To my understanding, pragmatism isn't generally considered to be a cohesive body of agreed upon thought that is acceptable to all of its adherents. And in identifying oneself to be a pragmatist there is always the paradoxical danger of misinterpreting pragmatism non-pragmatically in the spirit of metaphysical dogmatism.

For sake of argument, let's assume there is no such thing as retro-causality, such that a person's entire behaviour is explainable as being caused by events of the past.

Then whenever a person plans on, predicts, or discusses the future, what is it that justifies our interpretation of his behaviour as being of the actual future?

Suppose it is Monday and that he predicts the Sun will rise tomorrow on Tuesday. Given that it is currently Monday, can his prediction currently refer to Tuesday, before Tuesday has actually happened?

Or does it only make sense retrospectively, in a post hoc fashion, after having witnessing the following morning of Tuesday, to identify his earlier prediction as referring to the dawn of Tuesday?

Sorry, about that, I was implicitly referring to Quine's paper "Truth by convention" and Wittgenstein's analogous remarks in Philosophical Investigations that differentiates what is called following a rule in practice, versus what is called giving a supply of justifications for following a rule.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Tortoise_Said_to_Achilles
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/convention/#TruCon

Suppose X is true. Then it is true that "X is true". But it will also be true that " 'X is true' is true", and so on and so forth. In this case we clearly have a regress, but we have no problem in accepting it. In other words, what we have here is a benign regress. T — Mr Bee

I doubt that most Quinians or Wittgensteinians would say that it is a benign regress and would reject it, given it's similarity to the Modus-Ponen's infinite regress paradox of Lewis Carroll, as used by critics of truth-by-convention to attack the idea that the notion of logical necessity is representable or derivable from a finite supply of community conventions.

I am pretty sure that at least 20% of the population are quite unhappy; some of the population are profoundly unhappy. In most cases, there is nothing wrong with their "psychology". Their brains are in working order. They can concentrate, learn, remember, cope, produce, get up every day and go to work, get their laundry washed, and so on. If they are unhappy, they need to change -- their job, their family, their society, themselves, or all of the above. If they can't change, then they are going to stay unhappy, or they'll make some kind of accommodation. They don't need therapy--they need courage. — Bitter Crank

lol. So in other words, if 'perfectly healthy' miserable people continue to kill themselves and others because their psychological needs are ignored by psychiatry who should only concentrate on a minority of major depression disorder cases, then society's response should be a post-hoc sermon of "oughts".

:

Observing your own mental states and categorizing those mental states, and then sharing those observations with others is a scientific act. — Harry Hindu

Self-categorizing one's mental state doesn't sound part of a scientific act.

"Imagine someone saying: "But I know how tall I am!" and laying his hand on top of his head to prove it."

Why isn't the ordinary notion of games confusing?

Presumably because when we play games or talk about games we aren't attempting to build an ideal epistemological foundation. Which suggests to me that "language games" shouldn't be confusing as a vague term for anthropological activity within ordinary language philosophy. Rather, it is a tool too blunt for a different job one had in mind.

Compare philosophers' use of the terms "being", "language games", "consciousness", "rules" etc in meta-linguistic sentences, to a logicians' use of the noun-phrase "free variable" in open formulas.

When using meta-linguistic terminology i think it is more often that not the case that all the philosopher intends to communicate is an open-sentence containing one or more of these terms as free-variables, and is begging the listener to supply a relevant substitution, whether it be a named instance of the listeners acquaintance (e.g. "language game" -> "chess") or a perceptuo-motor action on behalf of the listener (e.g. "being" -> physically look around).


Perhaps it would be helpful if philosophers adopted a notation to explicitly tag speech-acts whenever there is a potential misunderstanding that a substantive proposition is implied when it is not, for example replacing "being" with <being>. That way confusions concerning the need for "third order talk" and associated paradoxes are kept to a minimum, and it is clear when the philosopher is intending an act of showing involving the listener that goes beyond the boundaries of language.

For this thought of the empirical ego as "someone else situated in front of me" is plain nonsense if it is intended to imply the existence of a literal hidden onlooker of my empirical ego.
— sime

That is referred to as the 'homunculus fallacy'.

the "third-person" and "subject of experience" surely have identical uses, do they not?
— sime

Clearly not. If I burn my hand, I don't say 'that hurt him'. I say 'that hurt me'. And that pain is a first-person experience, even though it can be described to some extent in third-person terms. — Wayfarer

it sounds as though we're pretty much agreed then :) the transcendental ego, in so far as it designates anything at all, cannot be an onlooking homonulcus. i would simply like to further suggest that the meaning of all linguistic concepts concerns first-person understanding of third person behaviour. I might often use language to point at my private intuitions as it were, but none of this implies additional metaphysical substances to what is empirically experienced.

