It seems pretty clear though that (3) there, the ideal we're aware of, is not the same thing as (2), — Srap Tasmaner

Yes. Look at peeving culture. People often put forward pet-peeves unaware that they're guilty of the same "sins". I remember an anecdote of linguist David Crystal, I failed to find online and thus is of dubious authenticity: He said that a particular violated rule wasn't really a rule people actually use, and to make his point he pointed out some instances in her very own usage. Rather than abandoning the rule she broke out in tears. (I wonder if I misremember the anecdote, the linguist involved, whether it's not online, or whether I just don't know how to find it.)

...and where (1) fits in is unclear. — Srap Tasmaner

That's a tough one. What complicates the matter is that there's also "traditional grammar", the scholarly approach to correct language that preceded linguistics and is still the main strain in schools, where we all learn how to use language "correctly", after we've already acquired not only our particular language, but language itself. (We don't just learn to speak English, we learn to speak.)

The structure of (2) we are largely unaware of, so it's more likely that (3) is something else that (2) generates alongside linguistic behavior. And (3) can readily grow from simple correctness to the art of rhetoric.

But maybe it goes in the other direction! — Srap Tasmaner

After the initial language acquistion as a toddler, it probably goes both ways, with judgments being made when what's already internalised is problematic in a stiuation (including being corrected by others). A lot of it is down to how we teach language in school, and also that language change means that old and new usage exist side by side and it's never quite clear what will survive. Some admonishments like "not ending a sentence with a preposition" and "not splitting infinitives" have been around for quite a while, so it's very likely that both the usage and its criticism is going to stick around for a while longer.

There's this idea of a language war between descriptivists and prescriptivists, but that would give you two insane positions: either "there are no mistakes," or "usage doesn't matter". Basically, you just navigate a linguistic landscape, accept some rules (and maybe internalise them, or maybe just pay lipservice), and discard others (maybe as a deliberate choice, or because your word habits are too strong and you just forget). Rules can be internalised from (3) into (2), and (1) can make hypotheses about when that happens (but I'm not sure how good (1) is at that currently).

Davidson's article appeared in a time when (1) generally became more interested in usage on various fronts. The rise of pragmatics, and of usage based grammar theories (such as cognitive grammar, construction grammar, or functional grammar). I sort of see it as a child of its time, and it's really older than me.

1. Davidson's principles (1) - (3) are a good description of lexical meaning.
2. Davidson's argument shows that (1) - (3) cannot account for linguistic behavior.
Therefore
3. We lose nothing by giving up the idea of lexical meaning. — Srap Tasmaner

This looks like a pretty good summary to me. Here's a key question:

What's the relationship between "first/literal meaning" and "lexical meaning"?

Davidson doesn't really address this directly, but I think there's a difference, here. First meaning is defined by the interplay of prior and passing theories, and - I think - "lexical meaning" would be part of the prior theory, but it wouldn't be it's entirety, because "lexical meaning" remains some sort of super-situational ideal, an abstraction.

Take this section where he looks at whether a prior theory could be what we think of a natural language.

An interpreter’s prior theory has a better chance of describing what we might think of as a natural language, particularly a prior theory brought to a first conversation. The less we know about the speaker, assuming we know he belongs to our language community, the more nearly our prior theory will simply be the theory we expect someone who hears our unguarded speech to use. (262)

I think there's an idea implied here, that the more we interact with specific people, the more we modify the prior theories we bring to conversations with them, but they don't impact "the theory we expect someone who hears our unguarded speech to use". It feels like a natural language is something a prior theory will diverge from the more we interact with a particular person. Or in short, that we expect Mrs. Malaprop to make malapropisms is part of the prior theory we bring to a conversation with Mrs. Malaprop, but it doesn't modify what we think of as a "natural language".

But he doesn't really talk about what it is he thinks of as "natural language". He keeps saying things like "in rather unusual ways" with the assumption being that there's a "usual" way we all think of language that's obvious.

And this is where I'll again have to emphasise that I come at this article from a linguistic perspective and not a philosophical one; maybe in philosophical traditions there actually is such a thing, and I just don't understand it. So I have this megpie mind; I snatch what's useful from philosophy and discard the rest. Linguistics basically started in earnest as a discipline with Saussure, and it turned into a systematic description of language, where signs interact with each other to make for a whole structure. Since early linguistics was tied up with anthropology, one way to look at it is to find a formal way to describe human artefacts. In other ways, lingistists aren't really doing anything that avarage language users aren't; they're just more systematic and ask questions that arise from being more systematic.

That's never been quite enough to account for all data, though, so linguists would look towards the philosophy of language, say Wittgenstein's language games, Austin/Searle's speech acts, and Grice's co-operative principle, and also towards linguists such as Jakobson and his functions of language, and would establish a discipline called pragmatics, so that we now have:

[Syntax, morphologly, phonetics, phonology, semantics] describe language, and pragmatics describes how people use language.

That was the mainstream standard organisation when I went to university in the 90ies, but pragmatics wasn't actually fully established, I think, until the early 70ies.

Then there's another distniction: linguistic analysis can be twofold: synchorony and diachrony. How language is used at any one time, and how language changes. Usually a synchronic approach would describe a fairly rigid set of rules, and a diachronic approach would then show how rules are broken, subverted, played with, so that langauge changes. (An example would be the migration of the "n" from the noun proper to the indefinite article "a": a nadder -> an adder; a napron --> an apron). Those approaches are seen as complementary, so a described, more or less rigid set of rules isn't taken to determine actual language behaviour.

So one problem I have is that my intuition seems to clash with Davidson's. I might agree with a lot of things he's saying, but I might never have held his view of what a natural language actually is. For example, I think one difference between my instinctive approach and Davidson's might be the following:

We both see language as an overly rigid structure. But where he expects language rules to determine behaviour (something he doesn't find in real life), I expect that rigid structure to be some sort of ideal type of a structuring principle; something people use to both create utterances and compare other people's utterances to, and something that will on occasion fail: people make mistakes, people don't find the words to express what they want to say and approximate with the best words they can find (and on failure to communicate try alternate ways of expressing themselves)... and so on.

It's not a surprise to me that you can also play with language. And we can learn by playing. For example, there's this little tale, "Ladle Rat Rotten Hut", which was written to demonstrate the importance of intonation to interpreting words (it's a rewritten version "Little Red Riding Hood"; sadly the audio link seems to be broken - the story's meant to be both read and heard. Here's a youtube link.) It's the perfect case for a passing theory, too. And it's also clear why the theory will remain a passing theory (but maybe turn into a prior theory for whenever you engage with the same text again). None of these new words we'd expect to spill over into dialect, though they might spread as in-jokes for an in-group.

I actually meant to be briefer and more concise this time round.

Basically, I think Davidson is saying that prior and passing theories establish first meaning, which in turn can have consequent meanings due to the compositionality of language (to understand the Shakespear sonnet, we must first understand "foison" and "tire"). What "first meaning" has in common with "lexical meaning" is that it's not necessirily identical with the intended meaning; where it differs is that, unlike "lexical meaning", "first meaning" is always situational. And the way Davidson analysis first meaning sheds doubt on "lexical meaning", though it's possible to import "lexical meaning" into a speaker's prior theory.

So when he finishes with these words:

And we should try again to say how convention in any important sense is involved in language; or, as I think, weshould give up the attempt to illuminate how we communicate by appeal to conventions. (265)

I think, the first clause is his conclusion, and the second clause his bias.

I think he's largely right, but I'm not sure I understand what he thinks a natural language is supposed to be, and I think we (Davidson and I) start in completely different places on that topic, which is why I have trouble reading him in detail.

If Davidson wishes to preserve a purported distinction between what a speaker means and what their words mean then literal meaning cannot ever be what a speaker means(but it quite often is). — creativesoul

I think that's wrong. Preserving the distinction merely means to preserve the analytical category. If you do that, you can say that what the speaker means is what the words mean. If you don't preserve the categories, you can't say that in terms of this particular theory, because you lack the tools. He's just describing the analytical framework, here. (The sentence Srap Tasmaner pointed out and I missed about making a distinction between what is "literal" and what is "conventional"... that is really odd, though. I'm not sure what to make of this.)

Is that right?

I rather suspect we use it, regardless, and become more adept over time. — Banno

We can make similar inquiries about all the principles. There's a point at which we don't know enough about a language to use it, and then there may come a point that we do. In this thread you're using English; could you say the same, in say, Hindi? Basque? Ancient Egyptian?

Still, I think that's an important point you make.

That is, learning a language and using it are the very same thing. After all, have you stoped learning English? — Banno

I don't think it's useful to conflate usage and learning, although learning usually involves usage. One of the things to bear in mind for example is that if a great number of people fail to "learn" a certain feature, we might be looking at language change. (Examples from the past: a nadder --> an adder; a napron --> an apron.)

Also, learning details about a language you're already speaking tends to work a little differently from acquiring a language you don't speak yet. It's especially interesting to look at first language acquisition. We tend not to remember what it was like to not speak any language at all, but there was such a time. What's it like to learn that there is language? (Do we? Some people thing it's innate.)

But further, and deeper, if you could learn a language before you used it, that would imply that there was a difference between knowing a language and using it. I can't see what that could be like - how could you show that you know a language without using it? — Banno

This is where I start to be out of my depth. I can see that my ad-hoc phrasing above isn't useful for that sort of questioning, but I can't rephrase it really, because I'm not sure what I'd want to achieve by doing it. I could maybe talk about types of usage? Like approaching an unknown language via a text book for second language learners?



That sounds like a plausible reading.

Interesting that you're from a linguistics background. I'm curious to know what you think about the adequacy and/or sufficiency of the three principles proposed for successful communication/interpretation. — creativesoul

I'm not really from a linguistic background; I just come at the issue from a linguistic perspective. I do have a university degree, but it's in sociology, and whatever formal education in linguistics I have I acquired in the context of a sociology degree (it's more complicated than that because of the way university studies were organised, but that's close enough). It's just that after graduating, I never did anything with my degree, and I kept up a sporadic interest in linguistic on my own.

About the three principles: I think they're all trivially true, but what's important is how you use them in a model of language, and I haven't quite yet figured out Davidson's model (and I probably won't just from this one article). He uses "first meaning", and I'm not quite sure what that means, so that's an additional difficulty I have.

