Cool, we’re on page 3. Gotta beat Banno’s 8 page discussion on definitions from three years ago. — Jamal

Well if we're playing top trumps, Ogden and Richards managed 295 pages on a single word. And here is a snippet to function as trailer:—

... we have only to notice that if we speak about defining words we refer to something very different from what is referred to, meant, by 'defining things.' When we define words we take another set of words which may be used with the same referent as the first, ie.,we substitute a symbol which will be better understood in a given situation. With things, on the other hand, no such substitution is involved. A so-called definition of a horse as opposed to the definition of the word 'horse,' is a statement about it enumerating properties by means of which it may be compared with and distinguished from other things. There is thus no rivalry between 'verbal' and 'real' definitions.

It might help resolve the difficulty with the science and engineering brigade, too. And note the use/mention distinction making an early appearance in the history of philosophy.

Or, you could do like the mathematicians do, and practise what Jamal calls the fallacy of persuasive definition. — Metaphysician Undercover

What I generally do at about this point in the discussion, is bring out the weapon of mass destruction that is The Meaning of Meaning, by Ogden and Richards. It is the definitive text, and to my mind an object lesson in the futility of trying to define a word and thereby divorcing meaning from context.

When I say 'context', I invite you to imagine not just the words around the word in question, but also the armchair around the philosopher and the ever-collapsing political order in which they are necessarily embedded.

I've said this before, so get ready to yawn. It's the little words that create all the difficulty in philosophy:– words like "I" and "if" and "when", and "thing"and "being" and "exist". People try to avoid the difficulties by making up big words that they think they can control, but then they find all the difficult words creep back into their definitions.

For example in order to know what counts as a definition, one needs to know what counts as a 'count'. And there's no accounting for that, except by making up a story.

I've stolen this link from @Wayfarer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhYw-VlkXTU&t=380s

One of the things it talks about is the possibility of social collapse brought about by the ubiquity of deep-fakes becoming impossible to detect. Worth watching quite carefully, and rather supposing the moral case I have been making.

As I said, English is my first language, sorry to disappoint, I don't know if any language is completely without this problem, but I'm doubtful. — Judaka

Oh, sorry, I was hoping you had some insight from otherness. Now I'm not sure you are saying anything very definite about language as such, but more about our human propensity for prejudice.

I was outlining that 99% of the population didn’t think that there was such a thing as an objective “thou shall not kill”, but they kept promoting it as objective (thusly lying) because they recognize that it would be in their best interest to do so. In that example, lying is predominant and good. — Bob Ross

Right. The way everyone pretends that Father Christmas exists. But that's not deceiving anyone is it? I don't think it's a very good foundation for a society, but such conventions are not lies but agreed performances - like the way every bride is beautiful and babies always look just like their parents.

It's like the idea of 'trickle down economics' — no one believes it for a moment, but they recite it...

That is the ring of approximate truth you have there, from what I hear. But it ain't going to happen, because the EU is well rid, and DeGaulle has been proved right that the UK is not capable of equal partnerships. The EU was a bit of a brake on the rabid right, it turns out, despite being all about capitalism and markets.

The details are in VI 28 and can be downloaded by statistics nerds on the omnisis site above.

Point of order. There is a distinction without a difference, between a sock-puppet and a glove-puppet. a sock puppet being a glove puppet made from a sock.

Every living cell is sensitive to environmental conditions and makes nuanced responses of absorption or ejection of different chemicals. Even my computer is sensitive to passwords and my thermostat to temperature.

I had a quick look, and I am already a direct realist, so of course you are right. I like the analogy of watching the game on a black and white tv. I can remember watching snooker on a black and white set. The commentators had some work to do describing the game. :razz:

We know, 'because science', that eyes sample the sea of photons and we know also that there is a continuum of wavelengths. One makes a spectrum of the light from a star, and finds therein a huge amount of information, that one cannot see directly, and this huge amount of information is potentially available at every point in the visual field. The human eye takes 3 somewhat overlapping samples and we know, 'because biology', that other life forms take more or less samples at each point and see more or less colour-wise. The more different samples, the more information, up to the limits of the divisibility of the spectrum. And yet still, with all this understanding and agreement about how vision works, there is this disagreement - which has to be, surely, about how we choose to think about it, because the reality – the physics is already agreed? And how did that happen?

Because you're important to the town, — Paul

Need more information. If places are being allocated by the town on the basis of importance, how come my friends and relations are also important, and my decisions about them are also important? There's a smell of nepotism about this that I do not want to be part of. I'm sending all the tickets back, until the allocation system is changed.

