Apparently my earlier criticism along these lines, criticism which is unsympathetic to the thoughts and feelings behind the creation of this discussion, was deemed to be worthy of deletion. — S

Wasn't me :confused:

Houses can't turn into flowers because the laws of physics as we know them preclude this kind of transmutation. — Michael

The laws of physics eh? The one pertaining to flowers? Or the one about houses? Remind me. Flower =/= House? F =/= H?

I agree with this, but I don't see how this precludes the conceptual possibility of houses turning into flowers. It's no different in kind to mercury turning into gold – it just differs in scale and complexity. — Michael

The idea is that there would be a concept of a house that one could imagine turning into a flower, but not our concept of a house. But tbh I'm not really that hung up about sticking this this one particular example. The philosophical point is that concepts can be stretched to a point at which they no longer are the same concept, but a different one entirely. At some point, it is not facts we get wrong, but the very identification of what the fact pertains to that we get wrong.

In any case, I still think it's just speculative posturing to imagine that houses can turn into flowers - at least in the context of scepticism I mentioned to Banno and Csal. Were people to really think this - and thoughts like it - outside of the contrived space of a philosophical discussion, communication between humans would be rather impossible. When the child says: "my house turned into a flower!" - we know she is not talking about our kind of houses - unless we were in some sense mentally underdeveloped; perhaps ourselves children. I want to say something like: arguments otherwise are a kind of argument from mental regression.

There's nothing theological about saying that things in the world are made up of matter and that matter of one type can (or can't) turn into matter of another type. — Michael

But the point being made is not about things: it is about concepts (or language). It's not about physical possibility. It's about conceptual possibility. And importantly, it is about how the one does not mirror or track the other (at least, not in any pre-established way - hence the bit about 'pre-established' harmony - an old theological notion). One way to put all this is that language is normative: we call things what we do not because (or not only because) of their 'physical properties' but also because of what we imagine things 'should' be: a 'house' is roughly what we call something to be lived in; the kind of thing made out of weather-proof material; usually has a roof; has connotations of homeliness; may be small; may be big: these things are what a house is because 'we' put them into the concept of a house: it was (communally?) created, not discovered (subject, usually, to lots of constraints).

Or, to put it a bit roughly from the other side of things, there is nothing in 'nature' that just is a house. You can measure particle interactions till kingdom come, and none of them will tell you that 'this is the kind of thing you ought to call a house'. Or, at least, one must have an idea of what wants to call a house before deciding: this is the kind of thing of qualifies as a house (made of the right material, is spacious enough, etc). This is what I meant when I said you can't read language off of the physical. The world is silent about what it wants to be called: only 'we' decide - pragmatically, in concert with others, sometime antagonistically, based off a million and one inscrutable reasons (maybe for no particular reasons at all) - why 'this' thing ought to be called, in our language, this.

You only get to make that face if you've studied and understand him.

Heideggerian destruction or Derridean deconstruction questioned the justification of the distinction, in the dialectically oppositional way it is presented by Cavell, in the first place — Joshs

Is it presented in a dialectically oppositional way? Or are you simply engaging in the standard Derridian one-upping that leads, over and over again, to the same, tirelessly repeated point about 'being within' or whatever is it Derridians monomaniacally roll out when the whiff of distinction graces the air? It's so tiring and has nothing to do with what's being posted. You want to talk about the 'within'? Fine. But that's a different topic. Or, if it's related, it does so by qualifying what's been said, but nobody asked, and what motivates it other than a 'I'm going to turn on the Derridian interpretive machine now and see what comes out the other end?'.

Look, sorry if I sound salty, but I used do very much the same thing, and I spent literally years learning to wean myself off that incredibly annoying temptation to deconstruct just in order to repeat the same conclusion(s) that Derridians have been reproducing ad nauseam as though novel for the last 50 years. OK, things are within and not between (or, they are between only insofar as they are within! Or whatever cute turn of phrase Derridans like!) - got it! Let's talk about something else now. Derrida - thank u, next.