When you start out studying any of the humanities, one thing you learn pretty quickly, is none of the terms probably mean what you think they mean, and different people use them differently, so knowing roughly what sort of theoretical background to expect helps you a lot in understanding a text. That's why it matters to me that I'm not very knowledgable about the philosophy of language. I have all the caution but none of the background when it comes to interpreting the text.

I'll have to run through the principles with what I think of as "lexical meaning", instead of Davidson's "first meaning". I think that's not quite it, but it should come close enough for the purpose here. "Lexical meaning" of a word is just the word it has outside of context. One can think of it as a dictionary in the mind.

So, yes, "lexical meaning" is systematic. For example, an apple is a type of fruit, but a fruit is not a type of apple. The hierarchy involved here is an example of the systematicity we're talking about.

And, yes, "lexical meaning" is shared, as is apparent when I ask you for an apple and you give me one.

And, yes, you have to learn a language before you can use it. And what you learn, are conventions. This is actually the most complex topic. In anthropology, colour terms are the go-to example, because it's easy to see that different languages order a spectrum differently. (Early linguistic is quite bound up with anthropology.)

But that's all pretty trivial. It depends on what you do with that in a language model, and the assumptions you make about what a language is can differ wildly. So when Davidson says "Probably noone doubts that there are difficulties with these conditions," I agree, but what difficulties you run into vary by the model you use. Sure language is systematic, but how systematic? Sure a language is shared, but what does sharing a language look like in practise? Sure a language is conventional, but how much do those convention enable/restrict your language use?

An easy example: If you study linguistics, you'll hear early on that the relationship between the sign and meaning is arbitrary, but then you'll immediately be told that onomatopoetic expression might be an exception. Are they? There's clearly still a level of arbitrariness, because, say, animal sounds are usually linguistic imitations of the real thing, but they still differ by culture. I think that's where the difference between a philosophy of language and linguistics come in. Philosophers tend to be interested in the topic, while linguists tend to be interested in those topics when they become problematic for their theories and research.

So when Davidson concludes that there is no langauge because of malapropism, I'll have to first figure out what is he expected. It's entirely counter-intuitive for me: there are language conventions, but unconventional language use doesn't automatically preculude understanding. For example, if a non-native speaker were to say "I hungy," you might still understand that he's hungry, even if he doesn't acutally use the auxiliary verb and forgets an "r". So to claim that a language is largely conventional is not to claim that if you deviate from those conventions, you can't be understood. We're not computers who return a syntax error for a simple typo. (And this is where I might inject that programming languages are more systematic than natural languages. That shouldn't be a surprise, but this is something you should consider when interpreting principle 1 within a theory.)

So, for example, Davidson says this:

Ambiguity is an example: often the ‘same’ word has more than one semantic role, and so the interpretation of utterances in which it occurs is not uniquely fixed by the features of the interpreter’s competence so far mentioned.

Here's where I'd just look at what I have as a model that I try to get as close to the real thing as I can. So when I notice that there's ambiguity, I'd just look at how we typically resolve ambiguities and add that to the model. Semantic Field theory, for example, helps a lot. "I took the money to the bank," includes two nouns, "money" and "bank", and because they're thematically related (part of the same "semantic field") "The pirate buried the money near the bank," feels more ambiguous, even though we still have "money" and "bank" - but "pirate" and "buried" suggests a river bank as a very real possibility. Beyond semantic field theory common sense would tell me that a pirate isn't likely to bury money near a institution that deals with cash. But once I have to consult common sense to resolve an ambiguity, I'm already aware of it. There's been a disfluency in interpretation. I have a model that would likely lead to misunderstandings, but that's no problem because, well, in real life there are misunderstandings. I don't need a model of language that's more systematic than the real thing. I don't need a model that's completely shared. I don't need a model that's totally formed and restricted by convention. Because the real thing isn't like that either.

The interesting line here is "uniquely fixed by the features of the interpreter's competence". At that point, I'm guessing that he thinks there's a unique thing like "linguistic competence", as opposed to a more general competence. So later he says that:

nterpreters certainly can make these distinctions. But part of the burden of this paper is that much that they can do ought not to count as part of their basic linguistic competence.

If I compare that to my intuition, I'd say he's got a much narrower and more specific idea of what a "linguistic competence" is than I have. As a result I have to be careful not to impose what I think on his text. It's a question of phrasing. So by the time he ends with:

In linguistic communication nothing corresponds to a linguistic competence as often described: that is, as summarized by principles (1)–(3). The solution is to give up the principles.

I'm careful. I still don't quite know what he means by this, or what he expected language to be like. But I connect it to the rise of a couple of linguistic theories from around the mid-eighties to the early nineties (cognitive grammar, construction grammar, functional grammar), many of which were designed in opposition to Chomsky's Universal Grammar program (where there's a deep structure that all people share, and transformation rules generate the surface structures). So he may have just given up on some sort of "linguistic competence", a feature of a person's mind (?), that I never believed in to begin with, so what I would have thought of when reading about those three principles would have been pretty different anyway. For example, it doesn't make sense to me that we'd switch off our cognitive faculties that aren't directly involved with language when speaking, and I certainly don't see a need to integrate functions into a "linguistic faculty" that other cognitive tools do pretty well already. There's some sort of specialisation going on (and some of it is typically brain-related, as Brocca's or Wernecke's aphasia shows), and acquiring your first language seems to be easier and more formative than later language acquisition. But it's still not clear to me how much of language-cognition is specialised. If there are two positions that say "much of it" and "little of it", I'm more inclined towards the little-of-it spectrum.

So my intuition is that three principles hold up pretty well, but it's definitely possible to ask too much of them, and I think Davidson might have realised he asked too much of them. The question I have, is that so, and if yes: what did he expect a "linguistic competence" to do all on its own?

I left university in the early 2000s, so I'm almost completely out of the loop and have been for a while. Computational linguistics and neurolinguistics should have had some interesting results since that time, I would suspect, but I know little about any of that. If I did, maybe the post would have turned out even longer.

A single use is enough to 'summon up a passing theory' - I think this speaks a great deal to how convention can be single-use. — StreetlightX

"Summoning up a passing theory" facilitates understanding, not necessarily agreement, not even necessarily provisory acting-as-if. And classifying the usage as a "malapropism" actively prevents consensus: a malapropism not a permissible variant. "Flamingo" can't be both a malapropism of and a synonym for "flamenco" (not in the same mind, at least). In this sense, the concept of "malapropism" hinders passing theories from undermining convention.

What sort of situation would you describe as a single-use convention:

A makes a malapropism; B parses it as such:

a) B corrects A.
b) B lets it slide.
c) B uses the malapropism repeatedly to make fun of A.
d) B decides to play along
e) B doubts his judgment, and passes over the topic.

And so on.

I've just noticed something about Davidson's notion of first meaning. — creativesoul

I have trouble understanding Davidson notion of first meaning in the first place. This is one of the places where I wonder whether I'd have better understanding if I was more knowledgable about the philosophy of language. But I come from linguistics, and this feels like a mess. What you've been pointing out is part of it, but I don't necessarily think he's being inconsistent. I just don't get that entire part.

"I dance the flamingo" is true IFF RussellA dances the flamenco.

...and at issue is what conventions permit the move from flamingo to flamenco.

Grice might have us do so by inferring your intent in making the utterance; but as I explained above, intent is not as clean a tool as Grice seems to suppose. — Banno

How do you get the truth condition without reference to a convention? I agree with the drive of RussellA's argument, but there's something I think is not exact:

Malapropism is exhibited in the relationship between two sentences, in that a sentence exhibits malapropism if it is different to the sentence the interpreter was expecting. — RussellA

I agree that the malapropism is exhibited in the relationship between two sentences, but I disagree that it's about what the interpreter expects, because that might be wrong, too.

"Flamingo" isn't a malapropism because the hearer expects to hear it. It's just an incompatibility in two ideolects at that stage, and that incompatibility could be resolved either way. The speaker could convince the hearer that the dance is, in fact, called the "flamingo".

Without convention, you have no malapropism, you have simply an unresolved conflict between ideolects that could - in theory - be resolved either way.

I think it follows that the term "malapropism" and the ralted concept is an utterance-external convention to keep the utterance-internal convention locked in. But a convention isn't absolute: it's dependent on lasting consensus. It may be more efficient to codify a recurring passing theory into a new prior theory than to try to convince a great number of people that they're wrong.

There are a lot of language wars around; "I couldn't care less," vs. "I could care less," for example.

When I hear "I dance the flamenco," what goes on in my head might be analysed thus:

"I dance the..." sets up the expectation that what follows is a dance. At this point, I may or may not pay enough attention to the actual utterance to hear that the other person is actually saying "I dance the flamingo," instead "I dance the flamenco." I could, on account of phonetic similarity, mishear the utterance. That is: I arrive at the correct interpretation by mistake.

If I do hear "flamingo" instead of "flamenco", my prior theory fails, but I can't yet assume why. Maybe there's a dance, the "flamingo", that I don't know? Maybe what I thought was called the flamenco is really called the "flamingo"? Maybe "flamingo" is a cutesy nickname for flamenco I'm not aware of? Maybe the speaker misspoke? Maybe the speaker has an "incorrect" prior theory?

This isn't just one "passing theory"; these are many? So why do I select the malapropism one? Common sense? A desire to be right? In any case, because word meanings are conventional there are "tie breakers" so to speak. Dictionaries, dance experts, and so on. All of that involves social conventions that have to do with language.

And I can have prior theories and passing theories, for example, about the reliability of any one dictionary, though they would not be - strictly speaking - linguistic prior theories.

Basically, with Gricean non-natural meanings, you need conventions to fix truth values, or else you have just unstructured conflict. The rest is just a question what you mean by "linguistic", and that was a question that was definitely in the air in the mid-eighties (with the creation of Langacker's "Cognitive Grammar", or Fillmore's "Construction Grammar", as opposed to hugely popular "Univeral Grammar" by Chomsky).

I'm enjoying this thread, but am a bit shy to respond because I'm not very familiar with the philosophy of language.

In my opinion one of the root causes of this is that we have a natural tendency to identify with the ideas that we store in our brains. We love ideology and we defend our informational catalogue with everything we got, because acknowledging a good argument means that we were wrong and that we need to let go of an idea, a part of our personality.