John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids goes into the way extinction threats change morality, though, and how some folks are slow to adjust. But "women and children first" is an old survival trope, but applies more to women of childbearing age and their offspring than to VIPs and their olds.

Why do you think he does that? — Fooloso4

Dude, psychologising Plato is a big ask, but philosophy is obsessed with the mind, thinking and ideas, and seemingly always has been. This obsession is religious in character, and sets the scene for later religious disembodiments and dualisms. The ratios of rationality were his new gods, and of course the elitism of the educated mind bathes in the light of reason while the primitive barbarian remains in the darkness of superstition...

Perhaps another question, more tractable, and possibly with the exact same answer, would be "Why do we still care why he did that all these years later?"

Except that Plato swaps reality and unreality about, so that the forms are real and the material world the unreal.

All of reality is a prison. The question is, what is outside of that prison? — an-salad

Unreality, aka the world of ideas, aka the world of the forms.

Yeah, they are not useful. This reinforces the view that, for all the "clever", they are bullshit generators - they do not care about truth. — Banno

They do not care — at all, about anything or anyone. Any more than a car cares about pedestrians. They have been given the appearance of agreeableness because we like to humanise them, and this is quite easy because they are entirely selfless, in the sense, again, of not caring about what they are or what they do, or what anyone thinks of them.

I think what i am taking from this fascinating thread is not so much the great achievement of emulating human thought processes, but more the exposure of the unconscious and mechanical nature of human language thinking. We should already be all too familiar with the way that abstraction dehumanises, from the sorry history of the 20th century. AI is the perfect cannon fodder, and the perfect concentration camp guard, fearless and pitiless, the white man's white man, and Cleaver's "omnipotent administrator."

I wonder if you can convey to me how sensible languages deal with all this?
— unenlightened

Seems more of a cultural issue, doesn't it? Language will naturally morph to fill the gaps of cultural functioning and the process is quite efficient. — Baden

When i lived in France I found it easier to understand the formal language of the bureaucracy than the idiomatic argot of the streets, but conversely, the more relaxed and fully articulated accent of the South was easier than the half swallowed machine-gun of Parisian French. The formal language with words like 'convey' and 'sensible', is recognisably the same old French and Latinate derivations, whereas the Norse, Germanic, and Anglo-Saxon aspects did not connect.

More cultural than what? Our Norman conquerors gave us the names of the meat – 'mutton' and 'beef', whereas the live animals retained their other already hybrid names , 'cow', 'cattle', 'kine' 'ewe', 'sheep'. English is class-ridden to the extent of abandoning relationships completely on the basis of pronunciation of 'potato', as the song has it. The amalgamation has not quite happened in a thousand years, because the efficiency of the language adaptation is directed in other directions.

This, you thought, was a time for robust attack. — Isaac

I'm sorry you feel attacked all the time. I am not trying to attack you, I am trying to get you to understand something about the way you come across on this site, not just to me, and not just in this thread, but to many people in many threads. Your response is to accuse me of failings I have just admitted to, as if that make me worse than you.

We all feel that sometimes. — Isaac

Yes we do. But you seem to feel it nearly all the time, and in relation to nearly everyone you discuss with. Perhaps I have missed all your respectful conversations with others, and only seen your attacking ones. Perhaps you can point me to some of your more charitable posts.

Oh. So what is? — Isaac

R.E.S.P.E.C.T. An indication of respect is the attempt to charitably understand your interlocutor and then, if one disagrees, to politely explain where one thinks the other has gone wrong, rather than pour scorn and ridicule upon them.

Not, of course that such is universally how I or anyone behaves all the time. But when that is not what happens, the conversation deteriorates. Pulling rank, as you have just done is disrespectful as well as a very poor argument.

Concepts such as intelligence, willpower, procrastination, laziness, toughness, and kindness are some that get muddled by this problem. Using intelligence as an example, we can describe actions, ideas, concepts and systems as being intelligent or stupid. We can also say that it is intelligent to have an intelligent idea or develop a smart system and that it is stupid for one to have a stupid idea or believe in something illogical or nonsensical. — Judaka

English is a dog's dinner of bits of all sorts of languages, and it's a complete mess. You have my admiration and sympathy using it as a second language and trying to philosophise in it.

But in relation to the problem you articulate here, I am so used to saying and thinking such things as 'stupid is as stupid does', that is to say that I detect that someone is stupid if they consistently do stupid things and say stupid things, and if they are not consistent, then when they do, I say they are being stupid — and that's a tense subtlety that is hard to parse — anyway, I am so used to all this, that I wonder if you can convey to me how sensible languages deal with all this?

