Btw, I don't think of names, unlike descriptions, as ever being translated, though they do get localized. It's an odd area.

Interesting ones are place names - London and Londres for instance: Kripke makes use of that in his A Puzzle About Belief.

Statements such as "John is John" in your example, insofar I understand them, presuppose information without that it is not possible to make sense of it

Kind of my issue with Frege - the assumption is that syntax and semantics is the whole story for natural language, whereas it is not (although it might be for formal languages).

Still not clear what mistake you think Frege is making though.

I've met quite a few professional philosophers, I wouldn't trust their opinions about anything :wink: I'll take a look at that article, thanks for the link.

I don't think it's inaccurate to say that the canonical versions of the argument from reason, as proposed by Lewis, have been completely refuted

Who refuted it? I know Anscombe went to town on the first version of the argument Lewis presented, but Lewis revised the argument in light of her criticisms. Peter van Inwagen had a crack at the second formulation a few years ago, and as far as I remember claims that Lewis didn't do enough to establish the idea that mechanistic explanations for beliefs exclude rational explanations for them, but I'd be astonished if his was the last word on the subject.

I also don't know if you are aware that this argument has been mercilessly refuted by now,

It lives on under other guises - most attempts to refute philosophical arguments end up being refuted themselves.

I contend that the predictive capacities of logic and math are entirely explainable by seeing them as emergent properties of human cognition.

By "them" do you mean logic and mathematics themselves of their predictive capacties?
If the latter, then it seems pretty clear that the predictive uses to which human beings put logic and mathematics is a result of human cognitive activity - but that almost sounds trivial. It would also leave unaddressed the question of what the subject matter of logical and mathematical statements actually is. Wayfarer, as far as I understand him, is claiming that their subject matter is non-physical (numbers/sets/relations between them etc).
On the other hand, if by "them" you actually mean logic and mathematics themselves, so that they aren their subject matter are emergent properties of human cognition, that's a bold claim - not a particularly recent one though, it goes by the name of psychologism. I think J.S.Mill is the usual point of reference for that kind of view, although perhaps it is to be found in certain kinds of pragmatist as well. It faces a number of serious difficulties (I'm not saying that they are insurmountable) - Frege and Husserl had a range of arguments against the position. One key difficulty is that psychologism might lead to relativism about truth.

Have you read Norman Malcolm's "The Conceivability of Mechanism"? If not, and you have the time/inclination, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on it - although it is a little dated it still bears on the idea that the kind of proposals that those like Seth are making are conceptually confused. Here's a link https://www.pdf-archive.com/2017/02/02/malcolm-cm/ to a free copy.

Frege raised his puzzle with the statement
1A) Hesperus is Phosphorus.
So, even if that statement could be metalinguistically ambivalent, it is not so in the way your statement (3) is concerned, since "Hesperus" and "Phosphorus" are words from the same language. However, perhaps there is a way of expressing the ambivalence you believe Frege overlooked if we consider 1A) above, rather than your statement (1)? Over to you on that score.

Personally, I think Frege overlooked a different issue for his sense/reference distinction. His fundamental claim is that there can be no informative identity statements of the form
4) A is A.
But it is possible to construct a story (I'm thinking of Mark Twain's "Million Pound Bank Note") where it would make sense for someone to say something along the lines:
5) Henry Adams is Henry Adams!
and be expressing a discovery.
There are also more mundane cases where someone might be expressing something informatiive with a statement along the lines
6) Well, you know, John is John, so you shouldn't expect anything else from him.

It may be that unpacking these examples will in fact lead in the direction of your ideas, though, but we'll see.

I know I'm not making as much sense here as I would like. I'm struggling to find the most meaningful vocabulary.

I think the reason why none of us perhaps make as much sense as we'd like to concerning this subject, myself included, is that in discussing mental conditions from a philosophical perspective, we come bang up against a fundamental incompatibility between two ways of viewing human action. On the one hand there is the mechanistic view which looks at human action as just so much physiological activity, and I guess that's the kind of view that lies behind your remark that OCD is a neurological condition. It is also a view that some see as gaining corroboration from the fact that drugs can "help" with mental conditions. On the other hand there is the view that looks on human action as purposive and rational, and I have a feeling that there might be something like that lying behind your expression of your reliance on performing your routines - they have a place in your life that takes them beyond the mere motion of bodily parts. There's a temptation to think that we can have it both ways ("two aspects of just one thing") but I'm inclined to suspect that the mechanistic view, taken to its consistent conclusion, just negates the rationalistic one. Eliminative materialists would say something like "too bad for the rationalistic view in that case", and what I'm struggling with is whether that is a coherent position or not.

I agree on all points. Cynical irrationality should be regarded as a crime against humanity.

