The literal meaning is, reducing the poem to P

"P" is false

The poetic meaning --

in the context of the thread the poem is clearly about the superfluous nature of poetic meaning, how it's an amorphous concept and so it depends upon what we mean when we mean poetic meaning.


Did you buy a cat today? — Moliere

I'm not sure I can follow what you're saying.

No, I didn't buy a cat today, and it follows that none of the other lines are true either. Is that what you mean by "'P' is false"? If so, yes "P" is false. If not, what are you saying isntead?

I'm not sure why a paragraph of contextual meaning is sandwhiched between two references to truth. As you probably guessed, I didn't buy cat today. I don't quite see why this important. If I did, you might arrive at a different poetic meaning, or you might not, depending on your approach. Does the literal meaning change at all? I'd say no.

What's "P"? The words of the poem? P for proposition?

As for metaphor, I find it interesting that you provide a hierarchy of complicated that goes from basic to more complicated like this: synonymy -> metaphor -> substitution. A similar hierarchy I would have thought of is: simily -> metaphor -> conceit.

I'll probably have to read you more carefully before I understand what you're saying.

I like the poem. It's simple, descriptive. Maybe a little sad. When I read it, I wanted to do this. Forgive me. — T Clark

Thanks, and no need for forgiveness. I find edits interesting. They point towards a different take. And I generally like this version, but I find the "And it was fun," line jarring. Not sure why. Something in the sound of it? Not sure.

On either way, though, we can make a distinction between the poetic and the literal, right? — Moliere

Depends on what you mean by "poetic". I just improvised a four line poem with no metaphors in it whatsoever:

I bought a cat today
She came to me to play
And play we did and it was fun
She went away when she was done

So what's the poems poetic meaning as opposed to its literal meaning? Since I didn't have anything in mind but just to assemble lines without figurative meaning in them, I didn't make a figurative meaning for the poem as a whole, either. Which is to say I didn't put it in consciously. If I look at the lines I notice that the poet's initiative opens the poem, the cat's initiative continues the poem, then there's joint activity, and the cat's initiative ends the poem. Then there are cultural associations with "bought" that might have implications on agency (you buy a human, it's slavery - you buy a pet, it's...?). And I can go on like that, and get some sort of gestalt of the poem in my mind as a result. But that just leaves... stuff unsaid, implied. In what way is this different from being literal? Couldn't I pretend any old literal text is a poem and give it that sort of questioning?

What makes the above seem like a poem in the first place is: linebreaks, no punctuiation, rhythm and rhyme. Formal language characteristics not primarily about meaning. So what if "poetic meaning" is dependent on what you do with a text once you decide it's a poem, and not on what's actually in the text? Savouring rather than resolving ambiguity, for examples, might be one of the things that gives rise to "poetic meaning". In such a context, what would "literal" mean?

The phonetic "Chair" stands for a chair I'm sitting on. In a way it is the most basic metaphor -- to treat a sound as a differentiated object of meaning. — Moliere

No, mere substitution doesn't make a metaphor. Metaphor implies a comparison between two things. But the sound or written body of "chair" doesn't have anything to do with the thing, other than marking the concept. It's, as linguists say, an arbitrary symbol.

This picture was generated by artificial intelligence and won a fine art competition — T Clark

The article says he won first place for digital art. AI is definitely a digital tool. I see no problem.

From the article:

He told 9News that he made 900 iterations of the art before the piece he eventually submitted, edited it on Photoshop, and spent 80 hours on the art.

If he'd submitted the first iteration, unedited, would he have won? We can't know.

I don't know the first thing about AI, but you do have to set parameters. What's involved in those 900 iterations? Just hitting refresh until you get something you like? Looking at the result and deciding what parameters to tinker with?

In any case, I like the picture. I like the colours and the composition. I'm not fond of the... 3D effect? I can't seem to get into that (even in modern movies). The figures stand out too much, almost as if they're not in the picture. I don't know anything about art, so I can't explain properly. But it's a minor quibble anyway.

Anyway, if some people are better at getting favourable results using AI than others, using AI is a skill, too. I'd agree with the artist in saying that AI is a tool, too. If using it isn't your thing, don't use it. It's not a vital tool.

Some writers within the tradition of sociology do explore the nature of subjectivity in relation to a sense of otherness, such as GH Mead. Also, Erving Goffman's understanding of the social presentation of self in everyday life do explore the social construction of human identity. — Jack Cummins

Mead's pretty important, yes. He's conceptualising the self as a social process, the dynamic between the "me" (what you think you are in the eyes of the others) and the "I" (what reacts to the me). The self emerges from that process. Mead would have to be one of the first to import the mind of subject into sociology.

Goffman's more of an excentric in sociology. He's had pretty influential ideas, but unlike many others he doesn't present a clear theory. One of the most interesting ideas, I think, from Presentation of Self would be role distance. A social role is some set of perceived expectations based on some trait you have: your job, your gender, your relationships... anything. So, when you're playing the role of "waiter" in a restaurant, then there are things you're supposed to do, and things you're not supposed to do. You can accept or reject the role. It's possible to play the role in a way that makes it clear you'd rather do something else. Goffman calls that cynical roleplay. However, no role completely determines your behaviour, and there are many ways you can "bring yourself" into the role (my words, not Goffman's; it's been too long since I read him, and I read a German translation to boot, because that's what was available). To the extent that you bring yourself into the role, you display role distance. Displaying role distance can be a way to reject the stricures of role play, withoug rejecting the role. It's not cynical role play. Interestingly, people who exhibit no role distance, Goffman says, are often perceived as "overly correct", or "creepy" (certainly my words). So role distnace is part of the expectations that come with playing social roles, but they're not part of the expectations of any specific roles. This is what allows people to have "their favourite waiter", for example. Public roleplaying is always geared both towards your role and what you bring to it personally.

I don't really remember what Goffman said about that beyond that; but I figure, in the context of this thread, this means that it's a structural property of life that you have to invent yourself in public. How much of yourself are you supposed to give up? Too much and you're imposing; too little and you're too reticent. That puts more pressure on the being-yourself-part than it would among "friends". You're supposed to be organically or spontaneously yourself, but in public you need to claclulate yourself, too. And if you get into the habit of playing roles and see "friend" as a role, too, eventually you might end up feeling that you can only "be yourself" when you're alone, but there's little you can do alone, and you feel like there must be some sort of mythic "true self" - something you can be anywhere, anywhen - no matter what role you play - without effort. (That's me riffing off Goffman.)

This is an area which I have been thinking about, especially in relation to modernity and postmodernism, and reading, 'Modernity and Self-Identity in the Late Modern Age', by Anthony Giddens. He argues that this involves self-knowledge and that,
'To be true to oneself means finding oneself, but since as an active process of self-constuction it has to be informed by overall goals_ those of becoming free from dependence and achieving fulfilment'. He points to the rites of passage in social life and the sense of meaning, including honesty and integrity. He looks at the way in which identity became mobilised through modernity and how bodily appearance became more significant, including lifestyle regimes. — Jack Cummins

I didn't expect to come across a post riffing off Giddens. For context: I have a degree in sociology, but I haven't been keeping up with the subject matte, and it's been about 20 years since I last read sociology. I did a little linguistics on the side, and did keep up with that a little better over the years, so as a result I'm more confident with my linguistic knowledge now than I am with my sociologogical knowledge. However, I do remember Anthony Giddens fairly well. I've found him fascinating; among system theories and hermeneutic theories he stood out by proposing a theory based on an ongoing process of structuration, and his methodology involves (among other things) a focus on time and space, something that was rarely as central to sociology at the time as it was to his approach.

I haven't read Modernity and Self-Identity, but I do own his Constitution of Society. A short summery of his theory of structuration might read like this (if my memory serves well): Knowledgable agents skillfully reproduce social structures through their daily activity, but due to unacknowledged conditions of action and unintended consequences of action, there's no guarantee that you end up reproducing structures perfectly, and thus every instance of reproduction of any social structure comes with the potential for change. In effect, that means that any social structure is best viewed as an ongoing process of structuration. Things like self-identy are (at least partly?) social structures, so it makes perfect sense to me that he'd say that to be true to oneself/find oneself is an active process of self-construction. I doubt Giddens would see the "true self" as something there, something to be discovered. You have a person who moves through time-space, interacts with others, and uses the concept of self in the process, and as a by-product reproduces self. I sort of think of the true self (as seen through a Giddens-lense) as the carrot dangling from the stick that keeps the donkey going. (The donkey might eat the carrot at the end of the day, but it turns to shit, and there's a new one the next day... maybe I'm taking my metaphors too far?)

