Focusing on metaphysics rather than epistemology is taking us farther and farther from the OP. — T Clark

I don't agree. What you say here is critical to the issues the OP raises. After all, Chakravartty himself refers to a realist commitment to scientific method as a "metaphysical stance." When you write, "It's not our only choice of the way to see things, even for science," you're coming to grips with the key point that separates Chakravartty and Pincock. So please stay on the thread if you're interested!

But doubt this will convince you — Banno

It's not so much a matter of being convinced. I feel as you did, in an earlier thread, where you said something to the effect of, I'm frustrated because I can't see a point that is so obvious to others. (This might have been in regard to Rodl's concerns about Frege.).

If everything that applies to {1,2,3} applies to "...is red", then what more is there to "meaning"? — Banno

This would be the source of my frustration, here. No matter what angle I squint at it from, I keep seeing a need for "meaning" in order to give a convincing account of how intension works. But . . . better philosophers than I have contested this, so I'm going to keep pondering it.

I understand. But of course you know that many religious people maintain that complete faith in God erases these fears and doubts. The Abraham story pushes this to the limit. Could a father feel any faith in God under such circumstances?

Sorry, sometimes my sense of humor is obscure. Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling is famous, and kind of required reading if you're interested in the Abraham story, so I thought you were kidding about "obvious." He examines the agony of faith vs. ethics from many perspectives, imagining Abraham's reactions in several versions of how the story might have played out.

OK. Since this thread focuses on comparing and contrasting two philosophers, I can see why it wouldn't interest you.

It depends on what you are trying to achieve. If you're trying to achieve the most logical outcome, then you should. — Philosophim

This, I think, is close to Chakravartty's sense. He specifies "minimal constraints of internal consistency and coherence” -- so, broadly speaking, logical. In that sense, then, you're saying that such a stance is not voluntary or optional; we should choose it. How would you argue for that? Or do you think Pincock's position basically sets out that argument?

Oh, you never know. Might not be so obvious after all . . .

OK. And would you say that's a voluntary epistemic stance, in Chakravartty's sense?

If you truly believe there’s a God and God is good, why would you hesitate to obey them? — praxis

We shouldn't assume that the Hebrew Scripture writers were unfamiliar with angst and doubt. The very question you ask is, I believe, why the story of Abraham was written and became part of the canon. Kierkegaard has a good book about it. :smile:

So would Chakravartty's view be correct, and Pincock's incorrect, as you understand it? That is, Pincock would be wrong in trying to argue for a particular version of "rationality" that ought to be adopted, on pain of no longer being rational at all?

Or perhaps I should ask, do you think there's a single version of what is rational -- and hence what should inform our epistemic stance -- when doing science?

Thanks for your thoughts on Chakravartty's paper -- I'm glad you were able to connect his ideas with your own perspective. "Where to go from here?" you ask. Well . . . now read the Pincock paper (also linked)! It is a direct response to Chakravartty.

what bothered me the most is that realism and antirealism are set up as mutually exclusive and incomprehensible. Fact is, you can use both. — T Clark

This occurred to me too. If I had to make one overall criticism of analytic philosophy, it's the tendency to separate ideas into convenient binaries for purposes of discussion, ignoring what is actually done with those ideas in the real world. Pincock makes a strong case for why realism and anti-realism do have something fundamentally incompatible about them, however.

whether the idea of objective reality is a useful one. — T Clark

I think both Chakravartty and Pincock would agree that it is useful. Pincock, though, would add that it has the additional virtue of being real or true.

You haven't disrupted anything, no worries.

A presupposition is an assumption that establishes the context for a philosophical or scientific discussion. — T Clark

I agree, this is in the same family as "epistemic stance," as used by Chakravartty and Pincock.
(@tim wood, above, also noticed the resemblance to Collingwood.). One difference may lie in the idea of an "absolute presupposition," which I think is too strong. For Chakravartty, at least, an epistemic stance is tentative, flexible, and dependent on a lot more than what I think you're calling metaphysics. Really, as I read him, it isn't an assumption at all, but a carefully chosen "best practice." In the context of doing science, he wants an epistemic stance to walk the line between filtering out weak knowledge claims while not squelching ones that deserve a hearing. Pincock's interest in rational obligation may be a little closer to something absolute. But of course Collingwood points out that different absolute presuppositions may apply in different situations, so perhaps the difference is small.

The debate I'm focusing on, though, is precisely whether this is a good characterization of what an epistemic stance (or presupposition, if you like) entails. Chakravartty would agree with Collingwood that such a stance is not chosen exclusively based on rational criteria, nor can it be defended that way. But Pincock disagrees. So would many others who believe that realism and objectivity are not optional but rather obligated by a certain understanding of rationality.

