:ok:

Less 'systemic' memoir, more autopsy ... of reflection / reasoning.

Well expressed.

"Drinks for all my friends!" ~Henry Chinaski, Barfly

Cheers. Next round's on me as well.

Ultimately, all reasoning is de se. Even for the de re sentence "Peter wants to get elected", the complete sentence is "I believe that Peter wants to get elected". A lot of language, when objectively describing the world, removes the "I", which is a mistake.

I am not sure you understand what de se reasoning actually is. If I state sincerely, "Peter wants to get elected" then that might be equivalent to stating sincerely "I believe that Peter wants to get elected", but in most cases, though not all, nothing is added or taken away by the choice that is made. If I were suffering from amnesia and was reading an account about what Peter had been doing I might also come to the conclusion that Peter wants to get elected, and I could say outright that I believe Peter wants to get elected, and be expressing the same thing. However, if my amnesia is cured, and I am Peter, I discover something new and express that discovery when I exclaim "I am Peter!". That is de se reasoning. I could also say "I believe I am Peter", but that would not add any extra de se characteristics to what I had already expressed. The puzzle some people see in de se reasoning is, on the one hand it seems that I have uncovered some substantive information when I discover that I am Peter, but on the other it is difficult to say anything more about what I have discovered other than that, quite simply, I am Peter.

@PfhorrestPerhaps you have edited your replies without indicating as much or perhaps a short night's sleep has made me come at this with a fresh set of eyes, in either case, there are links and suggestions in your remarks above now that I did not take into account last night, so I have taken the liberty of editing my earlier remarks.

Please do read, or reread, the "should I use 'I'" article you provided. As you do so, ask yourself the question whether you might be using the first person pronoun so much that you undermine any potentially positive effects of doing so.

It kind of sounds like many of you have never actually written a philosophy paper and are running on old high school writing rules.

I will not speak for the others contributing to this thread, but I have written more philosophy papers than I care to count and have read even more. Some of them were better than others, but none of them were better because the first person pronoun had been scattered around the pages like confetti. When I taught undergraduate philosophy, I certainly advised people to try to put things into their own words, find their own examples to replace the ones contained in the set texts, come up with questions that express what it is that they did not understand about some philosopher's remarks, and so on. To some extent, that is adopting a first person approach to writing philosophy, but does not require excessive use of "I" in its execution. I also advised on many occasions that where one sentence will do in place of five, opt for brevity. Many, if not all, of my colleagues were in the habit of dealing out very similar counsel.

On a different note, unless you are doing so with express intent, avoid splitting infintives. Some people, of course, intend to split their infinitives and on rare occasions doing so enhances a sentence. However, if you are doing it without that intent, then just bear in mind that sometimes the careless splitting of an infinitive can lead to unwelcome ambiguity and not simply to stylistic discomfort. Also, beginning sentences with conjunctions is mostly to be avoided: conjunctions have the grammatical purpose of conjoining two or more phrases in a single sentence. Finally, in the absence of its serving some essential end or its being unavoidable, eschew using the same word more than once in a sentence. Such repitition smacks of laziness, engenders boredom and can indicate to the reader that you lack vocabularly. You could also extend that last rule of thumb to cover a whole paragraph. Here is one sentence of yours where you go against all of the foregoing advice:

But I am not saying to automatically reject all claims made by all authorities. — Pfhorrest

Perhaps this is the one and only time you break those guidelines of grammar and style in so few words. However, on the off chance that the aforementioned quotation is indicative of your writing generally, you might want to look up those three pieces of advice on the internet and see if anyone else agrees with them or not.

my philosophy professors, who explicitly instructed everyone that philosophy is written from the first person;

Questionable advice, and in any case open to interpretation. The suggestion was not that you should, or even could, write without dropping in the odd first person pronoun here and there where it makes sense. However, your use of it seems extravagant and very often entirely unnecessary. Compare your use of it with, say, Kant's and perhaps you will see. In any case, you wanted opinions from people interested in philosophy and who read philosophy, and, being such a person, I gave you one. What you do with it is entirely up to you.

It’s not. I don’t see what the point of that would be, I’m not doing this for money, I’m trying to give away something useful to the world.