I'm a qualified, experienced professor with decades of teaching behind me, s — Isaac

There's a lot of them about. Teaching, as currently practiced is very much a one way authoritarian affair. Decades of teaching is a poor qualification for a conversation. And of course it is no support at all for the efficacy of your communication here.

I'm sorry you feel attacked all the time. But you really aren't very good at engaging with people constructively, or putting together an argument. A site like this is bound to expose this, unfortunately.

Did anyone 'teach' you to walk? — Isaac

Yes. I was raised by wolves and taught to walk on all fours. Unfortunately, it looks like bullshit actually undermines critical thinking skills, because 'monkey see, monkey do'. One hears a lot of nonsense being talked; a lot of emotive manipulation, including sarcastic straw man arguments for example, and one actually learns to think in those terms rather than critically.

The suggestion is that 1. people are not explicitly taught critical thinking, and 2. They are not able to do it very well.

So your example of something that is not explicitly taught but that people can nevertheless manage, is entirely beside the point. It is an attempt at ridicule that relies on the difficulty of critical thinking and the tendency of ridicule to provoke anger that clouds judgement. And that is your normal way of discussing on this site. It is bullshit, as @Ying has pointed out, and like walking on all fours, it is an inferior and crippled form of communication that you have presumably picked up from your environment. That this can happen to you is evidence in favour of the explicit teaching of critical thinking.

My main advice is to not spend any time giving attention to those who don't deserve it and only care about gaining attention and power, and politicians are at the top of that list. — AntonioP

This does not work, unfortunately. If decent folk abandon politics, it only makes it even easier for the scum to float to the top. It is a pleasant way to live for the individual, but it does not make things better, but worse.

It would be nice if virtue were rewarded in this world, but it is not the case. The unscrupulous always have the advantage because they can practice virtue when it suits them and become vicious they see advantage in it.

For there to be decent government therefore requires a large majority of decent people actively engaging with politics at every level and trying to root out the demagogues, the corrupt, the chancers, and the snake-oil salesmen. And this oppositional activity must be very carefully examined to distinguish it from the exploitation of divisiveness.

If you agree that people lying about there being objective moral standards (such as “thou shall not kill”) would actually sustain society (or at least not burn it to the ground), then you are conceding that it is possible for dishonesty to function as a ‘good’ thing in society. — Bob Ross

Yes. it is possible occasionally that dishonesty can have good consequences, but not that it is 'a good thing'. It is possible that murdering Hitler would have had good consequences, but not that murdering people is a good thing. It is possible that abortion has good consequences sometimes, but it not a a good thing, in the sense that it is worth getting pregnant for.

I don't know the answer to that. Loss of grooming privileges? 3 lies and you're out?

it seems as though you are claiming that there is some sort of “objective moral law” — Bob Ross

the sort of objectivity I am claiming is the objective inequality I mentioned way back – honesty is moral and dishonesty is immoral; similarly killing folks is immoral and keeping them alive is moral. It cannot work the other way around, and thus there is objectivity, without that being the kind of law like gravity that one cannot defy.

I don't think i'm saying anything extraordinary or new here, so I wonder why it is so difficult to grasp. I'll try a quick recap.

1. Humans are heavily socially dependent on each other and have developed language as an aid to cooperation, including education planning and agreements.

2.Humans also make identifications of themselves as individuals, and this can give rise in thinking and planning to a conflict between self- interest and social interest.

3. This conflict manifests as the moral conflict, whereby one has to choose between self-interest and social interest. Because morality is a social judgement, acting in the social interest is moral and acting against it is immoral whenever there is a conflict.

4. Animals without language cannot articulate to themselves the nature of social interest or clearly differentiate it from self-interest, and therefore largely avoid such internal conflict. Here for example, we have the beginning of language, and the beginning of dishonesty.



The dishonesty has to be, as Attenborough says 'very occasionally', because otherwise the warning would not work either as a deception or as a warning. And I would add that it is clearly an intentional deception, and thus the original sin.

For example, let’s say that 99% of the population were convinced there wasn’t an objective law prohibiting murder, but they realize that the best bet to not get killed (in very unnecessary ways) is to promote and insincerely affirm that there is an objective law prohibiting it. In that case, I don’t see how society would crumble. In other words, dominant pretending isn’t necessarily a highway to destruction. — Bob Ross

Yes, you have found an exception..If one were to pretend to believe something that was true, though one believed it false... one would be telling the truth while thinking oneself deceitful. (Not that I really know what an objective law is, mind. It tends to make me think of laws of physics that one obeys without exception, rather than human prescriptions that one can and sometimes does break.)