A much better way would be to identify with our way of thinking instead of our knowledge. Critical thinking skills are becoming more and more crucial in this age of informational floods. And these "tools" with which we can analyse the value of new information should be the centerpiece of our identity. — Hirnstoff

I'm not sure I agree here. The "informational catalogue" is intricately tied up with "the way we think". I think it's two sides of the same coin, really. You rightly call these things "tools", but the more you identify with "tools" the more they become thought habits. Being right still becomes personal; you just go from being right about things to being right about how to go about things.

What I'm saying can be summed up like this:

Identify with your knowledge ==> You're wrong.
Identify with your tools ==> You're stupid.

It's not an improvement. We need to relativise our tools and learn to figure out what tools other people use and see if there are tools we both can use. That's why science was successful: it's a tool many people can use. But that usefulness decreases the more you identify with the tools: it becomes a sort of scientism: if science can't explain it, it should be disregarded.

If people are suspicious of "critical thinking" there might be a reason. Any tool you use needs to be open to inspection. Less identification, not more.

Maybe I misunderstand you?

For instance, if the probability that the observation O is real, say, 90% then the probability of O being real if all 3, X, Y, and Z observe O is 90% * 90% * 90* = 72.9% and the probability that O is not real = 27.1%. — TheMadFool

Probability that O is real: 90 %
Probability that O is not real: 10 %

If all three observe O, the probability that O is not real is 10%*10%*10% = 0.1%. So the likelihood that O is real must be 99.9% right. But wait. 90%*90%*90% is 72.9% (as you correctly calculated). 72.9%+0.1%=73%. We're missing 27%.

In your way of calculating you're missing 75% when you assume a probability of 50%, and 27% when you're using a probability of 90%.

Instead of realising we're missing cases, you proclaim a paradox. That's not good maths.

What is the main issue here? Whether the observation O is real/not real, right? What model do you propose other than that which has to do with the probability of O being real/not? As far as I can tell, P(real) lies at the heart of the issue where P(A) means the probability of A. :chin: — TheMadFool

You haven't quite made clear what "observation O is real/not real" means.

Let's say you see a unicorn, and you ask others if they can see it, too. How would you describe this in terms of probability-prone variables?

This is what I would do:

There are three observations: O(x, y, z). Variable O can have two values:

"sees unicorn"/"does not see unicorn".

We know the values of the variable. The input comes straight from our experience. So O is not a random variable. No probability. It's either "sees" or "doesn't see", and we get the values by asking.

The second variable is the event E, which also a binary: "there is a unicorn" and "there is no unicorn".

What you're doing is basically estimating the likelihood of E with a coinflip: you set E as a random variable. It's random, because we have no way of knowing the value because observation doesn't count.

But what we're doing when we ask others if they're seeing the unicorn, too, is not asking whether the unicorn is real.

Your case is this:

O(x) = sees Unicorn
O(y) = sees Unicorn
O(z) = sees unicorn

E = ?

You calculate the probablity for E the following way:

First you assume that

P(E) = 50 %
P(~E) = 50 %

And then you calculate P(E(x))*P(E(y))*P(E(z)) = 12.5 %

However it's far from clear what it means to cross E with person X, Y, Z. There's no reason to bring in the observations at all. P(E) is always 50 %, as per your assumption.

Even in the case:

O(x) = does not see Unicorn
O(y) = does not see Unicorn
O(z) = does not see Unicorn

P(E) would still be 50 %, since you derived the likelihood simply from the two logical possibilities.

O(x) simply inspires the question, but E is an independent random variable. Basically, if there is a unicorn (E), then there is a unicorn no matter what values O take. There is no E(x) that corresponds to O(x), for example. There's only E.

What you propose looks like a game:

No matter who sees the unicorn, they all flip a coin, and if the coin comes up heads they say the unicorn is there, and if the coin comes up tails they say it's not there. But they'll only accept that the unicorn is there by full consensus, so they keep flipping coins until it's all heads or tails. In that case the likelihood that the unicorn exists or doesn't exist, as per consensus, would be equal, but only because there are exactly 2 ways the game can end. With a different likelihood the probability changes according to how many constellations end the game, and how many of those constellations are dis/favourable.

However, remember that I'm only concerned about the principle of repeatability which is basically the belief that the probability of an observation being real increases with the number of observers. — TheMadFool

Then you should choose a mathematical model that's up to the task. An independent random variable with the sample space of {Real, Unreal] isn't it.

While there might be a lot going on in between, I only have to consider the worst case scenaro (everyone [all 3, X, Y, and Z] observing something not real) and the best case scenario (everyone [all 3, X, Y, and Z] observing something real). — TheMadFool

Not if you treat O as an independent random variable. If you do that the math forces you to consider those cases, lest the math be rendered useless.

You <i>can</i> ignore those cases of coure. Let me show you:

RRR - 12.5 %
RUU - 12.5 %
RUR - 12.5 %
RRU - 12.5 %
URR - 12.5 %
UUR - 12.5 %
URU - 12.5 %
UUU - 12.5 %

Turns into:

RRR - 12.5 %
RUU - 12.5 %
RUR - 12.5 %
RRU - 12.5 %
URR - 12.5 %
UUR - 12.5 %
URU - 12.5 %
UUU - 12.5 %

And your probability that O is real remains 50 %, because 12.5 % are 50 % of 25 %.

You're not going to get very far if you don't understand the maths. There is no paradox.

You're right. Some people are more likely to hallucinate than others who, in turn, are more likely to observe the real. That means I have to calculate probabilities for each possible scenario.

However, in my defense, I'd like to point out that the variations are not so extreme as your numbers suggest. The Bell curve should be good enough to allay your concerns - most cluster around the mean. — TheMadFool

The bell curve isn't very relevant to my point. It's about distributions. And you'd first have to clearly define the variable that's distributed (the mean of what?). None of that is very relevant to the point.

You're talking about a paradox that doesn't exist, because you <i>don't</i> have a clear grasp of your variables.

Let me try to explain it again: You're multiplying your 0.5 probability as if it were a independent random variables. Of course, they're going to get ever smaller, no matter if they're all real or all unreal. Mathematically, what you're calculating is equivalent to coin flips. Three times heads in a row is more unlikely than two times heads in row. Same goes for tails. That's the sort of maths your using.

What you're ignoring is the likelihood that O is real when X sees it, unreal when Y sees it, and real again when Z sees it, and so on. The more people you add, the greater number of possible events you ignore.

Your 12.5 % is the chance that O is real for all three people, and the chance that O is real for none of them. The other 75 % distribute over all the other permutations (like, for example, real for X, but unreal for Y and Z, or real for X and Y, but unreal for Z).

If that state of events doesn't make sense to you (i.e. you're not a relativist about what's real), you've used inappropriate maths.

The problem is that you're defining O as constant, but then treat it as a variable during the calculations.

Basically, you're saying that O can either be real or not, and that's how you justify your 50 %, but then you treat O as a variable for the reliability of O(x), O(y), and O(z). Of course, both likelihoods are going to become ever smaller, because you're only considering the extremes. It's easier to show you what I mean, if we choose different values.

Let's say the likelihood that O is real is 90 % and the likelihood that O is not real is 10 %.

You're only considering the following cases:

O is real: 0.9 * 0.9 * 0.9

And O is not real: 0.1 * 0.1 * 0.1

There are a number of cases you're ignoring:

0.9 * 0.1 * 0.1
0.9 * 0.9 * 0.1
0.1 * 0.9 * 0.1

And so on.

It's understandable that you'd ignore those cases, since in all those cases people would be hallucinating things that are actually there. But your maths describes those cases and ignoring them gives you results you falsely interpret as a paradox, because you're not looking at the whole picture.

There's a theoretical problem here you have to solve. What do you do with cases in which all people see the same thing but only some of them see something real? Your math doesn't allow you to ignore those cases.

I would assume there are languages out there that lack the personal pronoun altogether (as I'm told is the case for Japanese), but I don't think we can then say the Japanese don't fully recognize the difference between people and hats. — Hanover

Japanese have plenty of personal pronouns, or none, depending on how your linguistic theories define the terms. All the Japanese pronouns are structurally identical to Japanese nouns, so you could say there's no need for the word-class, but there are functional equivalents to pronouns in English.

For example, there are two third person singular pronouns in Japanese: "kare" ("he") and "kanojo" ("she"). I'm not entirely sure, but I think their both derived from nouns for boyfriend ("kareshi") and "girlfriend" ("kanojo" - identical). There's no third person neuter pronoun that I'm aware of, and Japanese has a tendency to use proper names or nouns where we'd use pronouns, so the pronouns are quite a bit rarer than they would be in English (also because you can generally drop the subject of a sentence).

Japanese pronouns are a nightmare to learn, since you need to be able to properly judge your social standing as well as the formality of the current situation. For example, a boy talking to his friends might use "watashi" for himself ("I"), but it'd probably sound feminine (he'd be expected to use "boku"), but if he'd talk to a stranger on the street "watashi" would be gender neutral (and "boku" would be a social faux pas). I don't speak Japanese; I just looked into it at university to see a different system (and I like to watch anime).

None of that impacts your point. Languages encode different things differently, and what's not encoded can still be expressed. So the question remains how language relates to cognition. And that's a huge question. A one-to-one comparision between word-classes is often not going to be useful, because it tends to rais questions that are irrelevant to the topic (like "does Japanese have pronouns?"), and simultaneously narrows down the question too much.

I'm German. We have grammatical gender in German. The definite article "the" splits in three: "der" ( the - masculine), "die" (the - feminine), "das" (the - neuter). The German word for "girl" is "Mädchen", and the noun is neuter. There's a grammatical reason for this. The -chen suffix is a diminutive, and all diminutives are grammatically neuter. I'm perfectly fine with this. I don't even register a problem when speaking. "Das Mädchen" (grammatically neuter) refers to a girl (conceptually feminine). There's no conflict at all in my mind. However:

Rules of grammar would dictate for consistency that I use the neuter personal pronoun when refering to a grammatically neuter antecedant. I refuse. It feels outdated to me, and I'm uncomfortable using "es" ("it") for a girl. The notional antecedant overrides the grammatical antecedant for me. I've gotten into trouble for this in school, but not reliably.