I hope you find time to read the two papers. Your input would be welcome. But if not, I'll go on to fill out more of the debate within a day or two.

Yes, definitely related. An oldie but goldie, for sure. Why do you suppose it's yet unresolved, and continues to get new expressions in contemporary phil?

Take another look at the beads. I've claimed that {1,2,3} is extensionally equivalent to "...is red". . . The point is that if there is agreement we need explain nothing further. — Banno

I see the attractiveness of this position. But there's a synonymy problem still. {1,2,3} may be extensionally equivalent to "is red", but would you really want to say that "{1,2,3}" means the same thing as "red"? What about the lack of substitutivity? If the items {1,2,3} were green rather than red, we would discover "the same" extensional equivalence, but it would now be with "is green". Any number of items can be 1, 2, and 3, but that won't necessarily make them red.

In short, how is this different from the number-of-planets problem, where we agree that, as Quine says, "failure of substitutivity reveals merely that occurrence to be supplanted is not purely referential" (140)?

Gotta get offline now but I'll keep in the conversation, very interesting.

Well, the need would be to bridge the gap between planets, which are physical objects, and statements about them, which are not, to say nothing of synonymy, which looks to be yet a different thing.

To put it differently, do we know that we're "saying the same thing" about X by checking X and comparing it to what you and I have said? A kind of rough-and-ready extension of a correspondence theory? Doesn't that presuppose that you and I mean the same thing?

OK, let's fill this out. If planets and planètes have the same extension, then "The number of planets is greater than 7" means the same thing as "The number of planètes is greater than 7". Is there any intermediary step that would show this to be true? (Not necessarily doubting you, just checking your work. :wink: )

What they have in common is not some other entity we call the proposition, but that they say the same thing about the number of planets. — Banno

But are you entitled to the phrase "say the same thing" without explaining what it means? Synonymy again. Is this meant to be a brute fact? Some statements simply "say the same thing" and that's as far as we can go with it? This is where the proposition comes in handy.

But as I said, I'm happy with "says the same thing" and "expresses the same proposition" being equivalent.

I'm inclined to say that 'says the same thing as' is ordinary-language-speak for 'expresses the same proposition as'. The key idea in common is that there is a something -- meaning, sense, content -- that can persist despite differing verbal articulations of it. Are there uses of 'same thing' that would come out with a different truth value than 'same proposition'? Likewise for 'says' and 'expresses'? Until we think of one, I'm going to consider them cognates, one in slightly fancier dress.

The number of the planets > 7 = Le nombre de planètes > 7

Just to be clear: Do you read the '=' sign here to mean 'says the same thing as' or 'expresses the same proposition as'? Or would this difference, if any, not be significant? I'm looking for paraphrases that don't use "proposition."

Property or predicate? How does the use of each differ? — Banno

This is a good question. What would you say?

When you ask "What if Elizabeth had not had Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon (such an English name...) as her mother", you are thereby asking about Elizabeth... becasue you make it so.

And of course her name might have been Kate. In which case she would still be the very same person. — Banno

If the name changes but she is still the very same person, then a name cannot be an essential property -- or, if you like, any sort of property. (Though I don't really see why 'is called Elizabeth by everyone who knows her' can't be a property. How is it different from 'has red hair'?)

But compare "She might have had different parents. In which case she would still be the very same person." You're not maintaining that this is true in the same way that the Eliz-vs-Kate case is true? Indeed, it isn't true at all, is it? We might mistakenly designate her as the same person, but that would be an error -- if we agree with Kripke about the importance of parentage.

if the dream caused your kicking, it must cause kicking to all other folks who has the same dream or similar dream kicking. But it doesn't. Maybe it does to some folks, but definitely not to all the folks. Hence it is not causal event. It is random or contingent event or reaction during the sleep. — Corvus

Or maybe it's necessary but not sufficient. In order to produce the kicking, some other factors have to be in play as well.

During sleep, your thought and willful motivations wouldn't be present for your Kicking to be based on the thoughts process or willful motivation on the dreaming. — Corvus

Fair enough. I was definitely interpreting "thought process" generously to include whatever a dream is. Maybe we should just say "mental event" instead -- I think we can include more than just conscious thoughts as possible relata in the mental/physical causation problem. Memories, for instance -- where might they fall on the "willful" spectrum?

I see the difficulties you're bringing up. But "exactly the same dream" is an unnecessarily high bar. What we're interested in is, e.g., whether physical kicking is correlated with a dream that also involves some kind of kicking. If this turns out to be largely true -- it's easily testable if we accept subjective reports from dreamers -- then the next question would be, does one precede the other? Again, and assuming brain scans are sensitive enough to detect when dreams occur (I don't know if this is the case), we could easily test either hypothesis. Kick, then dream; or dream, then kick?