I did not say or imply that you were in it for the money. Publishers and agents are. You might, however; want your work published to reach a wider audience than a bunch of insomniancs with nothing better to do than try to prove other people are interpreting Wittgenstein incorrectly. If you do want to do that, you will need to have a sharper target in sight than just "people who in other cicumstances might have been philsophy students". If you sharpen your target you may also have to sharpen the focus of the work, of course, and turn it into something with more limited scope.

In any case, if your target audience is people interested in philosophy, then my single piece of advice to you, and I think Sushi made much the same point, and which you can certainly do something about very easily without affecting the content, is to depersonalise it. The "I" count is very high in the sample chapters I have skimmed through and, speaking as a person interested in philosophy, it is off putting.

I like sushi has a point Pfhorrest. From experience of my own, here is some advice about seeking feedback on your writing;
1. Do not expect useful literary criticism from anybody close to you emotionally. There are reasons why they have that connection to you, all of them sincere, and that are likely to bias their approach to your writing whether they are aware of that bias or not. That bias may, of course, be negative or positive.
2. Find someone close enough to your target audience as you can and who has no, or very little, vested interest in your emotional wellbeing, and ask them to devote some time to reading your work. You will no doubt have a clear picture of that kind of individual, so you can perhaps identify a suitable person or some suitable people within your circle of loose acquaintances. You might find such a person on this board, but I have my doubts. When you do find that person, ask that they be brutally honest and convince them that you have a thick skin, even if you don't. Do not expect that person to advise you what to do to improve the book, you are writing it, not them. When they do come back to you with a list of problems, and from personal experience with following this advice myself, they are likely to have quite a number of them, address those issues yourself and try to convince them to reread your work to see if they believe it has improved.

On a different note, if you goal is to see this book in print and to be published by someone other than yourself, you need to be able to convince a literay agent that you have a target audience that is crystal clear from a marketing point of view, and sufficiently large to give a chance that there will be some profit to be made. Agents and publishers are in it for the money, although perhaps not exclusively. What you have said about your target audience seems to me to be too nebulous to meet those commercial requirements.

Of course, if you don't care about seeing the book in print, and you are doing this just for yourself, then I do not see why you need the advice of anyone concerning your writing style, just keep writing and rewriting and make of yourself your own worst literary critic.

4. If R is a dox then A is an essential feature of dox

A material conditional that Wittgenstein would reject and provides plenty of grounds for rejecting. You seem simply to be gainsaying Wittgenstein, not arguing against him.

Wittgenstein is trying to undermine the idea that for something to fall under a general concept, that thing must satisfy identifiable conditions which are at once both individually necessary and jointly sufficient. Whilst in the vague notion of "having an objective" you may or may not have identified a necessary condition for what it takes to count as a game, you have certainly not identified a sufficient condition. As StreetlightX's examples show, many things that have objectives simply are not games, even if one can make a game out of them.

:ok:

For example, imagine you're watching a movie. The perspective would be the camera.

This is a peculiar use of language. A camera might be placed to give a specific perspective on a scene, but that does not entail that the camera is a perspective. If you are trying to illuminate a special techical sense of "perspective" by way of the analogy of a film camera, then I think you are digging your own grave: you can have several cameras recording a single scene in a film from a number of different perspectives. This would seem to imply, contrary to what you want to prove, that the idea of there being multiple perspectives makes perfect sense.

I'm saying we have two subjective experiences

Not sure how this gets around the problem. Remember you are trying to prove the premise of your argument, or at least my version of your argument, that mineness is a genuine feature of things in the world. Your argument that it must be is now that without mineness you could not distinguish between a subjective experience which is yours and a subjective experience which is not yours. But if there is only one subject of experience, which is what you are saying your argument proves, then there is no such distinction to make, so you cannot rest an argument for the existence of mineness on that distiction.

I'm reminded of an anecdote, I think of Bertrand Russell's, where he was talking about a letter he received from an amateur philosopher that began something like
"Dear Mr Russell
Solipsism appears to me to be so self evidently true that I do not understand why everyone does not believe it"

Because I can tell the difference between my perspective and yours

But you are arguing for a position that there are not two such perspectives, aren't you?
It seems incoherent to support a premise of an argument that leads to the conclusion that there are not two perspectives, the very premise that there are two perspectives.

and chemistry is clearly reducible to physics

Last I heard on that topic, admittedly the best part of a decade ago, it was a philosophically contested claim. Back then, there were some philosophers of science looking at how quantum chemistry might provide a reductive bridge between the concepts employed in chemistry and those employed in physics. I was not aware that the debate had been so clearly resolved, do you have a reference article I could read?