I haven't read the text in question, but I'd guess that for the question of the "true self" to arise you'd need a life-style that... fragments your social contacts? I mean, before the industrial revolution you often lived where you worked. You were part of the village you lived in. You were the village blacksmith, or the milkmaid on Mr. Brown's farm. There's a typical (but not universal) time-space unity here. You move through your biography fairly linearly. With the industrial revolution, you start to get things like opening and closing times of fabrics, a typical (but not universal) distinction between where you live and where you work, and as time goes on, there'd also be the places where you spend your spare time. There will be transitional spaces (roads in your own car; mass transport...). And you behave differently everywhere, you meet different people everywhere... etc. So you're this social vortex who accumulates different practises, but you're also the only you to move through your biography; so there's now an increased need to integrate disparate skill sets into one personal package. What is it that ties all those disparate patterns together? Who are you? Basically, the more fragmented your social space becomes, the more important such questions tend to become.

I'm not sure that's what Giddens says here; I might have gotten it totally wrong. But I'd imagine it'd have been something like that. This post was mostly just an excersise for myself, and I hope there's something interesting in it. I'll probably look up the text some time in the future.

The use-mention distinction is important. There's a difference between using the word "iron" in the context of saying "iron has 26 protons" and mentioning the word "iron" in the context of saying "'iron' refers to the element with 26 protons". Isaac and StreetlightX appear to be saying that because the latter is an institutional fact then the former is an institutional fact, but that's a non sequitur precisely because of the use-mention distinction. — Michael

They don't appear to me to be saying that, though.

See, the use/mention distinction is only relevant to the word iron. And words occur in the instituion of language.

"Iron has 26 protons," is not an instituional facts because "'Iron' refers to the element with 26 protons." is an instituional fact. They're both institutional facts because you need to understand chemistry to make sense of it.

"Iron has 26 protons," is an instituional fact within the instituion of chemistry. It's meaningless if you don't know what protons are, and why they're important to the periodic table.

"'Iron' refers to the element with 26 protons," is an instituional fact within the instituion of language. You still need to know about chemistry (because it's the specialised language of chemistry), but before that you need to know that what it means for words to refer.

Both these sentences express an instituional fact, but you can just demonstrate knowledge of those facts by engaging in relevant institutional activity (looking through a microscope and counting protons; using the word "iron" correctly).

I think the cunfusion here comes from an overfocus on language (understandable in a thread about Searle). Language, as a social institution, is used to talk about relevant things. And it's hardly a coincidence that instituions form around relevant things. Without boundries of relevance, you can't demarcate facts of any kind, and since relevance guids action, and we live together with other acting people, our personal relevance structure grow together with those of people around us. That's how we get institutions: a stream of call-and-response, consistently meaningful to all successful participants. That you talk about iron in terms of protons tells me you're more likely to wear a lab coat than a blacksmith's apron.

Instituional facts are the imputed shared meaning that makes instituions work. They needn't be expressed in words, and if they're not, there's really nothing the use/mention distinction could be applied to. If the imputation of shared meaning fails, what you thought was institutional fact ended up merely a personal, mental fact, and you need new theories.

Okay, I have a few thoughts on this.

First, language is an instituation, and it's a pervasive one. Almost all other institutions will involve langauge in some capacity, but it's not central. For a bishop to be a bishop, you need to treat it like bishop while playing the game. Calling it a "bishop" is one way to treat a bishop like a bishop, but it's not a necessary part of playing the game chess. I, who speak no Chinese and don't know what chess pieces are called in Chinese, can play chess with a Chinese player of chess who doesn't know what chess pieces are called in any language I speak. If we announce our moves in our respective language, we can learn those terms, and I'd argue that we'd have learned more about each others language than the game of chess, which we were using to learn.

In terms of "collective intentionality", we share the institutional context of chess, which is why my meaningful move is followed by my opponents meaningful moves. If I say, "bishop d 2 - e 3" and move my bishop, and if this goes on long enough, a non-English speaker could eventually figure out what the piece is called, and what the letters and numbers are. But I could be pranking them and say "knight d2 - e3," while moving my bishop (and be consistent all through the game). This would lead to false assumptions about the language of chess, but the game would go on without a hitch.

The point about institutions is that you can only meaningfully engage in them, if you share assumptions. Austin/Searle divide, for this reason, speech acts into illocutionary acts (what you intend to say), and perlocutionary acts (what actually gets across). A successful speech acts needs both illocutionary and perlocutionary acts to succeeds. In layman's terms, if you talk to me in a language I don't understand, you're not really saying anything to me.

Collective intentionality is easiest to understand with formalised transactions. Consider the following sentence:

"I sold you my car, but you didn't buy it." Out of context, that's rather hard to make sense of. If I succeed in selling you my car, you bought it. On the language front, that's just ye olde married bachelor. Selling and buying are the same transaction viewed from the perspective of two different stereotypical participant roles. That's what the institution is.

Selling isn't an "illocutionary act", because the locution-part means speech. But it's the equivalent half of institutional behaviour. "Buying" is the other. If two people aren't on a page, a muck-up may occur, and then saying something like "I sold you my car, but you didn't buy it," might make sense (and mean something like "I thought I sold you my car, but you thought it was a gift.") We can understand the sentence as institutional failure: what we have in common is not the institutional transaction of buying or selling, but the situation of the muck-up (and only after we both realise that there's been a muck-up, and what it's nature is).

"Institutional facts" are what we need to know to perform institutional acts. And performing institutional acts, is what reproduces institutional facts. We create a chicken-egg situation, here. And metaphorical mutations are possible: Institutions change, sometimes by conscious negotion, sometimes by unacknowledge "reproduction error".

I feel like Michael's distinction between mention and use is a red herring, because institutional facts aren't about language in the first place. They're about shared meaningful behaviour, such that whenever I sell something to someone that person buys that thing from me. Institutional facts aren't absolute or eternal; but they must hold to some degree for their to be any interaction in the first place.

That English is a nominative accusative langauge and not an ergative absolutive language is an institutional fact about English, and that we have these terms is an institutional fact about linguistics. What this means is:

Yes: [I'm eathing a cake.] and [I'm eating.]
No: [I'm eating a cake.] and [Me's eating.] [Disclaimer: I don't actually know about verb agreement in ergative absolutive language. It might have to be "Me am eating." I don't know. Anyone here speak Basque?]

Basically, an ergative absolutive language treats the agent of an intransitive verb like the object of a transitive verb. It's... weird if you're not used to it; normal otherwise.

(It's possible that some dialects display situational eragtivity in that way. Not sure. It's not the default.)

Linguistics describes this state of affairs; it's native speakers who create and recreate it. It's rooted in their practical consciousness to a degree that it's invisible and it takes awareness of other languages to see that what they do could be different. The sentence "I'm eating," and the linguistic analysis of this sentence occur in different institutional contexts. This means in practise that native speakers of English use "I" instead "me" before an intranstive verb like "to eat" (as opposed to it's transitive version "to eat something"), without being able to use linguistic terms to describe what they do. That linguists might not agree with other on how best to describe this instituional fact does nothing to change this. Non-linguistically-trained people can't even join that conversation; they lack knowledge of the relevant instituional facts - how to talk like a linguist about what they routinely say.

Each and everything we ever do, whatever is meaningful, occurs in an instituional context. So much is true. We can talk about the number of protons in iron till the cows come home, but we've been processing iron for longer than we've known about protons. Iron itself isn't an instituon, but whatever we do with iron occurs within instituions, and those instituitions are interconnected. Forging a sword from iron, and then cleaning it so it won't rust as quickly doesn't require knowledge of the periodic table. There's a cultural connection, an we can trace a memetic path for iron through inconnected institutions. We can't talk about iron without referencing institutions. We can't use iron without engaging in instituions. But iron itself isn't something we do; it's something that means different things in different contexts and provides cross-intstituitional continuity, by virtue of being real. But at the same time, whatever is real about iron doesn't necessarily need to give rise to "iron" as cross-instituitional cutlural practise (of which language and naming is a minuscle albeit pervasive part).

Long post, and i'm not even sure I made sense to myself.