So why am I completely comfortable with a gender neutral article, but not with a gender neutral personal pronoun? That's a cognitive question about the relationship between formal grammar and language in use. Saying that grammatical gender (wherever it's encoded) is a 1:1 correspondence to notional gender is clearly wrong. But saying that grammatical gender is irrelevant to notional gender is also clearly wrong. That's a difficult question even within one language, and it becomes even more difficult to answer once you compare languages.

It's an interesting topic, though.

When movements go wrong:

There was an excellent thread a while back on Lisa Feldman Barrett's way of looking at emotions as socially mediated categories for raw affects. — Isaac

Thanks for the pointer. I'll check it out when I have the time and inclination.

I just don't think it's possible to privately interpret one's mental states to an extent where one can form propositions about them without recourse to social modes of interpretation. So for me to say that my hitting old ladies is moral would require that I am first fluent in the social activity of interpreting some behaviours as 'moral' ones. This is an activity like any other, they do not arrive pre-labelled. The act of labelling (and this goes for any of our thoughts) is a piece of socially learnt behaviour. — Isaac

I'd agree to this. Just to be sure: I don't think of "society vs. person" as a dualism. Society is the result of lots of people interacting (when looked at from below), and "identity" (In a more basic sense than current identity politcs would have it) is a process of positioning yourself (when looked at from above). Because of this, I'd have to add that it's <i>also</i> impossible that social structures and artefacts exist if they're not being enacted/interpreted by knowledgable agents. There's something reflexive going on here.

When I convince you that the earth is flat, this is just as wrong as it was before. When I convince you that hitting old ladies is morally good, that's still wrong, but not in the same way. The entire system has just shifted a little to it being right. (Of course, it's very, very hard to convince people to begin with, and because of that it's unlikely to ever gain "critical mass", even in a subculure.) It's very likely always going to be wrong. But the dynamics involved make change possible in principle.

I've sometimes used 'moral' as shorthand for 'morally good' so hopefully this shouldn't get in the way too much. — Isaac

So have I. It's hard to shed everyday usage.

No, we do different things with some of our desires than we do with language. Calling those desires 'moral's is a linguistic event. It's you talking to me at the moment, It's a social interaction and so it has to involve only social meanings for us to be able to communicate. — Isaac

Okay, after around 1 1/2 hours of trying to puzzle out this paragraph, I think I might actually start to understand where you come from. Is you take on this issue derived from or at least compatible with Skinner's Behaviourism? How public events teach us to tease apart a holistic private experience into lingistic concepts.

When I hear "linguistic" my linguistics side takes over, so I was constantly looking in the wrong direction (if I'm right here).

The answer for me is that society has labelled certain types of objective 'moral' ones, just like it's labelled certain wavelengths of light 'blue'. — Isaac

The way I use "moral" it's more akin to "colour" than to "blue". "moral" =/= "morally good".

I know you'd like a definition from me, but there a lot of things I haven't figured out yet, and I have no "research goal" to guide a provisional one. For example, I've hinted in this thread that I think psychopaths can't act morally, but I'm not actually sure I really think that (for example: does morality necessitate perspective taking, or is a consequentialist approach sufficient?). As a result, I may be inconsistent across posts. Were I to attempt a definition at this point, the problem would get worse.

I'm not quite sure what you're asking here, but I'll have a go at answering it. — Isaac

I disagree with nothing you said in the following paragraphs. I had the impression that you're taking the public sphere for granted, as if it weren't made up of lots of private experiences we face in behavioural aggregate. But if my Skinner epiphany is in any way getting me closer to your perspective, I have a direction to think in now. I'll need to let this settle for a while.

Ah, OK. Then yes, I'm saying there isn't a difference. In short, morality is a social concept, the language used to describe it is social too and so private meanings make no sense. One can only speak about one's morality using the public definition of what morality is and that definition cannot refer to a private feature otherwise it's not a useful word. Wittgenstein's beetle and all. — Isaac

This isn't a beetle-in-the-box situation. We do different things with morals than with language. which was my first post in this thread was meant to demonstrate. "Using a wrong word" is not a moral failure.

How would they know? As per the private language argument, unless their behaviour is publicly acknowledged to be labelled 'moral' how would they privately maintain a criteria for their behaviour to class as moral and still expect the word to play a meaningful role in communication? — Isaac

I do think you have a point there somewhere, but I also think my focus is somewhat different and we're not entirely talking abou the same thing.

Any real-life decision is utlimately private, and only through lots of private decisions is there something like a public sphere. I don't think action points only upwards, so to speak. It's no more warranted to impute a public sphere than it is to impute private experience.

And even private experience is partly socially formed. My conscience is a home-grown trace of my social history, for example, but it's also partly informed by my personality (I don't like conflict, for example, and that would certainly have an influence on what I'd feel bad about; "I should confront this person, but I don't have the energy."). Some basic urges are socially formed. Toilet training comes to mind. Walking on the sidewalk, too.

Few actions are purely moral. Most have an instrumental aspect, too. Whatever we theorise about the socially accepted moral goods is abstract, anyway, and needs to filter through your private decision making process to become an action (or a tragically long hesiation).

On the other hand, when it comes to meaning I'm not looking for similarity between people so much as compatibility: as long as our actions proceed without a hich it doesn't matter what the beetle-in-a-box is like (if it's even there). But, well, incompatibilites do occur, and at least for me it's not always easy to spot whether there's a misunderstanding or a disagreement. See this discussion for plenty of examples.

How do you know? I mean how do you know it's a 'moral' compass, and not just any old compass? — Isaac

Okay. I'm hungry. There's a banana on the table. I don't like the banana and decide to hold off on eating it. There isn't a moral component in the decision I can find.

I know my little sister is looking forward to eating the banana. Now a moral component enters my decision. I have one more "excuse" not to eat the banana. I like to think well of myself, so I'd like to frame it as a moral decision. But this also makes me de-emphasise that I dislike bananas. Then I can ask why I'd think better of myself if my motives aren't "being picky" (oh hey, there has been a potentially moral angle on it all along, and I didn't notice) but being "considerate". My motivation is a sort of compound, though, so whatever I wish to think about myself isn't all that important. A panel of disinterested observers could tell me how I consistently act, though...

Yeah, how do I know? Maybe I'm just not hungry enough to eat a banana. But there is a constellation, and the ways to arrange the pieses are, to an extent similar, and extended observation can get you a clearer picture. I don't think purely moral actions exist, and I also think completely amoral actions are rare. So the question is most likely "how do I know the ratio?"

I probably don't, but I can guess and feel hurt when other people laugh at my guess and guess again.

Yeah, that's actually where I'm going with this. Once we accept that 'moral' is a publicly defined term, we simultaneously accepted the mess and the dynamism (like your definition here, by the way), we have to accepted that one a thing is 'moral', that's alk there is to it. There's 'moral', not 'moral', and 'sort of moral, fuzzy at the edges'. But there's no way if working out that fuzziness, there's nothing most moral, it just us what it us, a messy, community defined group. — Isaac

So where do you place protests, criticism, and conflict, if the moral realm is all public sanction? Don't forget that every single one of us is part of each other's context, even if only in some very minuscle way. How do topics (like, say, trans rights) enter the public discourse? I can't imagine explaining any of that without morally interested agents. (Meme theory maybe?)

Not entirely sure what distinction you mean here. — Isaac

Easy things first. I'm talking about the distinction between being wrong about language, and being wrong about morals. I can't figure out how to read you and still be able to tell the difference.

I think we agree 'bad' doesn't mean anything on its own beyond a vague indication toward a negative. One can be a bad actor, but a good person. One can be a bad person but a good actor. So bad and good only mean anything relative to some objective or ideal. Something which is morally bad is bad relative to ideals of morality (behaviour, character...). If I've understood you correctly, we're on the same page here. — Isaac

Yes, as far as I can tell, we're on the same page here.

The word 'moral' has to have some public meaning for it to be useful. It has to identify some publicly available set of behaviours or ideals IR characteristics, otherwise it would serve no purpose and be impossible to learn how to use. So I don't see how it can mean 'whatever behaviours you think fit'. That would be a private meaning. — Isaac

That one, I think, needs some unpacking. First, I think this is the place where I should lay open my bias. I've studied sociology on university, but the discipline I fell in love with was linguistics. So while I'd roughly agree that the word "moral" has to be useful when referring to the public, I also think it has to be applicable on all social levels from the individual, upwards, since a person has morals, and any grouping has morals, and there's no guarantee that they're the same, since not every behaviour that differs from public morals is immoral or amoral.

A person's bahaviour that doesn't conform to the public set of rules, for example, can be classified in three distinct ways:

a) moral (person acts according to private moral compass)
b) immoral (attempts to act according to a moral compass, but fails, maybe due to a lack of will power)
c) amoral (psychopaths see morals as an external imposition)

Now those are psychological terms, as they pertain to the way individuals make choices. There's a social level, too:

a) moral (in accordance with some superindividual set of rules - a culture or subculture)
b) immoral (deviant)
c) amoral (actions that have no moral import; chosing to eat a hotdog over a burger)

The easiest way to resolve this via separate lexical entries. (During analysis we'd be calling only one of those sets "moral", but we'd have to decide beforehand which one, to avoid confusion.)

I've noticed about myself that I when I say someone acts morally, I mean that the person acts according to an inner moral compass, regardless of whether that compass is aligned with the morals of a greater group. When I mean to say that someone acts in accordance with a group's morals, then I say it like that. So a psychopath may act in accordance with his cultures morals, but he doesn't act in accordance with any inner moral compass. My speech habit is to say a psychopath doesn't act morally, even he chooses to stick to his culture's rules.

If possible, I'd like to find a way to use the word moral on both the personal and social level, via some coherent theory, but... it's hard. I believe that people recreate social structures in their daily conduct, and by that I mean that a culture usually incorporates not only typical moral rules, but also typical moral conflict (e.g. pro-choice vs. pro-life). As such parameters shift, but some rules are more stable than others. Lines like "abortion is murder" or "(online-)piracy is theft" are emotional appeals to less controversial rules, but you can craft rational arguments about why this should be the case. And these discussions are part of the environment in which we develop our personal morals, the younger the more potent, I think.

I lean towards a dynamic meaning of moral that has something to say about all the levels. Individuals who move through space-time as social vortices who accumulate and disseminate morals through their behaviour. And any analysis should account for all levels, if possible.