As for Kant's argument for the transcendental ego from the unity of apperception, he already appears to presuppose a subject that is distinct from its representations, the very thing he sets out to prove.

I suspect his belief in a transcendental ego is a consequence of his metaphysical understanding of time in terms of an atomic substance, albeit a mentalistic one. A deleuzean or whiteheadean process philosopher presumably has no need of a transcendental 'glue' to bind "temporally distinct" representations.

↪Moliere ↪Sapientia Doesn't the distinction between spectral colour and perceptual colour resolve your dispute? — jamalrob

I think they require an additional distinction between perceptual colour and verbally reported colour.

For although a subject's verbal behaviour might narrowly imply that they are percieving red strawberrys, the rest of their behaviour might indicate otherwise. The meaning of "red" after all, is a public definition and not in terms of private ostensive definition.

"All experience implies a subject of experience" sounds a bit like

"I am able to see objects, therefore I must have eyeballs"
— sime

None of what you say refutes or comes to terms with the issue of 'the subject of experience'. A deaf, dumb and blind subject remains a subject. And Robinson might be a singlularly un-self-aware subject, but he remains a subject nonetheless. — Wayfarer

Certainly it is true that from my perspective, my concept of a third person is of a subject of experience, or perhaps I might say, a potential subject of sensory stimulus. Likewise it is true that I see my empirical ego as a subject of experience, because of my tendency to think of myself as someone else situated in front of me.

But for me, here things must abruptly end. For this thought of the empirical ego as "someone else situated in front of me" is plain nonsense if it is intended to imply the existence of a literal hidden onlooker of my empirical ego.

Ordinarily, is it not the case that the notion of an onlooker or of an experiential subject is necessarily tied to thinking of a third party, whose status as a subject is in terms of behavioural stimulus-response criteria?

If so, then I cannot apply this concept to the personal pronoun in so far as it is used to mean something other than the empirical ego.

the "third-person" and "subject of experience" surely have identical uses, do they not?

Rather than a deductive conclusion, Peirce's take was that the initial recognition of one's own existence as a subject of experience is a retroductive conjecture prompted primarily by the unpleasant surprise of being (repeatedly) mistaken:
In short, error appears, and it can be explained only by supposing a self which is fallible ... At the age at which we know children to be self-conscious, we know that they have been made aware of ignorance and error; and we know them to possess at that age powers of understanding sufficient to enable them to infer from ignorance and error their own existence.
— CP 5.234-236, 1868 — aletheist

Right. I assume here that in kantian terminology pierce is referring to the empirical ego of reflective consciousness, i.e how each of us privately understands our own empirical lives by thinking of ourselves in terms of a hypothetical third-person whose qualities are inductively inferred.

Any ideas on what Pierce thought concerning the idea of the Transcendental Ego?

"All experience implies a subject of experience" sounds a bit like

"I am able to see objects, therefore I must have eyeballs"

Suppose Robinson Crusoe lived from birth on an unpopulated island and failed to notice his blinking and reflection. How could he deduce purely from observing the objects around him, that his ability to see was dependent on a sensing capacity of some sort?

And if he later lost his sight, touch and hearing, what difference would it make for him to believe he had lost sensing capacity versus believing that the world itself disappeared?

lol. As for how to dissolve the first-person hard problem, it is presumably a simple matter of deflating "second order" talk of first-person experience, that includes an alleged subject of experience, to "first order" observation sentences that refer only to the contents of experience. (Presumably if the concept of "experience" is restricted to the first person, it can only mean something similar to "attention" or "intention" that refers to a perceptual act rather than a substance).

sorry , I perhaps should have been more specific. I was alluding to logical behaviourism, i.e that the mental predicates we assign to the third person is the very assignment of behavioural predicates to the third person. Regardless of one's metaphysics this is a fact. For when we judge a person's mental state we are judging nothing more than their behaviour. We aren't peering into their private psychic realm.

in other words as I understand it,

panpsychism conceptualises meaningful behaviour as the symptom of a separate internal mental state according to either a dualism of metaphysically independent physical and mental properties, or according to a generalised form of brain-world duality.

Logical behaviourism directly identifies third-person mental predicates as third-person behavioural predicates, whose assertability criteria I would suggest are generally holistic and involve brain-body-world interactions.

I stress the third-person here, because although I believe logical behaviourism dissolves the hard problem in the third-person (how can it not???) I don't see how logical behaviourism alone can be used to dissolve the hard-problem of the first-person. After all, first-person predicates and third-person predicates are generally non-interchangeable and have entirely separate uses.

How is it possible to know if the illusion indicates a distortion of visual intuition as opposed to merely a linguistic mistake?

Perhaps all the illusion shows is that our ordinary language colour words don't have the meaning we thought they had. Certainly the strawberrys didn't look to have the normal tint of red we associate with them. I'm reminded of Wittgenstein's manometer. Is a mistake 'mere show' here?

mmm... a few thoughts....