Which is why i think the people discussing physical reality both are and aren't missing the point. I think it does matter that the example has to force itself to work, it needs a lot of intepretive scaffolding. — csalisbury

Your point is well taken, but I think what's missed is the context of the example, which, to be entirely fair, I did not provide. Actually, I mentioned it to Banno in a post previously, but just to rehearse, the example is meant to function in the context of a (limited) response to scepticism, and the ability to doubt. It's a response to the question like ('why can't houses turn into flowers at any point? Can we guarantee that they won't?'). And as I also mentioned to Banno, this kind of question finds its lineage in Hume on induction (maybe the sun won't rise tomorrow), and in Kant on knowledge more generally (the cinnabar that turns red and black and light by turns); More recently in Meillassoux on radical contingency (physical law might and can change at any point, for no reason whatsoever).

So yeah, that's the context in which the example is meant to find purchase: it's meant to approach these questions from a different angle: that of meaning (it's 'post-metaphysical' in that sense, unlike Kant, Hume, Meillassoux, etc). And in some ways your response furthers this even - by attributing a 'background idea of a kind of physical univocity' to a kind of cultural-historical specificity (our singular situation!), you're 'skipping' the metaphysics and going straight into cultural critique, as it were, which I suppose might be exactly one of the upshots of treating scepticism in this way. Perhaps there's something to be said about how the experience of scepticism is changed under the conditions in which 'anything can be something else, or both, with a little help': that would make for an interesting study.

Hah, not you. Still, I'd say something like: a language game is conditioned by a form of life. So, in the 'context' of building something, 'slab' and 'block' mean something specific. In another context (maybe a certain board game say), the words will mean something different ('play the "slab" card'; 'play the "block" card'). A form-of-life has to do with the purpose one puts language too: are you a builder? A puzzle-game maker? In a situation of strife? A philosopher? And this in turn will condition how langauge is put to use for you: what language-game you employ. And what language-game another imagines you to be 'playing'. What action, what activity, what form-of-life are you engaged in? - this will condition the language-game in which words are used. Schematically:

Form-of-life > language-game > use > meaning.

Also, a quick note on something I was thinking about in the car today:

I've always disliked calling language-games 'contexts', and on reflection I think I know why: the idea of a language-game captures something that the word 'context' seems to miss, which is a distinction among types or kinds of words. A language-game determines not 'just' the meaning of a word, but also, the kind of word any particular word is: the role it plays in that game.

'Contexts', to me anyway, seem to make words differ only be degree - ("in this context, this means that; in another context, something else"). Contexts are more general than language-games; they don't discriminate as much. It doesn't capture, in the same way, the typification at work when 'language-games' are employed. I suspect that it may be considerations of this kind that led Witty to invent the slightly clunkly neologism of the 'language-game', rather than resort to the already-available word 'context' to get his point across.

I don't think the second bit of §117 can be properly discussed without referring to the discussion of ostension that took place earlier in the book. After all, "this is here" is about as an exemplary case of ostension as there could ever be. And in that connection, let it be remembered that Witty's major point was that any sensible act of ostension required a certain knowledge already in place before ostension would be able to get off the ground in the first place: a knowledge of what kind of thing was being pointed out (color? shape? outline?).

Insofar as this 'prior knowledge' amounts to knowledge of the language-game in which a particular ostensive act figures in to, when someone says: "You understand this expression, don’t you? Well then - I’m using it with the meaning you’re familiar with." - one can read this as an effort to appropriate or rather expropriate a language-game without the form-of-life which gives it meaning, or makes it 'work'. An attempt to take the language-game out of its lived context and claim it in the abstract: but to do this is just to deprive a language-game - and thus a word - of the very thing which makes it operative.

More Cavell! - On Morality:

"I take it that most moral philosophers have assumed that the validity of morality depended upon its competence to assess every action (except those which are "caused, "determined) and that the possibility of repudiating morality anywhere meant its total repudiation as fully rational; that a fully rational morality must be capable of evaluating the highest excellence and the most unspeakable evil, and that persons of the highest excellence and most unspeakable evil must agree with our moral evaluations if these evaluations are to be fully rational. I think of this as the moralization of moral theory - it makes any and every issue a moral issue, and for no particular reason. Such a conception has done to moral philosophy and to the concept of morality what the events of the modern world have often done to the moral life itself: made it a matter of academic questions.

Morality must leave itself open to repudiation; it provides one possibility of settling conflict, a way of encompassing conflict which allows the continuance of personal relationship against the hard and apparently inevitable fact of misunderstanding, mutually incompatible wishes, commitments, loyalties, interests and needs, a way of mending relationships and maintaining the self in opposition to itself or others. Other ways of settling or encompassing conflict are provided by politics, religion, love and forgiveness, rebellion, and withdrawal. Morality is a valuable way because the others are so often inaccessible or brutal; but it is not everything; it provides a door through which someone, alienated or in danger of alienation from another through his action, can return by the offering and the acceptance of explanation, excuses and justifications, or by the respect one human being will show another who sees and can accept the responsibility for a position which he himself would not adopt".