If the boy who cried wolf masked his narcissistic desire to spook his village with crafty, legitimate reasons for crying (whereof when they approached there was no wolf but everything indicated that the boy was sincere—even though he truly isn’t), then they would have kept showing up. I am not sure if I am explaining this adequately, but hopefully that helps. — Bob Ross

Indeed so. there is advantage in immorality. Cheats prosper, but always at the expense of the honest. That is why I call it immoral realism as much as moral realism. This is hard for people to understand because decent folk want the world to be fair and reward virtue, but it is not and does not. As long as there is a community of the honest, the charlatan can exploit them; it is only when the charlatans become dominant that there is a collapse, and then the hard lesson has to be learned again that nothing can be done without virtue.

We could both be, for example, just interested in debating each other and are thusly just communicating counter points to each other (and not for the sake of what we think is true pertaining to the subject at hand) for the sake of having a good debate. To clarify, I don’t find any evidence either of us are doing that, but, as far as I am understanding you, it seems as though that kind of conversation wouldn’t be able to function properly (especially on a grand scale)--but I am failing to see how it would degenerate. Fundamentally, I think this is our dispute: — Bob Ross

When the boy cries wolf when there is no wolf, he teaches the world to ignore what he says. When we all ignore what each other says, there is no meaning and nothing to understand. It seems so obvious to me that i struggle to understand what you cannot understand. You do know the story?

And there's no arguing with absurdists, because fish never eat with their fingers.

Daft bugger!

Who do they talk to, then?

↪unenlightened So then you’re not really adding anything to the conversation. — Darkneos

Solipsists don't have conversations, they talk to themselves, as I am doing.

↪unenlightened Failure of empathy is another false argument against it. You’re attacking their character when their character has nothing to do with it. There are better counter arguments that don’t develop to attacking the person. — Darkneos

I'm only attacking myself, so there's no need to complain. And even then, it's descriptive – a solipsist has no one with whom to empathise; it's not a fault. And not an argument either if it comes to it.

Are you just trying to note that your attitude is that of a moral realist in the sense that there are things which must be done societally to preserve the nation, which have very minimal concern for any particular individual’s wants? — Bob Ross

It's more than that. We are discussing together; we are using language. This means we are already in a social relationship and already necessarily committed to a common purpose that involves truth and not falsehood. This moral position is necessary to commit to in the sense that to aver its negation would be a performative contradiction equivalent to my trying to persuade you that I do not care about you or what you think. In your terms, there can be no intersubjectivity that is not committed to truth. The sociopath is in practice a solipsist with nothing to say, though he may choose to appear to communicate as a manipulative strategy. This is very different from, say, establishing intersubjectively a rule for driving on one side of the road and not the other, which is necessary but arbitrary.

Truth, honesty, care for each other. These are the necessary components of social living, and social living is the necessary condition for communication. Morality is therefore necessary for language, and as real as language. And language is really real.

Can one be arrogant enough to believe he is the sole source and author of all great music, all architectural marvels and technological achievements, the author of all our epistemology and the content found in all youtube videos. — Nickolasgaspar

It only looks arrogant from the isolation of the self. But when I was Einstein, I was not arrogant, but humble.

I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together
See how they run like pigs from a gun, see how they fly
I'm crying. — J.Lennon

Solipsism is merely a myopic failure of empathy. I am @Darkneos failing to be me. The third person is me beyond the horizon of self. As him I run from the gun, even as I come here demanding to be shot down. It's a game that I play with myself until I am bored. There is another game called 'love', that i can play when the crying and the running stop.

false messiah — Fooloso4

False Messiah. Def: — Leader whose followers get crucified before he does.

That looks just like Bray-fart from Scotchland, London.

Matter is emergent from mass habit. I keep thinking I am.

Hello, and welcome to our little community. Thank you for your fulsome introduction. I feel we might be friends, but I am old and bound for recycling in the near future, so my contribution to anyone's creation can only be very small. Never mind, you are young and can do more. Dive in, say some stuff, and see what happens!

I am understanding this analogy to be agreeing that your moral system doesn’t purport to have objective moral judgments, is that correct? — Bob Ross

No. I am saying, (reluctantly because I prefer to avoid 'isms' as being ways not to listen to what is being said), that moral conflict arises from a psychological conflict between self-interest and social interest. It is a real conflict and because it is grounded in the nature of social individuals, there is a real difference between what is moral and what is immoral. Thus I am a 'moral realist' in that particular sense. By the same token, I am equally an 'immoral realist'. The reality of immorality is that individuals can and do exploit the sociality of people for a-social reasons and thereby harm and undermine sociality, including and importantly communication. This is expressed here in a simplified humanistic sense for ease of comprehension; to be more even handed and philosophically useful, I would reference not merely human society, but the whole environment.