Since all of our ordinary-language criteria for attributing mental states to other people are behavioural criteria, it surely follows that Panpsychism is redundant if framed as a substantial metaphysical thesis. None of us use a non-behavioural theory of mind to understand other people (how on earth would that even work???), so why do we need a non-behavioural theory of mind to account for everything else?

On the other hand, if panspsychism is merely the rejection of the anthropocentric metaphysics of mind that is implicit throughout human culture, then pansychism wouldn't be to propose anything additional to the current physical picture. But in this case panpsychism is at best "Pan-behaviourism".

Pan-behaviourism however, is surely ethically dubious and linguistically nonsensical. For we can only consistently attribute purposeful behaviours to other people because as a species our natural and conditioned responses to stimuli are similar - the condition that allows us to form a community of speakers that share a common language in which we can inter-relate via sharing our agreed-upon definitions for our shared behaviours. I therefore don't therefore see any merit even to a belief in "Panbehaviourism" -for it overlooks the necessity of community customs when attributing purposeful behaviour to an agent of that community.

"There is nothing after death"

it first needs to be established whether there is a meaningful phenomenological or behavioural notion of absolute unconsciousness. Otherwise "there is nothing" cannot be part of a meaningful observation sentence , behavioural sentence or abstract sentence referring to experience, qualia or phenomena.

Even if such a notion is valid, general sentences of the form "This is how things are after my own death" look as problematic as the thought of a ruler measuring beyond its length.

Cultural atheism, while rejecting theism still clings to most of the same transcendental superstitions and prejudices as judeo-Christianity, superstitions that Immanuel Kant ought to have put to rest via a grammatical banishment of all talk concerning things in themselves.

For me, a possible world refers to a physically performable experiment that can be performed or simulated at some future time and location within our observable universe to a level of approximation that is considered acceptable by the modal argument under consideration.

For example, to speak of a possible world in which Donald Trump lost the 2016 presidential election to Hillary Clinton is to consider the potential outcome of a future scientific experiment in which the state of planet earth immediately prior to the conclusion of the election is approximately reproduced either here on earth or elsewhere on another planet such that the counterfactual result follows. The required precision and accuracy of this experimentally reconstructed copy of the past state that produces the counterfactual result depends on what information is demanded by the modal argument.

Obviously such a formulation of possible worlds means that neither "Trump" nor "Hillary" are designated rigidly, with "trump" and "Hillary" in the "possible world" referring to mere stand-ins for their original counterparts that are judged to be playing their respective roles "well enough" for the modal argument under consideration.

This thread reminds me of this other thread from a few weeks ago:

http://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/534/is-intersubjectivity-metaphysically-conceivable/p1

There, somewhat similar to your OP, I reached a somewhat solipsistic looking conclusion, that one cannot ask as to whether or not other minds exist. I prefer your presentation of the basic problem to mine, although I think your conclusion is confused.

To recap and expand a little:

The logical inference of other minds is an inference that is made via a supposed analogy with one's own case. This inference is motivated by our natural empathetic instincts towards other people's behaviour that often cause us to identify our own feelings with the feelings of others.

Hence at first glance, the analogical inference of other minds in themselves might seem to be unquestionable and a forteriori, sensical. And there is also the fact that, as for instance in the case of pains, that we don't merely use our own personal pain-behaviour as an a priori model for understanding third person pain-behaviour, because we also use our understanding of third-person pain-behaviour as a means of understanding our own first-person pain-behaviour. For example, just after stubbing my toe i immediately begin to recognise this fact in a shared language, by recalling similar past instances of myself stubbing my toe and leaping around the room as if observing myself from a third person perspective, and comparing and conflating this memory with both my current predicament and all of the times I have witnessed others doing the same.

But is argument by analogy valid for interpreting other minds as things in themselves? I conclude not for precisely the reason you state, for the supposed analogy relating the first and the third person isn't an analogy at all; for an analogy to be an an analogy it must be restricted to external comparisons that are empirically sensible, as for instance, in comparing apples to oranges, or in comparing external behavioural observstions of myself to external behavioural observations of others, or in comparing the law of addition in Peano arithmetic to the law of addition in Robinson arithmetic (these are also empirical examples since they involve empirical comparison of use cases in different calculi).

However, in the current case, we have merely assumed that there is a first vs third person analogy via a superficial appeal to introspection that has already conflated the first person with the third person. But as previously argued, for introspection to present a logically valid argument by way of analogy, the analogy must be reducible to what is sensical from the perspective of the first person, or else be rejected as logically nonsensical, even if accepted as being emotionally meaningful.