:up:

there needs to be a flag or property in the world which contains the information needed to tell which perspective my life becomes

You may be making some conceptual mistakes, but then again there might be something buried deep in what you are saying. If I try to generate something resembling a deductively valid argument from what you are saying, the first draft I get is:

1. Any experience can be truly described as "mine" by whoever is having it.
2. Where something can be described truly by the use of a word, that thing instantiates a property singled out by that word.
3. Therefore all experiences instantiate the property of being mine.
4. Mineness is one and the same property wherever it is instantiated.
5. Instantiations of one property can present no distinct aspects from one another, otherwise they are not instantiations of the same property.
6. One aspect of mineness is that it relates an experience to a subject of experience.
7. So, if two instantiations of mineness could relate experiences to two different subjects of experience, then those instances of mineness would have different aspects.
8. So, if two instantiations of mineness related an experience to different subjects of experience, those instantiations of mineness would be instatiations of distinct properties.
9. So, since it would contradict 4, two instantiations of mineness cannot relate experiences to two different subjects of experience.
10. Therefore, all instances of mineness relate an experience to one and the same subject.
11. A subject of experience cannot exist without having experiences. Therefore there is only one subject of experience.

If this is what you are getting at then premise 2 requires a lot of supporting argument. After all, all places can be identified by the person at them as being "here", but that doesn't entail that hereness is a feature of places. Even if you got past that hurdle, there would still be premise 4 to establish. Why couldn't "mineness" be a determinable property with many different determinations, like, for example, colour.

'The will' is a grammatical mistake. A modal verb mistaken for a substantive and pretending to be of any philosophical interest at all. The less it is taken seriously the better.

Yet if I were to propse that "the affect" is a grammatical mistake, a verb mistaken for a substantive pretending to be of any philosophical interest at all, no doubt you would say I was just an idiot missing the point.

You want us to do your homework for you? How about you present your answer to your question and then we discuss it?

Yes, we agree we agree on the terminology.

Now we are agreed how we are using the term "anarchist", I think I might need to be a little clearer about my use of the term "socialist". I do not mean to refer to the kind of socialist that is a member of an established political party, content with the existing mechanisms of the state, but who just sees the policies it enacts as in need of a tweak towards a little more redistribution of wealth. Nor do I mean the kind of socialist that simply wants to replace one kind of state with another, perhaps even more authoritarian one. I am talking about the kind of socialism that Marx and Engels propounded that sees the state as, in effect, an executive committee for the management of the affairs of the bourgeoisie, and the disappearance of which is a necessary step to reach the final goal of human freedom. People can have property under socialism and anarchism, that I understand, after all, who would want to share my toothbrush with me? So perhaps we need to distinguish also between what we might call personal property, on the one hand, and private property on the other. The distinction is a little difficult to define, particularly in boundary cases, but for a socialist the key idea would be that with the idea of private property comes the idea of private ownership of the means of production in a society, which includes arable land as much as it does nuclear power plants, and it is private ownership of those means of production that is anathematic to socialism. From what you say, private ownerhip of means of production is compatible with anarchism. However, since the so called left wing of any movement covers a much broader church than the right wing, I wonder if there is room within anarchism for the rejection of the principle of private property as well? Or is it on that specific point that you think we really boil down to the essential difference between socialism and all forms of anarchism?

Well, I certainly agree that Nozick spent absolutely no time engaging with anarchist thought, or much of any kind of thought for that matter. Generally speaking he was a glib philosopher, and not just in the realm of politics. Leaving the right wing of the anarchist movement aside for the moment, though, since you do seem to know your stuff here, l have a question concerning the difference between the left wing side of anarchism and socialism that you might have an enlightening opinion on, so please take all my future uses of "anarchist", "anarchism" and so on as referring to the left wing versions.
In the end, anarchists and socialists want the same thing, the disappearance of the state, at least it is not unreasonable to make that suggestion. Socialists also want substantive economic equality, not just equality of economic opportunity, and see that as a necessary condition for human freedom, and human freedom is the final goal. So let me start with this question: Do anarchists care about economic equality in that way, or do they see it as a peripheral issue? I'm genuinely curious, by the way, I'm not just looking for a fight :wink:

As you can see, you may find litte enlightenment on this forum as everyone seems to have an axe to grind, including me.

