I don't think it makes sense to talk about the "legitimacy of oppression" here. — Mongrel

Neither do I.

As for the research, that was the other phenomenological aspect of my enquiry, to try and ascertain the properties that enables a person to experience music[...] — TimeLine

It may be our use of words differs considerably along these lines.

I suppose the "properties" that enable us to experience music include properties of moving bodies that produce sounds in the world, properties of those sounds in the world, properties of ears and nervous systems, properties of the human organism that pertain to the production of emotion and affect in general.... I might ask how all such "properties", and the things they are properties of, are coordinated in auditory perception and in musical perception; in musical sound-production and music-coordinated activities such as dancing; and in musical imagination.

[...]and whether sound and perception help conceive of subjectivity. — TimeLine

I'm not sure what you mean.

Surely perceptual experience is very much part of what we might call "subjective experience", or experience considered in its subjective aspect; though in the course of ordinary affairs we may tend to focus on the objective aspect of perceptual experience.

Auditory perception is one sort of perception, I might say more specifically a mode of exteroception.

I say that:

In audition we may perceive sounds, as well as objects or states of affairs in the world in virtue of their sound-relative properties, their relations to the sounds that contact our auditory receptors.

Analogously:

In vision we may perceive lights, as well as objects or states of affairs in the world in virtue of their light-relative properties, their relations to the lights that contact our visual receptors.

In olfaction we may perceive odors, as well as objects or states of affairs in the world in virtue of their odor-relative properties, their relations to the odors that contact our olfactory receptors.

Accordingly, I'm inclined to think of perceptual experience, and thus subjective experience, as closely coordinated with what seems to be a ceaseless play of things outside, upon, and within my body, including the lights, sounds, and odors that appear to me; as well as the things in the world that seem, for instance, to produce, reflect, transmit, or absorb lights, sounds, and odors.

The soundcloud appears as a body in the world, a physical phenomenon. This is the body the musician moves and shapes and responds to and is moved by, the thing the musician plays and plays with and plays to, the thing we hear.

Think Hegel' aesthetics and the 'inward movement' or the subjective life that music is experienced conceptually without transcending 'Notion' or toward the immediate perception of 'Being' - music provides the aesthetic opportunity to access and express via sound the inward dimensions and turn it into a form, the “the Ah and Oh of the heart” as he says. When a piece of music is created, it enables us to understand this movement; this 'movement' is not subject to the constraints of space and time and music provides us with the link to these 'feelings'. He also notes that formalizing music may destroy this link or feeling [...] — TimeLine

I feel I don't understand any of this Hegelian verbiage, except perhaps for Ah and Oh.

That is the precise point. If the music was created through this elusive access to our subjective 'movement' would changing it according to the way it was meant to sound by the creator mean we have ruined it — TimeLine

What do you mean by "the music"? Do you mean the composition as recorded in the score, or do you mean one particular performance of what's recorded in that score? Either one may be called "the music", and the sense of the phrase varies accordingly.

A score is a script, a recipe, a record of a generic, abstract set of steps for application in performance.

A piece of writing is likewise a script, a generic rule. The sentence "Here I go, singing low" can be uttered "correctly" -- according to the letter -- in infinitely various ways without "ruining" or "destroying" the sentence, without breaking the rule laid down in the instruction.

What if one says "Here I go, singin' low"? Is that a breach of the original rule, or one of the acceptable ways of enacting the original rule? Depends who you ask; but in any case now there are two different rules. Arguably the second is a "specification", "determination", or variation of the first; while the first is more generic, less determined, than the second; unless we agree on a strict standard by which to interpret the first rule as requiring that the last phoneme, /ng/, be clearly articulated in any "correct" performance of the rule thus determined.

As it stands alone on paper, or on this digital screen, or as expressed in my head or your head, a rule like that doesn’t say anything about how it was "meant to be interpreted by its creator". That's another thing that's up to us, to each one of us or each group of us to settle on each occasion of performance.

It may be that some interpreters or performers have insights into a score or text that its creator never had. Once the score or text is completed, the creator stands before it as one interpreter among others; he may change his mind and develop alternative or even conflicting interpretations of his own finished script over time. Accordingly the selection of the composer's or author's intention as definitive is an arbitrary selection. In any case, it seems a score or text is a more generic thing than the same score or text as determined by the intentions or interpretations of any one person at any one time; and it's not clear how we're supposed to figure out the intentions and interpretations of anyone who is not available for comment, who may have left scant traces of his thoughts on the matter, apart from the marks we call the score or text.

I love Bob Dylan as a person, as a musician and as a poet and was overwhelmed with joy when I heard he had won the nobel prize. But, I still do not enjoy listening to him, however much I respect him. I agree with everything that you write here. — TimeLine

It's hard for me to fathom: In what sense do you "love Bob Dylan as a musician", and why do you "not enjoy listening to him", and how do these two attitudes fit together in the same person?

Yes. — TimeLine

I'm inclined to agree, though I find such thoughts difficult to comprehend and articulate:

What is it that makes one style, voice, personality, or performance more "authentic" than another?

Can one abstract or generic composition, for instance a score, also be more or less “authentic” than another?

Que? — TimeLine

I mean, what steps have you taken, how have you approached the project of learning to play piano?

For instance: It sounds like you've mainly been learning to play songs on the piano and to sing along with your own playing. How have you gone about learning the songs? Instructional books or videos, sessions with a local teacher, playing along to recordings by ear, putting each song together purely on the basis of memory.... Have you learned the names of the "notes" corresponding to each key on the keyboard? Are you acquainted with concepts like "octave", "scale", "phrase", "chord", "meter"?

For that matter, is this the first time you’ve learned to play an instrument? Why now? Why piano, instead of guitar or sarod or shakuhachi or dumbek, or any other instrument?

Well, I'm not that advanced yet to simply improvise — TimeLine

Anyone who occasionally hums or imagines a tune he doesn't recall having heard before, or slaps a free beat on table or thighs, knows how to improvise music. The trick is, how to transfer or apply this old skill to a new context, to a new instrument, say the piano; and how to cultivate the skill of musical improvisation, as one aspect of musical performance, in any such application and across all such applications.

It doesn't have to be great music, it doesn't have to be a masterpiece, it doesn't have to sound pleasant or marketable. You gain something from the effort, just like you gain something by straining to perform songs composed by others, even if it doesn't feel quite right or sound quite right at first, even if it feels off somehow for months or years. Even great performers feel off sometimes, don't let it get you down. Ride it out, release it, roll with it -- the opportunity for this sort of psychological practice is one of the benefits of practicing music -- and in the meantime, you're developing skills you'll be able to rely on, no matter how you feel on each occasion of performance.

Keep it simple and play freely. Do it like any of us hums a tune or sings in the shower, without worrying about "playing the right notes" or "playing in time" or what phrases to play or whether it “sounds good”. It’ll help you develop the coordination of your two hands, and your voice, and your ear, and your emotions, and a little repertoire of musical phrases, just by noodling around, playing, singing, hearing, feeling, moving, breathing.

Build up the skill from small parts by limiting your options in particular exercises: Try using two notes in your bass hand, say root and fifth, D and A; and five notes in your right hand, maybe D-F-G-A-C or A-C-D-F-G. Play without singing; sing and play simultaneously; sing without playing. Sing along with the notes you play in your left hand; sing along with the notes you play in your right hand; sing notes other than those you play in either hand; don't think about what you're singing, just sing. Play slower, play faster; play quieter, play louder; play more legato, play more staccato....

Really listen to the sounds you're making. As you build up coordination, focus on the emotions and feelings that accompany the sounds, emotions the music seems both to express and to summon, to flow from and to produce. Dig into those feelings, dig into those sounds. Play with greater emotional intensity (not necessarily greater volume). Vary the emotion.

How does "playing with feeling", or with various emotional intentions, alter the sound of the music, and how does it alter the movements of the body that produce that sound?

and I believe my insincerity lies with the fact that I am learning other people' music rather than creating my own, something I hope to do once I feel confident enough with playing. — TimeLine

Consider the difference between aiming to mimic another performer, and aiming to perform another composer's work in one's own voice, in one's own style. Imagine the same song, say "This Land Is Your Land", as it might be sung by any singer you can think of -- Woody Guthrie, Lady Gaga, Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, Eddie Vedder, Maria Callas, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan... whoever.

The song, the lyrics, the "notes", don't tell the singer how to sing them. The singer appropriates the song, assimilates it, personalizes it, makes it his own: Ain't what you swing, it's the way that you swing it.

I wonder if your experience of insincerity has anything to do with an attempt to mimic other performers or performances, as opposed to learning to play the song your own way.

Of course it can take years to start getting a feel for what "your own way" might be, to start finding your own voice. That's a natural part of the process, and in a way there's no end to it.

The project of cultivating a voice, a style, an authentic musical personality won't ever get off the ground if you don't develop a skill set, build up a repertoire, develop coordinated habits of bodily movements that produce sound; of hearing and listening; of feeling and emotion, of moving and being moved by sound and by the act of sound-production; of thinking and perhaps speaking about what's involved in the process of making and hearing music.

It's natural for everything to be out of joint in the beginning. If you keep at it and you live long enough, you'll work past it, and bring it closer together.

Your feeling of insincerity may just be a sign that you're sensitive to the process, you feel the unsettledness of the beginning, and you have a strong sense of the emotional value of music. To me that sounds like a good thing. Use that experience of insincerity like a beacon to help you find your way into the craft.

I recently started learning the piano so that I could give both singing and playing a chance, and it has inspired me to do a little bit of research mostly because I feel so insincere. — TimeLine

How did you begin to "learn the piano"? What kind of "research" did you get into?

In what sense did learning or playing the piano lead you to "feel insincere"? And why did this experience of insincerity lead you to try "research" -- instead of to try banging on the piano and singing your heart out in another way?

Whilst the musical notes itself, my vocal register being at the right pitch and other concrete elements are correctly applied, it is theoretical and lacks any aesthetic properties that I would intuitively attribute as authentic. — TimeLine

It's not enough to play "correct notes". Hear the sound, feel the swing, mess around with rhythm and intonation, play with emotion, play to the sound, really mean it. Then what you play will be "authentic", even if it sounds terrible to other people, even if it sounds terrible to you when you listen back to a recording of the performance.

It may take years of practice to develop your ear and your playing. Do you have something better to do with free time?

Then I thought what exactly is authentic music? — TimeLine

I'm not sure what this phrase means either. What is authentic laughter, what are authentic tears? What is authentic exercise? What is authentic rebellion? Authentic anger, despair, joy, hope, promises, denials....

Would that mean it is not music, though I am replicating a Norah Jones song for instance? — TimeLine

In what sense are you "replicating a Norah Jones song"? It's one thing to "sing the same notes", another to sing more or less like Norah Jones. Even Norah Jones doesn't produce an exact replica of her own original performance each time she performs. Each performance of "a song" is a new product, a new act, a new creation, that more or less closely resembles past performances.

If I were to play Chopin’ March Funèbre using a keyboard without the damper pedal, would that mean I am not playing it? — TimeLine

It would mean you were playing it without the damper pedal.

Is the damper pedal indicated in the score? In that case, it would mean you were playing it inconsistently with the score in this one respect.

But matching the score is only the beginning of performing a composition. And we haven't even begun to speak of improvisation.

From an ontological perspective, music being an eternal existent and therefore not contained within the confines of space and time is rather intriguing. — TimeLine

I'm not sure what this means. What is an "ontological perspective"? What is an "eternal existent"? What sort of thing is not "contained within the confines of space and time"?

A "piece of music" -- a fleeting phrase, or a whole symphony that has been jotted down or performed in the past -- may be repeated, in the same way that an utterance or a gesture may be repeated, in the same way that "seeing a sunset" may be repeated. Musical activity is like other activity in this respect; we understand it in terms of generic patterns. But the sound that strikes our ear, the sound that we produce by shaking a string -- that sound is a concrete thing in each instance, and the real focus of the musician on each occasion of performance -- that shaking thing, that motion in a medium, that unique soundcloud, not some abstract "notes" jotted down on paper or recalled by rote.

I noticed that my selection of music – whilst broad – has often been compelled to artists like Jeff Buckley or Joni Mitchell, mostly because of thehonesty in the lyrics combined with an authenticity in the music that turns the entire experience into lived poetry. Bob Dylan, for instance, I have profound respect for and absolutely love his lyrics, but I don't necessarily enjoy listening. — TimeLine

A song involves both lyrics and music -- but "the same notes" could be sung in another song, with different lyrics, or sung in another piece of music without lyrics, or played in another piece of music without song. Songs are one thing, music is another. The singer is another thing, and each singing is another thing.

I like Bob Dylan's singing overall. He's like an American griot. He sings phrases with a human voice, not "notes" according to some artificial standard of precision and correctness -- and the way he does it, it's no accident, it's nuanced and musical, he knows what he's doing, he's in touch with the sound he's making and he does it on purpose. Maybe he gets carried away sometimes, one way or another at different points in his career, because he's an artist leaning into his craft one way and another, trying it out, figuring out what works for him by trial and error. He's a real folk singer.

Yet, when I listen to Turandot by Puccini, I have no idea what is being said and particularly Nessun Dorma find myself nevertheless feeling moved and emotional. — TimeLine

Of course it's not necessary to understand the lyrics of a song in order to be moved by a song. Music is moving without any words at all, and without human voices singing.

When I think of Beethoven, I sense something different to Mozart as though who they are is exhibited in the compositions. — TimeLine

Each composer, each performer, each agent has his own style, his own voice, his own personality.

Shall we say some styles and voices and personalities are more "authentic" than others?

Does music have eternal properties? Or is philosophy is the highest music? — TimeLine

I'm not sure how eternity's crept back into this conversation.

I'm inclined to think of philosophy and music somehow together. Perhaps they both tickle my temporal lobes in a similar way.

Because probability is being used as a model to provide statistical predictions, you can choose to regard it as modeling either the physics, or your ignorance. The Principal Principle states that we should set our credences to equal the probabilities, so the two very different entities are empirically indistinguishable and often conceptually confused. — tom

In what sense is the model a model of one's ignorance?

Suppose I've never heard of physics and probability theory, and I (incorrectly) expect the outcome of a large number of coin tosses to be influenced by the force of wishful thinking in the vicinity of the coin.

It seems an ordinary probabilistic or statistical model is a model of something in addition to one's ignorance.

I've come across an article in the journal of social political philosophy. The argument goes like this:

1. The endurance of basic institutions* is in part a function of their 'factual' legitimacy, i.e., their actual actual acceptance by the population they regulate (in other words, endurance and factual legitimacy are correlated). — Kazuma

Is this definition in common use? To me it seems quite strained.

As if one were to say, the "factual legitimacy" of oppression and coercion consists in the persistence of oppression and coercion. Or, the "factual legitimacy" of an act of aggression consists in the victory of the aggressor.

2. Factual legitimacy is in part a function of how much these institutions avoid producing outcomes that are factually 'intolerable' (and thus not tolerated) for this population. — Kazuma

As if one were to say, the "factual honesty" of a lie is in part a function of how much the lie avoids producing outcomes in which it is considered contrary to a sincere assertion of truth.

3. There is some connection between what the people subject to these institutions consider normatively intolerable and what is actually normatively intolerable (i. e., factual and normative legitimacy are correlated, even if normatively intolerable outcomes are not always widely recognized). — Kazuma

Can you clear up this distinction?

I suppose "normatively intolerable institutions" are institutions said to be intolerable, or institutions that are in fact at odds with current normative limits of tolerance. Norms of tolerance would trigger actual intolerance, radical rejection of actual institutions, when there is a perception that the actual institutions have passed a threshold with respect to those norms. Is that the idea? In that case, it seems something like the perception of legitimacy, or the assessment of current "tolerability", plays an important mediating role between "norms" and "facts" of legitimacy or tolerability.

I wonder. Does it seem more correct to say that there is in fact, in each context, a threshold beyond which conditions become "intolerable", and that to pass this threshold is to impose a new norm of action -- e.g., of active rejection of the status quo? Is it always clear in advance where that threshold stands? Arguably, the location of that threshold is not the sort of thing that is predicted by "norms", but is rather a thing determined by changes in actual circumstances. It seems the norms may shift along with the circumstances.

4. Therefore, actual endurance is evidence that institutions have avoided producing normatively intolerable outcomes in varied circumstances in the past. — Kazuma

A lie's having passed unchallenged is evidence that the lie has avoided producing suspicions of insincerity and falsehood.