Oh, and thanks again to @Uber for the technical clarifications.

Having descended from the cloud of cluelessness to which I'd retreated after the withering critique of my scientific credentials by tom, I feel too serene to gloat. From previous experience on other threads, tom seems to believe that the first and last word in metaphysics is owed to science, and it seems to rankle with him when people point out to him that scientists take for granted many of the assumptions that are challenged when one is engaged in doing metaphysics. Having said that, I think it is extremely useful if you do do metaphysics that you have actually done some science, since it can help you identify the hidden assumptions (and dare I say errors) behind some of the more gradiose metaphysical claims that some scientists are sometimes inclined to make.

Thanks for this. Although patient X is not in your category, and my experience of other cases of OCD is limited, I accept absolutely that those with OCD could have complex feelings towards their condition. I could even imagine it being possible for someone with OCD to be perfectly content with their condition in its entirety, although I should think it unlikely.
A couple of follow up questions so I can clarify for myself your post:
What do you mean by a condition being intrinsic to a sufferer?
What specific qualitative differences between OCD and diabetes leads you have some doubts about it being intrinsic?
When you say that your best guess is that you are not capable of learning not to behave obsessively, is that based on some general lack of confidence in your abilities or more based on your previous experiences of having tried?
I'm not trying to trick you or anything - and if the questions seem insensitive, that is not my intent - I'm asking because I am genuinely interested in the philosophical implications that arise from these issues.

@tom

You think there is a fundamental difference?

Between Newtonian and Hamiltonian mechanics? Depends what you mean by fundamental. But in any case there is a difference in the tools they provide to solve problems. But all of that is irrelevant to the dispute about time-reversal symmetry.

The purport of time-reversal symmetry is that it does not matter from which of two given time-separated physical states you begin, you can calculate the transition to the other state using precisely the same physical laws because those laws are invariant under the reversal of sign of the temporal parameters. This requires that the two states are distinct and indentifiable in such a way that the necessary values to plug into the physical laws are available. One of the states you can define as "initial conditions" - it does not matter which - the other "terminating conditions". Time-reversal symmetry says nothing about what you can predict about the past just given a physical description of a system at one given moment.

Thanks for that Uber. The current bone of contention is the idea of time-reversal symmetry. My claim is that in order to display time-reversal symmetry in physics you need both initial and terminating conditions plus whatever mathematical tools you are using to model the system (Newtonian or Langrangian-Hamiltonian). Tom seems to believe that you need only intial conditions plus the mathematical tools and you can work your way backward or forward willy-nilly.

OK, so you are talking about Langrangian-Hamiltonian mechanics, whereas my example was expressed in the context of Newtonian mechanics. The principle remains the same. Initial conditions themselves using Langrangian-Hamiltonian mechanics will allow you to predict how the system will evolve. Initial conditions themselves plus tools of Langrangian-Hamiltonian mechanics will not allow you to display how those initial conditions arose in the first place - they are not even designed to do that.

Have you ever actually done any physics rather than just talking about it?

What are you talking about, your reply makes no sense whatsoever? In dynamics, if your system involves a particle in motion, part of specifying the intial conditions for that system is to specify the particle's acceleration and whether or not it is constant.

Initial conditions by themselves don't tell you how things were prior to those conditions, this is the fundamental error you are making. An initial condition at time t involving a ball with constant acceleration a an initial velocity v and an inital spatial location p will determine the forward trajectory of that ball. But without further information about that system before t - and so information not available from the initial conditions - no equations will give you the path it took to reach that initial state, since that initial state is compatible with an indefinite number of previous occurences. For instance, suppose that just up to t the object had a constant acceleration of (a+1) but was, just before t, subjected momentarily to a small decelerating force reducing the acceleration to the constant a. Suppose again that just up to t the object had a constant acceleration of (a+2) but was, just before t, subjected momentarily to a slightly larger decelerating force reducing the acceleration to the constant a. Nothing in the initial conditions, nor the equations of motion you choose to use will allow you to work backward to one or other of those previous states. The application of time-reversal symmetry requires initial conditions and terminating conditions.

When you dig down to the philosophical issues in depth, the distinction between fact and belief can seem to blur. However, with the possible exception of Pontius Pilate, I have never known of a single case where a politician or lawyer has seriously questioned the distinction from that kind of philosophical perspective. Giuliani, Trump and their like rather help themselves to the fact/belief distinction we're all familiar with from our everyday lives when it serves their purposes, and then simply move those posts together when it looks like they are about to score an own goal - at least, that's how it seems to me. At best it is intellectual inconsistency, at worst intellectual dishonesty - in the former case an appropriate cure might be a course in philosophical logic, in the latter some hard time might allow them to see the error of their ways - imagine what the world would be like if politicians and lawyers faced jail for intellecutal dishonesty, of course you'd have to be able to prove it beyond reasonable doubt.
I'm reminded of something I read towards the beginning of Robert Nozick's Philosophical Explanations (which in general is a double misnomer for that work, but that's another topic) in which he says that there really is nothing one can do just with words to persuade someone who, when faced with a choice between abandoning consistency or giving up their position, will prefer to abandon consistency.