Well, but what about a long dream which the subject reports as including a kick? How could we tell if the events in the dream caused the physical kick, or whether the kick occurred unrelatedly, and was then incorporated into the the story of the dream? This would certainly be a hard case to determine, but it seems to me that if we gathered enough data from simpler dreams showing that, let's say, the act of dreaming precedes the physical kick, we'd consider it strongly probable that this is usually the case in the longer dreams as well.

Notice, too, that this is all based on the hypothesis that the relation is causal. To me, that's by no means certain. If the physical kick supervenes on the dream-moment of kicking, then at best we might be able to say that the dream as a whole caused the kick, but the dream-kick and the physical kick, on this view, would be simultaneous. This is where the parallel with mental causation in waking life becomes clear: We want to say that my thoughts do result in physical actions, but that doesn't have to mean that there is a moment in time at which thought X causes action Y, with a teeny temporal gap. The thought process as a whole may be the causative part of the relation.

A proper name works only if those in the community agree as to its use. If a proper name does not in our conversations pick out an individual unambiguously, then it has failed to be a name. — Banno

Yes, a proper name is a convention. There is nothing to it beyond whatever a given community agrees is a sufficient "baptism."

But that determination need not be the origin story, as Kripke suggests. We might just as well depend on the community in which "Glunk" picks out Glunk. If we agree that "Glunk" picks out Glunk, the presence or absence of an origin story is irrelevant. — Banno

Hmm. I'm not so sure. The question is, Can "Community picks out Glunk" produce the same plausibility responses for us that "Glunk is picked out by his birth" does for Kripke?

Let me use the Queen Elizabeth example, as it's easier to quote directly. Kripke asks, "How could a person originating from different parents, from a totally different sperm and egg, be this very woman?" He acknowledges that others may have different intuitions about this, but for him, "anything coming from a different origin would not be this object."

So now we ask, "How could a person, Glunk, who is not so-baptized by his community, be this very person?" My intuition here is quite different from the Elizabeth-from-different-parents example. I would say that Glunk, under whatever name, is surely the same person. In other words, his name is not anything like an essential property. The name may be essential to how we designate him, but that's not the same thing.

Or if you prefer, and I think this amounts to much the same thing, we could use Davidson here, and say that the correct use of a name or a demonstrative is that which makes the vast majority of expressions that include it, true. — Banno

This is all well and good if the issue is indeed about the correct use of a name. But I think Kripke is talking about something different. It's the de re vs. de dicto question, yes? There has to be something about a rigid designation that transcends nomenclature or terminology. I appreciate that a community-wide agreement to name something is not the same as my personal, private-language decision to do so. But they are the same sort of thing. I don't think you can get to "independent determination of the referent" simply by letting "independent" mean "independent of me." I read Kripke as talking about an entirely different, ontological independence. Which comes with its own problems, of course, but this is a start.

So in this case, the syndrome would seem to trigger the dream, if any. Clearly it's hard to find a one-size-fits-all explanation.

With your caveat "most instances," I find this persuasive, thanks.

Just saw yours as I was posting mine. Gotta run now but will think it over. I want some way for Kripke to be on target here but it seems problematic . . .

This is helpful, thanks. But even if the domain is fixed to include only those worlds in which "that cloud" exists . . . must I (the "baptizer") necessarily be in that domain as well, in order for that cloud to be designated as "that cloud"? And there's still the question of what property I am picking out besides "'that-cloud'-ness."

there are possible worlds not blessed with my presence. — Banno

Good line for an obituary: "An eminent logician, the late X claimed he was necessary in all possible worlds, but alas, we now discover this is untrue."

OK. I want to try out some thoughts about this, but first I want to clarify something about demonstratives.

A proper name, according to Kripke, is a rigid designator. It picks out the thing named in all possible worlds. This does not mean, of course, that the thing named occurs in all possible worlds. It merely means that, if Banno exists in a world, the name must designate him and not some other. Importantly, Kripke points out that “the property we use to designate that man . . . need not be one which is regarded as in any way necessary or essential.” But at the same time, he says that the proper name itself won’t do as that property:

If one was determining the referent of a name like ‛Glunk’ to himself and made the following decision, “I shall use the term ‛Glunk’ to refer to the man that I call ‛Glunk’,” this would get one nowhere. One had better have some independent determination of the referent of ‛Glunk.’ This is a good example of a blatantly circular determination. — Naming and Necessity, 73

As we know, Kripke believes we should refer back to the origin story of a person in order to say what that “independent determination” is.

Now demonstratives are also rigid designators, according to Kripke. If I point out the window and say, “This cloud,” I have “baptized” the cloud and given it a rigid designation. The same caveat applies here as with proper names: The cloud may not appear in a given world, but if it appears, the designation “that cloud” is rigid.

I have two questions about this.