The persistence of strangling is evidence that the strangler has avoided producing circumstances that would have led the victim to escape or gain the upper hand....

5. The evidence that long-lasting institutions have avoided producing normatively intolerable outcomes in many kinds of unknown past circumstances is also evidence that they may avoid producing such outcomes in unknown future circumstances.
(X. Marquez, 2015, An Epistemic Argument for Conservativism) — Kazuma

The evidence that lies and strangling have succeeded in the past is evidence that they may succeed in the future.

*basic institutions are those institutions with the broadest scope of regulation (in my view, those could be, for example, capitalism, family etc.) — Kazuma

What does "scope of regulation" mean?

Personally, I find it to be more beneficial for the society to keep the status quo and to only improve on the current institutions, previously described as basic. There should not be a direction for a society, meaning there should be no desire for changes, as those changes are unpredictable and would only lead to creating a new ideology and revolutions. — Kazuma

I'm not sure how this view of yours is connected to the argument you attribute to X. Marquez. However:

Isn't "improving current institutions" one way of "changing the status quo"? Isn't change always change in some "direction"? Isn't a desire for improvement a desire for one sort of change, and a desire for change in a particular "direction"?

Do we have some reason to suppose the consequences of changes involved in "improvements" are more "predictable" than the consequences involved in a "change in direction"?

If we are inclined to agree with this analysis, then it becomes hard to deny that claims about appearances can't really provide an adequate evidential basis for claims about how things really are. That’s because each and every claim about how things appear is nothing more than the withdrawal from some companion claim about how things really are. — Aaron R

What shall we count as “adequate” evidential basis for claims about how things really are? I would argue along lines just indicated above, that the seeming-seeing of a seeming-apple does provide adequate evidential basis for claims about real apples, though not for claims that such claims are certain claims. In cases in which new evidence comes to light, that the seeming-apple was not in fact an apple, or that the seeming-seeing was not a seeing, we amend the record of discourse by adding new alleged facts (including claims about the seeming course of seemings) and revise or withdraw from our previous claim about what’s over there in the world where (it seems) it had seemed there was a seeming-apple.

Let’s not forget the role of expressions like “I thought I knew”. I thought there was an apple there, but it turned out to be a lump of wax. That doesn’t mean the initial claim was unjustified, unwarranted, and groundless -- only that it turned out to be incorrect; or rather that the speaker turned out to have reason to correct it. This new reason, or new judgment, is as fallible in principle as the first which it amends. But it seems such claims are correct when they happen to be so, and stand uncorrected until there’s reason for correction.

As such, it’s a mistake to think that we do or ought to start from claims about how things appear and then inferentially move to claims about how things really are. Instead, we start from claims about how things really are, and then inferentially move to claims about how things merely “appear” only upon being confronted by evidence that suggests we were mistaken about how things really are. — Aaron R

Who’s doing the “moving” here, and for what purpose? Arguably neither route will get us more “certainty” in the claims we make about what’s “over there”. It’s true that ordinary speech for ordinary purposes tends to follow the more direct route, speaking about “what’s over there” without wasting time on appearance-talk except in special cases, as when one is prompted by events to revise his own considered view about “what he thought he knew.”

The efficiency of that fine custom of, as it were, directly addressing things in the world as they appear to us, and revising only when it matters -- instead of constantly referring to the mediations of experience and conceivable doubts of reason -- gives us no reason to suppose those mediations vanish whenever there’s harmony between the seeming and the fact. It seems rather that when they appear in agreement, ordinarily we focus on the main track, according to our purpose, only falling back on the other, and to the task of realignment, when they fall out of whack.


I don’t mean to imply, by speaking this way, that the “appearance” is something like a color patch in my head, ontologically isolable from the “causal chain” that is -- I want to say -- identical to that appearance.

We may analyze a causal chain into parts, or happen upon one link at a time, and then in ignorant conjecture or counterfactual hypothesis, characterize that one link as part of indefinitely many conceivable causal chains. Some such stories seem to line up with the facts better than others. Yet others seem entirely off base.

And the facts keep coming in, or so it seems.

So, if claims about appearances can’t serve as an adequate evidential basis for empirical knowledge of how things really are, then what can? For Sellars, the only adequate justification for such claims is to be found in other empirical claims about how things really are. In particular, claims about the context of observation ought to (and do) serve as the primary justificatory backdrop for our first-order observational claims. To justify a claim like “this necktie is green” we ought to appeal to facts about the situation in which we find ourselves – that is, to claims about our historical reliability at distinguishing colors, about the lighting conditions, about whether we are afflicted with color-blindness, about whether we are wearing green-tinted contact lenses, about whether we are currently on drugs that effect our ability to distinguish colors, about whether someone is likely to be playing a practical joke on us, etc. — Aaron R

I strongly agree, objective claims about how things really are make good justifications for other objective claims about how things really are, and should be perhaps required in order to count such claims as “justified”. So far as I can make out, sophisticated theories about light and vision add little in this regard to a common-sense grasp of how seeing works.

Moreover, general knowledge about light and the historical reliability of judgments of color does not inform me of my present circumstances at all, unless experience informs me of my present circumstances in such a way as to warrant the application of thoughts about light and color discrimination to my thoughts about present circumstances. There’s no theory that tells me whether my eyes are open or closed right now, for instance, or whether it’s dark or light in here, or where the proximate light sources are in my vicinity of the world and what color of light they seem in my estimation to emit. Ordinarily I acquire such information noninferentially by using my eyes to see. It seems that any general theory of vision I may have acquired secondhand over the years, has accrued through centuries determined in part by processes involving the same sort of basis for judgment in others, who used their eyes in about the same way that I do on each particular occasion.

Again, the ultimate appeal to empirical claims as opposed to claims about appearances is hardly surprising given Sellars’s analysis of the looks/is distinction. For Sellars, to vacate all claims about what is the case is equivalent with vacating all claims to knowledge itself, and so a substratum consisting purely of beliefs about appearances is therefore simply not a viable starting point for empirical knowledge. — Aaron R

The main thrust of this point seems reasonable, but there’s arguably an unwarranted and undesirable implication, that “appearances” are not part of the empirical world, and that our accounts of appearances are not accounts of the empirical world.

I suggest, to the contrary, that “having an appearance” or “being appeared to” is a sort of knowledge of the empirical world -- a most fundamental sort -- that can be analyzed and expressed in terms of appearance-talk that coincides with matters of fact, whether or not the subject understands that or how the appearance coincides with other matters of fact.

The appearance is part of reality, that’s how it coincides. It is itself a matter of fact related to other matters of fact in the world. That’s how perceptual experience binds our thoughts to nature and opens the world to each perceiver.

As an aside, it’s interesting to consider how Sellars ultimately deals with the charge of begging the question against skepticism (this is only cursorily covered in EPM. See the articles “More on Giveness and Explanatory Coherence” and “Kant’s Theory of Experience” for details). If empirical claims about what is the case are to be justified by other empirical claims about what is the case then it appears that we’re caught in a vicious circle. Sellars will make a Kantian-style transcendental argument to the effect that the linguistic practices that are the pre-condition for the formulation of the skeptic’s challenge (or any challenge) are only intelligible against the backdrop of the very empirical knowledge that the skeptic is challenging the legitimacy of. Not that this approach is original to Sellars (though he puts an interesting “linguistic” twist on it), but it is note-worthy in that he is one of the only philosophers in his milieu (outside of Strawson) to explicitly employ the machinery of transcendental argumentation in his work. — Aaron R

I’m wary of transcendental arguments. For one thing, it seems they’re always missing the point in conversation with a skeptic who’s inclined to gesture at an infinite horizon of conceivable possibilities when we ask a question like “How possible?” On what grounds, in whose terms, for what purpose, do we limit the frame?

I consider myself a sort of skeptic, but I don’t worry much about circles. Language is prior to sophisticated epistemological arguments. Perceptual experience is prior to sophisticated empirical theories. Where do such self-evident, practically tautological, claims leave our conversation about the logic of appearances and its role in observational judgments?

One concern I have with the view you’ve attributed to Sellars, is that it may leave a gap between general empirical beliefs and particular perceptual occasions. I mean specifically, with respect to handling claims about whether and how appearances can “provide an adequate evidential basis for claims about how things really are”; and about “the primary justificatory backdrop for our first-order observational claims”. To unpack such baggage the wrong way, may be to fall into some version of the “frictionless spinning in a void” associated with coherentism.

By my way of reckoning, it makes more sense to emphasize the cooperation on each occasion of general beliefs and beliefs based on current perception. The essential role of the more general beliefs, and the ordinary tendency to gloss over appearance-talk in happy cases, doesn’t mean there isn’t a deep layer of belief that’s analyzable or even best described in terms of appearance-talk, playing an equally essential role in our acquisition of noninferential knowledge of present circumstances.

Sellars basically thinks that this gets things ass-backwards. He doesn’t exactly deny that beliefs about the appearance of round red patches in a person’s visual field can serve as evidence for the existence of, say, an apple on a desk, but he will claim that they provide (at most) very weak evidence when taken on their own, but that this is not their primary function anyway. — Aaron R

I hope to find myself aligned with Sellars in criticizing the strength of the warrant provided by claims like “I seem to see a seeming-red seeming-apple” for claims like “There is a red apple there”. We might say the first claim provides a prima facie reason for belief in the second claim, but nothing close to a foundation for “certain knowledge” that the second claim is true.

Likewise, however, the dubitability that burdens the more objective claim does not seem to transfer to the more subjective claim. If Price is one of those epistemologists with anxieties about “certainty”, who hopes to derive perfectly certain empirically grounded beliefs about apples and tables from the beliefs about seemings we may carve out as an epistemic layer entailed by experience, of course he’s barking up the wrong tree.

That doesn’t make it nonsense to speak about the epistemic role of that deep layer of belief based on appearances, which serves as a safety net for us to fall back on gracefully, precisely because it persists while we ignore it.

Sellars’s alternative analysis is basically this: the primary function of claims about the way things “appear” or “look” or “seem” is to provide a mechanism for withdrawing from claims about the way things really are. — Aaron R

Like Wittgenstein in On Certainty: One always forgets the expression “I thought I knew”.

Who forgets such an expression? Only a befuddled epistemologist like Moore, who seems to play the role of buffoon in Wittgenstein’s opera.

So to say “the object over there looks red”, or “It looks like there is a red object over there” is to withdraw further and further away from a claim about how things really are, namely, that “there is a red object over there”. The notion of “looking” or “appearing” (e.g. looks red) is conceptually dependent on the more fundamental notion of “being” (e.g. is red). — Aaron R

It’s a withdrawal from claims about how things really are over there, where there seems to be a red apple. But this doesn’t entail another withdrawal, from all claims about how things really are in the world: For this appearance, and this seeming, may be said to be part of the world. And it’s not clear that it may be coherently denied that the appearance and seeming are part of the world.

Accordingly, the appearance and the seeming are among the “facts” we may aim to piece together in each case. For instance by asking: How is it the case, how does it happen, that things appear thus and so (to me, now)?

In ordinary, happy cases, one fair answer is: Because there’s an apple there, and your eyes are open and aimed that way. The frequency with which seeming-seeings of seeming-apples turn out to be, to all appearances and “to a practical certainty”, genuine seeings of genuine apples, also serves as justification for the belief that “There is an apple there”, and lets the seeming-seeing of a seeming-apple stand as a noninferentially acquired defeasible warrant for the latter belief.

A more developed variation on this theme could haul into the account an empirically grounded story about light and the light-relative properties of physical objects; about retinas and cones and optic nerves; about perceptual processes in cognition.

None of this amounts to absolute “theoretical certainty” that there really is a real apple there -- a certainty we never attain, even as we bite and chew and swallow.

Here’s an extended summary regarding Sellars's analysis of "Looks" talk. I don't spend much time justifying my interpretation or explicitly engaging with the text (and I gloss some things), but I'd be happy to dig deeper if anyone wants to.

I think it was Calisbury who somewhere said that Sellars employs a kind-of "anstoss" logic in regards to the concept of veridicality, and that this under-girds his analysis of the “is/looks” distinction. — Aaron R

Would anyone care to say something about “anstoss logic”? What does this phrase mean?

I think that’s basically correct. In the “Looks” sections Sellars is responding to the Pricean line of argument that goes something like this (very roughly):

1. When I (ostensibly) see an apple, there are many things I can doubt about my experience, like that the object is really an apple, or that there is a material object present at all.

2. However, there are some things I can't doubt, such as that there is a round red patch present to my awareness. — Aaron R

Or perhaps less boldly:

2’: … such as that there seems to be a round red patch present to my awareness.

Or even less:

2’’: … such as that there seems to be a seeming-round seeming-red seeming-patch present to my awareness.

Are such revisions in keeping with Price? Or would he deem the “seemings” redundant or inappropriate here, perhaps in keeping with a view that “the presence of a round red patch” is not the sort of thing that “seems”, and is instead in every respect immune to doubt?

3. The fact that I can't doubt these beliefs implies that they need not be justified on the basis of any other beliefs (e.g. they are not inferentially mediated). — Aaron R

There’s something intuitively plausible about this, once we massage it the right way. I don’t ordinarily justify my belief that I am seemingly seeing a seemingly red seeming object on any other grounds than that it appears so to me in the ordinary first-person point of view; ordinarily there are no other grounds available for such claims.

However, putting it the way Price has here, one might ask him, what justifies your belief that there are such things as “patches”? And it may turn out that this is only a loose manner of speaking.

4. Therefore, it is things like round red patches that are the direct objects of apprehension, and it is only my beliefs about such things (i.e. beliefs about how things "appear") that could (and should) serve as the indubitable foundational (non-inferential) basis of all empirical knowledge. — Aaron R

See my concerns about “seeming” and “patches” above. And my previous and subsequent mutterings about epistemological “certainty” and “foundations”.

In any case, (my interpretation of) Hegel's point is that, in speaking of a 'quality' or 'property,' we're speaking about something repeatable, something that could (at least in principle) also be a quality or property of something else. For Hegel, this means that we're dealing with universals and I think he's right. — csalisbury

It often occurs to me that repeatability is essential somehow to the conceptual, but I've never managed to satisfy myself unpacking that "somehow".

Frege and Russell instruct us in formulating concepts of particulars. These are repeatable across various occasions, in different propositional contexts, in utterances by various speakers. The object corresponding to a concept of a particular may be varied in thought (e.g. in ignorance of the relevant facts or in counterfactual exercises), and thus the concept is "repeated" in application to a range of possible objects. Accordingly, it seems there is a generic character even to concepts of particulars. But I'm wary of conflating this generic and repeatable character of concepts with a presumption that concepts always correspond to something like "general terms" in the ordinary sense, man in general as opposed to this or that man.

But 'universal' is a loaded term, and I don't want to drag things too far afield. In any case, the 'mediation' I mentioned is exactly the second sort of mediation you mention, a mediation by concepts. To understand a quality or property as a quality or property, we must have recourse to the conceptual. — csalisbury

We who speak here aim to understand the quality as a quality, and to account for the sense in which a perceiver who says "This apple is red" says so in virtue of his own grasp of the "qualities" that appear to him. But to speak of "qualities" this way is to have already conceptualized the "content" of perception.

I'm inclined to say, on the basis of introspection, that ordinary perceptual experience is always already conceptualized. That doesn't entail that there is no determination of perceptual content by the "receptive" powers of sense perception; and it rather seems there is such a determining contribution from sensation in perceptual experience.

Accordingly, to characterize "sense qualities" as something like general concepts is arguably to jump ahead of a tricky discourse about the receptive character of a perceptual experience strongly determined by sensation. A discourse Rorty, for instance, seems eager to evade at any price.


Consider the quality as in the first place, not a conceptualized appearance, but an activity of the organism or mind involving an appearance of a particular type.

I move my arm to wave; I move it again to make "the same" gesture on a second occasion. I call it "the same". Perhaps you're observing me and agree it's "the same". Perhaps we turn to details, fleshing out criteria of similarity, declaring when to count a gesture as a wave, when to count a wave as this type of wave, and how to handle borderline cases.... However that exercise turns out, it's two different events in the world that we're considering, in terms of a similarity that we assign, on the basis of objective characteristics that we deem relevant and assess from a certain point of view, with a certain purpose, with a certain degree of accuracy and precision....

Likewise, we might say two visual appearings of or involving a quality of red are the same with respect to this quality on the basis of objective characteristics that we deem relevant and assess from a certain point of view, with a certain purpose, with a certain degree of accuracy and precision....

