Presupposing presupposes. It doesn't claim to know or be true. Best not to confuse the two. — tim wood

Yep. So I am not presupposing anything. Right? My claim was that in asking the question "What's that, what is that for?" I am not presupposing that X has a purpose.

Figuring out just what the presuppositions are can be not-so-simple. If in the kitchen I think to myself, "That's a can opener," that's because in my mind was the question, "What's that, what is that for"? The constellation of presuppositions includes can openers, bottle openers, and so forth. But the central presupposition, on seeing the object, is that it's for something, some purpose. If I did not presuppose that the object was something for some purpose, I would never have formulated the question. — tim wood

I wouldn't say that I presuppose that it has a purpose. It remains open, for instance, that it could be a bit of useless shrapnel.

All I know is what it would be for something to have a purpose. That does seem required for asking the question (reasonably).

But what presupposition I am making in knowing what it would be for something to have a purpose? (All I need to have is a certain concept. Does having that concept require a presupposition about the world?)

I'm still confused, Banno.

I don't know how much I need to assume in order to pose a question. Here's my attempt to reconstruct the argument. I think I'm not entirely getting the point.

If I were to say that when I ask 'are there trees?' I'm not even assuming that my question is meaningful, then I am not really asking a question at all. Suppose I just like the sound of my own voice, or enjoy the look of the markings that I can make appear by typing. I am not really asking a question. I am doing something else - something aesthetic, perhaps. Questioning is a social practice. In order to pose a question, I must also make the assumption that my speech act will be effective in various ways. (I was going to say that it has meaning... but that seems to theoretical. Can't you doubt that there are meanings and yet ask questions? I'd hope so, for the sake of meaning sceptics). This assumption seems to entail the further assumption that there is a world in which my question can be effective - that there are listeners with a capacity for understanding and responding etc. (even if that's just me, or some collection of thoughts existing in the future).

...that is, you rely on not doubting them, or in other words to treat them as certain.

Of course you might bring one or two into doubt; but in order to do so, you must hold firm to other beliefs. — Banno

Okay, interesting. So as my reply to Benj96 suggested, perhaps I am making more of the distinction between question and questioner than you are. I want to bracket out all the assumptions/certainty that is causally/psychologically required, and focus on the propositions expressed and what claims they entail.

But if the end goal is to refute global scepticism, then this distinction isn't very important. The anti-sceptic just needs to show that the global sceptic is themselves making some assumptions, and showing that doing X requires assumption Y seems to be enough.

All questions assume. At the very basis of a question is the assumption that it was worthy of asking in the first place/ may have an answer. — Benj96

I can agree that it is impossible for a person to intentionally pose a question that they don't recognise as being sensible or coherent. This is because, in order to recognise some speech act as a question, one must be able to make some sense of it (and doing something intentionally requires a level of awareness of what it is that one is doing).


But first, I wonder whether recognising the sense in the question entails making the assumption that it does make sense. I can recognise that a creature is a horse without assuming that it is a horse, can't I?

Secondly, there is a distinction between the question and the questioner. A questioner can make assumptions that the question doesn't. For example, the question 'does you car have petrol in the tank?' assumes that there is a car, that it has a tank, that it is yours, and so on. But the question 'are there trees?' doesn't itself make assumptions like that. At most, the questioner putting it might make certain minimal assumptions in order to engage in the practice of asking the question.

That you and I speak english, at least to the extent that we use "trees" in a sufficiently similar way for my answer to be applicable.
That we will recognise the structure of the text as a request
That your typing will produce a post on the forum
That the post will be read by others
That the keyboard will not dissolve as you hit the keys
I could go on at length, setting out the context in which the question has meaning. For: — Banno

I'm not certain about any of that. At most, I would say that my motivation to post the question might rely, psychologically, on these assumptions. But it seems possible for an agent to raise a doubt without having certainty that there is a language called 'English', or that their question even makes sense. Why not?

Well the truth is all questions assume. — Benj96

What assumption am I making when I ask 'do trees exist?'