I'd forgotten you'd mentioned physics. In any case you weren't who I had in mind.

So, again, we can imagine an architect working with biological materials, creating a house that, literally, becomes a flower. — csalisbury

All I'll say is that I what I'm arguing for can accommodate this (as I've already acknowledged!), and, that this is not an example of reading meaning off physics.

So a few people now have mentioned 'physics' - as though 'physics' could tell us what we call houses and what we call flowers; but this of course is a silly idea, as though one could read our language 'off' the physical characteristics of the world. As though a kind of pre-established harmony existed between word and thing. How ironic that those who speak of physics are theologians in disguise. What is missed is language - human language, and what we do with it.

§117:

This is a bit tough and I have to go a bit beyond what's just there to make sense of this one, but here's what I make of it: the metaphysician insists that she is using an expression in just the same way that it is used in an 'ordinary' circumstance (or what Witty refers to as a 'special circumstance'): "I’m using it with the meaning you’re familiar with."

And Witty's response is something like: you can't just say this. If meaning is use in a language-game, the language-game needs to be in place if that 'same' meaning is to be preserved - and it's not at all clear that, in the metaphysician's use, that language-game (or any language-game) is in place.

This is why Witty is critical of the idea that the meaning of terms is retained in "every kind of use": but Witty's whole point is that there is no 'every kind of use': use is always 'language-game relative' - use in this or that language-game, not "every kind of use".

And this in turn leads to Witty's critique of the idea that a word's meaning is separable from a word's use: "As if the meaning were an aura the word brings along with it and retains in every kind of use." Which, is some sense, follows analytically from the equation of meaning and use that Witty's attempted to establish (if meaning is use, it obviously cannot be otherwise than that use).

A relevant quote relating to issues around §116:

"In the work of Wittgenstein ... appeals to "what we ordinarily say" take on a different emphasis [from Moore]. In [Wittgenstein] the emphasis is less on the ordinariness of an expression (which seems mostly to mean, from Moore to Austin, an expression not used solely by philosophers) than on the fact that they are said (or, of course, written) by human beings, to human beings, in definite contexts, in a language they share: hence the obsession with the use of expressions. "The meaning is the use" calls attention to the fact that what an expression means is a function of what it is used to mean or to say on specific occasions by human beings ... Wittgenstein's motive (and this much is shared by Austin) is to put the human animal back into language and therewith back into philosophy." (Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason).

SO the house, long disused, is pulverised, composted and suitably arranged at its location so as to form a flowerbed. — Banno

Just to be clear, the context of Cavell's discussion - which I see you've found - is in relation to the problem of scepticism: do we need philosophy to come up with a guarantee that 'houses will not turn into flowers'? Do we know this? Cavell's question is something like: what would it mean to 'know' this? As I quoted in the OP: "What do we learn - what fact is conveyed - when we are told that they do not?"; It's not quite as simple as it might be on first brush.

Also note that this seemingly bizzare scenario has a long pedigree: Hume and the uniformity of nature, and Kant with his changing cinnabar: "If cinnabar were now red, now black, now light, now heavy, if a human being were now changed into this animal shape, now into that one... then my empirical imagination would never even get the opportunity to think of heavy cinnabar on the occasion of the representation of the color red." CPR). Cavell's intervention - after Wittgenstein - is to introduce a new line of approach: that of language (something absent in Hume and Kant).

I think these traumatic irruptions probably happen a lot, but in different settings, and this relativity of effect to setting seems key — csalisbury

Your post brings to mind alot of the debate that occasionally crops up, in Lacanian circles, between those who bank on the 'Real' as provding some kind of Big Heroic Eruption/Event in the Normal Order of Things, and those who see the 'Symbolic' as a site of potential (revolutionary?) change, able to be worked on over time. I think there's a parallel and related debate to be had here, and I think you're right that the 'relativity of effect to setting' is what adjudicates, to a large degree, how the change plays out.