The words, alone, don't make something the case (except perhaps in the case of the bet). Anyone may pronounce someone husband and wife, or name a ship something, or say they bequeath something to someone, and no marriage will result, nor would a ship be named, or a watch bequeathed. The officiant at the marriage must be authorized to marry others, the person naming the ship must be authorized to do so, the bequest must be enforceable under the law. — Ciceronianus

This is important. The institutional facts don't only care about what is said, but also about where, when and by whom it is said. For example:

All stories might be preceded by the unspoken "in the story...", and so it becomes a declaration about a fictitious story. It is false that 'in the Lord of the Rings' Aragorn takes the ring to Mordor. — Isaac

The novel is both an artifact: the book you're actually reading, and an institutional context. The production of the artifact side excludes readers, but involves authors and editors (and printers, and literary agents, and beta readers...). The reading process itself is often solitary (though there might be a public reading), but the reception side has stuff like reviews, criticisism, fan fiction, fandom conversation... It's one huge institutional context. So it's declarative for an author to write the story, but assertive after the fact to say that Aragon doesn't take the ring to Mordor. You can construe the novel - the artifact - as a speech act, because at the time and pace of the reading the artifact is all there is on the other side of the reading. But the novel is itself a product of many different speech acts (drafts, author-side edits, manuscripts, publishing-side continutiy edits, publishing-side copy edits... would type setting or printing still count as speech acts, or are they "only" reproductions? Hmm....) It'd be imprecise, if not entirely wrong, to assume a novel represents only the speech act of the author whose name is on the cover. (It's even more obvious if you're reading a translation.)

Basically, it's not only the content of the speech act that's bounded by the instituational context, but also the participant roles of the people involved in the production and reception of the speech act, and if words get written down you produce something that moves through space time indipendently from the originator and can be modified by anyone. Which is how we get, say, intellectual property laws. Institutional contexts connect to other institutional contexts. You need to be very clear what you're talking about.

A sentence like "It is false that 'in the Lord of the Rings' Aragorn takes the ring to Mordor," is most likely assertive about the novel. The words in the novel themselves are declarative; without that declarative act, no such assertion would be possible. We attribute the speech act consituted by the novel to the author (Tolkien), but that attribution is itself institionally bound, and elides, for example, the backstage roles taken by editors and printers, all of which might introduce changes along the way to the finished product. Often, for example, translators would like more public credit. (Topical, here: I've read Searls Speech Acts in a German translation, but I couldn't tell you the name of the translator without checking. I can read and understand the original English - the German translation was just easier to buy. So how would I compare the versions?)

If you're looking at institional context, you'll need to consider who says what to whom in what sort of situation, and some of the interesting questions to ask are stuff like what counts as a successful communication, and why?

And if wishes were horses the peasants would ride. I don't believe "human nature" is infinitely malleable. We are not all that nice, a good share of the time, — Bitter Crank

It's not even about human nature, for me. I think any kind of utopian ideal, perfection, or whatever you may want to call it ignores inconvenient apsepcts of reality. Or differently put:

Dawnstorm: I wish people weren't like that.
Unbeknownst to Dawnstorm somewhere a monkey paw's finger curls.

Regarding the poll, I voted undicided/no theory, and I'd have voted the same for the final question, except there was no option for that, so I voted "never" - I'll explain.

First, your theory is less implausible than limited, and unless I get the whole picture, I can't really judge your theory.

I'll start with laughter. You say, laughter is the natural response to humour - so what's the relationship between laughter and humour? If I'm not mistaken, babies start laughing at around 3 to 4 months. I'm sure they're not old enough to understand narrative jokes, which your theory seems to rely on. Laughter seems to be more basic, to me, than what you seem to be interested in.

Second, jokes. I'm not convinced all humour is about peril. Visual gags are often about impossibility, or incongruity. I'm thinking, for example, about the lolcat craze a couple of years back, which was kitty picture with captions in faulty grammar. There are non-narrative jokes ("What's the difference between a banana?" - "Huh?" - "Exactly." - Some people find that funny, some don't.)

I can see your theory making sense under a more abstract mother theory: for example - humour involvest he unexpected - unexpected stuff can be dangerous - relief when it isn't. Not sure I buy that, though, since baby laughter seems to be more about enjoyment than relief, but again, not sure.

As for the final quesiton: I think people shouldn't laugh at someone else's expense. Your final options talks about the "audience", and, well, I don't trust an audience to judge what's "benign", and part of it is that I seem to connect humour to pleasure more than you do (not only, but also), and that I think laughing at others misfortune gives some people pleasure, but it might be something they don't like to admit to themselves, because they might end up a little unhappy with themselves. So I ended up voting the "never" option, which I'm not completely happy with either, since my response is more based on a I-wish-people-weren't-like-that pipe dream. Bascially, I could have chosen any option, here, and I'd have been about equally unhappy. Maybe I should have picked the third option, after all.

However, it could be that the idea of God is a metaphorical truth, and that may be how Einstein saw the idea of God, and Jung too. — Jack Cummins

That's always been my working assumption when approaching he question of God and talking to others about God. I'm the son of Roman-Catholic parents who grew up to be an atheist by increment, without any notable outside input. As my worldview matured, my concept of God didn't mature alongside it. Apparently, I was a pretty naturalist-minded kid in elementary school. A couple of years ago I met my old religious-education teacher, who remembered me better than I remembered her. She said it's hard to forget a kid defending the honor of snakes when hearing about the Serpent in the Garden of Eden. Apperently, what I took from the story at the age of six was that it slandered snakes. (In German, the word "Schlange" is used both for serpent and snake, so it would have been the same word.) I have no memory of this myself, but it sounds like something I could have said.

So when all you have is a maldeveloped concept of God that remained undifferentiated from early childhood on, you'll have trouble believing that otherwise smart people would believe something so obviously stupid, so you develop a sort of split sense of meaning: my God, the one I specifically don't believe in, is different from your (general "you") God, the one you do believe in, though they're both gods grown in the same cultural soil. (I also don't believe in Zeus, Odin, Quetzalcoatl, or Amaterasu - but with the exception of Odin I've never talked to a believer). So how do we bridge the gap?

I've always thought metaphor, thinking of something in terms of something else, is pretty much the only hope there is. Take a the idea of a "creator God". I have to approach the creation part as a metaphor for it to make sense. And you have to bracket some question: it doesn't, for example, make sense to ask what God created the universe from, or who created God. I know it makes no sense to ask these questions only because of the reactions of theists when I ask them. No metaphor is complete. You circle around all the questions you can think of, and cross out the ones that the people trying to communicute with you don't find helpful. Then the questions you have left may or may not create a useful image for you. Nothing useful ever emerged for me, and I'm not really optimistic it'll happen in the future, since of most of the stuff I hear on that issue isn't new.

Basically, there's this metaphor with an extensive vehicle but not tenor at all. I don't get it. The only reason I bother(ed) at all to understand the topic at all is social. Spriitually this is all empty talk to me.

But here's the thing. What I have to approach as metaphor, someone else might have encoded differently and there may be no need to understand something in terms of something else. If someone's got an integretated understanding of "creation" such that God creating the universe isn't essentially different from a watchmaker making a watch or a sculptor making sculpture, then there'd be no need for a metaphorical layer to intervene.

And that might be why "God" is evident. This isn't scientific evidence. It's a basic intuition of a type that didn't grow in me.

But at the same time, that's not the whole picture, because there are atheists who deconverted from a believe in God, which involved rational thought. And this where I start getting confused when I think about "metaphor". It's obviously possible to think about God rationally and go from "God exists," to "God doesn't exist." I didn't have that experience. The experience was closer to "Wait, they really do believe in God, and they don't just pretend like with the Easter Bunny?" Though it wasn't a singular experience and it was far less tangible a development than that.

Basically, the only thing about God that really interests me is how minds work. Maybe the cognition of metaphor? Not quite sure.

I find the idea of God interesting also. ... I'm not sure how free will fits into that mix. — T Clark

Free will has nothing to do with God, in that sense. I don't actually find the idea of God interesting in itself; it's something I'd just shrug off and ignore. What I find interesting is that something that's obviously central to many a world view has no place in mine.

Free will is a similar concept. Plenty of people seem to think it's an important concept, and my reaction was originally "why?" Then, when I thought this through, I found that I didn't even quite understand what free will was supposed to be. It now feels like an oxymoron.

It's difficult to say what I'm actually interest in: concept formations, I suppose. And communication? It's a bundle of disparate topics. Basically, I'm more interested in human behaviour than spiritual beings.

Likewise, I find it fascinating that something that feels like obvious sense to me cannot be believed by so many people — EugeneW

That's good to hear. There are people out there who deny its possible to not believe in something so obvious, and thus all atheists are liars.