Doubt can only take place against a background of certainty. — Banno

What certainty does it require?

To follow on from your thoughts... I think you are probably right that bodybuilding is just like another other project in that its core appeal and source of meaning for people is simply development of a skill or progress towards a goal.

In my experience, the public do not have this impression. The accusation I'd anticipate to your claim is: "you could choose anything to pour yourself into, why choose something that is so obsessed with your own body?" As you acknowledge, for some it may be true that the core appeal is something to do with vanity (neurotic or not). But for others, it is possible to imagine someone getting into it almost by accident - they try the gym like regular people, for instance, and find that they really enjoy it, or that their body responds very well to it, in that they grow easily. It is rewarding, and so they get deeper into it.

There are many reasons people might be disproportionately critical of bodybuilders qua hobbyists or sportspeople. One is that it's not taken seriously as a pursuit in the same way as other projects of this kind (tennis, train modelling, poker, track athletics), and so the substantial dedication it requires is seen not as a virtue in aid of a worthy goal, but as mere self-obsession. Why? Perhaps because the aim is transformation of one's own body, which is usually a means to some other end. The object of dedication is literally oneself in a way that it isn't in most other pursuits. But it's far from obvious that this constitutes a different and objectionable type of 'self-obsession', at least when it comes to solo-sports and pursuits. The results may be enjoyable to others just as they are in these other solo pursuits.

Now I wonder how we should characterize neurotic as opposed to non-neurotic concern with looking a certain way, and how the notion of vanity fits in.

My first thought is this: vanity is concern with how one looks. Neurotic and non-neurotic vanity are distinguished in the following way: If in circumstances where S would fail to approximate looking a certain way, S would feel deeply inadequate, then S is neurotically vain.

If that's right, it's not clear most bodybuilders are neurotically vain. And it seems pretty certain that they aren't necessarily neurotically vain.

Yeah my mistake there should have been the words 'concern with' in there.

You mean there's nothing intrinsically neurotic about looking a certain way? I agree: there isn't. That's why I used the qualifier 'neurotic'.

You're right. I went for the most obvious diagnosis of the bodybuilder's impulse. But it is true that one can be interested in this type of competition/pursuit out of a certain fascination with aspects of the process rather than neurotic concern with looking a certain way. (E.g., self-mastery, control over the body, etc.)

It's an interesting question. I take it you're asking whether the sport of bodybuilding is in some way intrinsically pathological, rather than whether bodybuilders typically suffer from some kind of psychopathology.

The desire to have a 'perfect body' (or, what amounts to almost the same thing: the desire to win competitions where a 'superior body' is the criterion of success) seems to be a paradigmatic case of vanity. Vanity itself isn't pathological. But dedicating a large portion of one's life and energy to attaining such a body may be, depending on the individual - their values, commitments and psychology.

It is possible to love the pursuit and have very little inner conflict about it. I wouldn't consider people in these types of cases to be neurotic because of their bodybuilding.

Personal story: Years ago I got into it causally. I enjoyed lifting weights and autistic eating schedules (I don't mean autistic in the technical sense). I eventually did steroids and the experience was positive in many ways. But for various reasons, that life wasn't for me. My body, and my soul, were not well shaped for that path, and the friction proved too much. The way it interfered with the rest of my life and functionality was too much. So, in my case, though I didn't reach an advanced stage, the bodybuilding pursuit was pathological.

Exactly--otherwise it's not an adequate definition. Hence why my definition of rationality would be synonymous --and circular --with rationality. — Terrapin Station

I guess it's a matter of degree. I just thought you could say something more illuminating than is 'logical' or 'is believed on a solid basis', which seems almost synonymous at the level of individual words.

So starting with that example, "baldness" and "lacking hairs on one's head" are not synonyms in your view? — Terrapin Station

No individual word or phrase in the definition is synonymous with 'bald', no.

But I see your point now. Of course, if a definition or analysis is good, then the whole definition will be (at least somewhat) synonymous with the word defined.