Along these lines, one trick would be to distinguish the "objective characteristics" occurring in two events from the conceptualization of characteristics by virtue of which two instances are called alike, the same type, two of a kind, for instance, "red".

It's not that the concept red appears to me; but rather what appears to me I immediately recognize as red.

I hope that makes sense. A lot of these terms (concept, universal, property, quality) kind of bleed into one another. — csalisbury

So much philosophical activity must be spent sorting out such terms as they occur in the speech of others and in one's own usage. The difficulty of that task, the brevity of life, and the growth of the record of discourse over time, give a strong motive for plain speaking.

Funnily enough, Epictetus wasn't a skeptic though — Agustino

Wasn’t he a stoic? One of the great schools I mentioned.

You’re not suggesting we cite only those speakers with whom we’re in complete agreement on every point? In that case I might never cite anyone, including myself.

What exactly do you mean by the habits and attitudes associated with wholehearted skepticism? — Agustino

"Wholehearted skepticism" is a phrase I picked up from McDowell. Like many epistemologists in the schools, he persists in arguing against an old academic character called "the skeptic", a moldy straw man who's made to utter antiskeptical absurdities such as "No knowledge is possible". My employment of the phrase is ironic and emphatically critical in this respect, as I believe the old straw man should be laid to rest in a museum, not misleadingly cast as the chief antagonist in public discourses on skepticism and knowledge. On the other hand, I mean it quite sincerely, once we kick the straw man to the curb, the way is open to a wholehearted skepticism informed in part by encounters with prominent skeptics in the tradition, including Sextus, Gassendi, and the full-grown Hume.

If you look through the history of skepticism, these have been very different, varying with the time in which the skeptic lived. Skepticisim, precisely because of its non-assertive nature, can lend itself to a multitude of values and practices, including religion (see Johann Georg Hamann) or atheism (Hume), etc. even in the same time period. — Agustino

Quite so. When Gothic tribes who displaced Rome in the West at last discovered Sextus, the encounter with skepticism induced some Christian apologists to use skeptical arguments in defense of Christian faith. It seems one tendency was along these lines: If reason and science lead us to doubt the truth of scripture, the defense may employ skeptical arguments to make such reason and science seem doubtful.

We might say skepticism is always practiced from a point of view in a cultural context. Even if it were true in theory that, given enough time to move from alpha to omega, skeptical practice always tends toward the same sort of philosophical view; life is short, and cultural contexts various. So it should come as no surprise if two practitioners speak differently or hold different views while engaged in a similar practice.


I distinguish between the "habits and attitudes" most closely associated with the practice of skepticism, on the one hand, and whatever vestiges of belief may remain in a practicing skeptic who’s made some progress learning how to "follow appearances quietly" -- no matter with which cults the skeptic may have associated before his conversion.

I was a naturalist before I was a skeptical naturalist. That naturalism had phenomenological foundations I felt I did not adequately understand and that I hoped to work out. In the meantime, the view promoted strong inclinations in me along the lines of metaphysical materialism. Working on the phenomenological foundations led me to skepticism. In the transition to skepticism and skeptical naturalism, the disposition to metaphysical thinking was replaced by wholehearted skeptical epistemology. I now reject those materialist inclinations in theory, and argue against them along with all other metaphysical inclinations. But it seems vestiges of those inclinations stir in me still, perhaps influencing my thoughts, my expectations, my actions. As a skeptic I'm disposed to treat those vestigial inclinations as prejudices of reason, though bound to report them as among my appearances, until such time as the disciplined practice of skepticism should grind them out of me completely.

I suppose a Christian who becomes a wholehearted skeptic and skeptical Christian apologist might be similarly disposed to his own vestiges. But if he goes on to give explicit assent, even in his private thoughts, to claims like "A benevolent, omniscient, omnipotent, eternal deity created the world", and "Scripture is revealed truth", then perhaps his skepticism is not wholehearted.

For it's not clear how such claims would be supported by the balance of appearances. Clearing the way for a conceivable possibility is not the same thing as giving a positive reason for assent.

I also distinguish between any metaphysical inclinations and the sort of phenomenologically grounded, metaphysically agnostic naturalism that seems, to me, entirely consistent with wholehearted skepticism.

What is this "form of reason"? — Agustino

An excellent question, the resolution of which is far from clear and likely to cost a great deal of conversation.

I might distinguish a practice of “giving and taking reasons”, including reasons for belief or action, from the more basic condition of rationality we seem to share with dogs and other nonhuman sentient animals. It seems the human practice is supported by a greater capacity for abstraction, reflection, objectivity, imagination, and like those capacities closely connected to our power of speech. Along such lines, I might say the art of “reasoning” involves something like an ability to identify, evaluate, and construct justificatory and inferential relations among, for instance, perceptions, beliefs, memories, intentions, hypotheses, judgments, utterances, and other actions. The practice of this art seems to involve something like a capacity for thinking about thoughts, for reasoning about reasons.

Skeptical reasoning aims to correct the unruly impulse to unreflective judgment and belief, to strengthen the habit of critical thinking, by testing the justifications for any claim, by tracing doubt to its theoretical limit, by showing the joints at which conceivable alternatives sprout up for any claim, by thus clearing a path along which one may learn to “follow appearances”.

It seems the way to skepticism begins as soon as we learn a practice of “giving and taking reasons”. For arguably it is that very practice, taken to a sort of rigorous extreme on all sides.

Have you been reading Livingston's Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium where he goes on explicating exactly this line of thought traced from Hume, in a somewhat Hegelian/dialectical fashion? — Agustino

I don’t think I’ve heard of him. I’m no scholar and don’t read much nowadays, apart from conversations like these.

Interpretations of Hume aside, I like the grand distinction I just read in a blurb on the piece, between “false philosophy” leading to melancholy at groundlessness or to delirium at transcendence, and “true philosophy” leading to wisdom. I wonder if “wisdom” would consist merely in avoiding delirium and melancholy, or also in avoiding the correlate views on transcendence and groundlessness.

The question arises out of the idea that for something to exist, it must be somewhere. Am I wrong in thinking this? If so, than in what way does truth exist? — Perdidi Corpus

Where is the left and where is the right? Not "existing" in any one place, but consisting in relations among various things existing in various places.

I think of truth as something like the value of a relation between statements and facts. Given two truth-values, true and false, we may in principle divide (well-formed, meaningful) statements into "the true" and "the false", depending on how they line up with relevant facts.

Where are statements? Paradigmatically, in the heads of rational sentient speakers.

Why does anyone still continue to study this nonsense? — lambda

I've asked myself this question many times.

When I started reading philosophy, in my youth, I had some vague, untutored notions about theological agnosticism and moral absolutism, and I was attracted to the art of Socrates. Within a few years, partly under the influence of confusing encounters with Hegel and Nagarjuna, I was drawn to a sort of metaphysical idealism. Increasingly dissatisfied with the seeming arbitrariness of that position, I drifted toward a sort of Kantian-inflected phenomenology, influenced especially by Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer. I kicked aside the last vestiges of idealism somewhere between Bergson and Fichte, chewing on a "problem of matter" that set me on the road to what I'd eventually call "a sort of naturalism". I got a nice kickstart down that way when I stumbled into McDowell, and Anscombe, and Wittgenstein, and began to get acquainted with the analytic tradition we trace through Russell to Frege. And I suppose that sent me back to Hume.

In retrospect, the trip suggests one good reason for the social practice of philosophy: Some of us start out lighting candles in our parents' basements, inventing prayers and meditations and wandering the bookcases. We all start out in different places, exposed to who knows what customs and prejudices in the media, in the schools, in libraries and religious institutions, among strangers and friends and family, mixing like marbles in an urn, crowing like birds around a tower of Babel. The social practice of philosophy is inevitable and essential, not only as the expression of the great diversity of views sure to crop up in culture like ours, but also, more tendentiously, for the integration of all that dissonant activity into a more or less unified, harmonious, and organized conversation. Along these lines, I suppose there's some analogy between the philosophical fitness of an individual, and the philosophical fitness of communities and civilizations.

If skepticism is sound and valuable philosophy; if, as some of us are tempted to suppose, it belongs somehow to the form of human rationality; then another reason for the practice of philosophy is to educate the people and train them in a skill as useful and universal as algebra, physics, medicine, athletics, and meditation.


I've only lately come to that whole way of thinking. I rode my naturalism over a decade, sometimes casually and at a distance, other times in fits of energy. Through most those years, I thought it a waste of time, even regretting the Socratic enchantment that overtook me in youth and sent me on that strange distracted journey, even wondering at what seemed an irresponsible dissembling by the professors who promote this useless art as if there were something to it.

What's the point of practicing philosophy, I used to ask, once you've already got your bearings? You've lived on Earth a few years already, got a pretty good idea what to expect, what sort of actions, what way of life, those expectations most firmly recommend. You might be a naturalist, a Christian, an atheist, an idealist, a fan of Castaneda... what's the point of talking about it once you're sure enough that talk won't change your mind? In those years I treated philosophy like something between a filthy habit I'd inherited from my youth and ought to quit, and a pleasant pastime like music, or basketball, or dancing.


Since I never did kick the habit, my naturalism continued to take shape, pressed on all sides in conversations with friends, and strangers, and texts, and in solitary dialogues. On the one hand, I came to recognize the deeply skeptical character of the phenomenological foundations of my naturalism, and the close connection of the skeptical and phenomenological tendencies in our tradition, too hidden in the discourse of our times.

Why should anyone be introduced to philosophy by way of Descartes, without a glance at Bacon or Gassendi; or by way of Plato and Aristotle without a tour through the stoics, and skeptics, and cynics, and epicureans, the great schools of Hellenic philosophy in its most developed ages, in its most reasonable, social, and pragmatic forms? So you've read Chrissypus....

One reason might be, it's the more metaphysically encumbered texts that catch all the flies. Metaphysical controversy is the gateway to epistemology; epistemology is the threshold of skepticism. Surely there's room for that sort of branding without tilting the whole enterprise off kilter.


On the other hand, all those conversations informed me of the great diversity of views among the people. By sincere and earnest reflection on themes raised, and claims persistently asserted, by others -- so many of which are ruled out of court in the schools by no more than a well-placed snicker -- I became persuaded there are no "proofs" or facts or calculus by which the most fundamental disagreements may be definitely resolved. That realization coincided with my new appreciation of the power of skepticism, and these new insights reinforced each other. For where disagreements are most stubborn, it's skepticism that clears the way to common ground, no matter whether every party in a conversation adopts a skeptical attitude, or only one.

It takes a knucklehead like me a quarter century to get from lighting candles to the sort of skeptical naturalism I’ve come to practice. My views keep shifting while I’m at it, though I follow the same thread the whole time. I’ll bet most old philosophers agree it can take forty years of life or more before a body reaches what we might call philosophical maturity. How much of this time do we spend just figuring out what all this talk’s about, to say nothing of what’s at stake in it and what it’s for?

The philosophical activity we take up more or less responsibly in conversations like this, is ceaselessly at work in all hearts and minds, whether or not it’s noted, however it’s construed, however misdirected, ever shaping us through time.


Skepticism is not a matter of fact that one discovers by observation. It's an outlook and a custom that must be achieved and preserved and cultivated, or left to rot in the back alley of tradition. The cultivation of such customs is the work of philosophical activity. The personal and social value of such customs is the justification for the allocation of resources to that work.

If you’re so sure that skepticism is the true philosophy, misunderstood and undervalued in our time, and that we’d all be better off if the custom were more firmly rooted in our culture, then you might recognize an obligation to promote the cure yourself, or at least pay it lip service on the right occasions, as each of us has here by speaking his own mind.

Philosophy has failed, miserably. Skepticism has won; by a rather large margin. — lambda

Skepticism is a philosophy. See Popkin's Skepticism anthology and his History of Skepticism, for instance. Or The Outlines of Pyrrhonism by Sextus Empiricus. Or the full-grown Hume's Enquiry.

Accordingly, I suppose when you say "skepticism has won", you mean to assert that skepticism is more correct or useful than other philosophies -- perhaps, more specifically, that it reigns supreme among epistemological attitudes.


I agree that skepticism is powerful philosophy, and I call myself a sort of skeptic.

Accordingly, it doesn't sound quite right to me, to say "philosophers can't offer any reasons to believe in" free will, or other minds, or a mind-independent world. Philosophers can and do offer such reasons, and also offer reasons for the contrary beliefs. Skeptics most of all, if they follow Sextus, pile justifications on either side of a controversy, aiming to surpass even the partisans, in an exercise aimed at the suspension of judgment by a sort of exhaustion of the power of belief.

More recent efforts in philosophical "diagnosis" and "therapy" aim to persuade us that enduring traditional problems like those you've cited are vestiges of philosophical confusion and anxiety rooted in outmoded prejudice. Such therapeutic philosophy may have a skeptical character or tendency.


What's left when such therapy has worked its cure? The aim of training is not merely to avoid or remove ills, but to promote a state of wholesome fitness and optimal performance.

The miserable noise of our public discourse is a symptom of maladies that would be cured by more of the right kind of philosophical activity, not less. The “crisis of humanities” is political and fiscal, not methodological.

I agree with you, that cure should mean more inculcation of the habits and attitudes associated with wholehearted skepticism.

The absolute failure of philosophy is a great example of how unaided human reasoning leads to nothing but absurdity. — lambda

Skeptical philosophy is a sort of human reasoning. What is it aided by? The same thing that all philosophy and human reasoning is aided by, human experience.

I'm biased as a skeptic, and it's hard for me to resist the thought that skepticism (properly understood) shows the tracks of human rationality, traces the form of reason, marks the outlines of a discipline of reasonableness, and is that very discipline.

I don't agree that empirical understanding doesn't "approach" the questions we've raised here in this thread. I think it clearly does approach them, though it never gives a "final answer" in this or any other matter. There's always room for further investigation, and there's always more to be said. — Cabbage Farmer

One question I overlooked: A question like, "Why does the world exist"?

I think it's reasonable to expect this sort of question may be unapproachable for empirical understanding. In that case, empirical science has no comment on the matter.

One sort of philosophical approach however, is in keeping with the expectation that there is no answer at all to such questions, in other words, there is no reason that the world exists. The existence of the world is not the sort of thing for which there are "reasons" or "causes". It doesn't make sense to ask for the reason the world exists.

Another sort of philosophical approach would align with another expectation, that if there is a reason for existence, it's not the sort of thing we can ever have reason to suppose we've gotten wind of. If it even makes sense to ask for the reason for existence, it's not a reason we can ever grasp.


Either one of those varieties of response to the question leaves about as much mystery in the world as one could hope for. The whole thing is fundamentally mysterious to us, from here to eternity.

I'm inclined to think that's roughly how things stand. Ordinarily, to deny this is to launch a conversation about the epistemic value of phenomena like gut feelings, psychic visions, and revelations; and about the difference between philosophy and fantasy.

When all that's said and done: In theory there's always room for unwarranted faith, for faith "without reason" or rational justification, or even faith contrary to reason.

I suspect this is why the concept of faith has played such a special role in the Western tradition, a role that many who speak of faith nowadays may not adequately appreciate. For to believe purely on the basis of faith -- instead of on the basis of a bunch of more or less reasonable premises and arguments, or even in the face of quite reasonable premises and arguments to the contrary -- well that's a deep-rooted, powerful faith that deserves the name "pure faith".

Though as I've said, in practice it seems there's always something like a feeling, at least, to serve as a warrant for belief.

Without investigation there would be no hypothesis to begin with. That seems obvious, so I'm not seeing your point here. — John

One might hypothesize on the basis of casual observation or on the basis of what's called common sense. I'm not sure that's the same thing as hypothesizing on the basis of "investigation" -- which I might characterize as a more thorough and diligent following of traces. It also matters how the hypothesis may be expected to play along with subsequent observations and investigations.

That's right, and I did already note that the world is co-mysterious with reason. — John

One thing you haven't yet made clear to me: How is "reason" special in this regard, among all other things in the world? Is there anything in the world that is not "co-mysterious" with the world? Is reason the only thing in the world that is "co-mysterious" in this way?

What about love? What about time and space? What about matter and energy? What about imagination, possibility, life, freedom, perception, language, beauty, taste... what about anything else?