It's a matter - or at least, this is how I read what you're bringing up - of bringing history and 'materiality' back into the fold: what are the singularities of the situation that we need to pay attention to; the inflexion points, the points of instablity or opportunity or pain (in this time and in this space) which can be exploited or brought into play such that something new (= new meaning, new significance) can be introduced (in the most pragmatic(?) way). And this stuff ins't something that can be 'theoried' beforehand.

So yes, obviously I'm sharpening the issue to bring out the salient points in the starkest relief possible, skipping over the hard and patient work that someone (fdrake, in my example) might need to put in to 'acclimatize' me to learning that houses can in fact turn into flowers. And I think the reason this needs to be done - the reason why Cavell (who actually takes the example from Norman Malcolm) has to resort to this fancification - is that only by doing this can the (relative) difference in kind between adding new facts ("Unwatered seeds do not turn into flowers") and changing understanding ("Houses do not turn into flowers") be brought out, as a properly conceptual difference.

Also, as a last point, one of the things Cavell also focuses on is that this is how, for the most part, learning - pedagogy - takes place as well. Your comments on being childlike remind me of this: the 'wonder' or surprise of children might be said to be reflective of the fact that novel facts ("we can send people to the moon!") are more likely to (re)arrange the child's 'looser' - more plastic - conceptual network than it is an adult's (whose conceptual network might be more rigid). Facts for children can hew closer to 'houses can turn into flowers' than to 'watered seeds turn into flowers'.

--

Cavell: "If an utterance is meant to tell someone something, then what you say to him must be something he is in a position to understand, and something which is, or which you have reason to believe will be, informative, something which is news to him. The first of these conditions is obvious enough, but it has all the hidden difficulties we discussed in investigating the idea of teaching a word. (Consider, for example, what it would mean for a physicist to "tell" me, a child in the subject, what a pi-meson is, or that that (streak in the photograph) is the track of a pi-meson. He can tell me this only in the sense in which I can tell my three-year-old daughter who Beethoven is, or that that (picture in the book) is Beethoven. She and I, in the respective worlds in which we are children, will both be able to repeat the words we are given, and in the future point to the pictures and say the right word; but we will not exhibit the criteria which go with knowing what these things are; my world cannot compass pi-mesons.)"

I can easily imagine a world in which Professor McGonagall could utter the incantation fleurismus! and wave her wand in just the right way to transfigure a bungalow into a peony. I could imagine a somewhat less magical world in which some sort of emotional or spiritual force field made a house spontaneously collapse in a cloud of dust when the last person that had lived in it died, and when the dust cleared, there was a bed of blooming roses. — andrewk

Was thinking about this a bit more: I think I'm avoiding magical examples because if McGonagall could just wave her wand and transfigure a bungalow into a peony, I've got bigger conceptual worries: now there is magic! (where does that fit into things?) More than just the constellation of grammar associated with houses and plants ('growing', 'living', 'stones', 'seeds', etc), but also, physics, matter, possibility, and all the rest. The mesh or network of interrelated concepts that now need to be rearranged in relation to each other is massively larger. Keeping the example to something 'locally' bizzare allows us to keep focused on the philosophical stakes a bit easier.

@Csalisbury: about to sleep, will reply tomorrow.

Yes! There's a whole ethics, if not politics, of language bond up in all of this. It's something Cavell is attentive to, exemplified in one of my favourtie passages in the book so far:

"To speak for yourself then means risking the rebuff — on some occasion, perhaps once for all —
of those for whom you claimed to be speaking; and it means risking having to rebuff —on some occasion, perhaps once for all —those who claimed to be speaking for you. There are directions other than the political in which you will have to find your own voice — in religion, in friendship, in parenthood, in love, in art — and to find your own work; and the political is likely to be heartbreaking or dangerous. So are the others. ... Once you recognize a community as yours, then it does speak for you until you say it doesn't, i.e., until you show that you do. A fortunate community is one in which the issue is least costly to raise; and only necessary to raise on brief, widely spaced, and agreed upon occasions; and, when raised, offers a state of affairs you can speak for, i.e., allows you to reaffirm the polis". (The Claim of Reason)

To say "I speak" is always to make a claim for being part of a "we speak", by virtue of meaning anything at all. A claim that may be rebuffed, open to revision, itself a rebuff and so on. We speak not just as 'part' of a community, but for one; and it, for us. Right up until it, or we, do not. Thence enters the ethical, and the political.

Who is 'us', who is not? Who counts as 'us'? This is no less a question than what counts as a house or a flower. Who gets to count this as a flower, and that not.

