The idea that what is normative is what all rational people would advocate is Bernard Gert’s (see SEP’s morality entry of the last 20 years or so), not mine. I leave it to Gert to defend. — Mark S

If you bring it up then it is up to you to defend it, not leave it up to someone who is not here to defend.

My main point has been that there is an objective standpoint about the function of human morality. The evidence is that past and present cultural moral norms and the judgments of our moral sense are all parts of cooperation strategies. — Mark S

What is the relationship between morality and cooperative strategies? They are not, as you assume, one and the same. Cooperative strategies to achieve immoral goals are immoral cooperative strategies.

In addition an appeal to cultural moral norms is an appeal to moral relativism. The exact opposite of an objective standpoint.

Neither of your counterexamples contradicts the function of human morality being to solve cooperation problems. Both are more about the morality of 'ends', a subject the function of human morality is largely silent on. — Mark S

If the function of human morality is to solve cooperation problems, then this a "morality of 'ends'".

If human morality is largely silent on the morality of ends then whatever means or strategies are employed to solve cooperation problems would be moral. This would include coercion, imprisonment, and public execution in order to achieve cooperation.

I understand why thinking of human morality in terms of its function (the principal reason it exists) rather than in terms of its imperative oughts (the traditional perspective) can be initially confusing. — Mark S

It is what you do not understand that has led not simply to your initial but to your persistent confusion. A rejection of deontology may be part of a more promising path of moral deliberation but is not a solution. Deontology is not "the traditional perspective" but one traditional perspective. There are others.

All well-informed, rational people will have shared goals and ideas about how to morally accomplish them. — Mark S

Your ideal of well-informed, rational people with shared goals and ideas is nowhere to be found. The standards that might apply to science and technology do not apply to ethics and politics because there is nothing resembling an objective standpoint. Opinion and self-interest play an essential role.

Well-informed rational people agree that an embryo is a fertilized egg, but there is no information, no evidence, and no reason that leads to general agreement as to the moral status of an embryo.

Well-informed, rational people may agree that global warming is a serious problem, but there is no information or reason that leads to general agreement about what should be done. No information that leads to a general agreement on how to balance competing needs and interests.

You cite moral norms as part of the solution but moral norms are often part of the problem. For most of our history slavery was a moral norm. Gender inequality is still a moral norm. Prioritizing corporate profit over the health of people is still a moral norm.

In your other thread you claimed:

I propose that all past and present moral norms can be explained as parts of cooperation strategy explanations.

The "cooperative strategy" more often than not has always been and continues to be that those in power make the rules and those who are not "cooperate" by submitting to their power or suffer the consequences.

With regard to the saying showing distinction:

4.022 A proposition shows its sense.
A proposition shows how things stand if it is true. And it says that they do so stand.

but:

4.1212 What can be shown, cannot be said.

What is it that a proposition shows but cannot be said?

4.121 Propositions cannot represent logical form: it is mirrored in them.
What finds its reflection in language, language cannot represent.
What expresses itself in language, we cannot express by means of language.
Propositions show the logical form of reality.
They display it.

6.13 Logic is not a theory but a reflexion of the world.
Logic is transcendental.

There are two reasons why Wittgenstein attempts to draw the limits of language.

From the preface:

It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be drawn, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense.

On the one side is what language shows and on the other what it does not show. This other side is not called nonsense because it is of no importance but because propositions about what lies on this side lacks sense (Sinn). There is nothing in the world that they show.

But:

6.41 The sense (Sinn) of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists—and if it did exist, it would have no value.
If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is accidental.
What makes it non-accidental cannot lie within the world, since if it did it would itself be accidental.
It must lie outside the world.

6.42 So too it is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics.
Propositions can express nothing that is higher.

6.421 It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words.
Ethics is transcendental.
(Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.)

What is higher of the greatest importance. It is nonsense (Sinn) for the very reason that it is higher than what is in the world.

Wittgenstein make a distinction between 'the world', that is, the factual world, and 'my world'.

5.6 The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

5.62 The world is my world: this is manifest [zeigt sich (shows itself)] in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world.

Far from rejecting what cannot be said, he points to limits of what can be said in order to able to "see the world aright". (6.54) That is, to see what no proposition can show.

The "final analysis", in the Tractatus is not the names of objects. — Banno

I agree. What I said is:

That in the final analysis we have a configuration of simple names of simple objects. — Fooloso4

2.0231 For these are first presented by the propositions—first formed by the configuration of the objects.

2.0272 The configuration of objects produces states of affairs.

3.21 The configuration of objects in a situation corresponds to the configuration of simple signs
in the propositional sign.

His a priori assumption is that there are elementary propositions. That in the final analysis we have a configuration of simple names of simple objects.

4.221 It is obvious that the analysis of propositions must bring us to elementary propositions
which consist of names in immediate combination.