I also agree that the mystery of being is no barrier to empirical understanding. What we don't know is why things can be understood or what the significance of that is. — John

Do we know "why" anything is the way that it is, in the sense you mean here? It seems to me this horizon of mystery extends through all our understanding, "within and without" each phenomenon we seem to understand.

We can investigate phenomena, we can reason about the results of investigation and about the course of investigation. It's not only rivers and storm clouds we can get to know better, but also our own minds and the minds of others, including the powers and practices involved in perceiving, thinking, understanding, and speaking.

So far as I can see, the process of thus extending empirical knowledge never yields a "complete" account of anything. But that doesn't mean we don't understand any thing, and it doesn't mean there's no aura of mystery hanging in and around all things, even as we seem to understand them.

So I'm not sure why you single out "understanding" or "reason" as especially mysterious. In what sense, according to you, do we so perfectly and completely understand all other things, that there's no mystery left in them by the time we get done understanding?

Of course, it's also true that if things could not be understood then there would be no sentience, and no life to speak of. — John

I'm not sure I follow you here.

In what sense do sentience and life depend on "things being understood"?

My point was just that empirical investigations don't even begin to approach such questions. For me these are the interesting questions; the ones that cannot be answered by empirical inquiries; the latter are best left to science, it's better at them than philosophy is. — John

I agree, there's a big difference between philosophical activity and empirical science. Though I don't think they're unrelated enterprises: I'm partial to the old, unfashionable view that the empirical sciences are among philosophy's branches.

I don't agree that empirical understanding doesn't "approach" the questions we've raised here in this thread. I think it clearly does approach them, though it never gives a "final answer" in this or any other matter. There's always room for further investigation, and there's always more to be said.

Nothing wrong with that. I imagine this is the way most people work through a difficult text, whether they realize or not. — Aaron R

It does seem to belong to the process of interpretation whether we notice it or not. I enjoy building it into my method, and I like to pretend this improves my results. For instance, by breaking the text into small parts and working through them in a format that resembles conversation.

The practice is in keeping with a characterization of interpretation as a conversation with the text, and also in keeping with ancient customs of philosophical dialogue and philosophical commentaries, with ordinary human conversation, and with our behavior in forums like this one here.

But it takes too damn long.

You asked about historical context back on page 7 (I think), and so I wanted to add some historical notes that might be of interest — Aaron R

Thanks so much! I was hoping someone would fill in that blank.

EPM is probably best be understood as a response to theories put forward by the likes of William James, Bertrand Russell, C.D. Broad, C.I. Lewis, G.E. Moore, A.J. Ayer, H.H. Price, and Hans Reichenbach (among others) in the early part of the 20th century. He probably also had philosophers as diverse as Rudolph Carnap and Edmund Husserl in view as well — Aaron R

Quite a cast of characters. Which would you say figure most prominently in, or had most influence in the field in the decades preceding, EPM? Or, which if any are closest to the typical sense-datum theory Sellars takes aim at in the essay?

Riechenbach, for instance, argued that physical objects, not sense-impressions, are directly given in experience. According to Riechenbach, sense-impressions are mere abstracta that are never "seen" by anyone, much less seen directly (see Experience and Prediction, 1938). — Aaron R

I'm not sure I've heard of Riechenbach. The view that it's physical objects, not sense-impressions, which are "seen" sounds remarkably fresh.

So he buries sense-impressions behind experience.... Are the impressions mere theoretical constructs for him, or do these constructs perhaps refer to terms that play some causal or functional role in the organization of experience, or does he reject all such theories....

C.I. Lewis and H.H. Price, by contrast, tended to argue that it is colors, shapes, textures, etc. that are directly given in experience, and that beliefs about physical objects (and even physical objects themselves) are inferentially constructed out of these (See Lewis' Mind and World Order, and Price's Perception). — Aaron R

This sounds perhaps more problematic. Does it mean that some "beliefs" about "given" colors are also "given"? I recall Sellars' distinction between sensing particulars and sensing facts.

How and where does "inference" occur in their models? Surely not in experience: We don't run around the world ceaselessly making conscious inferential judgments about physical objects on the basis of given colors and shapes; but arguably we have (or many of us have) countlessly many "beliefs" about local physical objects on the basis of current perception.

If there's something like "inferential judgment" at play in all our perceptually grounded beliefs about physical objects in the environment, it must be a sort of "inference" that occurs behind the scenes of conscious awareness.

Perhaps this is one way to interpret, or to correct, strange old views in our tradition concerning "judgments of sensation": The synthesis of "objects" from the most basic elements of sensation is achieved primarily by nonconscious cognitive processes that inform conscious perceptual experience. The application of the language of "inference" and "judgment" to such nonconscious spontaneous processes, excusable in days gone by, is merely a sort of analogy. However, when nonconscious processes of sensory cognition result in perceptual experience, we may begin to speak of perceptual content, and this content is not only open to inferential judgment, but also arguably charged with meaning, with conceptual content, and thus full of implications.

Of course the conceptual content, the "beliefs", and the "implications" of perceptual content, would depend in part on the conceptual stance and character of the perceiver, as well as on what's "given" to perception by sensation. Particular conscious acts of inference on the basis of perception occur within this constant shifting context.

I suppose the hard problem of perceptual content, along these lines, is to clearly distinguish what's "given" to perception by sensation.

Consider the following quotation from Price's Perception:

When I see a tomato there is much that I can doubt. I can doubt whether it is a tomato that I am seeing, and not a cleverly painted piece of wax. I can doubt whether there is any material thing there at all. [...] One thing however that I cannot doubt: that there exists a red patch of a round and somewhat bulgy shape [...] directly present to my consciousness. [...] And when I say that it is directly present to my consciousness, I mean that my consciousness of it is not reached by inference [...]. This peculiar and ultimate manner of being present to consciousness is called being given and that which is thus present is called a datum. — Price — Aaron R

A beautiful passage. What's Price's spin on the phrase "reached by inference"? It could mean i) "achieved by a process of inference", or far more weakly, ii) "open to revision by a process of inference". A huge difference. As I suggested earlier, I think (i) is just wrong. If we run with (ii), then we have a conception of "presence to consciousness" or "givenness" according to which the datum that is given in perceptual experience is indubitable. It's not merely that the datum is indubitable; it seems Price has here carved out the sense-datum as whatever's indubitable in perception. An admirable exercise in skepticism. Good show.

Perhaps we can call this "datum" the sense-content component of perceptual content, and say that perceptual content includes both sense-content and conceptual content?

Is Price the source among analytic philosophers of talk about "direct presence" and "presence to consciousness", or did the usage precede him? I believe the first time I encountered the term, or the first time it stuck, I was reading Anscombe's "First Person".

Russel and Moore also tended to analyze physical objects as reducible to directly apprehended sense-data (e.g. secondary qualities). — Aaron R

They say the physical objects themselves, or merely our experience and knowledge of physical objects, are thus reducible?

William James was somewhat unique in maintaining that pretty much everything except the "entirety" or "totality" of experience is directly apprehended. In his view, sense-data (or "percepts") are no more or no less "given" than the relations (both causal and inferential) that bind them together (see A World of Pure Experience, 1904). — Aaron R

It makes sense to say some relations are ordinarily given in perception: I don't perceive two objects and then infer that one is to the left of the other; I see that it's so. Likewise, I don't feel the pot and and feel some heat and infer that the pot is hot, I feel that it's hot. I don't see the glass fall to the floor and infer that falling to the floor caused the glass to shatter... I believe falling was the cause of shattering when I see it, without making any inference....

But each of those claims is "open to doubt", and hence not "directly present to consciousness" or "given" in the sense carved out by Price. Or at most the first one, about relative spatial position, is given in Price's sense. (on my reading of that little passage)

The common thread running through the diverse positions of all of these thinkers is this notion of a directly apprehended datum, or "given". — Aaron R

So the family of terms includes "direct apprehension", "direct presence (to consciousness)", "direct givenness", "givenness", and "immediacy". And on the object side, "percept", "datum", "sense-impression", "sense-datum", "sense content", and I don't know what.

EPM does not take issue with the concept of direct apprehension per se, but rather with that the way that the concept of direct apprehension is used to justify foundationalist epistemologies in which the objects or contents of direct apprehension are taken to be incorrigibly or indubitably known purely on the basis of their being directly apprehended. — Aaron R

I'm inclined to say there is something indubitable in experience, along the lines I just drew out from Price, and to characterize what's there indubitable as "appearance". I'd say, further, that this indubitable appearance does provide a sort of anchor or foundation for the beliefs and knowledge of each rational sentient agent, from one moment to the next. But not the sort of foundation that could possibly ground anything like certain knowledge beyond the appearance of the present moment.

Of course knowledge is not the same thing as certain and indubitable knowledge.

I suppose the "foundationalist epistemologies" in question are in search of something more impressive than mere knowledge?

An example of synthetic modus ponens is :

If it is raining, then I will take my umbrella
It is raining
Conclusion : I will take my umbrella

Clearly, the conclusion has no effect on the premise prior to forming the modus ponens - whether you take your umbrella before looking outside does not effect the weather outside. Thus, synthetic modus ponens adds to our knowledge of the world - it tells us something new about the conclusion. — Real Gone Cat

I wouldn't say a conclusion "has an effect on" a premise. Conclusions and premises are statements or assertions in arguments. The premises determine what one might validly assert, and thus the validity of inferences.

So far as I can see, this sort of "determining" is merely logical, not causal. When the terms in an argument refer to real objects in the world, the inferential relations in the argument don't generally map onto anything like causal relations between the real objects indicated in the argument. Arguments about umbrellas don't add anything to umbrellas; they help us sort our thoughts about umbrellas. Deductive inferences don't add anything to premises; they help us sort our thoughts on the basis of premises.

Accordingly, I'm not sure I understand your conception of a "synthetic modus ponens". Can you give an example that doesn't involve a future event? My hunch is that the illusion of an "addition" or "effect" has something to do with the fact that the consequent in the conditional, "then I will take my umbrella", refers to an event that has not yet taken place, and more specifically to a potential action with the form of an intention that has yet to be discharged.

In this case the claim that plays the role of the first premise also plays another role -- outside the argument -- as a contingency plan or conditional intention of the speaker. Or less plausibly, a role as a sort of educated guess about oneself: "Knowing me, if it's raining tomorrow, I'll take my umbrella".

Of course the argument doesn't tell us whether the premises are true in fact. Given premise 2: The fact of your subsequent choice to take your umbrella would determine premise 1 as true, and the fact of your contrary subsequent choice to leave the umbrella at home would determine premise 1 as false.

Either way, it's your future action, not the argument, that "adds something" to the world in this case, something that was not "contained" in the world until you acted. The argument has even less power to determine your choice than your own prospective affirmation of the plan featured in premise 1. To the contrary, in this case it's your choice to take the umbrella, if it's raining, that determines the truth of the conclusion and the soundness of the argument.

Perhaps "temporal logics" are designed to put a formal stamp on such considerations. Temporal logic aside, I recall that some philosophers have spoken as if the truth-values of statements referring to future states of affairs are always already determined, as if the world were one Great Fact for all time.


Consider this variation:

If it's raining tomorrow, I'll take my umbrella
It's raining tomorrow
Therefore I'll take my umbrella

Now both the second premise and the conclusion "add something" to, or rather skirt ahead of, our present view of the facts. This isn't due to the general form of the inference (modus ponens, I'm told), but rather due to the relative temporal positions of the relevant facts and the present recitation of the argument.

From an epistemic point of view, this is just a temporal variation on a more general theme. The following argument contains a premise that purports to "add" to my knowledge of the facts, since I don't actually know whether it's raining in Shanghai:

If it's raining in Shanghai, I'll wear red
It's raining in Shanghai
Therefore I'll wear red

But since I don't know whether it's raining in Shanghai, I don't know whether that premise is true.

How's that for a biconditional?

Once intelligence reaches the point of being able to grasp them, then it passes a threshold, namely, that of rationality, which makes modes of being and understanding available to it, which are not available to its forbears. — Wayfarer

I’m still uneasy in my grasp of your use of the terms “intelligence”, “being”, “mode of being”, and “understanding”, among others. It seems clear we have a way to go just to line up our terms; and likely that once we’ve made more progress in that effort of understanding each other’s speech, we’ll continue to agree that we have different stories to tell.

I’ll agree there are various degrees of complexity and adaptability of “intelligence” and “rationality” in animals; and a particular “form” of mind is among the biological “traits” inherited by offspring.

I suppose there’s a “threshold” beyond which sensory receptivity to light counts as “sight”; perhaps another beyond which purposive sensorimotor organization becomes “sentience”; another beyond which animal communication becomes “language”; and so on. Now that you mention it, it seems I’m less sure about where to locate the “threshold of rationality”: For I might expect that the “rationality” of the sentient animal has its origins in a prior “rationality” of the nonsentient organism, consisting in the alignment of biological structure and function with features of the environment regularly correlated with biological purposes. That’s not to say that the two sorts of “rationality” are exactly the same in every respect, only that there’s enough in common to warrant the usage.

So in that sense, those elements of rational thought are not something that can be explained, even though they can be used to explain many other things. — Wayfarer

I believe I’ve made it clear enough, how I’m not sure I follow your reasoning in this regard.

Now it sounds as if perhaps you’re saying: The “elements of reason” have not evolved; and the capacity to reason is not the same thing as the elements of reason; and once organisms have evolved to be intelligent enough to grasp the elements of reason, and thus count as “rational”, those organisms have a capacity that was not available to their predecessors; and therefore the elements of reason cannot be explained….

Strikes me as the very picture of a non sequitur, so I suppose you mean something else.

In any case, I reject the claim that “the elements of reason do not emerge in nature”, along lines I’ve sketched above.

(That, by the way, is why I believe that 'science doesn't explain science', i.e., science doesn't really account for the nature of number or natural law, but it can use its ability to discern these things to explain all manner of other things. — Wayfarer

I agree that “science doesn’t explain science”. Philosophy accounts for the empirical sciences, which remain mere branches of philosophical activity despite general confusion on this point in our time. Only philosophy integrates the various empirical sciences, and the other arts, into a whole discourse that informs as it’s informed by the whole life of individuals and communities.

There’s a difference between science and scientism, and a corresponding difference between being antiscience and being antiscientistic.

Wittgenstein touches on this when he says 'the whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are explanations of natural phenomena.' TLP 6.371) — Wayfarer

What does Wittgenstein mean in the Tractatus by “the whole modern conception of the world”?

I agree that “laws of nature” are not explanations. I might call them generalized observations or generalized descriptions. We develop these general rules by observing many particular cases, and abstracting some trend or feature they appear to have in common. Such a “law” is a rigorous generalization of a set of rigorous observations that’s useful in constructing or explaining particular cases, and that’s open to correction in light of subsequent observations or superior generalizations.

We use these general rules to explain particular events, for instance in the manner of a forensic scientist, or in answering a question like “Why is it raining?” The same rules play a role in providing more general accounts, for instance in answering more general questions like “Why does it rain?” or “How does rain happen?”

The aptness of the accounts expressed according to the general rules tends to increase along with the range of observations informing the rule, and with the rigor and exactness of observation and generalization. I’m not sure what other sort of equally useful “explanation” of phenomena might be available to us, though it’s clear we’re free to posit any imaginary story we please alongside or in place of such empirically grounded explanations.

I think dogs, elephants, birds, primates, cetaceans, are certainly sentient beings, but that all of what you're describing can be understood in terms of learned behaviour, response to stimulus, memory, and so on. — Wayfarer

I emphasize this question: Does the dog have a rational expectation?

Actually animals are capable of a great many things science doesn't understand at all, like fish and birds that travel around the world to return to their place of birth. They're sentient beings, so we have that it common with them. But those attributes don't qualify as abstract rationality. — Wayfarer

I’m not sure I follow your claim about sentience and traveling fish. But I’m pleased to note we’re agreed that human beings are not the only sentient animals on Earth. I’m also content to say that each sentient animal “has a mind”; do our usages accord in this further respect? Or do you say there’s an important difference between “being sentient” and “having a mind”?

I thought we were speaking about rationality in general. Do you mean to suggest you’ve only been speaking about one sort of rationality this whole time, namely, “abstract rationality”?

What sort of rationality is abstract rationality, in your language? Is it this sort of rationality you say belongs to human beings alone among the animals? Do you also say there are other sorts of rationality enjoyed by both human and nonhuman animals? Perhaps you also recognize a thing called “concrete rationality”? How do you suppose the species, abstract rationality, is related to its genus? And which sort of rationality -- rationality in general, or abstract rationality, or concrete rationality, or some yet unmentioned variety -- is the rationality that “does not evolve”, that “cannot be explained”, and that dwells perhaps eternal among platonic shadows as a “source”?