So a person who personally thinks he should follow all of society's rules, and has not particular confidence in his own judgement, would act in accordance with society's morals, but he's also likely to encounter plenty of criticism as a "stickler for rules", and will be asked to lighten up. You cannot analyse this under the aegis of morality, if moral only has the public meaning.

I feel like I've been rambling, but I'll leave this as is, or I'll never finish this post. To summarise, I definitely think that the term "moral" needs to deal with the public sphere, but I think that ideally it should deal with the entire social spectrum.

You might want the public meaning to be something more than just an arbitrary set of behaviours, maybe publicly available membership criteria such that our violent student could make an argument that his behaviour fits the definition. But, as I said to SophistiCat, it seems highly unlikely to me that the meaning would be so pure, given the language's history, but even it was, it would still have to have boundaries in order to be a useful word at all. — Isaac

Nah, I'm perfectly fine with it all being messy. As I said above, though, I think we need to be careful about the word's scope. I consider morality to be some sort of never ending process where specific rules are both input and output of thinking-feeling agents' actions. It's going to be messy (not sure about the extent to which it is arbitrary).

Hitting old ladies is far from any of the ideals or standards within the general public definition of moral, so doing so is morally bad. — Isaac

In moral discussions, people tend to chose non-controversial rules, so controversies are going to feel implausible. You need to suspend disbelief, though, if you're going to use such examples for thorough study of what the concept could mean. If my personal morals demand to hit one old lady per week, and I do that, I'm not acting amorally. I'm not acting immoraly with respect to my own moral compass, but I am acting immoraly with respect to society's standards, and I'm going to have a hard time hitting old ladies in prison. (Maybe I'm secretly relieved, because I don't like hitting old ladies?)

There's really nothing you can say beyond that, if you're not aiming for universalism.

Hopefully the former, especially as I wrote 'work' where I meant to write 'word' (new phone, different keyboard). — Isaac

I didn't even notice the typo (so much for careful reading...). And I'm still not sure what you're saying here.

In order for the student to merely 'disagree' here, rather than be wrong about the meaning of the term 'morally bad' he must have his own private meaning of the term 'morally bad', one which is in disagreement with the one the rest of the language community uses. If, on the contrary, he does not have a private meaning of the term 'morally bad', then he must acquiesce to the meaning determined by the language community, and that does not include hitting old ladies. — Isaac

"Morally bad" represents a "negative moral evaluation". "Hitting old ladies" is a state of affair prone to moral evaluation. A person who doesn't evaluate hitting old ladies negatively would be using the term "morally bad" incorrectly if he said from his perspective that hitting old ladies is morally bad, but he would be using "morally bad" correctly if he said from his society's perspective that "hitting old ladies is bad". Moral evaluations are always tied to a perspective. The meaning of "morally bad" isn't private; the personal evaluation tied to the word is, independently of whether there's agreement or disagreement (or indecision, or indifference).

You're seem to be getting rid of a useful distinction, and I can't figure out why? What do we get in return?

You haven't answered the question though. I wanted to know why you confidently allowed the student to have his own private meaning for the term 'morally good', but you're deeply suspicious if he tries to claim his own private meaning for the term 'hitting'? — Isaac

I didn't anser that question, because that's not what I intended to say, and - to be honest - I don't think I I did. I called it a linguistic failure. Being wrong about "good" (he's not wrong about morally; the adverb's appropriate to the situation) and being wrong about "to hit" are both instances of linguistic failure. (I do allow him a private meaning for both words in some limited context - say, a diary written in code.)

Basically, I misinterpreted your question, and I'm still not sure why you'd think I allow a private meaning for the term "morally good".

You do seem to mingle language and morals at a deep level, in a way I don't quite understand. Sure, they're entwined, as you say, but it's generally not hard to follow the distinct threads, horrid tangles notwithstanding. Also, both language and morals involve social rules, so if you abstract enough you may end up in a place where they're the same, but they also use a lot of their usefulness at terms.

For example:

When the grocer delivers potatoes, you 'ought' to pay him because that's the meaning of the work 'ought'. — Isaac

This seems needlessly hard to parse or outright wrong. I don't know which.

So if, in the first example, the student says"I understand that you think it's 'hitting' to push my fist toward an old lady this way, but I disagree," why does no one treat it as a disagreement? It's not, he's just flat out wrong about what hitting is. — Isaac

Well, he's certainly flat out wrong. Whether or not he, in addition, disagrees is an empirical question. Personally, decontextualised like in this thread, I'm more likely to imagine irony designed to dismiss your intervention.

If it really is a disagreement about the word "to hit", I'd be inclined to think that he's trying to find a "loophole in the law" rather than to act morally. But that, too, is an empirical question. Very unusual people do exist.

If a foreign student learning English pointed at someone hitting an old Lady and said "stroking", you'd be inclined to say "no, not 'stroking', that's 'hitting'". If they then said "morally good", why would you not similarly correct them and say "no, 'morally bad'"? — Isaac

If a foreign language student sees someone hitting an old lady, intervenes, and says "No, no. Morally good," we have a likely a language problem. - A linguistic failure

If you see a foreign language student hitting an old lady, intervene, and he says "I understand that you think it's morally wrong to hit an old lady, but I disagree," we likely do not have language problem. - A moral disagreement

If you see a foreign language student hitting an old lady, intervene, and he doesn't understand why, we likely do not have language problem. - A moral failure

There can obviously overlap, but that's the gist of it.

The relation between discursive ethics and pratical morals is a rather interesting topic on its own, I'd say.

— Avery

• don't believe that objective moral facts exist, because I haven't seen any compelling evidence that they do exist.
• believe that objective morals are not required for a logical model to explain the world.
• things start to make a lot more sense when you remove objective morals from a model of the reality.

Have you tried out social relativism?

A social relativist would say there are "objective moral facts", but they're probably not what you think of when you say the above. A social relativist would say that moral facts are a form of social structure. For example, when you walk down the street and notice an open door, you're unlikely to walk in. There's a range of likely reactions, but you're only going to make an overt moral decision if your situational curiosity comes into conflict with "this is not my house; I have no business entering". But even if you're just walking by, maybe without much curiosity, there's a habitual moral layer to your behaviour.

An accidentally time-travelling cavement would have a very different reaction, because he'd been socialised in a very, very different moral environment.

Wanting moralist right/wrong rules I think is very common in humans, because we use abstraction to navigate our enviroment. The problem with fixing moral rights and wrongs is, though, that our theories about what's right and wrong are a crucial part of our moral upbringing, and to the extent that they influence our behaviour, gaining new moral insight keeps the moral environment changing. Moral decisions are only perceived as such when they're problematic, and if a particular group of people solidify a typical problematic situation into a norm, then there's a change in the moral environment for these people. And that change causes new unforseen problems. There can be no universal right/wrong rules for this reason, but some constellations of rules can be more stable than others.

So I think there are objective moral facts, but they're not about what's "really" right or wrong; they're about complex moral behaviour.

And if you hadn't said what I quoted right now, I'd probably not have realised it but: the headstart you get isn't your priviledge. You get the headstart because of your (unnamed) privileadge (I'm guessing it's shoe size, am I right?). — Dawnstorm

Eh, I'm not sure that's quite right. I'm having second thoughts. It's mostly a terminology problem, but I'm pretty sure priviledge is attached to a factor, but it's not quite the individual advantage either.

(What's the etiquette for such a case, where I have amendments to make, and I'm still the last post. Editing my post? Quoting myself?)

But focus on only one race, one game if you like game theory. — Alejandro

I'm not sure how to deal with that example, though. Sharing the cash is a stop-gap measure at best, and flaunting your priviledge at worst.

A few other things:

Eliminating my headstart can only be done by me right? — Alejandro

Generally, no, you can't eliminate your head start. It's baked into the system. In your example, you can walk back to the starting line, sure. In real life, you can't stop being a male, white, or straight.

And if you hadn't said what I quoted right now, I'd probably not have realised it but: the headstart you get isn't your priviledge. You get the headstart because of your (unnamed) privileadge (I'm guessing it's shoe size, am I right?).

However, if I do it, I will lose the race because I do not have the same abilities that the others may have. — Alejandro

Right. Now you're underpriviledged, and the headstart is "affirmative action". You're doing the right thing by investing in your skills. Affirmative action will cease once you catch up (or so the theory goes). Except it's only one race, so it's pretty pointless to invest. (And anyway, it's your example. You could have been an excellent runner with a headstart, who can afford to take it easy.)

Finally, if it's only one race, and you're slow (and thus underpriviledged), and you don't get a headstart, that's all right, too, since one of the winners might give you 50 dollar to teach him you're expertise.

It's not about one race. It's never about one race. It's about a repeated and systematic pattern across many, many races. So I don't really know what to say about solution, other than it doesn't change much (and in some cases it might be better to keep the money so you're not the well-meaning but cluesless guy who rubs salt into a sore wound by offering a trifle).

What if me, a privileged and slow individual, trade $50 with anyone that teaches me how to run faster and win? I still have my privilege, I am not renouncing it, but now I am using it as a tool from which someone else may benefit. — Alejandro

So, you, a slow runner, keep track of the guy who does not have your advantage but still almost beats you, and give him $ 50,-- you wouldn't have had without your headstart so he can teach you how to run faster, and so that in the next race, he'll have an eaven harder time catching up. He may get bitter, and since he now has $ 50,-- his motivation to run hard drops a little. However, all the others will race each other (not you), so the fastest of them can have $ 50,-- from you. You get $ 50,-- with each race, and expand your advantage, until you're good enough that your investment is just a charity holdover to flaunt your status, with lots of guys behind you to think: "That should have been me."

That's not a solution; that's the problem.

What I meant was that the idea of a "mode of limited transposition" didn't exist as something worth naming until exactly the moment when it was used by Messiaen (at least that's my understanding).

I don't doubt that there's math in music, but I think the process by which math becomes musically relevant is fascinating and potentially understudied (or I just haven't found the right resources). — Halley

It's... difficult. I'm not a philosopher actually, but music theory has always reminded me somewhat of linguistic theory (something I know a little better). What they have in common is that we have lived systems we learn, and theories about how they work that feed into learning.