A definition is going to present synonymous words and phrases. There is circularity to that. A feline is a cat, a cat is a feline. If someone doesn't know some of the synonymous words/phrases, definitions aren't going to help them, but we can't do anything other than that in a definition and still have it be a definition. — Terrapin Station

If a word can only be defined with synonyms (or a tight circle of cognate words), then it is a so-called 'primitive' word. Not all words are primitive words. I think there are many words for which we can offer useful, illuminating definitions. For example, baldness is the state of lacking hairs on one's head. A pond is a small body of water in the ground unconnected to a river or ocean.

Rationality is indeed tricky though. I would suggest the following. Instrumental rationality is the state of taking the most effective means to one's ends. Epistemic rationality is the state of having apportioned one's beliefs to the evidence and reasons; to form beliefs on the basis of principles likely to track how things are, and not on the basis of principles or mechanisms (cognitive biases etc.) which do not.

My (provisional) answer to the OP: We can think about it either way. We can say that philosophers are interested in words, or that philosophers are interested in the things they denote. I don't think it matters which way we put it.

When we claim that 'bachelors are unmarried men', we might be claiming either (1) all bachelors are unmarried and are men, or (2) the word 'bachelor' means unmarried man (as necessary conditions at least).

Similarly, when we claim that 'water is H2O', we might be claiming either (a) water is constituted by H2O, or (b) the word water has a meaning such that (in the actual world at least), it picks out H2O.

Claims about bachelors and claims about water might seem different at first. The first are more easily construed as claims about what words mean. The second are more easily construed as claims about what the world is like. This is because, as is familiar, claims about bachelors are paradigmatic analytic truths, which are supposed to be apriori, whereas claims about what constitutes water are paradigmatic aposteriori claims. But I think both sentences can be construed as claims about the world.

In saying 'bachelors are unmarried men', I am saying, of bachelors, that they have the properties of being married and being men. It might seem that I am making a claim about the word only, because I can change the meaning of the word, and then bachelors would no longer be unmarried men. But isn't that the same with claims about 'water'? Change the meaning of water, and water is not longer constituted by H2O. No. Clearly both entailments are false. You don't change the facts about the bachelor-things or the water-things in the world by changing what words mean, any more than you can make a tail a leg by changing the meaning of 'tail'. Being unmarried and being a man are properties - whatever they are exactly - that obtain in virtue of various social and natural circumstances. They are not changed. And they are just what we ascribe (essentially) to bachelors when we say 'bachelors are unmarried men'.

But we can say much the same things in terms of conceptual or semantic analysis. The only difference is that in some contexts it seems much more natural to think in terms of things rather than words. After all, the surface grammar of remarks like 'coins are legal tender if they are printed at the national mint' suggests that we are talking about certain coins and what they are like, rather than the meanings of words. Perhaps also the 'worldly' way of talking gets us out of problems having to do with defining analyticity (if it doesn't simply take up a Quinean picture wholesale, where all truths are 'worldly truths' in some sense; there are no simple, indisputable truths of language).

Rattionality seems pretty simple to me. It's basically just a term for thinking both logically and in terms of things that one has a solid basis to believe. — Terrapin Station

Seems like a nearly-circular definition. In effect, you seem to be saying: The rational thing to do is the logical thing to do. The rational thing to believe is the thing that has a solid basis.

I could twist the story about the elephants, and say that they get drunk in order to get happier, and thus releasing dophamine, serotonine, that will keep his mental state clear and thus= survival. It's sure that humans posses a lot of examples like so, but let's consider that one. If you type the word ,,analysis'' 50000 time in your workbook, you will get to a point where you will get from a very small amount to almost none of these hormons, probably even getting cortisol that will ruin your mental state of life. Even if that action doesn't have logic, you could do it without getting pleasure, so that is a very good example. Does any animal posses it too? I'm searchin currently for a counterexample. — benedict

Intoxication indirectly promotes mental clarity? That's debatable.