I intend this as a serious question and not at all as a criticism of what you've written - If that's how you feel, why get into this particular discussion at all? Most atheists here on the forum have a bone to pick. You don't seem to. — T Clark

I find it fascinating that something that feels like obvious nonsense to me can be believed by so many people. I think to get to bottom of it, you'd have to peel back your world-view, but the more you peel back the less is left to do the peeling. It's not really just about God, it's just the most prominent and most frequent topic. I feel similarly about topics like "free will", for example, but the topic doesn't have as much real life relevance.

Take Pascal's Wager: if your attention is on God a lot, and God's a central piece in your world view, it makes much more sense, even in the face of all of its incosistencies or logical short comings. The motivation you need is just to go on as you have, or to open up a little if you come from the other side. Basically, the contents of your mind have a believe-this-or-not structure already. Pascal's Wager makes a lot less sense if you have yet to build or consolidate that structure. A loss you can't even imagine isn't going to feel like a loss.

All those proofs of God? I think they're incomplete if you only consider the logic of the argument. There's always something behind this; something you either live or don't, some sort of intuition. For example, I'm the son of Roman Catholic christians, but I never fully grew into a belief in God - I left that behind with the Easter Bunny, and as I was zoology geek as a kid, I never believed in the Easter Bunny either. I came out as an atheist fairly early and never felt like I had any disadvantages for it. If I have no bone to pick, it's because I've never been given one. My situation is also different from ex-theists who at some point experienced a change of mind. Such people might have intuitions I lack.

I think the idea of god/s are incoherent too. Above and beyond all the arguments in both directions, I lack a sensus divinitatis so belief is not really possible in my case. — Tom Storm

Pretty much this, except I probably wouldn't phrase it as "the idea being incoherent". What I'm talking about when I say that "God doesn't make sense" is more personal and more intuitive. Certainly, any idea of God I can come up with is incoherent. And as a result, I can't seriously make Pascal's Wager. A gain I can't imagine isn't a gain, infinite though it may be.

Sometimes I think we can. People have tried to rationally justify a belief in God at least since the ancient Greeks. — T Clark

Raitionally justifying belief can help you if you're seriously consider the belief. I doubt it'll help at all if your intution tells you the item at hand is nonsense (i.e. if it doesn't make sense to you). Raitional thought can sway doubt, or function as a tiebreaker. It can get rid of "obstacles" (you believe X is wrong because of Y, but you find yourself convinced that Y is untrue).

A pragmatic approach, such as the wager, might motivate you to consider the item at hand, but only if the item at hand has a minimum amount of credibility. I'm an atheist, and I can't make enough sense of the concept of God to motivate myself to even think "yeah, I should belief." Pascal may talk about infinite gain and infinite loss, but it's all so abstract and alien to me that I just can't feel the loss, not even hypothetically. If it did, I could, for example, decide on a fake-it-till-you-make-it approach, or some such method. I can't guarantee success, of course, but I can try. However, abstract talk about infinite gain/loss isn't exactly experience-adjacent to this atheist mind. I don't long for heaven, and I don't fear hell, and no amount of rational argument is going to make it. What it'd take is a major upheaval in my world view. And I'm not sure what it would take to get there.

I got the context from an interview he had among other Japanese writers. They were debating about the art of writing poems and books. He hinted on the debate that literature could defeat religion.
It is important to keep in mind that Kawabata was atheist... Probably this could be connected to. — javi2541997

Thanks. It would be interesting to read that interview, but I suspect it'd be hard to find a translation online. I'm an atheist, too, but I can't even really guess what he meant. What T Clark said sounds like a reasonable guess. Or maybe it's that poetry, even if it's religious, transcends its origin and can be enjoyed by everyone. It's probably something I can't think of, though.

Without context, it's just a line, and I can't find the context. From his nobel lecture I don't even get the impression that literature and religion are "fighting". So what's the context? Where'd you get the quote from?

That's it. Now walk into a room you're familiar with a see if you have the same awareness of the wardrobe, the bed, the view out the window... I can guarantee you didn't actually receive any genuine photon-signals from most of that stuff, but you felt aware of it, no? — Isaac

Sure. I think the point here is that perception is never quite naive? I'm not sure.

"Same awareness": Same as what? I wasn't actually looking at a red flower, so the thing was hypothetical (and since I have aphantasia I wasn't even imagining anything visually specific, just a - to some degree - bare concept).

For what it's worth, I was just trying to pay attention to the window next to me. Running my eyes down it starting from top left down to bottom left, and then top right down to bottom right. I came away with the feeling that it's time to clean it again, and there's a particular smudge that stands out.

I can't do the same thing for the contents of my hippocampus, for example. I wouldn't know how to even start. It's just involved in what's going on with me right now. Don't know how to "pay attention" to it. When I try, my initial impulse is visual (as I try to use my eyes, before I abort - for lack of where ot look? because I realise it's not a visual "topic"?) - maybe because my familiartiy with the topic (however sketchy) mostly involves reading and looking at pictures? It feels like I'm aware of what's going on in my head in somewhat the same way that I'm aware there are platypuses in Australia. External stuff experienced in the past; no situationally present trigger or connection. If I apply neuroscientific knowledge to myself then I objectify myself, and it's all theoretic.

Think about the neurons firing from your retina, to your visual cortex, to your visual-spatial sketchpad... What's missing that means you don't feel 'aware' of the latter, what kind of signal were you expecting but found lacking? — Isaac

If I do that, two concepts compete in my mind for attention: the entire visual apparatus (which I conjur up from memory), and the flower (which currently occupies my visual apparatus). They don't integrate, and they don't make me aware of, say, the neurons that are firing right now, just of the genral concept. I know that's what's going on (to the extent of my knowledge), but it doesn't feel "present", it's abstraction I summon. What's missing is actual awareness of the process that goes on right now. I might miss a bee pollinating the flower, while I'm turning "inwards" (and get lost in a loop of metaphor).

First, I don’t assume determinism. I assume a form of compatibilism that is largely rooted in what most would nowadays term indeterminism (rather than one that is grounded in determinism). This part is exceedingly hard to explain in a nutshell. But such is my stance: compatibilism. — javra

I somehow mixed up "determinacy" (which comes up in the title of this thread) with "determinism" (which doesn't). I did actually think you're a compatibilist when it comes to mind because you were talking about "non-sentient teloi" in a bracket in your opening post..Where this occasionally tripped me up is in this: "How does a 'goal' determine an outcome, when you clearly say it doesn't?" I think that's why I focussed on the telosis?

For any given goal, there can be subordinate goals and supraordinate goals. Subordinate goals will serve the purpose of accomplishing the given goal. Ultimate supraordinate goals can potentially take the form of what various philosophers have described as a psyche’s overarching and generalized will to – be this will to power (Nietzsche), to meaning (Frankl), to pleasure or else the “pleasure principle” (Freud, which I acknowledge is not that great of a philosopher), and so forth (self-preservation also comes to mind as a candidate for some), which would then as an ultimate supraordinate goal hold all other goals as subordinates of itself. — javra

I almost got this far. What's new to me is that at the end of a sring of the goal hierarchy you end up with something like "generalised will". That's interesting.

And, I’m now thinking, other examples might have better served my purpose (my intent, or goal, or telos) of clarifying where I’m coming from. — javra

Yeah, it being a fairly formal transaction with typical goals for typical participants raises some questions. It's an interesting example, though.

For there to be an endpoint, there has to be goal, but not only in the sense of determinism. The goal also determines what counts as an endpoint, either by supplying any given state with flags such as "success", or "give up", "hey, that's even better", or whatever. — Dawnstorm

Well that could have been said clearer. As soon as I figure out what I meant to say, I'll let you know how. I do know that used the word "determine" in two different ways, but I'm unsure how. Sorry for the confusion (maybe it's only mine).

But, personally, I'm right now just focusing on how to best understand goals in and of themselves. To keep things simple, from a consciousness pov. — javra

I'm not actually sure the consciousness/unconsciouness distinction is my major point, though it's definitely relevant. I think I'm trying to piece together your model, but I'm unsure how to conceptualise the telosis:

The distinction between telos and endstate, in your model, seems to primarily be one of "projected" vs. "actual". And somehow a projected endstate engenders a process - "telosis". What is this process? I started out my post by saing it's not simply a series of telos-endpoint pairs; that there needs to be some constant monitoring going on.

For there to be an endpoint, there has to be goal, but not only in the sense of determinism. The goal also determines what counts as an endpoint, either by supplying any given state with flags such as "success", or "give up", "hey, that's even better", or whatever. But what that means is that goals don't fix endpoints, and endpoints might in turn influence how you see your goal. But then it would have to be active all through the telosis. Basically, my hunch might be that the telos doesn't determine your actions; it's just the meaningful part of your actions. As such, whatever determines what happens (if you assume determinism) determines both the telos and endpoint and how they relate to each other.