That only by abolishing human-made laws can men be complete, in the political sense of the word, free

I find it very astute of you to qualify your notion of freedom, as bandied about by anarchists, to the strictly political sense, because one thing that some socialists accuse anarchists of is that they fail to distinguish political freedom from human freedom, and even where they do distinguish it they think that the important type of freedom is the former and not the latter. In fact, for some very crude anarchists, political freedom is just equated with economic freedom. For the socialists I have in mind, and Marx arguably was one of them, one can be free as a human being within a law governed society. A necessary, but not sufficient, condition for such human freedom is, however, economic equality. Economic equality is a notion that many anarchists find anathematic, especially "right wing" minimal state anarchists of the kind well represented by Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia, since economic equality is something that has to be ensured. Left wing anarchists are really just liberals with guns, but at least they do not pose the question "why can't we all just get along?".

By tradition propositions are represented with "P", "Q", "R" ... but it really does not matter what you choose as long as you stick with the same choice all the way through the analysis of the argument.

Although socialists have a rather more complex conception of what it is to be an individual human being within a society than an anarchist, the goal of socialism and anarchism is in one sense the same, the disappearance of the state. There are and were plenty of socialists who did not agree with Lenin's approach to reaching that final goal, Rosa Luxemburg being the first amongst equals. One might argue that, empirically, Lenin's approach has been disproved, but Luxemburg's was never even given the chance.

I had a Trotskyist friend once who said an anarchist is really just a liberal with a gun.
@NOS4A2 What socialist societies have there ever been that would allow us to empirically measure successes and failures of socialism? Perhaps there are some, but I really hope you did not have in mind societies like the USSR.

:up:

Well folks seem to get angry, and we talk about anger. So we represent it. But I rather agree with you if you are saying that the startling insights of neurobabble have been once again contrasted with a straw man of primitive ignorance.

You have put pithily exactly what I was trying, but obviously failing, to put across. I certainly didn't mean to give the impression that I believe we never represent anger, and if that is the impression I gave, I apologise for not being clearer. As a matter of fact I also think that sometimes, in very specific circumstances, it also makes sense to say that we are confronted with representations of our own anger.

Edit : although where you use the term "neurobabble" my preference would be for "psychobabble", or perhaps both.

It might of course be a misunderstanding on my part of the notions of representation and representing, but I won't get any clarification on that point from that article.

By "the basis of the account being given" I presume you are referring to the author's positive account of what is going on, and not the account which she is attacking? If that is so, then the basis of her account is that each time there is emotional behaviour there is a representation of the emotion. I reject that basis on the grounds that I see no reason for believing that every time a person feels an emotion they must be representing anything at all. Why is that a misunderstanding of her position?

So the author agress with me that there is nothing systematic and appropriate for psychological investigation? Why not just say that then, instead of presenting an alternative account of what is involved in that systematicity? For instance, when she writes

The situation, then, will largely determine which representation of anger will be constructed to conceptualize a state of core affect

why assume that there is any representation going on at all when one is angry?

On what grounds? The vast variety of ways of displaying anger and other emotions. Why assume there is some one thing in common with them all? I have never seen a convincing argument to establish that there must be. The burden of proof here is on those who think there is.

There is not muh too it really. I'm simply expressing some scepticism that, psychologically, there is anything systematic and appropriate for scientific investigation going on when people exhibit emotional behaviour.

Like, what is your actual point? That we don't always experience emotion?

Nearly but not quite. More like "We don't always have emotion experiences, even when we are being emotional."

I'm flummoxed that Wittgenstein's argument might be so artless. And so, I'm asking for something more. — Banno

I do not think you are likely to get it. As far as I recall Wittgenstein himself did not in the end think very highly of his lectures on the foundations of mathematics.

Re Wittgenstein's finitism, for me it always just fell out from his view that mathematics is nothing over and above a human activity, and since we are finite, nothing we can construct is going to be infinite. Not sure whether that's a good argument or not, but it seems to be the bare bones of it. The idea that sets have only finite extensions is in any case not generally accepted, ZF set theory even has an axiom that includes infinte sets from the outset. Of course, W's reading of this would presumably be that the axioms just give recursive rules we can use to continually come up with new, disinct members to add to a set, but we always have to stop doing that at some point and just say "and so on" or, the more mathematically acceptable, "...". As you said, sure extensions are finite if you define extensions as finite, and Wittgenstein defined them as finite, but others did not. He thought they were making a mistake. They did not.

abstract entities come form our talking about what we do

I presume you do not mean that abstract entities are generated from our talking about what we do, since that would make them things anyway. So what do you mean by "come from"?