This divergence, then, is one manifestation of the 'culture war' between scientific naturalism and it's opponents. I'm not going to apologise for the conflict this often causes, but I will acknowledge it. — Wayfarer

I'd be the last to want an apology for a divergence in views. What would be the point of philosophical discourse if we all agreed with each other at every turn?

I'm not sure we understand the "opponents" in the culture war the same way -- but then, defining the culture war is part of the culture war. I hope we're not at war here, but only engaged in sincere philosophical conversation in a spirit of goodwill, aiming together at truth. Plenty of room to diverge without going to war. With respect to that ongoing conflict, however, I’ll declare I’m on the side of the pacifists, and the people, and humanity, and the truth, and plain speaking.

In any case, one reason that we can't explain reason is because of the recursive nature of such an undertaking. To explain anything, we must employ reason, but if reason is what we're trying to explain, then such attempts must invariably be circular. You can't 'put reason aside', and then analyse it from some point outside of it; every attempt to analyse it, must call on the very thing it wishes to analyse *. — Wayfarer

Here exactly is the sort of divergence I had in mind! You’ve jogged my memory: “recursion” is the word you tend to use in this connection, where I expect “reflexivity”.

...as if "recursion" were impossible. Here I am, a part of the world, and a part of the world wants to understand another part of the world. Is this a paradox for you? Can a stream splash itself? Do I use reason to add and subtract; and can I use reason to "explain" my addition and subtraction? Perhaps not without increasing the risk of error, if I try to explain it while I perform the calculation; but easily enough before or after.

We've gone round this sort of circle perhaps a dozen times or more. We can consider ten thousand more cases, it will remain a fallacy from my point of view. Or perhaps you can explain your thinking in the general pattern? Thus far I see no logic in it, only misleading poetry.

If you want to assume that "reason" is the name of a ghost in an eternal platonic world, then I agree, we can't explain it or any of its neighbors. But I'd require quite an account in support of that assumption.

The basic operations of reason - if/then, greater than, same as, etc - are in my view 'metaphysically primitive', i.e. they can't be explained or reduced to anything more simple. They are intrinsic to reason and therefore to science (a point that is broadly Kantian — Wayfarer

What is "metaphysically primitive" supposed to mean?

I call this rather primitive: the capacities to differentiate individual things, to recognize one thing as the same thing on different occasions, to recognize different things as of the same kind, and to act accordingly; and the principles (the logical, conceptual, or organizational relations) these capacities seem to exemplify and require, including principles of similarity and difference, whole and part, genus and species. These principles and capacities seem close to the root of minds like ours and conceptual capacities like ours. And it seems that once experience is organized in keeping with these basic principles and capacities, it’s organized in accordance with, at least, i) basic principles we associate with inferential logic (conjunction, disjunction, quantification, negation, implication) and ii) basic quantitative principles (more and less, many and few, again and another, amounts of the same), and perhaps already -- granting ordinary assumptions about animal life -- basic principles we associate with iii) causal and iv) modal relations.

Accordingly, by my way of reckoning, some of the terms you’ve singled out seem less primitive than others; and all of these principles can be accounted for as emerging along with the relevant conceptual capacities in living sentient beings, in organisms whose sensorimotor capacities are organized according to biological purposes in a more or less regular environment.

I think there are evolutionary accounts of how h. sapiens developed the capacity to reason - but notice the expression 'capacity to reason'. I think the furniture of reason, these primitive terms without which reasoning is not possible, are not themselves something that evolves - what evolves is the capacity to grasp them. — Wayfarer

Let’s emphasize that here we seem agreed: “the capacity to grasp them” evolves. Do we also agree that here “evolves” may be said to mean in the first place, emerges in nature, in the course of natural history, in the course of a biological lineage; and in the second place, emerges anew as each individual organism in the relevant line comes into its own?

Of course a capacity to reason is not the same thing as reason in general, just as a capacity to speak is not the same as language in general, and a capacity to walk is not the same as walking in general. But that fine distinction gives us no clue as to what sort of thing the more general term might be. What is the “furniture” of language or of walking? Where does it come from, and where shall we find it?

Many of us have eyes affording a capacity of sight. All things we call eyes in the relevant sense, have at bottom “the same furniture”, despite variations from one beast to the next. I say we have an empirical concept of “eye” and of “sight”, informed by our experience of eyes and sight. I’m not sure what it’s supposed to mean, what it may add or subtract from that general concept of ours, to say there’s an eternal form of “eye” and an eternal form of “sight”. To me these sound like mere abstractions, intellectual traces of our empirical concepts in the jelly of imaginary possibility. The Platonist, like the Pythagorean in awe of his own power of abstraction, reifies those traces to create a mythical world he calls divine, eternal, and most real, populated by the shadows cast by ideas.

Even granting that the investigation of that shadow world is a meaningful enterprise -- I don’t see how one might warrant the conclusion that the abstract shadow of our empirical concept of “eye” or “walking” or “rationality” or “mind” is somehow the source of the corresponding empirical concept, or the source of the corresponding things in the world that have given rise to those empirical concepts, or the source of the corresponding natural-historical processes that, we say, have given rise to those things in the world, eyes, and walks, and rational animals.

As if some such abstraction were the real ground of every corresponding real instance -- or rather, as if the coming-to-be of every real instance were somehow caused or produced or determined by an infinite host of applicable abstract concepts.

On the other hand: The story we tell from our present point of view in history, in keeping with the custom of methodological naturalism and resisting all temptation to metaphysical abuse of the rational imagination, has no trouble accounting in broad strokes for what appears to be a most general trend in rationality. For it seems the most generic features of rationality -- the features each of us has gestured at in his own way -- are most generic because they tend to emerge when perceiving agents with biological purposes emerge in the world. If the world were radically different, or if we were not perceiving agents, or if we had no biological purposes -- I suppose no such rationality would emerge. But since the world is what it is, it gives rise to biological organisms in some places; and since biological organisms are what they are, life gives rise to sentient animals in some places; and since sentient animals are what they are, their perception-and-action tends to be organized in keeping with the most generic features of rationality. And these are the features that seem to follow from the fact of perceptual identification and differentiation in sentient animal agents with biological purposes.

I suppose that account is an example of what Plato, according to some translators, calls a “likely story” or a “just-so story” in the Timaios.

The robot butler 'knows' how to do a lot of things, but it can't improvise, or adapt, or do anything outside being a robot butler. — Wayfarer

This isn't so in the imaginary case of philosophical zombies, and I see no reason to expect that "improvising", or playing various roles, or developing novel roles, is out of the question for AI in real life. Aren't there already AI music programs that "improvise" music to some extent? Any reason to expect a hard limit in progress along these lines?

On the other hand: Can a human being “do anything outside” being a human being? It seems every creature is limited in its own way.

I agree it's meaningful to talk of such things, but I think the problem with simulated and artificial intelligence is that it conflates intelligence and computation - it says basically that intelligence is a variety of computation — Wayfarer

How do you distinguish such terms from each other: rationality, intelligence, knowledge, sentience, mind? Are they all the same thing to you? Does each one of them imply all the others in your language?

I'm content to say an artificial heart is one sort of heart, an artificial intelligence is one sort of intelligence, an artificial knower is one sort of knower. Are we disagreeing about the facts, or are we disagreeing about the reasonableness of expectations about pending facts, or are we disagreeing merely about the appropriate use of words to describe facts and expectations about which we are more or less in agreement?

There's a difference between saying "intelligence is a variety of computation" and saying "some varieties of computation are varieties of intelligence". The fact that some speakers wrongly conflate intelligence and computation does not entail there is no meaningful correlation between the two terms: just as the possibility of wrongly conflating hearts and artificial hearts does not entail there is no meaningful correlation between the two terms.

To say an artificial man is one sort of man, is not to say the two sorts of man have everything in common. There’s no need to speak this way, and there’s no need not to. It’s merely a matter of how one draws up his terms. What’s asserted and denied in each case depends in part on the bias in the definition. Agreement and disagreement follow from that -- too soon, if we rush to agree or disagree without first understanding an interlocutor’s usages.

which is why the AI advocates truly believe that there is no ontological distinction between the two; that rational thought, and the operations of computer systems, are essentially the same. — Wayfarer

What is “ontological distinction” supposed to mean here? Is there an “ontological distinction” between my left hand and my right hand? Arguably they are two different “entities”. I say that there’s no single “privileged ontology”, that an ontology is just a way of organizing the world into things we agree to call “entities” and “existents” for the sake of conversation or for some special purpose. A valid ontology is not a solution of all the world’s mysteries, it’s just a useful way of speaking.

Anything that exists is "the same" as anything else that exists in some respect or other. I'm inclined to agree that many speakers have an exaggerated sense of the similarity of minds and information processors. In my view, one of the most important differences is the difference in sentience; the zombie discourses bring this out in their own way.

After all it's the absence of sentience, of subjectivity, of a subject, of experience -- that makes the artificial knowing of the syntax engine a mere simulation of knowing, instead of an artificially produced variety of the genuine article. If not for this crucial difference, I might be inclined to call such artificial knowing a sort of genuine knowing. On what grounds, in that case, would I reasonably withhold the label?

They're instruments of human intelligence; but I think the idea that they are actually beings themselves remains in the domain of science fiction. — Wayfarer

I'm not sure what you mean by "beings" here; is this Heideggerian usage? I’m content to say that anything said to “exist” -- oceans, clouds, raindrops, water molecules -- is rightly called an existent, an entity, a “being”, an object, a thing of one sort or another.

So far as I'm concerned the syntax engines are not sentient beings. Or rather: It seems to me an empirical question, whether genuine sentience can be produced by mere AI design, and I see no reason to expect that it can be. A doubt along the lines marked out by Searle in his Chinese Room.

The divergence is because I want to resist what I see as the reductionism that is inherent in a lot of modern philosophising; and I know this rubs a lot of people up the wrong way. My approach is generally platonistic, which tends to be top-down; the Platonic conception of mind is that mind is prior to and the source of the phenomenal domain, whereas naturalism presumes that mind is an evolved consequence of a natural process. — Wayfarer

I'm not sure this explains the "divergence" I had in mind. I mean we diverge with respect to certain maxims you characteristically assert, as when you say things like "reason is always the source of explanation, not the object of it", as if being "the source" rules out being "the object", as if human powers cannot be aimed at themselves, as if there's no such thing as reflexivity, or as if all reflexivity involves unfathomable and incomprehensible paradox. We've cycled through variations on this theme before.

I'm not sure how your platonism is at issue in that divergence. In any case, I like to resist reductionism too, and I might call your platonism a sort of reductionism -- reducing phenomena in a direction opposed to that favored by the materialist.

I guess most materialists nowadays would claim that what we call mind emerges in nature. I'm inclined to agree with that particular claim. But I call myself a skeptical naturalist, and I aim to be about as skeptical about materialist metaphysics as I am about idealist metaphysics. Your platonism sounds a lot like idealism so far, heralding "mind the source", and perhaps "reducing" all things to mind. But I'm not yet clear on your meaning:

If "mind is prior to and the source of the phenomenal domain", in what sense is “mind the source”? How are "mind" and "the phenomenal domain" related to the whole of existence? Does anything exist, according to you, besides minds and the phenomenal domain? Is there only one mind or many; only one phenomenal domain or many? What is contained in the "phenomenal domain" to which mind is prior and of which mind is the source?

What is the basis -- the rational basis, not the pedigree in the literature -- for these views of yours on mind and the phenomenal domain? How do we know, why should we suppose, that "mind is the source"? I say we have good reason to suppose that minds are sources of experience, and hence of phenomena -- no appearances without mind, without sentience -- but I have a hunch you mean something grander: not merely that minds are logically prior to appearances, and that each mind is a "source" of appearances, but also that mind and its "phenomenal domain" exist somehow independently of a physical world, or that mind is logically and chronologically prior to matter, or some such story.

As a skeptical naturalist, I don't count myself a materialist or an idealist, and I do my best to steer clear of metaphysics, which seems to me an exercise in arbitrary fantasy. I call my skeptical naturalism a sort of phenomenology. I characterize empirical science as an extension of ordinary empirical knowledge, and think of empirical knowledge as rooted in phenomenological foundations, in the perspectives of rational sentient agents.

I suppose most materialists nowadays, apart from their metaphysical diversions, tend to reflect on the world as it appears to us in keeping with principles of methodological naturalism. And I suppose this is why my views may seem to resemble the views of a materialist in certain respects, from the point of view of an idealist who posits another sort of world beyond the reach of Ockham's razor. For a knack with that blade, and the custom of methodological naturalism, seem about the same to me as a habit of respect for the balance of appearances. A habit exemplified in times past by Sextus, Gassendi, and the full-grown Hume.

You've really analyzed the hell out of this paper. Nice work, man! Like Calisbury, I'm short on time otherwise I'd participate a little more. — Aaron R

Thanks. I'm afraid it's a clumsy, discursive way of working through a text. But it's my favorite way of traversing the hermeneutic circle.

I won't be able to maintain this work rate for long. Hopefully each of us pushes the thing along when he has some time for it.

The essay isn't going anywhere!

(Perhaps too, the sense of 'content' in 'propositional content' is analogous? We might say that a proposition expresses some propositional content (we can understand why one wouldn't want to reduce the propositional content of some proposition to that particular proposition, or a relation whereby a proposition expresses some propositional content) — csalisbury

The analogy is appealing.

We say various subjects on various occasions undergo various “propositional attitudes” with respect to the same “propositional content.” On each such occasion there’s a relation of the content and the attitude; in at least some cases the attitude is or involves an “act” like doubting, affirming, hoping, and so on. Do we also say that the propositional content is supposed, or by many supposed, to have the form of a fact?

Likewise, we might expect that various subjects on various occasions undergo various “intuitions” (acts of awareness with “sensible character”) with respect to the same “sense content”. On each such occasion there’s a relation of the content and an act like sensing or imagining. Does the sense-datum theorist say (or does Sellars’ argument drive the sense-datum theorist to say) that the sense content has the form of a fact?

How are sense contents related to propositional contents? If a sense content occurs in “an act of intuition with sensible character”, can it also occur as a propositional content in a thought without (the relevant sort of) “sensible character” -- i.e., when if ever is the propositional content in such a thought also a sense content? On the other hand, is a sense content always a propositional content -- all sense contents are propositional contents, but not all propositional contents are sense contents?

Are Sellars and the sense-data theorists at all concerned with what I’ve called “sensible character” here, what I might call qualia or phenomenal characteristics paradigmatically associated with perceptual experience? I’ve got the idea that those influenced by Sellars tend to differ along these lines. McDowell seems more interested in phenomenology, while Brandom and Rorty seem, like Davidson, wary of subjectivity.

This analysis leads me to think that the importance of the distinction is that sense contents are something like qualities, something universal, while sense data are something fundamentally immediate — csalisbury

You're way ahead of me in the reading but I'll try a tentative reply.

So far as I can see, a sense-datum just is (for the sense-data theorist) a sense content in an appropriate relation to an act of sensing. Though this is an awkward way of speaking if one denies that sense content can exist without being sensed.

Oddly enough, it seems the "immediacy" of sense-data has something to do with their place in a relation. To be a sense-datum is to be a sense content given in an act of sensing.

If a sense content can exist without being sensed, is there some other way for it to be the object of an "act of awareness"? For instance, can sense contents be imagined, remembered, or thought when they are not sensed? I don't know whether sense-data theorists speak this way. Does this show the lines of the controversy Sellars mentions?

Perhaps one way to avoid speaking that way would be to say: Any act of awareness that has a sense content as an object is or involves an act of "sensing", including the acts we call imagining, remembering, and thinking sense contents.

Do any sense-data theorists want to say: If noninferential knowledge is given in an act of awareness, then that act is an act of "sensing"? Suppose the same sense content can figure both in an ordinary act of sensory perception, and in a "vivid and forceful" imagining that closely resembles perception, like a dream or hallucination. Arguably, in being aware of the imagining, I acquire noninferential knowledge about a matter of fact, that a particular imaginer is imagining a particular sense content. Analogously, in being aware of the ordinary perceiving, I acquire noninferential knowledge about a matter of fact, that a particular perceiver is perceiving a particular sense content. The analogy only goes so far; but that doesn't make it unreasonable to call the acquisition of noninferential knowledge in each case a sort of "sensing".