Note that I'm not actually making any arguments. I'm not even sure how coherent I am. I'm just playing around with what your model looks like to me in order to better understand it.

For example, if a goal is a projected endpoint and there's an actual endpoint, what is that actual endpoint? The totality of what really happens has a detail level magnitudes higher than what you project. Some of it interfers with the goal, but a lot of it is irrelevant. So is your endpoint the totality of happens, or the totality of what happens minus what the goal considers irrelevant. I had the impression its the former. But if it's the former, it's not really an endpoint to begin with, it's just a moment in which stuff happens. Do you see where I'm going with this?

I'm thinking you'll need to look more into telosis (or maybe I should since I'm seeing it). Let me explain with an example:

My telos is "Type 'typo'"
The endstate is "tyop"

So how do we conceive of the telosis? If you go chronolocially, you get:

Step 1. Telos: type "t" - endstate "t"
Step 2. Telos: type "y" - endstate "type y"
Step 3: Telos: type "p" - endstate "type o"
Step 4: Telos: type "o" - endstate "type p"

But that's not enough. Taken like that steps 3 & 4 would be two separate mistakes, but seem to be systematically related to the telos: correct letters, incorrect order. But you need to have the full endstate to be able to judge this. For example, on my German keybord I might additionally misplace my hand and produce "typü". Now it looks like "p" is correct, but it's actually an invisible set of two mistakes: wrong finger sequence and misplacing my hand on the keyboard.

So other than outlining the steps, we need some sort of meta-level of revision, but I'm not sure how to allow for that. For example, a sneeze might interrupt my telosis, or lead to an uninted endstate, messing with suboridante teloi. And how we interpret this seems to related to the telos, too. It's at this level that I'm getting confused.

My hunch is that this is pointing towards any action being the relationship between what you meant to do, what you ended up doing, and how you see what you ended up doing from the point of view of what you meant to do, and how that feeds into what you want to do next. But I'm unsure how that relates to time, except that some of it seems... nonlinear in some way? I'm not sure.

Wiccans are not comparable to Nazi’s. — DingoJones

In addition, symbols on something a non-affiliated person brought into the hospital for private use aren't comparable to symbols mounted on the hospital wall.

I've been on another forum that combined likes with a short private message. I once wrote a really long post that I put a lot of time and thought in. I got a like. It was a nice feeling. I got it for an obscure reference buried somewhere in a paragraph I'd made entirely by accident. If someone were to like one of my posts here I wouldn't have that sort of information. I can't decide whether that's a good or a bad thing. Human psychology, huh?

I would consider objects to exist "on their own" otherwise they wouldn't exist. — Benkei

I think it's a mix of wholism and pragmatism. There's one world. Any way we might subdivide it is dependent on our needs (which are also a part of the world). For example, if there's a banana on the table we can pick it up and move it to the right. We can't do the same to a hole that's on the table (and we can use that for comic effect in fiction, such as the movie Yellow Submarine). The defference doesn't strike me as one of existent, but as one of relations: what we can do with the object.

A hole's existence is wholly dependent on the thing it's in.

A ceiling's existence is dependent on walls, though it's contstituent parts will continue to exist when the wall comes down. There's a lot of room for discussion here.

A box exists "on its own" in a prototypical sense, i.e. this tells us more about "on its own" than it does about boxes. However, a box has constituent parts, and if too many of them go missing the box ceases to be box, though the constituent parts being else where (or even assembled differently) still exist.

***

On the linguistics side, my take of reference is not:

Words refer to things. It's Words refer to concepts, and a certain class of objects evoke the same concepts. It's only in that way that we can say words refer to things. Change within a person can start on any end here, and its all embedded in how we live, and we live with others.

Concepts have to do with how we divvy up the world, but the world exists even if we don't divvy it up at all. So what we call "a hole" exists regardless of whether we interact with it or not, except that if we don't interact with it it's not a "hole". What's missing is the interaction. Any act of naming is interaction, and asking of a hole if it exists is a form of interaction (though if it's done in abstract no actual "holes" have to be involved, only the types of concepts that holes or the word "hole" usually evoke.)

***

All of this is a lot more complicated, but that's pretty much where I stand.

Ah now that's interesting. I wonder how common this is. — Kenosha Kid

That's me, too. My parents would play the Christmas/Easter game long after they knew that I knew where the presents/Easter eggs really came from. I just assumed that was the same sort activity. It's not quite as simple, as at some point in my mental development I must have learned to distinguish fact from fiction. For example, I remember "praying" (say, asking God to help me pass a test, or something) before falling asleep, without believing that anyone actually listened. That was just the shape of my anxiety. A bit like knocking on wood, if you know what I mean. That behaviour fell away as I grew older, but there was never a moment when I "stopped believing". It feels more like a slow differentiation process between fact and fiction, and the distinction growing more important as I grew older. There was definitely a period where I slowly (not all at once) realised, wait, they're serious. I remember fretting about telling my parents that I don't believe. I don't remember a moment when I stopped believing. All that is just an ex-post narrative; these are early memories and unreliable. But I definitely grew into atheism through exposure to theism. Theism just didn't stick, and I had to learn to live with it not sticking: going to church and being bored, making up stuff to confess just so I have something to say, saying sappy stuff during preparation for confirmation. Oddly enough, as a teenager (definitely during confirmation preparation), I was open about being atheist, but nobody made life hard for me (even priests seemed more intrigued than anything else). I wonder if people were hoping for fake-it-unti-you-make-it? I can't ever remember having any sort of disadvantage for being an atheist (I'm Austrian, for what it's worth. Roughly 70 % Roman Catholics when I was a child, I think.)

God - That which atheists do not think exist — Georgios Bakalis

I wonder how many atheists ever get to a clear conception to what it is that doesn't exist. I'm the son of Roman Catholic parents, and the god concept just never stuck. I certainly couldn't tell you what it is that I don't believe in, since everything I can think of is apparently a caricature that the theists around me don't believe in either (e.g. the guy in the sky). I assume from their behaviour that there's something they believe in, and they have some way so that that, whatever it is, makes sense in their minds. Something like that never developed for me, so I'm an atheist.

Or in other words, going by that definition, the definition of God is "whatever it is that theists believe in". And while I'm mostly living around Christians, I extend that to Odin, Zeus, Quetzalcoatl, or Amaterasu. Being an atheist for me is primarily social: what they believe in I don't. Actively not wanting God to exist would mean I'd have to have a far clearer idea of what the concept means to you than I do.

Theists seem to have a hard time imagining a lack of belief, presumably because it's a really important concept to them. It seems to be even harder, though, to imagine that I don't get what all the fuss about. Basically, I don't have the motivation to figure out what it is I don't believe in. Whatever it is, me not understanding it hasn't kept me from having a working world view. If theists want to re-assure themselves that this means that I believe in God after all, I just don't know - well, they can. They just shouldn't conclude from this that I should go to church, because they'll end up disappointed (and through no fault of mine, I think).

An real-life example: my parents love me, and when I'm down, they've suggested (rarely) that I try talk to a priest. God helps them, so He should help me, too, right? Well, when I'm down is not the time for me to wrestle with concepts that are meaningless to me. I'd rather think about what's important, or not think at all if I find myself going down the brooding spiral. When the chips are down, the god concept is an unwelcome distraction. I only ponder God when I (a) deal with people who believe, and (b) have the mental capacity to spare.

Basically, I don't have to deal with the concept of "God", unless I have to deal with theists bringing Him up. (And those theists are usually Christians. People don't usually ask me whether I believe in Zeus, Odin, Amaterasu, or Quetzalcoatl.)

I was just wondering at the way the notion of absolute certainty is part of a subject dedicated to uncertainty. To me, that's like describing theism as a position in atheism. It seems odd that we can describe good as a variety/strain of bad. That's what I mean. — TheMadFool

Yeah, but that's not what we have here, really.

To calculate probability, you need two things:

A random variable, and assumptions about its distribution.

A random variable is by it's nature uncertain, but it's only uncertain within the limits of a well-defined distribution. Or differently put, both certainty and uncertainty collaborate probability. Without any certainty you're just left with pure uncertainty - there's no probability, no way to calculate it.

Note that this only applies to the math. Real world (un)certainty is irrelevant for the calculation. You can calculate the likelihood of a known outcome just as well as that of an unknown outcome, as long as you decide which of your variables is random, and how it's distributed.