1) Is the “origin story” here simply a matter of my pointing and declaring? Doesn’t that seem the same as simply declaring a proper name, which Kripke says is circular? Then, if the “independent determination of the referent” is something else in the case of “that cloud”, what is it? Do we have to start talking in terms of molecular structure? But that is very un-Kripkean; that would be like “using a telescope” to identify a table; it’s not how we designate things.

2) Presumably there can be a possible world in which “that cloud” occurs but I do not. Does the cloud remain rigidly designated? There seems something odd about this. Do we want to say that, because I appear in a different possible world to baptize the cloud, my action carries over in some way to a world in which I never did so? There must be a better way to understand this.

Clarifications and insights welcome.

Daniel Dennett proposed that we don't dream, that we do not have an experience over a period of time while asleep, but that rather a memory of dreaming is confabulated on waking. Dreams are not lived but merely recalled as if they had been. — Banno

I remember this, and I believe there was at least one experiment that provided possible evidence: An experimenter awakened a subject by (doing something like) placing his hand in a bucket of cold water. The subject then described a dream he said he'd been having, with a complicated plot that led logically to his being thrown into a pond. The idea is that there was no time between the immersion of the hand and the awakening in which the subject could have had such a purportedly long dream. So he must have retro-fitted it somehow; perhaps dreams appear all in an instant, but can only be remembered as sequenced stories.

That is, you kicked in your dream as the result of a spasm and convinced your dream self you chose to strike your enemy in order to maintain the free will illusion we're programmed to have — Hanover

Yes, that would draw the arrow of causation from physical to mental, with an interesting twist: As may happen in waking life, I came up with a rationalization that posited a mental choice. If dreams really do contain important symbols, then the symbolism of "choosing to do something" is powerful. It would reinforce my desire, in waking life, to see myself as an agent with genuine choices.

The potassium and magnesium of bananas are said to reduce night kicking. Worth a try, but that would of course eliminate the higher plane of perception you've achieved through essential mineral depletion. — Hanover

Oh yes, tried that one. Couldn't find any correlation. I would gladly keep the kicks in exchange for that higher plane of perception . . . if I can persuade my wife not to make me sleep on the couch.

Strikes me that the mechanisms and processes of dreaming are not a suitable subject for philosophical speculation. As you have hinted, the answers to your questions can be examined empirically - there are facts of the matter. — T Clark

There is certainly a possibility that a scientific investigation would show which comes first, the REM event (dream) or the physical event (leg-kicking). Do you think the entire mental/physical causation problem may be similarly resolved? I could imagine that happening if it is indeed causation that we're dealing with, because we could demonstrate a temporal gap between cause and effect. But if we discovered no such gap, we'd be left with the problem of how to understand the supervenience of the mental on the physical, or vice versa.

In any case, I agree with your term "speculation" -- that's all it is. And of course that dog is running! :smile:

. A feedback relation is not straightforward causation, nor is it a relation of supervenience. — Metaphysician Undercover

Right, this connects with @Christoffer's idea, above, that the dream and the physical event may mutually stimulate each other.

Does anyone know whether there is a term for this "reciprocal causality"-type phenomenon, in either the scientific or the philosophical literature?

I like this. So, just to play it out, would that mean that, in waking life, we can acknowledge both "mental-to-physical" and "physical-to-mental" stimulation, with "volition" being a key parameter? That is certainly what we want to say, in giving a standard account of what it's like to experience things: Sometimes we get the idea to do a thing, and lo, it is done, while at other times the thing is done (to us, in the case of a leg moving involuntarily), and lo, we construct the image or idea of it. In very loose talk: either the idea or the event can cause the other, depending on volition.

...so saying that situation (b) is an illusion, what hard determinists say is nonsensical! — MoK

I'm just not following -- why is situation (b) but not situation (a) an illusion?

Thanks. Yes, I see the difference. Not sure how seeing a difference in possible outcomes means that I would any choice about what to do. But perhaps that wasn't your point.

sleep paralysis. I've suffered this experience and it is terrifying. — Christoffer

Wow, it certainly sounds like it.

Could you realize between two situations in which you are presented with one ball or two balls? — MoK

Sorry, could you clarify? What does "realize between two situations" mean?

Have you ever been in a maze? If yes then you realize that options are real when you reach a fork. — MoK

The problem here is that the hard determinist would deny that you genuinely have an option. They would reply, "Certainly it seems as if you are making a choice at the fork. But this is an illusion; the elaborate process you may go through in order to 'decide on your choice' is itself predetermined. You have no more actual choice in the matter than a vacuum robot has when it 'decides' in which direction to vacuum next. Even if you (and the robot) are choosing randomly, to do so was still not really 'your choice' -- it's the programming."

No, I don't think this picture is correct, but what should we say to the hard determinist about this? What error are they making?