One problem is that it is unclear what you mean by 'acting for the sake of one's survival'. I don't think you mean 'acting with a conscious intention to promote one's survival'. That is deeply implausible. Nor do I think you mean 'acting in a way that does in fact promote one's survival'. Clearly, animals are not perfectly optimised, otherwise natural selection couldn't operate since it is predicated on differential fitness.

Perhaps you mean 'acting out of motives which are somehow essentially tied to survival value, whether or not those actions do in fact promote survival'. But it is hard to falsify claims of the form 'action A was motivated by motive M which is tied to survival value for such-and-such reasons'. It's too easy to come up with a just-so story as you have done, and hide behind vagueness implicit in the 'tied to' relation. How could I disprove you claim? Perhaps all actions (performed by the sorts of organisms we are familiar with) can be traced back in some way to mechanisms and motives which have survival value in some contexts. To describe such actions as survival-promoting would appear to be rather empty, or at least not saying very much. We could of course imagine intelligent systems which are stipulated not to act for any such motives. But the key part there would be the stipulation part. Without it, we could, in observing its (imagined) behaviour, entertain all sorts of speculations regarding its hidden motives.

Your example of the person writing out the word 'analysis' 50000 times is underspecified. Why are they doing that? Perhaps they are creating art, exercising their penmanship, performing some theraputic or meditative ritual, proving to themselves they can do something so gruelingly boring, carrying out an unusual sentence for some wrong they have committed, and so on. All of these performances could be associated with some survival-promoting motive.

The less I think about it, and the more attached I become to life, the more appalling the prospect of my own death becomes. But the more I think about it, and in particular about the nature of the self, the more I find solace in the idea that there is no enduring self. To the extent that I don't conceive of my life as 'the journey of one man', attachment to life becomes compatible with equanimity in the face of oblivion. But I don't claim to have reached that point of equanimity.

It's generally also thought that a definition or conceptual analysis needs to make the right predictions for imagined as well as actual cases. So even if actual nonhuman animals always act for the sake of the survival of their species - which I doubt - the fact that possible nonhuman animals could so act, and yet not do so in a way that seems rational, is still a counterexample.

Does any other animal (not human) have the will to act as not for the survival of its own specie? — benedict

Lots of behaviours of animals aren't obviously connected to their individual survival or the survival of their species. Consider Elephants and other creatures eating fermented fruit, apparently in order to get drunk. It's not clear that this is connected with survival. You could come up with some story, but I'm not sure how plausible it would be.

↪Welkin Rogue All what I try is to define rationality, not to define some of humans activities in accordance with its definition from wikipedia. Stil, it helds — benedict

No, it doesn't. I pointed out two general sorts of counterexample.

Nice way of saying it and good point. But how about this situation: two individuals are both on the lookout for merely verbal disagreements, though otherwise quite different. — macrosoft

In such cases, I think parties will need to carefully translate each other's utterances, and try to see what sorts of questions their interlocuters are asking. When we come from different paradigms, or have different perspectives (on a smaller, less systematic scale), we tend to ask different sorts of questions. This needs to be kept in mind.

Counterexample: a dumbass creature or species that modifies its environment in a way inimical to its survival and without the aim of promoting its own survival (on any specification or operationalization of 'aim'). It seems to lack rationality as ordinarily understood and yet satisfies your definition.

Counterexample: a creature that makes choices that make sense, are appropriate, or required, or in accordance with, some acknowledged goal, where that goal is the creature's own survival. It seems to have rationality as ordinarily understood and yet fails to satisfy your definition.

You seem to be making the observation that words have all sorts of functions, appear in different discourses, have various connotations depending on context, etc. Analogously, things are involved in our form of life in various ways. I wouldn't dispute either claim. But how does all this shed light on my question?

You say two contradictory things - or at least two things which appear to be in tension. On the one hand, you seem to claim that discourses involving certain words, and things featuring in our forms of life, interact with one another. That's not surprising, since the way we talk and what we do are intimately related. How I think and talk about chairs partly determines what I do with chairs; what I do with chairs partly determined how I think and talk about chairs. But on the other hand, you claim there is an "abyss" between the two.