Like defiance, overcoming?
But that makes it a Pyrrhic victory: remove, undo the self, so that there's no one to cage. — baker

I think overcoming the situation is outside of the scope of the quote. It's just a description of the situation. You can try to overcome the situation, or you can lament its inevitability (which would probably the default reaction for Kafka himself, if I read him right). Note, too, that the purpose of a bird in a cage lies without the cage. For the cage it's just the way things are.

ThaMadFool's interpretation works for me.

This, too:

A cage is for removing the freedom of a bird; a bird is not for caging. — Kenosha Kid

But I'd say I'd shift the focus onto the cage. This being Kafka, there's no guarantee the cage will ever find a bird, or will declare that an ostrich isn't a bird, because it's not what it's looking for...

Kafka was a beaurocrat. Imagine people creating an office to solve a problem, and then when the office actually solves that problem, do they dissolve the office?

I think the line is ironic. We think of the caging to cage the bird, but the cage is a cage unto itself. If there's no bird in it, it's empty.

If so, is this simply an a fortiori move from "Everything is socially constructed, gender is a thing, so that's socially constructed too." I get the feeling it's more interesting than that. For it to be more interesting, I'd like you to contrast gender with a concept that is not socially constructed (or at least not as socially constructed), so I can see the difference. — bert1

It's not that everything is socially constructed; it's that all meaning is socially constructed, but there is a difference in what ways that matters. Take gravity. Just like sex, we also only look at gravity in terms of what interests us. Yet, we don't have a split terminology here, like we have with sex/gender. I mean, the difference between weight and mass is something that only phycists really ponder (and those interested in the discipline, and those who use it to build stuff). It's a distinction that's far less useful in day-to-day life than in specific contexts. Sex is different, in that it's meaning in the form of gender is very pervasive in society, so before we become scientists we've already taken it all into account when looking at sex scientifically. That's not different from gravity, but there's likely less resistance here, because the difference between mass and weight and is not unequally distributed between people, so we all share largely the same realtionship to the "meaning of gravity".

Sex has many constellations, though, if you consider all aspects, such as physognomy, hormones, DNA, etc. Take DNA: you might decide, when you do research, that DNA is foundational. That is certain constellations are male, others female, and the rarer ones are mix. But in daily life we don't perceive DNA. When we assign gender we go by more visible stuff. We don't ask people for DNA tests to prove their sex. In most contexts it's just not practical. So: in what contexts would it be practical to look at DNA? When sex is ambigous. Basically, in cases of intersex or trans configurations, we could use DNA tests as "tie breakers".

Does this work? Well enough for people who feel no conflict with the gender they themselves were assigned for birth (even in those very rare cases where a DNA test might give them a surprise). That is: using a DNA test to determine gender might be a tie-breaker, but it's also - implicitly - a way of saying "That's your problem." You can probably explain sex in terms of the male/female dichotomy for those ambiguous cases, too, but it requires more effort, and is not as accessible to laymen (like, say, the difference between weight and mass).

A gender division between male and female makes sense if you research the devision of labour between the two sexes in the context of reproduction. What biologoical constellations can still breed? But if we take the results of this sort of research as foundational for social organisation, we cause problems for people who can't or don't want to breed. There might be physical regularities we're missing because the gender divide is instinctive to a majority of people (and non-instinctive for some, who don't have an alternative way to make sense of their bodies, because their parents and peers don't provide one). There are questions such as "Is the brain gendered," in the sense that some brains might send warning signals when it's business as usual. A while ago I found research in that direction, but everything I could find was funded by organisations that support trans rights. And, well, who else would?

I can't think of a similar social conflict for gravity. All we really care about on Earth is weight, and the rest is for experts in specicalised context (engineering, astronomy...) The standard concept of gravity disadvantages no-one, so we can easily stick with it.

Then there are social constructs that rely on social artefacts to exist: money, marriage, even objects like tables. We make those things based on meaning they have. A tree stump is not a table, but if we use it like one it has some of its attributes. Sex and gravity are not like tables. Sexual reproduction works the way it works regardless what social constructs we build around it. Gender is more dependent on sex then sex on gender. However, we do modify our bodies on occasion. When a trans person transitions, we're processing the body towards a gendered ideal. The resulting sexual constellation <i>is</i> due to human interferance. That's not so unlike the creation of an artifact, say a table. We modify what's there so that it's more useful to us.

Now at that point, it's social life that becomes important. Gender terms are not emotinally neutral, and everyday people are not biologists. So, when people say "I'm a man," or "I'm a woman", they're usually ignorant of the specifics of their body, though they have baseline feeling that's base of what those distinctions feel like. That's also where it gets mixed up with interpretative norms (socially constructed) and their applications.

So, for example, if we take the trans condition seriously we can ask questions: is it one condition? Is it different for trans males and trans females? What do trans men and cis men have in common and how do they differ? We can only ask these questions because of lived experience, and lived experience occurs in a social context.

I'm not sure I'm making myself clear here. This is complex, and I'm not an expert. I'd have known more around two decades ago. Basically what I'm saying is that both "gender" and "gravity" are social constructs, but they work in different ways with regards to the relation of the underlying reality to the socially consturcted reality taken for granted by many people to the point of near invisibility. Gender is about the framing of sex. We're not talking about the framing of gravity in the same way, because on earth g is a constant. If two categories of gender worked equally well for all people, we wouldn't talk about the framing of sex either. Everything is filtered through worldviews, but some things are cognitively distant enough, or universal enough (it's not always clear what the difference is) so that this has little practical effect. A hypothesis here might be that when it comes to sex, people cis-people might think sex is one of those things, while trans people don't. Lack of evidence can come from a lack of physical substratus, or from a social lack of interest and thus a lack of targeted research.

Does any of this make sense? I'm running up against my limits.

is this the sociology version of philosophical idealism? — bert1

That's a question I'm not confident on. It's really a philosophyical question, and I'm not sure how far you have to answer that question to use the theory. It might look a lot like idealism, but I think that's more methodological if anything. In fact, I think the underlying is issue is more epistemological than anything: Sociologists purportedly look at what people do, and constructivists think you can't look at what people do without also looking at what they think they do (that's the Max Weber angle I mentioned but didn't explain in my reply to Pfhorrest). As such sex is a topic for biologists, not sociologists, but biologists researching sex is a topic for sociologists, and that's why sex is gendered while also being real.

Two constructivists/constructionists argue. How many opinions are involved? Somewhere between one and, oh let's take a guess, seven. The participants aren't sure. Sure, that's a joke, but it does reveal something about the mindset: if you construct your world view and your own one is all you have, how does communication work? How do you spot differences?

An example of a proposed methodology would be Ethnomethodology: the idea to describe to your own culture as if it were alien to you. One particular method is the breaching experiment: you pick an element your culture takes for granted and breach that element: the idea is to figure out the nature of the difficulties that arise. Wikipedia should give a good overview (because it's also brief and contains examples). A constructivist will often be aware that them studying society is part of the topic they're studying. (I'm not entirely sure whether Ethnomethodologists actually view themselves as constuctivitsts or not, but they do share a lot of assumptions.)

So my hunch is that the ontology isn't really a major focus of the research; I can imagine both idealist and materialist mothodologists. Also note they're often coming from phenomenology, which feels like something inbetween. I really need to say at this point that I'm not confident on this topic; I'm not that familiar with philosophy.

"People do it all the time" is not a good argument. People used to believe the Earth was the center of the universe. Did that make it right? There is such a thing as mass delusions. — Harry Hindu

It's not supposed to be an argument. It's supposed to highlight the topic. Bilogoists study sex, sociologists study bioloigists studying sex and as such many of them assume that sex is gendered, because they're part of soiciety (as they are themselves, which many of them are aware of).

Using genitals and gonads alone, more than 99.9% of people fall into two non-overlapping classes... — Harry Hindu

I'm not sure if the "Using...alone" construction suggests that if you add more stuff in (like, say, hormones) things would get more clear. My own hunch is that the more details you add the more useful classes you could get. The key word here is "useful". A sociologist (of a certain kind) reads such a word and automatically asks "for whom" and "how".

Those clusters are biological realities, just as horses and donkeys are biological realities, even though they can produce hybrids (sterile mules) that fall morphologically in between. — Harry Hindu

Yes, they're a biological reality. And at least for a naturalist biologigists looking at such clusters are a biological reality, too, but a much more complicated one. If you have a way to replace sociology with a biological method that's both efficient and comprehensible to human brains, I'd be interest to hear about it.

I'm not a sociologist. I studied sociology at university, but didn't keep up with it after graduating. These days I know more about linguistics, which was a side topic, than about sociology, which is sort of embarrassing. I just think any term out there is only useful in limited contexts. That's why "significant other" has a meaning in day to day life that's completely different from its technical term.