What is it? Which 'philosophy of idealism'? Just the one? It's meaningless.

The first 2 require a metaphoric displacement just as much as the 3rd, even when they appear to be non-problematically intelligible. Simply determining something AS something is a transforming-performing. It understands, interprets, and articulates, and thereby "takes apart" and transnforms what it affirms. — Joshs

I don't disagree, and the distinction is more a matter of degree than kind; after all, even stipulation is a kind of way of life, albeit a very 'thin' one: not much rides on using a particular metaphor if a boxer is taking up MMA. But still, for the purposes of the point being made, the deconstruction of the distinction - while perfectly valid - is simply not relevant.

There is a motivation there. It's just a reactive, rather than creative one. It's taking something that's already there and using it, in order to define oneself against some clearly demarcated, monolithic tradition of Hocus Pocus. — csalisbury

But, 'the philosophy of idealism' is a placeholder: it names, at best, a space or place where such a motivation might be found. Like: "it's East of here".

Is this essentialism? Cavell's thesis seems to be that if our kind of houses do not turn into our kind of flowers, they must have an essential property, rather than an accidental property, that they turn into heaps of rubble when their existence as a house ends, rather than into a flower. — andrewk

If one wants to call this essentialism (I'm not a fan), it's a very strange kind of essentialism: a grammatical essentialism and not a 'metaphysical' one. An essentialism in Wittgenstein's mold (PI §371/373: "Essence is expressed in grammar ... Grammar tells what kind of object anything is"). An essentialism moreover, that is open to revision: were it to be the case that houses could turn into flowers, than that is what we would obviously have to say.

So it's that not our kind of houses do not turn into our kind of flowers because they have 'essential properties', but because what we call houses (the kinds of things we count as being houses) are not the kinds of things that turn into what we (happen to) call flowers (what we count as being flowers). So at stake here is a question of intelligibility, not properties and (substantial) essences. Or, if essences, then essences pertaining to what we count, call, or recognize as houses and flowers: a question of how we relate to the world around us, and not questions about the world 'in itself'.

So with respect to the magical or spiritual examples you invoked, the point is that if such things came to pass (and nothing in particular guarantees that they cannot), such things would not just count as one new fact among other facts which we add to the stock of facts we know about (what we call) houses. That houses could turn into flowers would not (only) be a fact like, 'houses can sometimes have attics and basements'. It would be a fact that would force us to revise what it is that we count as a house (or as a flower) to begin with.

There are a few things going on in the OP, some of which I'm myself trying to disentangle by writing about it. This...:

(3) Interpretation comes prior to truth value assignment — fdrake

...comes closest to what's going on, but the sense of 'interpretation' here is very particular. True, we must 'interpret' a claim before deciding if it is true or not, but quite specifically, we must also 'decide' if this is what the truth claim applies to; we must decide if this is what counts as what the truth claim is about. So: out of the blue, you say "houses turn into flowers"; I imagine my first thought is: you're not talking about roses and such - that's not what 'counts as' as flower in your locution; no, you're being metaphorical, you're being a bit annoyingly enigmatic about what you're talking about, but I'm sure it'll be cleared up if I inquire further (I suspect you're saying something like: an MMA fighter can't become a professional boxer). And that's alright.

But no, you really mean that houses turn into flowers. After a moment of shock, assuming you're not joshing me, I realize I no longer know what counts as a house; nor a flower. The world in which these terms took on their significance has been totally upended for me. Note that something has shifted massively between the first and second 'receptions' of the claim 'houses turn into flowers'. The 'metaphorical reception' 'fits' into the world I know: I still know, despite the metaphorical use, what here counts as a flower and house. The literal reception throws that all out of what: what counts any more as a house or a flower? I'm no longer sure, the grammar of my concepts needs to be revised; what kind of thing(s) I say about houses and flowers needs to be revised.

(I wrote, in a draft: The kinds of things I say about houses and flowers must change entirely. Not facts, but the 'relations between facts' (and these are not to be found 'in' the facts; they are found in our grammar, in how concepts relate to other concepts) must change. The change occurs 'in the space of reasons', qua Sellars).

Anyway, what this brings out is that there must then be currently a set of kinds of things that I or 'we' say about houses and flowers - there must be, if this is what must undergo revision upon the revelation that houses turn into flowers. One of the points, I guess, is that this is really hard to see. It's only at point of 'grammatical crisis', we might say, that our sedimented grammar shows itself up as sedimented. A bit like Heidegger's broken hammer.