It is an a priori assumption because nowhere are these names or objects identified. Nowhere are elementary propositions given. It is just assumed that the world and language must be built from this starting point.

Some people like speculating — schopenhauer1

I think this might be what is really at issue for you, at least in part, although it does not explain your apparent animosity. You like speculative philosophy.

I didn't see anything about empirical observation. — schopenhauer1

How can we compare a proposition to reality without empirical observation?

That is either saying nothing or saying something so obvious as to be not worth saying, "Ok, and anything of significance?". — schopenhauer1

This needs to be read against what he says about metaphysical propositions. The former have a sense the latter do not.

Each person describing reality thinks they are accurately picturing reality. — schopenhauer1

Right, and how do we determine which is an accurate picture of reality? There are facts about the world, but no facts about God.

It doesn't explain why observation and empirical evidence is more important than intuition, feeling, immediate sensation, abstractions of imagination, etc. — schopenhauer1

He does not claim it is more important.

6.432 How things are in the world is a matter of complete indifference for what is higher. God
does not reveal himself in the world.

6.4321 The facts all contribute only to setting the problem, not to its solution.

6.44 It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.

6.45 To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole—a limited whole.
Feeling the world as a limited whole—it is this that is mystical.

6.52 We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of
life remain completely untouched. Of course are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer.

6.522 There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest.
They are what is mystical.

My interpretation: Shut up in order to allow things that can be seen and experienced to manifest themselves.

So it's neat that you interpreted him this way — schopenhauer1

These were direct quotes from the text.

It doesn't tell us what true propositions are or anything like that, so I don't quite see the significance here of his project. — schopenhauer1

True propositions are those that accurately picture reality, propositions that state the facts.

He's basically saying, "Anything beyond atomic facts and their combinations is nonsense". — schopenhauer1

The totality of facts is the world. (1.1) The world is not nonsense.

But without explaining what makes something true, this is just a preferential or prejudicial statement about what statements/propositions are meaningful. Something he saw clearly as an error in his later work. — schopenhauer1

2.221 What a picture represents is its sense.

2.222 The agreement or disagreement of its sense with reality constitutes its truth or falsity.

The proposition, "it is raining", is true if it raining and false if it is not raining. The proposition has a sense, that is, we know what is the case if it is true or false.

What about the proposition, "God exists"? Does this agree or disagree reality. Can we know whether it is true or false?

It should be noted that Wittgenstein is neither affirming or denying metaphysical beliefs, he is attempting to draw the limits of what can be said. And what can be said is what has a sense, what can be determined to be true or false.

6.53 The right method of philosophy would be this: To say nothing except what can be said,
i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy:
and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate
to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other—he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy—but it would be the only strictly correct method.

He doesn’t really go into a thorough investigation on how to determine true propositions other than the circular understanding that it’s atomic facts, deduction of these atomic propositions and some remarks about observation and empirical investigation. — schopenhauer1

You have provided the answer: observation and empirical investigation.

4.01 A proposition is a picture of reality.

2.223 In order to tell whether a picture is true or false we must compare it with reality.

4.05 Reality is compared with the proposition.

4.06 Propositions can be true or false only by being pictures of the reality.

What value does any of this obviousness have? The important part is figuring out the true propositions. — schopenhauer1

How can we distinguish between and true and false proposition?

You are thinking of 'fact' as equivalent to 'actuality'. — Janus

Following the Tractatus, there is a distinction between facts, which are a combination of objects (2.01), and statements of facts which are propositions.

In a different sense, the encyclopedia is a compendium of facts, or true propositions and descriptions. — Janus

It is a compendium of statements of facts, that is, propositions. It does not contain the objects that make up facts.

What Wittgenstein is saying is that you can create any proposition you want by starting with the whole set of atomic propositions and negating a certain subset of those. — Reddit

Right:

6.001 What this says is just that every proposition is a result of successive applications to elementary propositions of the operation N(ξ).

Science as removing the false propositions from logical space...? — Banno

The problem is atomic propositions are an a priori assumption. He never identifies an elementary proposition. Without elementary propositions we cannot get started.

This is silly. — Banno

I agree.

2. What is the case—a fact—is the existence of states of affairs.

2.01 A state of affairs (a state of things) is a combination of objects (things).

What is the case, the state of affairs, the fact is that the baby (the thing) is crying.

The term 'fact'; is ambiguous; it can mean either 'true proposition' or 'actuality'. — Janus

A fact is not true or false. There are no false facts, only false claims and beliefs about what is a fact.

Where did I do that? — Banno

Here:

Neither does the fact. You're thinking of the baby. — Banno

The fact is what is the case. What is the case is the baby is crying. You are conflating the fact and a statement of fact.

The proposition does not get hungry or need its diaper changed.

You posited an ultimate ground in the other thread before moving your response to me here. In defense of it you raised science and monism.