I don't suggest that it's useful for biologists to use the term "gender". It might be, but that's for biologists to figure out, and I'm not one, not even hobby-wise. I do suggest its useful for sociologists to use the term gender when they talk about biologists studying sex.

As for social politics: it very nearly doesn't matter what terms you use, since they'll always be tied up more with interests in the end, than they would have been if purely motivated by curiosity (not that academic usage is ever only purely motivated by curiosity). I'm fine with using gender here, simply because I'm used to it.

I do think biological research framed by the cis/trans distinction is interesting, though, even though it doesn't impact me personally. There was some around last time I checked, but I didn't understand at least half of it. If it were more mainstream, we'd probably get more expert talk about it in terms I could understand.

It makes no sense to attribute those traits as masculine or feminine. — Harry Hindu

And yet people do it all the time. People "create" sense. Whether you think it's silly or not, it's part of social reality in some way or another. It's hard to get out of the mindset, a bit like being stuck in a metaphorical spiderweb.

I definitely agree that the biological factors are more conclusive, but to get a precise picture I'd need to describe a body as completely as possible before making the categorisation. That's not what we usually do, and once we have that wealth of details, who knows whether man/woman would still feel like a sufficent set of categories.

Just here you said that a male might have just masculine traits. Could a female have just masculine traits? Or does the definition of 'female' preclude that? — bert1

I think the problem here is that it's not clear what it means to have "traits". Phenomenological constructivism says people construct a world view, and within that you make sense of the world in a way that fits what you do. So what you have to ask yourself is how how it would be possible for someone to have only "masculine" traits to be constructed as female within this world view.

Stuff you take for granted is only going to enter awareness when it becomes problematic. My initial hunch is that if you see someone who "only has masculine traits", you're likely going to just assume male, as some sort of "background radiation" of meaning.

But even more importantly: by the time we notica "feminine" trait about a "man", we've already categorised the "man" as "man", and that's why a "feminine" trait is remarkable enough to enter awareness and even focus as feminine in the first place.

However, for a sociologist, the question is primarily empirical. If you do think of someone as female, but when you try to assign traits you can't think of a single stereotypically masculine one, why is that? That would be a very interesting situation that could lead to refine the particular theory.

Note that we think of, say, a penis as a male attribute, not a masculine one. That's a social coding of some sort, part of what we think of fundamental. The thing is, though, that usually genitals are not on display, and not all people wear clothes that make the genral contours plain in view, yet, for the most part we slot people into male/female with no hesitation. We're probably wrong about that categorisation now and than without ever noticing, because attention is fleeting when it comes to passes-by. And we only notice that we're constantly assigning gender, because the process sometimes fails, and we take a second look to figure that stuff out. So the stuff that comes up in discourse about whether or not the trans condition is real, like genitals or DNA, are probably not the traits we primarily use in day-to-day life to make those judgments. They're tie breakers that work as long as worldviews are compatible.

So let's start with your (2): how people feel inside. Children acquire their worldview while living with their parents and peers (and their wider social circle beyond that). At some point they probably acquire a sense of what it means to be boy or a girl. But they've been gendered in other worldviews before that: and if you've just gone along with how people who gendered you in <i>their</i> world view treat you then your behaviour is going to be compatible with that worldview at the time you acquire the distinction in question, and the distinction is just one among many largely unproblematic facts about the world you take in. That does not mean that you can't sometimes "buck the trend". You can be a boy and play with dolls, for example. Depending on your parents views on propriety, you're going to run into different amounts of "trouble", the lightest probably being a short moment of surprise, or maybe even none at all. The degree to which a boying playing with a doll is noteworthy, is the degree to which the act is stereotpically feminine. You don't get an affirmative reaction to a girl playing with a doll in the same way, unless you've been "worried" that she's not "sufficiently" feminine. But all of this occurs on a baseline of maleness and femaleness. And that's your (1).

Appearance matters quite a lot when it comes to gender assignment, and if we're not sure we have couple of more privacy-intrusive methods to check: genitalia, DNA, etc. Biology. But the way we look at biological sex is heavily influenced by our interest in the topic. The categories we use to describe sex are inevitably gendered.

Trans people are, compared to cis people, very rare. They know they're transe because of how they feel inside, but that's hard to communicate, because other, much more common world views don't include that sort of discrepancies. So to figure out what to look at when it comes to biology you'd need to listen to them, but to listen to them you'd need to take them seriously, and accept that your failiur to understand is your failure to understand, and not, say, a delusion of the person who feels something - to you - incomprehensible. Someone who responds to "I'm a trans-man, you're a cis-man," with "that's stupid; you're obviously a woman," isn't likely to be in favour of funding research as to the biology of trans people.

It's not that what what we know about sex is wrong, it's because sex is gendered through a cis bias, that we the categories we have to describe sex are insufficient for the needs of trans people. I've looked into then recent research at some point, and thought that was interesting, but I'm not enough of a bilogist to understand that sort of stuff easily, and I haven't retained much. But there's definitely a gendered compenent to how we research sex and what we look at. So when you conclude here the following:

It is senses 1 and 2 that determine a person's gender, and sense 3 only adds masculinity and femininity to that. So what I'm questioning is that sense 3 is not really about the male/female opposition, and wholly about the masculine/feminine opposition. — bert1

I'd say that we (cis-people) are used to use (1) to legitimise our gender, but it's really (1), too. But because we're the majority it stands largely unchallenged and doesn't often our awareness. A trans person (and a genderfluid and agender person) would be more aware of (3), simply because they keep clashing against the mainstream. The main struggle is not to be agreed with; it's to be understood in the first place, or even to get people to realise that they're misunderstood. And it's difficult to talk about because the gendering of sex also heavily influences our vocabulary. That's how we get the new prefix "cis-". But it's difficult to promote the term when cis-people generally don't have the experience that pushes the entire problem-area into awareness. There's a whole baseline of how some people relate to their body that we can't intuit. The same is true, presumably, for trans-people: what is it like to blind to that area? The difference is that nearly everyone they meet will fall into that category, from childhood on. I've heard time and again what a relief it is to find other people with a similar experience.

Gender then is the entire constellation. What and how many constellations do we find meaningful? What do we attribute to biology, etc. A social construct tends to only enter awareness if it's problematic, and the mainstream gender conception becomes problematic when we ponder trans people, intersex people, other constellation in other species (write a SF story about sentient slime molds, for example), other orderings of the same biological matter of facts in other cultures or sub-cultures etc. A social constructivist would abstract (3) from a set of compatible world-views, I think. (It's even more complex, because gender is only part of any given worldview, and worldviews might otherwise be largely compatible.)

I'm probably not explaining this very well, since I'm... unsure myself. It's been more than 20 years since I read any of the literature. I left university in my late 20ies and I'm now nearly 50. And it's really hard to understand in the place, because sort of have to imagine a world-as-is beneath a world-as-experienced, while also maintaining that you can't really do that.

Think about animated films for example: Robots, Cars, Brave Little Toasters... they're all gendered, without, logically, having a sex. We create the illusion of "sex" with very few signals, without actually assuming the underlying biology (since none of those have an underlying biology). How does that work? Gender is a sort of narrative we use to explain sex: without gender, sex esists, but is meaningless. Does that make more sense?

I would be interested if you wanted to start a thread talking about the philosophy of social constructs more generally, since it's an area I'm lacking in formal education and a discussion of it would be informative. — Pfhorrest

I'm unlikely to make a thread, as I'm a slow reader and thinker, and if something's my thread I'd feel compelled to reply to everyone who replies to me, and that would probably take up more time than I can manage. I'm not primarily a philosophyer, to boot, and I'm coming from the sociological side, and that means that I'm additionally not very confident I even can lay out the underlying philosophy. For example, phenomenological constructivism takes off from Husserl, but I'm familiar with Husserl via his sociological reception, which is already a bias.

Some of the questions you have, though, I think are pertinent to this thread, especially when it comes to the difference between "gender" and "sex" when it comes to the "male/female" pair (rather than the "masculine"/"feminine" pair), which I'm going to address in my reply to bert1.

