successors, perhaps because the meaning of his thought is not determinable. At that time in history there was a revolutionary attitude that swept through many disciplines, and also reached beyond academia. Wittgenstein strikes me as someone who was trying to be original, to such an extent that he becomes opaque and even somewhat mystical (again, almost like a guru).

- It seems like Wittgenstein's work is inherently resistant to interaction with the rest of philosophy. Thoughts?

- "People do things because they believe they should do things; therefore moral realism is false." Good stuff, Janus, good stuff. :roll:

Then you should realize there is no objective morality and stop pretending you have a theory or could have a theory of objective moral truth. — Janus

Your tautology has no relation to these other claims you are making. It's not clear you realize this, either.

I say this too because I notice a tendency whereby when you question Wittgenstein's ideas, the only answer that seems to be legitimate to the majority who jump on these threads is to quote another line from Wittgenstein.. As if you cannot refute Wittgenstein, you can only have varying levels of understanding of Wittgenstein. — schopenhauer1

:lol: You're not wrong.

Did you see my post <here>? Specifically the paper, "Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein on Self and Object."

Help me understand why it is SPECIFICALLY Wittgenstein where I see this?? — schopenhauer1

I don't know that much about Wittgenstein, but I have noticed a lot of strange intransigence among those who rely heavily upon him. 'Thing is, historically speaking Wittgenstein's approach to philosophy is very weird and idiosyncratic, and when this is combined with gatekeeping what results is something that is comically absurd. There is something guru-ish about the whole phenomenon.

(Maybe this should be in the Lounge.)

People are motivated by their moral feelings and thoughts, but they may not always follow them. There is nothing tautologous in any of that. — Janus

It's little more than a barebones tautology. People are motivated by feelings and thoughts, obviously. Anyone who understands what feelings and thoughts are understands this.

I think the formalisations are thus red herrings in the discussion regarding quantifier variance. Since if even mathematical reasoning has both ambiguity and commonality regarding the underlying logic and its quantifier introduction rules, why would we expect logic to behave as more than a prop, crutch or model of quantification in natural language? Never mind ontology! — fdrake

Right, and that is why I think Sider's analysis is a great deal more incisive than Finn and Bueno's. For example, here is his shorter version of explaining what quantifier variance is:

Quantier variance: There is a class, C , containing many inferentially adequate candidate meanings, including two that we may call existence_PVI and existence_DKL. PVI’s claims are true when ‘exists’ means existence_PVI and DKL’s claims are true when ‘exists’ means existence_DKL. (Similarly, other views about composite material objects come out true under other members of C .) Further, no member of C carves the world at the joints better than the rest, and no other candidate meaning carves the world at the joints as well as any member of C —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. — Sider, Ontological Realism, p. 11

They are not tautologies; people don't have to be thus motivated. — Janus

I never said they did. The statements remain tautological. They are tautological conditionals (if/then statements).

I was interpreting this statement charitably, but I think that interpretation was incorrect:

They are binding socially (normatively) only insofar as most normal people hold to them. — Janus

What you mean to say is—simplifying even further to highlight the tautology—people do (moral) things because they believe they should do (moral) things. This doesn't say anything at all. It certainly doesn't amount to a moral theory.

People pray, for e.g., for safety while traveling, and if they arrive safely, then they believe their prayer was answered. What's bizarre is that any answer can fit within their beliefs about prayer. — Sam26

Why is that bizarre?

It's like the self-sealing argument, any outcome can fit within their belief. — Sam26

Prayer is not an argument.

The truth is there is no way to know if a particular outcome is from God, it could simply be chance or even deterministic. — Sam26

If God (of the classical variety) exists then all outcomes are from him. To say that it might be from God or it might be from something else is to misunderstand God.

More mundanely, if I ask someone to do something, and they are capable of doing it, and they receive my request, then any outcome will implicate a choice on their part. This isn't "bizarre," it's quite logical.

But prayer is asking God for something. Do they mean to say that God had decided I would recover slowly but, because THEY are asking, God will speed up my recovery? Do they think they are that important? Isn’t that egotism? — Art48

It is not egotism to petition an important or powerful person. Some petitions are motivated by egotism/pride, and some are not. If you have a reason other than pride to think that the petition is worthwhile, then you need not be egotistic. Christians do, and if you think impetration is egotistic, then Heaven knows what you think of the hypostatic union. :wink:

(The truly egotistic people don't bother with impetration. They just attempt to do it themselves.)

I seriously doubt it. QV seems to be the love-child of incommensurability and a bizarre over-promotion of the principle of charity. I don't know why I'm even posting, it's so stupid. — Srap Tasmaner

Isn't it wonderful that we can agree on things like this even while being at loggerheads on Hume and probabilistic logic? :grin:

FWIW, here first, which happens to be a post of mine you responded to, but I quoted it in the section responding to Banno, so understandable that you missed it. — Srap Tasmaner

So you haven't been reading my posts. Fine. — Banno

Ah, I actually did read those but I didn't realize at the time that a previously-uncited paper was being introduced.