If someone thinks of the it as a precise science like watch-making, then of course it's all about the details. But if someone thinks of it as an attempt to get a grasp on existence as a whole, then it's better to try to work backward from the big picture of the other person --and to help them do the same by emphasizing your own sense of the big picture. — macrosoft

Could I rephrase this thought in terms of Kuhnian paradigms? Philosophy as a "precise science" is philosophy as prosecuted by 'technicians' within a given paradigm; philosophy as something broader is a discussion between individuals occupying different paradigms (or, within a single individual entertaining multiple paradigms). This picture would suggest that the latter kind of philosophy is much more vulnerable to merely verbal disagreements, insofar as different 'paradigms' involve different systems of language.

Maybe the person just doesn't want to get into a dispute that they're tired of, or that they find silly, or futile, or whatever.
— Terrapin Station

Indeed. Or counterproductive, moving in the wrong direction, starting off on the wrong foot, with the wrong method. — macrosoft

Yes I bet people do throw around the accusation that some dispute is terminological quite loosely. But that's pretty lazy. It seems to me that there are various ways of a dispute being defective, and being 'terminological' or 'merely verbal' is just one of them.

I'd have to look into this a lot more in order to follow what you are saying here.

The “things” have their own form – the state of things, or all actually existing separate bodies with their use, means of production, use, dispose of, etc. So, the word chair, as well as I, have been used simultaneously in two separate registers. — Number2018

Is 'thing' just the ordinary sense of 'thing' here? What does it add to say ""things" have their own form"?

What are the two registers of use for the word 'chair'?

Sometimes folks (philosophers and others) try to basically "wave away" an issue by claiming that it's only a terminological dispute. As if they're implying that everyone really agrees on the non-linguistic stuff, but they just have disagreements about how to use language/which words to use.

But it's not the case for a lot of disputes that they're merely terminological. People are really disagreeing about what the world is like, independent of language.

There could be various reasons for trying to wave away disputes as if they're only terminological. Maybe the person just doesn't want to get into a dispute that they're tired of, or that they find silly, or futile, or whatever. Maybe they're insular (and/or arrogant) enough that they actually have a difficult time understanding that someone could disagree with them about what the world is like. And of course, sometimes disagreements are only terminological, but that often doesn't seem to be the case. — Terrapin Station

It does seem like the language-first view entails that philosophical disagreements are terminological. If we are investigating the rules of use of various words, then disagreements will be disagreements about which rules govern which words. So by modus tollens, if many philosophical disagreements aren't terminological, then philosophy as such isn't as the language-first view describes:

(1) If Philosophy is the investigation of the rules of use of various words, then philosophical disagreements will be disagreements about which rules govern which words.
(2) Disagreements about which rules govern which words are terminological disagreements.
(3) Philosophical disagreements are not terminological disagreements.
(C) Philosophy is not (wholly) the investigation of the rules of use of various words.

I think something iffy is going on. I'll start by questioning (2).

Consider debates over free will. It seems that we are arguing over whether to apply to word 'free' to certain actions. We might not disagree about what those actions are like apart from whether or not they are free. But this doesn't immediately show that the dispute is terminological. After all, looks perfectly good to say that whether or not an action is free is a fact about that action. I think this shows that all descriptions of a thing (e.g., an action) are dependent on our language in some sense, it's just that some are more controversial and philosophically interesting than others. Whether an action occurred at noon or not is relatively uncontroversial and uninteresting. But it still partly depends on language: given the meaning of the word 'noon', the action is either such that it is appropriately described as having occurred at noon or not. Given the meaning of the word 'free', an action is either such that it is appropriately described as being free or not. Much of the philosophical interest is in working out what counts as a free action. But just because we are arguing about the application conditions of 'free' doesn't immediately show that our dispute is terminological either. We might both in fact have the same concept <free>, and yet one of us is just mistaken in our articulation of the necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for its application. We are wrong about such things all the time, I think. Of course, there are some situations in which we do have different concepts, and really are arguing past one another, but even here there is room for interesting debate: which concept is the better concept? Perhaps we can get all the work we want the concept to do done by shaving off the incompatibilist's insistence on being on able to do otherwise, for instance.