So basically, you have this theory and it can be used in different ways:

1. Describe what people are doing
2. Use the theory as a method of learning (which impacts what people are doing and creates a feedback loop)
3. Scour the theory for logical possibilities and see what people could be doing but aren't.
4. Use it as a set of rules to judge the value of the product

So there's a question in what ways a descriptive music theory is useful. For example, the following video discusses basically what theoretical framework is useful when describing the harmonics of "Sweet Home Alabama": Tonal Harmony? Modal Harmony? Or something else (with Tagg's tonic-outgoing-medial-incoming loop as an example)?



The problem here is that what sort of description you find most useful often depends on what you hear, and what you hear may be influenced by the theory you've been exposed to.

Similarly, you can write a piece of music with a particular theory in mind. And then you can make an adjustment because it sounds nice, but it's not entirely clear what you've done in terms of theory. Now, someone else comes along and doesn't like the adjustment you made. That person could easily try to use the obvious non-conformity as a legitimisation for why it doesn't work, but that would involve dismissing that it works for others, and dismissing the question of why it works for others as unimportant (since they're wrong).

So you have the same theory as a set of regularity interpreted as (a) a description of what's going on, (b) a generative aid, or provisory template, and (c) a system for judgement of good and bad. I see that all the time in both composition theory and linguistics.

Scientific theories for behaviour-external fields such as physics don't have (b) and (c). If you see an apple floating up into the sky you won't punish it for violating the laws of gravity; you'll try to figure out what's going on. And gravity, unlike language or music, isn't something you meaningfully participate in. (You do participate in gravity, obviously, to the extent that you're a physical object).

I'm not familiar with Messiaen. It seems to me, he's been scouring the formal properties of the theories for things that are logically possible, some of which have been done before (the wholetone scale is identical to his first mode as far as I can tell?), and some maybe haven't. You could, in theory, compose musics with a random scale (random variables: number of notes (1 -12), location of notes on the chromatic 12-tone scale). Even then, there a still elements we're taking for granted (for example the primacy of single notes a half-step apart), and they're ingrained in culture (for example in the form of instruments). That's not a problem if all you want is a generative method you can deviate from at pleasure, or if you want judgement standards. As a descriptive set of rules, though, you might encounter music you can't describe or will "misunderstand" if you use that particualr theory, and that's something you need to be aware of.

Not an expert in anything, but these are my thoughts about the topic.

As you say, it's a silly statement, but also a true statement. That's the puzzle. — Michael

For me, the puzzle is why this is a puzzle, but then I haven't read Moore and know little about him and the context of this puzzle.

Here's the thing: "It's raining, but I don't believe it's raining," isn't necessarily a silly statement. What if we're talking narrative present (present tense for past events) with an intrusive narrate. "It's raining (as I, the narratar), but I (my past self) don't believe it's raining." When speaking, you need to take perspective into account in a way you don't have to if you consider well-defined philosophical propositions. If you ignore perspective, you can create plenty of absurd situations:

Bill: I'm Bill.
Joe: No, I'm not.

Both are correct, and yet B seems to contradict A. What a puzzle! This constructed situation is nonsensical, because it entails that Joe can use "I" correctly but can't parse it when someone else uses it. (Not sure if cognitive impairments exist that make such a situation plausible.)

Similarly, Moore's puzzle is the result of assuming things about Macintosh's knowledge and then decontextualising him so that his knowledge is only partially relevant.

It's just not a puzzle that you can't truthfully speak the truth about whether or not it's raining if you don't know whether or not it's raining. Macintosh could gamble on it, though, if his intention is to speak a true sentence, rather than to speak the truth about rain. Basically, Macintosh would be betting on himself being wrong about rain. That this leads to real-life absurdity doesn't automatically cause a philosophical problem. It depends on what problems you want to explore (and this is where my ignorance of Moore limits me).

I'm not surprised they say this puzzle helped develop pragmatics. It's definitely relevant.

Okay. But if you were saying, "So far no one has been able to convince you that World War II actually occurred"...where would that leave us? — Frank Apisa

"World War II" is a valid value for "occurring". Even if we had no evidence, the meaning is fairly straightforward. "God", the creator god of the monotheistic religions at the very least, is different from that. If "God" created everything there is, then existance is a product of that process, and to say that "God" exists either sends me into an Escher painting equivalent of meaning, or it's an incomprehensible mystery for which I have no intution.

In any case, the logic for the empirical world, which I'd be prone to apply to things like "World War II" doesn't apply. If it did, most theists I know wouldn't be able to believe in God; as it is, when I outline what sort of God I don't believe in ("bearded man in the skay") then they say they don't either.

God concepts are manyfold, and Shintoist kami are very different beings from the monotheistic Gods, but there's also this spiritual, transcendental whiff to it that I have trouble understanding. I always end up at a point where there is no discenible difference between any one God existing or not. The only difference I can see is the word-behaviour of the believer.

This is true for everything. X either exists or does not exist. It is a mutually exclusive proposition. — Frank Apisa

My entire point, though, is that so far, no-one's been able to convince me that "God" is a valid value for X in that instance.

A lot of this question comes down to sentence structure and which words are used. “All Gods are fictional” and “Gods don’t exist” are synonymous, but add “I believe” to the front of each and (perhaps?) one negates itself, while the other does not. Hence why I say it comes down to sentence structure and essentially the logic behind grammar. — Pinprick

Language isn't that logical, though, when used in the wild. If you insist on thorough grammatical logic within philosophy, you either have to be very careful how you phrase things, or you create a insulated bubble, where your conclusions have little to do with the world we live in.

Under the assumption that "All Gods are fictional," and "Gods don't exist," are synonymous (which is not a given in every context), you could lead someone to commit to the positive phrasing and thus have them have a belief. Intuitively, I'd consider that move a rhetorical trick rather than anything philosophically meaningful.

They do not "believe" C...they KNOW C. — Frank Apisa

?

You are supposing that A is a positive statement...and B is a negative one. But that is not so. Both are positive statements. If made as assertions...BOTH would bear a burden of proof from the person making the assertion. — Frank Apisa

This isn't about the burden of proof. It's a negative statement, because it negates a positive statement. I brought this up precisely because the relation between the syntax and the semantics isn't as straightforward as it appears.

If I were to claim that the platypus doesn't exist, that would be negative statement, but the burden of proof would be on me. Whether or not a claim is positive or negative in syntactic structure doesn't really impact the burden of proof.

I'll demonstrate why I brought this up with my reply to Pinprick.

Perhaps?

All Gods are fictional.
No Gods are fictional. — Pinprick

That may work. The question, then, is if "All Gods are fictional," are semantically tied together with "Gods don't exist," phrased once with a positive and once with a negative structure. If so, can you say that there is a "believe in nothing"?

I don't really have an answer to this myself, except that I think it pays to make a difference between intutive concepts, semantics tied to word structures, and the structures themselves.

I think this because 'theism' is defined - definite - insofar as it's a 'conception of divinity' that consists of distinct truth-claims about g/G, and therefore, to my mind, are not "meaningless" ontologically, epistemically or ethically. g/G, I agree, is meaningless, but what we say about g/G - if it's proposition - is not. (Obviously, I exclude noncognitive theism, for instance, from consideration and give the mainstream / classical theists their cognitive due.) — 180 Proof

I tried to address this in a longer post, but I talked myself into a corner and got confused.

Basically, I view statements like "God exists," to have the structure of a statement, but its social function is appellative rather than referential. A complex of behaviours is tied to ritualistic verbiage. Except that's clearly not how the theists around me see it. And that's where my confusion enters.

Note that I make a difference between "undefined" and "meaningless". It's my impression that God being "undefined" (or "undefinable") is part of the mystery and thus meaningful to theist. I can't mine meaning that way. I don't know how that works. And that's what makes me an atheist.

A: God exists.
B: God doesn't exist.
C: God may or may not exist.

Some people believe neither A nor B, because they believe C.

For me the concept of God holds no meaning, so I reject A, B, and C as the same sort of alien stuff. I reject the topic itself as meaningless in both theory and practise, not the propositions as untrue.

Also, how you phrase things often determines what the negative is:

To use Cobens example (abridged because I'm too lazy to type it all):

A1: There is a feline that hasn't been catalogued by science.
B1: There is no feline that hasn't been catalogued by science.
C: There may or may not be a feline....

A2: Not all felines have been catalogued by science.
B2: All felines have been catalogued by science.
C2: All felines may or may not have been catalogued by science.

Can anyone here think of a way to phrase "God doesn't exist," as a positive, to which "God exists," would be a negative? I can't.

But, if you want to suppose someone saying that either "yes" or "no" is correct for a "yes or no" question...go with it. — Frank Apisa

That's not what I'm saying, though. I'm saying that my hunch is that it's possible to be fooled by the grammatical structure of sentence. Just because you can formulate a yes/no question for gods' existance doesn't mean that this formulation is a valid treatment of the concept of God.

For what it's worth, I do think I'm overshooting my mark by treating all god concepts the same. Even translation is difficult. A monotheistic God is rather different from the Greek lot, and they're both pretty different from Shintoist Kami. I'm shaky on this all, because I'm generally not bothered by any of this in my daily life.

I mean what about:

Does the Mellow-winged Staggerthwart exist? (Can you answer the question with yes/no, before figuring out what this is supposed to be? I just arranged random words, here. There's no meaning to it.)

Or self-referential: Does existence exist?

Not all sentences of a certain structure are necessarily valid representations of... well, anything meaningful. It's an empty phrase that traps people in an uresolvable conflict and sorts them into two sides, where emotional intensity is substituted for content. The divinity aspect allows people on either side to shift goal-posts at will. People can be umpires in the game, but they can't do anything about the goalpost shifting, because it's in the rules.

Goalpost shifting is easily possible about nearby aliens, too, but it's not in the rules. I realise that the burden of proof, here, is on me, and since it's just a hunch (with ever-decreasing certainty about different God concepts), I don't quite know how to do this or if I can at all.

One of the things I "got" there, though, was a predisposition toward "There probably are no gods"...which is a perfectly fine take to have on the REALITY. Fact is, either there is at least one god...or there are none. So the hard atheist and the hard theist have at least a 50% chance of being correct. And the use of "atheist" as a descriptor for someone with that disposition MAKES SENSE. — Frank Apisa

Hm, maybe. It's entirely practical, though. I definitively behave as if there are no gods. Now, I'm a rather cautious person, and I even have a tendency towards anxiety. I'm fairly sure if I were, in the back of my mind, considering the possibility that there are gods, I'd be worrying about that, and it would be a hindrance in making decisions. What if I angered a god? Things like that. I have no such worries, so it'd be probably more a pre-disposition towards "There are no gods," without the probably. Which would be even further down the atheist road, under the three-category-model.