Tom seems to have gone into stealth mode, but I - like you -await with bated breath not only for his explication of time-reversal symmetry but also his explanation of causation-free determinism.

OK, you win, I'm an idiot. Now can we please have a clear explanation from you concerning what you take determinism to be and how it is freed from any notion of causation?

So, you cannot find a single case where a physical system, whose time-evolution is determined by laws of motion, expressed in differential equation form, is not set for all times given a set of initial conditions.

You asked about differential equations for physical systems in general, not laws of motion in specific, so the example I gave concerned thermodynamics, not dynamics. But even so, on a general point about the use of differential equations given initial conditions, the differential equations will allow you to calculate the future changes of the system, I've not denied that at any point, but they will not allow you to calculate how the system arrived in that state, so you cannot use the laws of motion with just initial conditions to calculate how things were in the past. Why? Amongst other things, for the simple reason that there is no representation within the differential equations of dynamics or thermodynamics of system for the amount of time for which the system has been in that initial state.

Of course, given an initial conditionand a terminating condition, the equations of dynamics and thermodynamics will allow you to get from one to the other in either direction by making appropriate reversals to the time-dependent variables and their derivatives, but that was not the question you asked.

Now, will you please provide us with some precision on what you take determinism to be?

First, differential equations themselves do not determine anything. Second, if your point is that all physical laws are time-symmetric, you are not accounting for the Second Law of Thermodynamics. That allows for some time-symmetric solutions where there are no changes in entropy of a system, but where changes in entropy are concerned, we have irreversibility and, yes, there are differential equations (to be specific, partial differential equations) that are used to model entropy changes. So from those equations you cannot get any results about the past of the system, only regarding the future.

Now that I have met your challenge, how about responding to my question (for the third time of asking): what conception of determinism are you working with that frees it from the notion of causality?

Read Suppes's critique of Russell's position regarding physics not using the notion of causality, before just citing Russell as an authority on the subject. Russell got many things wrong - more things wrong than he got right, by some lights.

Differential equations you say? You mean the type of equations, that given the state of the system at any time, the states for all other times may be calculated?

No, I mean simply equations that relate functions to their derivatives (of any order): i.e. the mathematical definition of a differential equation. It would perhaps help the discussion if you were aware of some basic mathematical terminology.

And once I again I have to ask the question I posed: what is your definition of determinism lying behind your claim that modern science is deterministic and so eliminates the notion of causality.

Yet you still believe that science is about modeling known causal relations mathematically, and thus miraculously capturing unknown causal and acausal relations, without being aware of what you are doing.

Some science very definitely is involved in modelling supposed causal relations, I never made the claim that all science is about modelling causal relations.

@tom

I see. You claim that science merely models causal relations, but somehow manages to model unknown, unexpected, surprising causal relations, even when those relations, as in the case of quantum entanglement, are explicitly not causal?

That makes no sense.

Then let me clarify it for you. When you model what you take to be causal relations using mathematical tools, you end up - if you are successful - with a set of equations. Often enough these equations are differential in form, and differential equations can have different solutions. This is precisely the case for Maxwell's equations, developed after years of modelling the causal effects of electricity and magnetism. One of the solutions to those equations was the surprising prediction of electromagnetic radiation, which was subsequently discovered by Hertz several years later. All of the scientists involved with this discovery were modelling nature causally. The same goes for the General Theory of relativity - the prediction of graviational waves falls out of a solution to the field equations for massive binary systems - the waves are caused by the interaction of those masses. Einstein's Special and General Theories are both of them causal models of the universe.

Scientists outside of QM (which is not all of science, just a part of it) continue to model nature causally.

I'm still waiting for your definition of determinism.

If that is the case, then how can quantum entanglement be discovered in the theory, 50 years before technology was capable of testing, or observing that prediction?

I don't see the relevance. The fact that in most cases science models causal relations doesn't entail that it always does, nor that it cannot, on the basis of those models, predict as yet unobserved phenomena. After all that is precisely what Maxwell's equations did, and those were very definitely the result of modelling events that were taken to be causally related.

Both quantum mechanics and general relativity are deterministic theories. Deterministic physical theories, being time-invariant, render causality meaningless.