I hope that's not too far afield. In any case, talk of "immediacy" and "givenness" of sense-data seems closely connected to the idea of noninferential knowledge acquisition, noninferential knowledge of "facts." If sense contents are said to exist without "being sensed", we’ll need to hear more about how else they can "exist", whether they're involved in other acts of awareness that are not called "sensing", and whether they can exist without any involvement in an act of awareness. That should help us figure out whether they differ from sense-data with respect to "immediacy" and "givenness".

(keeping in mind the Hegelian point that to deal with 'qualities' is already to deal with universals and mediation.) — csalisbury

Can you develop the Hegelian point?

I'm never sure what's meant by "qualities" and "universals." I recall Kant speaks of "sensible qualities" -- is that the right ballpark?

I can think of two sorts of "mediation" to watch out for: mediation by inference and mediation by concepts. I expect the given to play the role of foil in this narrative, while Sellars develops an argument supporting a view in which nothing is given in noninferential knowledge acquisition without some contribution from concepts -- or however he puts his version of the Hegelian theme developed in our time by Sellarsians like Brandom and McDowell.

Glad to have you on board. I envisioned this thread as a kind of free-form reading group, but unfortunately I've since become too busy to participate regularly. As it stands, I suppose this thread could either become simply a 'place' to discuss Sellars' essay, or, if someone else wants to take the reins, could still remain a week-by-week, section-by-section discussion. — csalisbury

Glad to have stumbled in. I've been meaning to work through this text for years, and the group's given me a nudge. I'll chime in when I can. Time's short and you see how slowly I trudge through it.

I, too, am a little confused by Sellars' distinction between sense content and sense data - or at least confused by the importance of making such a distinction. The possibility that he draws this distinction simply to remain neutral within a larger controversy makes sense, tho, if that is the case, I wish I understood that controversy and what was at stake (or believed to be at stake) in it. — csalisbury

Sellars mentions the controversy in (I.2) during his search for "another locution" by which to refer to sense-data. He rejects the term "sensible" for the role, as having "the disadvantage that it implies that sensed items could exist without being sensed", adding that this is "a matter of controversy among sense-datum theorists". So Sellars settles on the term "sense content" as a neutral choice.

It's a strange passage. He seems to want a term that

i) refers "to an item which is sensed in a way which does not entail that it is sensed"; and

ii) does not imply "that sensed items could exist without being sensed" (for this is a matter of controversy)

At this point I don't see what motive Sellars has for criterion (i). Perhaps in his circles, it's a commonplace that one needs something more than a relational predicate to refer to an item in good faith?

Being a sense datum, or sensum, is a relational property of the item that is sensed. To refer to an item which is sensed in a way which does not entail that it is sensed, it is necessary to use some other locution. Sensibile has the disadvantage that it implies that sensed items could exist without being sensed, and this is a matter of controversy among sense-datum theorists. Sense content is, perhaps, as neutral a term as any. — Sellars

I can only guess, and hope the motive's cleared up in the course of the reading.

On the other hand, in light of a controversy about whether sensed items can exist without being sensed, it may be that Sellars is aiming at neutrality, preparing his terms so as to be able to range the discussion over both sides of this particular dispute. Or perhaps he's biased in favor of the claim that sensed items can exist without being sensed.

What's at stake in the controversy, for the sense-data theorist? I suppose it depends in part on what sort of things sense-data and sense contents turn out to be. Another point that's quite unclear.

Sure, we can reason about reason, " turn it back to face itself"; which presumably a dog or chimp cannot. — John

I see by virtue of the light that strikes my eye. So does the dog.

I have a capacity to take that light as an object in its own right, to investigate it, to devote my life to the study of light, if I so choose. My powers outstrip the dog's in this respect, even with respect to the light and sight we have in common, or with respect to any object we encounter in the world.

We can investigate and hypothesize about histories of reason, in animal and human lineages, just as we can with histories of digestion, if that is what we find thrilling. — John

If we find it thrilling, or for any other reason.

Let's note in passing that hypothesis is only one factor of investigation; and that without some corresponding investigation, hypothesis is just a sort of talk.

But we have no clue as to its origin and its mysterious ability to make the world intelligible, just as we have no way of rationally working out what the absolute origin of the world, or its capacity to be made intelligible by reason, is. — John

You say "no clue?"

What is the origin of the power of sight or hearing, the power of motility or digestion, the power of speech or rationality? Any of us can pluck the eyes from his own head, if he has no clue what "origin" the power of sight has in him. And where did these eyes come from? With the rest of this body, traced back to an act of conception, say the old-fashioned kind. And where did those parents come from...

We've got plenty of clues about the empirical origins of animals and animal powers. Do you have some special reason to imagine that rationality, alone among those powers, flies down from the heavens full-grown to dwell in hearts and minds?

What special mystery do you find in the way that rationality "makes the world intelligible"? One might face the whole of existence with a sense of awe; and any piece of it with the same awe. I see no more mystery in the fact of rationality than in the fact of sentience, or in the fact of life, or in the fact of existence. And look, here we are. That mystery is no obstacle to understanding.

This is where reason ends and faith based on intuition begins. — John

What do you mean by "intuition"? I'm not accustomed to treating "reason" and "intuition" as if they were mutually exclusive. Nor "faith" and "reason", for that matter.

I do acknowledge a thing we might call faith without reason. For instance, "we have no reason" to believe any of the infinite horde of imaginary possibilities the mind can add to the balance of appearances. I'm not sure anyone actually has that sort of faith; for in the end, it seems there's something like a feeling that drives one to favor some such fancies and to reject the others, instead of maintaining tranquil repose in the balance of appearances; and for the one thus driven, the feeling may be said to count as reason for his faith. Once the faith gets going, it becomes a habit in its own right.

I'm not sure what any of this has to do with our conversation about rationality, sentience, animal life, and philosophical zombies. Of course we can have faith in anything we imagine, based on nothing but whim or feeling, if we've run out of other reasons for faith. Another option is to suspend judgment in such cases.

Shall we suspend judgment here, or begin trading fancies?

Of course no one is constrained to step beyond merely empirical inquiries if the latter are found to be satisfactory. That's certainly a matter for the individual, and individual taste. — John

No one is constrained to heap imaginary possibilities upon the balance of appearances, and thus distort his own sense of natural fact.

The formation of taste is a mystery.

Perhaps this is what Sellars means by relational property? — jkop

See, e.g., SEP on "Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Properties"

Whenever I hear philosophers go on for long about properties, I get a little dizzy and recall Duns Scotus.

Better to let the world teach us how to speak, than to pretend we understand heaven and earth by practicing grammar.

3. Now if we bear in mind that the point of the epistemological category of the given is, presumably, to explicate the idea that empirical knowledge rests on a 'foundation' of non-inferential knowledge of matter of fact, we may well experience a feeling of surprise on noting that according to sense-datum theorists, it is particulars that are sensed. — Sellars

Need Sellars presume that the category's purpose is to explicate the idea of such an epistemological "foundation"? Perhaps it is presumptuous: The ordinary, unobjectionable sense of "givenness" is arguably prior to the Gothic quest for that foundation. It may be only in tying ordinary intuitions about "what is immediately given" to anxious thoughts about foundation, that the epistemologist constructs the "epistemological category of the given".

What's put in this category: matters of fact grasped without inference, paradigmatically on the basis of "being sensed".

Why does the presumption, or the point presumed, occasion surprise that, for the sense-datum theorist, "it is particulars that are sensed"? Is there some further prejudice by which "objects of knowledge" are characterized as general rules, as opposed to particulars? Does the arguably generic character of our grasp on sensed particulars militate against the claim that it's in fact particulars we thus grasp? Who claims it is not particulars that we sense?

For what is known even in non-inferential knowledge, is facts rather than particulars, items of the form something's being thus-and-so or something's standing in a certain relation to something else. — Sellars

What sort of wedge is this? If a fact involving particulars is counted as known: when, and in what sense, and on what grounds are the corresponding particulars counted as not known? Perhaps this very point is at issue in the controversy over whether "the fact that x is sensed" is analyzable?

Or is the point that, if sensing is merely the sensing of particulars, then it's insufficient for knowledge, for it's facts that are known, and particulars are not in themselves sufficient to constitute facts. This seems reasonable. Though it would be a strange sort of "sensing" by which particulars were grasped -- or indeed not grasped, but "barely sensed" -- bereft of all facticity. Even the fact of being sensed, or being sensed by S, or being sensed at time t, or being visually sensed -- surely some whiff of fact would accompany any such "bare sensing" of particulars?

Does anyone raise the objection, that we may call each fact a particular; and then say, the particulars that are sensed are facts involving non-fact particulars?


A fine bit of shop-talk, "it's facts rather than particulars, that are known". When did this way of construing situations analyzable in terms of "facts" and "particulars" turn up in the tradition? Does Sellars really stand by the slogan, as he seems to here?

I presume the sense-datum theorist, at least, will not object to it.

It would seem, then, that the sensing of sense contents cannot constitute knowledge, inferential or non-inferential; and if so, we may well ask, what light does the concept of a sense datum throw on the 'foundations of empirical knowledge?' — Sellars

If the "sensing" of sense-datum theory is mere sensing of particulars, it is insufficient to constitute knowledge. But "sensing" in this theory is associated with the role of providing what's "given", and the purpose of the category of givenness is to provide a foundation for empirical knowledge in noninferentially grasped matters of fact. The theorist must show how his "sensing" can yield knowledge of facts.

The sense-datum theorist, it would seem, must choose between saying:

a. It is particulars which are sensed. Sensing is not knowing. The existence of sense data does not logically imply the existence of knowledge.

or

b. Sensing is a form of knowing. It is facts rather than particulars which are sensed. — Sellars

I'll reiterate my reservations about (conscious, phenomenologically available) "sensing" of particulars without any whiff of fact. It seems a legacy of strange shop-talk that one should feel compelled to make (or feel justified in proposing) this hard choice, either facts or particulars, as if we don't get them both together in perception.

On alternative (a) the fact that a sense content was sensed would be a non-epistemic fact about the sense content. — Sellars

Alternative (a): It is particulars which are sensed. Sensing is not knowing.

The fact that a sense content is sensed -- and perhaps (analytically) related facts pertaining to the architecture of the fact of sensing, that it was sensed by S at t, and so on -- would be nonepistemic facts about the sense content. I suppose they'd be epistemic facts about the sensing-act? But nonepsitemic about the sense content. Of course the fact of sensing gives the sense content as related to the act of sensing, but facts involving relational properties of this sort are "nonepistemic facts about the sense content".

Given as, taken as. It seems we must take things as they're given, however else we may take them.

What is "nonepistemic fact" supposed to mean? Does it mean: to grasp facts nonepistemic about a sense content is not to have knowledge about the sense content -- but only knowledge about a fact of sensing, in which a sense content figures as sort of placeholder, an empty term, until further notice? Do we, in effect, grasp a sense-datum as such, without reaching here the corresponding sense content?

Or do we have perhaps beliefs, but no knowledge, about the sense content, given the existence of sense data?

Yet it would be hasty to conclude that this alternative precludes any logical connection between the sensing of sense contents and the possession of non-inferential knowledge. For even if the sensing of sense contents did not logically imply the existence of non-inferential knowledge, the converse might well be true. Thus, the non-inferential knowledge of particular matter of fact might logically imply the existence of sense data (for example, seeing that a certain physical object is red might logically imply sensing a red sense content) even though the sensing of a red sense content were not itself a cognitive fact and did not imply the possession of non-inferential knowledge. — Sellars

Even if "the existence of sense data does not logically imply the existence of knowledge", there may be another logical connection between them. The denial of that particular implication doesn't rule out the alternative that the existence of sense data is necessary but insufficient for the existence of (at least some sorts of) noninferential knowledge -- another way of putting the "converse" case.

"not itself a cognitive fact": is "cognitive fact" here synonymous with "epistemic fact", or does it have, in addition, some phenomenological implication or connotation? Is the thought perhaps that the fact of sensing is not (ever) directly available to consciousness, to the thinker, to the knower.... That the fact of sensing, its act and its sense-datum, are theoretical constructs, perhaps in principle verifiable by empirical research, but not ordinarily available from the first-person perspective?

What sort of constructs? Theoretical conditions of noninferential knowledge acquisition.

On the second alternative, (b), the sensing of sense contents would logically imply the existence of non-inferential knowledge for the simple reason that it would be this knowledge. But, once again, it would be facts rather than particulars which are sensed. — Sellars

Alternative (b): Sensing is a form of knowing. It is facts rather than particulars which are sensed.

On this alternative, the fact of sensing is sufficient for the existence of noninferential knowledge. Presumably this is knowledge of the sense content. The fact that is sensed is a fact "epistemic" about the sense content. The fact that is sensed is a cognitive fact.

Boiled down my notes on sections 1-2.

1. Two tasks in the essay

• attack sense-datum theories as a special case
• criticize the whole framework of givenness

2. Framework of givenness (framework of immediacy)

• “a way of construing” situations analyzable in terms of characteristic bits of shop-talk, with characteristic theoretical commitments, common to most “major philosophical systems”
• some of the terms: given, (sense-)data, observation
• some things that have been said to be given: sense contents, material objects, universals, propositions, real (aka synthetic necessary?) connections, first principles
• “characteristic features of the given”: tbd
• inference vs. "givenness"
  
  • e.g., inferring vs. seeing that something is the case
  • inferential vs. noninferential knowledge acquisition
  • analysis of observational judgments

3. Sense-datum theories (SDTs)

• act-object model
  
  • an act of awareness called “sensing”
  • an object sensed (e.g., a “color patch”)
• the fact that x is sensed, however complex or simple that fact may be, has a form by virtue of which for x to be sensed is for x to be the object of an act.
• “relational properties” of sensing-acts and objects-sensed
• sense-datum distinguished from sense-content
  
  • being a sense-datum is a relational property
  • sense-content is “another locution” to refer to the same item as logically distinct from any sensing-relation or sensing-act
  • two-place predicate-relation vs. one-place predicate?
  • introduced for the sake of neutrality with respect to controversy #3; any other motives?
  • no analogous distinction yet considered for the sense-act. (Does Sellars, or SDT, tend to conflate (or identify) the sensing-act with the sensing-relation?)
• SDT controversies
  
  • Controversy #1: are sensing-acts “phenomenologically simple” or “further analyzable”?
  • Controversy #2: If sensing is analyzable, can it be an act?
    
    • “deep roots for the doubt that sensing (if there is such a thing) is an act”, roots traced to one of two lines of thought tangled together in classical SDT
  • Controversy #3: Can sensed items exist without being sensed?
  • Controversy #4: are varieties of sensing distinguished by sort of object-sensed, or in terms of “full-blooded species” of sensing-act or sensing-relation?
    
    • no mention of “both” as an option?
    • Is this a controversy within SDT, or is it a bit of analysis from Sellars?
  
  4. Look for
  
  • an ambiguity in sense-datum theories: What’s the ambiguity?
  • inferring, seeing, “sensing”: How will the distinction be drawn?
  • play between professional epistemological shop-talk and the common ground of ordinary language and experience
  • hints about motives for sensum/sense-content distinction
  • the third term: Where is the subject of the sensing-act in this story?
  • further definition of SDT
  • further definition of the framework of givenness, its “characteristic features” and theoretical commitments
  
  5. References or allusions to trace through the literature
  
  • Kant and Hegel
  • “dogmatic rationalism” and “skeptical empiricism” (major philosophical systems)
  • What philosophers have attacked the philosophical idea of givenness or immediacy?
  • What defenders have claimed that critics of givenness “fly in the face of reason”, perhaps charging they imply there’s no difference between inferring and seeing (sensing, perceiving)?
  • Who has called each “given”: sense contents, material objects, universals, propositions, real connections, first principles, givenness itself
  • first attackers of “intuited first principles”?
  • first attackers of “synthetic necessary connections”? (Hume)
  • contemporaries who claim to attack “the whole idea of givenness”, but who “are really only attacking sense data”
  • “classical exponents” pro and contra “phenomenologically simple”, “not further analyzable” (controversy 1)
  • pro and contra: if sensing is analyzable, it cannot be an act (controversy 2)
  • deeper roots for the doubt that sensing is an act
  • pro and contra: items sensed can exist independently of being sensed (controversy 3)
  • Who uses each idiom to distinguish varieties of sensing: i) visual, tactual sensing; ii) directly seeing, directly hearing.
  • Is there prior discussion of the bases for distinguishing varieties of sensing (“controversy 4”), or is this Sellars’ analysis?