Hence there isn't an analogy relating the first and third person after all, and therefore other minds in themselves are not logically conceivable. This conclusion looks a bit like epistemological solipsism, namely that one can only know of ones personal pains and remain agnostic about the pains of others. Yet this is also mistake, since neither can the ABSENCE of other minds be logically conceivable. We are merely left with sensations and feelings, including empathy and social harmony, that are not logically interpretable in terms of a public-private distinction. For this reason, if this is to be described as a solipsism it is a grammatical solipsism.

To quote Wittgenstein, "sensations are private" is comparable to "one plays patience with oneself", from which I conclude that "are" means 'analytically entail being'. So talk of public sensations, i.e third person sensations, is nonsense, ergo the notion of sensual privacy is also nonsense.

From my understanding, the "one world interpretation", even if representative of kants personal views, is misleading if treated as a viable conclusion of his epistemology, for you cannot even claim ignorance about a fact you cannot reach in relation to a concept you cannot define. Perhaps what I'm seeking to clarify is what could be called a "zero world interpretation"

my crude understanding of kants position regarding the self, is that the personal pronoun is used a transcendental designator without a reference or conscious representation, that consciousness itself is more or less synonymous with cognitive acts of synthesis and the unity of apperception , and that knowledge of the self is restricted to representations i.e appearances only. Regardless of kants theological or ethical motives, noumena never make a positive appearance in his theory of the self or of consciousness or of valid cognitive judgements, well at least not on the SEP page discussing his complicated theses regarding the self.

So as i currently understand, one can never arrive at noumena when working strictly within Kant's constructive account of cognition. "Noumena" is more like a grammatical demonstration of an illegal move within his construction. It is as if Kant had said in defining chess that "only the bishop can move diagonally" and with everyone mistaking this for a physical theory or an empirical law, and then proceeding to evaluate whether in theory an in practice this was necessarily the case.

Metaphysics doesn't appear to be conceivable as a priori and independent of empirical observation ever since the collapse of the analytic-synthetic distinction. An insight I would personally tribute to Wittgenstein rather than to Quine, given how the abolishment of logical necessity is a simple corollary of the abolishment of the notion of privately obeying a rule. For there is no example of logical necessity to be found in the outside world.

Information theory, specifically the minimum description length principle seems at first glance to be the closest thing to a theory of naturalised epistemology, given its natural identification of ontology as an empirically updated data compression code that is not critically dependent on the a priori/a posteriori distinction in the way that classical metaphysics assumes ontology to be. Perhaps deleuze reached a similar conclusion through introspection.

Yet the identification of information theory as a transcendental principle of a naturalised metaphysics that lies as a foundation of certainty beneath all other knowledge and understanding looks to be a mistake for the same reason as earlier, namely that it is just another example of a rule of logic with no meaning outside of praxis, and that to conceive of it as being metaphysical is to appeal once again to an absolute and private notion of rule following or of logical necessity.

So I can only conclude that in all important respects, neither the presence nor absence of other minds is metaphysically conceivable. — sime


It is certainly conceivable - you've done that. But whether it is completely knowable - in a way that your logicism wants to demand - is another question. — apokrisis

mmm... but I must protest again, do the habits of my social cognition really amount to metaphysical conceivability of other minds in themselves, given the fact i can neither imagine the presence nor absence of sensation in the third person?

What about children relating in earnest to dolls, robots, cartoon characters and teapots? does this mean that they have metaphysically conceived of objective idealism or pan-psychism? and isn't equating psychological attitude with metaphysical absolutes fraught, misleading and even potentially dangerous?

So that goes to the issue of what counts as knowledge. As a Pragmatist, my view is that it is what you cannot doubt in your heart. It is what you would actually be willing to act upon in confidence. — apokrisis

well it appears I have at least a choice between perceptual stances. I am free to perceive someone as a person as i naturally do and to feel empathy towards them in a pragmatic fashion, but I am also free to perceive them as a zombie in a critical fashion and to deconstruct their speech acts into acoustic blasts, and analyse away their appearance into moving edges and changing colour blobs. It appears that i have a freedom of stances, but without any means of epistemological justification for choosing one over the other. And in no event, can the stance I take tell me anything metaphysically, since what i interpret is strictly relative to the perspective of my a priori chosen stance.

The analogical approach to 'other minds' is a common approach, but is beset by a problem which is equally often pointed out: what motivates the application of the analogy to begin with, if you did not already recognise the 'other mind' in the first place? In other words, aren't you simply assuming your conclusion? — StreetlightX

Perhaps the stance I take towards other people is the starting point of the sense of my language and a necessary condition to be established prior to its meaning and use. In which case, the so called ontological question about other minds does not really concern the existence of other minds, surely an inconceivable interpretation of the question, that as you've additionally mentioned often leads to a circular answer. Rather it is a question concerning the psycho-linguistical grammar or stance that one should use in every day social interaction. Choose whichever stance you wish, either way, you're right!