But there are other points to be made too: about how the intelligibility of language (of what we say) is derivative or premised upon the world, the life in which it is used; in 'this' world, houses are not the kind of thing that (can) turn into flowers. And the very intelligibility of our speaking of (what we call) houses and flowers is derived from this (more or less) stable fact. And while we can, as you said, simply stipulate (as with metaphor) what we mean by such a phrase that does not turn upon this fact, we would not be speaking about the same thing as someone who is speaking about red bricks and peonies.

--

Another way to make the same point: one might make a distinction (which Cavell kinda does) between words which are 'only' their meanings (stipulations, metaphor), and words which take their significance from the world in which they are embedded - 'lived' meanings, as it were. Cavell speaks of words which 'have nothing but their meanings' (which are 'merely'/only conventional), and contrasts this with words that have a relation to the world, which take their intelligibility from how things are in the world (like the fact that houses are not the kind of thing which turn into flowers!). Both 'kinds' of words are of course meaningful - one cannot deny that metaphor and so on are meaningful; but the danger is in confusing the two, in treating the one like the other.

I should have said: not only our facts are at stake.

Framing devices and their rhetorical background/discursive-conceptual structure/philosophical grammar could possibly have 'houses turn into flowers' as a metaphor or allegory — fdrake

I agree, but importantly, it would not be houses and flowers (red bricks and peonies) that we're talking about. 'Houses do not turn into flowers!' might be used as - say - a warning to a boxer who wants to take up MMA or something. That's the point: it's not facts that are stake here. Yours is a good point I wanted to address but for lack of space left out. But a Cavell quote, now you've given me an excuse:

"It has been suggested to me that "Houses are turning into flowers" does mean something clear, for example in an animated cartoon or a dream. This is undeniable. In such contexts we say, for example, see a cathedral with a rose window turn into a rose. But I did not wish to suggest that such a statement meant nothing, only that we had to give it a clear meaning. And in having to imagine such a context in order to invite its projection we are imagining a world for which the statement "We have absolutely conclusive evidence that houses don't turn into flowers" is false, or rather, means nothing, because in such a world the (our) concept of evidence has no application: anything can be followed by anything. Cartoons make us laugh because they are enough like our world to be terribly sad and frightening."

Non-answers, both paragraphs.

But I think I've answered your questions, although I grant that I might not have spelled absolutely everything out. — S

But I didn't ask you to spell everything out. I asked you quite specifically about what force of necessity the distinction you've drawn has. What motivates it? Why this distinction, and not any other of the rather fanciful ones I came up with? What presuppositions are at work such that this distinction is significant? What is the drawing of this distinction meant to say - imply - about how the world is, such that it has this significance? What makes this distinction non-arbitrary? The very drawing of this distinction - and not another - has something to say. But what?

Another way this might be put: as it stands, the whole question of 'objectivity' as you've set it out is merely nominal. 'Objectivity', as you use it, simply names a particular (let's call it) state of affairs, which may or may not be the case. And what is being wrangled over is nothing but the applicability of a name ("turns out, the existence of Jupiter is (what we call) an objective fact! Wow!); But again, why this distinction and not another? It is simply arbitrary that this relation (between 'us' and Jupiter) is called 'objective'? Or is the significance of this distinction - from whence it draws the force of its necessity - being guided by a certain set of (as yet un-spelled-out) presuppositions? If you're doing any kind of philosophy worthy of the name, then of course it is. If.

When I say that the existence of Jupiter is objective — S

'Subjectivity' aside, I'm asking genuine questions though. They really aren't rhetorical.

Is it not a massive problem to interpret my claim about the existence of Jupiter to be a claim about an observation being reproducible under fixed conditions? — S

Sure, but I wasn't interpreting your claim. I don't much care about your claim - whatever it is - at all, and I believe the 'interpreting' was done by you.