How can you leave that aside? If knowledge is not genuine, then it's not knowledge. — Wayfarer

Surely we can leave it aside for just a moment, as I did, to consider a question like "could it be a convincing simulation of knowledge"?

So far as I can see, only that much is required to get these thought experiments running. I say it could be a convincing simulation; but it doesn't count as full-blooded knowledge if there's no sentience.

But I think in this context, it's 'intelligence' that has to be put in scare quotes, not 'knowledge' or 'reason'; it's not really knowledge until there's a knower involved. Otherwise it is still just binary code. — Wayfarer

I don't mind putting all three terms in scare quotes, or doing away with the quotes and adapting usage to accommodate different kinds of intelligence, knowledge, and rationality. The knowledge of honeybees, the knowledge of homo sapiens, the knowledge of syntax engines.

There would be a referent corresponding to the grammatical subject for "know"-talk in relevant cases: Does the robot butler know the way to the store? Has the robot butler learned to recognize each of the guests' voices yet? And so on. It's meaningful talk, we know how to check for the answer, and there would be good reason to extend usage this way under such circumstances.

I quite agree that Descartes was spectacularly wrong about many things, but I still think his depiction of the universal nature of reason is on the mark. I think it's a big mistake, and one made every day, to feel as though reason is 'something that can be explained'; reason is always the source of explanation, not the object of it. — Wayfarer

Reason is not a simple instrument. It can be stretched and folded, and turned to face itself. Why should we suppose that rationality cannot "explain" rationality; that language cannot be used to speak about language; that thinking cannot be about thinking; and so on? This is a familiar pattern for us; you and I tend to diverge at such points.

Everything that appears to us may be described. Everything that remains available to us may be investigated. To describe is not to describe completely and perfectly. To investigate is not to arrive at complete and perfect understanding.

Reason is not the only thing in the world of which we have a partial view.

As Thomas Nagel says, somewhere, reason often seems to be imposed on us, it is something we have to yield to, oftentimes through painful learning. — Wayfarer

Reason is imposed on us as a natural fact.

If a mind tends to recognize the same things as the same on different occasions, and to recognize different things as of a same kind, then its experience is organized in accordance with basic principles of number, arithmetic, and logic -- whether or not it can count and give proofs. To have a mind like ours, or like a dog's, is to be a sentient rational animal. Conceptual capacities and rationality emerge in the animal world together.

Whereas, I think us moderns take it for granted that reason 'has evolved' and that, therefore, we have an in-principle grasp of what it is - namely an adaption, something which helps us to survive. But that is precisely what has been criticized as the 'instrumentalisation of reason'* which is endemic in materialist accounts of the nature of the mind. — Wayfarer

A moment ago I criticized you and Descartes for treating reason like a simple instrument.

What's meant by "instrumentalization of reason"? Such a postmodern ring.

I'm not sure that a thing's "having evolved" or "not having evolved" has anything to do with how easy or hard it is for human beings to understand. A stone has not evolved, but we have ways of getting to know the stone, as it stands in the present, and with respect to potential or prospective uses to which it may be put, and even with respect to its history.

Reason has a history, in each of us, in communities and civilizations, in animal lineages. That history can be investigated, just like the history of the stone, or of mathematics, or of wheat cultivars can be investigated. To recognize the historical character of a thing is not to "instrumentalize" it. Nor is it to neglect the structure and limits of the thing as they appear to us in the present and across time.

Another effect of that, is that we think because we understand it, that it is something that can be replicated by us in other systems. Hence the debate! — Wayfarer

Of course we understand it one way or another, to some extent or other. Can we understand it well enough to simulate it?

I'm not sure how well we need to understand it in order to simulate it. What we need to understand are adequate techniques of production. Some of the most promising developments in AI involve systems that develop their own programming by a process of trial and error in coordination with feedback from human trainers.

As far as I can see h. sapiens is the only rational sentient animal. I don't think robots are rational, but are subject to reason; higher intelligences, if there are any, are superior to it. And all of that is in keeping with classical Western philosophy and metaphysics. — Wayfarer

There's plenty of bathwater in that tradition. I'm not sure being in keeping with it warrants a strong recommendation for any view. Hume's Enquiry has a short section on the reason of animals. Even Aristotle skirts around the issue.

I call dogs and chimps, for instance, rational and sentient. I'm not sure yet if we differ in our views on dogs and chimps, or merely in our use of words like "rational" and "sentient".

A dog forms rational expectations on the basis of past experience: Hearing a familiar sound that has been frequently followed by a desirable result, a dog adopts an attitude of expectation, even while the states of affairs reported by that sound remain otherwise hidden from view. The dog moves through attitudes resembling hope, wonder, doubt, and positive anticipation with respect to the prospect that sometimes, though not always, follows the sound. It seems absurd to deny the dog knows what it expects while it's expecting, knows what outcome it has in mind. The dog has learned a sequential correlation between two sorts of event, the sound and the desirable outcome; it adopts attitudes of expectation upon recognizing the first event in the sequence; it has an idea what it expects while it's expecting; the character and intensity of the attitude of expectation vary over time in proportion with historical trends in the correlation of the two events, sound and desirable outcome; the dog's behaviors are correlated with the attitudes it undergoes, and thereby with trends in the correlation of sound and outcome.

All this counts as a form of "rationality" in my language.

'The same' means 'the same type'. — Wayfarer

In this case, yes. Type-identity, not token-identity; isn't that how it's said?

Or we might say, a one-to-one correspondence of molecules and relations of molecules, "the same exact type" of molecular structure.... Or whatever idiom the make-believe mad scientists use to cook up doppelgangers nowadays.

Not at all. Notice the last passage: — Wayfarer

Thus one would discover that they [machines, p-zombies] did not act on the basis of knowledge, but merely as a result of the disposition of their organs. For whereas reason is a universal instrument that can be used in all kinds of situations, these organs need a specific disposition for every particular action. — Descartes

Even here. Leave aside for a moment the question of whether it counts as genuine (as opposed to simulated) "knowledge" and "reason" -- I suppose that's still at issue between Searle and the eliminitave materialists and the other players in this market segment. The question is whether the thing could resemble us enough to deceive us into mistaking it for one of us over indefinitely long periods of interaction. Not, would it be genuine knowledge and genuine reason, but merely, could it be a convincing simulation of knowledge and reason? It seems likely we're getting there; I see no reason to expect it's out of the question; and it seems an empirical question.

As to the archaic flavor of Descartes's account: What do we make of "these organs need a specific disposition for every particular action"? For me it calls to mind all those gears and levers, each single action prepared mechanically as a passive response to a particular input, without any room for adaptation or generalization, without any active gathering of information from the environment, without any coherent organization of rules and functions and behaviors.... It seems too simple. Even our floor-cleaning robots seem more intelligent than Descartes's sideshow automaton.

And then "reason is a universal instrument that can be used in all kinds of situations": Do we suppose "reason" to be a single, indivisible instrument? Surely we should remain open, at least, to the possibility that our power of reason depends on and consists in the shifting "dispositions" of so many moving parts in us.

So on both sides of that coin, his picture seems out of fashion. Descartes seems perhaps to miss the full potential of computational technology, to exaggerate the "unity" and "universality" of reason, and to speak as if "reason" were a ghost in the machine. Though it's a small passage out of context.

Non-rational creatures can't form concepts, they're essential to the operations of reason. — Wayfarer

I'm inclined to agree that something like conceptual capacities are essential to rationality, to the emergence of rational creatures. However, I leave open the possibility that there are various sorts of rational creature. For instance, a rational sentient animal, a rational sentient robot, or a rational nonsentient robot.

Life, sentience, and rationality are logically distinct terms. The way I prefer set my terms, there's no language without rationality, but there is rationality without language.

I say nothing appears to a nonsentient simulated intelligence. So it doesn't perceive like we do, it doesn't introspect like we do, it doesn't know like we do, it's not rational like we are. But it seems to behave rationally, like we do, and not only in the manner of an old-fashioned machine, according to a fixed set of rules, but even as we do, learning new tricks as we proceed, creating new rules, cultivating a style or even something like a personality.

That's my sense of the direction we're already headed. It seems in keeping with what the mad scientists have in mind when they speak of zombies.

Creativity and sentience may be the same thing or mutually necessary. One difference between a p-zombie and a human is that the p-zombie would not be able to create knowledge - i.e it would be stuck in its programming, just as animals are. — tom

Don't the AI geeks still talk about neural networks, and programs programming themselves ad infinitum, and all that jazz? I don't see any reason to doubt that it's already underway with plenty of room for growth.

It seems to me that humans are like other animals, we're stuck in our programming too. It's just that our programming is more flexible, more variable, more adaptive, more creative, amenable to far greater complexity.

What I'm suggesting is that p-zombies cannot possess a GENERAL intelligence, because they cannot create knowledge of themselves — tom

What do you mean by "creating knowledge"?

Continued reflections on sections 1-2.

The most arcane thing in the essay so far is the introduction of the term “sense content” in the last two paragraphs of section 2. I’m not clear on the motive or the justification for this move. And I’m not sure there’s parity in the treatment of act and object along these lines.

Sellars wants two names for the sort of item that enters into sensing-relations as the object of an act of sensing: When the item figures in a sensing-relation, call it a sense-datum. When the item does not figure in a sensing-relation, call it a sense-content.

Sellars notes it's “a matter of controversy among sense-datum theorists” whether “sensed items could exist without being sensed” -- i.e., whether a sense-content could exist without being identical to a sense-datum, without existing as a matter of fact in a sensing-relation as the object of a sensing-act.

Perhaps this is the only motive for the distinction: He wants a language that’s neutral with respect to this particular controversy. This interpretation is reinforced when he settles on the term “sense-content” as perhaps “as neutral a term as any”.

Fair enough. So long as the controversy’s undecided, we use a language unprejudiced with respect to the outcome, with resources sufficient to accommodate advocates on either side. Though I'll want to remember to look for alternative motives for this abstraction as the essay proceeds.

Is there an analogous controversy about the act-side of the sensing relation? Does anyone in this story claim or wonder whether the sort of item that enters into sensing-relations as the act of an object-sensed could also exist independent of any such relation? Perhaps there’s no analogous controversy on this point. That would account for the disparity in Sellars’s account, if it turns out there is a disparity: Either everyone’s agreed, the act in the sensing relation can exist outside that relation; or everyone’s agreed, it cannot. If everyone’s agreed that it can, or if it rather is a controversial matter, we should expect Sellars to offer us two names to refer to the thing called the act, just as he took pains to provide two names for the thing called the object of the act of sensing: One name for the item when it exists in sensing-relations; and one name when, if ever, it exists without involvement in any sensing-relation.

In any case, it may be that by giving two “locutions” to refer to the item that stands as object in sensing-relations, Sellars has defined two distinct predicates. One seems, thus far, a two-place relation, like SENSE (a, x). The other is perhaps a one-place predicate, as for instance, S-CONTENT (x).

If SENSE (a, x) then S-CONTENT (x).


Perhaps Sellars spins the analogy -- between act and object, with respect to independent existence of the item -- in another direction?

He says: “In the latter case” -- the case in which “varieties” of sensing-relations and sensing-facts are sorted according to the varieties of sensed-object, and not by distinguishing “full-blooded species” of sensing --

being a visual sensing or a direct hearing would be a relational property of an act of sensing, just as being a sense datum is a relational property of a sense content. — ”Sellars”

But this seems to jump ahead of the question, can the item that enters into a sensing-relation as an act, also exist independent of any such relation, and do we want our language to have the resources to refer to such items by way of “another locution” that is prima facie logically independent of any such relation? For instance, a one-place predicate, S-ACT (a), perhaps determined in part by the condition

If SENSE (a, x) then S-ACT (a).

Hasn’t he jumped ahead, isn’t there a disparity? Having distinguished in principle, and in the language of the model, sense-data from sense-contents, Sellars neglects the question of whether there is an analogous distinction for sense-acts, and moves on to discuss varieties of sensing-relation.

Just as, he says, being a sense datum is a relational property of a sense content, so being a “visual sensing” would be a relational property of an act of sensing. This does not seem to address the question of existence independent from the sensing-relation; it only tells us what sort of sensing-relation, on the basis of the sort of object in the relation -- “x is a color patch which is sensed”. So not quite “just as”: For there’s no mention of a “locution” by which we might refer to the item that enters as act into the sensing-relation apart from any such relation. A “visual sensing-relation” would be a relation of a sensing-act and a visual sense-content; but what, if anything, are we to call a sensing-act that has no object, or at least a sensing-act as an item logically distinguishable from any sensing-relation?

One way we might characterize the “former” case -- the case of various full-blooded “species” of sensing-relation: Define distinct predicate-relations for each species of sensing, each correlated in the same way with the generic sensing-relation. Say for visual-sensing:

If V-SENSE (a, x) then (VS-ACT (a) and VS-CONTENT (x) and SENSE (a, x)); and
If VS-ACT (a) then S-ACT (a); and
If VS-CONTENT (x) then S-CONTENT (x).

And the same song and dance for each sensory mode assimilable to this form.

Some reflections on sections 1-2.

Is it the act, or the object, the analyzability of which is here contested? Is the object counted as "part" of the act; i.e., we identify an individual act of sensing-awareness, analyze it into two parts, act and object, and then either find that we can go no further, or find that we can continue analyzing (act, or object, or both) into component parts? — Cabbage Farmer

By the end of section I.2, it seems the object is not counted as "part” of the act, at least in the logician's notebook. One way to draw up the account: Two terms, act and object, figure in a predicate relation of "sensing" that can be used to express "facts" involving acts and objects in that relation. So it’s both acts-of-objects and objects-of-acts that figure as logical objects of sensing-relations used to express facts. Some marvel along these lines:

There is some a and some o such that: SENSE (a, o).

I take it this would have implications for what logicians and model-builders call the "ontology" of the model. There are two sorts of entity implicated here, two sorts of entity-in-the-model: i) acts of sensing-relations and ii) objects of sensing-relations. You might call it a "hard" sort (or what's a more convenient phrase): We might expect that what counts as an object in one sensing relation cannot figure as an act in another sensing relation; and that what counts as an act in one sensing relation cannot figure as an object in another sensing relation; and that act and object in the same sensing-relation cannot be identical to each other. (Though these rules may be contested, depending on what kind of “sensing” it turns out we’re discussing here.)

Along these lines, it would seem I strayed from the mark earlier by using the language of entailment to paraphrase Sellars remark that "the fact that x is sensed... has the form... by virtue of which for x to be sensed is for it to be the object of an act." For once we start packaging acts and objects in the sort of formal predicate language I've indicated today, it seems there just is no way to say "x is sensed", or to express a fact that x is sensed, without calling up something like the relation SENSE (a, x). This is an example of a "form by virtue of which for x to be sensed is for it to be the object of an act" -- which seems now a far more binding condition than the implication I used to paraphrase in my reading notes: "if x is sensed, then x is the object of an act [of sensing]." Given the ordinary conventions of predicate modeling, and the terms I've drawn up today, I'm not sure how one could express that conditional statement without the most blatantly redundant tautology.

According to Sellars the model-builders agree along these lines: there are facts with the form "x is sensed", and if x is sensed, then x is the object of an act [of sensing]. — Cabbage Farmer

In light of today’s shift in interpretation, I might want instead to say:

According to Sellars the model-builders agree along these lines: There are facts with the form “x is sensed”, and by virtue of this form, x is the object of an act.

According to Sellars the model-builders disagree about whether a fact of the form "x is sensed" is simple or complex. — Cabbage Farmer

Could this mean that for some of the model-builders, the fact that x is sensed is not analyzable as a fact involving both an act and an object? Sellars seems to rule this out. For instance:

[...]however complex (or simple) the fact that x is sensed may be, it has the form, whatever exactly it may be, by virtue of which for x to be sensed is for it to be the object of an act. — Sellars

So for clarity’s sake I might want to say:

According to Sellars the model-builders disagree about whether a fact of the form "x is sensed" is simple or complex; but no matter how simple or complex a fact of this form is said to be, the model-builders agree that the form is such that, for x to be sensed is for x to be the object of an act.

I wonder if Sellars’s way of carving up the fact of sensing is supposed to shed light on “characteristic features of the given” and on “the framework of givenness”. Or does this carving pertain only or primarily to the special case of sense-data theory, while the implications for the more general framework are not yet in view in the narrative?