Since this area is for quotations rather than discuss I will leave off, but I have discussed Plato's zeteticism elsewhere.

Facts and states of affairs are propositional. Hence the world is propositional It can be put into propositions, despite not having all been put into propositions. — Banno

What can be put into the form of a proposition is not a proposition.

The fact: the baby is crying
The proposition: the baby is crying

The latter is about the former but is not the same as the former. There is an immediacy and urgency in the baby's crying that is hard to ignore, it demands our attention. The proposition may be false, the baby crying is not.

All I'm doing is trying to show that logic is not only part of W's thinking in his early philosophy, but it's also part of his later philosophy as well. ↪Fooloso4 seems to want to deny this, or dimmish it. — Sam26

Of course it is part of his later philosophy. The question is, where does it fit as part of his later philosophy? You say:

there is an underlying logic to language — Sam26

What does it mean for logic to underlie language? This sounds like what he is rejecting when he says:

For it sees the essence of things not as something that already lies open to view, and that becomes surveyable through a process of ordering, but as something that lies beneath the surface.

(PI 92)

Logic does not underlie language. It is not a structure that is already there. The logic of language is built. It develops according to its practice. The idea of a surveyable representation
an 'übersichtlichen Darstellung' is, as he says, of fundamental importance. He is looking at the lay of the land of language, not something underlying it.

His concern with grammar is simply to untangle the philosophical knots.

PI 125.

This entanglement in our rules is what we want to understand: that is, to survey.

What the baby and the dog want can be put into a statement.

Seems propositional to me. — Banno

So can the baby wants to eat the dog.

You can't separate what is said (propositions) from what is done, which is why language-games are connected with our forms of life (activities). — Sam26

What he being said when the baby cries? It it communicating but is it trying to communicate and what is it saying? My dog will knock over her metal water bowl when it is empty. It is loud enough to be heard even if you are not in the room. It has become an effective means of communication but is it a proposition? I agree with those who question the usefulness of the term.

In many cases they can't, but spatial thinking does not always require anything being said.

402. In the beginning was the deed.

— On Certainty

The deed was not a word.

Plato, following Socrates, is a zetetic skeptic. This is redundant since both terms originally mean to inquire. He knows he does not know. He desires to be wise, but is not. And so he inquires.

In the Antichrist Nietzsche says:

What I here mean by philology is, in a general sense, the art of reading with profit—the capacity for absorbing facts without interpreting them falsely, and without losing caution, patience and subtlety in the effort to understand them. Philology as ephexis in interpretation ...

(52)

The term ephexis (Greek ephektikos) means suspension of belief.

He goes on:

Do not let yourself be deceived: great intellects are sceptical. Zarathustra is a sceptic. The strength, the freedom which proceed from intellectual power, from a superabundance of intellectual power, manifest themselves as scepticism.

(54)

I prefer philosophers ... — schopenhauer1

Yes, we all have our preferences.

So, in the PI and beyond, logic is seen in the various uses of the proposition in our forms of life. Logic, then, is still about the proposition, but it's internal to the various uses we give to the proposition. Logic, is intrinsic to how we use propositions in various settings, and it's what gives propositions their sense. — Sam26

This is where we disagree. I think there is a distinction between a propositional logic and a logic "good enough for "a primitive means of communication". When a baby cries I do not think this means of communication is propositional.

I would argue that the logic of our most primitive forms of life lies foremost in the activity, what is done, rather than what is said. Someone could, for example, learn to fish in the same way non-linguistic animals do, by imitation. There were builders before there was a builder's language.

Ah, as expected, he's just railing against his own previous work and basically Russell. — schopenhauer1

Not just his own and Russell's work, but the more common assumption that is found in much of philosophy and religion.

His obvious is not obvious though. — schopenhauer1

As I understand it, what is at issue is the distinction between description and explanation:

Here we come up against a remarkable and characteristic phenomenon in philosophical investigation: the difficulty–I might say–is not that of finding the solution but rather that of recognizing as the solution something that looks as if it were only a preliminary to it. “We have already said everything.–Not anything that follows from this, no, this itself is the solution!”

This is connected, I believe, with our wrongly expecting an explanation, whereas the solution of the difficulty is a description, if we give it the right place in our considerations. If we dwell upon it, and do not try to get beyond it.

The difficulty here is: to stop.

(Zettel 314)

To look for an explanation is to look away from what an apt description calls our attention to. Consider, for example, 'forms of life'.

God grant the philosopher insight into what lies in front of everyone’s eyes.

(CV 63)

One way to approach Wittgenstein's philosophical therapy is to ask what one hopes to bring to light from its hiddenness. More generally, what lies behind the assumption that something is hidden?

Wittgenstein is critical of two attempts to get at something hidden. The first is analysis. That if we break things down to what is most simple and fundamental we will discover an underlying reality. See these quotes cited earlier.