Yes, philosophy seems an attempt to arrange the symbols in our mind to represent reality as accurately as possible. If/when we shift the focus from arranging the symbols to reality itself, that's the end of philosophy, a prospect which may understandably be unpopular with many philosophers. — Jake

I think I agree. Maybe, for many philosophical problems at least, it is the job of science and experience more generally to give us information about the world, and the job of philosophy to describe the world using that information. We want an accurate description - i.e., to accurately apply the concepts that we have, and perhaps come up with new concepts that are useful, or variants on existing concepts that are more useful.

As example, to observe an apple to the greatest degree possible we have to set aside all distractions, such as for instance, our ideas about apples. Observing an apple, and observing symbols which point to the apple, two different things. — Jake

Not sure I under I understand this. Plausibly, "observing symbols" is different to "observing an apple". (Unless we buy into a represenationalist theory of mind in which the observation of the apple reduces to observation of a representation of the apple, and a representation may be considered a kind of symbol.) But surely that's not the sense in which the language-first view takes philosophers to be 'interested in language'. Nobody is claiming that philosophy is linguistic morphology or something like that!

That's probably more text than I needed to ask my question. Don't feel like you have to read it all to respond. I am interested in your thoughts.

See if there's any openings around you for philosophy teachers, maybe in grade school or a community college. You might have to have education credentials, though. — darthbarracuda

Teaching would be great in theory. Guess I'd have to do it to see if I was any good at it. I sort of want to be a student forever, and teaching would facilitate that to some extent.

Have you taught?

I'm glad I reached out. You all have given me much to think about. Thank you. Just a few replies.



I like the sentiment. I think you're right that the 'problem' is largely a matter of perspective. Keeping control of one's perspective is, however, a struggle, especially in a materialistic/extroverted culture which becomes fairly inescapable as long as one is connected to social media.



Yeah having time to alone is a big plus in such lines of work. As long as I can disappear into thought or audio, it's not so bad. I also enjoy the opportunity to move. You feel much better than you do after 8 hours at a desk. That was one of the reasons I eschewed white collar drone labour. What do you do now?



Cheers Bitter Crank, you've given me meaningful questions with which to refine my general despair.

I think you correctly identified an important, if regrettable fact about our simian psychology:

Then there is the issue of self-esteem and the regard in which others hold you. Oh, you're working temp at a factory -- what good did your philosophy degree do you then? What is wrong with you? — Bitter Crank

Although I had imagined I was above these anxieties, and I think adopting a more enlightened perspective can mitigate them, they are tenacious, as I said in response to unenlightened. Perception of status, even among friends and family, is to a large extent based on socio-economic position. There is also research indicating correlation between cortisol levels and leadership (http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/2012_PNAS.pdf). I think this suggests a causal connection between well-being and two associated factors - control over one's environment and status (although this goes beyond the evidence of the study). Thus while I enjoy being free from serious responsibility and the bother of managing other people, perhaps the long-run outcome could actually be more stress insofar as the roles which confer these 'advantages' lead to lack of control and lowly status. But they needn't. I've found that some low-responsibility jobs (working checkouts) tend to be unpleasant because of this, but others (cleaning) are not. Maybe that's a possibility... find more solitary, autonomous jobs. Then eliminate Facebook and forget about materialistic expectations... Not sure.

Another consideration is what employment does for one's romantic/sex life. What finally made my concern about status transparent was when I lost confidence around girls. I suddenly realised that I was no longer a 'recently graduated student' just doing jobs to fill in time and get money. I was now a 'real person' having to contend with the dominance hierarchy of society. My crude understanding is that girls tend to 'date up', so the lower one's rank, the smaller the pool of romantic prospects. But perhaps thinking it makes it so! (I have next to zero experience in this domain, incidentally).