My position, though, is better described that the hard atheist and hard theist have a 0 % chance to be correct, because their respective claims aren't meaningful enough to trigger correctness conditions. Both claims can be disregarded. (This implies that an agnostic who believes that either the hard atheist or the hard theist is correct, would also have 0 % chance to be correct.)

This is further complicated by the fact that I'm a relativist, though. I can only say this some degree of confidence within the confines of my own worldview. I strongly suspect that theists at least do attach some sort of meaning to the proposition, but I since all my perspective-taking exercises in that direction have failed, I can't behave as if. In a sense, this makes my atheism mostly performative, with no content.

There are strange flies in your country. In mine they are not so easily frightened off. Declaring yourself an atheist is the easiest way to get bitten by flies. — David Mo

I'm Austrian. Upper Austria to be precise. It's a very secular life around here. You won't even talk about religion at all until you know each other a bit better (or the context warrants it; e.g. you're talking about news). I'm pretty lucky in that respect. Pretty much the only people trying to convert me are Jehova's Witnesses.

Do these terms mean that you have observed the stimulus prior to its description, or, you heard its description prior to your observation, respectively? — CeleRate

Yes.

If the order is the distinction, I'm still unsure how that would be the critical variable. Wouldn't the extraordinariness of a claim be more pertinent? — CeleRate

It's a framing issue. When you see a thing and part of its aspects surprise you, you'll want to integrate it into your worldview. It changes via direct experience. If you learn about a concept via a word, then you assume the word is meaningful, and you'll try to figure out what it means. You'll first have to try to figure out what the word means, because it's possible that the "thing" is already part of your worldview, but the other person uses an unfamiliar word and sets different accents. If that's the case, you'll have a oh-you-mean-X type of experience. Basically, an unfamiliar word and a description that doesn't trigger recognition doesn't necessarily introduce you to new concept. It might introduce you to an unfamiliar perspective on a known concept. That is: you get knew information about the person you're speaking to via a familar concept (but only if you figure out that they're referring to a familiar concept).

But if you're really introduced to a new concept, you'll not be "naive" about the concept when you encounter the thing in the wild. From the get go, your take on that thing will be influenced by the perspective of the person who introduced you to the concept. Part of the world-view integrational work has already been done. The more abstract the concept, the more pronounced the effect is.

At some level of abstraction the concept itself might actually be an interpretative mold to organise several disparate perceptions and/or feelings into a "comparative matrix". I think words like "love" and "justice" fall into this category. Anything that's culturally specific you usually learn about during childhood, a time when you're still consolidating new concepts into a world view. A lot of these things feel very basic later in life, but you actually absorb them early on by imitation, trial and error. When there's a concept you feel is vital to others, you might be motivated to actively seek out clues. A series of Is-this-it? experiences until you're satisfied. If you fail to acquire too many culturally specific abstracts, you're going to have find other ways to deal with it. I didn't acquire the God concept properly, I think, because I sort of tagged with make-belief, like the Easter Bunny, who supposedly coloured and hid Easter eggs (it was clear to me that bunnies can't hold brushes, and all those pictures were cartoons, that my parents were smart enough to know this, too, yet they'd never admit that they were responsible - I thought God was a similar sort of game; I remember the surprise when I found they were actually serious about that).

One important question about word-first concepts is this: how do we satisfy ourselves that this thing or this constellation of things corresponds to this concept? (Conversion experiences should be interesting.)

Maybe it would help me to understand the epistemology you use to develop an understanding of things contained in the universe, and what is meant by level. — CeleRate

Sadly, that's a mostly intuitive process, and I'm not so sure how to describe this myself. I'm not even quite sure what I mean by level. When I look at the word "God", then I'm trying to figure out what that could mean in a way that would make sense within the confines of my world view. Since I have functional world view that does fine without the concept, this is difficult. So it's mostly an exercise in taking another persons perspective. But the God-concept is opaque.

Unicorns, for example, are comparatively easy. There physical objects, for example. There can be things that look like unicorns, and they then either are Unicorns or not. I don't need complete information. For example, I don't need to know the gestetation period of unicorns, unless if that were the easiest feature with which to distinguish them form mere single-horned horses.

Basically, I'd need some way to check for evidence of God, or some sort of perspective that allows me to interpret stuff that's there as evidence for God. I've developed the unsystematic intuition that if you have faith in God, everything is potential evidence, and if you don't nothing is. And that's a bit of a road block. I don't think there's a specific direction my God concept has to... concretise?... before I can really tackle the question of existance.

That's precisely the area where I confuse myself the most, though, so I doubt I can explain myself very well here.

One's world-view is ultimately what a given individual believes is understood. But people's worldviews can undergo conversions. — CeleRate

I'm not sure I'm reading you right, here, but I think the bulk of one's worldview is unconcious, and it's less a finished product, and more an ongoing progress. Crises will lead to restructurings, and things like epiphanies may not be as sudden as they seem to your conscious self (on account of a sudden trigger). I think I may be using the term a little more broadly than you do in this paragraph (and also a little less precisely as a consequence). There's nothing I disagree with here, though.

The easiness is something I experienced. Trial and error. It would have been different for Huxely. For example, not believing in God, it seems to me, was quite a bit harder in the 19th Century than it was a hundred years later, and that's likely not the only difference. People tend to leave me alone, when I say I'm an atheist. It's just not a big deal. Saying I'm an agnostic is morely to invite discussion, and I'm not always in the mood. Trial and error helped me to find out that I was happier if I generally said that I was an atheist and clarify that I was actually an agnostic when already in conversation on the topic. Nobody took offense, or thought I'd been lying to them. Also, when time was of essence, "atheist" was simply a more reliably known word. In my day-to-day life, I'm very pragmatic about this.

I'm being difficult in this thread, mostly because it's about the term's meaning. I'm stating my preference, but what I'm actually advocating is to know and accept all the definitions out there, at least passively, when hearing or reading.

How about if someone says "unicorns don't exist". Would one be unable to not believe in unicorns if one understood (maybe even imagining renditions seen) what is meant by the question? Or, is there a different point I missed? — CeleRate

In this paragraph, I was using the "atheist" definition that says you need to believe that God doesn't exist. If I don't know what "God" is supposed to be, I can believe neither that he exists, nor that he does not exists. This means that I mean the standard for "does not believe God exists," but I do not meet the standards for "believes that God exists." There are higher standards for believing a negative statement than there are for not believing the corresponding positive statement.

But there are complications here; the short version is I understand the concept of unicorns well enough to believe it very likely that unicorns don't exist. I cannot say the same for God. But what's the difference?

First something obvious: Do I believe sparrows exist? Yes, I do. I've seen sparrows before I even learned to speak. I can point at the bird and ask, "What is this?" It's a thing-first concept.

But if you tell me about the platypus, I might be skeptical. Does such a creature really exist? It's a word-first concept. You describe the creature, and it sounds really unlikely. Maybe you've tried to sell me on drop bears in the past and laughed at me when I was gullible? It's a word-first concept for me, but there's a hierarchy of ever more convincing evidence: pictures, videos, seeing the real thing in a zoo.

A unicorn is word-first concept, too, for me, but the word's cultural status is "mythical creature" rather than "animal", and that complicates things. The unicorn sounds unlikely, but maybe it's not impossible. I might believe it exists, the way a crypto-zoologists would: somewhere out there is an animal that fits the description more or less closely. Maybe it's a hidden species? Maybe it's an occasional mutation of a known species? But if we're sufficiently influenced by myths or fiction to think of it as "magical" in some form (say, it's not really a unicorn, if it's horn doesn't have healing powers), then a real life horned horse simply won't count as a unicorn. But the concept is still understandable. I'd have to say that it's unlikely a unicorn exists to begin with if we expect an animal, but exponentially more unlikely if we actually expect a magical creature.

Things complicate even more if the myth in question is alive and well in the culture you operate in. A word-first concept believed on faith has dubious evidence requirement. Once you reach the level of the Christian God, you have an entity where nearly everything in existence can count as evidence, simply because you have faith. I don't think that people relax their requirements for evidence; it may be just that different sorts of entities require different sorts of evidence. But if I don't understand what sort of entity God is supposed to be, I'm not sure how to look at the world to find evidence. I can dismiss the concept as making no sense (which is what people do when they parody the concept of God with "invisible pink unicorns"), but I can't "believe that God doesn't exist". The concept never reaches a high enough epistemic level within the confines of my world view. Cultural practise is important here, because I know people who believe in God, but who are neither gullible nor idiots.

However, I'm not sure I understand what distinction you were alluding to in the comparison of the two propositions "God exists," and "God doesn't exist". Thanks
Options — CeleRate

That's without a doubt the hardest concept to explain, not the least because I haven't actually worked this out myself. It's more a hunch than anything, and it ties in with the above: what counts as evidence for God, and how do you have to look at the world to see those... things? as evidence. To what extent, am I just using language differently from someone else? Does God have a clearly demarked reference in the real world (as a unicorn would have were it to exist)? At some point in the process I abstract so much that I suspect the difference between existance and non-existence might disappear you it were possible to compare worldviews directly (it isn't; world views other than your own are only available via interpretation through the lense of your own, and how much - if anything - of human worldviews are human universals isn't clear.)

I've never come to clear understanding on this myself, so I'm really struggling to put intution into words.

Is there anyone here who uses “atheist” as a descriptor or part of a descriptor…who falls outside of that parameter? I’d love to discuss the issue with anyone who does. — Frank Apisa

That's me. Or at leat that's my self-perception; I'm not sure you'd agree.

I definitely think that "God exists," and "God doesn't exist," have the same epistemological status. They're both undecidable in my world-view, because I don't know how to order things in a way for the concept to make sense. There are simplistic concepts of God that I do believe don't exist (e.g. old man with a beard in the sky), but neither do most theists, so these simplistic concepts don't count.