The second is to construct what lies hidden beneath what is obvious. Such conceptual constructs do the opposite of what they intend. They direct us to look elsewhere - arche, ground, Mind, God, Being, the hyperuranion, language ...

The ultimate ground and what is grounded are two different things.

Science tends towards monism. — Art48

Science does not posit an ultimate ground or one supreme reality. The terms 'ultimate' and 'supreme' are question begging.

The two parties today are the Democrats and the Trumpists. With or without Trump they are on their way to becoming the Autocratic Party by some other name, perhaps Republican but perhaps a third party. In that case, there would be significant differences between the parties.

This at least puts the philosopher in better stead to understanding the nature of reality itself … — invicta

Proof that they are living in a simulation is not enough. Unless the philosopher escapes, the "real world" remains a hypothetical world. Only someone who has lived in both worlds can decide which world is preferable. The philosopher may think the truth is always preferable, but the truth may be that depending on the actual differences she may prefer the simulated world.

I am complete skeptic when it comes to Plato.
Nietzsche — Twilight of the Idols

Said by one skeptic about another. It takes a skeptic to know how to read a skeptic.

What do logics basically consist in, if not intelligible regularities? — Janus

It might be more productive to see what he excludes. From On Certainty:

475. I want to regard man here as an animal; as a primitive being to which one grants instinct but not ratiocination. As a creature in a primitive state. Any logic good enough for a primitive means of
communication needs no apology from us.

287. The squirrel does not infer by induction that it is going to need stores next winter as well. And
no more do we need a law of induction to justify our actions or our predictions.

I just finished watching "The Good Place" while on the stationary bike. The Buddhist story of the wave was told.

Fortunately it is only the imagined self that dies. — unenlightened

Or, perhaps it is the imagining self that dies. And with this prospect some look to charm away their fears and anxiety with stories of not dying.

Why posit an ultimate ground? Is not what is sufficient? Is the world too imperfect for it to exist without it depending on something else? Does being ungrounded cause vertigo? A yawning abyss one is too fearful to approach?

...there seems to be a kind of logic built into the world around us and how we interact with that world. — Sam26

Rather than a logic I would say an intelligible regularity. Even in the Tractatus he says:

For all that happens and is the case is accidental.

(T 6.41)

Peirce is not misled by the dualistic idea that thought language is unreal. — plaque flag

And we should not be misled in thinking that the opinion is true or the object is thereby real. What is true and real may remain beyond our grasp. As he says:

Our perversity and that of others may indefinitely postpone the settlement of opinion; it might even conceivably cause an arbitrary proposition to be universally accepted as long as the human race should last.

Wittgenstein's claim that nothing is hidden refers to his rejection of the transcendental logic of the Tractatus. A rejection of the idea that there is a logical structure underlying language and the facts of the world that must be brought to light.

But now it may come to look as if there were something like a final analysis of our linguistic expressions, and so a single completely analysed form of every expression. That is, as if our usual forms of expression were, essentially, still unanalysed; as if there were something hidden in them that had to be brought to light.

(PI 91)

It may also be put like this: we eliminate misunderstandings by making our expressions more exact; but now it may look as if we were aiming at a particular state, a state of complete exactness, and as if this were the real goal of our investigation.

This finds expression in the question of the essence of language, of propositions, of thought. For although we, in our investigations, are trying to understand the nature of language its function, its structure yet this is not what that question has in view. For it sees the essence of things not as something that already lies open to view, and that becomes surveyable through a process of ordering, but as something that lies beneath the surface. Something that lies within, which we perceive when we see right into the thing, and which an analysis is supposed to unearth.

‘The essence is hidden from us’: this is the form our problem now assumes. We ask: “What is language?”, “What is a proposition?” And the answer to these questions is to be given once for all, and independently of any future experience.

(91-92)

Philosophy just puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. Since everything lies open to view, there is nothing to explain. For whatever may be hidden is of no interest to us.

The name “philosophy” might also be given to what is possible before all new discoveries and inventions.

(PI 126)

With this last statement about what is possible there is a shift.

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of their inquiry do not strike people at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck them. And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.

(PI 129)

What are the "real foundations" of his inquiry? Given the topic of this thread I will say only that the real foundations of his inquiry are not linguistic or discursive or inferential or an "embrace of rationalism".

More generally, when talking about what is the case, it helps to look at the case. My example was me eating cake.

How does this compare to your claim that?:

What is the case rests on rules, criteria, norms, but none of these have existence independent and outside of the actual pragmatic contexts in which we enact the sense of what is the case. — Joshs

What is the case is that I ate the cake. We can make up rules and criteria for what is and is not a cake, we can appeal to norms for what a cake is and what it means to eat, but even if someone does not know what a cake is or what it means to eat, the fact remains: I ate the cake.