:lol: This is both funny and profound.

Well, after more than a skim read I see where the real problem with all this lies for me. Let's start with the first three sentences of the article:

Humans experience emotion. For many, experience serves as an emotion’s central and defining aspect. We feel the heat of anger, the despair of sadness, the dread of fear..

So, how about those who are not among this supposed "many" and who might, I presume reasonably, ask the question: when I am angry, do I experience my anger? According to the author we always do, since her opening sentence is never really put up for challenge.
Granted, "I have never experienced so much anger" might make sense and could mean:
1 "I have never seen anyone so angry before"
2 "I have never felt so angry before"

Most of the focus, although not all, is on reading 2. The implication throughout the article seems to be that every time I feel a certain way requires that there be something being felt, whether you use the term "state" to denote that thing or otherwise, and that the issue is how to scientifically analyse that thing. Does that principle generalise, though? Sure, everytime I write a certain way requires there is something I am writing. But, does every time I sleep a certain way require that there is something I am sleeping? Does every time I yawn a certain way require that there is something I am yawning? Somebody might point out that we do talk of "sleeping the sleep of the just", and one can "give a yawn" but these are just metaphors, you can't pass round the sleep of the just as you would a bottle of sleeping pills, and you cannot donate yawns to charity.

Of course, physiologists might have lots of interesting things to say about what happens to the body whilst a human being sleeps, or yawns but that doesn't entail that what they are describing is sleeping or yawning.

Her summary of the faults she finds in others is conlcuded in these few words:

the empirical evidence supports two conclusions about the study and measurement of emotion experience. First,the experience of emotion cannot be measured objectively. Second, discrete emotion experiences are not psychologically primitive.

This might lead a sceptical scientist, and should there really be any other kind, to suspect that there is no such thing as what is being referred to as "emotion experience" at all. Yet the author happily proceeds to give her own theory of precisely these things. At one point it is said

Emotions exist, but only as experiences.

Shortly afterwards we have the phrase

the experience of feeling an emotion

So not only do we experience emotions now, we also experience our feeling an emotion. How do we do that? I can feel angry, can I also experience that feeling? Would it make any difference if I did not?

"In psychology there is experimental method and conceptual confusion."

Guess who said that.

Not sure, didn't catch that myself when I skim read, it was in the quotation cited by Streetlightx:

"Like beliefs and memories, however, emotions are not things. They are states. ...The experience of emotion is not the result of an “inner eye” perceiving an object called “core affect.” Instead, it is probably more correct to say that both valuation and categorization processes change the state of the person to create an emergent product that is at once affective and conceptual" (p. 35)

Maybe I will, but I expect to find as much difficulty with the idea of an emotion being a state as I do with emotion being an experience. I can be in an emotional state, but that doesn't entail emotions are states.

Skim read it, I would like to be convinced it is worth spending more time on but on the basis of some of the things the author writes, I feel my time might be better spent reading something else:

People parse the world into things emotional and non emotional, and they further divide the emotional world into discrete categories.

Do they? What is parsing supposed to be here? I know what it means to parse a sentence, but parse the world? Do we just have a common place that people can have different emotional reactions, and sometimes no emotional reactions, to different events? Or are we supposed to already be buying into the idea that doing so involves systematic mechanisms? If the latter, where is the evidence for that position?

Emotions exist, but only as experiences.

Do they? I can have an emotional experience, but that doesn't entail emotion is an experience. It doesn't entail that it is any thing at all.

The author appears to want to undermine the idea that emotions are hidden mechanisms, but then much of what she says only makes sense against the background that they are internal mechanisms, just different from the kind that other scientists have proposed.

Specifically,the experience of feeling an emotion... occurs when conceptual knowledge about emotion is brought to bear during the act of categorization.

If emotions are not things, they cannot be felt in the sense she is talking about, but I don't see any evidence presented to convince that they are things.

Maybe I am just not subtle enough to understand psychology.

One of the really wild things about this account (for me) is that it can almost be 'translated' point-by-point into a Wittgensteinian account of concept-use in general.

Indeed, much of it sounds like reheated Wittgenstein. Does she acknowledge the influence at least?