Pondering the question of God is a bit like trying to run a piece of software that won't run on my OS on a shoddily written emulator. The functions the programs fulfills are either not very important to me, or I have programs that actually work fine on my OS (not without the occasional bug) that do it for me. The only reason I'm bothering with the program at all, because many people say it's a must have and keep asking me what I think of it. What I think of it is that it's a nuisance, because the emulator sucks, and I'd rather not bother with it at all, when I have workable alternatives.

My daily life experience back when I self-identified as an agnostic was that it was still easier to call myself an atheist, because not everyone the term "agnostic". The question I used to encounter most is "Do you believe in God," to which a yes/no answer was usually a sufficient answer. The line isn't just a question about the existance of God; if you grow up in a Catholic household and go to church on Sunday, you're intimately familiar with the Apostle's Creed ("I believe in God, the Father almighty..."), and at least that sort of contextualises the question. It's a question about faith, not about whether you believe a proposition. In context, I can talk about why I don't really fit in. It's a social question.

Most of the time I used the term "atheist" (while calling myself an agnostic in a more technical context), it was in a really banal context. ("Oh, it's nearly time for church. You coming?" - "Nah, I'm an atheist." - "Gotcha. See you later." -- I wouldn't have been giving them information here. They're fine with a nonbeliever coming along, but by emphasising that I'm an atheist, I'm telling them nothing's changed)

To me the question "Do you believe in God," loses all meaning when I take it out of its social, lived context. And in isolation "Does God exist?" is even worse, because then you'll have to take into account the possibility that people - being fallible - are mistaken about His attributes, and once you go down that rabbit hole nothing remains to make a proposition about. You have to wait until understand the concept enough before you can even start to ponder it. At this point, I'm not holding my breath. But conversion experiences do happen, so who knows?

For me, the word "God" derives its meaning entirely from its lived social context. And as such, I found the grid-based approach makes it easier for me to organise the social environment, for example, because there are theists who share my sense of the unknowability of God, but are somehow able to endow mystery with metaphysical significance, something I fail to do. Basically, I don't know what it's like to believe in God.

Personally, I've never seen an argument for God that's convincing, and I've never seen an argument against God that's convincing. The ontological argument sounds silly, the problem of evil isn't a problem, etc. Now, I'm basically a relativist. We create our worldviews as we live in the world. So if I grew up with my worldview, but at some point my concept of God just stopped growing along with it, it's no surprise that all the God-concepts I can muster are childish. Basically, when the ontological argument looks silly to me, it's just a symptom of the underlying underveloped concept.

This sort of relativism is not without its problems though. Crucially, it's very hard to figure out how much about the differences in worldviews is down to personality differences, how much to personal experience/history, and how much to semantics and usage.

The difference between "atheist/agnostic" in different usages is pretty transparent to me. I can translate between the concepts, but since I've been using the grid-based approach for around 15 years, now, I'm biased towards this one - by habit. The difference between "God exists," and "God doesn't exist," is semantically opaque to me, though the logical structure suggests they're opposites. And at this point I have to remember that all the meaning I can assign comes from the terms social context. I'd expect for a theist the difference between "God exists," and "God doesn't exist," is clear as day, and they may suspect at this point I'm just bullshitting around. I'm not. This sort of stuff really does go on in my head.

If you need to understand how this world would change if a God existed to be an agnostic, then I can't be an agnostic. And if you have to understand what it is that doesn't exist when you say "God doesn't exist," I can't be an atheist. There are a lot of questions like these, and none of them mean much to me. A binary like "believes in God/doesn't believe in God" is about social behaviour, which is observable, and easy to understand. Thus it's more useful as a comparative, social term to me.

So if I have to choose between "God exists," and "God doesn't exist," I'll definitely choose the latter, though I'd rather not choose. This is not an expression of likelihood, though; it's that if I said the former in the context of my day-to-day life people will have expectations about my behaviour that won't pan out. I don't go to church, I don't pray, the "Word of God" carries no weight with me, etc. As a proposition, "God doesn't exist," is simply more compatible behaviour. None of this says anything about what I actually do believe, except what you can glean from what I have to deal with, and how I deal with it.

I worry that this amounts mostly to meaningless babble, but I'm not sure I can do better.

That MISTAKE is the entire reason for the controversy...a reason you seem willing to simply disregard, Dawn. — Frank Apisa

Yes, I'm perfectly willing to disregard this "mistake". First, and foremost, I'm willing to disregard this "mistake" because etymology isn't destiny. I'm willing to use the word atheist this way, because a lot of people use the word this way, and because I like it.

Whether or not this is an actual honest mistake, or whether it's a series of little mistakes, or a politically motivated deliberate re-interpretation, or whatever else might have led to the current usage doesn't matter much to me at this point.

But apart from this, I'm really not sure how you think language works, or what etymology does. When
you're saying this in a follow-up post:

"Anti" has a specific meaning. The letter "a" at the beginning of a word does not. Agreed? — Frank Apisa

I just don't know how you can say this. Anti- is a prefix with a determined meaning, and a- is also a prefix with a determined meaning (although there's more than one "a-"; from the etymology site you're linking to).

Of course, a word-initial "a" isn't always a prefix. It's not in "aardvark", to use your example in my reply to me. The a- in atheist and the a- in agnostic are the same prefix.

"Agreed" very obviously has nothing to do with greed, since the uninflected verb form is "agree". The a- is definitely a prefix, though. Etymologically a variant of "ad" as the etymology site tells me.

The part of grammar that deals with wordformation is morphology. It's important to understand morphology if you're going to do etymology.

(a) theist, resulting in a meaning of "without a belief in any gods" IS A MISTAKE. — Frank Apisa

Yes. When the word was originally coined, we didn't tag "a-" onto "theism". But according to the link you provided it's from Greek "a-theos", and the site even specifies the "a-" as "a (3)", which is referring to their own site and the linke I provided above. So it basically meant "without god" rather than "without theism".

It never happened.

It didn't happen when the word was coint. Something happened later, or nobody would be using it like that now. You can call it a "mistake" if you like, but we'd have to go through the history of the word to see what really happened. Langauge is, has been, and will be messy.

It couldn't happen, because the word "atheism" came into the English language BEFORE theism. It is an etymological construct that makes as much sense as supposing "abate" means without "bate" or "aardvark" meaning without "ardvark" or "abridge" meaning without a"bridge."

Once again, if you're going to argue from etymology you should demonstrate a better sense of morphology. "a-bate" is the same prefix as "a-gree", and not the same prefix as "atheist". "Bate" doesn't exist, I think, as a standalone English verb, but it does survive in phrases like "with bated breath". The "a-" in "abridge" is the same "a-" again, as in "abate", and "agree". But "bridge" (romanic) in "abridge" is unrelated to the noun bridge (germanic). The a in "aardvark" isn't a prefix at all.

The more you talk about etymology, the less persuasive you actually become.

"Rusty"? Why? — David Mo

I haven't used the "theist->agnostic->atheist" partition in years (I'd guess around 15 years, but I don't remember exactly), and I'm a creature of habit. There were some transition hiccups, but I don't remember them that well either.

And if it reaches a deadlock, I would suggest no longer discussing it. No one can force anyone to change. — Coben

That's not the problem, really. I don't much like conflict. I've typed up replies I chose not to post pretty much since the beginning of this thread, because I was dissatisfied with them. A discussion I don't engage in can't reach a deadlock. It's more a matter of feeling like contributing but finding no opening. I'm aware it's really a personal problem of mine. But under such conditions letting it go also feels wrong. Disrespectful? Patronising? I don't know. Something in this direction.

I replied to your post because I found it easier to open up the thread for me, but pretty much immediately after replying I felt it was maybe a bit impolite to talk about Frank Apisa rather than to him. I sometimes think I worry too much.

This argument has just come up because some people in this forum are INSISTING that I...all other agnostics...and all babies and toddlers...

...must accept the descriptor ATHEIST, because some dictionaries describe it that way. — Frank Apisa

See, I find this terribly confusing. If I use the grid-based definition (a)theist/(a)gnostic, then of course you are an atheist under that definition. I'm aware you reject that definition, and that's fine with me. But you seem to be so vehemently against being called an atheist, that it's nearly impossible to even posit that definition. If that's the case, though, why make such a thread?

The grid-based approach is a different discriptor attached to the same label. You're being labeled an atheist, not described as one the way you understand the term, and I'm fairly sure you understand that. So if, beyond rejecting the label, you reject the underlying descriptor - then you invalidate any opposing point of view from the get go, and conversation is impossible.

So:

I do not know if gods exist or not;
I see no reason to suspect gods CANNOT EXIST...that the existence of gods is impossible;
I see no reason to suspect that gods MUST EXIST...that gods are needed to explain existence;
I do not see enough unambiguous evidence upon which to base a meaningful guess in either direction... — Frank Apisa

Yes, this is an agnostic position, because it's about knowledge. I doubt anyone would disagree. However, the grid-based approach doesn't see agnosticism and atheism as mutually exclusive, so at this point people who use the grid-based approach don't have enough information to label you an atheist. You're definitely an agnostic, though.

It's when you add:

...so I don't. — Frank Apisa

that we can start to make a guess. One of the reasons I do remember why I made the switch from the three-category to the four-category (grid-based) approach is that quite a few of the Roman Catholics around me also subscribe to the position that they don't know whether or not God exists. But they react differently to this: it's that lack of knowledge, they tell me, that gives meaning to their faith. Under the three-category model, they'd be theists, because they believe in God. The four-category (grid-based) approach accomodates for these similarities with the categories itself, though: agnostic atheists and agnostic theists have something in common.

Of course, there's a trade-off: "atheist" is no longer a label for a positive belief. To get that back, you add subdivisions like "hard atheist". But there's no reason I couldn't do the equivalent under the three-category model, by subdividing theists. Which you choose will depend partly on what you're used to talking about more.

So:

The question ended up being: Which is the more sensible, more useful definition of the designator “atheist”… — Frank Apisa

I'm not that interested in the "more sensible" part, but the "more useful" part depends on the person and context. I personally made the switch from the three-category definition to the grid-based model, simple because I like variable based grids. You can simply expand them by adding another variable should one become relevant, for example. I like them. They fit the way I think, and so I expand less energy thinking. That's what makes them useful.

Unfortunately, when they realized they were about to be blown out of the water in that argument…the EVERYONE people abandoned ship. — Frank Apisa

Is this a debate? If so, I'll abandon ship, too.