What notion of determinism are you working with here? One very typical one connects it explicity to the idea that each state of a system is ineluctably caused by the previous states of the system, so I don't see how a determinisitc theory in that sense is able to render causality meaningless. You could try stripping out the explicit reference to causation and say that a system is deterministic if (and only if?) the state of that system at time t allows for precisely one next state of the system. The direction of time, though, is embedded into the idea of next state and so if by time-invariant you mean to include the idea of equivalence under time-reversal, it cannot be that sense of determinism in which you take the two theories you are talking about to be deterministic.
But perhaps you have a different notion of determinism that I've yet to be introduced to?

This is right, but also misses the point to some extent. The laws of physics are usually expressed in terms of mathematical equivalences, but those equivalences are often developed on the basis that they model the relations of causes to their effects. No doubt someone is going to shout "but quantum mechanics proves there is no causation". It proves no such thing - if it proves anything at all, it proves at most that we require a probabilistic conception of causality when dealing with some specific kinds of events.

I think you are right about Harry Hindu, although Berkeley's connection to the act-object view of perception is quite problematic (on the one hand he seems to need it to account for several people to see one and the same thing, but on the other, the existence of that thing is ultimately an idea in the mind of God, and it's not clear that God's perceptions/conception of the object can be assimilated to the act-object model).

Yes, but even if you were an idealist in your fundamental metaphysics you will still find it useful to have a distinction between the physical and the non-physical. You will still need to allow for things that have spatiotemporal locations (objects) and those that don't (e.g. thoughts about objects) even if at some level everything is mind-dependent.

But in the end, Newton was right.

Not really. Newton's corpuscular theory of light failed (and still fails) to account for the diffraction phenomena that Huygen's wave theory adequately explains. However, if all you mean is that Newton was right insofar as light exhibits particle-like behaviour in certain circumstances, fine, but then so was Huygens if you simply read him as claiming that light exhibits wavelike properties in many circumstances. Typically, in undergraduate physics courses in electromagnetism, it is the wavelike aspects that are focussed on.

Try reading all of the post.

I did try, and here's something else wrong with it:

I have never encountered the claim that the scientists working on e.m. radiation thought they were trying to understand something non-physical before. I just doesn't make sense.

You don't seem to understand how electromagnetic radiation was discovered. Maxwell gave us electromagnetic radiation as a new theoretical concept, Hertz gave us its empirical confirmation. Prior to Maxwell, physicists working in electricity and magnetism worked - like Maxwell - on electromagnetic fields. Maxwell brought together the previous work of those other physicists into "his" four field equations. It turned out that those equations have a solution which describes the wavelike propagation of electric and magnetic energy in a vacuum at the speed of light. After Maxwell's theoretical discovery/invention of electromagnetic radiation, that radiation became an object for physical research, and most famously Hertz's which culminated in confirmation of Maxwell's theory.
That's entirely consistent with the OP's suggestion that electromagnetic radiation is non-physical right up to the point where Maxwell's conceptual apparatus suggested its existence.

it is interesting that many of the prominent materialist philosophers are or were Australian;

Bernard Williams once made a "joke" that whilst Australia wasn't the only place where materialist theories of mind were believed, it was the only place where they were true.

One evil demon is enough to get the skeptical argument about certainty going - in fact you don't strictly speaking need the evil demon in any case. If you burrow into Descartes's argument it is, in the abstract, simply based on the idea of the fallibility of all processes, and that obtaining knowledge is a process. He "gets around" this by introducing his clear and distinct ideas which provide us with knowledge without having to go through a process of acheiving it.
We've long since moved on from Descartes obsession with certainty - but he changed the terms of the philosophical debate: prior to him the big distinction in metaphysics was between form and content, after him it was all about mind and matter.

This is a reasonably clear article casting doubt on the usefulness of the notion of physicalism in philosophy (a little dated now perhaps, but makes some clear points):
There is no question of physicalism

I don't think I am misrepresenting physicalism too much by describing it as the metaphysical assertion that everything that is instantiated in Reality is physical.

Unless you expand on what you mean by "physical" that description is unilluminatingly circular.

Sorry, I should not say "abstract things" more like "non-particular things" - i.e. things that cannot be identified uniquely by their spatiotemporal location.

If I remember rightly (and I'm not 100% certain I do) David Armstrong was a mind-brain identity theorist (of the functionalist kind I believe) but argued throughout his life against nominalism. Of course, that doesn't mean he was correct to do so - there may have been hidden inconsistencies in his position - but it looks coherent to be both a materialist about the mind and yet a realist about some kinds of abstract things (laws of nature for instance).

We also describe laws as physical of course, and they don't seem to be covered by either of our definitions, but presumably the idea is that a law is physical if and only if it treats of physical events and objects.