I can address a few basics, here:

I'm particularly interested in something that seems to be implicitly believed by many of the kind of people who usually talk about social constructs, but not explicitly claimed so far as I'm aware: that not only are some things merely socially constructed, but everything is, there is no objective reality at all, and (most to the point I'm curious about) that all talk about things being some way or another is therefore implicitly an attempt to shape the behavior of other people to some end, in effect reducing all purportedly factual claims to normative ones. — Pfhorrest

This here is difficult to untangle, because I'm not sure who you're referring to. But generally that's part and parcel in the topic. They're sociologists. Sociology is a pretty young academic discipline, and there's a sort of we-can-say-things-about-this-too attitude common here. They're competing with economists, psychologists and so on. Philosophy isn't a competitor, but more a sort of grounding. The origins of sociology lie in Comtean positivism, and constructivist schools tend to openly disagree, but not all who disagree with positivism are necessarily constructivists.

I'm not sure I'd say constructivists reduce all factual claims to normative ones, but there's definitely a trend in that direction. It's definitely strong, for example, in the Frankfurt school, who take the phenomenological perspective and modify it via communication, which they frame through Marx's historic-materialist dialectic. The idea is that every individual constructs a worldview for themselves, which is the basis for everything they do, but they don't develop that in isolation. I'm going to say this again in my reply to bert1, and use the example of gender and sex, so I'm not going to go into much detail here. (Expect a new post, since this post is likely going to be too long otherwise. Does this forum have a wordlimit per post? I've run up against that on other forums...)

Basically, the important sociological concepts here are:

Max Weber's "verstehende Soziologie" (Again, I'm not sure how this is translated into English. Wikipedia uses the header "verstehen" on the English page, so maybe they don't even translate that? The basic meaning of "verstehen" is to understand. Weber is talking about subjectively intended meaning, but he's also talking about constructing, methodologically, "ideal types" against which you compare empirical action.)

Schütz's Husserlian analyisis of everyday life.

Marx's historic materialism.

George Herbert Mead's social psychology (and maybe William Thomas' "definition of the situation").

There's a bit of pick-and-mix going on, and I'm not sure I've captured all of the important stuff. (I'm trying to figure out, for example, if there's some anthropological lineage as well, for example. Or maybe Mannheim's sociology of knowledge? A lot of this is one way road towards sociology, though, and probably not too interesting for philosophers?) I've never really tried to map "constructivism" in sociology before, so that's hard for me as well. Take nothing I say at face value. I'm out of the loop for too long, and I've never really been an expert to begin with.

I have not heard that usage, not even once. At no point have I ever heard a man referred to as a woman because of the roles he performs. Do sociologists do this? Do they go around calling male cleaners female?

Are cleaners female (or lumberjacks male), by definition, in this sociological sense? — bert1

I'm not sure how got this from Pfhorrest's post. The social roles in questions aren't occupational; they're gender roles. male/female is the distinction in question, and it combines with other distinctions:

Age: Man/Woman vs. Boy Girl
Family: Father/Mother/Son/Daughter vs. Man/Woman/Boy/Girl
Occupation: Waiter/Waitress (vs. the generalised occupational profile)

And so on.

"Gender" tends to refer to two distinct adjective pairs: male/female vs. masculine/feminine.

And gender expectations aren't generally strict. In fact, if a male person only has masculine traits, people tend to think of him as hyper-masculine rather than as the norm, and when it occurs in adolescents we tend to think of it as "a phase". There may be strict elements, though, depending on where and when.

It's my impression that the current discourse about being trans doesn't reject the mainstream construct, but treats it as insufficient. Most trans activists, for example, would be fine with a four-way distinction "male/female" and "cis/trans", while also being aware that this might not help genderfluid or agender people. The problem is that a social world traditionally structured for cis people isn't really equipped for the trans distinction (see public bathrooms or locker rooms), and in practise treating a trans woman like a trans woman isn't always possible because the mindset isn't widespread enough yet.

Finally, remember what I said above about strictness and hyper-masculinity/feminity? Well that's an area that tends to affect trans people differently than it does cis people. A cis-woman who is "too masculine" is a "deficient woman". A trans-woman cannot be "too masculine" under the same mindset; she - no HE - is mistankenly, deludely, or dishonestly claiming to be a man. What gender construct you buy into and apply (automatically and unreflectively for the most part) heavily influences the social reality you see.

The term "social construct" doesn't only have one meaning in sociology, but if nothing's changed the most common usage tends to come from phenomenology. Husserl - Scheler - Schütz. I think the most-cited text could have been Berger/Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality when I graduated in sociology in the early 2000s, but I'm not sure. It's definitely a defining text, though. It's not really that important here, and it's also not the whole academic picture. I'm just mentioning it in case your interest runs deep enough so you have a place to start your research, should you want to.

"Soup latrine", since it is a malapropism, does not occur elsewhere in the object language, or at least does not occur with any where near the of "soup tureen". Empirically it is not a good candidate for the metalanguage interpretation. — Banno

Ah, so the right is empirical to some extent. I'm slowly getting there, I think (your reply to creativesoul about imperatives is helpful as well).

***

About chess: I find the comparison hard. There's only one mishap I can imagine that's unambiguously a semantic mishap; more on that later.

A pawn taking a step back could be a "semantic" error, or it could be a "syntactic" error. That's not me being undecided; I think chess blurs distinction. If we take pieces as the comparative equivalent to words, then how they relate to each other is a syntactic relation, but in terms of the game that's also their only meaning. That's because, unlike language, chess has a clear procedure to "end the game". Language is open purpose, you can do with it what you like. But a game of chess is over when no more moves are possible (or when someone gives up, or when the only possible move left leads to an eternal loop). So a pawn taking a step back is unforeseen in the rules, and that's both a syntax error <i>and</i> it's also a semantic error, because the pawn "doesn't move like a pawn", which is really its only meaning. (Aside from flavour meaning: it would make no sense for the chess-as-war aspect to have 8 kings on the frontline protecting a single pawn. That's not what's at issue here, though.)

Ways to play seem more like a best-practices thing; more comparable to rhetorics than semantics.

What I think comes closest to a malapropism in chess is the following:

When setting up the board put the knights where you'd normally put the rooks, and put the rooks where you'd normally put the knights, and then play the game according to initial postion rather than according to the look of the pieces. You'd have a piece that looks like a knight but behaves like a rook. That's pretty much what a malapropism is: it's a mishap about appearance, and it works because of the arbitrariness of the sign. As long as your knight-looking piece moves like a rook, it's a rook in all but looks. The biggest challenge is habit: if you're used to playing chess with a knight-looking knight and rook-looking rook, you might confuse the pieces based on habit. That's an additional challange, but it doesn't really ruin the game. Same rules and same pieces; just a mismatch in the "lexicon".

Thus the meaning of a word is the "contribution" it makes to the truth or falsity of sentences it could appear in.

Does that make sense yet? — Srap Tasmaner

Sort of. I still feel it's a little awkward; starting in the middle, so to speak, and then figuring out the meaning of words and texts both on the basis of sentences (if that's what happens). But at the very least I can work with it, I think. Need to let it settle for a while.

↪Dawnstorm, by way of a start on explaining T-sentences. — Banno

I do think I get that much, and I also get:

The interpretation is not word-for-word; it is holistic. — Banno

The problem I have is a different one:

There are many different possible sentences that contain "soup latrine". There may not be a limit to them. Assuming that "soup latrine" is a malapropism for "soup tureen", all the truth conditions would hold the meaning we associate with "soup latrine". Since only the left side of T-sentences is the actual utterance, it shouldn't matter what word is on the other side:

A) "This is a nice soup latrine" is true iff this is a nice soup tureen.
B) "This is a nice soup latrine" is true iff this is a nice soup latrine.

The only difference between A) and B) is whether I use the word "soup latrine", too (in the meaning I have heretofore associated with "soup tureen"), or not. The interpretation, being holistic, remains the same either way. How do T-sentences deal with word meaning? Why aren't A) and B) synonymous? How do I interpret a host of difference sentences (A1...An) in which the systematic difference is that there's "latrine" on the left, and "tureen" on the right?

By virtue of the T-sentences "This is a nice soup latrine" and "This is a nice soup tureen" should be synonymous, so I should be able to write "soup latrine" in my attempt to tansliterate my holistic interpretation, too, right?

Now try explaining why this doesn't work without recouse to convention. Am I making a mistake here? Where?

We ought add Davidson's own semantic theory. It looks to me to be the best candidate for a prior interpretation. — Banno

As far as I can tell, Davidson wasn't very influential when it comes to developing pragmatics as a field, even though this article would have fit to some degree, so maybe I just never came across the name. (Wittgenstein was the only one I knew before studying linguistics.)

Is it worth setting it out here? — Banno

It'd definitely help me understand the article. I've done a little research on truth-conditional semantics, and the most glaring omission is that I can't seem to find out how it deals with word meaning, since truth claims seem to require sentences/clauses. I actually meant to ask, but I forgot.