There appear to be varieties of sensing, referred to by some as visual sensing, tactual sensing, etc., and by others as directly seeing, directly hearing, etc. — Sellars

Who are those who speak in each way indicated?

But it is not clear whether these are species of sensing in any full-blooded sense, or whether "x is visually sensed" amounts to no more than "x is a color patch which is sensed," "x is directly heard" than "x is a sound which is sensed" and so on. — Sellars

Good point. Notice how the point is developed in terms of the act-object conception: do the varieties of sensing sort out into different sorts of act, or into different sorts of object for the same sort of act.

I presume this is an important difference in the logician's notebook. It might also lead us to inquire into the bases of the distinctions between sorts of sensing-acts (seeing, hearing, etc), or the bases of the distinctions between sorts of sense-contents (color patches, sounds).

Either way it begins to seem there may be room for analysis beyond the form of a fact "x is sensed", if every such fact entails that x is some sort of sense content, or that the sensing of x is some sort of sensing, or both. Or is this not the sort of "analysis" at issue?

In the latter case, being a visual sensing or a direct hearing would be a relational property of an act of sensing,... — Sellars

In the latter case -- the case in which the varieties of sensing are not "species of sensing in any full-blooded sense", but only various sorts of sensing distinguished in terms of their different sorts of object -- being a visual or auditory sensing would be merely a relational property of an act of sensing. In that case, a place for this relation is built into the form of a fact that x is sensed, but is (I presume) determined in each case by some property of the object of the act: it is a color patch, or a sound patch, one or another sort of sense-content.

I suppose to approach the matter with less bias, we might leave it an open question whether this relation is determined by some feature of the sense-content, or instead by some mediating factor, some other term in the analysis.

...just as being a sense datum is a relational property of a sense content. — Sellars

"just as": i.e., the first is a relational property, no less than the second. Is the analogy much stronger than this?

Being a sense datum is a relational property of a sense content. In other words, it is a property of a sense content when the sense content is related to an act of sensing in the right way. But this seems strange: What is a sense content, when it is not a sense datum? Perhaps merely a figure of speech....

Earlier I read Sellars as peeling off the "existence" and the facticity of "being sensed" that belong to the sense datum (in the model), in order to produce a highly abstract theoretical construct of "sense content", which I tentatively glossed as something like a hypothetical "object of possible experience" characterized somewhere in a logician's notebook for the purpose of analysis and conversation. Is this line of interpretation still open?

Are there "color patches" floating around somewhere, sometimes taken up in acts of sensing, other times slipping by unsensed? Are these sense contents, sensed and unsensed, inside heads, or outside heads, or mere possible-sensums marked down in philosophical narratives assembled according to a certain cumbersome framework?

Being a sense datum, or sensum, is a relational property of the item that is sensed. — Sellars

I suppose "being a sense datum" is the same as "being the object of an act of sensing". It's a relational property, according to which an object is associated with an act of sensing in a specific way and in a particular "fact".

To refer to an item which is sensed in a way which does not entail that it is sensed, it is necessary to use some other locution. — Sellars

Much as, to refer to an item which was thrown by Jim at noon today, in a way that does not entail that the item was thrown by Jim at noon today, it is necessary to use some other locution.

Sensibile has the disadvantage that it implies that sensed items could exist without being sensed, and this is a matter of controversy among sense-datum theorists. — Sellars

Of course it's controversial, if the sensum is something like a "color patch".

Sense content is, perhaps, as neutral a term as any. — Sellars

Oh my, are we going to start speaking about "content"? Was the term in use already in this connection by the time Sellars composed this essay?

What does Sellars introduce the term "sense content" for here? As a substitute for "sense datum" or "object of sense-act", a substitute that doesn't imply that the object could exist without being sensed; and that doesn't entail that the object is (has been, will be) in fact sensed

What kind of possibly nonexistent and possibly not-sensed object is a particular "sense content" supposed to be?

I suppose it's something like an "object of possible experience" -- or how do the Kantians and phenomenologists put it? We use a term like "sense content" to talk about the sense data that would be sensed -- in hypothetical cases, for the purpose of analysis, for the sake of this strange conversation -- if things were in fact the way we have characterized them in our notebooks.

2. Sense-datum theories characteristically distinguish between an act of awareness and, for example, the color patch which is its object. — Sellars

This must be the "act-object conception" that Shoemaker loves to wrestle with. I always got the feeling he never quite shakes himself free of it.

An "act of awareness" and an "object" of the act. What object? Not an apple or a chair or a man, but a "color patch". Perhaps something like the smudgy strokes in an impressionist painting?

I take it Shoemaker's line of criticism is still in fashion nowadays: The analyst wants to analyze perception so that the perceptual object is the thing we ordinarily say we "perceive" ("see", e.g.): The apple, the chair, the man -- not some color patches.

The act is usually called sensing. — Sellars

Is there a difference, for the sense-data theorist, or for his critic, between sensing and perceiving?

Classical exponents of the theory have often characterized these acts as "phenomenologically simple" and "not further analyzable." But other sense-datum theorists -- some of them with an equal claim to be considered "classical exponents" -- have held that sensing is analyzable. — Sellars

Who are the more or less classical exponents mentioned, on either side of this divide?

On one side, they say particular acts of sensing are "phenomenologically simple". On the other side, they say particular acts of sensing are "further analyzable" -- phenomenologically, or in some other way?

Is it the act, or the object, the analyzability of which is here contested? Is the object counted as "part" of the act; i.e., we identify an individual act of sensing-awareness, analyze it into two parts, act and object, and then either find that we can go no further, or find that we can continue analyzing (act, or object, or both) into component parts?

And if some philosophers seem to have thought that if sensing is analyzable, then it cannot be an act, this has by no means been the general opinion. — Sellars

Who seems to have thought this, and why wasn't it a popular view?

Why should anyone think that an act -- an act of awareness, an act of sensing -- must be unanalyzable, phenomenologically simple, etc. Do these thinkers object even to the analysis into act and object?

There are, indeed, deeper roots for the doubt that sensing (if there is such a thing) is an act, roots which can be traced to one of two lines of thought tangled together in classical sense-datum theory. — Sellars

"if there is such a thing": i.e., if traditional shop-talk in terms of "sensing" holds up under scrutiny.

What deep tangled roots?

Who doubts that sensing is an act?

Well, sensing in what sense, and act in what sense? I might doubt that "sensing unanalyzable color patches" or "sensing phenomenologically simple sense-data" is ordinarily (or ever) an act of awareness. For instance, it may be that whatever the simplest elements of sensation happen to be, they are processed at a preconscious, prephenomenal, stage of cognition, and that from a phenomenological point of view, it makes more sense to say that we see things and places in the world around us, than that we see color patches.

For the moment, however, I shall simply assume that however complex (or simple) the fact that x is sensed may be, it has the form, whatever exactly it may be, by virtue of which for x to be sensed is for it to be the object of an act. — Sellars

According to sense-data models, the form of "the fact that x is sensed", whatever exactly that form may be, entails at least that if x is sensed, then x is the object of an act [of sensing].

What is the purport of this clunky way of speaking? I suspect there is some scribble in a logician's notebook at issue here behind the scenes, when philosophers like Sellars begin to speak of the "form" of a "fact", and begin to lay down implications this way. I suppose the scribble might include marks that stand for acts of sensing, marks that stand for objects of those acts, marks for variables like x, and some way of packaging such marks to express "facts" about states of affairs in which objects are sensed.

According to Sellars the model-builders agree along these lines: there are facts with the form "x is sensed", and if x is sensed, then x is the object of an act [of sensing].

According to Sellars the model-builders disagree about whether a fact of the form "x is sensed" is simple or complex.

One bit of complexity seems missing from the account so far: Whose act? What senses x? What mark in the model for this?

But, the example you gave was 'bread that was molecularly identical to bread' except that it wasn't nourishing. So that example seems to me to violate the law of identity, as it basically amounts to saying 'imagine bread that isn't bread' - which amounts to saying 'imagine an instance of A that is not actually A'. — Wayfarer

I'm not sure "molecular identity" in the sense intended exhausts the concept of logical identity. (Incidentally, are you suggesting that all there is to identity of objects is "molecules"? I'm not sure I've ever heard that sort of claim from you.)

What I said was the bread and the p-bread are "molecule-for-molecule the same". I don't mean it's the very same molecules, but rather exactly the same type of molecules, in exactly the same numbers and arrangements. Two tokens of the same type, type-identical, not token-identical, so far as the molecules are concerned; but there is this one functional difference. A functional difference without a physical difference. Isn't this how some philosophers have characterized the similarity of p-zombies and ordinary humans? I thought that was the whole point of their exercise.

I think it's a frivolous notion.

Whereas bread that was molecularly slightly different, and therefore had different, or no, nutritional value, is a very different kind of idea. But then the point is lost. — Wayfarer

The point would be lost if there were a difference in type-identity of molecular structure. But that's not what I've said about bread and p-bread.

I did leave the possibility open in the case of Yellow-Eyed and Brown-Eyed Cabbage Farmer, but that's another example. The two examples have this in common: In the case of the eyes, I imagine the difference without worrying how it's possible; in the case of the breads, I imagine the difference without worrying how it's possible. That's just how easy it is to "imagine and conceive" in the loose, ordinary sense of these terms. You leave a blank where an imaginary explanation might go.

For that matter, I can imagine a being with a radically different type of inner life - an alien intelligence perhaps - but not one with no inner life, because then, how would they simulate an answer to the question, 'how do you feel about X'? — Wayfarer

Perhaps your standards of imagining are stricter than mine. I just imagine it, like a child, without worrying about the details and implications.

How would the zombie answer questions like "how do you feel..."? To say it has no grounds for answer, is to imply that the only bases in us for such answers are somehow metaphysical, drawn from "pure subjectivity", external to the physical organism and its physically instantiated cognitive system. I see no reason to suppose that is the case in us. For instance, I'm pretty sure you can poke enough holes in a brain to the point where it will lose the capacity to answer such questions, one way or another.

However, if there is something like a phenomenal character to conscious experience, and I'm inclined to say there is, then it seems a zombie, if it's an honest zombie, when asked to report on the phenomenal character of its experience, would report, perhaps after a period of confusion and disillusionment, that it doesn't seem to have any.

How would such a thing be possible? It's the job of the make-believe mad scientists who get paid to cook up such fictions, to fill in those blanks.

The zombie is not sentient. It's "phenomenally blind". Nothing appears to it. It's not appeared to. It's a syntax engine.

There's a favourite quote of mine from Descartes which makes this point brilliantly (not least because he made it in the 1630's) — Wayfarer

The passage strikes me as rather primitive. Descartes seems to be imagining a machine made of pulleys and cables and levers and buttons and gears, running on mechanical principles. He seems not to anticipate the growth in computational complexity kicked off in the past century.

I expect that, given enough time and resources to develop, artificial intelligence will meet and exceed human capacities of speech, creativity, and performance. None of that is sentience.

That's why I posted in that long quote from Feser. Basically, he is arguing that expressions like 'the laws of motion' or the rules of Euclidean geometry are concepts, as distinct from imaginings, in part because they are determinate - they stipulate precise outcomes. They're not reducible to imaginings, either - you can't imagine the outcome of a calculation, you need to actually perform the calculation, i.e. exercise reason. Although that is somewhat tangential to the main point. — Wayfarer

It seems to me that conceptions and linguistic utterances can be "indeterminate" and imprecise in one way or another. We can use our conceptual capacities to refine our ideas and expressions -- whether we use words, or pictures, or gestures, or any other tokens for the purpose. I'm not sure there is a standard of clarity, definiteness, precision required before we count something as a "concept". There are formal rules of math and logic, there are norms of syntax, and so on. And there's such a thing as sorting things out, or getting your point across, well enough to suit your present purpose.

Perhaps this is tangential. It might be brought home, if someone would clear up for us what sort of "conceiving" is at issue when we attempt to conceive p-zombies, and what relevance such exercises might have for our understanding of consciousness or anything else.

Oh yes I most certainly do, but there is some entertainment to be had in saying why. But I am still at a loss why so much ink is spilled over the question. — Wayfarer

It seems we're on the same page here, too.

Given this and given the ideal of Christian justice, and indeed the ideal of a requirement for a rebalancing of injustice inherent to most philosophies – consisting essentially in the concept that a meaningful resolution of such nihilism[...] — Robert Lockhart

This was an unexpected turn in the essay. How does the specter of nihilism slip in? Same as in Nietzsche I guess, as the dark side of inflated moral expectations about Cosmic Justice.

I don't have any such expectations of the cosmos, and I see no hints of nihilism in the thought that human animals are radically influenced by cultural contexts.

Are you arguing that a vague, confused, unclear concept is conceivable? All are synonyms for incoherent. — Real Gone Cat

I'm not sure what you mean to say here. Do you say that a "vague concept" is an "inconceivable concept", or is perhaps no concept at all? So if someone seems to implicate in speech a concept of mammal or universe or justice, but there is something (anything) "vague or confused" in the concept -- then in this case you say "it's not a concept at all", or perhaps "it's an inconceivable concept"?

I'll say that a "vague concept" may be "conceivable" in the loose, ordinary-language sense I indicated earlier. I suppose many ordinary-language concepts are "vague" in some way or other. Many philosophical concepts, too.

If we keep the sense of "conceive" loose enough, of course we can say we "conceive" of things that are vague, or that are inconsistent with the facts as we understand them, or that are inconsistent with the facts such as they may be whether we understand them or not.

It seems some such looseness is required in order to say we can "conceive" of p-bread, given our understanding of bread, and stomachs, and nutrition. And another such looseness is required in order to say we can "conceive" of p-zombies, given our ignorance of brains and consciousness.

It's not clear what import such "conceiving" has for philosophical discourse. Or what's the difference between philosophy and fantasy?

So you can imagine something that is at once identical and yet completely different?

That seems both incoherent AND inconceivable to me, on the grounds that it contravenes the law of identity. — Wayfarer

Hello Wayfarer, old friend!

I can imagine having been from birth exactly like me, but with yellow eyes. I imagine that Yellow-Eyed Cabbage Farmer is identical to Brown-Eyed Cabbage Farmer in every respect but this one.

How much else would have to differ -- in these two alleged humans, or in the whole alleged history of the universe -- in order for the eyes to differ in the way I thus imagine them to differ? The difference as I imagine it doesn't settle such questions. It leaves a blank there, in the space where an imaginary explanatory narrative supporting the imaginary difference might go. That's typically how it is when we entertain thoughts about counterfactuals.

We leave the same sort of blank when we "imagine" or "conceive" (in the loose sense I have indicated) p-zombies or p-bread. How could p-bread be the same as ordinary bread but not nourish? The conception leaves a blank where an answer might go. How could p-zombies be the same as ordinary humans but not be conscious? Draw another blank.

Agreeing that we can conceive of p-bread and p-zombies this way, by drawing blanks: How do these exercises in fantasy inform our understanding of ordinary bread and ordinary humans, our understanding of nutrition and consciousness? It seems they do not.

Some remarks on the distinction between concepts and imagination by Ed Feser: — Wayfarer

I presume we agree that terms of art like "concept" and "imagination" are used in various ways by various speakers, and that making progress in philosophical conversation involves coming to terms with one's interlocutors, getting the hang of each other's usages, especially with respect to such terms of art.

How far do we need to sort out our respective usages with respect to the whole family of terms you've implicated here by citing Feser, just to talk a while about zombies, bread, and conceivability?

Are you familiar with the loose, ordinary-language senses of "imagine" and "conceive" I've indicated? Do you think there is another, perhaps narrower, conception of such terms, more suitable to the present context?

Perhaps we can jump ahead of such preliminaries: Don't you agree with me that the philosophical discourse about p-zombies seems a frivolous and misleading waste of time, and teaches us nothing about the nature of consciousness? And do you also agree that p-zombies are "conceivable" in a weak sense, since we are ignorant of the relevant facts about how consciousness is in fact connected with human bodies, and thus can "conceive" of p-zombies primarily in light of our ignorance? And would you agree further, that even if we understood the relevant facts, and those facts as we understood them did not seem consistent with the possibility of p-zombies, we could still "conceive" of p-zombies in an even weaker sense, by pretending in thought that things were somehow other than they seem in fact to be, without specifying how they were otherwise except for the abstract counterfactual condition we entertain in thought, that there are p-zombies?