The logical consequences of what I am saying, if we assume it to be true, is that Jupiter would still exist even if we had all ceased to exist. It is about a planet, not an observation. — S

Sure, and this is fine! And I agree it's also an entirely different use of the word objective to mean something entirely different. I mean, I still think it's rather a bit of noise still - as if anti/realism is at all a worthwhile debate having - and it remains rather arbitrary: as if one ought to qualify the 'existence' of anything (as 'objective' or otherwise) as turning upon 'our existence', or lack-thereof. As if we were so important that existence itself begets a whole new qualifier ('objective', or 'not-objective') to mark its proximity (or lack-thereof) to our existence. But why not the existence - or lack-thereof - of George? Or this rock here? Or that blade of grass there? Whence the conceptual necessity of this qualification, and not another? (not a rhetorical question! - It's only here that one even begins to do philosophy at all). (Edit: And maybe you can begin to see why your question isn't about Jupiter at all - it's about - and always has been - about 'us').

And I'm sure you know what subjectivity means. Everrryyonnee knows what subjectivity means.

Because Kant done fucked it up for everyone, including everyone in this thread, myself included.

No, that's just how it works in a very narrow context. Consider that you're using language wrong in both the context around us, which is philosophy, and in general, which is ordinary language. — S

I'm not pitching philosophy against ordinary language. I'm pitching ordinary philosophy against senselessness. You say there's a 'context' for your claim - well, show it.

For instance, what would it mean to say that objectivity can be predicated of fact about existence, for instance? What kind of question, or questions, would it take to eatablish this (or not?). I know the question for reproducibility: is this observation reproducible under fixed conditions, yes or no? (Therefore it is objective (or not)). Now say I want to disagree that the existence of Jupiter is an 'objective fact' - what exactly am I disagreeing with here? Why is it not just a fact tout court? What conceptual work does the modifier 'objective' do, in this context? And what concequences follow - or not - from agreeing or disagreeing with this statement? And why are those concequences significant? What do they tell us about things - about Jupiter, or about facts, or about the relation between the one and the other (or something else perhaps?) What, in other words, is the grammar of 'objectivity' as you use it?

Note that I'm not saying there isn't such a grammar. Only that you've not provided one, and without it, the claim is - and remains - senseless: not even wrong.

But that is how it works. Or at least, in any real life scientific context where objectivity is said of expriments and their results. It's only here, among 'philosophers', where I am 'attempting to dictate language'. But consider that you've been using language wrong, from the very beginning.

Right, so 'the existence of Jupiter' is not the kind of thing that can be qualified as objective - or not. You're projecting a grammar mistake onto the thing itself. It doesn't work because you've commited a category mistake.

Could you please elaborate? — Merkwurdichliebe

Well if objective just means reproducible under fixed conditions, does the opposite of that mean ‘subjective’? No. Some conditions simply cannot be fixed, as with, say, large-scale economies or large-scale societies, in which reproducibility is hard, if not impossible to come by. Yet the latter two are far from what anyone might call ‘subjective’ phenomena (and if they do, they’re twisting language).

So not-objective does not mean ‘subjective’; the latter is not the natural anti-paring of the former. And as for ‘subjective' - frankly, nobody knows what ‘subjective’ means. It’s one of those weasel words that people like to throw about, and it has zero conceptual consistency whatsoever. It has connotations of ‘from a first-person POV’, and it's used loosely in that manner, but it’s mostly useless as a philosophical term of art. Everytime someone uses the word ‘subjective’ in a philosophical context, the default assumption ought to be that they have no idea what they are talking about, unless they prove otherwise.

So subjective and objective are not a pair. To speak about them as such is like speaking about apples and emotions as though they were a pair. But they don't even share a similar grammar. But people are ticked by a nice bit of poetic resonance. And also because fuck Kant.

Yawn. Objective just means reproducible under fixed conditions. Nothing more. The blather about mind and feelings and independence and perception and reality and truth and so on is just noise.

The sooner people realize objective and subjective do not form an antithetical pair, the better.

The EU is traumatic for Hungary because it doesn't govern according to the particular, settled culture of Hungary, which is characterized by unsettled Roma and historical trauma. Hungary should instead be governed according to its shared culture of not having a shared culture. This shared culture can only develop very slowly over time, and we need it right now. — csalisbury

Seems reasonable.

Provide evidence and fair analysis rather than pathological interpretations and you'll be treated to a fair audience. — Judaka

Interpretations of what? Of a political scene which you proudly professed your ignorence about? No, it's not my job to educate an 'audience' who is simultaneously proud of their ignorance yet happy to pronounce other's views as 'pathological', despite that self-same self-confessed political illteracy. You made your bed in mud: you don't get to fling it about as you attempt to crawl your way out.

That something be subjectively the case, objectively. That such and so is subjective, being objectively true.

Can something objectively subjectively be the case?